by Lyla Payne
Except how I’ve firebombed my friendship with Leo.
I still have a lot of feeling sorry for myself to get out of my system. At least there’s another email from Clara, another translation, waiting for me on my laptop. That’s something.
But for now, Big Ern apparently wants an audience.
“Hi,” I say, both wary and surprised. A spark of hope lights at my center. For a moment, I let myself believe he’s here to tell me that Clete has come back, that he’s alive and well.
There’s no denying my life would be easier without Clete in it, but I don’t wish the man any ill will. And I can’t pretend I’m not dying to know how he knew my mother, and what happened that time he found her in the woods.
Not to mention the fact that I still don’t know who left that clipping on my desk and why. I’m tired of mysteries at the moment, so Clete returning to simply tell me the answer would be super convenient.
“Is Clete back?” I ask, stepping out onto the porch and tugging the door shut behind me.
He always seems uncomfortable with a roof over his head, so I don’t bother trying to make him come inside, even though the wind on the porch cuts straight through my fluffy, warm cardigan—a Christmas present from Beau.
Ern shakes his head, his mouth pulling into a frown. “Nah.”
“Oh.” I tug the sweater tighter, at a loss. Until now, Big Ern has only ever come to see me with Clete or because Clete sent him. “Do you need something?”
“I was wonderin’ if ya had heard from him.”
“Me?” Surprise lifts my eyebrows toward my hairline. “Why would I hear from him before you?”
“I dunno. Somethin’ he said afore he took off, or got run off…makes me think you tha one who ken find him.”
“Find him?” I chew on my lower lip. “Maybe he doesn’t want to be found. Ever think of that?”
Big Ern shakes his head vehemently. “He ain’t never took off before without tellin’ me. Never said nuthin’ like he did ’fore he left, neither.”
“What did he say?” I wander over to the porch swing and sit, even though it makes me colder. If only curiosity could keep a person warm.
Ern follows me, hands stuffed in the pockets of his overalls and a pained expression on his face. It’s hard to say whether it’s because he’s here in town, talking to me, or because he’s worried about Clete.
I suppose it could be both.
“Said that the past comes back to haunt everybody. That you came back ta Heron Creek jus’ ta be his ghost. That you ain’t the only one who knows what it’s like.”
A long minute passes while his words sink in. I have no idea what to make of them, or why they made Big Ern think I could be the one to find his missing friend.
Did he think Clete was dead, and that I should go hunting for his ghost? Or was the comment meant on a more figurative level? Did my mother, and whatever their relationship had been, haunt Clete?
“I don’t know how I can help, Ern.” He looks so lost that I find myself really wanting to, despite how eager I am to be done with mysteries.
The article drifts into my mind again.
Could Clete need to be found? Could someone be trying to help me do it?
“Someone left me an article from the Creek Sun, published a long time ago, when Clete was young,” I say. “It says that he and my mother knew each other. That he saved her life at one point.”
At the mention of my mother, Ern’s expression shutters closed. He folds his beefy arms over his chest and backs up to the edge of the porch, so far that one more move would dump him onto his butt. “Don’ know nuthin’ ’bout that.”
He’s clearly lying. It’s just as clear that he’s not going to admit to any such thing.
“Well, I don’t know how I could find him, Ern. But I promise I’ll keep my ears open, and think on it besides, okay?” I try a smile, which only makes his forehead wrinkle harder. “Thanks for telling me what he said before he left. It’s interesting, for sure.”
Big Ern nods, looking uncertain, before tipping his hat and spinning on his heel to shuffle down the driveway. I watch him until he turns the corner toward town.
Clete usually drives when they come to see me. I hope Ern isn’t walking all the way back to the mountains. I would have offered to drive him. Should have, probably.
Instead of going back inside, I snuggle into my cardigan and let myself mull over Big Ern’s visit. Clete’s words—that I’m not the only one who knows what it feels like to be haunted, and that I’m his ghost—dig fingernails under my skin until they draw my blood. I need to know what he meant.
It must have something to do with my mother—and whatever connection they had when they were children. Which means that it went beyond his simply rescuing her when she was lost. They were friends, the report in the Sun had said. So it must have been common knowledge.
Amelia pushes the front door open quietly a while later. There’s a thick afghan in her arms, and she spreads it across both of our laps when she comes to sit beside me.
“What did Big Ern want?” she asks, her tone conversational, after a few minutes of watching the moon.
“He thinks I can find Clete.”
Her eyebrow goes up. “He really thinks Clete needs finding?”
I nod. “He’s worried. Real worried. I’m not sure even he knows why, but guys like Ern stay alive because of their gut instincts. I’ve got to assume he has a reason to be worried.”
“What does he want you to do?”
“No idea. I asked about that article, and whether he knew about Clete and my mom, and he totally shut down.” A sigh escapes from my chest. “But he told me that one of the last things Clete said before he left was something about me coming back to South Carolina just to haunt him.”
“Another mystery.” My cousin’s tone is amused, but her smile is sad. “This is your life now, Grace. Isn’t it.”
It’s not a question, so I don’t answer it. We swing in silence awhile, contemplating the ways that both of our lives have changed, maybe. Amelia is right—mysteries are my life now. They’re not going to stop finding me, even if the Fournier thing is over. Even if I’m off the hook for murder.
Now, there’s Clete. There’s my mother. There’s the next ghost who will come calling, even if Lavinia never returns.
I think maybe I’m okay with that. A break would be nice, though.
“I like Brick,” I tell her. The comment surprises her. I can tell by the slight jerk of her head. “I mean, he’s kind of a dick. But the charming kind.”
That earns me a laugh, and she leans her head on my shoulder. “I like him, too.”
I know it’s not the first time I’ve thought that things might be okay since coming home to Heron Creek. I know I’ve been wrong every single time before this one.
There has to come a day, though, when we’ll be able to believe that it’s true.
Maybe it could be today.
Chapter Twenty-Two
People are coming over soon, to celebrate the recent upturn in my fortunes. I’m in my bedroom under the guise of showering and getting ready, and even though I did rinse off, shave, and even wash my hair, I’m not dressed or anywhere near ready.
For some reason, my brain has decided now is the time to read the journal from Clara. It should be the Carlotta whose mother first emigrated to the United States, the one who lived in New Orleans until her death. I want…I don’t know. Some kind of reassurance that she’s okay. That things could have gone well for at least one of the women in my family’s past.
That there’s a real possibility that, with Gillian gone, the unnamed threat whispering at my heels, at Travis’s, could be gone.
So, instead of going downstairs to help, I open the file.
Baltimore, Maryland, 1875
I’ve been in the North for four years, and things haven’t worked out exactly how I’d hoped. Of course, life could be worse.
It could always get worse, baby girl. Don’t ever forge
t it.
Some of my mother’s favorite words.
They’re true, of course, even though no one wants to believe them.
Her people, the ones she warned me about, the ones she feared, found me. It didn’t take them long—it was like Mama said. People up here don’t understand my gift or others like it. Look down their noses at people from the South, especially colored people, who claim to see things they don’t believe exist.
I think my reputation, gained quickly and not easily shed, is how they found me.
Luckily, I haven’t married. Haven’t had children of my own, though I find deep in my heart, the desire for both remains strong. But this way, there was no one else for them to try to hurt. No one else for them to steal away in the night.
And now, it’s over.
There’s blood on my hands but it’s done, so I’m going to have to find a way to live with the bright red stickiness that’s never going to wash out of my soul.
To live with the knowledge there’s a body buried in my root cellar. I only hope he crossed right over into the ether and that he won’t be coming back, demanding I pay for what I’ve done. Given that he tried to kill me first, I don’t see how he could ask any such thing, but if anyone knows that ghosts—and the Fourniers—don’t always live in reality, it’s me.
I suspected I was being followed for weeks. Felt eyes on the back of my head whenever I went out of the house, and half the time when I laid down for bed, too. The police thought I was crazy—they would have, perhaps, even if they hadn’t known about my particular proclivities. It lasted for weeks, the feelings, until one day I came home and found a man sitting at my kitchen table.
His hair was uncut and shaggy. His clothes stank of urine. He was older, perhaps as advanced as seventy, but he was quick and mean. A long knife gleamed in his lap and I froze at the sight of him, packages gripped tight and cold rain dripping off my bonnet and onto the shoulders of my coat.
“What do you want?”
“Your blood,” he said, as cool and as calm as if he’d asked me for a few pennies to buy dinner at the pub down the way.
“Why?”
It was strange, having this conversation with a stranger in my house, but him talking was better than him coming at me with a knife. I started inching, little by little, back toward the door. Careful to avoid the weak boards the landlord had never come to fix.
Probably never would, since he crossed himself and ran every time he laid eyes on me.
“It’s tainted. Evil. You see the spirits.”
“Why do you care?”
“Our family. Our duty to rid the world of the devils we bring into it.”
It all happened quickly after that. He hesitated, a brief flicker of grief, or regret, in his black eyes before he stood and lunged. I dodged, and his foot—supporting a far heavier body than mine—went through the weak board.
He fell, smashing his face into the door. The knife skittered away.
It felt as if I was in a dream. Walking under water as I went toward it. The hilt was cold under my stiff fingers, the inlay rough against my palm.
He was awake but disoriented, blood streaming from a gash on his forehead as he twisted to face me. Horror spread across his face, draping from top to bottom like the lazy but insistent first flakes of a winter snowfall.
“Bitch,” he said, fingers fumbling for the cross around his neck.
I don’t know what it says about me, but I didn’t hesitate. I plunged the knife into his chest, waited until he stopped breathing, and then cleaned up the mess. In the middle of the night, I wrapped him in a sheet and drug him down to the basement. Buried him.
I shouldn’t have had the strength. The will. Any of it.
But I did.
It’s been months and no one is watching. No one else is coming. I know that, despite the fact that my actions will lead me straight into hell at the end of my days, for now, I am free.
I’ll have to enjoy the days I have left on this earth, and do what I can to erase the blackness on my soul before the Lord comes to take me home. On that day, he’ll be the one to judge my actions, the sum total of my works in this life.
Until then, I’ll do my best not to judge myself.
Holy shit, I think, gaping at the computer screen. Carlotta the Daughter of a Slave was a total badass.
Pride tickles my lips and I can’t help but smile, though a sinking feeling in my stomach wipes it away soon enough. Because as nice as it is to read about one of us standing up for herself and winning—feeling free—I know that it must have been an illusion.
Because the deaths continue. I’ve read later journal entries, and know that the people in our family who see spirits don’t stop feeling hunted. Haunted. Not by a long shot.
My heart hangs heavy as I stow the computer and go through the motions of getting dressed, fixing my hair, and slapping on some makeup. The day is supposed to be a happy one, and maybe it still can be—there’s nothing to say that anything bad ever happened to that Carlotta ever again. Maybe she did work herself free by killing the man bent on her blood.
Maybe she didn’t.
Downstairs, I do my best to ignore the fact that even though we’ve invited “all” of our friends in Heron Creek over for the official celebration of my exoneration for murder—again—there are glaring, painful gaps where people should be standing. Eating. Laughing.
Leo’s not here. Neither is Marcella or Lindsay, and of course Beau’s missing presence is felt by everyone, not only me.
Whenever Leo and I have seen each other in passing, we use polite nods in an attempt to detract from the fact that we’re not speaking. People have noticed. The women at the library, and at the coffee shop, on the rare instances I’ve braved a trip, ask me how that “handsome Leo Boone” is doing, then exchange knowing smiles when I answer that he’s fine, as far as I know.
As far as I know. Ugh.
I ended up emailing Beau a short response, just to let him know that I received and appreciate his letter, but I think it’s better for both of us to deal with our own lives at the moment. Separately.
The words mirror the ones I said to Leo, but they feel different. With Beau, it was what I want, not only what I need—the space to move on, to figure out what he means to me and if there’s space in my life for him going forward. There’s going to have to be, in some capacity, if things continue to go well between Amelia and Brick.
Which, all signs point to yes.
With Leo, the separation isn’t what I want. More than that, I’m not even convinced it’s what I need. The Leo-sized hole in my life somehow feels bigger every day. My best hope seems to be adopting a zen-type attitude or repeating to myself the ridiculous platitude that if you love something and let it go, it will come back to you if it was meant to be.
I don’t even know what that means, but I’m pretty sure whoever wrote it or said it ended up alone for the rest of their life. Like I’m going to.
It’s been two weeks since Gillian Harvey’s last attempt on my life. Two weeks since Travis killed her instead. The only mystery-related things I’ve done are to write a return letter to Carlotta in France, to which I’ve heard no reply, and try to get ahold of the two relatives Travis and I were supposed to talk to the day we were attacked.
Strangely, they’re both refusing to speak to us. The first one ignores every email I send trying to reschedule and the second, in Prague, answered our Skype call, took one look at the two of us, and disconnected.
Tonight, for the party, for my friends, I try shaking off the melancholy that should have no place in this world where my problems have skittered off like cockroaches back into the shadows. I laugh with Will. Give Travis a hard time for getting shot. Play with Grant. Gossip with Mel as we spy on Brick and Amelia and, of course, give my lawyer his due. I thank Cade for keeping his eye on us, even as I can’t wait to get away from him.
It was Amelia’s idea to extend the invite. I know she’s right—I owe him my life, twice over—a
nd maybe also that it’s better to have people close if you want to keep an eye on them.
At one point, Mel pulls me aside with a twinkle of curiosity in her dark eyes. “Did you hear that Trent Boone was in town the other day?”
My own eyes widen, all of the troubles on my mind banished for the moment. “No. To see Leo?”
Mel shrugs. “I think so. I mean, him or Lindsay. Why else would he be here?”
I mull that over as Grant pulls her away with questions about how many cookies, exactly, is he allowed to have since technically, they’re very small.
Why else would Trent Boone be in town, other than to see his family? His mother and sisters have moved, if only two towns away, leaving Lindsay and Leo to Heron Creek.
But now Trent’s here.
It’s none of your business,” one devil says firmly. “You and Leo are taking a break, remember?”
“Yeah, but…” the second one starts to argue.
No buts, I tell the devils, who really are starting to get on my nerves with their terrible advice. We need space. Whatever his brother wants, no matter how interesting, maybe he’ll tell me about it some day.
Please, God, let him tell me about it some day.
I manage to hold onto my emotions, and my tears, until our guests drift out the door and into the cold winter evening. Even Brick, who has plans with his mother first thing in the morning at their lawyer’s office, makes a reluctant exit. It definitely sounded like family business, something that, unlike with Leo, I have no interest in sticking my nose into.
Amelia and I are in the kitchen, washing up the dishes that wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher. Despite everything that’s happened here recently, the house feels cozy and warm, and I’m so grateful to do this mundane task with Amelia, part of me wants to get down on my knees and give thanks for it. I nudge her with my elbow after a few minutes of soaking it all in.
