by John Hart
Everything.
Jack took down a row of pictures; shifted three more.
He owed Johnny everything.
* * *
By morning the next day, even Jack had to admit that he was drifting dangerously. His career was falling apart. Johnny wouldn’t answer the phone.
Maybe like this …
He cleared an entire wall and tacked up drawings of the cave and scattered bones. Leslie called at nine, but every thought was Johnny, the Hush, Jack’s worry. At noon he had a beer, but it didn’t fix the problem.
Jack was hiding in the drawings.
He was afraid.
* * *
By early afternoon, Jack knew it was time to leave the apartment. The cracks were widening. He needed answers.
Taking the stairwell down, he hit the sidewalk, blinking. People were lined up at the bakery counter, and a few stared at him through the glass. Ducking around the corner, he slipped into the car and pointed it at the Hush, making it two full blocks before stopping at the curb and pressing palms against his eyes.
“Damn it.”
Unfolding a crumpled page, he studied a drawing of the frozen waterfall and the forked tree. Jack knew what he had to do, but laid his forehead on the steering wheel instead.
The Hush was Johnny’s home.
Johnny didn’t want his help.
Looking in the mirror, Jack saw red eyes and bruised-looking skin. “You don’t have to do it,” he said, then tried again.
You don’t have to do it now.…
Jack held the stare for ten hard seconds, then looked away and twisted the mirror up. Hating himself more than he had since childhood, he phoned the office and found an assistant still willing to help. “Desk drawer,” he said. “The Johnny Merrimon file.” He waited while the assistant found Luana Freemantle’s address in Charlotte.
It was a ninety-mile drive.
The Hush, he decided, could wait.
* * *
Charlotte, North Carolina, was like a lot of old cities grown rich. Towers rose like the tines of a crown, and wealth spilled outward from the shadows. Fine restaurants. Trendy neighborhoods. Time and neglect had driven the poverty into entrenched pockets of subsidized housing, and Luana Freemantle lived in one of the worst. GPS took Jack to a faded tower beside a cracked sidewalk and an empty lot, where he parked on the street between a shuttered church and the offices of a bail bondsman named Big Chris. People moved outside, but not really. They leaned on cars; lifted bottles and cigarettes. After crossing the street, Jack passed through a courtyard and into an elevator that smelled of urine and vomit. On the twenty-third floor, he found the right number above a heavy-gauge door with multiple locks. He knocked twice and waited. Trash spilled down the hall, and a boy on a tricycle maneuvered through it like an old pro, his eyes sliding left as he rolled past and disappeared around a corner. Eventually, locks turned and the door opened, catching on the chain. A single eye filled the gap—a young woman.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Jack Cross. I’m looking for Luana Freemantle.”
“Why?”
“I’m a lawyer—”
“We’re done with lawyers.”
The woman cut him off, but Jack caught the door before it could close. “Please. I can pay.”
“For what?”
“Information.”
“How much?”
“A hundred dollars?”
“Just keep walking, mister.”
“Five hundred.”
The one eye narrowed. “What kind of information?”
“I want to know about Hush Arbor. Raven County. Do you know it?”
“I lived there for four years.”
“Oh my God. That’s perfect. I have this research—”
“You said five hundred dollars.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Jack dug out his wallet. He opened it, hesitating. “I have fifty-seven dollars.” The door started to close again, and Jack panicked. “Please,” he said. “I need to know if people die there.”
“What?”
“Not now. I know about now. I mean in the past, the history. I want the old stories.”
“Those stories are not for you.”
“A thousand,” he said. “If you have stories, I’ll pay a thousand dollars.”
“You don’t have it.”
“I can get it. Wait.” Jack pushed a card through the crack. “That’s office and cell on the front, personal on the back. Please don’t close the door.”
She studied the card, doubtful. “Why do you care about Hush Arbor?”
Jack thought about lying, but decided against it. “Johnny Merrimon is my friend. I’m worried.”
“You should be.”
“Wait. What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” She said it softly. “It means nothing.”
“Wait, wait. One more thing.” He dug out the crumpled drawing and held it up: the frozen waterfall, the forked tree. “Do you know this place?”
The girl grew very still. “Where did you get that?”
Jack passed the drawing through the crack, and she took it. “Have you ever seen it?”
She looked from the drawing to Jack’s face, and when she spoke, the lie was in her voice. “No,” she said. “I’ve never seen this place.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said, and closed the door.
* * *
After that, Cree stood for a long time, staring at the drawing even as the lawyer knocked at the door, his voice faint on the other side: Excuse me … hello …
He left eventually, but Cree stood even longer, childhood rising up as she remembered her grandmother and a winter’s day. The sky was heavy with cloud, the first flakes falling. Cree had gone wandering, and wasn’t supposed to. She was five.…
* * *
“Hello, child.”
Cree stopped walking, her hand on a twist of vine, brambles at her feet where the trail bent left. Her nose ran from the cold, but her fingers were warm in the mittens her great-aunt had made. She’d never left the village alone, and knew in the way of children that displeasure lurked behind her grandmother’s cool and careful smile. “Are you mad at me?” she asked.
“A little, yes.” Grandmother stepped around the tree. “But just a little. I wandered, too, when I was young.”
“I’m sorry,” Cree said.
“Sorry you broke the rules or sorry you got caught?”
“Both, Grandmother.”
“Tell me the rule for little girls.”
“The village is safe, the woods are not.”
“When can you leave the village?”
“Only when you say.”
Grandmother knelt, and her knees popped, and she made an old person’s face. “When you are older, it will be different.”
“How much older?”
“When you know enough to stay safe. When you are stronger.”
The smile was the same that sent Cree wandering in the first place. It was patient but amused, warm and somehow not.
“Would you like your first lesson?” she asked, and Cree nodded, suddenly afraid. “Take my hand.” They turned away from the village, and followed a game trail through the trees. Grandmother asked, “Are you happy here?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“A well-intentioned lie. That’s fine, too. Tell me what you miss most. Your mother?” Cree looked down, ashamed to say it was her toys and her bed and the little girl next door. Grandmother recognized the conflict and squeezed her hand. “What do you like most about Hush Arbor?”
“The animals.”
“What about the people?” Cree lifted her shoulders. There were few people and no children. She spent her time with the old women in the single cabin. “It’s okay,” Grandmother said. “You make them nervous. That’s all. I make them nervous, too.”
“Why?”
“Because they think we know things.”
“Do we?”
“Some t
hings, yes. Also they are afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Some are afraid of the world outside. It’s so large and different. This is the only life they know. Others are afraid of what lives in the swamp. Some fear what’s buried beneath it.”
“What’s beneath?” Cree asked.
“That, too, is for when you are older.”
Cree considered what she was being told. Other than the old women, only twelve people lived in the village. It had been larger once. She’d seen the empty houses, the old barns. Just last week, a young man had left, destined, he’d said, for any place other than this. There’d been yelling and tears, and Cree had been afraid of that, too. The next day, though, no one mentioned the young man. People worked in the gardens and butchered a hog; and Grandmother, once, smiled sadly and winked.
The snow fell harder as they walked. Flakes caught in Cree’s eyelashes and melted on her nose. “Are you afraid like the others?” she asked.
“No,” Grandmother said. “Not for a long time.”
“Are you the one that keeps the village safe?”
“Partly,” she said. “There is also my mother. Would you like to help us someday?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The trail ended at a clearing, and Grandmother knelt again, pulling Cree close and pointing across the glade. “This is your first lesson, then. You are never to go there. No closer than this, not even when you are older. Do you understand?”
Cree nodded solemnly. “I will never go there.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Good girl.” The bony arm squeezed her tight. “It will be dark soon. Would you like some warm milk?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay, then—you and me, and warm milk by the fire. There may even be some chocolate.”
“I like chocolate.”
“Every little girl does.”
Grandmother stood and took Cree’s hand again. She turned for the village, but not before Cree looked a final time across the glade. It was beautiful, she thought.
The waterfall on gray stone.
The funny tree on top.
* * *
The drawing brought it all back. That’s how perfectly it captured the forlornness of the glade in winter. The weight of sky. The empty spaces. Whatever the cause—exhaustion or memory—Cree began to cry, there on the low sofa with its stains and cigarette burns. After that day with Grandmother, life had become richer somehow. A bond had grown between them, a connection born of smiles and knowing looks and promise. There are secrets in this world, she’d say, and those of us born to keep them.
What was Cree’s life now?
How much had she lost when Grandmother died, at last?
Smoothing the drawing on her lap, Cree felt the thinness of her legs. Her hands were gaunt as well. She had no appetite or energy. How much longer could she stay awake? What dream would find her if she slept?
Grandmother …
Cree curled on the sofa, clutching the drawing to her chest.
If only Grandmother had lived.
If only Cree could sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The road ran empty for miles as Johnny left the Hush, and the old moped rattled along at thirty miles an hour, the bald tires slick on the pavement, the smell in the air like burnt oil and hot metal. Since the dream of John Merrimon, it was harder than ever to leave his own land, but Johnny’s need today was bigger. He needed to see something, to kneel in the dirt and touch it.
Rolling back the gas, he coasted to a halt where a long drive wound through the hills and touched the county road. He saw trim pastures and manicured trees, a large house on a far hill. A stream babbled along the drive before disappearing into a culvert under the road. Johnny knew the stream, as he knew the forest trails and the hollows between the hills.
He’d walked the land a thousand times.
He’d owned it.
Such feelings lay in constant wait—the shadows of another man’s life—but none of that made the sentiment less real. Johnny didn’t have all John Merrimon’s memories, but what he’d dreamed he knew as if he’d lived it himself: the actions and reactions, the loves and hates, small flickers of thought.
This had been his home.
The drive was paved now, but it followed the same lines.
The manor had been just there.…
Johnny studied the lodge, and thought briefly of William Boyd, humbled by how eternal the land remained.
John Merrimon, dead and gone.
Now William Boyd.
Johnny turned onto the drive and moved slowly for the lodge. He’d owned this once.…
That wasn’t me.
But he passed open fields and remembered clearing them. The town was to the south, and he knew the ride on horseback, how long it would take and the best places to cross the last, large creek before it fed into the river. At the lodge, he turned off the engine and faced the views that were as intimate to him as the memories of any husband and wife. He’d buried his parents and a sister here. Far off were distant hills, a smudge of green that was the Hush.
The lodge felt empty, but he rang the bell anyway. As much as he hated trespassers on his own land, he could do nothing different, even with Boyd dead. When no one answered, he stepped back into the heat and followed a footpath through trees as old as Johnny’s memory. They rose, twisted and gray, their limbs sweeping low, as if to brace themselves on holy ground.
And for Johnny, it was.
The cemetery dated to 1769, when his first ancestor died on this land. William Merrimon had been English and a retired officer before moving here under a land grant from the king. The original document was under glass in the Raven County Museum, and Johnny knew the language by heart.
George the Third by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith. To all Whom these Presents shall come, Greetings …
Johnny slipped through an iron gate, still smiling at the memory of such childhood pride.
Know Ye that we of our special grace, certain knowledge, and mere notion, have Given and Granted, and by these Presents do Give and Grant unto William Merrimon, forty thousand acres of land, defined and bounded as follows …
The cemetery was overgrown, but Johnny found the stone he wanted in a far corner where the shade was deepest. He had to drag honeysuckle from the face of it to find John Merrimon’s name adjacent to Marion’s. Time had weathered the letters, but Johnny could make out the dates of birth, and beneath those numbers the words that said it all.
BOUND IN LOVE, FOREVER SOULS
Johnny touched his forehead to the stone. He’d lived alone for most of his life. He’d been with women, but never felt emotions like these. He knew the look in Marion’s eyes, her gentle ways, the fullness of her lips.
It was his life, before.
She was his life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Cree could not get off the sofa. She missed home, her true home, and those feelings were larger than memories of Hush Arbor or the big bed or the little stool kept by the winter stove. Young as she’d been, she’d had a people, a future. Pushing deeper into the cushions, Cree smelled her mother’s perfume and spilled coffee and all the foods she ate. Everything smelled of plastic: the plates and the food, the television that sat blankly across the room. A clock ticked in the kitchen, and even that was plastic.
Rolling onto her side, Cree stared at the drawing.
They said I was special.
A mighty thread.
Looking at the drawing, she thought maybe her grandmother had been insane, after all. What did her mother call her?
A crazy old witch.
An old witch born of old witches …
Cree closed her eyes, but flinched when a knock sounded at the door. The lawyer, she thought. “Go away.” Someone hit the door again. “Please go away.”
“Open the door, child.”
The voi
ce was faint through the door, but like her grandmother’s. No one else had ever sounded so frail but sure. No one else had called her child.
“Who are you?”
Through the peephole, the woman appeared small and withered, so short that Cree could see little of her face, just the forehead and hair, the creases and the black eyes.
“You can call me Verdine. Most everyone does.”
“What do you want?”
“Why, to talk to you, of course.”
Cree opened the door to the length of the chain. “I don’t know you.”
“We met once when you were very young. Your mother brought you to my house. I took you into the Hush.”
Cree thought she remembered the day: her mother’s hand, hard on her wrist, an old woman wreathed in smoke. There’d been yelling then, too, then her mother’s car throwing gravel and dirt. “You had a dog,” she said.
“That’s right, child. A Plott hound we called Redmond. After your mother left, he slept on the porch with his head in your lap. He rode with us into the Hush. You wanted to keep him, and I wouldn’t allow it. You grew very angry.”
Cree unbolted the door. The woman was very old, and smiling. Behind her was a big man with a square jaw and flecks of white in his hair.
“This is Leon, my grandson. Is it your plan to leave us in the hall?”
It wasn’t the wry smile that decided Cree, but the smell of smoke on the old woman’s clothes. Even now it was familiar.
“Thank you, child.” Verdine and Leon entered the apartment, and Cree locked the door behind them. “Is your mother home?”
“She’s out.”
“Do you have coffee?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Be a good girl and check, would you?” They followed her into the kitchen, and to Cree it felt unreal. Verdine looked as her grandmother had looked, small and wiry and sharp-eyed. They sat at the table while Cree opened cabinets and made coffee. “You appear much as your mother did as a teenager, though I must say, you look unwell.” The sugar jar rattled in Cree’s hand, but she got the top off and pushed in a spoon. When she turned, the old woman looked sad, even with the smile. “Thank you.” She took the sugar and a mug. “Milk, too, if you don’t mind.”
