Wildwood Whispers

by Willa Reece

  My smile was odd on my face. Not forced. Not faked for politeness’ sake. Lu made me smile. This quick and certain kinship had happened to me only once before. The preciousness of it caught my breath and tightened my throat around words it was too soon to say.

  “Lu’s got a new song coming on. I can always tell. She gets wistful. Waiting. Listening. I thought you needed a song, but I was wrong. I do believe you brought a song with you this morning,” May said.

  I had been Sarah’s protector. I’d failed. I couldn’t be anyone’s muse. But, for some reason, after meeting Lu and hearing her song, Granny’s confidence in me no longer felt impossible. I was strengthened. Fortified. The music had worked on my hesitancy.

  Lu and her dulcimers were good. I had seen and felt enough bad to know its opposite, and without warning my protective instincts flared. What if Granny was right? What if Melody’s murder hadn’t been the end of danger? Would learning the teas and tisanes and creams and oils in the remedy book be enough? Shouldn’t I do more? Now. Right now. To help. To heal. To keep from harm.

  Granny, the remedy book, my dreams and now Lu’s music… I hadn’t truly believed in mountain magic. The wildwood kept its silence with me. Didn’t it? Or maybe I’d mistaken my unwillingness to hear for silence. I thought about the bottles I’d labeled all lined up in their neat rows. Life didn’t line up like that. It was more jumbled and confusing. Sarah had deserved to live a longer life. She’d been a healer from the day she’d been born. Had someone cut that short? Intentionally depriving the world of what she should have been? People like Granny, Lu and her grandmother deserved to live in peace. But could there be any peace in Morgan’s Gap as long as someone had gotten away with murdering a mother and her child?

  Six

  Lu walked me to the door because the shop was her home and also because lingering goodbyes were as Appalachian as the music she played. I’d been here a couple of weeks. Long enough to see people rise and chat from interior door to interior door, through kitchen and hallway and living room, until they could do nothing but pause on their feet in the archway of an open front or back door and chat some more before a brave soul actually followed through with goodbye. The farewell ritual normally made me impatient. I was used to rushing from place to place without making eye contact or slowing down at all. But not as much with Lu. I turned to thank her, but my words died on my lips. Lu’s smile had disappeared. In its dazzling place was a hard jaw and storm-cloud eyes. My shoulders tightened. Lu’s disapproval wasn’t for me, and once again, the urge to defend her stiffened my spine. I turned to face whatever troubled her without hesitation.

  “Every Wednesday like clockwork he parades them through. Best to stay out of the way,” Lu said. Gone was the warm rhythm of her lyricist’s voice. In its place was a stark monotone I barely recognized.

  Up the center of the street with no regard for vehicles or empty sidewalks more appropriate for pedestrian traffic, a flock of women came. They moved in a nervous flutter of blue homespun fabric and gray kerchiefs that completely covered their hair. I’d seen this outfit in my nightmare. The kerchief had wide straps wound tightly around their plain pale faces and the identical nature of the head coverings and calf-length skirts made them all seem eerily similar. Like a murmuration of starlings or chimney swifts they flocked up the street, their individual nervous movements oddly coalesced into unified purpose.

  But, Lu’s frown wasn’t for the women either.

  She stared at the tall black-clad man walking with purpose behind the women. He was dressed in an outdated suit and flat-brimmed hat, funereal in their severity. As they came closer, the man’s expression became clearer. It matched his garb, grim and plain.

  But his sharp gaze wasn’t as plain as the rest of him.

  It followed the women’s movements. This way and that. Catching and observing. Every finger twitch. Every sigh. Every stumbled step. Every furtive glance toward shops with colorful window displays. His eyes were as active as the movements of his flock, unquiet and unceasing.

  “That’s Reverend Moon,” Lu said. A warning not an introduction.

  My throat tightened. The women’s starling motions were wrong in a way I hadn’t been able to define until I saw Reverend Moon’s eyes. The obsidian chips of his pupils allowed them no ease.

  The other people on the street made way for the man and his nervous flock. Cars pulled to the side with blinkers flashing. Pedestrians stopped and turned away. One mother pulled a staring child into the barbershop. A man tipped his baseball cap then stared down at his feet.

  Moon herded the women up the street and his manner suggested he would keep them in formation. Away from all the shops’ windows. From Lu and her grandmother’s music. From my basket of herbal tisanes.

  Like the young woman in my dream, these women were all impossible to age, but some of their unlined, shiny faces made my gut clench hard on the toast I’d grabbed for breakfast.

  If the people around me sensed the wrongness of this parade, they did nothing to stop it. I stepped forward. One stride. Then two. Lu made a guttural noise as if she was taken by surprise. I gripped the basket’s handle until my knuckles were white. My reddened scars stood out on my fingers and the backs of my hands. I continued stepping until I was on the street and in the flock’s path. Until I disrupted their progress, I didn’t know I’d intended to.

  I only knew I had to do something.

  Not one woman said a word. They simply stopped to mill around me in a flurry of faded sunshine-scented clothes that must have been hung out to dry time and again. Lu called my name from the edge of the sidewalk as if the street was lava and I was breaking the rules of a game we’d played as children.

  Reverend Moon came through the milling women. He didn’t have to raise his arms and shout a command. The frightened birds moved in unison away from him, naturally avoiding all contact with the man.

  They instinctively evaded the dart-eyed shepherd in their midst.

  I wanted to flutter away too.

  “You won’t find anyone here who is interested in your devil’s wares, girl. Fly away with your filthy potions,” Moon said.

  But I wasn’t one of his birds, so I stood my ground even though I didn’t know why I’d stepped into the street in the first place. The women weren’t in chains. Many of them even mumbled Moon’s words in soft whispering echoes that were as creepy as their instinct-driven movements. The man’s black irises drilled into me and my eyes burned in response, dry and angry.

  I refused to blink to moisten them.

  He’s coming.

  The slow throb of my heartbeat connected this darkly watchful man to the threat Sarah’s mother had faced in the nightmare of the night before. It was the dresses and handkerchiefs. That was all. He was in the middle of the street in broad daylight. He posed no danger to me. Yet…

  Go back to the house, girls. Don’t look back.

  My spine was made of icicles. My breath came up through a tight throat and out stiff, cold lips. The basket trembled in my hands.

  But I didn’t step aside.

  My feet suddenly had roots that reached down, down to the dirt beneath the asphalt.

  Reverend Moon’s dark eyes narrowed and his attention left his flock to thoroughly examine my face from brow to chin.

  “Are you looking for a taxi? You’re going to be out of luck. They say there hasn’t been one of those in Morgan’s Gap since prohibition. Supposedly a gangster drove up from New York looking for home brew. The Lumstons had a lucrative side business in the stuff until well into the sixties,” Jacob Walker said. I didn’t jump. Not even when his calloused hand closed over my clenched fingers on the basket’s handle. I was not relieved. I refused to be. He casually encouraged me to loosen my hold on the basket as he spoke as if he wasn’t interrupting a standoff in the middle of the street. He took it from me with one hand and used his other to direct me toward a running Jeep that had been left with its door open on the side of the street.

  I was r
eminded of his subtle moves to edge the barstools out of her way so Granny could pass in the diner. And of his sudden defensive stance against a possible threat in the wildwood garden. Was I like the discarded lavender? Was he picking me up from Moon’s path before I could be crushed underfoot?

  Moon watched, but didn’t say another word as Walker walked me around to the passenger-side door.

  “You can toss your devil’s wares in the backseat,” Walker continued.

  I held the basket on my lap instead as Lu came forward to close my door while Walker circled back around to get behind the wheel. I turned to meet Lu’s serious gaze. The biologist was trying to defuse a situation that couldn’t be defused.

  Sometimes the shadows I sensed around every corner came out to play and sometimes they screamed.

  “The women were pregnant, Lu. All of them. Every. Single. One.” I didn’t have to tell her. She knew. Everyone knew. The whole town couldn’t have missed the various stages of rounded bellies beneath the dresses the women wore. Women? Some of them were too young for that designation. I didn’t have to expand upon the observation and what it implied. Some of the deferment I’d seen on the street from the townspeople had been respect. But some of it had been fear.

  “The devil isn’t in your basket,” Lu said. “He walks bold as can be by my shop when the Sect comes to town.”

  I looked down at the few bundles of herbs that were left after my deliveries. The scent of rosemary and mint rose up to tickle my nose. My eyes were still wide and unblinking. They might crack like the ground after a drought. I might never blink again. The flock of pregnant women had already begun to move. Reverend Moon had resumed his place behind them. What kind of cult was the Sect? It was suddenly hard to believe I hadn’t stepped back in time. Sarah had always warned me a woman’s freedom in our society was illusory. Had she grown up seeing women—and even girls—treated this way?

  “What were you going to do?” Lu asked. Moon looked our way, but neither of us had the stomach for more direct eye contact with the man. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I remembered Sarah’s mother in the clearing facing the trees. She’d sent Lu and Sarah away, but she hadn’t backed down. She’d watched and waited for whatever might come through the wildwood. Had one of Reverend Moon’s flock tried to run away? Had he been chasing her that day?

  “I was going to stand,” I replied. “I needed to get in his way.” Lu leaned in through the window and touched her forehead to mine, confirming the connection I’d sensed earlier with skin to skin that was comfort not imposition, until Walker revved the Jeep and pulled away.

  By the time Walker made the five-minute drive to Granny’s house, my body was shaking. He pulled the Jeep into a driveway nearly hidden by overgrown Althaea bushes heavy with rose-red buds as I clenched my teeth so they wouldn’t chatter, but the rustling of dried-herb packets in my basket gave me away. I’d been flooded with adrenaline during my strange confrontation with Reverend Moon. Now, it was gone and I was both flushed and chilled by its sudden absence.

  Had I just met someone who might have had something to do with Melody Ross’s murder?

  “Damn,” Walker said. He struck the steering wheel with his palms and the thud made me jump. “Damn,” he repeated, but before I could form the words to question why he was angry he’d flung open the driver’s-side door and strode around the front of the vehicle. He wrenched my door open and reached in to grab me by the hand and pull me from the seat. “Walk it off,” he said.

  He didn’t give me the chance to refuse. I left the basket on the seat and rushed to keep up with his quick strides. He was only slightly taller than me, but he pulled me around the Althaea and into the yard with surprising speed.

  It was the cure I needed, but not in the way he intended. Suddenly, I had a new challenge to face—one with curly brown hair and intense eyes who had no right to notice my vulnerability or try to tell me how to handle it.

  “Stop,” I said. I came up short and pulled my hand from his. To his credit, he immediately loosened his hold and let me go. “I’m fine. Believe me. I’ve faced worse than creepy cult leaders in my life.”

  “Debatable that anyone is worse than Moon, but your face was so white for a second there I thought you were going to pass out,” Walker said. He’d stopped to face me with his hands on his lean hips. Today he wore a yellow plaid shirt with sleeves rolled to show muscular tanned forearms. The goldenrod color brought out the highlights in his hair… and in his eyes. Flecks of sunlight dwelled in his irises, the opposite of the shadows that must have been in mine.

  That intimate discovery caused my temper over his arrogant handling to stutter and ease. Our bodies were too close together and it didn’t feel like a challenge. It felt like… possibility. We were hidden from the world behind the verdant bushes. Had he pulled me here to give me privacy to recover or because he wanted to be alone with me?

  “I wasn’t faint. That was fury. Something about that man…” I began.

  “The Sect is a religious group that broke away from the Mennonite tradition fifty years ago. Moon is their leader. They live in a community outside of town,” Walker said.

  “From the other side of the forest,” I whispered, recalling Sarah’s memory of the Sect woman running away. He gave me the history lesson as a way of changing the subject from his observation of my pale skin. He’d noticed how upset I was. He’d cared. Enough to get personally involved. Now, he was backpedaling. He was the biologist again, not a concerned friend. Good. I’d never handled concern well and I rarely made friends. The Althaea might wall us off from the world, but my walls were even more effective. Usually.

  “Let me guess. Model citizen. Respected religious leader,” I replied. My stomach still churned when I thought of Moon’s darting eyes.

  “By some,” Walker said.

  “But not you,” I guessed. I could see his disgust for Reverend Moon. It tightened his lips and hardened his jaw. It also soothed me more than the walk had done. I liked that he agreed with my instincts about the freaky reverend. He edged back from me as if our nearness was suddenly a bad idea. I was glad. I needed to be far away from the sunlight in his eyes even more when we agreed on something.

  “His word is law with the Sect people. He’s their messianic figure and they take his opinions as holy truths,” Walker said.

  “And you think I should stay away from him,” I gathered.

  “Ask Granny what she thinks about Reverend Moon,” Walker advised.

  “I should trust her opinion, but not her brews?” I asked. I plunged my hands in the back pockets of my jeans to give them something to do now that I wasn’t holding Walker’s hand. Okay. Yes. I was probably hiding my scars. Had he felt the rough patches and ridges when he’d grabbed me? Not vanity. Vulnerability. And it pissed me off.

  “I told you to leave. You became a kitchen witch’s apprentice instead. Are you always this rash or does she have you under a spell?” Walker asked.

  “I think the preferred term is wisewoman and I don’t believe in spells,” I replied with a tilt of my chin and set to my teeth that Sarah would have recognized as trouble.

  Walker either didn’t see my temper or he wasn’t intimidated by it. He took a step in my direction and it was all I could do, temper or not, to hold my ground. He might be a scientist, but the glitter of anger in his eyes sparked off the gold flecks in the green like flint on steel.

  I wasn’t afraid of Jacob Walker. I was drawn to him. And that scared me.

  “There are logical reasons not to self-medicate with natural ingredients of unknown potency and origin,” he said.

  I slowly pulled my hands from my pockets, surprised by his sudden deadly seriousness.

  “Granny has lived on this mountain for at least sixty years if not more. She isn’t some rando with a pop-up Internet shop. She has traditions. Recipes. And her own garden. We’re good here, Mr. Walker. What’s really bothering you?” I asked.

  Was this about his precious ginseng or somethin
g else I couldn’t understand? His intensity didn’t jibe with our level of acquaintance. It was another mystery added to an already overwhelming puzzle I didn’t even know if I wanted to solve.

  “Work with Granny if you must. She’ll cure whatever ails you, I’m sure. But stay away from Moon and stay out of the forest,” Walker said. “There are dangers from plants and insects and animals there it would take years for you to understand. Not to mention the isolation. People who get lost are sometimes found in much worse shape than you’d expect—exposure, falls, black bears and bobcats. You’ve been through something.” He nodded toward my scarred hands. “I can see that…”

  I was done. With his warnings and his keen observational skills.

  “Never through. Always in the middle of something,” I corrected. “Usually in between the threat and someone being threatened. And right now, I’ve got work to do.”

  I left him standing in the midmorning light behind the Althaea bushes. I’d been certain after listening to Lu’s song I needed to take my studies with Granny more seriously. That hadn’t changed because of Walker’s concern. In fact, his warnings only made me want to understand the wildwood he acted as if he alone could know and navigate. Yes, it was vast and dangerous. I could easily believe elements of it were deadly. Yet, the garden was part of it and the garden and Sarah were intertwined.

  The basket was where I’d left it and I collected it quickly and headed inside. It was a strategic exit not a retreat. But I was glad there was only a fat cat to see me lean with my back against the front door once I was inside.