The House in Poplar Wood

by K. E. Ormsbee

  “I am not going to worry myself about you, Gretchen,” she was saying. “I have a hundred and one other disasters to manage, from seating to flower arrangements.”

  “What’s wrong with the flowers, Mom?” Mayor Whipple asked, still distracted by his papers. He reached over to pat her hand and, since he wasn’t looking, patted the butter dish instead.

  “Archie, really,” said Gram, flicking his hand. “It’s not that there is a problem at the florist but that there will be. It’s the fate of any responsible soul who plans too well in advance. Misfortune always befalls the hard worker.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t plan so much then,” suggested Gretchen.

  She knew she was pressing her luck, but Gram was too distracted by future woes to notice her granddaughter’s impertinence: “Poinsettias are a monstrously unpredictable flower. They possess an innate will to cause suffering in my life.”

  Gretchen was tempted to suggest that a simple solution would be to order flowers other than the accursed poinsettias. But that would be too impertinent, and Gretchen was not going to intentionally provoke her grandmother with the threat of North Carolina looming. She had to be on her best behavior, if not for her own sake, then for the case of Essie Hasting.

  The questions writhed in Gretchen’s mind, persistent little worms:

  What did it mean, for Death to “kill” someone?

  How was that any different from Death’s usual job of taking people’s lives?

  Why would Death kill Essie Hasting?

  And why—why—would Gretchen’s father cover that up?

  “Dad,” Gretchen said.

  It was the third time she’d said his name but the first time Mayor Whipple heard.

  “Hm?” He looked up from his papers. “What is it?”

  “Why do we hate the Hastings and the Vickeries?”

  “Gretchen, really!” cried Gram. “Speaking those families’ names in this house. Don’t bother your father with such obscenities.”

  But it was too late. Gretchen had miraculously captured Mayor Whipple’s attention.

  “Curious question, Gretchen,” he said. “What brings that on?”

  Mayor Whipple was staring at her—not appalled like Gram, but staring all the same. Gretchen didn’t blame either of them. The Whipples hated the Vickeries and the Hastings, and the Vickeries and the Hastings hated the Whipples. That’s how it had been for time out of mind. No one spoke about that hate at the supper table; it simply was.

  “I know why we hate them technically,” said Gretchen. “Because they’re apprentices, and they’re no good. But no one ever talks about why they’re no good.”

  “Don’t answer her, Archie,” Gram Whipple told her son. “It isn’t appropriate.”

  Mayor Whipple was not listening to his mother. He was listening to Gretchen, for once. He leaned back, fingers interlocked. He seemed surprised, and more than a little amused.

  “You know what apprentices do,” he said.

  “Sure. They live with Shades: Death, Memory, Passion. Help them out.”

  “Yes,” said Mayor Whipple. “Like lackeys, groveling servants. They serve the Shades, and all for their own selfish reasons: the promise of a cure for some ailment, the erasure of memories too hard to bear, the hand of a love they cannot win on their own. They’re too weak to seize such things for themselves, so they sign away their lives for a single favor. And so their loyalties lie with their Shades. But our loyalties lie—and always have—with the people first.”

  “Right. But the Vickeries help people, too. They’re doctors.”

  “They are shams. They call themselves professionals, but they’re as much doctors as Hemingway is a politician.”

  Hemingway was the family’s cocker spaniel. He was fourteen years old, and his eyes perpetually leaked yellow goo.

  “But then why do so many people in town go visit them?” Gretchen asked. “They seem to think the Vickeries are okay.”

  Mayor Whipple bristled, sitting up tall. “The Vickeries give them quick fixes, that’s all. They claim they can save them from death, or take away all the bad memories in their heads. But death and memories, they catch up with you one way or another. All those townspeople will learn that lesson soon enough.

  “We are really on the side of the people, Gretchen. Summoners—we maintain balance, you understand, among the three Shades, but also between them and humanity. In times of trouble, we intervene for our towns, using the Rites. We request miracles, memories, and love when our towns need them most. Ours is the noble task. A responsibility we have inherited for generations.”

  Gretchen chose her next words carefully. She had her father’s attention—a precious gift she did not mean to squander. “So, if Essie Hasting is dead, and Ms. Hasting is retired, who’s going to be Passion’s apprentice?”

  Asa cussed, rubbing both hands over his cheeks and groaning low. “God, Gretch. Who dropped you on your head as an infant?”

  “You, probably,” she snapped at him.

  “Passion will find another,” Mayor Whipple said. “In this town of ours, there is no shortage of feeble characters to choose from. Three Shades to every town, one apprentice to each Shade, one summoner to balance and intercede using the Rites. That is the way of it. Always has been, and always will be.”

  The way Mayor Whipple spoke was not unkind, but it was worn, threadbare. Though Gretchen’s father had never talked this much about the family business—not to Gretchen, a secondborn with no future in summoning—it sounded like a story he was exhausted of retelling. Gretchen could feel Gram firing an almighty glare in her direction, but she stayed the course.

  “I go to school with a Vickery, you know. His name is Lee. Have you heard of him?”

  “My dear, I barely have time to memorize the names of all my council members, let alone every member of your seventh-grade class.”

  “Eighth.”

  It wasn’t Gretchen who’d corrected her father, but Asa. “She’s in eighth grade, Dad.”

  Gretchen blinked, shocked first that Asa knew her grade, and second that he’d make any correction on her behalf.

  “Very well, eighth. All the same, the Vickeries should be of no concern to you. Stay away from that boy.”

  “But why? I mean, how are they dangerous?”

  “Their loyalties—”

  “Yes, I know,” Gretchen interrupted, earning a reproving look from Gram. “But what did they ever do to us?”

  Mayor Whipple’s brow creased, an expression Gretchen wasn’t used to. Very rarely did her father look as though he were struggling for words. He always had a response on the tip of his tongue, ready for reporters and constituents and his family alike. But now, Mayor Whipple looked hesitant. Only after a long silence did he speak.

  “We were born to be enemies. Apprentices might help the town in their way, but in the end they will always choose Shades first, and we will choose people. That is all there is to it. Some things in this life we simply must accept.”

  “But maybe,” Gretchen said, “the apprentices know things we don’t. Maybe we could learn from them.”

  She saw the precise moment she lost her father. His frank gaze closed, like double doors swinging shut. “Don’t be absurd, Gretchen. Such thinking doesn’t become a Whipple—even one like you, who will never practice.” And like that, he was Mayor Whipple once more—the high summoner of Boone Ridge. “If you’ll excuse me, I have five meetings tomorrow morning and a proposal I’ve only half read over.”

  He left the table without even touching dessert.

  Asa was playing his music, volume cranked up high. The thumping bass made Gretchen’s picture frames quiver on their nails, but she was used to it. After a while, she didn’t even notice the wailing guitars.

  Tonight, Gretchen sat on her window bench, looking out over Boone Ridge. Mayor Whipple had once told Gretchen that her room had the best view in the house. His window faced the industrial side of town, a place where down-and-out workers had swarmed
during the Great Depression and that now looked like an even greater depression itself, all steel and sooty windows. Asa’s window faced the back garden, and Gram’s room had no windows at all.

  But Gretchen’s was the only bedroom that faced south, out toward the pretty end of Boone Ridge—a grid of quaint houses, fenced in and shaded by hickories. Gretchen could see Hickory Park, a black square tucked in amidst the houses. She couldn’t see the police tape from so far away, but she knew it was still up, marking the place where Essie Hasting had died. And farther still in the distance rose a dark line of trees—Poplar Wood.

  The wormy questions were back in Gretchen’s mind, writhing and wriggling. They had grown in size and confidence, relentless. Together, they unearthed an idea inside her brain. It was an idea she could not shake, same as the poem she’d written on Mr. Edmonson’s whiteboard.

  She knew the Vickeries were her enemies. She knew they were bad. But just because you were an enemy did not mean you didn’t know things. Things about Death. Things about Essie Hasting, another apprentice. Maybe, thought Gretchen, just maybe, if she was smart about it, her enemies would be willing to share those secrets, which was more than she could say of her own family.

  A Whipple like you, who will never practice.

  Her father’s words stung inside Gretchen’s ears, but she refused to accept them. With his help, or without it, she’d get to the bottom of this. She’d show her family just what a secondborn Whipple could do.

  Gretchen needed her answers.

  And so, she decided, she needed to speak to Lee Vickery.

  “The champion sits with us!”

  “Yeah, Lee, you hear that? Sit with us today.”

  Emma tugged Lee toward the only orange table in Boone Ridge Middle’s cafeteria. It was a terrible table, rusty at the edges, riddled with chewing gum on its underside, and colored like a traffic cone. No one knew why this table wasn’t green, like all the others in the cafeteria, but for that very reason it was where the popular kids had chosen to sit at the beginning of Lee’s eighth-grade year, and it was, therefore, the coolest table in school.

  This wasn’t the first time Lee had been invited to the orange table. But unlike the other kids there, Lee never committed. Some days he chose to sit in the corner, with kids who wore all black. Other days he sat near the dessert cart, with the really smart kids. Some days he sat all alone, at the table next to the garbage cans. Lee didn’t care where he sat, and for some reason that seemed to make him even cooler to the popular kids, which was why Emma and Dylan were so excitedly leading him along now.

  “You guys,” Dylan announced to the others seated at the orange table. “Lee here just set a new record. Forty-seven seconds around the entire field. He beat Chris Anding by a full five.”

  Lee reddened and took a seat next to Emma, who hadn’t stopped smiling shyly at him since they’d left the recreational field.

  “Dude,” said one of the kids. “You’re going to the Olympics for sure. Coach Rogers at the high school? He’s going to put you on varsity track. My brother’s on varsity too. He won the four-hundred-meter sprint at State.”

  “What’re those, Lee?” asked Emma, pointing into his paper sack.

  “Brownie bars. My mom made them yesterday. Want one?”

  “You’re so sweet!” Emma cried, grabbing the dessert from Lee’s hand. “You should sit with us all the time.”

  Lee smiled and shrugged. If he were honest, he didn’t like the kids at the orange table all that much. They were loud and mean to each other, and the guys all wore a ton of gel in their hair. Lee worried that, if he were to sit with them every day, he’d have to start putting gel in his hair too. Also, he would much rather eat both his brownie bars than share.

  “Hey, Lee,” Dylan whispered across the table. “Don’t look now, but Gretchen Whipple is totally staring at you.”

  Lee looked up from his pasta salad, half a noodle hanging out his mouth. Ashley Brown giggled at him. “Lee, you’re so adorable.”

  Under the table, Emma clamped Lee’s hand in a possessive grip. “Shut up, Ashley,” she said.

  Lee turned cautiously. Gretchen Whipple was sitting a few tables over with the girls’ softball team, staring straight at him—until he stared straight back. Then her eyes widened, and she ducked her head.

  “Man, she’s got it bad,” snickered Dylan. “Makes sense. Athletes go for each other.”

  “I’m not an athlete,” said Lee at the same time Emma said, “Gretchen’s not an athlete.”

  “She’s. A. Weirdo,” Emma went on, emphatically enunciating each word. “Sorry, but it’s true. I heard Mayor Whipple had to bribe the principal not to expel her, just like he’s had to for Asa. And did you hear what she did in Mr. Edmonson’s class?”

  “I was there,” said Dylan. “The poem was stupid, but it was pretty great to see Mr. E flip out like that.”

  Lee was still looking at Gretchen. He knew that, unlike Dylan suggested, she most certainly did not have the hots for him—judging from the way she’d yelled at him Halloween night.

  “Seriously, Lee, how do you run that fast? What’s your secret?” asked Ashley.

  “Uh,” said Lee. “I just let my feet do all the work, you know? I’ve been running since I can remember. I time myself, and then I try to beat that time, then beat that time. So . . . that’s how I do it.”

  Lee wasn’t telling the whole truth. It was Felix who did the timing.

  “Do you run a lot in the wood?” Emma asked. “I bet it’s really peaceful out there.”

  Actually, Lee wanted to say, it’s more creepy than peaceful. But he answered, “Sure, it’s nice.”

  “Maybe we could hang out there sometime?” pressed Emma.

  Lee pretended he had not heard the question. The Vickeries weren’t encouraged to entertain guests who weren’t patients. That wasn’t part of the Agreement; it was simply understood that Death did not like visitors hanging about the place. Once, one of Lee’s teachers had come for a house call and mistakenly knocked on the east end’s door, then tripped and broken her wrist on the front porch—an “accident” Lee knew was Death’s doing.

  “I’ve heard your parents are pretty cool,” said Dylan. “My mom saw your dad once about this sore throat that wouldn’t go away, and she was better by the time she got home. But I bet your parents get in a lot of fights. Like, do they ever try to diagnose each other with diseases?”

  “My mom’s a psychiatrist,” Lee said. “She listens to people more than anything else.”

  “Maybe Gretchen should make an appointment,” Emma said, twirling her finger beside her head.

  Lee just concentrated on eating his pasta salad.

  When school was over, Lee left through the back exit. He didn’t ride the bus or wait to be picked up—the Vickeries did not own a car. He walked home, cutting across the rec field toward Poplar Wood.

  Today, Lee was halfway across the field when something hard whacked him on the back.

  “Ow. What the—?”

  Lee stumbled, nearly falling flat on his face. He turned to find that his attacker was none other than Gretchen Whipple.

  “Hey,” she said, far too casually.

  “Uh, ow?” Lee rubbed at the space between his shoulder blades.

  “Oh, stop. It was just a tap.”

  Lee backed away. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

  Gretchen smiled. “And I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

  Lee backed farther away. Maybe the kids at the orange table were right about Gretchen. Staring at people and hitting them—maybe she really wasn’t all there.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  Gretchen was squinting at him as though trying to determine whether or not he was a spelling error. “What do you know about Essie Hasting?”

  “What? Nothing.”

  “But you were at the burial.”

  “I told you, Felix and I always cut through the cemetery on our way to town.”

  “So that�
��s his name! Zeke is really Felix. And where is he now?”

  “He went back home.” Lee turned red at his slip-up and redder still at his lie. “He’s not in town anymore.”

  “Oh. Well, I do feel bad about what happened. I didn’t know about his eye.”

  Lee was tense. Why was Gretchen Whipple speaking to him? Was she trying to trick him somehow? Judith had warned Lee that the Whipples were selfish and cunning.

  “I can’t talk to you,” said Lee. “My mom wouldn’t like it.”

  “Or is it because you have something to hide?” Gretchen took a step closer. “I think you know more about Essie Hasting than you’re letting on. She was an apprentice, like you’re going to be. You have to know more.”

  “I don’t!” cried Lee. “You think just because I was around her funeral means I know something? It doesn’t work that way. I didn’t hang out with the Hastings. I didn’t know them at all.”

  “I need your help,” said Gretchen.

  “What?” Lee was positive he hadn’t heard her right.

  “I’m investigating something,” she said, matter-of-factly. “It might get me into trouble, so I’ve got to have help.”

  “But why are you asking me? I’m an apprentice.”

  “Not technically,” said Gretchen. “You’re not a true apprentice until you sign your contract. That is, if you decide to sign at all.” She smirked at Lee’s startled expression. “Yeah. I’ve done my research.”

  “Well that . . . doesn’t change anything! You’re still a summoner.”

  “Ugh,” said Gretchen. “Get over it, would you? I’m being very open-minded, Vickery. Why not show me the same courtesy?”

  “Because your family is rotten. All you want is money and power, and you don’t care who you hurt to get it.” Lee was surprised by the words coming from his mouth—accusations rolling out like clunking marbles. They were all true words, of course. Judith had told him those things, and she was not a liar.