Chapter Eighteen
I make it back to the house without incident, but then, Logan also turned on the floodlights. When I get inside the tiny house
I tell Logan about the possum that he somehow failed to hear right outside. When he seems less scared than I am, I’m annoyed.
When he sounds dismissive it infuriates me so much that I throw a decorative pillow at his head.
“Stay mad, Lex,” he says, after easily ducking my childish missile. “But maybe also put yourself to bed. Your toddler is showing.”
That makes me mad. He knows it makes me mad. That’s why he said it.
I have no choice but to make a dignified exit into my bedroom, and he knows that, too.
Dick.
And I dream about the clock tower with possum tails wriggling into the hour and minute hands that night.
But I wake up in bed the following morning knowing I didn’t somehow sleepwalk anywhere, so I guess the protections Nora showed me work.
And my dreams are sometimes just dreams.
More importantly, they’re not my fault.
The days tick by, deeper into the dark embrace of October and closer to Halloween. The leaves keep shifting their colors,
bright golden yellows and warm oranges, and splashes of deeper reds. In the diner, I hear about a grisly crash on the bridge
with no survivors and strangely, they say, no alcohol. There are whispers of a missing teen from the next town who everyone
thinks was involved in drugs, but Jack only shakes his head, and I think about my night on the flood wall. Meanwhile, leaf-peeping
tourists fill in all the empty spaces in town, flooding the streets, crowding the sidewalks, wandering wherever they please
with sulky children and their phones out to take pictures of Midas’s charms and never seeming to sense the watching shadows.
Marleen kept her word and presented me with my very first scotcheroo the morning after Knit and Sip. She even waited there
while I took a bite, her arms crossed. I was determined to like it no matter how it tasted, obviously.
But it was glorious. A Rice Krispies treat, basically, but with peanut butter and a whole chocolate butterscotch situation—pure
bliss, in fact.
“You’re not really taking this off the menu, are you?” I asked with my mouth still full.
“Not you, too,” Jack muttered, but he looked pleased.
Marleen reserved comment, as usual.
But the scotcheroos stayed on the menu. For the moment. And while Marleen continued not to speak, she does not pretend I’m
not there anymore. I get a nod, a wave. Not a smile, not a word.
It’s progress. I think maybe she’s protective of Jack, and how can I not support that? I feel that way, too.
I do my best to live like I don’t know Halloween is coming and, currently, we have no plan. Sometimes, during my breakfast
shift on the stool in Jack’s kitchen, I wonder.
Do we know that everything will get better if the deal is broken? What if it doesn’t? What if breaking the deal only returns
Midas to chaos?
What if it gets worse? What if I’m just crazy and people just die and crash their cars and that’s part of life, not a demon deal that’s been forced on an otherwise charming Iowa town?
But I keep questions like that to myself, and not only because I’m personally invested in the demons being real, too.
The studying I’m doing with Harrison doesn’t seem to help me achieve any higher level of understanding or insight. It’s history,
that’s all. It doesn’t connect to my dreams, and it certainly doesn’t give me any bright ideas on how to undo a two-hundred-year-old
deal with evil forces.
I’m reminded of what Jack said to Logan when they first talked to us about this. Did you think it was going to be easy?
I’m feeling broody as I sink into my usual seat in the antique store and pretend to read through the never-ending stack of
books Harrison prepares for me daily. If I really dig into my mood, I can admit that it’s possibly only half to do with feeling like I’m spinning my wheels here as the literal drop-dead date draws closer.
The other half probably has a lot to do with Jack resolutely not bringing up my dream notebook, though he always gives it
back to me each day so I can keep it updated and leave it with him again. There has been no more hand holding, either.
He places it on my stool every morning and puts my latte on top, and takes it back before I go in to see Harrison.
So efficient, I think now, and not in a complimentary fashion.
I could ask Cleo or Nora if he’s mentioned it to them, of course. We knit together after the shop closes a few times a week now, but I’m always afraid to introduce the topic of Jack. Our de facto leader, who hasn’t seemed very leader-y lately.
Then again, the diner is packed at all hours now. There’s a new Midas festival every weekend and themed weeks, and they all
bring in the crowds. On the surface, I feel like I should enjoy them all. It’s like living in a Hallmark movie every day,
except mostly, it just seems like a lot of people all up in my space.
Ironic for a New Yorker, I know.
This just doesn’t seem the place for it. There’s no infrastructure here for teeming people. They are always in the narrow streets. They wander into private
areas, like our yard, and seem baffled when we try to shoo them back to a public sidewalk.
Then again, the point is the teeming, I’m well aware. This is all so the demons can feed, not because Midas is the Fall Festival Capital of the World as some of the promotional flyers claim.
I realize I’ve wandered off in my own head when it’s clear that Harrison has been talking to me for a minute. I try to tune
in, only to find that he’s telling me the story of a foundling who jumped off the flood wall in the early 1920s. Everyone
chalked it up to losing her husband in World War I.
“Suicides were covered up in those days,” Harrison tells me. “Some say she made sure to do it in a way that couldn’t be hushed
up.”
The last thing I want to talk about is a suicidal woman jumping off the flood wall. That flood wall.
I change the subject. “Has anyone ever done any research to where these girls come from?”
I ask this from my spot on a cushy recliner that was likely made in the seventies, based on the olive green-and-orange pattern.
We’ve talked about foundlings before, a lot, but not in the context of researching them.
“Of course.” Harrison is going through a box someone dropped off, full of what looks to me like mostly junk fit for a dumpster, not something to put a price tag on.
This is why I don’t work here. “I suppose in the old days, it was a more frequent occurrence. The world was harsher. It was harder to communicate with people from other towns who might be missing a child, and orphans were more common all around. In the eighteen hundreds an orphan train ran through Midas, in fact.”
“An orphan train?”
He glances over and sees my confusion. “Oh, they moved orphans in overcrowded cities on the coast to the Midwest where families
had more room to house them. They had specific routes. I’ve got a book on it I’ll get you.”
Harrison is forever getting me books—all on topics I don’t have much interest in and never seem to have anything to do with
demons. But every afternoon I dutifully lug another stack home with a smile on my face. I’ve built a wall of them in the living
room, in the hopes they might fall on Logan while he sleeps. Any day now.
“What about Nora?” I ask. “She said she was found at the clock tower.”
I try not to shudder at the idea, the clock tower looming heavy in my head the way it always does. Even a pretty tapestry
of fall colors all along the river can’t make that clock tower feel less oppressive.
“Poor thing. Just a little baby, not more than a few days old.” Harrison clucks his tongue, a kind of sorrow in his tone that
tells me he remembers it well. “She was left there to cry in the rain. Luckily, I came across her before she’d been there
too long. It was clearly a case of abandonment.”
My heart twists at the idea of a little baby all alone in the rain. Especially when that baby was Nora. Not to mention, the clock tower wasn’t any kind of safe space, and not just because it creeps me out. It also apparently fell on a baby once.
“Did you ever try to figure out who abandoned her?” I can’t help but keep asking these questions. “Or who she belonged to?”
Harrison blows out a breath. “There was a legal process, but everyone involved knew there wasn’t anything good going to come
from getting her back to the people who left her out like that.”
I don’t think this really answers the question. Did he go through the legal process? Did he know who left Nora and why? Is
he deliberately not telling me—or is the town’s unofficial historian in the dark, just like me?
“What about my mother?” I press. “She was found, too. By my grandmother at that creepy mine, right?”
“That was how Amelia told it,” Harrison confirms. Though that phrasing is off, I think. Like he doesn’t believe that’s the
full story. Like maybe he thinks Amelia kept things from him, which maybe means they weren’t the great buddies I’ve been thinking
they were.
This only makes me want to know the full story more.
But there is clearly something touchy here. Something about foundlings as well as, maybe, my grandmother. And since I don’t
want to push too hard on sore subjects when it comes to the people I like, I let it go.
I page through another diary of a Darling from long ago, since journal-keeping is apparently a Darling family tradition. This
one is particularly dull. Just a woman’s list of what she baked and cleaned every day. The occasional mention of a funeral
or church event or baby shower, but no mention of demons at all.
I’m not sure if it’s more or less interesting than a Darling ancestor who referred to himself as the Village Lamplighter, made it his life’s work to lobby for Midas’s streetlights, and spoke of his obsession in wildly heroic terms. Very male, in my opinion, to make a chore into an epic poem when it would just be another in a list of household tasks if he were a woman.