“Thanks,” Jackie said brightly, grinning, her mouth full.
I took the doughnut box away from her, and reached inside for one, but she’d eaten all of them.
Incongruously, I thought, I’ll be damned if I’m going to live with a woman who I have to fight for the doughnuts!! If for no other reason, we have to get this thing solved.
“Orchids,” Miss Essie Lee said. “Did you meet him at a place with wild orchids?”
“Yes,” Jackie said, grinning and looking at me. “You saw the photo of the roses. There were orchids there, too.”
“Yes,” I said, “I did see them.” I didn’t like Jackie’s perky attitude. I would have felt better if she were crying. Which reminded me. Why had Miss Essie Lee burst into tears when I’d told her Jackie’s name?
“Can you walk?” Miss Essie Lee asked, looking me up and down.
So maybe I wasn’t devilishly thin—every pun intended—but I wasn’t past walking.
An hour later, I wished we’d had time to stop and buy a Jeep. Miss Essie Lee and Jackie, my father on their heels, were hotfooting it down an old trail that was all rocks and plants that I was sure were poisonous.
Jackie, leading the pack, was chattering away at ninety miles an hour about the time she and I had gone hiking together and, according to her, I’d complained “incessantly” about the cobwebs across the trail. I would have defended my honor, but I was too busy defending my life against tree branches, loose rocks, and a couple of kamikaze insects that looked lethal.
Every now and then, Miss Essie Lee asked Jackie a quiet question about her father and what she remembered about her mother. Jackie answered with a carefree air that made me want to give her pills to knock her out. Her attitude was proof that no one on earth should give up sugar. You needed to build up a tolerance so that when you did have it, you wouldn’t go into some insulin shock and start acting like a toy with a broken wind-up spring as Jackie was doing.
After a long time we came to a clearing in the woods. It was a ghastly place. There was a rotting bench under a wall of dense trees, and a falling-down fence nearby. Few plants were growing, as though there was something wrong with the earth. Radiation, maybe. It was dark and gloomy inside the circle of tall, dark trees, but when I looked up, there wasn’t a cloud. Behind me, I could see sunlight, but this place, open as it was, had none.
The worst thing was that it felt creepy. It was like the forest Hansel and Gretel had been lost in. It was like all the forests in all the scary movies. As I looked around, I expected big gray birds with long talons to swoop down out of the trees.
Miss Essie Lee, my brave father, and Jackie walked to the middle of the desolate spot. I stayed on the trail. There was light there and air.
“What do you see, dear?” Miss Essie Lee asked softly. Behind her back, she was holding my father’s hand.
Jackie whirled around like Cinderella wearing a ball gown. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. The roses…” Closing her eyes, she inhaled. “Can you smell them?”
“Why don’t you pick some?” Miss Essie Lee said, and it was the voice of a psychiatrist to a crazy, and probably violent, patient.
“Oh, yes,” Jackie said as she sprinted over to the rotting old fence and began to break off bits of dying vine. When she had her arms full, she buried her face in the ugly mess. “Aren’t they divine?” she said. “I’ve never smelled roses like these before.”
When we were kids we used to catch bugs in jars, screw the lids on tight, and leave them there for days to turn into black juice. This place smelled almost exactly like that bug juice.
“What’s on the ground?” Miss Essie Lee asked, and I saw my father step closer to her. He was as creeped out by the place as I was.
“Orchids,” Jackie said. “Wild orchids. Lady’s slippers. They’re everywhere. Oh! I wish I had my camera.”
“And when do lady’s slippers bloom?”
“June,” Jackie said, smiling, looking around the place, clutching her “roses” to her.
“And what month is this?”
“It’s August,” Jackie said, then she raised her head from the vines. “It’s August,” she repeated quietly.
I wish I could say that this bit of logic made Jackie see the place as it truly was, but it didn’t. Slowly, she walked over to the old bench and put the vines down, treating them as though they were precious.
Miss Essie Lee went to the bench, my father attached to her, and put her hand on Jackie’s arm. She nodded toward the trees behind the bench, which were as dense as a rock wall. “Your grandmother lives in the house up there. She’s been waiting for you for a long time.” She smiled at Jackie. “When you played in this garden when you were a child, it looked as you see it now.”
I saw Miss Essie Lee’s hand tighten on Jackie’s arm. “I hope you can forgive us.”
This last sentence seemed to catch in her throat, and she turned away to the comfort of my father’s arms.
Jackie looked up the hill and, for a moment, seemed to consider whether or not she wanted to visit this newly-found grandmother.
Personally, I wanted to get the hell out of there. If Jackie was seeing dying vines as fragrant roses, what was she going to see in her grandmother? Was the woman the witch from every fairy tale? Or was she the devil’s handmaiden? Was she even alive?
I looked at Miss Essie Lee in question. “I can’t go,” she said softly. “Jacquelane must go alone.”
Alone, I thought and looked at Jackie. She seemed to have made a decision because she took two steps toward the wall of trees.
Alone, hell! I thought.
By the third step, I was by her side. I slipped her arm into mine, and even though I wasn’t Catholic, I crossed myself, and we started walking up the hill together.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jackie
I know they all thought I was on the verge of insanity. It had never occurred to me before, but a person is the way she’s treated. In the last twenty-four hours people had started seeing me as a person who was, maybe, losing her marbles, so I was beginning to see myself that way, too.
Ford had spoiled me. From the first, he’d acted as though my visions were normal, no big deal. He’d listened to my first “dream” and when he’d seen it in reality, he’d acted on it. Afterward, he’d not quizzed me or even once looked at me as though I was a freak. And we’d even had fun with my second vision.
While Ford was at Miss Essie Lee’s, Noble had grilled me until I felt like a cross between a witch and a spy. He made me feel as though burning-at-the-stake should be brought back as a legal punishment. He hinted that I’d moved to Cole Creek so I could find out everyone’s dirty little secrets and use them to—What devious purpose I was to use my knowledge for wasn’t clear.
I don’t know how I came out to be the bad guy. If anyone was to be blamed, shouldn’t it be Ford? I’d started this whole thing with a fiancé who’d stolen my life’s savings, so I’d been pretty desperate for a job, preferably in another country. All I did was accept Ford’s job offer and move to Cole Creek. Okay, so maybe it was my story that had set Ford off, but if he weren’t so nosy, the story would have stayed buried inside me to my grave. So why was I being blamed? Because I’d had a vision or two? Me and half the world. Didn’t these people watch cable TV?
As for Tessa, she was as bad as Noble. She didn’t say much out loud, but she’d whisper something to Noble, then he’d ask one of his worst questions. After a while, I stopped thinking of her as an innocent child and started asking her questions in return. It didn’t take long to figure out that she didn’t know much. All I could piece together was that a member of each of the founding families of Cole Creek had helped kill the woman, and as a result, the oldest descendant of each family couldn’t leave town.
“So how do you break the spell and get out of here?” I asked.
Tessa shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom won’t tell me. All she says is that I have to le
ave here before she dies.”
“Then you never see her again?” I asked. “Or if you do return and she happens to die while you’re here, do you get stuck here? Forever?”
Tessa set her jaw in a way that let me know that she wasn’t telling me anything—or didn’t know any more to tell, I wasn’t sure which.
In between questions, Noble offered me iced tea-size glasses full of whiskey—such as he was drinking—and kept glancing at the door as though he were fantasizing about escaping. Since I knew from Ford’s books how afraid of the supernatural his family was, I could guess what he was thinking.
Afraid or not, Noble kept us on my vision of Rebecca. I went over and over it in detail to try to pinpoint where Rebecca would start the fire. But we could figure out nothing. I’d seen high, dry grass and the corner of a wooden building. Nothing was identifiable.
Eventually, Noble decided to call Allie and get her to drive them around town to see if they could find Rebecca. I couldn’t resist a remark about the nearly empty bottle of whiskey. I said Noble had made himself into a human compass and could now probably home in on any alcoholic.
I thought my comment was pretty funny, but Tessa turned traitor on me and, looking very adult, said, “You know what this town did to the last woman who loved the devil.” Then, with her nose in the air, she took Noble’s hand and pulled him out of the room.
After they left, the image that “child” had put into my head made me decide to see if some of my problems could be forgotten with alcohol. But when I picked up Noble’s glass I couldn’t get past the smell, so I set it down and went to the kitchen. Maybe I could find some cooking sherry.
But there was no sherry so I looked inside the refrigerator. Before Noble arrived, I’d had complete control of the food that entered the house. Except for Ford’s ham, the most non-nutritious item I’d purchased was yoghurt with that high-sugar jam in the bottom of the carton.
But with the arrival of Noble and Toodles, I’d lost control of the refrigerator’s contents. As a result, there was sugar and fat, and fat and sugar inside that white box. Jam would have seemed healthy. I started to shut the door in disdain, but something snapped in me. I saw myself as one person—sane, hardworking, sensible—but the world was seeing me as someone else—flaky, semi-psychotic, and scary. Women who saw visions didn’t eat healthy food. Women who saw visions wore purple shawls, big hoop earrings, and ate fried things.
By the time Ford returned, I’d pretty much emptied the house of its sugar content, and I was feeling much better.
In fact, I was feeling so good that I was quite agreeable to going for a hike with Miss Essie Lee, Toodles, and Ford. We walked through the lush North Carolina forest to where I’d met Russell, and the place was as beautiful as it had been the day I’d met him. But the others stared at me as though I were a madwoman. I figured that if they couldn’t lighten up and enjoy the beauty, it was their loss. Ford wouldn’t even step out of the forest. All this because this was the place where I’d met another man. His attitude gave new dimension to the word “jealousy.”
Miss Essie Lee threw me a couple of times. She pointed out that the particular species of wild orchids that I saw so clearly bloomed in June, not in August. I was a little shaken by that, but then I thought that weirder things have happened than some flower blooming off schedule. Environmental conditions differ. If there were snowstorms in June, couldn’t there be wild orchids blooming in August?
The second time Miss Essie Lee threw me was when she told me my grandmother was alive—and they all seemed to expect me to walk into the dark forest to go to her.
Okay, so maybe “threw me” was a little mild. Ran over me with a dump truck, backed up, and did it again would have been more correct.
I wanted to say, Couldn’t we backtrack on this a bit? First of all, didn’t I need some more information before I leaped ahead to “grandmother?” Maybe we should wait until we’d established “who” I was. I had some ideas, but I wasn’t really sure. But Miss Essie Lee seemed to know, and when I looked at Ford, he seemed to know, too. Only Toodles and I looked bewildered.
When confronted with the idea of entering that forest, my first impulse was to suggest to Ford that he and I go have a lunch of doughnuts and talk about this. Didn’t I hear once that some doughnuts came with cherry jelly inside them? I’d always been partial to cherries.
I looked at the dark, dense, forbidding shadows of the trees, knowing they all expected me to walk into them to meet my grandmother. But my feet weren’t moving. My sugar high was gone, and like an addict, I wanted it back. I turned to Ford. Surely, he would understand if I didn’t do this.
But Ford was looking at me with his hero face. It was the face I’d seen in the seconds before he leaped out of the car and saved a bunch of teenagers from being blown up. I’d seen it when he’d kept me from going into hypothermia after my second vision. And I’d seen it when he carried me into the living room after my third vision.
Why, oh, why did I have to get hooked up with the only writer on earth who was a true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool hero? Didn’t modern writers observe and not participate? Hemingways died out long ago. Now best-selling authors coached Little League. They didn’t run with the bulls. They wrote eBooks.
I turned away from Ford and looked into the blackness under those trees. If I lived through this and Ford wrote about our experiences, he’d have to name it Reluctant Heroine. Reluctant to be; reluctant to go.
Taking a deep breath, I stamped down the urge to ask Ford if he had a candy bar, then took a step forward.
I wasn’t surprised when Ford appeared beside me, caught my arm in his, held on tight, and started walking with me.
I thought of several things I wanted to say, such as begging him not to let me do this, but I didn’t say any of them. Instead, I said, “If you write about all this, I want fifty percent.”
Ford chuckled, but I didn’t look at him. The forest seemed to grow darker, and the silence was maddening. No bugs or birds were making sounds.
I held on to Ford’s arm and kept my eyes straight ahead. “Maybe you could write a story and I could illustrate it with my photographs,” I said. “Or maybe you could write about your dad and Tessa.” Words might help dispel my fear.
“Yeah, good idea,” he said, not taking my hint and telling me he’d already written a story about them.
Ahead of us was pure blackness: a wall of dark so deep it looked solid. I’d been doing quite well in the bravery department, but that velvety blackness just about did me in. Maybe I should rethink my goals in life. Was staying within fifty miles of Cole Creek all that bad? I liked it here. I—
“Wish I’d brought the truck,” Ford said, and for the first time since we’d started walking through that forest, I looked at him.
“Break a leg, kid,” he said, then he kissed me on the forehead, and we looked ahead at the wall of darkness.
In the next second we let out a yell and held it as we started running directly into the void.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ford
It was over.
Maybe not over, over, but finished enough that we could all have lives and stop with the devil-story. I hadn’t yet decided if I was going to write about what had happened. I think I’d have to discuss that with Jackie.
We were home now, and I’d managed to carry Jackie upstairs and put her in bed. I would have liked to undress her and snuggle down beside her while she slept, then, when she awoke, I’d let what happen, happen.
But I didn’t do that. I pulled off her shoes and her jeans, but I left the rest of her clothed, then I sat on the chair beside her bed and looked at her. It had been a tough day and she slept like an infant.
At that thought, a little thrill ran through me. Kids. While I’d been with Pat, I hadn’t thought much one way or the other about children. But since I’d met Tessa, I’d wondered, What if? What if Pat and I had had children? What would they look like? Whose talents would they inherit? Whose mechanical ab
ilities? Would the child be able to spell?
All sorts of things went through my mind, and I knew that I was toying with the idea that maybe Jackie would have me and we could…
Oh, well, I thought. That would come later.
Last night we’d burst through that forest onto a dirt road and seen a small, run-down house on the opposite side. For a moment, Jackie and I had stood there looking at each other in silence. The road and the house were so ordinary, reachable by an automobile.
I looked back at the forest, dark, gloomy, silent. “So what the hell was that about?” I asked.
Jackie looked as bewildered as me. “A shortcut through hell?” she said, making me smile.
Still holding her arm, I started across the road, but when Jackie stayed where she was, I looked at her in question.
“What did you see back there?” she asked. “You know, where I met…him?”
As we slowly walked across the road, I described the place, sparing no details.
Jackie didn’t say anything, just nodded. I think she had the same thoughts as I did:Why? Over and over I’d asked that. Why? Why had the devil chosen Cole Creek? Why the woman Amarisa? Why Jackie?
By the time we were standing before the front door of the little house, I could feel Jackie trembling. I squeezed her hand, then knocked. A large woman in a white nurse’s uniform answered the door and let us in. And inside, sitting up in a bed, was Jackie’s grandmother.
Mary Hatalene Cole was in her eighties and, to my eyes, she looked as though she’d been wanting to die for a long time. There was loneliness, pain, and longing in those watery old blue eyes. She seemed to recognize Jackie instantly because she held out her hands, tears running down her wrinkled old face.
As I watched the two of them hugging each other—and Jackie had no reluctance or shyness—I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like not to have relatives. I had so many of them that I got on planes just to get away from them. But Jackie’d had her father and no one else.