Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

by Tucholke, April Genevieve

  I tried to look like I didn’t care. I kind of hated River, so I should have been better at it.

  “You’re the first girl, if it’s any consolation,” he said, noticing my expression. He stopped walking, grabbed my hand, and turned it over. Then he leaned over and kissed my palm.

  I sucked in my breath, stunned. He’d done it as natural and easy as smiling in the sun.

  And I’d thought River was smooth.

  Neely laughed when he saw my expression. “I’ve never caught River sleeping next to someone before. Look, there’s no doubt that he’s fed you some lies. That’s what River does. My brother has . . . problems. But, as far as I know, you’re the first girl he’s ever noticed. And it’s got to be a good thing. So . . . thank you.”

  “You kissed my hand to say thank you?”

  “Yep.”

  I’d spent the last few days with a rich boy who had a glow he couldn’t stop using and an inclination for vigilante slaughter. But all I could think about, the rest of the way into town, was how I could still feel Neely’s kiss in my palm.

  I looked around the park after we arrived, my eyes peeled for River. But nothing.

  The night had gotten cool, and I could feel the warmth coming off Neely where he sat on the quilt next to me. On the screen, a train went by, and Rachmaninoff began to play. The movie was Brief Encounter. I’d seen it before, last summer in the town square. Crisp British accents and a damn heartbreaking end.

  To my left, two girls whispered in each other’s ears, while a little kid shared a dripping ice-cream cone with a very polite border collie. To my right, a tall, skinny boy with deep red hair—almost purple, in the fading light—cut an apple into slices with a small, thin knife, and offered it to a blond girl sitting with her family nearby. A bearded man stepped over a pile of dirt and threw a blanket down beside it. I knew why the dirt pile was there. Someone had dug up the bloodstained grass where Daniel Leap . . . fell.

  “Are you a philanderer?” I asked Neely, under my breath, as the horrid, chatty woman with the hatbox interrupted the doomed lovers on the screen in front of us.

  “A what?” he whispered back, throwing me an amused, puzzled look.

  “A . . . a man who has many love affairs.”

  Neely’s laugh burst through the movie-night stillness. People turned around to look at us, but he didn’t stop, not for a while.

  My face turned red. Thank God for the dark.

  “I get it now,” Neely said, whispering after his outburst. “River. You. I get it. River’s always been so picky about girls. But this”—he pointed at me—“this makes sense. You make sense.”

  And then he smiled at me, and it was crooked like his brother’s, and I thought about how I’d been sitting in this same spot, doing this same thing, with River, just a few days ago.

  Halfway through the movie, right after the rowboat scene, I felt a hand on my elbow. I looked up into Gianni’s brown eyes.

  “Come, Violet” was all he said. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Okay,” I whispered. I was curious, but not all that worried. He probably just wanted to show me his new coffee pour-over thing.

  I got to my feet. Neely looked up at me, his eyebrows raised, but I just pointed at Gianni and shrugged my shoulders. “Neely, this is Gianni,” I whispered. “I’m going to go talk to him.”

  Neely frowned at him, then at me. “Hurry back,” he whispered.

  I followed Gianni away from the square. He stopped under the oily yellow glow of the streetlamp near the Antiquarian Bookstore, and shook a black curl out of his eye. He had a scratch on his right cheek that looked fresh.

  “Gianni, how did you hurt your face?” I asked.

  He ignored me. “Violet, I want you to see something.”

  A cool sea breeze hit me out of nowhere. I began to button up my yellow cardigan. “All right. But can it wait until after the movie?”

  “No. You have to see it now.”

  It was strange. It was. And if I hadn’t been so distracted, thinking about River, and Neely, and the Devil, and the suicide, and Jack, and the letters, and the glow, I would have noticed it at the time. But, instead, I just let Gianni slip his fingers through mine and pull me down the street. Down, down, into the dark dead end.

  I should have told someone that I was following Gianni into the great unknown. Like Neely. The bearded guy. The kid with the apple. Anyone. But I didn’t. I trusted him. Hell, I’d known him since sixth grade.

  So I let him lead me, calm and serene as a nun saying her prayers.

  We came to a stop on the road outside Glenship Manor. Gianni pointed. “The thing I need to show you is in there.”

  Finally, the first tingle of fear rustled inside me. “But the Glenship is boarded up,” I said. “We can’t go inside. And I wouldn’t want to. No one has been in it for years. There must be rats, and bats, and ghosts, and . . . other things.”

  Normally I wasn’t such a coward. But the night was dark, and Glenship Manor looked big and black and imposing and haunted as hell. And Gianni was staring at me in an odd way. His bright brown eyes looked different in the moonlight . . . kind of dull, and blank. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a small hammer.

  “Come,” he said.

  He led me over to the Glenship, and his fingers didn’t release mine, not for a second. I saw that two planks of wood were lying on the ground. One of the Glenship’s floor-length windows was exposed, and I saw a dim light flickering inside the building, low to the ground. Gianni ripped another plank back, one-handed, and threw it on the ground. The window was broken, but Gianni made sure all the sharp glass was clear before he pulled me inside after him.

  He dropped the hammer and picked up the lantern. It was the kind that needed oil. Using the moonlight that streamed in through the now un-boarded window, he found the knob on the side and turned. The room filled with light.

  I was standing in the dusty, ramshackle library. Peeling wallpaper, a lonely leather chair, ripped and ragged, all the books gone, and the shelves looking naked and empty. I fought an overwhelming urge to run around and explore. I hadn’t wanted to come inside, but suddenly I wished I would have broken into Glenship Manor years ago. I was dying to compare it to the Citizen, to see what things had been left behind, to dig in drawers, oh, all sorts of things. Gianni was still looking at me strangely, but damn, I wanted to see the bedrooms, and the kitchen, and the cellar where the girl was murdered. Freddie said once that the Glenship had an underground swimming pool, and six secret passageways, and—

  Gianni tugged on my hand. “Come, Violet. He’s up here.” He motioned with the lamp toward the staircase.

  My eyes stopped scouring the room and focused on Gianni. “Who’s up where, Gianni?”

  He blinked at me, his fingers still wrapped tight around mine, his eyes still holding that eerie, lifeless look. “The witch, of course.”

  Even then, after he said that, I wasn’t really scared. I thought Gianni was joking. Poorly, and in bad taste, after that Jerusalem Rock story. But still. I let him pull me out of the library, across a black-and-white tiled floor, up the grand Glenship staircase, so like the Citizen’s, up and up past the second floor, past the third. The staircase got narrower and narrower, and then we were in the attic.

  I caught my breath. The Glenship attic looked so much like my own sweet attic that for a moment I forgot where I was. The full-length mirrors, the wardrobes, the trunks, the cobwebs.

  Who had left all these things behind? Was there anyone still alive to claim them?

  My fingers itched to dig into the dust and see what I could find; I imagined photographs and old records and maybe even a mention of Freddie in some letter—

  Jack.

  His auburn hair was tangled and dirty, matted with dust and God knew what. His skinny arms were raised above his head; his hands were tied with
ropes that hung down from the support beam stretching across the slanted ceiling. He had on a pair of jeans, no shirt, and his bare feet looked small and porcelain-white against the dirty floorboards.

  His freckled face was turned to the side. I could see tracks through the grime where he’d been crying.

  “Help,” Jack said, his voice cracking. “He keeps saying I’m a witch. What does he mean? What’s wrong with him?” He pulled on the rope above his head. His wrists looked impossibly small, pressed together underneath the knots.

  I turned to Gianni. All the fear that wouldn’t come before, it came bursting through me now. “Gianni? What is this? What are you doing?” But my throat closed up as I spoke and my voice got smaller and smaller until I wasn’t even yelling, only whispering.

  Gianni smiled and nudged me with his elbow. “Someone tipped me off that you had cornered a witch at Citizen Kane. So I went to your house and tempted him out of your lair. What do you think, Violet? Look at that red hair. What wickedness. Red-haired Devil-loving monster.” He paused, bent down, and picked something up. “I had to show you, Vi. It is a rare kind of girl that could appreciate what I am about to do. And you are rare, Vi.”

  “What are you going to do, Gianni?”

  That’s when my eyes caught sight of what Gianni had in his right hand. I reached forward, yanked the lantern out of his left, and shined it around the attic.

  There was a pile of rocks in the shadows to my left. Next to a wheelbarrow-red can of gasoline.

  Gianni looked at me with his dead eyes. “Make him confess, of course. You can watch. Or help, if you want. I’ve got the rocks over there. But if they don’t work, I found a rusty old jackknife in the cellar. That will do the trick. We just have to make sure to leave a little juice in him, at the end. He’ll need to feel the flames. I’ve heard that you’ve got to burn the Devil out of witches, and you can’t do that if they are already dead before you put them in the fire.”

  Jack was screaming by this time. Writhing against the ropes and screaming.

  And over his screams, I could hear someone else. Someone behind me, laughing, in the dark. I lifted the lantern, but it didn’t penetrate the far corners. Laugh, laugh, laugh.

  “River?” I cried out, my voice a whisper that couldn’t cut through Jack’s screams. “Please don’t be River,” I said to no one, because no one was listening.

  Freddie, help me. Gianni’s going to burn him, what should I do, what should I do? Something’s wrong with him and he’s not himself and I think I know why, Freddie, help me, help me, Freddie, please . . .

  Gianni picked up the gasoline can. “Might as well get him good and drenched before the confession. Saves time.”

  And he lifted the can over Jack’s head.

  Freddie wasn’t going to help me. How could she?

  She was dead.

  I threw myself into Gianni’s side. He let out a strange, guttural yell and dropped the can. It went sprawling onto the floor. Thick fumes filled the air.

  Gianni jumped to his feet. His beautiful face was scrunched and twisted and he was howling and shaking my arm and I dropped the lantern—

  And then came the flames.

  And then came Neely.

  Smoke and fumes were everywhere, and I couldn’t see, but I heard laughter, and then Gianni was rubbing his eyes next to me and yelling Where am I? and the smoke cleared a bit and Neely was throwing old quilts and clothes on the fire until it was dead-dead-dead and I was trying to get Jack free and finally the last knot came loose and Neely was pushing us out of the room and down the stairs.

  We climbed through the broken window in the library and everything was jumbled and confused and my knee hit the windowsill and I fell to the ground and felt grass under my hands. I got back to my feet, keeping my eyes on Gianni, who didn’t look angry anymore, just confused and terrified and so damn lost.

  Jack wrapped his arms around me, and I held him. Tight.

  Gianni was still rubbing his eyes.

  “Gianni,” Neely said, his voice low and hard. “Gianni, look at me.”

  Gianni moved his hands away from his face. “Why am I here? What happened?”

  Neely reached out and grabbed a fistful of Gianni’s plain white T-shirt. He shook him, not rough, but not gentle, either. “Quiet. Be quiet, damn it.”

  “Did I start that fire?” Gianni kept looking from Jack to the Glenship attic windows and back again. “I . . . Something’s wrong with me, I—”

  Neely hit Gianni. In the jaw. Gianni went down in the dirt. He lay there for a second, not moving. Then Neely reached over, gave him a hand, and helped him to his feet.

  “Gianni, focus.”

  Gianni’s lip was bleeding, and the blood was running down his chin. But he met Neely’s eyes and nodded.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do,” Neely said. “You’re going to forget this all ever happened. You’re not going to think about it, you’re not going to ask questions.” Neely reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and took out a pile of green. “Take this and keep your mouth shut.”

  Gianni just stood there, mouth open. Neely grabbed Gianni’s hand and shoved the bills into it. “Gianni. Go home. Someone might have seen that fire and the cops are probably on their way. So go. Get out of here. Now.”

  Gianni tightened his fist over the money. He nodded. Turned. Cast a look back over his shoulder at Neely, and then his eyes met mine. Held. Broke away. He took off into the dark.

  Neely grabbed my arm. “We need to get going too, Violet.”

  I shook my head. “He’s up there. In the attic. We have to go back—”

  A police siren ripped through the still air. Neely pulled on my arm. I grabbed Jack’s hand. We ran.

  CHAPTER 22

  “GIANNI SAID YOU were looking for me.” Jack and I were sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace in the green guestroom. I gathered some wood from the garage when I got home, and started it up, thinking a warm fire might help after all that, if anything could.

  Jack had stood near me as I got it ready, as if not wanting to let me out of his sight. He’d been shaking, and was pale under the dirt still streaked across his face. But he was doing better now. The shaking had stopped. I’d given him an old black sweater of Luke’s to wear, and his cheeks were red from the heat. So he was warm, at least.

  “I’d left Sunshine’s, but Luke was still there and Gianni found me alone in my room and said you were waiting for me in the Glenship attic,” Jack continued. “It was weird, and he was acting weird, but I don’t know . . . I fell for it. It was stupid. I won’t, next time. Next time I’ll be smarter.”

  Jack’s hands clenched and unclenched. “He made me take off my shirt, and my shoes. He tied up my hands and said he was going to burn me alive.”

  I put my arms around Jack and hugged him.

  “I heard the laughing too,” he said. He tilted his head up at me. “Was it River?”

  I didn’t answer, and we were quiet for a while.

  “I found something today,” I said, figuring now was as good a time as any. “Some letters. You know that painting you have over there on the nightstand? Well—”

  “Is this about my grandpa?”

  I sighed. “So you know already.”

  Jack shifted and got to his feet. He went over and got the painting from the nightstand. “This is her, isn’t it? Your grandma? My dad told me things, when he wasn’t drinking. Things Grandpa told him.”

  “Yeah. It’s her. And that’s John Leap, your grandfather. He looks like your dad.” I stopped and took a deep breath. “And mine.”

  We looked at each other for a heartbeat. Two.

  “I found the paintings of your grandma in the ballroom,” Jack said, putting the canvas back on the stand. “That’s when I knew for sure.”

  “Show me.”

  I
followed Jack, down the hall, and up the marble stairs to the third floor. I wanted to stop in Luke’s room as we passed, but I could hear Sunshine laughing inside.

  Jack walked to the far left of the ballroom, by the windows, and pointed at two small nude paintings, both of Freddie, both lost amidst the sea of bigger, fatter canvases that covered the walls.

  Now that I was looking at them closely for the first time, I could see that John Leap’s paintings had been done in the guesthouse. Same sofa, same wallpaper—there were even cans of paint on the windowsills. Freddie was white and naked and shining.

  Jack and I stared at the portraits for a while. And then we went back to the green guestroom. I pulled out Freddie’s letters, which I’d been carrying in my pocket all day, and gave them to Jack. He read them by the fire.

  And when he was done, his blue eyes met mine. And he smiled. “So our dads were . . . brothers.”

  I nodded. “Half brothers, it looks like.”

  “So I can live here now? Because we’re related?”

  “If Luke and I have anything to say about it, then . . . yes.”

  And he grinned again. Even after the night he’d had, the kid could still grin.

  I stayed with Jack until he fell asleep. I sat by his bed and read to him from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe until his eyes closed. But then I woke him up before I left, and made him lock the door behind me. And I made him promise not to let anyone in, except Luke or me. Not for anything.

  I walked to my bedroom, closed the door, and sat down on my bed. Now that I was alone again, I felt empty, all through my insides. As empty as Montana, which I heard was the emptiest of empties, next to Wyoming. I went to one of the windows. They were black with the black night, which matched my black, empty sort of mood.

  There was an origami penguin sitting on a pile of books on the floor.

  I went downstairs to the kitchen.

  Neely was there, right where I had left him when we got back from Glenship Manor. He’d lit the two candles on the table, and things looked medieval. He was sitting on the couch, whistling Rachmaninoff.