Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,69

retrieved my cap and my lantern, and went carefully down the path, stopping often, listening as hard as I could, hoping we wouldn’t meet again. Only a small part of me wishing that we would.

* * *

—

When I walked through the door of our cabin, I found my mother waiting inside by the window, and for just a moment I thought maybe my father had woken up again.

She took one look at my face and said, “What happened? Where’s Esther?”

I didn’t know what to say first. “Is Daddy awake?”

She shook her head.

So I told her everything in order. Ending with the plan to go find Larkin and get more honey for Cate’s leg, first thing in the morning.

I left out the part about the bear. Otherwise she would never again let me go back up that mountain in darkness, doll or no doll.

And I left out the part about Cate being Mrs. Cleary.

I would let Esther tell that part, though I’d miss the chance to make my mother smile.

Ever since I’d imagined Esther being mauled by a bear, I had cared much less about other hurts, however real they might have been.

“Esther stayed there? Instead of you?” my mother said.

“She didn’t much like being in the woods, and she didn’t want to come home in the dark.” Which was true. I didn’t say that she had wanted to stay with Mrs. Cleary. That they were most likely chatting, at this very moment. Or maybe Esther was reading Cate a story from one of her many books. “She’ll come home as soon as I go back.”

“After you fetch honey with Larkin? I don’t like that at all, Ellie. You going near his mother. That woman’s far too angry.”

My mother was in her nightgown, her hair down around her shoulders, but she still managed to look fierce.

“You would go, too, if you saw that wound on Miss Cate’s leg.”

She pursed her lips. “Not near Larkin’s mother. And neither will you.”

I squinted at her thoughtfully. “Wait right here,” I said.

She gave me a puzzled look but stayed put while I went through the kitchen and along to the bedroom where my father and her mandolin were both sleeping.

I picked it up and carried it to my mother. What I felt as I held it in my arm made me lonely.

“Wait,” I said again when she began to speak.

I held the mandolin up to the lantern light and peered past the strings to the mark burned into the back of its belly, a label pasted below that.

The mark said KEAVY.

And I knew that Larkin’s father had made this mandolin. And named it for his wife.

I held it out to my mother.

She gave me the lantern and took the mandolin in her arms as if it were a baby.

“What?” she said.

I held the lantern up.

“Look inside.”

“I don’t need to,” she said. “I know what’s inside. A maker’s mark. Keavy. It’s a Keavy mandolin. The best.”

“Which is her name.”

“Whose name?”

“Larkin’s mother. That’s her name. Keavy.”

My mother peered into the mandolin. Looked back at me, her eyes wide.

I said, “His father was a luthier.” The new word tasted heavy and good on my tongue. “He made mandolins. He made that one.”

“He was a luthier,” she said softly. “He made my Keavy.”

She seemed confused, and I thought I knew why.

I said, “It’s hard to imagine him naming his mandolins for someone so mean.”

She nodded. “It is.”

“Larkin says she wasn’t mean before his father died. Maybe she’ll wake up soon and come back to what she used to be.”

My mother looked me in the eye. “Or what she’ll be next.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

It was odd being in the cabin without Esther.

I could breathe more easily. But the cabin also felt emptier.

I fell asleep almost as soon as I lay down, the day catching up with me. And the day before that. And the one before that.

As I slept, I dreamed a different version of the memory that had so often kept me awake.

As always, I was with my father, clearing trees by the frozen garden.

As always, Samuel came running after the rabbit, my father and Esther and my mother all busy with their work.

But in this dream, I didn’t see my little brother in time.

In this dream, I rushed toward him too late. And then I tripped and fell as he ran, the tree sweeping through the air, spinning on its stump.

This time, my father saw only me, sprawled in the dirt.

And Samuel, this time, was the one felled by the