by Laura McHugh
“I thought this was something we were doing together. And don’t you need a ride?” Daniel prodded. “You’ve got that big box to carry.”
“I could call Bess.”
“How’ll Bess protect you if something happens?”
“I don’t need protection. I’m going to visit my friend’s mom. Simple as that.”
“Your murdered friend’s mom. To get rid of a ghost. You’re right, pretty simple.”
I hated how he made me smile when I was mad. “What would you do to protect me? Blind the bad guys with your pretty smile?”
Within the space of a breath, he grabbed my arms and pinned them behind my back, pressing me against the boat shed so I could feel the tensed muscles of his chest. He looked down at me with an impish grin. “District wrestling champ, junior year.” He released me just as quickly, the phantom of his touch lingering on my skin. My insides were giddy with wanting things I shouldn’t have.
“Show-off,” I said.
“Sorry.” He stepped back. “I only resort to force when necessary. Usually the pretty smile’s enough.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Fine,” I said. “You can come.”
It was dusk when we reached the trailer. Doris let us in, wearing the same housecoat she’d had on the last time we saw her. A cigarette trembled between her fingers. “You bring it?” she asked.
I held up the box. “It’s all here.” I’d read Sarah’s lengthy instructions, and while I wasn’t sure what we were about to do would cleanse the trailer of spirits, it might be enough to convince Doris. I’d asked Daniel whether he believed in this stuff, and he’d shrugged, saying it couldn’t hurt.
We began by holding hands in a circle, the three of us, as I recited Sarah’s blessing word for word. Then I lit a bundle of sage and walked through the trailer, cleansing each room with smoke and prayers. Cheri’s room was stale and dusty, the lightbulb burned out and the mattress on the floor stripped bare. As we left each room, I placed wrinkled green hedge apples in the four corners. I seemed to remember Birdie telling me hedge apples kept away spiders, not ghosts, but maybe they worked for all kinds of pests.
When I finished with the sage, we were supposed to feel a sense of lightness as the spirits left us, set free, but I didn’t feel any lifting of the heavy air in the trailer. Sarah’s instructions didn’t say what to do if I thought it wasn’t working, so I retrieved the jar of salt and crumbled leaves and continued. This part of the ritual was meant to keep spirits from returning once they’d been released. They would no longer recognize their earthly home; it would be repellent and unfamiliar and no longer pull them back from the light. It was sad, and cruel, if you believed it, that you could so easily unmoor a being from all it had ever known. We walked the borders of the property, pouring the salt mixture into the earth and repeating the earlier blessing. We lit candles at the end and walked the path in reverse, dripping wax over the salt, circling back to the front of the trailer, where we blew out our flames.
Daniel and I followed Doris back inside, where a lilting breeze lifted the curtains and dissipated the haze of sage smoke. “You feel that?” she said, holding her hands out and looking around. “I can breathe.”
I didn’t feel anything, but I nodded, packing the remaining supplies back in the box. Doris sank into a recliner, and I perched on the edge of a shredded sofa that I assumed, from the fur and the smell, was the dog’s bed. Daniel leaned against the wall. “There’s one more thing we have to do, to make sure it sticks,” he said. “We’ll finish when you’ve told Lucy what she needs to know.”
“Cheri,” I said. “Was she hanging around anybody new before she disappeared?”
Doris snorted. “What, you think she got some other friend ’sides you?”
“I thought, maybe, one of the men … ?”
Her eyes narrowed and she hunched forward in her seat. The housecoat gapped open between the snaps, revealing glimpses of flesh. “Look. I know you’re sitting there blaming me. But you ain’t got no idea. She’s the one fucked everything up. I was doing what I could. Had three kids to look after, plus one my sister dumped here when she got sent up to Chillicothe on a five-year stretch. I was stitching uniforms at the factory in Mountain Home all day and cleaning the old folks’ home at night. I didn’t always have somebody to watch the kids. My oldest, Joey, he was real responsible. Had to leave him in charge some of the time, and he did real good. One night he was boiling macaroni for dinner, and Cheri—couldn’t get nothing through that kid’s thick skull, you tell her the stove’s hot, and she’d stick her hand right on it—she grabbed the handle and pulled the boiling water down all over Joey. Burned him pretty good. He’d pushed her outta the way, and she was fine, not a spot on her. I salved the burns when I got home, but they wouldn’t heal up, and after a while they started looking worse. Took him to the medicine woman on my day off, and she sent me straight away to the doctor. I did just like she said, went to the doctor in town, and they still come and took my kids from me. Stuck ’em in foster care, like they get treated any better in there. Well, wouldn’t you know they brought Cheri back. The one that caused the whole mess. Said she had special needs, she was still so little and wouldn’t stop crying for her mama. And surely I could do better, taking care of just one. I tell you why they brought her back: couldn’t handle her. Asking the same dumb questions over and over, doing the same stupid things, pissing her pants and walking around like nothing happened.
“I had to start working from home to watch her; nobody else wanted to do it after what happened, they knew she was trouble. Gave up rights on my other kids, knew I couldn’t support ’em no more. Curtis, he got adopted, he was still cute enough, but Joey, all them scars. Nobody took him. Used to write me these letters wanting to come back home, but he don’t write no more. Don’t know where he is.” Doris rubbed her eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me and went on with her story.
“Cheri was always getting in my way when I was trying to work. Walking in at the wrong time, staring. Grew them big tits when she was ten, that weren’t normal. Didn’t have sense to wear a bra. She brought it on herself, all that attention. She liked it, too, lemme tell you. Crawl up in their laps while they’s waiting, show ’em the pictures she’s drawing, retarded little stick things.”
I thought of Mr. Girardi, how Cheri’s face had glowed when he’d helped her in class, taken her artwork seriously. She’d been starved for any kind of attention, good or bad.
“Was there anyone in particular she talked about, maybe? Anyone she might’ve wanted to leave with?” I asked.
“Hard to tell. She jabbered all the time, ’specially about that art teacher at school. That’s what I told the cops.”
“What didn’t you tell them?” Daniel asked. I had practically forgotten he was there.
“I ain’t ratting nobody out. I ain’t got proof of nothing.”
“My mother has other spells,” Daniel said. “To summon ghosts. Maybe Cheri needs some company.”
Doris’s face hardened as she looked at him, but there was fear in her eyes. She’d had a taste of what she felt was freedom from Cheri, and she wanted to hold on to it.
“There’s one guy,” she said, turning back to me. “Prick to do business with, but he was nice to her. He’d make a point of coming by when she was getting home from school. But he never tried nothing on her. They just sat on the steps and talked. Then I got to thinking that’s what was strange about him—he didn’t try nothing.”
“What’s his name?”
She laughed. “I don’t know his real name. Ain’t from here. Drives a van, that’s all I know.”
“Was he here the other day, right before we stopped by?” Daniel asked.
She looked down at her lap. “Might of been.”
Daniel and I exchanged glances. She didn’t want to tell us too much, just enough
to ensure that the ghost wouldn’t come back. She didn’t say anything more, so I stood to go. “Thank you,” I said.
“Finish up whatever you have to do to keep her away, and then get out of here,” she said. “Just let me be.”
“Poor Cheri,” Daniel said when we were back in the truck. “Growing up with a mother like that.”
“Worse than not having one at all,” I said. “So what’s the last thing we were supposed to do? I didn’t see anything else in Sarah’s instructions.”
He shrugged. “If you think you’re haunted, you’re haunted. And vice versa. Doesn’t matter what we do so long as she believes it.”
II .
Chapter 14
Ransome
Ransome knew infection when she saw it. When she was a kid living up on the ridge, her dog Beans got in a fight with a coyote and won. He was a scrapper, guarding the chickens like a true working dog, like it was in his blood, and maybe it was—he was five kinds of mutt, maybe more. No doubt that coyote was sorry it bit Beans, if it could be sorry from inside the stew pot, but Ransome was sorrier. The bite was on Beans’s hindquarters, and he couldn’t quite twist his neck enough to lick it. Ransome and her sister cleaned his wound every night before he jumped up on their bed to sleep, but a wet rag lacks the curative properties of dog tongue, and every morning he’d be right back out rolling in filth, as dogs do.
The bite festered and Beans got sick. His nose dried and scabbed. He slept on the stone slab behind the springhouse, where it was cool and shady all day, his flanks shuddering with each shallow breath. Ransome’s mama wasn’t one for pets you didn’t eat; said when Beans died, another mutt would wander in to freeload in his place. But Daddy gave in to Ransome’s begging and got Birdie Snow to come. She was midwifing animals more than people back then, working for a farm vet. She made a poultice for Beans to ease the pain and help draw out the infection, but she thought it might be bad enough that he’d need an antibiotic. Daddy bagged up one of the bantam hens to trade for the medicine. Not likely a fair trade, but Birdie took it and called things even.
Beans got better. Before long, he was back to stealing salt pork off the kitchen counter. But a coyote bite’s not a human bite. You’d think a person would be cleaner than an animal, but a human bite’s got venom to it. Poison. Maybe because a person’s got to think to bite, Ransome guessed, to make a choice. Poison’s in the intent. She knew from the beginning that Lila wouldn’t be okay, though she told herself she would. She put some of Birdie’s salve on the wound, because that would fix most anything.
Ransome walked back up the hill after checking on Lila for the last time. She couldn’t sleep, knowing the girl was right down there in the garage, in the dark, waiting on things to come. She thought about the other girl, the wild one, that Crete had sent away. Such a tiny thing, full of piss and vinegar, as her daddy would say. Never let down her guard, never did a single thing Crete asked, but Ransome could hear her crying at night, hoarse, choking on her own snot. She’d been relieved when that girl was gone, and tried not to think about where she went. She thought Crete had given up on that sort of thing, trading in girls. She figured he’d lost money on the first one, and that was his least favorite thing to do.
Then Lila showed up, and Ransome pretended this one was different. She’d come to the farm of her own free will. It was hard to understand why such a comely girl had need to sell herself anyway; in Henbane, a girl that pretty would be married to the car dealer’s son. Ransome expected her to dress up in slut clothes and sit around filing her nails while Crete drummed up customers, but that wasn’t Lila at all. She took a real interest in the farm, like she really thought that was her job. And heck, maybe she believed it; maybe she was in some kind of denial about the mess she’d gotten herself into.
Ransome wondered what had happened to Lila to make her end up here, in a place like this, but didn’t ask. The girl had some sweetness to her, like she hadn’t given up on things completely. Sometimes, in the field, she’d look up at the sky with a little smile on her face, and it made Ransome think of herself and her sister when they were kids, playing in the sweet corn, and how glad they were to be out in the sun, how other things didn’t much matter, and she wondered if Lila felt that same way. Still, Ransome stood by and let the bad things happen. She showed Lila less care than she’d shown her mutt dog. But she needed the house and the paycheck and didn’t know what Crete would do to her if she crossed him. She told herself Lila would get used to her new job, or she’d get sent away, too, and either way Ransome wouldn’t have to worry about it.
That last night, the night before the first customer was set to come, she found Lila sweating in her bed. The sheets were soaked, and she blazed with fever. She didn’t stir when Ransome pulled up her shirt. Red lines spidered out from the bite, and Ransome couldn’t deny anymore that it was infected, that Lila could die if it went untreated. She couldn’t let that happen. Part of her job was protecting Crete’s assets, and he’d made it clear that Lila was an unmined vein of gold. So she called Crete close to midnight and told him that Lila needed to see the doctor. The phone went mute while he turned things over. It didn’t take long. Some folks thought him cold-blooded, but Ransome knew he wasn’t all bad. He said he’d see to it first thing.
The next morning she was out weeding before the sun got too high. After a while a truck pulled up to the garage, and she squinted across the field to see if it was Crete or the doctor, but it was an old two-tone Dodge that belonged to Joe Bill Sump. She wiped her face off with a handkerchief and hurried through the rows to see what he wanted. If he had an appointment, it would have to wait. She doubted Lila would let Joe Bill touch her unless she was sedated first, and Ransome wasn’t about to drug the girl when she was already so sick.
“Need you to open up early,” Joe Bill said, spitting tobacco juice at her feet. “Crete said the girl needs breaking in. Gotta get this done before work.”
“You’ll have to come back,” Ransome said. “She’s sick.”
“I paid my money,” he said. “Now, lemme in or I’ll make you.”
“I’m gonna call Crete,” she said, turning toward the house. “Just need to make sure that’s all right with him.”
Joe Bill grabbed her shirt and yanked her back, reaching around to feel her pockets for the key.
“Hey!” She heard footsteps quickening on the grit path. Joe Bill shoved her aside, and she nearly lost her balance. “What the hell’s going on here?” It was Carl, who’d come from the direction of the woods. She hadn’t expected him back for another couple weeks. He gripped the front of Joe Bill’s shirt, but he was looking at Ransome. “You okay?”
She didn’t know what to say. Lies spilled out like water from a spring, an effortless gush. “He’s gone crazy,” she said. “He’s trying to get to Lila. He attacked her once already, we had to lock her in to keep her safe. Crete’s getting the doctor.”
“Doctor? She all right?”
“She’s a lyin’ bitch,” Joe Bill spewed, twisting himself out of Carl’s grasp.
Ransome bit down on her lip and shook her head. Carl’s face darkened, and for a moment he looked just like his brother. He spun around and shoved Joe Bill into the wall. “I told you to leave her alone,” he snarled.
“I got every right to be here,” Joe Bill said, shoving him back. “You wanna fuck her, you can wait in line.”
It happened so fast that it all smeared together in Ransome’s brain, leaving only one thing clear: the sharp crack of Joe Bill’s skull against the garage after Carl struck him. They stood there staring at the crumpled body. An accident. Had Joe Bill been a few more inches from the garage, his head wouldn’t have hit the wall with such force, if at all. Had Joe Bill not been such an asshole, he wouldn’t have been punched in the first place. Part of it fell on her, she knew; had she not lied, he wouldn’t be dead. Everything that came after hinged on her lie, a door swinging open on a futur
e that hadn’t existed until that moment. The lie worked out better for everybody involved, everybody but Joe Bill, though she was hard pressed to find that a bad thing.
She had to work quickly to smooth out the edges. She sent Carl home to get his truck—he’d walked through the woods to surprise Lila—and ran up to the house to call Crete. She told him about the scuffle with Joe Bill and Carl showing up, how she panicked and blamed everything on Sump because she didn’t know what to do. Then she explained how Joe Bill needed getting rid of, and Carl was too worked up over Lila to take care of it himself. Crete was quiet for all of one second before he calmly told Ransome her pay would be docked the hundred dollars he wouldn’t be getting from Joe Bill now that he was dead, though she’d done the right thing by trying to see if he’d paid up front. (He hadn’t.) She kept her mouth shut about that not being fair. If that was all she had to pay for what she’d done, she’d call herself lucky. He gave her a message for Carl—that Crete would handle Joe Bill, and Carl could owe him—and told her everything was scrapped now, to let Lila go, to make sure the girl kept her mouth shut or Ransome would be out on her ass, looking over her shoulder every step of the way.
She ran back to the garage, her joints wobbly and threatening to give, and shook Lila awake. The girl was groggy and unfocused, but Ransome gripped both sides of her head and explained that this was her chance to get out and she had to do everything just right or hellfire would rain down on the both of them, that if they didn’t end up dead, they’d be chained in a cellar sucking redneck dick every last miserable minute of their time on earth. She didn’t know if that was true, but she sure didn’t want it to be.
