she spasmed in his arms. Mose and I sat with him, and we each took one of her hands, and Emmy’s pain was ours, too. These spells never went on long, but they racked her whole small body, and it was torture watching.
When the episode had passed and she’d gone limp, her eyes opened and she said, “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
“Who, Emmy?”
“I couldn’t help them,” she said. “I tried but I couldn’t. It was already done.”
“Is she talking about the Indian kid?” I asked.
“More than one,” Albert noted. “She said they’re all dead.”
I looked down at Emmy, whose eyes were open but glazed. “Are there more dead kids on this island, Emmy?”
“I tried. There’s nothing I could do.”
“Tried what?” Albert asked.
She didn’t answer, just closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep. We wrapped her in her blanket and sat with her as the last of the flames from our little fire died out, leaving only the dull glow of red coals.
“They’re all dead,” I said, repeating Emmy’s words. “What did she mean?”
Albert stirred the fire with a stick. “What she says in her fits always sounds like nonsense.”
Maybe isn’t, Mose signed. He turned and peered at the dark stand of trees that covered the island and hid God knew what.
“This place is giving me the creeps,” I said. “I think we should leave.”
Mose nodded and signed, First thing in the morning.
What little sleep I got that night was restless, and although I didn’t remember them exactly, my dreams were full of menace. When the sky began to show signs of morning, Mose and I got up, and in the cool blue of first light, packed our things and loaded the canoe. Albert tried to help but wasn’t much use. Emmy was sunk in such a profound slumber that she didn’t stir as Mose lifted her and laid her gently in the canoe. Albert sat in the middle, the position he’d occupied before his snakebite, and I took the bow. Mose shoved us off the island and stepped into the stern, and we lifted our paddles.
Although we didn’t know it yet, the current of the Minnesota River was sweeping us toward revelations that would open our eyes to a darkness even greater than the Black Witch.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THERE WERE NO railroad tracks shadowing this stretch of river and, for a significant distance, no towns, and along the banks only thick stands of trees, so no prying eyes to discover us. We made good distance that first morning. Emmy had awakened in the peach light of dawn with, as usual, no recollection of her spell the night before. She seemed refreshed and full of smiles, and both her spirits and her lively conversations with Peter Rabbit buoyed me and even seemed to lift Albert’s spirits. Mose, of course, was silent, but something came from him that told me he was still in that dark place he’d gone after our discovery of the Indian kid’s skeleton.
Near noon, we pulled up to the bank where a little brook emptied into the silty brown river, and we ate the last of the food I’d bought at the village market.
“How long do you reckon we’ve been gone from Lincoln School?” I asked Albert.
He was slow answering. “A month, give or take a day or two.”
“How long before we reach the Mississippi?”
“Days,” he said with a heavy sigh.
“And how long after that before we reach Saint Louis?”
“Weeks. Months. I don’t know.”
“Months? That’s forever.”
“Would you rather be working Bledsoe’s hayfields?”
“I’d rather be eating at the Morrow House and sleeping in one of their soft beds.”
Emmy sighed, but not sadly, a kind of pixie sound. “I’d rather be a princess riding on the back of a swan.”
“And eating nothing but ice cream,” I added.
She held up her sock puppet. “With chocolate sauce,” Peter Rabbit said in a little rabbit voice.
“What about you, Mose?” I asked.
He’d put his back to the rest of us and was chucking stones at the river, flinging them hard so that they hit the water with little explosions. He didn’t respond.
“Come on,” I said. “What would you rather be doing?”
He turned toward me, and what I saw in his face scared me. He signed, Tracking down my mother’s killer.
Which brought an end to the game.
We stayed on the river until late afternoon and made camp on a little strip of beach at the base of a rock bluff. I tried my hand at fishing again, and this time had some success, pulling in