The Winter People

January 29, 1908

The novel opens with an excerpt from Sara’s journal. Sara writes that she first saw a “sleeper” when she was nine years old. She was in the woods near Devil’s Hand, a rock ledge in the Vermont wilderness, when she saw Hester Jameson, a girl her age who had died of typhoid fever two weeks prior. Sara hid behind a rock, but Hester’s “sleeper” saw Sara. Sara smelled Hester’s “acrid, greasy, burnt odor” (8). Sara hissed at Hester and Hester ran off into the forest. Shortly afterward, Hester’s mother Cora came running down the path. Cora told Sara not to tell anyone.

Later, Sara asked “Auntie” if it was possible to bring someone back from the dead. Auntie is a half-Indigenous, half-Quebecois woman who has lived with their family since Sara’s mother died in childbirth. Auntie has a ring carved out of bone with symbols on it that she wears everywhere. People in town come to Auntie for cures. Auntie tells Sara that sometimes the dead do come back and that Auntie will write the instructions for how to resurrect the dead in a sealed envelope for Sara to open when she is ready.

In 1908, Sara is in bed. She hears her husband, Martin, talking to his brother, Lucius, the town doctor, downstairs. They are worried about her. Sara thinks about her daughter, Gertie, who recently died.

A few weeks earlier, Martin woke up from a dream where a woman had told him something important. He realizes Sara is in Gertie’s room. Martin reaches into his pocket and feels the bone ring he found that spring in the field near the Devil’s Hand. He had tried to give it to Sara, but she had been horrified. She told him to rebury it, but instead he has kept it. Martin goes out to feed the chickens. Two of them are dead, and he sees a hole in the fence where a fox got in. He goes to get his gun.

That morning, Gertie is in bed with her mother, Sara. It is snowing and Gertie is staying home from school. They are hiding under the covers. Gertie likes to hide; she has found a secret place to hide in her parent’s closet through a loose wallboard in the hall linen closet. Gertie tells her mom she dreamed the “blue dog” took her to see “the winter people” (23) in a tree. She explains that the winter people are “people who are stuck between here and there, waiting” (23). Some of them are good, some are bad. Sara tells Gertie not to tell Martin about her dream or the winter people.

Martin has known Sara his whole life. She has always “seemed otherworldly” to him. When they were children, Sara told Martin that she was going to marry him one day. He was shocked that such a pretty girl would marry an awkward bookworm like him. As adults, they married. They suffered three pregnancy losses and one infant death of their son, Charles, before having Gertie. Gertie and Sara are very close.

That summer, Martin was cutting firewood in the forest late one evening. When he headed home past Devil’s Hand, the horse was startled by a white flowing human-like shape with a “terrible” smell of “burning-fat” that swooped down from a tree. The cart ran over his foot. Sara found him unconscious and dragged him home. He has been lame ever since.

On January 12th, Martin follows the fox tracks through the orchard. He thinks he sees an old woman pointing at him, but it is just a tree. Martin sees the fox and thinks it has Sara’s eyes. He shoots the fox, but it gets away. He keeps tracking it to a cave at the foot of the Devil’s Hand.

Martin arrives home with the dead fox and nails it to the wall of the barn. Sara is frantic: Gertie followed Martin out into the woods hours ago and hasn’t been seen since.

Martin searches for Gertie in the snowstorm for hours without luck. He returns home to tell Sara. They pray together. Then, Martin goes out to the barn for the saddle. He is shocked to see that instead of the fox, Gertie’s blond hair is nailed to the wall. He takes it down and puts it in his pocket. Before he rides off to get help with the search, Sara comes out and tells him she knows he never reburied the ring like she told him to do. She tells him to go rebury it in the field immediately so they will get Gertie back. He agrees to do so, but when he gets there, the ring is not in his pocket where he keeps it. Instead, he buries Gertie’s hair.

January 13, 1908

The next morning, Gertie’s body is found curled up at the bottom of a deep well on the Bemis’s property. When she was younger, Auntie had told Sara that the well might “lea[d] to another world altogether” (47). Sara is devasted at the thought of how her daughter must have felt falling into the well.

In the present day, 19-year-old Ruthie is driving home after a party with her boyfriend Buzz. Ruthie has dreams of leaving her hometown of West Hall, Vermont, to attend university, but her mother told her they couldn’t afford it that year. Ruthie’s parents are homesteaders who live off the grid. Ruthie’s father died of a heart attack two years ago. Her boyfriend, Buzz, works at her uncle’s scrap-metal yards. He is interested in UFOs and conspiracy theories. He claims that he once saw a gray alien in the woods near Ruthie’s home. They have been dating for about a year.

Ruthie’s mother, Alice Washburne, didn’t want Ruthie to stay out late that night because a few weeks before a teenage girl named Willa Luce had disappeared. Ruthie sneaks nervously into the house, expecting her mother to yell at her, but her mother is nowhere to be seen. That night, Ruthie dreams of being at Fitzgerald’s Bakery with a woman she doesn’t recognize. Then, she dreams of being trapped in a small space.

Ruthie wakes up to find her 10-year-old sister Fawn in bed with her. Fawn tells Ruthie that their mother isn’t there. Fawn is a solitary girl who plays with friends no one else can see. Ruthie is worried about their mother’s disappearance, but she tries not to panic.

Two years ago, Ruthie’s father died while cutting wood near the orchard. Ruthie found him and noticed a small set of footprints near his body.

Ruthie finds no signs of her mother anywhere near the house. Ruthie walks through the woods up to the Devil’s Hand. She thinks she sees something move in the orchard. When Ruthie doesn’t find her mother, she rushes back to the house.

Ruthie decides not to call the police and instead to look for clues about where her mother has gone after breakfast.

Katherine, an artist, wakes up in her apartment in West Hall. She thinks she can smell her deceased son, Austin, and husband, Gary. She has just moved to West Hall from Boston. Two years and four months ago, Austin died of leukemia at the age of six. A few months ago, her husband, Gary, died in a car crash. Katherine learned from his credit card bill that his last meal had been at Lou Lou’s Café in West Hall. She decided to move there to find out more about why he was in West Hall before he died. Her husband was a photographer, but his camera went missing from the crash.

Katherine goes to Lou Lou’s Café. Lou Lou tells her that Gary had met with an older woman. While working on an art piece about Gary’s death, Katherine smokes a cigarette and asks aloud to Gary how she can find the woman he met with.

Ruthie feels worried about being responsible for her younger sister Fawn. Fawn and Ruthie play hide-and-seek to give Ruthie an excuse to search for clues while Fawn stays entertained. Ruthie gets nervous when she can’t find Fawn, who finally pops out. Fawn tells Ruthie that she and her doll, Mimi, were hiding in a secret place. Ruthie and Fawn go into their mother’s bedroom, which is usually off-limits.

Ruthie notices the bedroom closet has been boarded shut. Fawn finds a trapdoor under the rug that holds a gun, a shoebox with the wallets of Thomas and Bridget O’Rourke from Woodhaven, Connecticut, a gold bracelet, and a copy of Visitors from the Other Side: The Secret Diary of Sara Harrison Shea. They realize that Sara lived in their house in 1907.

Two weeks before her husband died, Katherine and Gary had taken their first trip since the death of their son, Austin. They went to the Adirondacks and talked about having another child. On their way home, Gary purchased a box of old photographs for his collection at a vintage shop. In the box, he also found a bone ring with engravings on it, which he gave to Katherine. When they got back from the trip, Gary shut himself away in his studio.

Katherine opens up Gary’s tackle box to find some small paint brushes for her project. Inside, she finds a copy of Visitors from the Other Side. She takes it out and begins to read it.

Buzz, whose father runs a gun store, comes over to examine the gun Ruthie and Fawn found. He tells her it is loaded and well-maintained. Ruthie is surprised that her dependable mother has disappeared and that she owned a gun. Buzz speculates that her mother was abducted by aliens. Then, he points out how strange it is that they live totally off the grid. Ruthie says it is because her parents are hippies, but he suggests there might be another reason. Fawn is sick in bed with a fever.

Buzz pries open the closet, but they don’t see anything usual in there. Buzz picks up Visitors from the Other Side and comments on how strange it is that Sara lived in their house. He tells her that Sara was found skinned in the backyard. Her husband, Martin, shot himself when his brother found them. Some townsfolk believe she still haunts the town and so they leave offerings to her on the full moon.

Ruthie takes a nap and dreams again about Fitzgerald’s Bakery. When she wakes up, she thinks she sees something moving in the closet, but when Buzz checks, there is nothing there. Ruthie thinks she smells “an odd acrid, burning odor” (119).