Chapter Seven
Logan and I don’t mention the raccoon at first.
We go to the grocery store. We marvel a bit at the low prices, while I complain bitterly about the lack of sparkling water
options. Particularly when compared to the length and breadth of the cheese aisle. I think that for a little while we both
want to pretend everything is the way it should be, which is to say, lacking in animal sacrifices.
We check out and are loading our haul into the trunk of the rental car when I decide enough time has passed that we can have
a conversation about the most notable thing about the knitting shop that does not involve entrails. “What’s your problem with
Nora?”
Logan stiffens. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She’s cute,” I say, ignoring him. “She seems sweet. I liked her, which is rare. But why did she turn you into a clumsy asshole?”
I realize as I say this that I want Logan to have gone all stupid over a girl. That is a much less ominous explanation for his sudden behavior shift. I want the Midas effect to be in my head only.
Because that means it’s not real and I’m just being dramatic and a little psycho, and that’s fine. That’s business as usual.
“Their lawyer didn’t give me the full story, and I don’t like the way Cleo was pressuring us,” he says, shaking his head in
that I’m having important thoughts way he has. “Why bother? What is she hiding?”
He puts the cart away and we climb into the car. It’s overwarm, almost humid inside, and the moldy smell is less offensive
now than the other, sharper, grosser thing, so I try to breathe out of my mouth instead of my nose.
I study his profile. I think about that raccoon and shudder. Then I think about how he didn’t answer the question. “Maybe
Cleo was protecting her clearly very shy friend?”
Logan shakes his head again. “No. There’s something more. She was far too adamant.”
“About selling the store to the one person who has a vested interest in it? Weird.” I don’t have to roll my eyes when my tone
does the heavy lifting for me.
But Logan seems oblivious. “Once we get the full financial picture, I’ll know what they’re hiding and we can move forward
accordingly.”
“She said it would take days. We’re headed back to New York on Sunday.”
Logan slides me a look as he’s driving down this godforsaken deserted highway back to Midas, past expansive fields to nowhere.
“I canceled our flights.”
I can only stare at him open-mouthed. Has he lost his mind? Did he drink the Midas water that is clearly poisoned by something?
“We need to figure this out,” he says, mounting an argument in his counsel for the defense mode, and I want to punch him.
“It’s one of those things we have to be here for.
We’re not going to clear out Amelia’s house by Sunday at the rate we’re going, and we still have to talk to a Realtor about putting it up on the market.
With the Wi-Fi at Jack’s diner, I can work remotely until we’ve got it all sorted, and you said it yourself—you’re taking a sabbatical this month before launching another show.
So, why not stay the month and handle this ourselves? ”
It’s like he’s having a stroke in front of me in real time. “I don’t know, Logan, maybe because this is the literal pit of
hell?”
“It’s not that bad.”
“It is that bad. I sleepwalked last night. A diner owner took against me for no earthly reason, but it feels like I should start
listening for banjos on the breeze. There was a raccoon murder that I swear Nora and Cleo blamed us for.”
Jack and that clock tower freak me out, for different reasons, but I don’t say that part out loud because I know it’s my own
paranoia, not reality.
I know this because your girl has been down this dramatic road before.
Logan is resolutely silent to all my very salient points, so I make the most important one. “I can leave on my own, you know.
I don’t need your permission.”
“You’re right,” he agrees in that easy way of his that enrages me on a good day. “You don’t.”
I refuse to say anything else. He’ll only agree with me, and it’s infuriating, because he’ll still do exactly as he pleases
while I work myself up into a state. I am not going to fall for it.
I’m not.
“You can’t just stay here,” I say after maybe a full minute of silence, tops.
He smiles, golden and bright. “I can. I will. You, as you pointed out, can do whatever you like.”
I would poke him in the neck, which he hates, if he wasn’t driving.
But then he’s turning off the highway, and I hate to think I know my way around Midas so quickly when I would prefer to erase
it from my head entirely, but I know this isn’t the turn we’ve taken the past few times in and out of town.
“Are you taking the scenic route?” I mean that as an obvious joke, but I have to admit that there’s something not . . . un-scenic about all of this. The fields. The bluffs. It’s kind of pretty, like a strange but not unpleasant glimpse into what
people would have seen hundreds of years ago.
It’s the emptiness that gets to me.
“I just saw this sign,” Logan says, his eyes on the road. “I want to check it out.”
“What sign?”
He points. We’re on a paved two-lane road, and right before us there’s a brown highway sign with a white arrow, pointing down
a gravel one.
The Old Mine. One mile.
The sign looks like it’s weathered like wood, though it can’t be. I’m pretty sure all road signs are made of aluminum. Even
here.
More importantly, “Why are we driving toward a mine?” I ask.
“The brown sign means it’s some kind of historical marker.”
“Okay. So?”
“So, I want to go take a look.”
There is something so un-Logan in all of this, I feel like we’ve gone through some strange role reversal. “Logan. We have groceries in the back.”
“They’ll keep.”
“You’re aware that you’re a lawyer, not a miner, right? Also, literally nothing we bought will keep in this heat. Have you learned nothing from my lifelong interest in food safety best practices?”
By which I mean my paranoia and anxiety—six of one, half-dozen of another—but he ignores me, pulling into a parking lot that
is little more than a glorified ditch. There’s another brown sign with the words Old Mine on it. Then there’s a little overgrown path that’s nothing but a suggestion in the tangle of shrubs and other once-green
things. Just hidden enough to think better of traipsing down it, to my mind.
The mine must be down that way, but why would anyone want to see it?
Clearly, no one does. Hence the overgrowth.
But Logan is out of the car and already moving toward the path.
I am not going after him. I do not care about a mine. We don’t have to be joined at the hip, and we haven’t been for quite some time. Before this trip, we were living separately as perfectly
functional adult twins who text each other incessantly and call each other at least once a day, which is serious distance
for people who used to share a womb.
I repeat this to myself for less than thirty seconds before he disappears into the grass, and then I’m scurrying out of the
car to follow him.
Alone out here is worse than every other alternative.
And I’ll admit, it’s pretty. The leaves are putting on a fall show of reds and yellows that glisten almost gold in the sunlight.
The prairie grasses, or that’s what I’m assuming they are, sway in the breeze that’s cooling everything off enough that my
sweater feels appropriate at last. It even smells nice out here, like . . . fall.
Like crumbling leaves and whispers of winters yet to come.
I catch sight of Logan once I’m on the path. He’s ahead of me, but I can see his destination. It appears to be the entrance of a cave with a kind of crosshatch of rusty metal that has been drilled across the opening.
Clearly, to keep people out.
As we get closer to the mine, I start to prickle all over and slow down accordingly, but Logan is striding ahead.
“Remember how people in horror movies always see the scary Keep Out sign and keep going?” I yell at him. “Why are you doing
that?”
But he keeps moving closer to the opening, like he’s considering squirming his way through the gap between metal and cave
and actually going inside.
A sudden wash of terror grips me, almost like I can see him doing it. Almost like I can feel his end. “Logan!”
He stops, swaying slightly on his feet. And when he looks over at me, it’s like he’s been in a trance.
It sends something cold and sickening through me. Goose bumps break out all over me, and my sweater isn’t keeping me warm
at all anymore.
“We need to go,” I tell him firmly, like a mother would to a disobedient toddler. With just enough snap to make them understand
you’re serious.
And it works, because Logan backs away from the mine and then it’s him following me down the path, back to the car. He doesn’t
say anything, and neither do I, even though I’m shaking from the inside out.
I glance back as we’re walking away, not fully meaning to. Just with half a thought to assure myself this was nothing. Absolutely
nothing.
It must be a trick of the sunlight, because I certainly don’t see movement in the mine opening.
We’ve already established that my mind loves nothing more than playing tricks on me.
Or maybe it was local wildlife, not an uncommon occurrence out here in the country, one would assume. It could be any innocuous thing.
Like raccoons, I can’t help but think. Like back at the knitting shop.
Which doesn’t settle me any, but I don’t want Logan to look back that way and get mesmerized again, so I keep marching us back along that indentation masquerading as a trail.
We get back into the car and I slump in my seat. I’m exhausted. I’m somehow hot and cold at once. And I’m worried, because that glazed look on Logan’s face is nothing I ever want to see again.
Everything inside me seems to lurch queasily.
“We have to go home,” I say, quietly and firmly, once Logan gets us back out to the highway. I want my apartment. I want the
familiar. I want to see my dad and not ever mention our secret grandmother or Iowa ever, ever again.
Logan blows out a breath, but at least he doesn’t smile. Or give me some more of that malicious compliance that makes my teeth
hurt from clenching them so tight. He sounds like the real Logan. Intent, if slightly shaky underneath it. “There are all
these weird things here that make no sense, in this place that we clearly have a connection to whether we knew it until now
or not, and you want to run away instead of find the answers?”
“As fast as humanly possible.”
“Not in the cards, Lex.” He spares me a serious look. “I think, deep down, you know we need to see this through.”
I want to argue, because this is unsettling and I can’t believe we’ll come out on the other side of whatever this is unscathed.
I open my mouth to start. To mount a hundred arguments of how there’s absolutely no need to engage with any of this.
But I think about the way my always easygoing and confident brother somehow lost control of knitting needles in a yarn shop.
And then, worse, seemed like he was being pulled into that mine.
Into a terrible darkness that I didn’t have to get any closer to myself to understand I wanted no part of it. To know that we needed to run far, far away and stay away.
I think about that slack, awful look on his face when I snapped him out of it.
And that thing that moved just beyond the opening, like it had been lying in wait.
What I know is that I can’t leave my twin brother here with all of this, not least because he thinks I’m the crazy one. He’s the one who takes care of me—he always has—but I’m the one who sees the creepiness, where he assumes he
can smile his way through.
I don’t care if Logan thinks I’m having yet another episode.
What I can’t have is anything happening to him when I could stay here and see it coming and maybe keep it from happening,
like today.
Maybe it’s my turn to look out for him.
Even if that means staying in this weird place a little longer. At least I’m not pretending it’s charming when I’m pretty
sure it wants to kill us.