Chapter Four
Four
“Dovie.” Lo breathes my name like it’s a charm. A bewitchment he’s reading from one of his beloved Ozark mountain spell books. Lowan Wilder is the only one who’s ever been able to make my name sound like that.
Like it’s some kind of magic word.
“Heard you were back,” I say in the most disinterested tone I can manage, but I don’t turn around to look at him yet. My heart is pounding in my throat, and I need a second to steady myself before I can meet his eyes.
He doesn’t give me a chance, though. Before I can even blink, Lo is kicking off his shoes, then peeling off his socks and lowering himself down to sit beside me on the rough planks that span the creek. I’m staring hard at my feet. Concentrating on the neon orange polish that’s chipping at the edges of my toenails.
I feel the warmth of Lo’s arm against mine and I breathe in his familiar scent. Cedar and burnt sage and a hundred other things I can’t name. It’s warm and comforting. Like walking into a familiar kitchen and smelling something wonderful, and maybe a little mysterious, simmering on the stove.
“Sheriff came to see me real early this mornin’,” he tells me. “Said you found that missing hiker not far from our place.” I feel his eyes on me, but I’m still studying my toes like I have no idea how they showed up at the ends of my feet. “Asked if I knew anything.”
I hate myself for not being able to talk. I’ve spent the last two months working out this conversation in my mind, imagining exactly what I’d say to my best friend when I got the chance. When Lowan Wilder eventually came back to town with his tail tucked between his legs.
Now here he is, and I can’t make my damn mouth work.
“Dovie,” he says. And there’s that magic sound to my name again. “You mad at me?”
“Jesus, Lo,” I mutter. “I was never mad at you.”
But that’s a lie. I’ve spent the last two months boiling with a rage so hot that anyone who touched me would’ve burned the flesh right off their fingers.
Now that he’s sitting here beside me, though, on this bridge over Lucifer’s Creek where we’ve sat together a million and a half summer afternoons, I can’t seem to rake up a single scrap of that anger.
There’s only bone-deep exhaustion mixed with confusion and hurt.
I grit my teeth hard to stop the tears coming, and Lo slips his arm around my shoulders. “Hey.” His breath is warm on my cheek. “Don’t cry, Dovie,” he murmurs. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
That white-hot anger comes roaring back like someone took a blow torch to my backside.
I shove him off me, hard, and scramble to my feet. Lo looks up, surprised. His hair falls across his huge dark eyes in soft waves the color of polished cherry wood, and it’s all so achingly familiar that it comes close to sapping the madness right out of me again.
Only, this time I don’t let it go. I grab that fury and hold on tight. I dig my fingernails in and hang on for dear life.
“Don’t say that,” I snap. “Don’t you dare sit there and tell me it’s all okay. You left me, Lo! You left me here all alone!”
“Dovie—”
“And then you didn’t even come tell me you were back? I had to hear it from the goddamn sheriff over that kid’s rotting corpse.” I shudder. “Jesus, Lo. Go to hell!”
“Where do you think I was headin’ just now?” he teases. “Vacation Bible School?”
I don’t laugh.
Of course we were making our way toward each other at the exact same moment, meeting halfway in the middle. That’s the way it’s always been with Lo and me, each of us pulled hard toward the other one like a couple of magnetized paperclips.
Lo blinks up at me. He’s got on an old pair of cut-off shorts and a soft T-shirt the color of the wide Arkansas sky, but they both hang loose on his frame. When he raises one arm to shield his face from the sun, it hits me just how much weight he’s lost. He’s skin and bones. I suck in my breath from the shock of it. Lowan was never a big guy, but he looks like a ghost of himself.
He reminds me of Riley Alden’s skeleton. Nothing much left.
Then I notice the dark circles under his eyes.
How he’s bitten his fingernails all the way down.
The bare spots where he’s pulled at his eyebrows.
He runs his hand through those gorgeous red-brown waves on the top of his head and drops his arm to his lap. “I’m fine, Dovie,” he reassures me. “I know I look bad. A little worse for wear, maybe, but—”
“You don’t look bad, Lo,” I mumble. “You’re beautiful.” My voice breaks and I curse at myself inside my head. “I just— Shit.”
My anger is evaporating again. Rising off me the way heat rises off a blacktop highway in the summer. I can almost see it floating up and away in the still air.
Why can’t I stay mad at Lowan Wilder?
“I’m sorry, Dovie,” he says. “I didn’t wanna leave you. You know that.” He almost grins at me. “But it never went away. That special friendship you and me have. It’s still there. I know you feel it.”
Lo and I have been best friends our whole lives. Our mamas were best friends, too, until his died and mine took off. And so were our grandmothers before them, until Nana and Pearl Wilder had a falling-out neither of them has ever said a word about.
Two generations of Clovers and Wilders ripped apart.
The daughters by death.
Their mothers by a feud.
It’s a curse. That’s what Nana told me once. The only time she ever spoke on the subject.
But Lo and I always knew we were different. We were born to walk through life together. Side by side. We promised we’d never leave each other alone. Swore we’d beat the family curse.
When we were both ten, we wrote our names in blood on the weathered trunk of an old maple tree out behind his house, then circled the trunk with strips of cloth cut from one of Granny Pearl’s old aprons. It was a binding ceremony Lo found in one of his spell books. A ritual meant to tie us together. Best friends forever.
I guess forever lasted up until a couple of months ago, because it was just a few days after Riley Alden vanished in the middle of May that Lo came to me and announced out of the blue that he was leaving for good. He said he couldn’t take it anymore.
The missing.
All the dead.
Lo’s not hard like I am. He feels deep, and things weigh heavy on him.
“You said you weren’t ever coming back.” I stop to swallow hot tears because I flat-out refuse to cry. Not right in front of his face, anyway. Not when I’ve already spent the last two months lying in my attic bedroom crying myself to sleep every night from wanting him so desperately. “You didn’t even let me hug you goodbye.”
Lo reaches for my hand, and I give it to him without thinking, because loving Lo is a really old habit of mine. I let him pull me down to sit beside him again on the rough planks of the makeshift bridge.
“That was shitty of me,” he admits. “But I knew if you hugged me I wouldn’t be able to leave.” Lo’s rubbing little circles on the back of my hand with his thumb, and I almost throw my head back and sob from the sudden tidal wave of feeling it unleashes inside me. “But I’m back. For good.”
“Are you still—” I pause, searching for the right words.
Delusional?
Having hallucinations?
Seeing and hearing things that aren’t there?
“Haunted?” he finishes for me, and I bristle without meaning to. I go along with his mountain magic and his spells. I wear his charms and drink the concoctions he brews up for me in Granny Pearl’s ancient mason jars. I light the candles and say the rhymes when he asks me to. Burn the sage and tie the knots. Write the words in chalk. Because he’s my best friend in the whole world. But I don’t take any of it seriously.
I don’t take him seriously.
That’s what we fought about before he left.
Now we’ve been back together all of five minutes and I’ve already got my back up again, like our old cat Phantom does when he feels cornered.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts or evil spirits,” I insist, and Lo looks at me like I’m some kind of riddle he’s trying to solve.
“Jesus, Dovie.” I hear the frustration rippling like mountain stream water under his words. “I’ll never understand how you can do what you do, and not believe that there are things beyond our understanding.” Lo reaches down with one long finger to stir at our reflections in the creek. “The world is full of magic.” When he shakes the water droplets from his hand, one flies through the air to land on my cheek. Lo reaches over to rub it away with his thumb, and I shiver. “You’re full of magic, Dovie.”
“No. I’m not. That’s different,” I argue. Now it’s my turn to get frustrated. “What I do is different.” We’ve been over this so many times. “It’s not magic, finding bones, Lo.”
“What is it, then?”
I shrug. “Some kind of talent. Like having perfect pitch. Or being able to draw a rose so real it looks like you grew it.” I always struggle to explain this. “It’s rare. An ability not everybody has. But it’s not magic. Not any more than having a strong sense of smell or a photographic memory.” I pick up a little stone and toss it into the water just to see the tiny splash. “Believing in magic doesn’t make sense.”
The truth is that magic failed me. Let me down. But the way I hear the bones, that’s something I can count on every single time. It’s something much more dependable than magic.
“Come on, Dovie. You and me both know there’s plenty goin’ on in these hills that don’t make any sense when you haul it out in the light of day.”
Even when he’s being stubborn, there’s something about the way Lo talks that reminds me of fiddle music. His voice is my favorite song. It’s wild and sweet like the mountain honeysuckle that grows along the old fence lines out here. The sound of it melts into the trickling of the stream and the buzzing of the bees, like it’s always been part of the soundscape of these hills.
“How can I believe in ghosts and spirits when I don’t believe in heaven or hell or anything else?” I shrug. “When you’re dead, you’re dead.” Every rotting body I find leaves me more convinced of that, not less. I’ve seen enough skeletons to know for a fact that they don’t get up and dance around, rattling and smiling and wearing top hats, the way they do in old black and white cartoons. They just lie there, bits of skin and hair stuck to their scalp and someone’s favorite T-shirt molding on their rib cage.
“Listen to me, Dovie. I was seein’ ’em everywhere. All the time. That’s why I left back in May.” His words have the flat ring of truth.
“The shadows?”
Lo nods. “Spirits. Or whatever. I couldn’t get away from ’em. They were always there. At the edges of my vision. Around corners. Behind every tree. Right out in the middle of the afternoon. Watchin’ me and whisperin’ to me and—”
“Lo—”
“I was afraid they were gonna get me. Or Granny Pearl.” He stops and looks away from my face. “Or you.” His jaw tightens. “I didn’t want to keep bringing that darkness around the people I love most.”
I reach out and put my hand on his thigh. The skin there is warm from the summer sun, but I’m suddenly cold. I knew things had been bad for him, but I didn’t know how bad.
“You could’ve told me, Lo.”
“I tried,” he says, and I wince. “But that’s the truth of it. That’s why I left. I figured I could leave ’em behind if I left this place. I’d disappear and be gone. And maybe I’d be free, finally. Seemed like it would be better for everyone that way.” He stares down toward our faces in the milky surface of the creek again. “You could go on with your life imagining me living up in New York City or somewhere.”
My stomach lurches and I think I might throw up, because if he’d asked me, I could have told him that wouldn’t be better. Not knowing is never better. It leaves you with a million questions—deep holes—that are always there, just below the surface. Most days you might walk around almost okay, but then all of a sudden— bam —you slip up and find yourself at the bottom of one of those damn questions.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds. I’m living proof. Only having answers can do that.
Lo is staring at something off on the creek bank now. Something I can’t see. I watch him squint at it, eyes narrowed and wary.
He starts to tremble and I reach out to hold his hand tight. I’d tell him there’s nothing there—just the breeze moving through the pines—but I know it won’t help. And sometimes it makes it worse. It’s too late now, anyway. In a few seconds we’ll be surrounded by an invisible army that only Lo can see.
It’s been like this the last couple of years. It’s almost never just him and me anymore. It’s always him and me and them. The shadow people.
Whoever they are.
I won’t say they’re real, Lo’s spirits, but I do know he’s not making them up. He sees them, and they terrify him. That I believe. And I don’t know how to keep him safe from something that only exists in his mind.
I get up and pull Lo to his feet. “Come on,” I urge him. “Let’s go back to my place.” We tug socks over wet feet and start to slip on our shoes.
Lo’s focused on the dark, black mud at the edges of the stream now. “Lucifer’s Creek starts its life way up in the hills. Just water trickling out of a stone,” he tells me. “That’s why it smells so strong. Why it has that bite to it. ‘Cause of all the minerals it leeches from the rock layers it passes through on its fight to get outta the earth.”
I’m trying to be patient, but I’m covered with a thin film of sticky sweat and the flies are biting me something awful, and Lo is standing there with one beat-up tennis shoe on his foot and the other still dangling from his hand. “The English and German settlers used to bottle it and sell it as a cure-all,” he goes on. “But way back before there were any white people in these mountains, the Osage and the Quapaw would come here to drink the healing water and bathe in the mud. They used it for all kinds of important rituals.”
He doesn’t mention how his mama drowned in it when he was a baby. Not even walking yet. My mama found her best friend face down in Lucifer’s Creek one morning, the petals of a white rose floating around her lifeless body like beautiful confetti.
“It’s just water,” I tell him, and Lo bends down to slip on his other shoe.
“Not all the stories are healing stories, Dovie. Hill people used to say that if you drank too much—”
“If you drank too much water from Lucifer’s Creek, you’d go mad,” I finish for him. “But those are made-up stories. You know that.”
“But what about—”
“Come on,” I practically beg. “It’s hot.”
Lo’s distracted again, peering back into the undergrowth beyond the tree line.
“Can’t you see them?” His words are a desperate whisper.
I crouch down to tie the laces for him. “Come home with me.” I stand up and reach out to touch his cheek. “Please?” I’m not ready to say goodbye to him yet. Not when I just got him back.
Lo follows me down the old road toward town. We walk in silence for a bit, sweating and shooing away horseflies—trying not to kick up too much dust—while Lo keeps glancing back every few minutes at his invisible stalkers. I’d hoped wherever he went in the two months he’s been gone, maybe he left his demons behind there. But I guess they’ve been tailing him the whole time, because they’ve evidently followed him right back here to the hills he loves so much.
We’re coming up to the churchyard when a question falls out of my mind and lands in my mouth. “Why’d you come back?”
Lo’s moved ahead of me, and he turns back to gaze in my direction. The sight of him standing there, rail thin and pale as an apparition, with that old white church and that little cemetery spread out behind him almost stops me cold. It looks like a painting. Or the cover of a novel. Some kind of Southern gothic horror story.
“I never got to hug you goodbye.” Lo reaches for my hand again and we duck under the fence together to pop up among the dead of Lucifer’s Creek.
Much as I’d like to believe that, I know there’s more to it. “Lo—”
“I had to come home,” he whispers, as if the bones in those old coffins could hear us. “So I could tell you who they are. I figured it out.”
“The shadow people?” I ask him. He nods, and the look in his eyes tells me I’m not going to like whatever he’s about to tell me.
“They’re the murdered hikers, Dovie. And they want me to put a stop to it.”