When the Bones Sing

Chapter Sixteen

Sixteen

Something grabs me by the arm, and I scream.

“Dovie! Run!” Lo’s jerking me along. We stumble around the side of the cabin, and he shoves me up the steps in front of him. The door swings open and Granny Pearl appears in her nightgown with a lit candle. She barely has time to step out of the way before Lo and I are barreling through the door and slamming it behind us.

Lo hands his unlit candle to Granny Pearl and she lights it with the one she’s holding before she sets it on the table.

“Goddammit!” He’s trying to slide the rusty bolt into place to lock the door, but it hasn’t been used in decades and it won’t budge.

“Who was that?” I shout. “ What was that? Was that Turley?”

Lo doesn’t have time to answer my questions.

“Get the gun!” he yells in my direction, and I grab an ancient rifle off the wall. Granny Pearl and Lo use it for hunting rabbits and deer and whatever else they can scare up to eat. I hand it to Lo, and he lifts it to his shoulder and levels it at the front door. “Get back,” he tells me, and I take Granny Pearl’s arm and pull her toward the big fireplace at the end of the cabin, away from the door and the window.

I slide one hand into my pocket to find the holey stone she gave me earlier and I worry it between my thumb and my finger. There’s a clattering at the back door and Lo whirls around to point the gun in that direction.

“Don’t be scared, Dovie Lovie.” Granny Pearl pats my hand. “That thing out there can’t hurt us. I got a protective fence around this place.” The clattering noise outside the back door comes again, and I grab her arm tighter. “The magic’s strong,” she reassures me. “It’ll hold.”

That god-awful howl cuts through the night again, and it’s like whatever is making that sound is right there in the cabin with us. It’s all I can do not to cover my ears and scream. Instead I clutch the holey stone tight in my fist.

“What the fuck is out there, Lo?” He’s standing there with that gun trained on the back door. “It’s gotta be Turley. Right? He’s trying to scare us.”

“Claire woulda been safe, too,” Granny Pearl says softly. “If she had just stayed home that night.” She looks lost and confused for a second, then her eyes are sharp and clear again. “The magic is strong,” she says again. “It’ll hold.”

We’re all waiting, but everything has suddenly gone still. There’s no more rattling at the back door. No more howling.

There’s just our breathing and the moaning of the wind outside.

“That wasn’t Turley,” Lo says. Every muscle in his body is tensed. Ready. He hasn’t lowered that gun yet. I don’t think he’s even blinked. “It was the Howler, Dovie.”

For a second, I almost believe him, but Granny Pearl speaks up.

“No, Lowan,” she tells him. Her voice sounds like mountain dulcimer music in the silence of the cabin. “The Howler is a harbinger of death. He ain’t an instrument of it.” Lo lowers the gun to listen to his grandmother, and she pulls away from me to go and lay a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You hear that howling, you know death is stalking these hills. That’s why old timers feared him so. But the Howler won’t be the one who brings it.” She peers out the front window into the blackness beyond. “Whatever was after you two, it wasn’t the Howler.”

“Turley,” I say from my spot by the fireplace. I don’t trust my legs enough to move yet. They’re still shaking. “It had to be Turley.”

“Dovie and me saw a knife,” Lo tells Granny Pearl. “A bloody skinnin’ knife in the shed out back of the church.” He glances in my direction before he goes on. “We got reason to believe Turley’s the one that’s been doing the killin’.”

Granny Pearl frowns. She moves toward the big table in the center of the room and clears a spot. “You put that gun down, Lowan. Ain’t nothin’ can harm us here. You know that.”

“Four red cedar sticks,” he tells me. “Soak ’em overight in camphor oil and put one in each corner of the property, workin’ in a clockwise direction, and you got yourself a protective fence.”

“Better than barbed wire,” Granny Pearl says proudly. She crosses to the shelf against the wall and selects a mason jar of red juniper berries to take back to the table. I watch her use her candle to light a piece of charcoal in a little cast iron cauldron, then she looks back at Lo. “Come on, then. Ask your question.”

“Divination. Probably the oldest spiritual practice that exists.” He reaches for me, and I let him take my hand to lead me toward the table. “Cultures all over the world have their own ways of seein’ the unknown.” We sit side by side on the smooth wooden bench while Granny Pearl stands opposite us. “Granny Pearl can read answers in the patterns of flying birds and scattered bones. Or tea leaves in a cup. Corn kernels tossed onto a hearth.” She raises her chin toward Lo. “The tracks that drops of water leave when they run down a windowpane.” He looks toward the little flame burning in the cauldron at the center of the table. Granny Pearl stands ready with a handful of those red juniper berries. “Even the curl of rising smoke.”

I hold my breath, waiting for something magical to happen, and I forget to be afraid.

“Go on,” Granny Pearl prompts again. “Fire’s ready.”

Lo takes a deep breath in the stillness of the hushed cabin, then he blows on the flame three times. I watch it burn bigger and brighter.

“With this breath, I give you life, little ember,” he says, and the wind moans louder outside the cabin in response. I feel goose bumps break out across my arms and the tops of my thighs. “Burn bright and let your smoke give me an answer.” All three of us lean toward the tiny fire. “Tell me true. Is Brother Turley guilty?”

Not one of us is breathing now. The first wisp of smoke curls from the cauldron and Granny Pearl squints at it like she’s a surgeon studying a patient’s X-ray. We watch it for a few seconds until it starts to rise toward the ceiling.

“Coiling clockwise,” Granny Pearl announces, and she and Lo lock eyes across the table.

“What does that mean?” I whisper.

“Smoke curling clockwise means the answer is yes,” Lo says. “It means he’s guilty.”

“What are we gonna do?” I ask him, and Lo turns to look at me.

He’s shadow and light. Half his face is licked by fire, but the other half wears a mask of darkness. It reminds me of an illustration I saw once in one of Daddy’s books. The Phantom of the Opera .

“We’re gonna go back to that shed and get that knife and we’re gonna take it to the sheriff. Tonight.”

Thunder rumbles in the distance, and another unearthly howl goes up from outside. But this time it’s just the wind.

“There’s another downpour brewin’.” Granny Lo frowns. “It’s bound to be a bad one. This is a summer of storms.” I’m not sure if she’s givin’ a weather report, or if she’s talking more figuratively. “Best wait for daylight.”

Lo shakes his head. “We can’t. That gives Turley more time to get rid of it.”

“He might be waitin’ for us.” Fear climbs down my throat, and it threatens to choke me when I think about how the preacher caught us peeking in his shed window earlier.

“We got no choice, Dovie.” Lo puts a hand on my knee as thunder rolls across the hills again.

I think about Turley. And about whatever that was out there in the dark, whether it was him or something else. I think about the storm we all know is coming.

And I nod.

Lo takes my hand and uncurls my fingers to reveal the holey stone lying in my palm.

“You believe in protective charms now?” he teases me, and one corner of his mouth twists into an almost-smile. His eyes are glowing from the flame on the table, and from the warmth of that fire that burns bright inside Lo.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “But I believe in you.”

He smiles for real then, and I know I’d face down Turley or the Howler or any other monster in these hills to save him.

“I believe in us,” he says.

Granny Pearl takes a flashlight off the hook by the door and hands it to Lo, then she looks back and forth between the two of us. She’s holding one of the candles, and her white curls glow like a halo. It’s like a picture right out of the Bible, or a stained glass window in a cathedral. Saint Pearl of the Hills, Patron Saint of the Haunted.

“Remember,” she warns us. “Divinin’ with smoke is powerful, but you gotta ask the right question, or that magic can steer you wrong.”

“We asked the right question,” Lo assures her.

“You make sure you listen to your hearts. Both of you got good ones, and you love each other deep.” Granny Pearl reaches out and touches my hand and then Lo’s, and I know she’s passing us some bit of unnamed magic. Spellin’ us without tellin’ us , is what Lo and I used to call it. “That pure heart-magic between true twin flames is rare, and it’s the strongest magic this world has.” She heads toward her bedroom, but before she opens the door she turns back to give us one last warning. “But be careful, loves. A body can end up just as haunted by the things we do for the people we hold dear as by the things we don’t.”

“We’ll be careful,” Lo promises.

“Then we’ll see each other tomorrow,” she says. “God willin’ and the creek don’t rise.”

When Granny Pearl disappears into her room and closes the door, Lo looks at me and grins. “You ready to get that son of a bitch?” I hesitate, and the grin slides off his face. His brown eyes knit together with worry, and he reaches out to tuck a wayward strand of hair behind my ear. I feel the brush of his thumb along my cheekbone, and something low in my stomach ignites and spreads out through my body like molten candle wax. Thunder shakes the tiny cabin and the copper pots hanging from the rafters above us rattle and clank with its power. Lo takes a step closer to me. “Don’t be afraid, Dovie.”

“I’m not,” I tell him, but that’s a lie.

It isn’t Brother Turley I’m fretting about, though. Or the mountain thunderstorm that’s kicking up outside. It’s not even the Howler, Ozarks harbinger of doom.

It’s the Wilder/Clover curse that has me scared to death tonight, because losing Lo like Nana lost Pearl and Mama lost Claire is the only thing in the world that would bring me to my knees.