“Good,” I said. I could barely get the word out; I had to shove it out, past the lump in my throat. “Because I’m just miserable about it. I hardly got a chance to know her, but she was so welcoming. She made me think there was a place for me in this world, all evidence to the contrary. The first night I came here . . . and she fed me supper. We talked about witches . . .”
The memory jogged against something else in my head, so I stopped talking and tried to figure out what my brain was trying to tell me.
Tomás asked me what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just thinking.”
The trees were tall and scraggly, and the shade was spotty there in the cemetery—but we took what we could get. It was too hot when the sun was out, and just fine when it wandered behind the thin, high clouds that waved back and forth. The grass was spotty, and it was hard to walk in the naked sand—where small brown spurs hid, and snuck into shoes, and made a funeral even more wretched than it was already bound to be.
The whole camp meeting had emptied out for this, even people who had arrived only a few days before on the train, like Tomás. Dr. Floyd was known well beyond this corner of Florida, so people may not have met her, but they’d heard of her. Folks came out from DeLand, too, and I heard there was someone present who came from as far away as Longboat Key, wherever that is.
All told, there were maybe three hundred people present. The crowd managed to make even this small, vacant cemetery feel . . . well . . . crowded. Elbows and shoulders knocked up against me from all sides, as everyone crowded as close to the rectangular hole in the ground as they could get.
I thought about how hard it must be to dig a hole in the sand. It must take forever. It must be hopeless work—for every shovelful out, half a shovelful topples back in.
I thought about all kinds of things, rather than the red and bubbling body of Dr. Floyd, not quite dead, still trying to speak. Lying in the middle of Stevens Street, her hands burned to the bone and coiled up in fists.
All right, fine. I thought about that, too.
• • •
MR. Colby arrived in a car driven by Oscar Fine. Oscar came back from the hospital in DeLand this morning, saying that David was doing much better and would be released either today or tomorrow—but he wasn’t quite strong enough to make the funeral. David had sent his apologies. He said he’d be home soon. That’s what Mr. Fine told everyone after he’d parked and helped Mr. Colby up to the grave site. He made a few little announcements like that, and then he stepped aside to let the founder speak.
He looked so frail and so small. His suit was loose and his hands shook.
“Thank you so much for being here, everyone. I appreciate your presence, and I know that Dr. Janice Alicia Floyd appreciates it, too. Hers has always been a brilliant mind, and we have been very fortunate to have her company for these last twenty years. In that time, she has always graced Cassadaga with her keen wit, her wise advice, and her diplomatic flair for organization.”
A few people chuckled. I did not. It might have been an inside joke, and that was swell—but I was leaking tears again, clutching a fresh handkerchief to my face.
“She has been a teacher and a mentor, and an upstanding citizen—of our town, and of the world. Now she is an upstanding citizen elsewhere, undoubtedly improving her new location with the practical charm and friendliness for which she has always been known.
“Today, we release her physical remains to the earth, so that they may return to whence they came. Today we remember our friend and colleague, and we reaffirm our commitment to continuing the great work she pursued throughout the last decades of her life.
“Like the sunflower, she turned her face to the light and followed wherever it led her. Now those petals have closed, and they will not open again. Now she has joined the light, and we shall see her every time we lift our eyes to the sky and ask for Spirit’s warmth and guidance.”
• • •
THERE was more, and it was lovely—every word, every condolence, all of it—but at the end, people began throwing sunflowers into the hole in the ground and I simply couldn’t stand it anymore. This new faith of mine was too new to sustain me, too fresh to grant me the calm acceptance of these other people, who commune more easily and frequently with the dead than I do.
I wanted to run to her house (but it was gone) and knock on the door, and ask if she had any cucumber sandwiches, and then we could talk about witches (and how they so often burn). I wanted to cry into her shoulder (but that was gone, too). I wanted to run, even though I never want to run. All the way back to Cassadaga, with a spur in my shoe that I couldn’t dig out with my fingernails if my life depended on it, and a snag in my stocking, and my heels sinking into the sand with every stupid step.
But I just walked.
Tomás was largely silent beside me. He carried Felipe, who had decided he wasn’t interested in walking anymore (and that might have been because of the spurs, so I could hardly blame him).
• • •
AS we neared the gates of the camp, the sun was just beginning to take on that orange hue that says it’s getting late. The sky wouldn’t start getting dark for one more hour, but it would be very dark in two. I looked for sunflowers and saw a few planted up against the side of the bookstore—growing tall enough to touch the eaves. I’d never noticed them before, but they were tilting on their stems, leaning to the west.
• • •
AS we crossed the train tracks, Tomás finally said, “That was a lovely service, don’t you think?” But he sounded like he wasn’t too sure about the whole thing. It must’ve been wildly different from your average Catholic funeral. (I think he used to be a Catholic.) Lord knows it was wildly different from any Methodist funeral I’d ever attended, too, but that didn’t mean it was bad or wrong.
It was just different.
“Lovely,” I agreed. I dabbed at my nose with the handkerchief, which was hardly any more helpful than a wet washcloth at that point. “I’ve never seen anything like it, have you?”
He shook his head. I thought for a moment that he’d say something else on the subject, but he looked up and brightened. “Alice, isn’t that your friend from the church?” He pointed at a man who was walking toward us, up the road, between the hotel and the bookstore.
“David!” I exclaimed. “I thought you weren’t coming!”
There was David Fine, thin and wobbly, but he was upright and very alert. His eyes were wide and positively twitchy. His dark hair was ruffled by the breeze, and one of his shoes was untied. The laces straggled behind him in the powdery white sand. He did not look well, but apart from his rumpled state, I could not have said what exactly was wrong. But something was wrong.
He did not look at me when I said his name. He was looking at Tomás.
“David?” Edella Holligoss emerged from the bookstore. “David, you’re back!” she happily observed, then paused, one hand on the nearest porch column. He didn’t look right to her, either.
“He did this,” David said, one arm hanging at his side. (The other arm was folded, his hand grasping his forearm, holding it steady.) He stalked steadily toward us—yes, that’s what he was doing. He was stalking. Toward Tomás. And me.
He wasn’t blinking.
I stepped in front of Tomás. I did it on instinct. “David, I guess they must have released you from the hospital, but are you feeling quite well? You don’t appear . . .” I held out my hands and walked toward him, hoping to intercept him.
He still stared ahead, past me, at Tomás. I was surely blocking most of the view.
That didn’t stop him. “He did this. He brought it here. He has to take it away.”
David lifted his hand. It’d been hiding in his pocket. His fingers were wrapped around a gun. I didn’t know what kind of gun, because even when Daddy tried to teach me, I’d never cared anything abo
ut guns. All I knew was that they killed. It was the only thing they were good for.
And now David was holding one. Now he was lifting it and pointing it.
I shrieked his name, but I couldn’t stop there. “What are you doing!”
He reached me and he pushed me—he shoved me aside—and he fired: One, two, three shots. All in a row. My ears were ringing. People were shouting, but I could barely hear them. I could barely hear anything.
I clapped my hands over my ears and looked around, scanning the scene for help. Someone must know what to do, because Spirit knew that I didn’t have the faintest idea. I saw Mabel—slender, waifish Mabel—leap from the hotel’s porch and into the street. She tackled David head-on, knocking him to the ground. She flattened him but didn’t stop him. It took Edella and Sidney to do that when they joined in and kicked the gun away.
I flailed for Tomás. He was hunkered over, facing away from me. His arms were wrapped around Felipe, protecting him. His left shoulder was bleeding; the wound spurted and blood spread down the arm of his jacket and I couldn’t see if he’d been hit anyplace else.
I trudged toward him, tripping over myself in the sand. I grabbed him by the arm—I know, I shouldn’t have! I know, it hurt him!—and pulled him around. I tried to draw him away from the street, where this wasn’t a showdown, this wasn’t the O.K. Corral, and it wasn’t a duel, and I didn’t understand what was happening.
David writhed beneath a small crowd of people who meant to hold him there, and his gun was unattended on the sidewalk, out of his reach. I kicked it even farther away.
Tomás was bleeding, and David was screeching, and none of this made any sense. The blood. The words. The reasonable, funny, brilliant friend of mine, who was covered in sand and wriggling like he might bury himself in it, beneath the weight of well-meaning others. Then there was his father, who arrived a moment later—and helped haul him off to Harmony Hall, only a few feet away.
Dr. Holligoss abandoned them all and ran to Tomás, who hadn’t moved. He was frozen in a standing crouch, holding the little dog away from harm.
“Give him to me,” I said. “Tomás, give me Felipe; let me hold him.”
Dr. Holligoss said, “Over here, sit down. You must sit down.” He led him to the curb.
• • •
I took Felipe. Tomás did not protest, and neither did the dog—who did not wiggle or squirm. He only shook, like he might vibrate himself into pieces and escape this terrible life. I tried to comfort him, petting him desperately enough that I’m sure I made his terror even worse, but what could I do? What do I know of dogs? They’re adorable and they bark, and they are faithful. What happens when they need reassurance? When you need to lie to them and tell them everything’s all right?
Maybe you can’t lie to a dog. Maybe they always know the truth.
• • •
“OFF with this,” said the doctor, yanking on Tomás’s jacket.
He was glassy-eyed and blank; he was shocked—yes, maybe it was shell shock, coming back to him now. Or maybe David had just surprised the shit out of him.
He’d surprised the shit out of me, just about.
I could still hear David yelling his head off in Harmony Hall—they’d taken him to Mabel’s office, since that was the room right there down front, on the corner. He was writhing and fighting and spouting off nonsense. The only part I caught with any clarity was the phrase “He’ll need three of them! He’ll need three!” But three of whom, what, or which, no one managed to drag out of him.
Tomás sat like a stone while the doctor dropped his bloody jacket to the ground and unbuttoned his shirt, peeling that halfway off him, too. It was indecent, a little, but this was a battlefield and I told myself there was no such thing as indecency when somebody might bleed to death.
The bullet had entered from behind; Tomás had turned just in time, shielding the dog with his body. I want to say that I couldn’t imagine such a thing, taking a bullet for a dog—but right then and there I was holding Felipe like I could save him, or like he could save me, and I completely understood why Tomás did it.
“The shot didn’t go through. Mr. Cordero? Mr. Cordero?”
Tomás finally heard him. He swiveled his head to look at the doctor. “Yes?”
“I need to get you to my house. I have a medical office there. We need to fish this out and stop this bleeding.”
“I’m bleeding?”
“Oh, Tomás . . .” I was crying again, this time with fear and confusion. He didn’t even know he was bleeding or how serious this was. It must’ve been the shell shock—he must not have understood; that’s what I thought.
But then he held up his hand and weakly waved it, like he would shush a nervous child. “No, no. It’s only a scratch, and he only hit me once. I’ve been hurt worse and fared just fine. Did he harm anyone else?”
Vigorously I shook my head, but since I hadn’t thought to look until he asked, I checked over my shoulder. I didn’t see any signs of anyone else in trouble, except for Candice Pearson standing on her porch across the tracks, surveying the broken glass from the window that David had shot out with one of the bullets that had otherwise missed their target.
“He broke a window,” I snuffled. “And he shot a hole in you.”
“If that is the sum total, then we should count our blessings,” he said graciously. He held very still while Dr. Holligoss pressed his own handkerchief to the wound, blotting it to see it better.
“Alice, help me get him to his feet.”
“I don’t need help . . . ,” he said, then swooned when he was halfway upright.
I swooped in and ducked under his good arm, with Felipe tucked under mine. “I’ve got him,” I confirmed. “Show us where to go.”
Ladies gasped as we went by, and Tomás staggered so badly that other men offered help—but it was only twenty yards to the doctor’s house and the bleeding had slowed. I hardly had any blood at all on my sleeve; most of it was absorbed by the bandage I was wearing, and I might save the shawl with cold water and soap.
• • •
NOT that I really cared about either of those things. I’m not even sure why I’m writing that part. Of all the things on earth that simply don’t matter . . .
• • •
I helped him onto a narrow table and did my best to console the dog while the doctor got to work.
It took twenty minutes to remove the bullet and provide Tomás with stitches to close the hole, but it felt like hours. He was getting cleaned up when Mabel arrived, bearing his bloody jacket. (We’d left it on the sidewalk. I’d forgotten about it. She was using it for an excuse to stop inside and talk to us; I could tell that much immediately.)
Tomás was leaned over a padded bar, positioned so the doctor could see his wound better. He hardly looked up when he said, “Thank you for returning the jacket, but it is ruined now. It is a pity. It was a good piece.”
“That’s not entirely why I’m here,” Mabel said, confirming my suspicions and fidgeting her fingers into knots. “The police have been summoned. They haven’t arrived yet, but when they do, they’ll want to talk to you.”
“How is the young man?” Tomás asked with a wince. Dr. Holligoss was tying the bullet hole shut, and I was too fascinated to look away—for all that it hurt to watch. The needle rose and fell, and all he did was flinch. I couldn’t have stood it with half so much calmness myself. I probably would have passed out cold . . . except I’d done all right with the burn on my arm, hadn’t I? I might be made of tougher stuff than I thought.
I should give myself more credit.
“David is . . . the same.” Dr. Holligoss answered Tomás’s question. “Edella gave him a sedative and a shot of rum, and he’s calmer now, but he isn’t himself. He tried to murder you, Mr. Cordero. In cold blood, on the street, in broad daylight. Something is terribly wrong—he isn’t
himself. I want you to know that.”
Tomás let his head droop while the last stitches were pulled firm and tied off. “He is precisely himself,” he said softly. “He only said what you all have told me—what even Alice has told me: I have brought something awful to Cassadaga, and he wants me to take it away again.”
“Sir, that’s not—”
“It’s the meat of the matter,” he interrupted. “It’s the truth of the matter. He’s right. I’ve been selfish and impulsive, and I have endangered you all. This was never my intent, but it was naïve of me to think that it would not come to this. I always believed . . . I still believe . . . that my Evelyn was with me. But apparently”—he shook his head slowly, sadly—“she was not alone. And now, for better or for worse . . . I am.”
“You came here for help,” I said, not to remind him, but to assure the doctor and Mabel by saying it out loud, insisting upon it. “We will find a way to help.”
“Maybe there is no help to be found for me—not here, or anywhere else. I should not have come to Cassadaga, and I apologize for doing so. I should leave. If I leave, maybe the danger will follow me once again. Perhaps I can lure it somewhere else.”
Mabel didn’t agree. “Where would you take it, even if you’re able? Better that you stay here with us and leave this thing with us—for at least we might prepare some defense against it. Besides, it’s loose now, whatever it is. Whoever it is. It had to be somebody, once upon a time.”
I remembered what Mr. Colby had said the day before. “It’s found what it wants, right here. It wants for us to burn. Tomás, you won’t help that by leaving. Whatever you’ve brought will remain behind, as likely as not.”
“Staying won’t help, either. I have wasted everyone’s time, and worse. Thank you, Doctor,” he said as the bandage was taped into place. “I regret the necessity of asking, but could I trouble you for a clean shirt? Something to wear back to the hotel. I’ll have it laundered and returned to you as soon as I’m able.”