“Yeah, fine.” She wiped her hands on her trench coat. “Now that we’re all accounted for, we’ll just need to follow one of you guys’ strings back to where Mr. Unthank is. Freedom is in our reach, ladies.” As if to underscore what she’d said, she pushed her goggles over her eyes and flashed a smile. Rachel looked at Elsie.
“Where’s your string?” Rachel asked.
“I was going to ask you the same,” responded Elsie.
Martha, goggled, stared at them both. “You don’t have your twine?”
“Well, I don’t see you have yours either,” said Rachel.
“I dropped it somewhere,” said Martha defensively. “Or something.”
“Then don’t, like, get in my face about it,” said Rachel.
“I wasn’t getting in your face about it,” shot back Martha. “I just thought at least one of you would’ve had the sense to hold on to your string.”
“You guys,” said Elsie softly.
Rachel took up the bait. “How about this good sense: I’d like to knock you in the nose right about now.”
“I’d like to see you try,” said Martha. She was brushing off her hands.
“You guys!” Elsie said, louder. “Are you crazy? Don’t do this.” She stepped between the two girls, her arms raised. When they’d settled back, she spoke again. “This is exactly the sort of thing that Intrepid Tina warns against, you know. You know what she’d say? She’d say something like …” Here she tried to mine the collected bons mots of her doll for the appropriate comment. She was drawing a blank. “She’d say, ‘Friends should stay together and be friends.’” It wasn’t an actual Intrepid Tina quote, but she figured it was a sentiment Tina could probably get behind.
“She never says that,” said Rachel.
“It’s true, though,” said Martha. “We shouldn’t get all freaked out here. We need level heads.”
“Right,” said Elsie. “Level heads.”
“So what do we do?” asked Rachel.
“Well, I figure we just try to find our way back out of here,” said Martha, “back to Unthank. Demand our reward. We just need to decide which way to go.”
The three girls paused as they stood, their eyes casting over the knot of green, all dusted with white snow, for a suggestion of which direction might be the way out. Just then, Elsie remembered the rabbit.
“Hey,” she said. “This is going to sound crazy, but over there a little ways, when I was still on my own, I saw a rabbit. A white rabbit. But he didn’t run when he saw me. Instead, he kinda waited for me, like he was leading the way.”
Rachel looked at her sister askance. “You did get too wrapped up in that book we were reading over the summer.”
“This is not a joke. I’m serious. I feel like he was wanting me to follow. Maybe he was going to show the way out.”
Martha shrugged. “It’s as good an option as any. Show the way.”
It was fairly easy for Elsie to retrace her steps to the meadow where she first had seen the rabbit; she could even find, here and there, the little indentations that her boots had made in the fine, light snow. Once she’d found the place where she’d heard Rachel calling for her, she began tracing the rabbit’s little paw prints through the bushes. She’d never done something as careful as tracking wild animals, and it required all her concentration. After she’d walked this way for a while, she heard her sister speak up behind her.
“Hold up,” Rachel said. “Where’s Martha?”
Elsie turned to look at her sister. There seemed to be a kind of notable absence in the space next to where Rachel stood. The two Mehlbergs blinked and stared at the spot.
“She was just here,” said Rachel. “Just a second ago.”
Without saying another word, they both turned and began retracing their steps, all the while yelling Martha’s name. They followed their own footmarks in the snow; conspicuously, there were only two pairs of them. Martha’s seemed to have dropped away long before they’d come to the meadow. After a time, they arrived back where they’d started, where the flurry of their combined footprints made a wide crater in the snow.
“Goggles!” shouted Rachel.
There, sitting on a felled cottonwood tree, sat Martha. She was picking mud from her boots. “You guys,” she said when they arrived. “You can’t ditch me like that.”
“We didn’t ditch you,” said Elsie. “We thought you were right behind us.”