Chapter Three
Three
Nana is sitting on the porch waiting up for me when I get home, even though pink dawn is starting to show through jagged cracks in the sky. She opens the door and takes me by the hand to pull me inside, ignoring the dirt caked into my palm. Then she guides me upstairs and tells me she’s proud of me. “You done a good thing, Dovie. A service for a grievin’ family.” She turns on the shower before she steps out of the bathroom and eases the door closed behind her.
I strip naked and stand under the stream of hot water to let it wash the grime from my body. I’m not thinking about Riley Alden anymore, if I ever really was. I learned a long time ago not to dwell on the bones.
My job is to find them. That’s all.
Instead I’m thinking about Lo. That one singular phrase keeps repeating in my head.
Lo came home.
I don’t know why I’m shocked. Hardly anybody leaves this place for good. They try. But they don’t make it long in the world outside these hills. Then they come crawling back to this cozy little corner of the Ozarks where things move slower. Where life is uncomplicated. And people are safe.
Unless you’re a hiker on the AAT.
But Lo swore he’d never come home. He said it to my face that night almost two months ago. This is our forever goodbye, Dovie. And something in his eyes meant it. If there’s anything you gotta say to me, say it now.
But I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
The water’s gone cold, so I switch it off and reach for the fraying towel Nana left on the sink for me.
When I’m dried and dressed, I head downstairs. Nana’s in the kitchen cooking up bacon and eggs. She’s got her thick hair wrangled into a long, silver braid down the middle of her back now, the way she usually wears it.
Daddy’s place at the table is vacant. Nothing but an empty coffee cup and a crumpled-up napkin to show he was ever there.
“He went on back to the gallery,” Nana tells me as she reaches for a spatula to flip the eggs. “Has a new piece he’s workin’ on. Custom order.”
I figure that’s a lie. He just didn’t want to sit across the table from me this morning. Not after my adventures last night.
Nana puts a couple of pieces of bacon and a runny egg on my plate, then she slices up a big, juicy tomato plucked from our garden and shakes salt on it for me. I stare out the window at our old tomcat, Phantom, hunting bugs in the grass.
“Sleepy, Dovie girl?” Nana settles into her usual chair. She reaches out and smoothes my damp hair with one wrinkled hand. “This was a hard one, wasn’t it?” She dumps sugar in her chipped coffee cup and I listen to the familiar clink ing of her spoon as she stirs. “You oughta try to eat,” she starts. “I was always starvin’. After. And your mama was. It takes a lot outta—”
“Did you know Lo was home?”
The spoon stills in Nana’s hand and the kitchen falls quiet. Suddenly she’s watching Phantom out the window too. The huge white cat pounces toward a grasshopper and misses. He’s too fat to catch much of anything these days.
I sit there waiting for her to answer.
“No,” she finally admits. She’s watching Phantom, but he’s rolled belly-up to nap in the sun. “I ain’t spoke to Pearl in years. You know that.” She starts stirring that coffee again. Clink , clink , clink . “You seen him yet?”
I shake my head because I don’t trust myself to talk without crying. I’m worn out from last night. Frazzled and cut all to ribbons from the brambles. But it’s my insides that feel torn and bloody. Not the deep scratches on my arms and legs.
When Nana gets up to refill her coffee, I slip out of the kitchen while her back is turned, and I’m pushing open the front door before she has a chance to ask where I’m going. I make my way down the stone path toward the gate, past the bright pink crepe myrtles my mama left us to remember her by, and head east on Mud Street.
It’s early—just after seven on a Saturday morning—but it should be a good day for hikers coming through, so people are already getting things opened up. I can feel eyes on me. Watching. Trying to work out where I’m going and what I’m up to.
Mrs.Pickering is sweeping the sidewalk in front of the tiny shop where she sells handmade jewelry, and she gets so caught up in staring at me that she trips on her own broom and practically falls on her face.
Just two doors down, outside the Mountain Spring antique store, the two old-maid sisters who run the place stop watering the lanky sunflowers in their whiskey barrel planters to whisper and glance in my direction.
But I just keep walking. I’m used to talk about me.
Down the block, there’s a cluster of hikers gathered outside the Bite-Size diner waiting their turn for one of the tiny tables inside. Judging by the somber looks on their faces, they’ve heard the news about Riley Alden being found, but they got no way of knowing who I am, or that I’m the one who found him. Sheriff keeps my name out of all that. That’s the deal he struck with my daddy when this whole mess with the hikers started three years ago.
My services in exchange for my anonymity.
Lucifer’s Creek folks all know, though. Because I’m my mother’s daughter, through and through.
And Nana’s granddaughter.
Mama and Nana were hill people. They lived most of their lives in a little house tucked up on the edge of a cliff, a good ten miles from town. The two of them only came down every few months to stock up on supplies. But on one of those trips, my mama and daddy knocked shoulders with each other when they both reached for the same bag of flour, and to hear Nana tell it, it was love at first sight, right there in the aisle at Sutton’s Grocery. Nothing to be done about it.
After that, it wasn’t long before Mama came down off that cliff to marry Daddy. Then, when I came along, Nana followed her to town to help take care of me. She says that was love at first sight, too. So she stayed. And I guess it’s a good thing she did, because it was barely three years later that Mama cleared out for good.
Even after she up and left us, most people in town never forgave Daddy for marrying a hill girl. Especially one as strange and beautiful as Lucy Clover.
They definitely don’t forgive me for looking exactly like her and having her ways, even though my last name is Warner, like my daddy’s. Everybody around here knows I inherited more than my mama’s coal black hair and her icy blue eyes. I also got her uncanny ability to bring home the dead, a little something she inherited from her own mother. And while it may be a useful skill to have, particularly around here, it’s not one that’s likely to win you any friends.
I hit the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek, and the water looks milky blue now. Not black like it did in the dead of night. A couple of blond women sit on the bank with their hiking boots off and their pants rolled up to their knees, soaking their blistered feet in the mineral-rich mud and the cold water. Their noses are wrinkled against the overpowering sulfur smell, but they look happy. I can hear them laughing together, and I wonder if maybe they’re sisters. They look so much alike.
I have this impulse to warn them—to tell them to turn around and hike right back the way they came—because I don’t want to end up pulling their bones from a shallow grave by the light of a full moon.
But I don’t, because the last thing we need is a bunch of panicked hikers. Everybody in town is clear on one thing: if the hikers quit coming and spending their money, we quit eating.
After the bridge, I cross over to the other side of Mud Street and duck through the creaking graveyard gate so I can work my way around to the back of the square-framed church building that sits at the edge of town. The plastic flowers folks stuck in the ground on Decoration Day back in May are fading in the July heat, and weeds and volunteer seedlings are threatening to take over between the neat rows.
I’ve stopped to bend down and pull stickers out of my socks when I feel eyes on me. I glance toward the church and see the preacher, Brother Turley, standing on the back steps.
I take my time pulling the last of the stickers free before I stand up and continue on my way, because I refuse to let him intimidate me. The churchyard isn’t his private property, and I’m not hurting anybody cutting through.
“Come on inside next time, Dovie,” the preacher calls to me in an overly friendly voice. “Bring your daddy and Miss Fern. Y’all need the forgiveness of the Lord, same as everyone else.”
I keep walking. There’s not much chance of any of us showing up in church. Daddy doesn’t believe in religion anymore, so he doesn’t give a flip what Turley thinks, and Nana may be a believer, but she sure as shit isn’t buying what Turley’s selling. The preacher ain’t supposed to be a chef , she always grumbles. He’s supposed to be a waiter. God don’t want his ministers makin’ the meal. He just wants ’em to deliver it to the table without messing it up. And as far as Nana is concerned, there’s a fly in the soup Turley is serving his followers every Sunday.
It’s a mutual scorn. We think he’s a swaggering charlatan, and he resents the fact that our little family are the only ones in all of Lucifer’s Creek who aren’t under his righteous thumb.
Usually I go out of my way to skirt around the tiny cemetery with Turley standing guard over its crumbling stone markers and leaning wooden crosses, but today I’m more intent on avoiding my daddy’s stained glass gallery on the other side of the street. If he happens to be leaning in the doorway or looking out the window, I don’t want to catch his eye. If I do, he’ll wave me over and I’ll have to go in and come up with something to say to him.
I’d rather deal with Turley.
At the back of the churchyard, I duck under the fence and take one of the little dirt roads that lead out of town and up into the hills. There are two ways to get to the Wilder homestead. The first is to follow the Aux-Arc Trail up a ways and then cut across through the forest. That’s what we did last night to get to Riley’s burial spot. That means fighting brambles, though. Especially this time of year. Plus you have to haul yourself up a steep ravine to finally reach the cabin.
The second is to follow this road up about two miles. It’s a longer distance, but an easier trek, even though, like all the roads around here, this one isn’t much more than a glorified trail itself. Barely wide enough for a pickup to squeeze down and overgrown with weeds in the center.
The road starts to climb, and at first it feels good to walk. The sky is blue and beautiful, and the steady movement of my feet eases my mind a little. It almost stops me thinking about where I’m going and what’s going to happen when I get there.
What I’m going to say.
And who it is I’m planning to say it to.
By the time I’m a mile out of town, though, I’m wishing I’d taken the truck that sits mostly unused under our carport. Nobody drives it much, except the couple of times a year we have to go down to Rogers or Fayetteville for a doctor’s appointment or to get a tooth fixed. Usually, I don’t mind walking, but there’s another mile to go still, and it’s already hotter than Satan’s armpit this morning.
I stop for a few minutes on the loose planks where this road crosses Lucifer’s Creek for the first time. As it flows down the mountain toward town, the strong-smelling stream winds and weaves, changes direction, and doubles back on itself so often that you can cross it a dozen times or more on a day hike. When I continue on up this road toward Lo and Granny Pearl’s place, I’ll cross it three more times before I reach their cabin.
It’s disorienting, meeting the same creek over and over and over. That’s why the first settlers here gave it such a miserable name. Well, that and the fact that it literally smells like hell.
Nana told me once that if you try to follow it from start to finish, you’ll never reach the end of Lucifer’s Creek. You’ll just keep walking and walking forever, doubling back and retracing your steps—somehow finding yourself at the beginning again and starting all over—until you’re lost in the Ozarks for all eternity.
That’s what the old hill folks say. They tell all sorts of wild tales.
None of those stories scare me, though. I’ve known the difference between what’s real and what’s pretend since I was a really little girl. Since Mama ditched me with nothing but a yard full of crepe myrtles to remember her by, and none of the magic words or charms she’d taught me to have such faith in were strong enough to bring her back to us.
Prayers weren’t enough to do the trick either, even though back then I’d prayed till my knees were bruised.
I push Mama out of my thoughts the same way I wave away the gnats and no-see-ums that are swarming around my head. I pretend she’s nothing more than a low buzz in my ear. A memory I can swat at absentmindedly while I wipe away the sweat running down my neck.
The trees hugging the creekbank are shady and the stream looks cool and inviting, so I sit down and slip off my shoes and socks to let my feet dangle in the milky blue water. I feel the bite of it. A little sting that sort of brings me back to life. The sound of the creek hopping and dancing over the rocks soothes me in a way nothing else ever does. It cools off my soul the way the water cools off my body.
I watch my reflection distort as I wiggle my toes beneath the surface. My chin’s a little too pointy, and my long arms and bug-bit legs a shade too skinny. It strikes me as unfair that I could be a dead ringer for my mother and somehow lack every bit of her beauty.
A red-eared turtle moves through the water and my reflection blurs, so I shift my attention to the little fish darting in and out of the weeds along the creekbank.
That’s when I hear the sound of shoes crunching on dirt and gravel. Someone is coming up behind me, and I don’t even have to turn around to know who it is. I’d recognize the rhythm of his footsteps anywhere, even if it’d been a hundred years since I’d seen him.
But it hasn’t been a hundred years. It’s only been two months that felt like a lonely, miserable century.