“My mother took her over the hill somewhere to break hemlock boughs for the needles.”
“In the name of Heaven. A day like this.”
Toward the end of the lane they slowed and searched back and forth across it. More than two feet of snow had already fallen. The old snow and the new were piling in drifts waist-high. A small body would be hidden under them.
McCarthy shouted, “Pray God the child’s kept moving. ’Tis the one thing would save her.”
But she had lain down, Amelia said. So that the snow fairies would come to her. He had told her no such fantasy. Had she then made it for herself, or had it come from the dark arctic mind of a madwoman? And from madness only? He lurched into the gate that opened into the hill pasture. He tied one end of a rope to a gate post. Shaking in the cold, he kn
