First Frost

by Sarah Addison Allen

  The wind had died down, but the stranger’s silver hair and trouser cuffs were moving slightly, as if he had attracted what little breeze left to him, the way birds flock to seed.

  His light, silvery eyes finally landed on Bay. There was a road between them but, strangely, all the cars seemed to have disappeared. He smiled, and it was just as Bay had suspected. It was as if he could tell her everything she wanted to hear.

  “I was wondering,” the man called to her in a pearly voice, “if you could tell me where Pendland Street is?”

  Bay paused at the coincidence. She had just come from the Waverley house on Pendland Street. Pendland Street was long and winding and contained the oldest homes in Bascom, rambling, shabby-chic houses that tourists like to see. He could belong at any number of them. She looked at his old suitcase. Maybe at the inn on the street.

  She pointed back the way she had come.

  “Thank you,” the man said.

  Cars suddenly appeared again, racing down the busy downtown street, obscuring her view. She jogged to the nearby newspaper box and climbed on top of it, steadying herself with the lamppost beside the box.

  But the green was empty now. The man had disappeared.

  As Bay stood there on the box, a blue Fiat drove by. Inside were the upper-crust girls from Bay’s high school—Trinity Kale, Dakota Olsen, Riva Alexander and Louise Hammish-Holdem. Louise leaned out the window and yelled to Bay in a singsongy voice, “We’re going to Josh’s house! Do you want us to give him another note from you?”

  Bay, used to this, just sighed as she watched the car drive on. Then she jumped down from the newspaper box and walked to her mother’s hair salon across from the green.

  When she entered the salon, she saw her mother deep in conversation with her last appointment. Sydney was thirty-eight, but looked younger. She was a confident dresser, her preferences leaning toward shorts paired with striped tights and midcentury vintage dresses. Her skin was smooth and her hair was a delicious caramel blond—usually. Today, Bay could swear there were new, electric shadows of red in it, ones that hadn’t been there that morning.

  Bay dropped her backpack behind the reception desk where Violet, her mother’s new (totally ineffective) receptionist was fast asleep in her chair. She was even snoring slightly. Bay took a tattered paperback out of her backpack and held it up for her mother to see, then she hitched her thumb at the door, telling her mother that she’d be outside reading.

  Sydney nodded and gave Bay a look that had driver’s ed written all over it. She’d been nagging Bay about signing up for driving lessons for months now. But Bay didn’t want to learn to drive. If she did, there was no telling what sort of embarrassment she’d cause herself before first frost. No, she was fine walking and taking the bus to her aunt Claire’s house and waiting for her mother to get off work in the evenings.

  Too much freedom was a dangerous thing for a girl in love.

  “Take your phone. I’ll call you if I get through early,” Sydney said, and Bay grudgingly went back to her backpack and took out her phone and put it in her pocket.

  Her mother said she was, quite possibly, the only teenager in the world who didn’t like talking on the phone. That wasn’t necessarily true. It was just that no one but her mother called her.

  Bay walked across the green, wondering for a moment where that strange elderly man had gone, and considering going back to her aunt Claire’s house to see if that’s where he’d ended up. But doing that would mean she couldn’t walk over to Josh Matteson’s house and back in time to leave after her mother’s last appointment.

  So she trekked through more backyards, then through the woods by the cold rush of the river, where the best homes in Bascom were. The new chancellor of Orion College lived there, as did a few doctors. And the Mattesons, who owned the largest manufactured housing plant in the state. Live in a double-wide? It was probably made here in Bascom, by the people who lived in this seven-bedroom Tudor. In the shadow of the half-bare trees, Bay climbed the hill that overlooked the Matteson’s back lawn. She could see straight past where their pool had been covered for the season, to the hot tub and the open patio doors.

  There were a lot of kids there already, some in the hot tub, some watching television in the sitting room off the patio. They were taking advantage of the fact that Josh Matteson’s parents were away for the month. They were all trying a little too hard to look relaxed, like something they’d seen in a movie, but the truth was, none of them really belonged there.

  The girls from the Fiat, for instance. Trinity Kale, whose parents were divorcing, belonged in Florida with her grandparents. And Dakota Olsen wanted to be working on her college essay, because she clearly belonged at Princeton. Riva Alexander, just this shy of plump, always on the bottom of the cheerleader pyramid and always on a diet, wanted to be home, cooking. And Louise Hammish-Holdem, well, Bay couldn’t tell exactly where Louise belonged, she just knew it wasn’t here. That was high school in a nutshell. No one was where they belonged. They were all on their way to someplace else. It drove Bay crazy, and also made her something of an outcast, because Bay knew exactly where she belonged. She belonged here in Bascom.

  With Josh Matteson.

  She’d known about belonging in this town the moment her mother moved back here from Seattle when Bay was five years old. It was the fulfillment of a dream Bay had had a long time ago, a dream of lying under the apple tree in the Waverley garden, everyone happy, everyone in the right place. It took a while longer to realize that Josh was who she was supposed to be with. Bay and Josh had never had a chance to socialize, not until this year, when Bay finally entered high school, where Josh was now a senior.

  Josh was sitting at a patio table, engaged in some animated conversation with another member of the soccer team. He was blond and beautiful and funny and good-hearted, but so clearly miserable that Bay was surprised no one else could see it. It radiated around him like smoke, like he was smoldering, slowly burning away.

  She belonged with him. That alone was hard enough to bear. But the fact that she knew he also belonged with her, that he was on a path he wasn’t meant for, was excruciating. Getting him to believe that was the hardest thing she’d ever tried to do. She’d made a fool of herself two months ago, writing that note to him, giving herself a reputation she didn’t really need, on top of being a Waverley. So she kept her distance now.

  She finally understood that, no matter how hard you try, you can’t make someone love you. You can’t stop them from making the wrong decision.

  There was no magic for that.

  * * *

  Late that evening, Claire Waverley woke up and shivered. The bedroom window in the second-floor turret was open, letting in cold air. The chill hovered above the bed, twinkling in tiny white stars she could almost reach up and touch.

  She got up quietly and went to the window to remove the board her husband, Tyler, had used to prop it open. Last night’s big rain had finally blown colder weather into town, following a particularly scorching Indian summer. Outside, the neighborhood streetlights glowed in a blue haze, the way a warm glass will haze over when put in the refrigerator.

  Claire looked over her shoulder at Tyler, blankets kicked off of him, his bare chest emanating heat in waves. He never got cold. The man even wore his Birkenstocks, without socks, all year round.

  “I’m going to finish up some work,” she said softly. The words barely took form, because she didn’t want to wake him up. If he woke up, he would draw her back into bed with him, telling her that it could wait until morning.

  She turned, just missing Tyler opening his eyes as soon as she left.

  But he didn’t stop her.

  They had been married for almost ten years now, and Claire would still wonder, when she was tired and particularly short of temper, why he was still here, why he still loved her so much. He wasn’t from here—he’d moved to take a job here at Orion College a decade ago, a time in Claire’s life she always referred to as the
Year Everything Changed—so he’d never fully invested in all of Bascom’s superstitions and eccentricities. He’d never put much stock in the fact that everyone in town believed there were things about the Waverleys that couldn’t be explained. In fact, deep down, she knew he didn’t believe in any of it. He loved what wasn’t special about her. Her hair, her laugh, even the way she walked. And it was confounding. Who she was without her gift was someone she couldn’t even imagine. Being a Waverley, she used to think, back in the old days, back when she was alone, was her one redeeming quality.

  She loved him with a force that could bring tears to her eyes, and the thought of losing him felt like standing on the edge of an endless black pit, about to fall in.

  She shook her head as she walked down the hall. She was catastrophizing again. Tyler wasn’t going anywhere. She knew her husband was as patient and happy as a leaf in the wind, blowing in whatever direction Claire went. But Claire had long ago realized, even after those constant dreams of her mother leaving faded away, that when you are abandoned as a child, you are never able to forget that people are capable of leaving, even if they never do.

  Claire stopped at the end of the hall. She opened their daughter Mariah’s bedroom door and saw that Mariah’s window was open, too. Mariah was sleeping in a position similar to Tyler’s, arms and legs outstretched, like she was dreaming of floating in warm water. She was so much like her father, and so little like Claire, that sometimes Claire thought it felt like loving another piece of him, wholly unattached from herself.

  She picked up Mariah’s ballet clothes and backpack as she crossed the room, looking around and feeling her child’s normalcy like a crossword puzzle clue that made no sense to her. Mariah had wanted a pink room, perfect pink, the shade of watermelon cake frosting. She had wanted white furniture and a tufted princess comforter. She hadn’t wanted old wallpaper or antiques or handmade quilts. Her daughter took ballet and gymnastics and was always invited to sleepovers and birthday parties. She even made friends easily. Just this week, she’d said she made a new best friend named Em, and Em was now all she talked about. That kind of normalcy never came so easily to a Waverley. And yet, here Mariah was, as normal as her father, as happy as he was, as oblivious to the eccentricities of Claire and this house as he was.

  She reached the open window in Mariah’s room and pulled it down. She thought of all she needed to do downstairs. She would make sure all her Friday candy orders were boxed and labeled. Then she would answer business emails in her office and save them in a draft folder to send during business hours so no one would know she was awake at 2:00 A.M., worrying about things that didn’t need to be worried about.

  Everyone was excited about Waverley’s Candies, how much it was growing, how it was bringing so much attention to Bascom. Tyler, his brows raised when he’d found out what the profit margin had been over the summer, happily remarked that the new business was definitely good for Mariah’s college fund. And even Claire had to admit that it was thrilling—seeing the Waverley name on the candy labels for the first time; the unfamiliar, but not unpleasant, jangle of nerves the moment she truly realized there were untold numbers of people out there, buying something she’d made. Claire. A Waverley. It was so different from catering, no longer personal, opening her talent up to a wider pool. It felt like the precipice of something big, and she wasn’t immune to the idea of success. In fact, she was overcome with it, putting all her effort into the candy, thinking how proud her grandmother would have been. Grandmother Mary had been an intensely withdrawn woman who had sold her wares—her mint jellies and secret-love custard pies and rose geranium wine—only to people who would come to her back door, like it was a secret to be kept by all.

  But as first frost approached, bringing with it that noticeable uncertainty, Claire could no longer deny that something about Waverley’s Candies was distinctly off.

  When orders from gourmet grocery chains and specialty stores around the South flooded in after the Southern Living article, Claire couldn’t keep up with making the flower essences that flavored the candy herself. The demand became too great for what she could harvest from her garden, so she’d had to quickly make the decision to buy the essences, instead of making them.

  And no one noticed.

  As the labels on the backs of the jars attested, the lemon verbena candies still quieted children and eased sore throats. The lavender candies still gave people a sense of happiness. And everyone still swore the rose candies made them think of their first loves.

  But the candies now contained nothing from the Waverley garden, that mystical source of everything Claire held true.

  In weaker moments, she found herself thinking, What if it wasn’t real? What if Tyler was right and Waverleys were odd just because everyone had been told that for generations, because they just happened to live next to an apple tree that bloomed in the wrong time of year? What if the little girl Claire used to be, the one left here as a child, clinging to her grandmother Mary’s apron, had latched on to the myth of this family simply because she’d so desperately wanted roots? What if the flowers weren’t special? What if she wasn’t? Instead of keeping the Waverley name local and mysterious like her grandmother, she’d opened it up to wider speculation. She’d wanted the attention, she’d wanted more people to know her gift, as if the more people who knew, the more real it would be. But she’d begun to wonder if she had betrayed a secret her grandmother had entrusted her with.

  It didn’t help that, at this time of year, Claire felt the loss of her grandmother Mary the strongest. Claire had been twenty-four when she’d lost her. That had been twenty years ago, but Claire could still smell Mary’s fig and pepper bread sometimes, and there were times she was sure Mary was still here, in the way a carton of soured milk would tip over into the sink, or the mixing bowls on the shelf would seem to coordinate themselves by color overnight. She missed how natural everything felt with her grandmother around, how substantial.

  She stepped away from Mariah’s window to go to the kitchen. She paused, then turned back. Across the street, on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Kranowski’s house, she thought she saw a shadow. She squinted, her nose almost pressed to the glass, and the shadow began to take form.

  There was someone standing in the darkness between the streetlights. He was tall and wearing something light, like a gray suit. His hair was silver. Everything else was obscured, as if his skin were invisible.

  But he was definitely staring in this direction.

  She made sure Mariah’s window was locked, then she quickly went downstairs and pulled a flashlight out of the drawer of the table by the door.

  She unlocked the door and opened it, stepping onto the porch. The chilled floorboards made her toes curl.

  There was no one across the street now.

  “Hello?” she called.

  She flicked on the flashlight and aimed the light on the front yard. A breeze flew through, picking up some leaves and swirling them around, the sound like fluttering pages in a quiet library. Mrs. Kranowski’s dog barked a few times. Then everything was quiet.

  There was a scent of something familiar in the air, though, something she couldn’t quite place, a combination of cigarettes and stout beer and sweat and, strangely enough, cheap cherry lip gloss.

  Everything meant something, in Claire’s experience. And this vision of a man made the hair on her arms stand on end.

  First frost was always an unpredictable time, but this year it felt more … desperate than others.

  Something was about to happen.

  2

  Earlier that day, when the old man had stepped off the bus and onto the green in downtown Bascom, he had looked around with dismay, wondering how his life had gotten to this point.

  He was usually one step ahead of the colder weather as he traveled, doing jobs as he made his way from the north to Florida every year. Hoards of carnival people wintered there. Mostly old-schoolers like him, who never referred to the past as the good old days.


  But he needed a quick infusion of cash first, which was why he’d stopped here. It wouldn’t be a lot, but it would get him through the next few months. Business had been slow this year. There were fewer and fewer people on his list and, truthfully, he didn’t have the skill he used to have. He once was able to blackmail people so smoothly he could make them believe giving him their money was all their idea. But his heart just wasn’t in it anymore.

  Or so the expression went.

  He was fairly certain he didn’t have a heart anymore. The only thing that kept his blood flowing through his veins was the thrill of the heist, and even that felt like going through the motions these days. The last time he could remember feeling an actual beat to his long-ago heart was when he’d been eight years old and his mother, the Incredible Zelda Zahler, Snake Charmer from the Sands of the Sahara, had left him during the night, never to be seen again. Her name had actually been Ruthie Snoderly, and she’d been from the tiny town of Juke, West Virginia, about as far away from the sands of the Sahara as one could get. She’d been neither pretty nor nice, but he had loved her. Under her thick pancake makeup, her skin had been pockmarked, but he would stare at her adoringly from his cot at night and imagine her scars were constellations, a secret map to a far-off, happy place. Her accent had been thick and rural, and sometimes when he heard that deep Appalachian accent even today, he found himself longing for something he’d never really had in the first place: home.

  He set his suitcase down. It was a strange place, this North Carolina town. There was a huge gray sculpture of a half-buried head in the park. One of the eyes on the sculpture had a monocle, and the hair had been so expertly molded even the comb marks looked real. He sighed, thinking this almost wasn’t worth the effort. If he hadn’t put so much research into this already, he would wait for the next bus and go to Florida right now. Maybe he would get a job at Taco Bell for the winter.