Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
Inside the house, I head straight up to my room for a nap. I don’t see Nana anywhere, and I figure she must be tending to her vegetable garden out back. That’s okay, though. I’m exhausted from last night’s research expedition and then working at the gallery all morning, and I don’t really have the mental energy for a conversation.
I crank the window air conditioner all the way up before I crawl in under the quilt. My pillow still smells like Lo, and the last thing I think about before I drift off to sleep is that ghost of a kiss. His lips brushing mine in that narrow space between awake and asleep, and the even narrower space between our bodies.
When I wake up, it’s almost dark. Outside my window, the sky looks like all the light is draining out through a hole somebody poked in the bottom.
My stomach is rumbling so I crawl out of bed and head downstairs. Before I make it to the kitchen, I hear Nana singing that same old mountain song.
I will tell you a story of a pretty white rose,
It is true but oh how sad,
Of a poor, poor woman whose heart was turned to stone
But cruel she was treated by her lad.
She was found one morning in a cold, cold stream,
Where he threw his love there to drown,
With that rose between her teeth, as if she seemed to say,
I want to wear this rose in my crown.
Something about the melody makes my bones hum. Like I’ve always known the tune.
Nana finishes the last line as I step into the kitchen. She’s standing at the sink with her back to the door, her long silver braid swaying gently behind her as she scrubs at a cast iron skillet. A plate of pork chops and fried potatoes sits waiting for me on the table.
“I can heat that up for you,” she says, without turning around to look at me. “Didn’t want to wake you for dinner. Figured you needed the sleep more than the food.”
“Thanks,” I say, and Nana wipes her hands on a dish towel before she turns around to pick up my plate and pop it in the microwave. When it dings, she takes my dinner out and slides the plate back toward me across the table, then she settles in her chair with a cup of tea.
“Daddy home yet?” I ask, and she shakes her head.
“Came home to eat and went right back. Guess that piece of Ira’s is givin’ him fits.”
“It’s big,” I tell her. “I saw it today.”
“What is it?” She reaches for the sugar dish in the center of the table. “Delbert’s hardly been home long enough for me to ask him.”
“It’s the Howler,” I tell her.
She stops dumping spoonfuls of sugar into her tea to frown in my direction.
“Why on earth would Ira want a thing like that hangin’ in his nice place up there?”
“Ira said it was Daddy’s idea.” Her frown deepens. “It’s actually kinda pretty,” I say, “the way the black glass shines.”
Nana’s stirring her tea now. The clinking of her spoon against her mug is as familiar to me as the rhythm of my own name. Nana’s always stirring sugar into something.
“Ain’t nothin’ pretty about the Howler,” she tells me with a shake of her head. “Folks in these hills hear that Howler call, they know death is hot on their heels.”
“Those are just stories, Nana.”
Daddy told me once that moonshiners are the ones who helped spread the old tales back in the day. They figured, if people were scared to go up into the most remote parts of these mountains, they wouldn’t be accidentally stumbling across their illegal stills. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the growers and lab rats were the ones doing their best to keep the old legend alive more recently. They got a lot worse than moonshine hidden up there, and everybody knows it.
Nana huffs and takes a sip of tea, then she blows into the chipped mug a few times to cool it down. She’s constantly drinking hot coffee and hot tea, even in the sweltering summer heat. Like she can’t ever quite get warm.
“Every story in the world is at least partly true, Dovie.” She lifts the mug to her lips again and a whiff of lemon and honey floats across the kitchen. “You don’t know near as much as you think you do.” I take a few bites of my potatoes. Outside, Phantom is chasing bugs in the very last of the summer light. In another few minutes it’ll be completely dark.
Voices drift in through the screen door. Sheriff and Deputy Jonah are setting up camp for the night out on the front porch. I want to tell them it’s too soon—it takes a while for the bones to start singing—but they’re always out there waiting, from the very first night, just in case. They’re afraid that, once those bones are ready, if I have to wait for them to get here, I’ll lose the trail, like a bloodhound that’s gone off the scent.
Tonight, for the first time ever, I’m actually kind of glad to have them out there. Those boot prints in the mud across the street have me on edge, and the darker it gets, the more uneasy I feel.
I pick at my dinner while Nana fills glasses of iced tea for our slumber party guests. “It’s hot out there yet,” she says. “They’ll be needin’ somethin’ cool.”
“Thank ya, Miss Fern,” I hear the sheriff say.
“Mighty good of you,” Jonah adds. “Gonna be a long night.”
They won’t drink the tea, no matter how hot and sticky they get sitting and stewing out there waiting for dawn.
You know the old lady murdered her husband.
When Nana comes back to the kitchen, I hit her right in the face with a surprise question. “When did you start hearing the bone song?”
She stands at the sink with her back to me again, and I watch her take her time getting an old dishcloth wet with hot water and wringing it out so she can wipe down the countertops.
“That’s a strange question to be askin’,” she finally says. “I don’t even know if I can say, it was so long ago.”
“Ira told me today that Mama didn’t start hearing the bones until after Claire died.”
“I guess that’s right.” Nana sighs. “Ira knows the truth of things. They was all such good friends, your mama and Claire and your daddy and Ira.” She rinses the dishrag clean before hanging it over the sink to dry. “Lucy never did hear the bones before that, but after Claire’s accident, she started hearin’ it plain as I did. Like some kinda switch got turned on inside her.”
I’m doing the math in my head. Claire drowned when Lo and I were just a year old. Then we were both three when my mama left town.
So two years.
Two years between the first time she felt the bones cry out to her and the time she left these hills. That’s all she could stand it. Just two short years of reaching into the ground and pulling out skeletons and my mother was ready to throw in the towel and leave the Ozarks, and me and Daddy, behind.
I’ve been feeling the bones of the dead vibrate off my own rib cage since I was not quite four years old. Since before I was even old enough to even know what being dead really meant. That’s thirteen years I’ve put up with it so far. And the bodies have been coming way more often here lately than they did in Mama’s day.
I guess Nana knows what I’m thinking because she says, “Not everybody is made the same, Dovie. Some people can handle burdens that other people can’t. That’s just the way of things. Some bend and others break.”
I know she’s talking about Mama, but I’m thinking about Lo.
And Nana still hasn’t answered my question.
“But you always heard it?” I press her again. “Since you were little? Like me?”
Nana shakes her head. The kitchen is spotless now. Every dish except mine has been washed and the countertops are clean enough to eat right off of, but she’s still looking around for something else to do. Something to keep her hands busy. She settles for lighting a little candle that sits on the windowsill.
She strikes a match against the outside of the box, and I listen to the whoosh and sizzle of it. “I was grown with a baby girl of my own before I ever heard it.” Nana leans across the sink to coax the flickering candle to life with the kiss of the match. “You’re the only one of us who got your gift early like that.”
I snort out loud. I can’t help it. “It’s not much of a gift.”
Nana blows out the match she’s holding. “I expect it’s a gift to the families whose loved ones you bring home to rest.”
That gets me thinking about Riley again, and how there’s people somewhere missing that easy smile of his. Nana goes to get ready for bed, and I finish my dinner and wash the plate clean. Then I blow out the candle before I climb the stairs to my attic room.
I stand at the window for a long time, peering out over the top of the air conditioner toward the stand of trees on the other side of Mud Street. There’s no movement there tonight, but I’m thinking about those boot prints in the mud. It isn’t the specter of Riley Alden. I’d bet my life on that, no matter what tricks my mind tries to play on me.
Turley, probably. He’s been awful interested in what I’m up to lately, and I can’t figure why, but the idea of him standing out there in that black coat staring up at my window makes me more angry than afraid.
I head to bed and burrow down under Nana’s soft quilt, and the last thing I do before I turn off the lamp is look back up at those tinkling skeleton keys dangling from my ceiling. Old-fashioned brass keys tied together with yellow yarn. They remind me of Lo a little, the way they belong to another time. Like the Ozark Mountains do. The keys to the past , I think.
It’s been a long time since I believed in magic, but if I could let myself, I’d believe that Lo had the power to keep me safe with his charms and his spells and the way he loves me.
I wish I could do the same for him.
My eyes drift closed as the air conditioner hums in the window, and that’s all I know until someone is shaking me awake.
My eyes jerk open, but it’s too dark to see who’s got a hold of me. Cold panic explodes in my gut and spreads out to every part of my body.
“Dovie. Wake up.” The words are a desperate whisper, but I know immediately whose mouth they came out of.
“Lo?” I can smell him now. That familiar scent floods my brain, but I can’t make sense of it. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”
“Shhhhh.” He puts a finger to my lips, and it makes me think about that almost/maybe kiss again. My eyes have adjusted a little and I can just make out his face in the moonlight filtering through the lace curtains. The clock on my bedside table says it’s just after eleven. I’ve been asleep less than two hours.
“How’d you get in here?” I know Sheriff and Deputy Jonah are posted up out front waiting for the overture of the bone song.
“Sneaked around back,” he says. “Door to the laundry room was unlocked.”
Of course it was. Despite the fact that Lucifer’s Creek, Arkansas, is now the murder capital of the Southern United States, nobody around here locks their doors at night.
It wouldn’t be neighborly.
I reach over and flip on the lamp and Lo recoils as if I’ve punched him. He’s crouching by my bed like he might cut and run any second.
“Jesus,” I whisper. “What the hell happened to you?” I reach out to touch his face. He’s covered in dirt from head to toe. Cut up and bleeding from scratches on his arms. But it’s his eyes that scare the living daylights out of me. They’re dead. Flat and brown and staring, without a hint of the light and warmth I always find there.
“You gotta help me, Dovie. I can’t do this anymore.” He grabs my hands and squeezes so hard I wince. “Please.”
“You know I’ll help you. Anything you need.”
“I found the murder weapon,” he hisses.
I’m wide awake now, but so confused. I wrench my hands away from him before he breaks my fingers. “Lo?”
“God, Dovie.” He’s looking around the room now, peering into every dark corner, and I figure the ghost army is assembling for inspection. “It was right there in plain sight.”
“Lo, you’ve gotta tell me what the hell you’re talking about.” I grab his face between my hands. “Look at me. I’m here. I’m real. What was in plain sight?”
“The knife Brother Turley used to gut Riley Alden.”