Wicked Charm

by Amber Hart

  26

  Beau

  I haven’t talked to Charlotte about the earring yet, and Willow’s asked about it only once since she discovered the stone yesterday. She’s agreed to give me time but not much. Soon, I’ll need to confront my sister.

  The truth is, I’m afraid to ask. I don’t want her to be involved, or to know why Charlotte has the earring. It’s too close to home. If it isn’t hers, and I ask for an explanation, I just might strain the most solid bond I have with another person. Charlotte is mean, sure, but she’s my sister. She’s been with me the longest. She knows me the deepest.

  Willow takes a seat with me under a pecan tree. We gather a few of the fallen nuts and break them open against a hard rock. Her small boat sits at the shore, tied to a tree. This part of the swamp is like our own private beach. Only instead of clear waters, we have green swamp. And instead of sand, we have dirt. The peacefulness is the same, though.

  “Beau,” Willow says. “Do you ever miss your parents?”

  “Yes.” I surprise myself by answering.

  “Tell me about them?”

  I don’t think of them often. Well, that’s a lie. I do think of them, but usually I push the thoughts away. This time, I let them come. And with each one, I feel it, the pang of grief, heavier than anything I’ve attempted to carry.

  “My mom used to crochet everything. Scarves. Blankets. One year she knitted me the ugliest sweater out of all her scraps.” I laugh at the memory. “I still have it.”

  I picture Mom’s wavy black hair, her open smile. She smiled so much. Until she lost my dad. My dad is easier to remember. Maybe because his death was an accident. He didn’t choose to leave us. He was a hardworking man, tender toward Mom and Charlotte, tough in a good way toward me.

  “She shouldn’t have died the way she did,” I say with a grimace.

  Willow must notice my frustration because she asks, “Are you mad at her for leaving you?”

  “I suppose I am, yes. A little bit.” I dig my fingers into my palm to distract from the pain in my chest. “I wonder sometimes why we weren’t enough. Why she couldn’t have tried harder.”

  There’s a lump in my throat, and I can’t talk past it for a full minute while I work to swallow it down.

  “And your dad?” she pushes.

  “My dad was a strong man, up until his last breath. We used to go fishing. I remember quiet times with him. Funny how he didn’t have to say anything, but I heard so much in his silence.”

  Willow reaches for my hand.

  “He had this thing he did where whenever he left to go somewhere—the store, work, out with buddies—he’d put me in charge, tell me to take care of the family. I do that now. I take care of Charlotte. I look out for her. Though she’d have my head if she heard me say that. She likes to think she looks out for herself, and I suppose she does to an extent.”

  “What about your grandma?” Willow asks.

  “Died during childbirth, so I never knew her, but I hear she was nice to everyone. I guess Grandpa needed that after the hell your grandma gave him.”

  Willow offers a sharp look that makes me think I offended her. Maybe she knows more about it than I do. Or maybe she’s just fiercely protective of family. Probably the latter.

  “Don’t you talk about my—” she begins, but I cut her off with a kiss.

  When my lips touch Willow’s, there’s an instant sweetness and a bit of the lingering taste of pecans.

  “Willow,” I say, “I can’t talk about my family anymore. Please understand.”

  Willow, because she’s sweet like that, nods and doesn’t mention another word about it. I breathe a sigh of relief, tension melting from my bones.

  A hot breeze blows over our sweat-stained skin. Branches reach toward us. Leaves weave through and tangle in her hair. And soon, so do my hands.

  I lean her back against moist earth and a rotten piece of log. She doesn’t complain even one tiny bit. I brush dirt away from her sticky skin and kiss her again.

  …

  An hour later, Willow helps me drag the boat into the water. Our fishing gear weighs down one side, so I move the small tackle box opposite the rods.

  “Do you fish often?” I ask.

  It was Willow’s idea to catch our own dinner, then cook it over an open flame afterward. It reminds me of my childhood.

  “Not often, but enough to know what I’m doing,” she replies.

  We glide over the water with a smoothness that makes it feel as if we aren’t on water at all. A cormorant suns itself on a branch, its wings spread wide, exposing black feathers, a long neck, and a hooked beak. Another torpedoes underwater for a meal. It surfaces near our boat to swallow a fish in a slick gulp, its head bobbing up and down like a buoy.

  “Let’s look for the next big opening,” I say.

  We need an opening like this one—minus the feeding birds—to drop our hooks. Channels don’t offer the same opportunity to go home with a catch.

  We find what we’re looking for not long after. Willow baits a hook with a fake worm and casts her line. I haven’t fished since my father died. It’s been too hard to revisit his memory this way until now. Though my gut aches with the memory of him, I still remember the same stretch of muscle as I swing the rod. The same sound of line unraveling as it runs through the wind. The same plop as it hits the water.

  “Perfect hot day,” Willow says, closing her eyes for a moment, a tiny grin pulling at her face.

  Already, out in the open, sun beating down on us, I feel the beginnings of a burn tingling across my skin. But we came here for a fish, and I’m not leaving without one.

  I love what’s happened today. For the first time since my parents’ passing, I’ve purposely done something that reminds me of them. Maybe all I needed was for someone to ask me the way Willow did. To replace the pain with a new, good memory. My line tightens almost immediately. I wait a moment to let the nibbles turn into a real bite.

  When the line yanks, I begin to reel in whatever is on the other end of my hook, hoping that it’s a fish and not a turtle or crab.

  “Look at that!” Willow says as I bring it in.

  A white-gray catfish belly flops on the bottom of the metal boat. It’s a small thing compared to some of the monsters under the depths, but it’s big enough for the both of us. She admires my catch while handing me pliers to remove the hook. I’m careful to avoid the spine on its back, not wanting to get impaled.

  When I get it off the hook, we head back to shore, where Willow starts a fire.

  “I know we’ve gone over it,” she says while adding leaves to the flames, “but I can’t get those poor girls out of my mind.”

  “No one can, Willow.”

  “Have you talked to Charlotte about the earring yet?”

  I wince, knowing I need to question my sister but dreading the moment I actually have to. “Not yet. I will soon.”

  She spears the fish with a sharp stick and cooks it over a wood blaze, scales and all.

  “Do it, Beau.” Her eyes find mine, and I see the conviction in them. “If you don’t, I will.”

  I don’t doubt her sincerity for a moment.

  “I’ll do it,” I say.

  I watch the fish on the spit, turning it over after a minute to cook evenly on both sides. The smell of charred scales fills the air. Willow says nothing more of Charlotte, but still I feel the urgency of the situation settling between us.

  “I keep trying to think of people who might have something against you, though I could be completely off track. Maybe it’s all a terrible coincidence, your connection to the girls,” she says. “I know Brody is jealous of you. But the murders started before he became jealous, so it couldn’t be that, right? I could never see him harming anyone anyway. And speaking of jealous, Grant’s envious of you, too.”

  Does she mean to label them as suspects?

  “I know.”

  “Do you think Grant is imitating you? Maybe he’s trying to go for the girls you da
ted.”

  I rotate the fish again over the flames as I consider her implications. It’s not like I haven’t thought the same thing myself.

  “Maybe.”

  Willow’s eyes widen, and she lets my answer sink in.

  “And while we’re naming people close to me, there’s also my grandpa, but I don’t think he did it. Charlotte, either. They are innocent, I’m sure. But like I said, I plan to talk to her about the earring soon.”

  “They,” Willow says. “Oh my God, Beau. What if…what if more than one person is to blame? What if the killer has an accomplice? Or worse, if there’s not just a single killer?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  What if she’s right? What would that mean? How many people could possibly be acting together to kill innocent girls, and why?

  “I suppose it’s possible,” I say.

  “What about Pax?” she continues. “He’s so big and quiet. That frightens me. What’s going on in his mind?”

  I pull the cooked fish from the stick and curse as it burns my fingertips. I drop it on a clean wood plank for Willow and me to share.

  “Do me a favor, okay?” I say. “Don’t stop being aware of your surroundings. Don’t stop questioning people’s innocence. We don’t know who the killer is, and I don’t want you caught off guard.”

  “I’ll be careful,” she says.

  I believe her.

  27

  Willow

  I am falling for Beau, and I’m not completely happy about it. My heart stutters each time I see his face and with every rumbling word he speaks. I daydream about him in class. I talk over things with Jorie, because I can’t always figure him out on my own. It would be easier to fall for someone like Brody—soft smiles and plain to read. Beau is the opposite of plain. He knots my stomach and twists my thoughts and invades my dreams.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, Jorie,” I say.

  She doesn’t even attempt to argue. She agrees completely.

  “I asked him to let me in, and there’s a possibility he listened. I’m not sure if he’s ready for a relationship, but I think maybe I am.”

  “I’ve been tellin’ you,” Jorie says. “He’s dangerous. Please hear me. Girls linked to him are showing up dead.”

  The wooden bench cuts into my legs, so I pull them up and cross them. Jorie unpacks her lunch and sits with me under the oak tree that shades us.

  “Am I stupid to keep talking to him?” I ask, biting into my apple.

  “Maybe,” she replies.

  Jorie hands me a carrot stick, and I give her half a slice of my homemade banana nut bread with peach marmalade baked on top.

  “He’s not gonna let you go now. Not until he’s good and ready. Girl, didn’t I warn you?”

  I smile. “You might have.”

  The courtyard is a pristine blanket of grass. Practically no one in the school eats inside, despite the heat. Jorie and I stretch out on the bench so no one gets the idea that they can join us. The earring settles on my mind, and it’s hard to erase…or keep to myself.

  “We found an earring in the woods. Right after we spotted the hooded stranger there.”

  Surprise colors her face. “A dead girl’s earring?”

  “That’s what I thought at first, too, but the police said they don’t have a match. As far as they know, it doesn’t belong to one of the victims, and there aren’t any new bodies.”

  I shudder at the thought of the possibility of a new fatality, another gone girl.

  “We found its match,” I say. “In Charlotte’s jewelry box.”

  Jorie stops eating. She stares at me like she’s waiting for the catch. There isn’t one.

  “You don’t think Charlotte…?”

  “I don’t know what to think. Should I suspect her? Do you think it’s crazy of me to?”

  Jorie looks around the courtyard as though speaking of Charlotte will somehow conjure her up on the spot.

  “I think the girl is strange, and I wouldn’t rule her out,” she replies.

  Charlotte is nowhere in the crowd.

  “Just be careful,” Jorie warns. “I’ve seen the way she is. Mean. Stubborn. She doesn’t have friends. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  “Yes,” I admit.

  “She’s smart, as far as I know,” Jorie continues. “I sit behind her in biology and she’s always getting As on her papers and tests. She most definitely shouldn’t be confused with dumb. There’s a difference between book smart and street smart, of course, but she’s both. There must be a reason she keeps to herself.”

  I remain quiet.

  “She’s not in any extracurricular groups. She doesn’t play sports. She’s hardly seen in town. No one knows a thing about her, except maybe that brother and grandpa of hers.”

  “Doesn’t make a person a killer, to want to be alone,” I say.

  “No, but finding an earring match in her house sure does seem odd.”

  I’ll give her that.

  “Where are her parents?” Jorie asks.

  I offer a noncommittal shrug.

  “No parents. No friends. No social life. Suspicious.”

  Beau seems to think his sister is innocent.

  Jorie cups her hands around her mouth like a megaphone and shouts, “Find something to do, won’t you?”

  I realize she’s talking to a group of people who have made it their mission to stop and stare at me, passing quiet words among one another.

  The girls scatter.

  “They wouldn’t quit staring,” Jorie says.

  Hell, they’ve been staring since Beau kissed me in the hall a few days ago. Different groups of them take turns watching me.

  “Apparently Beau doesn’t normally show affection?” I ask.

  Jorie laughs. “Affection? Not even. More like claiming.”

  She adjusts the waist on her white skirt and pulls the hem of her shirt down to cover her slightly showing stomach. My skirt is long, black, and covering my sandaled feet. I fan my tight-fitting shirt in an attempt to stanch the sweat that threatens to drown me.

  “He claimed you, girl, and you know it,” Jorie says. “And no, he’s never done that before. Why do you think all these damn people are staring now? They need to know why. Why you? Why the girl who is every bit as ordinary as them? No offense.”

  “None taken,” I say.

  She’s right. I’m not model beautiful like Charlotte. I have absolutely nothing particularly astonishing about me. I could be the girl walking past us. Or the one laughing with her friends. Or the one reading, spread out on her back under the sun. I’m no different than Jorie or the next girl.

  “They want to know why,” Jorie says. “But there is no ‘why,’ and that confuses them more than anything. They’re sheep. One whispers, and so the next one does, too. They begin their rumors as a herd. Then they add fuel until eventually it burns out and they get bored.”

  I hope that happens to be soon.

  “Except none of them, bless their hearts, ever seems to get bored of Beau.”

  “Some of them must have moved on,” I say.

  “Of course they have. I’m just speaking for the majority of his exes here. I think it must have something to do with the way he ends things so abruptly. Maybe they feel they never get closure? All of them swear he’s just fine one day and the next he’s gone. You’d think they’d learn.”

  She looks apologetically at me as she realizes her slip-up. I’m the one with Beau now, and all I’ve realized is that he makes a good friend. And that I love his lips on mine.

  “They expect him to be rid of you soon. They’ve placed their bets on when and where and how. They’d probably love to see it play out at school, sorry to say.”

  He pretends not to care for a very good reason. I can’t tell Jorie why I sympathize with him, so she isn’t necessarily wrong in her observations, but she doesn’t understand him on the inside.

  “Let’s not forget that he’s involved in a murder in
vestigation, either,” she continues. “There’s reason to worry.”

  “Do you think things are different for me?” I ask. “I mean, I know he’s been with other girls and that he doesn’t stay with them for long. But we were friends first, which he doesn’t normally do. And I don’t believe he killed the girls. His alibis are airtight.”

  “Are you sure you’re friends?” Jorie asks. “Because maybe he’s using you for a purpose. No offense, but he’s Beau. This is what he does.”

  “I’m sure.”

  For the first time, I know Jorie is wrong. Beau is more than he appears to be.

  28

  Beau

  The news of another dead girl isn’t what shocks me the most. It’s the fact that they didn’t find her body for two days. She was too deep in the swamp, too far in the thick mangroves. Her body was bloated with water and infested with decay brought forth by the relentless Georgia sun. Word around is that her eyes were crawling with worms and her body was heavy with mosquito bites, looking like chicken pox. Luckily, a gator didn’t get her. They tried, though. They colonized in the water like a leathery, scaly tarp, waiting for a good rain to wash her into the deeper waters where they could feed.

  This time it was Jackie Wales, another girl from our high school who I’d known. We’d dated. A few times together, quickly over.

  They say she was murdered late in the evening two nights ago. A shiver crawls up my spine.

  “What’s bothering you?” Grandpa asks.

  He’s on the couch, remote in hand, TV on, but watching me instead. Black circles rim his eyes.

  “Nothing,” I say as I take a seat at the window chair.

  I stare at Willow’s house.

  “Don’t lie to me,” he says.

  My lies are harder to tell when they’re told to him. But I want to lie. I don’t need him thinking I’m in deep with Willow. Already, he and Charlotte suspect I like her, as opposed to her filling a use for the time being. But unlike Charlotte, Grandpa doesn’t mind my dating the next-door neighbor.

  “Okay,” I say, biting the bullet. “The murders aren’t stopping. They obviously have something to do with me. Do you think Willow’s safe?”