The animal stared for a moment, but when she feinted toward it, the eyes blinked, and disappeared.
• • •
Inside the house, Ivy slipped off her clogs and started to lock the front door, her hands still shaking. But she thought better of it. Anthony was certain to come back. This was his home now. He would soon be hungry. Tired.
She went down the silent hallway to turn on the light in Anthony’s room. It’s not fair to call it the guest room anymore. He had formed a kind of nest on the floor with the blankets and sheets from the bed. The room smelled of urine, but so far he hadn’t defecated anywhere but the bathroom. Most of his clothes lay in a pile on the room’s single chair, and nine or ten plastic water and soda bottles stood in neat rows on the dresser. A cupcake wrapper and an empty peanut can sat in the middle of the bare mattress. It was like a young boy’s room. A boy who had bad, indulgent parents.
Surely he would come back.
Glancing again at the pile of clothes, she realized he had been wearing pants and a shirt when she saw him running into the woods. Progress? Maybe.
Inside, she was still nervous. Worried. But as she walked back to her own bedroom, she smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jolene was so grateful to be out of the trailer, she didn’t care that the coffee Lori Ann’s daughter brought to the table tasted like ashes. She emptied two more sugar packets into the sturdy porcelain mug and stirred until the amber crystals melted. Charity and Eli had dropped her at the diner on their way out of town for the day, even though Bud had made Charity swear to keep her in the trailer until she looked better.
Charity had taken her temperature that morning. When she saw there was no fever, she told Jolene she needed to get up off the couch and get some air no matter what Bud said.
“Come to the mall with us,” Charity had said. “Eli’s picking up his monkey suit today. That stuck-up bitch his cousin’s marrying is costing everyone a freaking fortune.”
Jolene had begged off going to the mall even though she was curious. There were so many things she didn’t know, hadn’t seen. After thirty years the world was different— again—but the people were always the same. Naïve. Hopeful. Sometimes they were weak or cruel. Sometimes, like Charity, they surprised her. Strong, vibrant people like Charity didn’t need to be saved.
But it was Eli who understood Jolene. His family had settled on Garrett’s Mountain almost two centuries earlier, even before Jolene’s first life had begun on neighboring Devil’s Oven. The legendary crimes—the vile murders of her father and baby brother—that her mother had committed back then were part of Eli’s familial memory. Nothing that happened on Devil’s Oven surprised him. Jolene was grateful it had been Eli who found her the night she came off the mountain.
Tripp walked into the diner just before nine looking preoccupied, like he wasn’t sure what he was doing there. He wore his DNR uniform with a gun snugged into a black holster on his belt.
“Hey,” Jolene said. “I remember you.”
At the sound of her voice, his face cleared for a second and she knew he had been looking for her. Then he was on guard again. He was so different from Bud. Warier. Bud could never be cruel; Tripp wasn’t safe. Through the confused green of his aura, Jolene could see how he wrestled with himself, and that he had no clue as to what was really happening inside him. His aura was at war with itself, surging blue one moment, overcome with sickly gray the next. His turmoil saddened her. There had been a time in her long, long past when she would have been afraid of him. There was weakness in that confusion. Chaos.
He sat down on the other side of the booth and slid over. “You having breakfast?”
“I ate already,” she said. Another girl might have been flattered that he had been looking for her. Jolene knew it was just a step. Something that had been decided long ago.
He waved at Lori Ann’s daughter and she nodded.
“Lori Ann doesn’t have corn chips on the menu, I guess,” he said.
She laughed. “No. But she does have blueberry pancakes with whipped cream.” They had been wild blueberries, once frozen, but still tiny and tart. She loved the feeling of food passing her lips, tasting salt, sugar, bitter lemons, and the thick sourdough bread that Eli’s mother sent over. Any food, really, except for meat. Charity had even found her standing in front of the refrigerator eating hot sauce from a spoon. All Charity had said was, “Ugh. Gross.”
Charity never asked her any questions, never even wanted to know where she had come from or if she had any people nearby, let alone why she had eaten hot sauce from a spoon. Jolene wondered what Eli could have told her that made her willing to take in a naked stranger as her roommate, then help that stranger get a job.
Tripp Morgan, though, was full of questions. She could almost see them in the air between them. She started first.
“Is she still mad? Mrs. Tucker?” she said.
Then Lori Ann herself was there setting a cup of tea in front of him and asking if he wanted his usual omelet. They talked for a minute as though Jolene weren’t even there, Lori Ann asking questions about Claude Dixon. Jolene listened to him describe coming out of his cabin in the morning and seeing something that looked like a pile of laundry in the driveway.
His aura flickered as he talked. Clouds of black—an absence of light—bled into the green and brown and gold. Death was breaking through. He was lying! But why? She didn’t really need to see his aura to know that the picture he was painting for Lori Ann was all wrong.
Lori Ann left the table, finally satisfied. She hadn’t acknowledged Jolene at all, but turned around when she got close to the kitchen.
“You ready for more coffee, honey?”
Jolene shook her head.
They sat for a minute, Tripp staring into his tea. Jolene noticed how rough his hands were. A pair of loaded coal trucks broke the quiet, rattling the picture window as they passed.
Tripp sat back and took his watch from his wrist. “It’s this kind of stuff I don’t need from Lila,” he said. “I need her.” He slid the watch across the table and Jolene caught it before it slid off the edge.
She held it close so she could see the diamonds beneath each numeral on the watch’s face. She had never worn diamonds before. Byron, Ivy’s father, had given her a narrow rose gold ring that bore a single fashioned heart at their Justice of the Peace wedding. It was the sort of ring high school boys gave their girlfriends, but she had worn it lovingly until the day he chased her into the woods. She had thrown it back at him, frightened, tired of his insane accusations. It was the last day she had seen Ivy.
“Why are you telling me this?” she said.
“I don’t know why I’d tell you anything,” Tripp said. He leaned closer to her and lowered his voice. “I don’t even know why I felt like I had to come and find you today. When you’re riding in my truck or we’re sitting across from each other in a public place like this, I think I’m okay.” Jolene saw fear and something else—hate, or passion, or both—in his eyes. His aura surged. “But when you’re in my head, you scare the hell out of me. And I want to know why.”
Jolene wanted to look away, but found she couldn’t. She knew why she frightened him. She just couldn’t tell him. Not in words.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
He woke curled in an earthen pocket beneath the base of an uprooted hickory tree, his skin still damp from the morning mist. The sun was high overhead, but the niche was sheltered, still shaded. As he stretched his legs to climb out of the hole, a sluggish blacksnake that had been sleeping at his back broke ahead of him. He watched it muscle its way through the roots and into the brush.
He was hungry again. The woman’s food had become a habit, but he was nowhere near the house now. Standing outside the hole, he unzipped his pants to urinate. When he was finished, he went in search of the creek he had heard running during the night. He found it a little farther down the mountainside, near the uppermost branches of the fallen tree. The creek was shallow and rocky
. He lay down on his belly and splashed the cold water on his face, then drank his fill, his mouth to the water’s silver surface. Resting there, the smell of dirt and water and new growth filling his nostrils, he knew he could get up to follow the creek and eventually come close to the town. There was no telling how he knew this. Some things he knew, some things he didn’t. In between there was no frustration, no worry. There was simply a need to go forward, to follow a path whose destination he couldn’t see. He would get there soon enough.
The shoes the woman had given him were too small. He had only been walking a few minutes when he had to stop and sit down on the ground to pull them off. He bent and twisted them in his massive hands, trying to make them larger, or at least more comfortable. But they weren’t good shoes and when he put them back on, they still wouldn’t yield. With a great cry—Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!—he took them off again and threw them into the trees, out of sight.
He hated to wear shoes, especially the white vinyl ones his mother brought home from the thrift store. Everyone else, even some of the girls, wore expensive basketball shoes with famous logos or players’ names stitched on them. Today he would just wear his boots. He would have to sit out P.E. and get a zero, but that was fine with him.
He lay on his stomach, sliding the shoes with his fingertips as far back as he could beneath the bed. He heard the school bus’s brakes sigh at the corner, then the grind of the engine as the bus pulled away without him. Then came her footsteps. He gave the shoes a final push and eased himself over the gritty carpet. By the time she appeared in his doorway, he had pretty much brushed all the cat hair and crumbs off his navy blue shirt.
“Hey, Ma,” he said. “I missed the bus. Can you take me?” He smiled at her because sometimes it worked and she would just laugh and tell him to get in the car. For someone who almost never laughed, her laugh was pretty. Contagious.
But she already had the thing in her hand. It was just a handful of unbent wire hangers tied into a bundle. They didn’t need a name for it.
“Uncle Abram said I’m too old for that,” he said.
“When your uncle starts paying my bills, I’ll let him tell me what to do for five minutes. Maybe.” She gestured with the thing. “Hurry up. You’re not going to make me late for work today.”
Which meant she had someone coming to the house because she didn’t work at the nursing home on Thursdays. He had heard Uncle Abram warn her about the men who came to their apartment. Uncle Abram didn’t like the way it made their family look. Maybe Uncle Abram needed to know she was back at it.
“Sure, Ma,” he said. “Whatever you say.” He smiled again and his acquiescence confused her for a second. But she didn’t leave. He unbuttoned his blue jeans.
As he crossed the mountain, he was watchful for anything that might be food. It wasn’t until he had gone almost half the distance he needed to go and the sun was much lower in the sky that he found a single, intact apple tree in the remains of an orchard. The other trees had long since crumbled, their insect-eaten trunks lying in pieces. The tree had no leaves, but its fruit—four perfectly shaped apples, each about the size of his fist—shone bright yellow in the hazy sunlight.
Saliva warmed in his mouth. The apples were too high for him to reach, so he climbed the tree’s fragile lower branches, snapping several as he went higher. Anyone watching would have seen the smile on his face. It was a different smile from the one the woman was used to seeing. Bracing himself in an elbow of the tree, he reached out with both hands and picked two at the same time.
Once he was back on the ground, he put one in the pocket of his pants. He pressed the other against his nose to smell it before opening his mouth and biting into its tender flesh.
A handful of March flies, drawn by the scent of the unseasonable fruit, dove at his head, biting wherever they landed. Their bites on his neck and ears were painful, and he stood up to slap them away without losing the apple. Finally, he slammed one against the back of his left hand, dropping it onto a pale leaf at his feet. With two flies still crawling on his neck, he stooped to examine the dying fly, which was on its winged back, waving its bent legs in the air. He flicked it onto its abdomen with the ragged edge of a chewed fingernail, but it didn’t stir from the leaf. Picking up the leaf, he held it to his face. When his tongue met the fly, its wings stuck to him. The thing buzzed frantically in his mouth. Even mixed with the sweetness of the apple, it tasted bitter. Foul. He spat the thing out onto the ground and finished the apple.
• • •
He stood on the mountainside looking down at the blue rectangle of concrete sitting in the center of the parking lot like some kind of giant, ugly cake. There was a sign—a glowing white figure of a large-breasted woman, featureless except for a pair of pouting red lips—astride a shining yellow neon star. It wasn’t the image of the woman that stirred something deep inside him. It was the building itself, and what it contained, that aggravated the small semblance of feeling he had left. It wasn’t anger. It was something more substantial, something elemental. It was a slow-burning, constant hum like the buzzing of the flies. If he had words for it, he would call it rage. But he couldn’t go down to the building. Not yet. He was following the path. He couldn’t veer from it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Tripp waited for Jolene to put up the passenger window before he released the key from the truck’s ignition. She had spent the entire drive up the mountain pressed against the door, her face to the wind.
“I had a dog that used to ride that way,” Tripp said.
“What did you call her?” Jolene said. Already she looked better. Her cheeks were chafed pink from April air and she looked more awake, less tense than she had seemed down at the diner. When she’d asked if he would take her up on the mountain, he didn’t question why she wanted to go there. There was a new kind of understanding between them. Not a comfortable understanding, but something.
“Peaches,” he said.
“Peaches.”
“She was small and kind of—I don’t know. Kind of a brownish peach color.”
“Oh,” Jolene said.
“I didn’t name her,” he said, embarrassed.
He saw she wasn’t listening anyway. From the truck, she headed straight for the sad mix of moss and yellowed grass filling his front yard. Dropping to a squat, she ran her hand over it thoughtfully, as though it were fine silk. He had to look away from the inch-wide stripe of porcelain skin that appeared between the top of her jeans and her black cotton pullover.
“I want to take a walk,” she said, standing. “Will you come with me?”
She looked young and untouched. He had the feeling she would go on without him if he told her no.
“Nowhere I need to be today,” he said. He was officially off the clock, and it suited him to stay away from the post, where they would all be talking about Claude Dixon. Burns and Johnson, the detectives, had said they wanted to talk to him again, something he definitely didn’t want to do. “It’s cold up here. I’ll get you a jacket from inside.”
“Sure, thanks,” she said, turning away toward the woods.
• • •
He had never hurt a woman before.
Tripp held on to the thought like a talisman as he followed her over the mud-slicked trail. It seemed like it had rained almost every day since Claude Dixon was murdered. No big storms like the previous month, but a continual pattern of morning showers that left each afternoon draped with a dull silver sky. The air was heavy all the time. Even his legs felt weighted and reluctant to carry him.
They hiked across the mountain’s southern face on a trail that eventually dumped out on a state road on the other side of the mountain. Every so often it branched off and led to smaller, less-traveled trails. They talked little, and always about what was around them. Not about Alta or Claude Dixon or Lila or even the club.
Where was Lila in all this? Lila was still his. Lila was his love. This girl was something altogether different. This girl felt necessary. Lik
e breath. Like air. But if she was like air, why did he feel as though he would suffocate if he got too close to her?
Unlike Lila, there was no feminine scent trailing her, no perfume of roses or lilacs or other summer flowers. Today her hair was loose like it was when she danced. Before she put on the navy wool jacket his sister had sent him for Christmas, she had pulled her hair over one shoulder so that it framed her face like a satin hood. What would that feel like spread over his face, caught between his fingers? His lips? Along with hundreds of other men, Tripp had seen almost every inch of her skin under the stage lights. She was here now and he could reach out and touch her shoulder or her waist if he wanted to. He tried to keep his voice under control when they did talk, and not be distracted by the way her ass moved in her tight-fitting blue jeans or the tilt of her head when she laughed, the sound spilling through the trees like music.
“Here,” she said, slowing.
At some point they had taken a branch of the trail that joined the old logging road the department used—he used—to access this part of the forest. He hadn’t noticed when the ground beneath his hiking boots changed. They had just kept moving. Time seemed to be closing in on him again, just as it had when he was last with Lila.
“Ah, this place,” he said. They stood at the edge of the remains of a cabin site. He had heard the story repeated his whole life—how a woman had gone mad at the end of a starving winter and murdered her husband and two children, one of whom was an infant boy. If he remembered correctly, though, the daughter’s body had never been found.Jolene was naïve, and young enough to believe any story, of course. There were plenty of them, but none got to the heart of what he believed was wrong with Devil’s Oven. He was certain it had to be some kind of mineral buried here, perhaps something magnetic. The ground was somehow dead. Murders had happened here, yes, but he was always careful to differentiate between causalities and correlations.
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