When the Bones Sing

Chapter Fifteen

Fifteen

I take Lo’s hand and let him lead me around the side of the cabin to a little clearing that stretches out behind it. I can’t see it tonight because it’s too dark, but I know exactly where our maple tree is standing. The one we wrote our names on in blood all those years ago.

By the light of the moon and the shine of the tiny flame he’s carrying, Lo navigates his way through the tall grass to a crooked row of five stone markers that stand at the edge of the woods. Hand-chiseled headstones to mark the family plot.

Even though the clearing is overgrown, the grass around the graves is trimmed and neat. “Granny Pearl keeps them cleaned up,” he tells me. “Eighty years old and she still gets out here and pulls every single weed from this patch of earth herself.”

I couldn’t tell you who the oldest three markers are for, but I know the one next to the last is Saul, Pearl’s long-dead husband. Lo’s grandfather. He lost his footing on a muddy slope and tumbled headfirst into a deep ravine when Lo’s mama was still a baby, so Lo never knew him. Drunk as a skunk. That’s as much as I ever heard Granny Pearl say about Saul, but Lo told me that his grandfather was a violent man. Abusive and dangerous. Mean as a wild boar, and just as destructive. He set fire to the cabin once, with her and baby Claire still inside it. That’s what Granny Pearl told Lo when he asked about the stone with Saul carved into it. So nobody ever mourned him much.

The last marker on the end is for Lo’s mama, Claire, drowned all those years ago in Lucifer’s Creek. She’s the one we’ve come to visit tonight. “I wanted to sit with her a spell,” he says. “Is it weird to miss someone you can’t even remember?”

“I think your heart remembers her,” I tell him. “Even if your mind can’t.”

I know what he means, though. I only have a handful of fading memories of my mother, and I was two years older than Lo was when she left me behind.

Lo kneels down beside his mama’s tombstone and the light from his candle illuminates the words chiseled deep into the rough stone. Beloved Claire. In the hope of blessed resurrection.

He runs his hands over the letters before he stands up and leads me to an old wrought iron bench. We sit there, side by side, with the dark woods looming behind us and the Wilder dead spread out in front of us like a captive audience.

“I’m scared.” Lo breathes the words out like the long, slow exhale of a chain smoker.

“We’ll figure something out,” I promise him. “We won’t let Turley hurt us. And we won’t let him hurt anyone else anymore, either.”

“It’s not him I’m most scared of,” Lo admits. “It’s me.” His voice quivers and it’s almost more than I can take. “I got somethin’ dark inside me, Dovie.”

“What do you mean?” I reach up to stroke his cheek. That candle is still burning in his hand. “There’s nothing dark about you, Lo.”

“There is, and it’s gettin’ harder and harder to keep it under lock and key.” Lo’s staring at that flame, and I’m watching it dance in his eyes. “I can’t tell what’s real anymore. I walk around all the time hearin’ voices, not knowing if the things I’m seein’ are there or not. But they’re with me all the time now, even if I’m tryin’ hard not to show it. They don’t ever give me a second’s peace.” He’s shaking, and I slip my arm around him. “I’m afraid of the dark, Dovie. Not the outside dark. The dark I feel growing inside me every time that moon rises in the sky.”

My heart hurts. I thought maybe he wasn’t seeing his shadows so often lately, but evidently he’s been dealing with them on his own.

I don’t want Lo to hide from me. Ever. There’s no part of him I couldn’t love.

“Are they here with us now?” I ask him, and he nods, scanning the dark just beyond the tombstones.

I squint into the blackness, and for a second, I think maybe I see something. A blur of movement. The faint outline of a shape.

“I know you don’t see ’em, Dovie. Tell me the truth. I trust you.” The muscles in his jaw tense and he looks me in the eyes. “Am I losing my mind?”

It’s quiet for a few minutes, except for the wind sweeping through the trees. We’re both staring at Claire’s grave. I’m wondering how different our lives would have been, mine and Lo’s, if we’d ever had the chance to really know our mothers.

“I thought I saw Riley Alden the other night,” I admit, and Lo stares at me, eyes wide in the candlelight. “He was standin’ in the middle of Mud Street looking up at my bedroom window. Saw him again the next mornin’ too. Through the trees.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrug. “Because I knew it wasn’t real. I’d been thinkin’ about him so much, you know? My mind was playin’ tricks on me.” I hesitate, remembering those deep boot prints in the mud. “Or maybe there was somebody else out there. Turley, maybe, watchin’ the house. But my imagination made him into Riley. Turned him into a ghost.”

“Were you scared when you saw him?” I nod and Lo whispers, “Dovie. You gotta tell me when you’re afraid. You gotta let me know.”

“That’s the thing, though,” I explain. “Sometimes our minds play tricks on us when we’ve got a big enough worry weighing us down or some problem that pulls hard on our soul. Like you caring about those hikers so much and wantin’ so bad to stop the killing.” I reach for his hand, and I love the way our fingers curl perfectly together. We’re such a good fit, Lo and me. “That’s the darkness you feel. It comes from whatever’s out there leaving bodies in these hills. Not from anywhere inside you.”

He reaches over to lay his other hand on my bare knee. “You’re my best friend, Dovie. We can’t hide things from each other anymore. Otherwise, what’s the point?” He raises an eyebrow at me. “Promise?”

I promise, and we shift positions so that his arm goes around me now and I lay my head against his shoulder.

Lo reaches down to tuck a strand of stringy black hair behind my ear, and without planning to, I lean into his touch. It’s instinct. As natural as breathing. His fingers linger on my cheekbone and his eyes spark. They burn like honeyed fire, so much brighter than the candle that’s dripping and melting in his hand.

He’s watching me, lips parted, and all I can think about is how his mouth would feel on mine. I reach up to run my fingers through his wavy hair. I want to be tangled up in him.

He’s a deep ache in my bones.

In that moment, I know I’m in love with Lo the same way I’m in love with the moon. It’s something brand new between us, but also something old and eternal.

He sets the candle on the bench beside him and bends toward me in slow motion, and I realize we’ve been slowly bending toward each other our whole lives.

I could barely tell you my own name if you asked, but I know exactly what Lo will taste like.

His kiss will be earthy and sweet.

Like cinnamon.

Cloves.

Ginger tea and honeysuckle.

He’ll taste like the hills.

Like home.

Lo’s hand is on the back of my head, and he pulls me close. Fog rises from the damp ground and swirls around our ankles. Our foreheads meet and our breath mingles.

“Dovie.” My name is a magic word in his mouth, and I’m completely under his spell.

His T-shirt is worn and soft under my palms, and I feel the pounding of his heart keeping time with mine. I close my eyes and wait for the press of Lo’s lips, but a sudden sound stops us cold.

A strangled howl cuts through the night and we’re frozen, clinging to each other at the edge of the dark woods.

It sounds almost like a person, wounded and desperate, but there’s something inhuman about it, too, something older than the sky and sadder than the wind.

This is what the Ozark Mountains sound like, I think as Lo and I huddle together, afraid to move or breathe. Deep and dark. Mournful and strange and impossible to pin down.

I’m suddenly aware of how very far away we are from everything and everyone. How isolated. And how vulnerable. Just two dots and one tiny candle on a bench in the middle of a dark wilderness that spreads across northwest Arkansas like an ocean.

We wait, counting the seconds, but the howl doesn’t come again. Whatever was out there in the dark has moved on. Either that or it’s watching us. Waiting and biding its time.

Stalking us.

“Stay with me tonight,” Lo whispers. He picks up what’s left of the candle and pulls me to my feet so we can move toward the safety of the cabin, but as we start back in that direction, I notice something I hadn’t seen before.

The light from our candle illuminates a white rose that’s been carefully laid across Claire’s grave.

“Look,” I whisper, and I point the flower out to Lo who stops to stare at it. “Where did that come from?”

“It wasn’t there before,” Lo whispers, and the ground shifts sideways. I have to hang onto his arm to stop me swaying on my feet.

“Are you sure?” I ask him, but then I remember that he knelt right there. He would have seen it. That means somebody put it there, slipping though the curtain of night without us even noticing.

We were only a few feet away.

I can almost hear the words to that old song floating on the fog that’s started to creep in all around us.

I will tell you a story of a pretty white rose—

“Somebody must’ve left it when we were…” Lo trails off, but I know what he means.

When we were distracted.

Focused on each other.

The hair on my neck stands up. “Someone’s watching us, Lo.” I feel eyes on me as sure as I feel Lo’s fingers wrapped around my hand.

“Come on.” He pulls me toward the cabin, but I can’t resist looking back over my shoulder at that ghost rose, glowing bone-white in the shine of the moon. Something about it tugs on a memory I can’t quite name.

Just beyond the graves, a shadow looms in the fog.

“Lo.”

He looks over his shoulder at me, and then past me to the hulking black shape at the edge of the woods.

Thunder rumbles long and deep. Looks like another storm cell is moving through. There’s a flash of lightning and a gust of wind comes sweeping around the corner of the cabin. “Shit!” Lo lets go of my hand to shield the flame, but it’s too late. Our candle goes out.

The shape at the edge of the trees is moving in our direction now. There’s just enough light to make out the outline of something coming slow and careful across the space between us. It moves silently, like the mist that’s rolled in to fill up the clearing.

“Lo?” I whisper his name, but there’s no answer, and when I reach for his hand I can’t find him. My heart is pounding against my ribs so hard that I’m afraid my bones will crack. “Lo?” I hiss, louder this time.

But the only response I get is a bloodcurdling howl.