Miss Maeve was nowhere to be seen.
Her lantern sat on the well’s edge, its light a sickly yellow. “Miss Maeve?” I fumbled for the matches in my pocket and relit my own light, trying to make out anything in the murky woods. My pulse thrummed in my ears as I shuffled forward. The well was within arm’s reach when my foot struck something at once solid and alarmingly soft. I looked down through the fog.
My scream tore through the clearing, echoing off the trees.
Miss Maeve lay on her back at my feet. Pale, unseeing eyes stared out from her white face. I dropped to the ground beside her, my lantern throwing slashes of light into the dark. “Miss Maeve! Can you hear me?”
Her hands were crossed at her waist, like those of a body laid out for viewing. I shook her shoulder, gently at first, then again with more force. A lock of platinum hair slid across her open eyes.
Reason shouted over my rising panic, reminding me to check for signs of life. I slid my fingers under her sleeve, pushing back the vine-and-hair bracelet I’d seen at Sunday dinner. No pulse. I placed my ear close to her lips, praying for the slightest stirring of breath, but found none.
I had to fetch help. I turned in a circle, gathering my bearings. When I’d stumbled upon the well for the first time coming from Wheeler, I’d emerged just beside a massive, smooth-trunked tree. I spied it and rushed away in what I hoped was the right direction.
Limbs and leaves whipped against my face as I ran. Every breath burst from my lips in a frosted cloud. An ache spread from my numbed toes, through my feet, into my legs. Was my father still in the woods, suffering in the creeping cold? I pressed my free hand against the lantern for warmth.
It was so hard to think. Where had I been going? I staggered to a stop, blinking heavy lids. When I opened my eyes, there she was.
The little girl stood at the edge of the lantern’s glow, the light hollowing dark circles under her eyes and shadowing her round cheeks. I fumbled with the lantern, trying to make it shine brighter. My fingers wouldn’t work, as though the commands from my brain weren’t getting through.
The child moved at a steady pace, weaving and ducking between trunks and vines. I staggered after her, wondering if I was dreaming, wondering what I’d been doing in the woods before she came along. Why was it terrifyingly cold?
A violent tremor shook my body. The lantern slid from my fingers, its globe shattering with a sound like sleigh bells. I stared at it for a long moment. When I dragged my gaze up again, the girl was gone.
I sank to my knees and slid beyond caring, to a place of blissful unconcern. Only sleep mattered now. I felt myself slump to the ground. My last thought was of how perfect the leafy earth felt pressed against my cheek as I watched the icy cloud of my breath drift away into the dark.
15
Sunlight kissed my closed lids. I stretched, coming awake slowly. Hettie must be distracted, to let me sleep this late. Surely it was well past time to start breakfast.
A honey-sweet smell wafted by. I opened my eyes to find Carolina jasmine blossoms floating down through the trees. They shone bright yellow as they passed through slanted shafts of morning sunlight. For a moment, I thought I drifted in a lovely dream.
Then I turned my head and saw my broken lantern. I shot up, wiping dirt from my sweat-dampened skin. The shards of glass glinted with an ugly truth—last night’s impossible events had actually happened.
Alarm raced through my stomach when I realized hours had passed since I fled the well to find help for Miss Maeve. With a pounding head, I resumed my run toward town. There had to be an explanation for what I’d seen, for Miss Maeve’s sudden crisis. She might’ve had a pulmonary embolism, or a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. Had Lilah alerted anyone when she woke to find Miss Maeve gone this morning? My heart clenched to think of how frightened my sister must be.
I stumbled out of the woods, bits of twigs scattered in my hair, and crossed the grassy acreage that separated the trees from Wheeler. The little girl I’d seen must live in the woods, perhaps even unknown to the locals. She’d probably been frightened away by seeing me succumb to the cold. I tried to blanket the night’s events in warm, comforting reason and logic. But underneath the hastily thrown cover, I felt the stirring of the inexplicable, felt it creeping out from its hiding place like a spreading frost.
I reached the town, expecting to find the sidewalks crawling with distressed citizens. School should’ve started already. By now, the teacher’s unexplained absence would surely have caused alarm.
But the town drowsed in a placid heat haze. A woman passed into a store, shopping basket over her arm, glancing with surprise at my disheveled appearance. As I rushed by, two wizened old men looked up from their checkers game in front of the barbershop. I made for the courthouse, determined to find the sheriff. I needed someone in authority to deal with what I’d seen in the woods.
As I approached, the man himself strode down the wide courthouse steps, spurs jingling.
“Sheriff!” My skirts flapped loud against my legs as I ran to him. “It’s Miss Maeve.” I bent forward, hands on knees, struggling to draw enough breath to speak. “I know where she is.”
The man lifted a gold pocket watch and peered at it. “So do I. She’s teaching right about now.”
I shook my head. “She’s in the woods. And I’m almost certain she’s dead.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, already moving at a fast clip down the sidewalk in the direction of the school. I rushed along beside him, matching him step for step.
“She’s lying on the ground in the woods, beside an old well. I couldn’t find a pulse,” I said, forcing myself to speak calmly. “And I saw a little girl wandering out there.” I didn’t mention that my father, escapee from an asylum, could possibly be in the woods, too. The terrible thought that he might not have survived the cold threatened to overtake me. I shook it away. “We have to do something.”
“What did the child look like?” he demanded.
“Maybe six or seven years old, dark hair and eyes. Round cheeks.” A shiver raced over my skin when I thought of her pale face as she’d walked away into the night. “There must be people living out there, even though Big Tom and Hettie say there aren’t.”
The sheriff’s posture went rigid. “No one lives in the woods,” he said. We turned a corner at the end of the sidewalk, and the red schoolhouse came into view.
Sheriff Loftis’s eyes darted toward the open front door. I stepped up behind him onto the porch to look inside.
There, writing sums on the chalkboard, was Miss Maeve.
My feet went to lead, dragging me to a stop. “It can’t be,” I murmured.
Miss Maeve stood at the front of the long, narrow classroom, her back to us. The busy space fairly hummed with the tap and scratch of chalk on slates as the students bent over their mathematics lesson. “Carry the one,” she said, “like so. Is everyone following along?” She glanced over her shoulder and, instead of catching the eyes of her students, met my confused stare instead.
“Verity? And Sheriff Loftis. Come in, please.” Heads popped up, borrowing and subtraction forgotten, as the class took note of our intrusion. Miss Maeve’s pale gaze flitted over my face, worry darkening her brow. She put down her chalk and dusted her hands on her skirt. “Students, you’ve all worked very hard today. I think an extra recess is in order.”
Amid the excited shuffling of children filing from the room, Lilah broke from the line to come to my side. “Is something wrong, Very? You look peaked.”
“No, I’m fine. I was in town, and I wanted to thank Miss Maeve again for dinner,” I invented. “The sheriff was walking this way and offered to join me. Why don’t you go on out and get some fresh air?”
Lilah looked to Miss Maeve for confirmation.
“Run along,” she said with a reassuring smile. “I’d like to visit with your sister and Sheriff Loftis for a bit.” Lilah nodded, a little reluctant, then went off to join Cecil under a shade tree at the edg
e of the schoolyard.
“What brings y’all by today?” Miss Maeve clapped the eraser against the board, sending billows of dust into the air. The sight reminded me of the fog, drifting around her pallid face the night before.
“I saw you in the woods last night, by the well.” I couldn’t take my eyes from the purplish veins lining the backs of her hands, the same color her lips had been as she lay on the ground in the cold. “I thought you were dead.”
She turned, confusion dancing over her features. “I beg your pardon?”
The sheriff tucked his thumbs into his gun belt. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, Miss Pruitt, but I won’t stand for it. Were you trying to cause a panic? Play some mean-hearted prank?”
“No,” I stammered. “No, I saw her. She was by the well. There was no pulse. I—”
Sheriff Loftis cast a look toward Miss Maeve, standing before us, the very picture of health. “Outright lies,” he said. “I can’t imagine your motives for spinning such a tale, but they can’t be good.”
“Can you tell me what you saw?” Miss Maeve asked. I gave a brief account of the night, caught between her deepening frown and the sheriff’s accusatory glower.
“And then I fell asleep. When I woke up the little girl was gone. And, here you are. And…” I waved my hand in her direction. “… obviously, you’re alive.” It wasn’t a shining moment of deductive reasoning.
“Sheriff, Verity’s clearly had an upsetting night,” Miss Maeve said, gently. “Whatever she saw has deeply unsettled her. Would you give us some privacy, please?”
“If you insist. But be on your guard. I don’t know what this girl’s angle is.” Sheriff Loftis nodded in my direction. “I’m keeping my eye on you, Miss Pruitt. You’ve shown yourself to be a young woman who can’t be trusted to tell the truth.” With that, he stalked away.
I settled into the desk Lilah had vacated, eyeing Miss Maeve closely. She pulled another desk close and slid gracefully into it. The sharp scent of chalk dust hung heavy in the air. When her clear eyes searched mine, I saw apprehension and, to my surprise, sadness. “I know this will be hard to accept, Verity, but for your safety you must listen. Don’t go back in the woods. Some people, like the sheriff, might never believe it, but the woods are an eldritch, dangerous place.”
“You mean haunted?” I wanted to sound brusque and dismissive. To my chagrin, my voice wavered.
Miss Maeve nodded. “You’ve experienced it yourself now. The strange fog, the cold. What you thought you saw”—she gestured to herself—“and the little girl are all part of it. The woods play tricks on your mind, especially near the old well. Someone should’ve warned you when you arrived in town,” she said, suddenly the stern teacher. She tapped her toes on the pine floorboards.
“Big Tom and Hettie tried. I saw the same little girl there once before. They told me to stay away without getting into much detail. But I’m not sure anything could’ve fully convinced me something otherworldly was really happening until … well, until I saw the thing by the well.” I pressed a hand to my forehead. “It’s hard for me to believe still. I’ve never put stock in anything supernatural.”
Miss Maeve nodded. “I understand. But you aren’t the first to encounter unbelievable things in the woods. The people who’ve lived here for decades tell me there was always an eerie feeling there, especially at the old well, but since the Loftis girl drowned—”
“Loftis girl?” I asked. “Was she related to Della?” I remembered Della saying her mother had been gutted by the loss of a child.
“Josie was Della’s little sister,” Miss Maeve said. “About a year ago, she wandered into the woods to play, and fell into the well.” She broke off, pressing her lips together. “It’s a terrible thought, imagining her spirit is not at rest. After such a tragic death, she should at least have peace.”
“But what about the thing I thought was you?” I frowned. “Was that some sort of … specter?” I couldn’t believe that I was speaking such nonsense, much less that a growing part of me wanted to embrace it as fact.
Miss Maeve sighed. “I wish I could say. There have been occasional sightings over the years of an apparition, a ‘white lady,’ as the people like to call her. But even living as close to the woods as I do, I’ve never experienced anything there. Perhaps because I have sense enough to stay away.”
She ran a finger along the spine of a well-worn reading primer sitting on the scarred desktop. “It’s troubling, hearing that whatever you saw looked like me. All I know for certain is this: I wasn’t by the well last night. And I’m very much alive.” Her smile was careful, as if waiting to see if I’d accept the obvious truth—she was alive, plain as day—along with the nearly unbelievable: that the woods held something otherworldly.
I cast my eyes up to a neatly written cursive alphabet tacked just below the plank ceiling, as though the curling letters could spell out the answers to my many questions. “Miss Maeve, I don’t know what—”
A little boy burst through the door, bottom lip trembling, a rip in the knee of his overalls. He leaned dramatically against the black potbellied stove that stood in the center aisle of the small room. “Samuel pushed me down,” he whimpered.
Miss Maeve rose in one smooth motion and began fussing over the boy’s scrapes. “I’ll have a word with him. It doesn’t do for friends to fight. Now, I could use a helper. Would you like to ring the bell for me to call the others in?” She took a brass bell from the windowsill and handed it to the boy. He scampered away, injury forgotten. Miss Maeve watched him go with a fond smile.
I rose on wobbly legs. I had responsibilities at the farm, and a lot of explaining to do to my employers. “I should go. I’ll just say goodbye to Lilah and get back to the farm.” Heaven only knew what Big Tom and Hettie had thought when I hadn’t returned last night. And Abel. What had he made of my unexplained absence?
Miss Maeve took my hand in hers. Her fingers were cool and soft. “I know I’ve given you a good deal to think about, and much of it seems impossible. It always bothers me when I can’t give solid answers, but in this case, I fear there are none to be had.” She looked at me with an almost maternal worry. “But please, Verity. Don’t go into the woods again.”
I looked back into her pale eyes. “Of course not, Miss Maeve.”
Dawn trailed amber fingers through the trees, tugging ribbons of light over the girl’s motionless body. She lay on the mossy ground beside the well, eyes closed, her right hand clenched in a fist around a small linen bag. She felt the rigor mortis ease from her joints as her consciousness returned, dragging a familiar despair in its wake.
She flung away the little bag of failed spells. It landed at the feet of a solemn-faced man and an older woman, who watched her with expressions of defeat and dread. “Let me try cutting it. Just once more,” said the woman. She bent down, a pair of heavy silver shears in her hand. “I did a new working. Maybe this time…” The blades snicked together beside the girl’s pale wrist. A bracelet fell away.
A coil of black smoke swirled to life around her wrist. Twisting and snaking along her skin, it circled her arm for a few moments. Then it drifted away to reveal that the bracelet had returned. The man cursed, reaching out a hand to help the girl he pretended was his family.
She got to her feet, shaking away the offered hand of help. The sympathy made her furious. She knew he’d come to think of her as a daughter in their short time together, but she was sick of his pity. And sick of the old woman’s useless attempts to fix the disaster she’d caused.
The girl felt the blank despair of the past few months twist inside her. It flared hot and wild, then hardened into something cold. Something pitiless. She locked eyes with the man, and saw him suppress a shudder. With a surge of satisfaction, she realized he was afraid of her.
The older woman tugged a tattered shawl around her slumped shoulders, her chin wobbling, unable to meet the girl’s eerie, angry gaze. The girl began to walk away, deeper into the woods. Her
mind was ablaze with plans for righting wrongs, plans for revenge.
“Something will work, sooner or later,” the woman called, her voice wavering. “Please be patient, Mary.”
“That’s not my name,” the girl replied, still walking deeper into the woods. Before the green and gold of the trees took her, she paused, looking back over her shoulder to where the man and the old woman stood motionless by the ancient well. “Not anymore.”
16
I trailed back toward the farm, trying to reconcile myself to the notion that things of murk and darkness, of shadow and evil, lurked in the woods. I didn’t want to believe that unseen beings like those my papa feared could actually exist.
I didn’t want to believe that his demons were real.
The sound of hurried steps on gravel drew my focus. I peered down the dirt road to find Abel running toward me. He was unshaven and his eyes looked weary, as though he hadn’t slept. But when I lifted a hand in greeting, a smile radiated across his face.
“Verity!” He said my name with an unabashed joy that stopped me in my tracks. He halted within arm’s reach and I thought for one wild moment he would hug me. Instead, his eyes lingered on the dirt on my skirts and the scrapes on my hands.
“Where in the world have you been? Hettie said she went up last night to ask you how the calf was doing and found your bed empty. We’ve been worried to death.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “She figured you’d run away. I wasn’t so sure about that. But then I thought maybe your daddy had shown up and…”
The words tapered off, and worry clouded his blue eyes. His fingers brushed my cheek as he pulled a leaf free from my tangled hair. My face tingled from the sweep of his skin against mine. “Have you been in the woods?”
“It’s a long story, and one that makes me look pretty foolish, so I’d rather only tell it once.” I started forward, unable to look him straight in the eye any longer. As we walked, I unbraided my hair and began to weed out the remaining greenery. “Are the Weatheringtons terribly upset with me?”
Eventide Page 12
