Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
I try a couple of times on the way home to find out more about what Daddy was doing wandering around the hills in the dark, but he tells me that it’s a free country and people are allowed to go hiking any old time they want to, which he points out that I clearly know, because I was also traipsing around in the goddamn dark.
We don’t see anyone on Mud Street. There are lights on inside the church building, though, and the notes of a slightly off-key hymn drift out the open windows into the night, mingling with the noxious smell of sulfur. The stench is strong enough to burn my nostrils. Even Daddy covers his mouth and his nose against it when we cross Lucifer’s Creek.
I fight the urge to pause for a second at the top of the bridge and glance down at the spot where I saw Turley’s body. It’s strange to think that Lo and Xan and I are the only ones who know what happened to him.
I’m so lost thinking about everything that I don’t realize we’re home until we’re turning up the stone path to our front porch.
And I don’t realize the front window is broken until I hear Daddy say, “Fern? You okay? What the hell happened?”
I look up to see Nana standing on the front porch in her nightgown, surrounded by shattered glass.
“Rock came through the window,” she says, and she points to a stone about the size of my fist lying on the floor inside the living room. “Didn’t see who flung it.”
“Goddammit,” Daddy mutters. His jaw is tight and his shoulders are tense. “Where was the sheriff? I thought he was supposed to be camping out on our front porch waitin’ for my daughter to do his damn job for him.”
“Came by earlier,” Nana explains. “Said they was gonna be tied up tonight, dealing with Brother Turley.” She turns to look at me. “Told me we should call ’em up at the office, if you start feelin’ them bones, Dovie.”
“Why would somebody throw a rock in our window?” I feel like all I do lately is try to wade through layers of confusion. The townspeople have never liked us, but nobody’s ever come after us before.
Daddy looks at me. “I told you this mornin’. When people are angry, they lash out. Even if it don’t make no sense.”
“This is about the preacher,” Nana says.
“Our front window didn’t do anything to Turley,” I tell her. “And neither did we.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Daddy says. “People don’t understand us, same as they don’t understand Lowan and Granny Pearl. They don’t understand what you can do.” He kicks at the shards of glass with his boot. “They didn’t understand it when your mama did it.” He jerks his head toward Nana. “Or when Fern did it.”
“Not understanding someone isn’t good enough reason to go around throwing rocks,” I argue.
“No,” Daddy admits. “But bein’ afraid of someone is. At least in their minds.” He looks back and forth from Nana to me. “And people here fear the Clover women.”
“My last name is Warner,” I remind him. Like he doesn’t know that.
“May be,” he says. “But you’re a Clover through and through, and everybody in this town knows it.”
Daddy goes inside to get the broom, and we work to get the glass swept up while Nana sits in her rocker humming that white rose song under her breath and staring out at those bare crepe myrtle bushes. That melody sets my teeth on edge, but I try to focus on the task at hand. Once the mess is taken care of, we tape a big piece of black plastic over the window.
“I’m gonna go in and get showered,” Daddy tells us. “Maybe get some sleep. If either of you hear anything tonight, you come let me know.” He rubs at his forehead. “I gotta head up to the lodge tomorrow mornin’, Dovie. Need to hang that Howler of Ira’s. Thought we might swing by Pearl’s and pick up Lowan. It’s a big piece. It’ll take all three of us.”
“Yeah. Sure,” I tell him. “Night.”
Daddy looks at that black plastic and then back at me. “It ain’t your fault people are scared, Bird.”
“I know that,” I tell him, but I suddenly feel like crying.
“If they weren’t afraid of you—and Lowan—they’d be afraid of somethin’ else. People ain’t happy unless they got somethin’ to fear.”
When he goes inside, Nana reaches for my hand. “You go on to bed, sugar pie.” Her fingers feel cold and bony in mine. “I’m gonna wait up just a little bit.”
“What are you waiting up for, Nana?” I give her hand a gentle squeeze. She seems frail tonight. Like she’s partly made of fog.
“Hopin’ to catch a glimpse of my girl.” She speaks the words around a lump in her throat, and I kneel down by the rocker.
“You mean Mama?”
“I saw her ghost walkin’ a few nights ago. That’s how I know for sure she’s passed over.”
“Nana—”
“I told you, Dovie girl, some things have to be believed to be seen.”
“You know the boy from Tulsa?” I ask. “The dead one from the newspaper article?”
“Seen him, too,” Nana says. “More than once.”
“That wasn’t his ghost you saw. He has a brother. Looks just like him. And he’s been hangin’ around tryin’ to figure out what happened to Riley.” I give her knee a little pat. “Sometimes our eyes lie to us.”
“You don’t know what you don’t know, Dovie.” Nana takes her other hand and lays it against my cheek. “I seen your mama with my own two eyes, standing right there by them crepe myrtle bushes.”
“I wish I did believe,” I tell her. “I’d love to see Mama, even if she was just a ghost.”
“She left us that white rose as a sign.” Nana gives me a little smile. “Maybe she’ll be back.”
“Maybe,” I tell her, and I kiss her forehead before I stand up to go inside. Something stops me, though. “Nana, what happened between you and Pearl Wilder?” The question has been on the tip of my tongue so many times over the years, but I’ve seen how deep that pain goes, for both of them, so I’ve never been brave enough to bring it up.
But tonight is a strange night.
“That’s an old story, Dovie girl. I don’t expect you wanna hear it.”
“I do,” I tell her, because I do want to hear it, and I think maybe she wants to tell it. Finally.
“I didn’t set out to kill your granddaddy.” Nana takes a long, steadying breath and settles a little deeper into her rocking chair. “You know that.”
I nod. I’ve heard that story my whole life. Nana borrowed some poison for the rats that were takin’ over the garden. She meant to sprinkle it around to kill them. But she’d put it in a sugar tin. It was all she had to carry it in. My granddaddy found it hidden in the back of the pantry and made himself some tea. He was dead before Nana came downstairs to breakfast.
My mama was a little girl then, and Nana was never charged. It was an accident. Careless, definitely. Suspicious, maybe. But nobody could prove murder.
“That poison was meant for Saul,” Nana tells me. “I put it in that sugar tin to give to him.”
“Wait.” I lean in closer. Maybe I didn’t hear her right. “Granny Pearl’s husband?”
Nana nods and her face goes harder than I’ve ever seen it. “That man was mean as a snake. He was gonna kill Pearl. We both knew that. Her and baby Claire, too, probably. He came close. More than once. She was always coverin’ up the bruises. So I came up with that plan. I’d borrow the poison for the rats. Then I’d bring it up the mountain in that sugar tin, and I’d leave it on the table for Saul.”
“Holy shit.” I can’t believe I’m hearing this.
“It was all we could think to do,” she says. “And we had to do somethin’. There was no other way, back then. No help for a woman like Pearl way up here. Not up in these mountains.” Nana shrugs. “So I got the poison. And I put it in the sugar tin. For Saul.”
“Only, Granddad found it and got in it first.”
Nana nods again. “And then Saul got himself drunk and fell off a mountain anyway.” She frowns. “But Pearl and I, we never could get past it. Couldn’t forgive ourselves for what we planned to do. Or for what happened.” She wipes at a tear that slides down her wrinkled cheek, and it hits me hard that she’s crying for the loss of her best friend, not the loss of her husband. “Tore us apart. We couldn’t ever speak about that. So we couldn’t speak about anything ever again.”
I remember something Granny Pearl told me and Lo. 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.
“Do you blame me, Dovie?” Nana looks up at me with worried eyes, but I shake my head.
“No,” I tell her. “I’d probably have done the same thing.”
I kiss her cheek again before I head inside and leave Nana rocking on the front porch humming that song about the white rose.
I get the mud washed off and find something to eat, then I dig Hannah’s lost-and-found trail angel out of my pocket and pin it to my lace curtains, alongside the one she and Candy gave to Lo and me. Two identical angels.
Sisters. Like Hannah and Candy.
Or twin flames, maybe, like me and Lo.
“I’m sorry, Hannah.” I whisper the apology out loud, but it sounds empty and hollow, even to my ears.
I crawl into bed and drift off to the tinkling of Lo’s skeleton key charm. The last thing I think before I sink into blackness is that I hope he still has the key I cut off and gave back to him.
And I hope it really does keep him safe.
I sleep like the dead. At least for a few hours. It’s after midnight when a strange sound wakes me up, like someone is tapping on the outside of my attic window. I get out of bed and make my way across the creaky floor to peer over the vibrating air conditioner. I’m half expecting to see my mama levitating out there.
But it’s not a specter of any kind. It’s Lo, down on the ground in the front yard. He’s tossing tiny little pebbles up at my window like we’re in some kind of romantic comedy.
I pull on a pair of shorts and tiptoe down the stairs. I’m so relieved to see him that I don’t even care he’s waking me up for the second night in a row.
“You okay?” I whisper as I push the screen door open and creep out onto the porch. “I was worried when you didn’t show tonight.”
Nana’s rocking chair is empty. She must have given up waiting on Mama.
“I fell asleep,” he says. “I’m sorry, Dovie. I let you down. I should’ve been there. I—”
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You haven’t slept in days. Your body was bound to give out eventually.”
He’s standing in front of me, silhouetted against the light from the moon. Every time I see him, there’s less of him to see. He’s vanishing bit by bit right in front of my eyes. Like a magic trick.
“The stars are out tonight.” I sit down on the top step and wait for him to come to me. “Remember how we used to try to count them?”
“Until Granny Pearl told us it was bad luck,” he reminds me as he settles himself on the steps. “Never count your stars or you’ll die before you reach one hundred.”
“I forgot about that part,” I admit.
It feels good sitting together, looking up at the sky over the tops of the hills. We’ve passed so many long, hot summer nights like this. Just the two of us up late after everyone in the whole world has gone to sleep. Except now Lo’s eyes are sunken and his cheeks are hollow. His T-shirt and shorts hang on his body like he borrowed them from someone else. If I introduced this version of Lo to the old version of him, the two of them wouldn’t even recognize each other.
“Dovie, would you still love me if I told you something terrible?”
“What could you tell me that would be terrible?” I ask him. I already know about the darkness that follows him every step he takes. I can’t imagine anything worse than that.
“If I did, though, if I told you something really terrible, could you ever hate me?”
“Lo, I could never hate you. Not ever in this lifetime or the next. Not in a hundred million years. Our souls are all bound up together. That would be like hating myself.”
He’s quiet for a minute, scratching at a bugbite on his knee. “I hate myself,” he finally says. It’s barely a whisper, and at first I’m not sure he even said it out loud. Maybe he thought it, and I heard it somehow. Sometimes it seems like that between us. “I wish whatever is killing the hikers would take me instead.”
I feel like someone’s blown up a balloon inside my chest and it’s hard to breathe around the sharpness of that pain.
“Don’t wish that.” I slip my hand into his and lean my head on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t survive losing you, Lo.”
“You think that, Dovie.” He rubs at his temple, like he’s trying to erase some image that’s stuck in his brain. “But you’d be okay.”
I don’t have to wonder what it would be like to lose him. I know for a fact it’d be hell. He was gone for two months and I had no idea where he was, and the hurt of that was so different from the old hurt of missing my mama. It was new and fresh. Sharp enough to make me cry out from the sting of it, like having my lungs pierced by a hot needle. Nothing in the world felt good or right without Lo to share it with. There was no point in any of it.
But seeing him like this is almost worse. I still miss him, even though he’s sitting right beside me.
“The things I’ve done,” he whispers, “you’d be better off without me.”
“What happened to Turley isn’t your fault. And what happened to those hikers isn’t your fault. There’s nothing you’ve done wrong.”
Lo turns toward me, and the only thing I recognize about him is the dark brown color of his eyes. This is the face of a total stranger.
“You don’t know the things I’ve done, Dovie.”
“Then tell me.” I reach up and brush my fingers through his loose waves. At least the softness of his hair feels familiar. “There’s no part of you I couldn’t love. I promise.”
“No.” Lo lurches to his feet and glances around the yard. His eyes land in one of the shadowy corners. “Please.” His hands are in his hair, and his voice sounds desperate, like the wind when it howls around the outside of the house at night. “Stay the fuck away from me.” He’s backed up the steps and across the porch to press himself against the screen door. “I can’t help you! I tried!”
I’m watching him completely unravel.
I move to where he is, and I take his face in my hands. “I know you’re scared,” I whisper, “but I’m here with you. You’re not alone.” He looks down at me, and just for a second, there’s a flash of Lo in those brown eyes. He’s trying to fight his way back to me. “Do you have the skeleton key I gave you?”
“Yeah.” His eyes are darting back and forth between my face and whatever he sees out there in the darkest corner of the yard. “I keep it in my pocket all the time.”
I reach into his pocket to find it, but there’s nothing there. I try the other pocket, but it’s empty too.
“I must’ve lost it,” he says, and his voice splinters. His breathing is coming in sharp gasps now, and he flattens himself against the screen door. “Don’t let ’em get me, Dovie. Please. Don’t let ’em take me away. I wanna stay with you.”
“Hey. Hey!” I tilt his face down toward mine. “You’re not going anywhere, and I’m not going anywhere. It’s okay. You don’t need a magic key to keep you safe, Lo. I’m right here. And we’re magic together, right? We’re stronger than whatever is out there in the dark.”
“Yeah,” he says, like he’s trying to convince himself. I’m rubbing his hands like he’s got frostbite and his breathing is finally evening out a little bit. “We’re magic. You and me.” I see his muscles relax. “Stronger than the dark.”
“Dovie? Everything okay?” I look over my shoulder and Xan is standing on the sidewalk watching me and Lo.
Shit.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “We’re good.”
“What happened to your window?” Xan is pointing at the piece of black plastic Daddy and I put up.
“Nothing,” I say. Lo is staring at the plastic now too. “Somebody chucked a rock through the window.”
“Damn,” Xan says. “That doesn’t sound like nothing.”
“They hate you because of me, Dovie.” Lo’s voice is like a slow-moving river, deep enough and sad enough to drown in. He reaches up to touch my cheek before he glances at the broken window again. “That’s my fault.”
Xan is watching us, and I can tell he’s trying to figure out what Lo and I are to each other. It almost makes me laugh, because good luck with that, buddy.
“Why would somebody want to break your window?” Xan asks me.
“What’re you doing here?” I ask him in return.
We weren’t supposed to meet up again until tomorrow.
“Oh. Sorry. I just—” Xan shoves his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Look. If I’m interrupting something, or whatever, I can—”
“No,” Lo tells him, and he squeezes my hand to let me know he’s okay. “It’s good you’re here.”
I notice Xan is all cut to ribbons. There are holes in his shirt, and deep scratches spread out across his forearms like spiderwebs. “You find the burial spot?” I ask him.
“Yeah. Right by the big rock with flowers, exactly like you said.” Xan lowers himself to the bottom step and Lo and I go back to sit side by side on the top one again. “You were right, Dove. It felt peaceful.”
“I’m glad you went,” Lo tells him. “It’s important.”
“Did you guys know there’s a cabin up at the top of that ravine? More like a shack, really. There was a kerosene lantern burning out front. Maybe we need to head up that way when it gets light. Ask some questions.”
Lo and I look at each other. “That’s my place,” Lo tells him. “Me and my granny live there together.
“Oh,” Xan says. “Shit.” He looks embarrassed. “Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to be obnoxious.”
“It’s okay,” Lo says. “We know it’s a shack.” He actually smiles a little. “But neither one of us saw or heard a thing.”
Xan’s face falls, like that was his one idea, and we’ve already shot it down.
“Okay,” he says. “So what do we do first, then? I’ve already talked to Riley’s friends and some people in town, but nobody’s given me anything real to go on. I don’t have a clue where to start.”
“Me either,” I admit. I’ve never tried to solve a murder before.
“Nana have any bay leaves?” Lo asks me. His eyes are liquid fire, and it makes me so happy I almost kiss him for real right then. I thought maybe that flame inside him had been put out for good, but every time I think that, he manages to rekindle it for himself.
“Probably,” I tell him. “In the pantry.”
“We need three of them,” Lo says. “And matches.”
Xan wrinkles up his forehead like he’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on. “Are we cooking something?”
“It’s for a ceremony,” Lo tells him. “We need to set our intentions. So we start off on the right foot.” He looks at me. “We got hung up on Turley. We gotta start over clean.”
“Okay,” Xan tells us. He clearly isn’t sure what to make of this, but he seems to be okay with it.
I stand up to go get the stuff Lo needs. “Three bay leaves and some matches,” I say, and I pull open the screen door as gently as I can.
“And a black marker,” he whispers as I slip inside the dark house.
It only takes me a second to find the bay leaves and the matches in the kitchen. I hold my breath when the pantry door creaks loud enough to wake up Brother Turley down at the funeral home in Rogers, but I don’t hear Daddy or Nana stirring.
The black marker causes me some trouble. I dig through the kitchen drawers, but the best I can find is a broken pencil. I know Lo well enough to know that his list of spell requirements is always precise. If I don’t come up with a black marker, things are going to fall apart, and I don’t want that.
I remember then that Daddy keeps black markers in his desk in the corner of the living room. He uses them when he’s drawing out stained glass patterns. I tiptoe in that direction to see if I can find one.
Voices float in through the screen door. Lo and Xan are talking in whispers. I can’t make out the words, but Lo’s honeysuckle Ozarks drawl and Xan’s Oklahoma twang blend like overlapping music when one radio station starts to fade out and another one starts to come into range. I wonder what my magic mountain boy and the sad-eyed boy from Tulsa are saying to each other.
I make my way across the living room floor, avoiding the specific boards that I know are the creakiest, then I slide open Daddy’s top desk drawer to see if I can find the marker Lo needs. I don’t see any at first, but then I spot one. It’s shoved way at the back. When I grab it, I catch sight of something shiny. I reach for the tiny object and hold it up to the moonlight coming through the window that isn’t covered by black plastic.
It’s a little gold angel pin.
Triplet to the twins upstairs.