by Deirdre Dore
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For my mom
And all our beloved lost
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
—Mary Oliver, “When I Am Among the Trees”
Prologue
Summer 1986
RAQUEL WEAVER HAD never liked the woods. Her friends seemed to love them: Chris Pascal, Tavey Collins, and Summer Haven always wanted to play in the woods, ever since they had first started exploring when they were five, until now, when they were eight, or almost eight. They wanted to find the creek and jump in the swimming hole, or play hide-and-seek, or find the hidden places that Summer described in her stories. The truth was, Raquel preferred the cool rooms and subtle luxury of the Collinses’ house, where she lived in the servants’ quarters with her grandmother.
Tavey’s family—the Collinses—had built the mansion around the turn of the century, but they had lived on the property long before that. Raquel’s grandmother, Bessie, had tended the laundry and mended clothing for the Collinses since she was a girl. To Raquel, the wealth and tidiness of the mansion were comforting. The smell of furniture polish, old books, and the starch her grandmother used on the linens felt safe—safe in a way that the woods, wild and dark, full of mystery and secrets, never had. Raquel thought the woods were haunted. In a way she couldn’t explain and didn’t want to think about, they reminded her of her mother, Gloria Belle. They were dangerous, these woods. Beautiful, dangerous, and unpredictable.
Which explained, in part, why she was following Summer through the woods now. She worried that her friend, blind since birth, would encounter something unfamiliar, a fallen log or a wild animal or maybe something worse, something that lingered in the tucks and folds of the earth from an old time, a time before. Raquel didn’t know why she worried; Summer made her way through the woods like a ghost, seeming to know every turn and step and overhanging limb, but it was in Raquel’s nature to worry, just as it was in her nature to protect.
The path they climbed through the trees was narrow and steep in places, the tree roots acting as steps of a sort. A steady chirp and rustle of insects played in the subtle shadows beneath the outstretched limbs of oak, ash, and elm. Outside the forest, the summer heat made everything throb and glimmer, but in the valleys and ridges of the north Georgia mountains where they lived, the air was tepid rather that steamy.
“What are you lookin’ for now, Summer?”
Summer had been spending a lot of time in the woods lately, upset about something, though she hadn’t opened up to Raquel about exactly what was bothering her. She rarely did. Raquel, Chris, and Tavey all ran to Summer with their problems—she knew how to listen better than anyone—but Summer rarely shared her own troubles. Raquel knew it had something to do with Summer’s older sister, Jane, and her new husband, Mark, because Summer seemed uncomfortable around them, her small, bony shoulders tense and still.
“Hmm?” Summer paused, her blond head turning left and right, as if she were listening to sounds that echoed from far away.
“What are you lookin’ for?” Raquel repeated, taking the time to wipe the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. The sweat left a shiny streak on her dark skin. She frowned in distaste and wiped her hand on the back of her shorts. They couldn’t get any dirtier than they already were.
“Someone,” Summer said obliquely. “A man who should be dead, but isn’t. One of ours.” Her voice was without inflection or accent and sounded much older than her eight years.
Raquel shivered. Summer never talked to anyone else like that. With the others, when she spoke of magic, of her family, she told stories. She shared the history of her strange family—the Havens, who had lived in their tiny town of Fate for hundreds of years—as if she were repeating a fairy tale. A dark tale, maybe, a tale of witches, and beauty, and the power to know the fate of the people in town. But with Raquel, when they were alone, she revealed a presence that was older than the girl she appeared to be, a presence that frightened Raquel sometimes, enough that she’d never described it to Chris or Tavey, never known how, really.
So she swallowed and ventured, “You wanna tell me why we’re looking for this man? He’s one of the witches?”
Summer didn’t answer right away, her attention caught by something in the breeze. She started climbing again, occasionally ducking as if she were trying to avoid a low-hanging branch. Raquel didn’t want to tell her that there was nothing there.
“Summer?” Raquel prompted without moving. She was tired of climbing, especially if they were looking for a dead man. Raquel didn’t want to find a supposed-to-be-dead man, or a live one, for that matter. She wanted a glass of ice water and a cookie from the Collinses’ chef.
Summer stopped up ahead on the trail and reached out with her fingers, like she was feeling the damp, humid air. “This is the time when I can sense him, when the world is thin.”
“Thin?” Raquel look around, wanting to scoff at the idea of the world being thin, but then she thought of her mother, and how the world felt when she was with her. She looked around at the trees; they seemed to shift and hide in the changing shadows of the leaves. She could believe the world was thin here.
“Yes, the solstice.” Summer stopped feeling the air and moved forward again, ducking her head as she continued on.
“The what?” Raquel groused, slapping at a mosquito. She was tired of the woods.
“You know what the solstice is . . . the longest day of the year.”
Raquel sighed—they’d been learning about it during science in their second-grade class, but she didn’t see what it had to do with anything. In resignation, she started climbing again. She was within a few feet of Summer when she felt the touch of a spiderweb against her face. She tried to back away, but she’d gone too far and the strands stretched and snapped, bouncing back on her.
“Ugh,” she gasped, and tried to brush them away, but the sticky threads clung to her. She scrubbed harder, running her hands down her arms, cursing. She felt like there were spiders and dead bugs all over her; there had to be.
Summer stopped her frantic motion by catching her arms. “Stop,” she ordered, sounding like Raquel’s grandmother—firm, but kind. “It won’t hurt you.”
“Spiders bite,” Raquel hissed.
“There’s no spider, just a web,” Summer soothed. “Just a kiss of fate.”
Raquel blinked, startled. “A what?”
Summer smiled, the blue of her eyes as blank and radiant as the sky on a clear day. “A kiss of fate.”
“Gross. Why do you call it that?” Raquel muttered, absently brushing her fingers over her hair. In her mind a kiss was something pleasant, nothing like the icky feel of spiderwebs, which seemed unnatural to Raquel, unnatural in their strange designs and weird strength.
Summer shrugged, seeming to look up at the web, even though she couldn’t see. “I can feel them sometimes, even before they touch me, like a tingle on my skin. Like a kiss. Ninny says that’s how they catch things . . . they don’t actually wait; they reach out and take.” Summer smiled. “Fate’s like that. You can sense fate, if you pay attention, and if you don’t . . .” She snapped her fingers. “She takes you.”
Raquel scrunched up
her small nose. “You’re weird, Summer. Spiderwebs are gross and freaky, and fate isn’t a person.”
Summer chuckled, and again it was the old sound, the sound of the Summer who knew impossible things about the people in town. She turned away and started climbing ahead of Raquel again.
“If you say so.” Summer’s mild reply seemed to float back to Raquel on a stray breeze, which brushed gently against her face, like the soft air kisses of the ladies in church. The comparison was so creepily similar to the one Summer had given of fate that Raquel shuddered.
Raquel took a deep breath and moved forward, still following Summer, making sure that she ducked whenever Summer did, not wanting any more encounters with spiderwebs or fate or anything else strange.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it, though, couldn’t stop thinking about the pull and tug of the strands, how they’d broken. She didn’t know why the thought of those broken threads made her heart beat faster with fear and dread, but they did, and she wished she could convince Summer to come back to the house with her, back where it was safe.
But she already knew that Summer wouldn’t come. Summer wasn’t afraid of the woods, wasn’t afraid of much, really.
“Come on, Raquel. Don’t be afraid.”
Don’t be afraid. God, she was. All the time. Not like Summer. Not even like Tavey or Chris. They all seemed fearless.
Raquel wasn’t fearless, but she hated being afraid, hated it, but Summer was her friend; she couldn’t let her go into the woods alone. Chris would go with her, so would Tavey.
“I’m not afraid,” Raquel called ahead, “but I ain’t doin’ this again. I just saw a spider.”
Summer chuckled.
“Not ever,” Raquel repeated, “and you aren’t, either. Don’t be stupid, Summer.”
But Summer didn’t listen. Not then, and not two months later when she ventured into the woods with Chris by her side. On that fall afternoon, something in the woods took Summer Haven, and she’d never returned.
1
THE WARM SPRING sun shone bright and cheerful on the open hillside while trees danced in the capricious breeze. It was a beautiful day. Too beautiful for one funeral, let alone three, but there were three graves dug in the red Georgia clay on the hillside, two situated near the rest of Tavey Collins’s family, and one farther off, in a section of the family graveyard where the grass had only recently been cut, close to the tree line. Raquel Weaver and her two best friends stood together, slightly apart from the other mourners, as they considered the casket of Robert Carlson, a man none of them had known or even liked, even though he was Chris’s father.
Raquel held Chris’s hand, trying to conceal the bone-deep rage that filled her at the idea of Robert Carlson being anywhere near the other graves. One of them belonged to her grandmother, Bessie Weaver. She didn’t want Chris to feel guilty, especially if she was upset about her father’s death, but Robert Carlson didn’t matter the way Bessie did—he just didn’t.
Chris wasn’t crying, though; she was unusually expressionless, her lips set beneath her sunglasses. Tavey held Chris’s other hand, but she was also watching Chris’s face, studying her friend for some sign that she was distraught. In other circumstances, Raquel would have left Tavey to her perusal and the barrage of questions that would follow, knowing that Chris would talk in her own good time, but recent events had left them all shaken, and Raquel didn’t feel like anything was quite the same.
“I’m fine,” Chris said to them both. “It’s not like I knew him. Bessie and Atohi are the ones I’m upset about. I don’t think he belongs here.”
Raquel squeezed Chris’s hand. Chris meant that her father didn’t belong in the small family graveyard on Tavey’s property, because Chris’s father hadn’t been family or a lifetime servant of the Collinses like Bessie or Atohi, the man who’d helped breed and train the Collinses’ hounds for generations. Robert Carlson was an ex–real estate broker and former convict who had ignored Chris—his illegitimate child—for her entire life. They’d only recently learned that he’d also been involved in a plot thirty years earlier to move drugs through Fate with Tavey’s father, Charlie, and Mark Arrowdale, Summer’s brother-in-law, though the details surrounding what had happened were still unclear. Robert Carlson had been a liar, an addict, and, in all likelihood, a murderer. Raquel didn’t think he deserved to be on the same planet as her grandmother Bessie, much less in the same graveyard.
Tavey lifted her chin and replied mildly, “Apparently my father’s grave shouldn’t be here, either, and not just because he didn’t die when everyone thought. We can’t always choose our family.” Tavey paused for a moment, looking at Raquel and Chris. “Unfortunately.”
Raquel noted the paleness of her face and knew that beneath her sunglasses, Tavey’s eyes were dark circled and red rimmed. Her equanimity was part of her character, at least in front of others. In private she was more open about how hurt she’d been to learn that her father had faked his own death in 1982 to avoid his debts, that he’d been involved in running drugs. Mostly, however, Raquel thought Tavey was upset about Tyler, the Cherokee County investigator who had inherited Summer’s cold case. He was in the hospital—shot by Summer’s brother-in-law Mark, the same man who had killed Bessie and Atohi—and Tavey was blaming herself. She’d loved him for a long time, and they’d finally gotten together amid the turmoil of Mark Arrowdale’s return and the death of Tyler’s uncle, Abraham, who’d lived on a small slice of property between Tavey’s and the Havens’, where Summer’s family still resided.
Tavey continued, releasing Chris’s hand to brush aside a stray lock of dark brown hair that the wind had blown in her face. “But if we all agree, I’ll let the minister know that we don’t need to have a service for Robert Carlson.”
Chris shrugged. “I wanted to cremate him and put his ashes in a Folgers can since his legitimate family couldn’t be bothered. You’re the one who wanted to bury him.”
Tavey took that as a yes and went to speak with the minister.
Raquel glanced back at the small crowd just behind them, which was made up of various people who were either family or close friends, so there was no real reason they were keeping their distance, except that they seemed to realize that she, Chris, and Tavey had needed some space. Chris’s lover, Ryan Helmer, who also happened to be the FBI agent who had helped catch a serial killer who’d targeted Chris last fall, had his gaze fastened on the back of Chris’s head, his handsome face concerned. Only one person was looking back at Raquel—Brent Burns.
Brent was a documentary filmmaker and a complete pain in her ass. His lips, usually smiling with a good-natured insouciance that belied his calculating intelligence, were set in a frown, his eyes dark with concern for her.
Raquel ignored him and focused on Sylvia, the Collinses’ housekeeper and Chris’s mother. Her narrow face was strained, her dark hair pulled back in an achingly tight bun. She was watching her daughter’s back, but she didn’t make any move to come closer. Sylvia had always seemed to feel ashamed of the affair she’d had with Robert Carlson back when she had been his housekeeper in the late seventies, and had been distant with Chris. Raquel thought of her own mother. There are worse things than distance.
“I’ll be back in a second,” Chris muttered, drawing Raquel’s attention back to her.
Chris was walking across the hill, toward the graves of Bessie and Atohi, where Summer’s nieces, identical triplets, were standing silently, wildflowers in hand, their dog Penny sitting on the grass next to them. The girls, Datura, Schisandra, and Yarrow, looked younger than their fifteen years in dark blue dresses and sandals, their hair in blond fishtail braids that reminded Raquel of Summer. Chris had developed a close relationship with the girls when they had all been captured by Joe Sherman—the “string killer”—last fall and held in a crumbling old paper mill deep in the nearby woods. How they’d escaped death was something of a mystery, neith
er Chris nor the girls had ever been able to clearly explain what led up to Joe Sherman’s demise, but Raquel wasn’t surprised when strange things happened around anyone in Summer’s family. There were rumors in town that the three sisters had strange talents, and Ryan said they’d warned him that Tavey and Tyler were in danger.
I wonder what else they know, Raquel thought, but was distracted when Brent stepped to her side.
“Hey—” he began.
Raquel cut him off, “I don’t want to talk.”
He exhaled in a deep sigh, but he didn’t respond to her rudeness in kind. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about Bessie. I liked her.” He touched her elbow briefly in comfort, a warm, soft touch that she remembered well, a touch that made her shiver briefly in remembrance. Involuntarily, her eyes followed his big muscled body as he strode off toward chairs that had been set up near the graves.
More people were moving in that direction, but Raquel waited, not wanting to approach and have to talk to anyone. She was looking at the caskets rigged above the holes that had been dug in the earth by hand by several laborers who were taking a break in the shade of the trees at the edge of the cemetery. There weren’t any roads to get heavy machinery up on this side of the hill. She distracted herself with idle thoughts about how long it must have taken while she waited for Tavey.
Her lips felt chapped. She kept licking them even though the day was slightly humid, and the bright sunshine felt too bright, like it was an alien sun shining on a strange world. She’d felt the same way when Summer had disappeared, like the world suddenly didn’t make sense. She’d never known a world without the constant, steady presence of her grandmother, and the rage that bubbled and rolled inside her had nowhere to go.
Tavey came back from speaking with the minister and took Raquel’s arm. “He doesn’t agree, but he understands.” Tavey paused, looking closely at Raquel’s face. “I’m so sorry, Raquel.”
