Chapter 5 Carrie
Stir the salt and dried lavender under the light of the waxing moon and leave until at least the next full moon before use. Sprinkle liberally over every threshold, every window ledge, to ward against ill luck and spirits trying to get in.
—Abigail Morgan, March 23, 1871
Woodsmoke is just as I remember. As the drizzle begins, painting the pavements a darker gray, I tread the familiar path through the town. Past the greengrocers with punnets of imported grapes and strawberries outside, the inside overflowing with middle-aged women carrying baskets. One of them laughs as I walk past, a hearty clanging sound with the local twang laced through it. I wonder if she’s someone I would remember.
I linger on the threshold of the bookshop, the crisp new editions fronting the jumble of secondhand paperbacks stacked up at the back. I’m sure old Mr. Winter will be around somewhere, searching for a book he hasn’t laid eyes on in six months. They hide from him, I’m sure of it. Swap places in the night, pages ruffling with mirth.
There are layers to this town, with memories lingering on every corner—like the time Sally Nash swiped a tube of lipstick from the chemist in the main square on a dare. She wore the rose-pink shade on her lips the next day at school, planted a kiss on a napkin, and in second-period French passed it to Gregory Smith, whose ears turned the same shade of pink. Or when Jess and I would go Christmas shopping for our small circle of friends each year, the cold winter wind sharp on our cheeks, our breath frosting the air. After giving the shopkeeper in the trinkets and jewelry shop off the main square our exact budget, she would solemnly present us with a bundle of tiny treasures that we then carefully wrapped in tissue paper packets when we got home.
I glance up and see a couple of women my mother’s age staring at me, one with a hand comically raised to cover her mouth. I smile uncertainly, and they quickly look away, rushing past me. It triggers another set of memories, another layer. Without Jess at my side, I always felt like an outsider. Like I was too different and didn’t belong. The stories and whispers about magic and superstition were always intertwined with my last name, Morgan. I never knew exactly how to fit in, how to shake off my name. After I left, it all got too much for Mum and Dad, and they left too.
I carry on along the pavement and reach the shop that my grandmother, Ivy, ran. The candle shop is a tiny crooked thing with a narrow green door and a window with square glass panes. My breath hitches when I see the display, taking in how faded it looks. How tired and old the jumble of candles appears. This shop used to sparkle, luring in passersby with the scents of jasmine and fig, light spilling out in a golden pool over the pavement.
Now it belongs to me, another provision of the will. The lease, the stock. The extra pile of responsibilities. And I’m not sure what to do with it. I press my fingers to the glass, breath fogging up the panes, and feel as though I can almost see Ivy inside, see her smiling, plump little form peering around her old-fashioned cash register. Fingers of cold brush the back of my neck and I step away, thrusting my hands into my pockets.
I hurry away, even though I have the key in my pocket. I need to do an inventory, find the paperwork for the lease, and decide what to do with those two dusty rooms. Ivy leased the shop from Cora and Howard; it was Howard’s mother’s shop before it was Ivy’s. Howard’s mother, Mrs. Price, ran it as a haberdashery, a small treasure trove of ribbons, lace, and buttons . . . but that was before my time. I pause in the street, then turn back to the shop, my fingers closing over the large iron key in my pocket.
No. Not yet. I release my hold on the key, letting it drop back to the lint lining my pocket. Not today. One thing at a time. Today I need to find the old hardware store and work out what to buy for the renovation.
Cora, in her busy way, has arranged for an electrician to come over. All I had to do was leave the door unlocked and make myself scarce for a few hours. It wasn’t hard. Especially when I heard who it was: a boy a few years above me at school, now a man who had moved two towns over. I wasn’t quite ready for the small talk, the quiet judgment. One step at a time, I guess. There are plenty of months left to find out what Woodsmoke really feels about me and the choices I’ve made. To learn if anything has changed for the Morgan women, or if we’re still largely outsiders, just as we have always been.
The hardware store is on a little side street off the main square, squat and wide, a labyrinth of items. I went in only once before, when I was a teenager looking for picture hooks to hang something of myself on my bedroom walls. Something I had chosen, not Mum. I came away with six hooks in a little white envelope, the price written in pencil on the front. I borrowed a hammer from my dad’s workshop and put up six crooked pictures behind my bed. I can still picture Mum’s pinched mouth, the way she folded her arms when she saw them. A thrill of triumph and rebellion coursed through my veins. Now I realize she was cross only because I pulled great chunks of plaster off the walls, using Dad’s hammer.
The bell rings over the door as I walk in, echoing back and back. The shelves are stacked up to nearly twice my height, creating a maze of nails and screws, paint tins, and brushes in dusty packaging. I can hear the owner some way off, his voice muffled and far away. I breathe it in, the scent of purpose. Of wood polish and glue and the tang of metal. I pull the list up on my phone screen, mentally checking each item. It seems so inadequate, this little list, to face the work I have to do this winter.
The owner’s voice cuts off suddenly, and I hear footsteps as he moves along the narrow walkways. When he spies me by the door, his eyebrows shoot up, creasing his forehead.
“Carrie Morgan. Ivy said you’d be by.”
He blinks at me, an HB pencil tucked behind one ear, as he dusts his hands off on the front of his royal-blue boiler suit. “You’ll be wanting supplies.”
I barely hide the shock of hearing my grandmother’s name tossed around so casually, like she’s still here with us. “She . . . told you?”
He nods as I hand over my phone so he can scroll down the list. “Before she passed. God rest her soul. Beautiful funeral, Carrie. Just beautiful. Cora made some lovely sandwiches afterward. Good cake too. That woman sure does know how to bake.”
He looks around as though checking to make sure there’s no one else in the shop. No one listening in. “Between you and me, Cora gave my wife a remedy last year. A seasonal ailment. Bets had a terrible rash. All down her neck, her face . . . anyway. Doc didn’t have a clue. Made us a consultant appointment, nothing came of it. Then she goes to Cora, quiet in the night like, and . . . well.”
His eyebrows raise. “I know plenty knock the Morgan name, but they soon all come calling if they need something, don’t they? Helped my Bets no end. Ivy was a good woman. Cora is too in her own way.”
“Right,”
I say awkwardly as he hands back my phone. And not for the first time, I wish my last name wasn’t Morgan. That I didn’t have this legacy dragging behind me. I can picture Cora making the spread for Ivy, ensuring everything was just so. They might not have gotten along toward the end, but Cora would never have seen her sister buried without a good send-off. And she would never turn away someone from the town if she could help them. “You think I need anything else? I just typed out the basics . . .”
He squints at me, humming discordantly. “How about I put together a few bits, and you can take what you can carry today? Howard can drop the rest over to you.”
“I—sure,”
I nod, following as he skirts around teetering shelves laden with items as varied as rubber sink plungers, mouse traps, and boxed-up champagne coupes. It’s an Aladdin’s cave, and he seems to know exactly where each item is. I trail in his wake, breathing in the scent of wood polish as he collects screws and nails in little white envelopes, writing the numbers and prices on each one before sealing them. This small detail somehow reassures me. While the only constant in my life has been change over the past decade, this shop has managed to stand still.
“Have you been to see Cora yet?”
the owner says, tucking the pencil back behind his ear. “I don’t like speaking out of turn, but . . .”
“But?” I nudge.
“She’s getting worse, Carrie. Almost reclusive. And when she does come into town, it’s to tuck one of those recipes of hers inside a letter box, or to cast a warning. You know the ones. She helped my Bets, but some people . . . they don’t take kindly to it. Not if they don’t seek it out.”
“I know,”
I sigh. Woodsmoke has always been divided over Cora. Those who think she’s completely lost it roll their eyes and stuff her recipes in the bin. Sometimes that works out for them, but sometimes it doesn’t go so well. When she tells someone to stir up honey and blackberries picked on the second Thursday in September for a tonic and to give it to their sickly child, they might bristle, but they usually follow her advice. Then some find their child becoming even sicker from some unknown illness even the doctor can’t figure out. Because that’s the thing about Cora—she’s got a finger on the pulse of those mountains. When you live in the shadow of such an ancient place, full of stories of disappearances and cries in the night, it’s best to heed any advice you can get.
“Howard told me the doctor’s been by.”
“He didn’t say.”
I wonder what the doctor makes of Cora. Whether they believe in the old ways, or if they think she’s lost every marble she ever possessed. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
When I leave the hardware store, laden with paint tins, brushes, packets of screws and nails, a hammer, and my very own drill, the drizzle has hardened to ice. Hailstones ping from the pavement, and tiny chips of them graze the back of my neck. I hiss, trying to shrug my jacket higher as the sharp little claws of ice burrow beneath my collar. The town square empties out almost immediately, with shoppers dashing for the car park or the sanctuary of the chemist and greengrocer.
That’s when I feel it.
A change, a shift in the way the air flows around me. And when I look up, my eyes crash into his across the square. I falter, and the pounding of my heart lurching in my chest echoes through every inch of me. The ground tilts.
“Tom,”
I whisper, that one syllable carrying the old weight of a broken, restless heart.
He’s got his hood up, half obscuring his features, but I’d know him anywhere. I’d know him as a child, as a middle-aged man, as an elderly man walking the winding road toward death. There are some people you just know that way. And as though he heard my whisper across the pavement and the wide, cobblestoned square, he takes a step toward me. But there’s a child, a small, insistent little girl tugging on his hand, pulling him back. With another sickening, aching lurch, I realize that this child must be his. His and Jess’s. I heard they got together after I left, but even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t call Jess. I couldn’t write to her. She didn’t feel like mine anymore, she felt like another person entirely. And this man, this man I knew as a boy, is all hers now. A stranger.
I can’t be here.
I run. I run as fast as I can, weighed down with the paint and the drill and everything else. I lumber all the way to my car, parked on a side street, dump all the supplies onto the backseat, and then sit in the driver’s seat taking gulp after gulp of frigid air.
Twenty minutes pass before I feel able to drive. The tremors in my hands rattle and rattle, forcing me to turn inward. To relive the last few moments of our parting, when I ripped my world apart to save his. I haven’t had a panic attack since the months leading up to the day I left. After leaving Woodsmoke behind, the attacks vanished too. Until now, I guess.
The engine turns over twice, three times, before the low rumble starts. The hail has stopped, leaving pockets of ice in the corners of the pavement shining like tiny marbles. The clouds still linger, though, pressing down on Woodsmoke, reminding us that winter is here. And the snow, the endless cold, will arrive with a finger snap soon enough.
It’s not until I’m on the road and turning out of town that I remember the last thing on my list. Tea bags. And somehow, forgetting that one item, that simple, everyday thing, is what sends me plummeting over the edge.
When I return to the cottage, there’s another bunch of wildflowers on the doorstep. For a beat, I just stare at them. I purse my lips, frustration building in my temples, and think about all the stories, the superstitions woven through Woodsmoke. About Cora and the book and her warnings. My heart thuds faster and faster, drumming up a tempest. I don’t know if it’s fear or anger or something in between, but I pick up those flowers and hurl them into the frost.
I slam the door to the cottage in my wake. It’s not just about the wildflowers. Or the fear of who or what might be leaving them on the doorstep. It’s everything. It’s this crumbling cottage, it’s being back here. It’s the hole in my heart I’ve carried for a decade, wanting so desperately to fill it with a home that didn’t seem to belong to me. I lean against the front door, gazing at the hallway. I should go back upstairs and carry on stripping wallpaper. That’s what I should do.
But I have that feeling again. Like I’m being watched. Tested. Like every move I make is being weighed and measured.
I take a deep, shuddering breath, expelling my fear and frustration, and turn to open the front door. I bend down and carefully gather up the stems of the discarded wildflowers, making sure none of the buds are damaged. Then I go into the cottage, pull one of Ivy’s old enamel jugs down from a shelf, and fill it with water. Looking at the flowers sitting in that jug on the farmhouse table, I can’t help feeling like I’m losing. Like my homecoming is a test, and I’m failing so far. Like I’m cursed, cursed to never belong here. Like the mountains are filled with fury that I left.
I rummage in the drawers, then pull out an old tub with a blend of rock salt and dried lavender buds inside. Peeling back the lid, I inhale the delicate fragrance, then carry the tub to the front door. Carefully, slowly, I pour the contents of the tub along the threshold. Along the windowsills outside. I close the lid, look up at the mountains, and squint, eyeing the path that winds up through the trees.
I can’t ignore the stories here, not like some people in town try to. I can’t ignore the signs or the warnings. I’m back in Woodsmoke, even just for the winter, and the old rules exist for a reason.