Leni stared numbly down at the floor. There was a bone shard near her foot, another on the coffee table. It would take all night to clean this up and she feared that even if they wiped all his blood away, it would come seeping back, bubbling up from the wood like something out of a horror story. But they had to get started.
“We need to clean up. We’ll say he disappeared,” Leni said.
Mama frowned, chewed worriedly at her lower lip. “Go get Large Marge. Tell her what I did.” Mama looked at Leni. “You hear me? You tell her what I did.”
Leni nodded and left Mama alone to start cleaning.
Outside, it was snowing lightly again, the world darker, layered with clouds. Leni trudged to the snow machine and climbed aboard. Airy goose-down flakes fell, changed direction with the wind. At Large Marge’s property, Leni veered right, plunged into a thicket of trees, drove along a winding path of tire tracks on snow.
At last she came to a clearing: small, oval-shaped, ringed by towering white trees. Large Marge’s home was a canvas-and-wood yurt. Like all homesteaders, Large Marge kept everything, so her yard was full of heaps and piles of junk covered in snow.
Leni parked in front of the yurt and got out. She knew she didn’t have to yell out a greeting. The headlight and sound of the snow machine had announced her.
Sure enough, a minute later the door to the yurt opened. Large Marge walked out, wearing a woolen blanket like a huge cape around her body. She tented a hand over her eyes to keep out the falling snow. “Leni? Is that you?”
“It’s me.”
“Come in. Come in,” Large Marge said, making a sweeping gesture with her hand.
Leni hurried up the steps and went inside.
The yurt was bigger inside than it looked from the outside, and immaculately clean. Lanterns gave off a buttery light and the woodstove poured out heat and sent its smoke up through a metal pipe that protruded through a carefully constructed opening at the yurt’s canvas crown.
The walls were constructed of thin wooden strips in an intricate crisscross pattern, with canvas stretched taut behind them like an elaborate hoop skirt. The domed ceiling was buttressed by beams. The kitchen was full-sized and the bedroom was above, in a loft area that looked down over the living area. Now, in the winter, it was cozy and contained, but in the summer she knew that the canvas windows were unzipped to reveal screens that let in huge blocks of light. Wind thumped on the canvas.
Large Marge took one look at Leni’s bruised face and squashed nose, at the dried blood on her cheeks, and said, “Son of a bitch.” She pulled Leni into a fierce hug, held on to her.
“It was bad tonight,” Leni said at last, pulling away. She was shaking. Maybe it was finally sinking in. They’d killed him, broken his bones, dropped him in the water …
“Is Cora—”
“He’s dead,” Leni said quietly.
“Thank God,” Large Marge said.
“Mama—”
“Don’t tell me anything. Where is he?”
“Gone.”
“And Cora?”
“At the cabin. You said you’d help us. I guess we need it now to, you know, clean up. But I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Don’t worry about me. Go home. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Large Marge was already changing her clothes when Leni left the yurt.
Back at the cabin, she found Mama standing away from the pool of blood and gore, staring down at it, her face ravaged by tears, chewing on her torn thumbnail.
“Mama?” Leni said, almost afraid to touch her.
“She’ll help us?”
Before Leni could answer, she saw a spear of light flash across the window, tarnishing it, casting Mama in brightness. Leni saw her mother’s sorrow and regret in sharp relief.
Large Marge pushed open the cabin door, walked inside. Dressed in Carhartt insulated coveralls and her wolverine hat and knee-high mukluks, she took a quick look around, saw the blood and gore and bits of bone.