Servants of the Storm

  But when I get to his yard, I stop in my tracks.

  The chain-link fence has a huge rip in it, like a car burst right out of it. But Mr. Hathaway doesn’t have a car. The wire curls back from the jagged opening, and little drops of dried blood paint the rusted metal. Otherwise everything is the same as it’s always been, which means his house looks like it was abandoned a century ago. Even his lawn chair from last night is untouched among the weeds. Grendel’s frayed leather collar is broken and laying across the dirt-stained seat.

  I speed past, collect the empty trash can, and drag it home as fast as I can. The more quickly I’m out of this neighborhood, the better. It’s hard to believe that it used to feel safe and comfortable. Our happy little house, Carly’s house around the corner, my grandmother on the other side of the alley, and Baker’s house just a few streets over. Now everything about it looks forgotten and sinister, even in the morning sun.

  When I back the trash can into its corner of our yard, I stop. Something’s different. At first I think it’s just the usual stink of an old garbage can that should have been replaced last year. But there’s something more under the residual rot. I move around the house, hunting for the source of the stench. It’s somewhere in my yard. I grab a stick and poke around in the bushes.

  There it is, behind the hedges against the house. An unidentifiable mass of guts and blood. Long, goopy strings of intestine tangle with bits of wet bone. I shudder when I find the chicken carcass next to the opossum’s face, its beady little eyes wide open in horror. The thing is spread out all over the place. But most of it is under my window, surrounded by bloody paw prints.

  I’m sick to my stomach, but I know what I have to do. I’m no coward, and I’m not letting my house carry the stink of death like that. I use my stick to nudge all the possum chunks into a pile, then go inside and get a garbage bag and scoop them in there with an old shovel. Then I run back down the alley with the bag held far in front of me and dump it all in Mr. Hathaway’s dented old aluminum can. If his dog is going to kill innocent animals, the old man can deal with the guts himself.

  I toss the shovel on the ground in my yard and go back inside, where I can finally breathe again. After washing my hands until they burn, I head out to my car and hit the road. Truman Parkway is abandoned this morning, as always, and the streets downtown are quiet too. I park on the curb and run into the dance store. After trying on several leotards, I find one off the clearance rack that I’m willing to wear onstage in front of the entire school and pay for it with my mom’s cash.

  Once it’s stashed in my trunk, I’m ready for my next objective. I check my hair in the side mirror of the Buick and put on a fresh coat of lip gloss before driving to the Catbird Inn, which is just as adorable and historic as it sounds. The sidewalk is lined with freshly planted pansies, and the sign proclaims no vacancies. I take the stone steps to the front door and open it sheepishly. An older lady smiles at me from behind a vase of lilies on the counter.

  “Can I help you, dear?”

  “I’m looking for Isaac, please, ma’am,” I say.

  Her smile deepens, and her eyes twinkle impishly.

  “He’s in the back garden,” she says. “Right through those doors and down the stairs.”

  I thank her and walk through the old-fashioned sitting room. I bet they serve tea in here and tell ghost stories, the bread and butter of a Savannah bed-and-breakfast. My grandmother worked in one when she was younger, and she used to love to tell me about the crazy people who came to stay in the Stanford Room to see a famous ghost that was entirely made up just for that purpose. Part of her job was to play ghost by knocking on the walls and flickering the lights at night, doing her part for the Savannah tourism industry. After hearing her story and seeing how hard she laughed about it, I never considered for a moment that ghosts could be real.

  Pushing through the French doors, I emerge on a pretty terrace with the sun in my eyes. The garden is small but beautiful, with a brick walk and roses and a fountain, all twinkling with dew. I have to look around for a minute before I spot a figure pulling weeds against a carriage house. I can tell from the disheveled blond ponytail that it’s Isaac.

  I walk up slowly and deliberately, giving him every chance to turn around and start the conversation. But he just keeps at the weeds, shoving them into a yard bag with angry grunts. When I get close enough to see the sweat stains on his raggedy henley, I can see why he hasn’t noticed me. He’s got earbuds in, and music is blaring.

  After taking a deep breath and putting on a careful smile, I tap him on the shoulder. He startles and whirls around violently, teeth bared and dark chocolate eyes narrowed. I jump back and start to wonder if coming here was the best idea, but when he sees that it’s me, he grins and chuckles to himself.

  “I wasn’t expecting you this quick,” he says, tugging out the earbuds.

  “You said to come find you,” I say, matching his flirty tone.

  “I didn’t know if you would remember.”

  “How could I forget? Although, I lost your card.”

  “What card?” The look in his eyes is teasing.

  “Lot of things going on I don’t understand these days,” I say.

  He shrugs and tosses some weeds into the bag.

  “If you say so,” he says.

  I pin him with my mama’s lawyer glare, and he has the good grace to look down and swallow a chuckle.

  “You sure you’re ready for this?” His voice is low, almost pleading. “You sure you can’t just take your pills and be good?”

  “No more numb fuzz,” I say. “You said—”

  “Not here.”

  He stands and tosses his leather gloves down by the rosebushes and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. I can’t help noticing that he’s missing the top part of his pinkie finger, but it’s not a good time to be asking personal questions. I guess it goes with the territory when you’re a gardener/handyman, or whatever he is.

  “Come on,” he says, and I follow him back into the inn.

  The lady isn’t at her vase anymore, and he scans the room before leading me through a narrow door to old, wooden stairs. As I take the first steep, creaking step down, I have a little ripple of fear. No one knows where I am, and I’m following a stranger down a dark stairwell into who-knows-where. But he says he has answers, and I need them. Right now all I can think is that he’s my only link to Carly.

  The stairwell is confining and crooked, and I trip and nearly fall, catching myself on the splintering banister. The bottom step leads to a tidy office that must have been redone after Josephine. There’s even a set of French doors to the street, and I feel safer with an exit in sight. But before I can settle in, he’s opening an even smaller wooden door and leading me down an even darker and more crooked staircase. The bare brick walls remind me of a crypt, and I get the creeping sensation that we’re headed underground.

  “Um, where are we going?” I ask.

  “Somewhere we can talk.”

  He hurries down the stairs, and I brush cobwebs off my face as I try to keep up. The temperature goes down, and the bricks feel old and worn under my hand. The smell here is earthy, ancient, and moist. I sense the open room before I see it, and I’m nearly blinded when Isaac clicks on a bare lightbulb. The walls are in different colors of brick, like someone built and rebuilt the foundation, and the dirt-floored room is filled with old tools, most of them broken. There’s a wicker chair with the caned bottom punched out, and Isaac lays a rough piece of plywood over it and says, “Have a seat.”

  So I sit, the cold of the board seeping through my jeans. I feel like I’m about to be interrogated. Or kidnapped. Or tortured. But I don’t budge.

  Isaac squats in front of me, and we stare at each other for a moment. In the dim light I see things about him I didn’t notice last night or just now, out in the sunlight. His eyes are, as I half-remembered, deep brown, almost black, and he has blond beard stubble, and there are little sun streaks in his hair.
There’s an ornate silver cross hanging on a simple chain around his neck, but I definitely don’t get a religious vibe from him. Again my attention is drawn to the missing bit of his finger, and I want to ask about it, but I don’t. I wonder which details about me he’s cataloging, whether or not he finds my freckles pretty.

  “Are you sure I can’t persuade you to drop all this?” he says.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Do you understand that it’s dangerous?”

  I snort. “This is Savannah. What isn’t dangerous here?”

  “Well, you’ve got the right attitude,” he says with a half grin. “So, what do you want from me?”

  At least that question is easy to answer. In part.

  “I want to find my friend Carly.”

  “I don’t know where she is. What’s next on the list?”

  “Is she even alive?”

  “No. Kind of.”

  My heart jumps. “ ‘Kind of.’ What the hell does that mean?”

  “I can’t explain right now. Next question.”

  My mind is racing along with my heart. I’m so close. “You said something about not fighting this. What’s this?”

  “I can’t tell you that right now.”

  I lean forward, furious. “Goddamn. What can you tell me? You promised me answers.”

  “I never said I had all the answers. You just have to ask the right questions.”

  He looks at me earnestly, waiting. I have to think for a minute.

  “Fine,” I say. “Is there really a fox-hat girl?”

  His face stills, and he goes wary. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that.”

  “So there is?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Jesus, Isaac,” I say. “What’s with the riddles? Did you drag me down here to a rotten cellar just to tell me ‘no’ fifty different ways?”

  He chuckles, a gleam in his eyes. “No, I definitely don’t drag pretty girls into cellars just to tell them no.” I blush, my heart racing for a completely different reason, and he stands, hunched over a little so his head won’t scrape the ceiling. “But, yeah, she’s real. And she’s . . . dangerous.”

  “I don’t care. I need to talk to her. I think she knows where Carly is. There was this picture at Café 616—”

  He cuts me off, waving one hand. “Don’t go back there. You can’t talk to her. It’s out of the question. She would rip you to pieces and eat you alive. But maybe I can try, if you promise me you won’t go back to Charnel House ever again. If I can make it possible for you to say good-bye to Carly, will you stop getting in the middle of things? Just take your pills?”

  I nod and hold up my pinkie. “Pinkie promise.”

  He flinches like I’ve slapped him. “Don’t say that.”

  I can’t help glancing at his hand and realizing I’ve just made the biggest faux pas on earth, but he just paces for a moment.

  “I know where she’ll be tonight—the fox-hat girl,” he says. “I have to work the hotel desk until midnight, but she should still be there after that. Can you meet me here tomorrow morning?”

  Tears well up but don’t quite fall, relief flooding me as I slump down in the broken chair. He’s all but admitted that I’m right, that I’m not crazy. That Carly isn’t just a dead girl in a coffin buried on a hill. That there are answers to my questions, and that the things I’m seeing, the things I’m experiencing, aren’t just in my head or in a jar of little white pills.

  “That would be great,” I say with wet eyes and a big smile. “Anything that will give me a lead on Carly.”

  And then something else comes to mind. “Wait. Why can you talk to the fox-hat girl but I can’t?”

  “Let’s just say I move in certain circles,” he says. “Dangerous ones.”

  I stand, hands on my hips as another piece clicks into place.

  “Wait a minute. You say it’s dangerous, and there are pills involved. Are you a drug dealer, Isaac?”

  He stares at me with the weirdest mixture of bemusement and sadness.

  “Would it matter if I was?” he asks.

  I don’t even have to think about it.

  “Not if it will get me to Carly,” I say. He just shakes his head like he knows I’m a lost cause.

  “Any more questions?”

  I snort. “None that you’re going to answer.”

  But my smile is real. I’ve figured out how to get what I want without playing his game.

  “Look, Dovey. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. It’s for your own good. I’m just trying to protect you.” His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he checks it and winces. “You’re not going out of town this weekend, are you?”

  “Nope. I’m in a play that opens Friday.”

  “Shit,” he says to himself. Then to me, “Are you feeling sick at all?”

  “Never felt better. What is wrong with you?”

  “I just think . . .” He looks at the phone again and shoves it into his pocket. “I just think it’s a bad week to be onstage, is all.”

  I stare up at him, and sadness and frustration are written across his face. And something else, too. Guilt. My eyes narrow at him, and I try to remember when he looked that way before, because there’s something so familiar about the way his eyebrows knit together.

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  “You wouldn’t understand.” He looks like he wants to say more but just shakes his head and storms up the stairs.

  I stand beside the broken chair, staring at the swinging cellar door. Something is bothering me, scratching at my mind like a cat at a window screen. There’s something I’m forgetting, something important about Isaac. His footsteps clomp overhead, and I start to pull the light chain, but I can’t bring myself to be alone in the darkness. I leave the bulb shining and run upstairs to let myself out of the inn, feeling determined and unstoppable. I’m finally on the right track.

  Baker’s mom’s minivan is parked in my usual alley spot near the Liberty, so I have to parallel park on the street, which puts me in a foul mood. I am so not looking forward to talking to him today at rehearsal, even if the only words that pass between us are on the stage. The way I see it, he betrayed me, and he betrayed Carly, and there’s nothing more to say about it.

  I push through the side door into the Liberty and nearly knock him over. His smile is way too bright as he pulls me into a hug and holds it for a beat too long. I don’t hug back, just stand stiffly, anger hot in my cheeks. He doesn’t notice.

  “Hey! I was just coming out to look for you,” he says with a grin.

  I snort. “Why, you want to call me crazy again?”

  He stops and stares at me, incredulous. “Dovey, what are you talking about? I would never call you crazy.”

  Now it’s my turn to stare.

  “Have you completely forgotten about last night?” I splutter.

  “Remind me.”

  “You asked me if I was on my meds, then you made fun of me for flirting with Isaac, then you told me to give up on Carly and go see my therapist. If I was a guy, I’d be kicking your ass right now.”

  “Whoa,” he says, holding up his hands. “Whoa. Who’s Isaac? When did all this happen?”

  I sigh in utter exasperation. “We were at Café 616. And then you followed me to Charnel House and got mugged on the way. Isaac was the bartender. You had two Cokes and acted drunk and fell down. Then we walked back to my car and I drove you home at breakneck speed because I was so mad at you that I couldn’t stand it.”

  He’s shaking his head, eyes wide.

  “I don’t remember any of that,” he says. “I swear on my Xbox that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s convenient.” He opens his mouth, and I say through gritted teeth, “If you ask me if I’m on my meds again, I really will punch you.”

  His mouth snaps shut, and he looks thoughtful.

  “Tell me everything that happened,” he says.

  I give him the short version, and he swallows and
looks at me hard and says. “Okay, so I don’t remember any of that. I don’t remember anything between when play rehearsal ended and I woke up this morning. But I can’t find my peacoat or my phone, and this was in my jeans pocket from last night.”

  He holds out a small plastic sword.

  12

  BEFORE BAKER AND I CAN make plans, Mrs. Rosewater storms through the hallway like Moses parting the Red Sea. I barely have time to yell “Later!” to Baker as she guides me into the dressing room with a heavy hand on my shoulder. After the door shuts firmly on my butt, I put on my new leotard and catch up on gossip with Nikki as she does my makeup. I’ve missed out on so many little things from the last year—the inside jokes, the who-kissed-whom, the fact that Jasmine was supposedly dating a skeevy college guy.

  “That’s because all the guys at our school are scared to death of her,” I say, and Nikki laughs.

  “I really missed you, Dovey. We should hang out again. Want to spend the night sometime soon, like we used to? My dad turned the family room into a home theater after the hurricane.”

  She and Carly and Tamika and I used to do that all the time, and I’m glad to know she misses it as much as I do.

  “That would be great. Is Tamika coming too?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” Nikki carefully draws swirls across my cheeks, her face blank and smooth. “I haven’t seen her since she ran out of rehearsal.”

  “Have you called her?” I say. “Talked to her parents? You guys are still besties, right?”

  “Yeah,” she says with a gentle smile and a shrug. “But I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Tamika has been gone for two days and missed school and isn’t at rehearsal, and you think she’s fine?” I can’t keep the sarcasm and anxiety out of my voice.

  She shrugs. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  It’s chilling, how little she cares. I watch her closely while she paints stars and dabs glitter on my face, and she looks kind of dreamy. It almost reminds me of my dad, now that I think about it. Like she’s somewhere else. I don’t think it’s as bad as my numb fuzz from the pills, but they’re definitely not acting normal. Tamika is not the kind of girl who would just disappear, and Nikki’s not the kind of friend who would shrug it off.