Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,60

as you said before, I’ll thank you for seeing to your business and letting us see to ours.”

She lifted her chin and looked down her nose, as if she had royal blood running in her veins. Which, as far as I was concerned, she did. “And unless you own this mountain, my daughter will climb it whenever the spirit moves her. And she will visit Miss Cate whenever Miss Cate wants her to.”

“You’ll be sorry. I know more about it than you do.”

“Oh, now, look,” my mother said impatiently. “This is easy. My daughter is a kid. Your son is a kid. They are kids on a mountain that has very few kids. Is it really such a terrible thing that your son knows how to wash a bedsheet? That he has a friend in my Ellie, here?”

I liked that, but Larkin’s mother didn’t, and she said so.

“Friends now, and I hope that’s all they’ll be. But when things get better in town, you’ll all go back again. And she won’t be taking Larkin with her.” She looked at me. “So don’t think you will.”

I felt myself pink up.

Larkin looked like he had swallowed a bug.

His mother glared back at mine. “We know what we need to know, and we have what we need to have.” She turned and headed toward the path up-mountain. “Come on now, Larkin.”

Larkin sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said yet again.

“I’ll come up tomorrow,” I said softly.

Then I realized what I’d done.

“I’ll come up tomorrow,” I called after him—loud and clear—as he followed his mother out of the yard.

But only his mother looked back.

I didn’t like what I saw on her face.

And when we went inside the cabin again, I locked the door behind us.

Chapter Forty-Five

“Now, tell me what just happened,” my mother said when we were back in the kitchen.

Esther and Samuel sat waiting for us, clearly eager to know more about Larkin and his mother and Cate.

It had been a long time since Esther, especially, had seemed interested in anything I had to say.

Samuel was most curious—and alarmed—about the maggots. “What’s a maggot?” he said, his eyes big. “And, Ellie, what did you mean, they eat dead flesh? Do they eat alive flesh, too? How big are they? Do they eat boys? Have you ever seen a maggot?”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Esther said, looking a little green around the gills. “A maggot is just a worm, Samuel. About as big as an oat.”

“But how can a worm as big as an oat eat a boy?”

“Hush now,” my mother said. “Go on, Ellie.”

So I told them the story of what I’d done over the days since Quiet’s birth.

It took me a long time.

Samuel interrupted to ask why Cate had saved the tick from Captan’s ear.

The rest they listened to in silence.

I felt almost as good telling it as I had felt living it.

“So that poor woman lost her husband,” my mother said, clearing her throat. “And that poor boy lost his father.”

Esther got up from the table and went to the window.

“You left out a few things,” my mother said. “Like how I made you sleep in the woodshed. And how I had Esther stand guard over your father before he woke up.”

“But how were we supposed to know that all her weird business might help Daddy?” Esther said. “She’s not a doctor. She’s just a girl. And she’s too wild and willful. You know she is. If she weren’t, she wouldn’t have been under that tree when it fell and none of this would have happened in the first place.”

I took a step back.

I couldn’t help it. I was amazed by how ugly a pretty girl could look.

Samuel said, “You’re as nasty as a rat, Esther. Ellie didn’t mean to be in the way of that tree.”

Which brought me up short.

“I’m not nasty,” Esther said. “You just wait until you’re fifteen and all you want to do is get off this mountain.”

Nobody said a word.

My mother looked away.

I thought back to town. For me, that life was hazy. Not only because I’d been so much younger then, but because I’d given myself instead to the here and now.

Esther surely had strong, clear memories of that time. That home. And I knew that, for her, life on the mountain was the thing she’d rather forget.

For the first time, I realized that town wasn’t just a place where Esther wanted to be.

Town was Esther’s mountain.

And I felt newly sorry for my sister, who had once held