She closed her eyes tight, then opened them wide, and the woman was still there. Helen could see the box of nails Nate had left on the floor beside the mantel. And there was his hammer. There was an unused roll of fiberglass insulation.
This was no dream.
“Where are the children?” the woman asked, looking around, eyes frantic. She seemed to be speaking loudly, shouting even, yet Helen could barely hear her; her words came out like a cicada buzz. Then she looked down at her front, reached a hand up to touch the bullet hole, and started to scream. It was the most anguished, high-pitched keening sound Helen had ever heard.
“Please,” Helen said, trying to raise her head but finding it too heavy. “It’s all right.”
But as soon as she spoke, the woman faded like a gust of smoke being blown by a sharp wind.
She was gone.
But the sound remained.
Outside, the screaming went on and on.
It was the same sound Helen had heard that first night. The sound Nate had insisted was a fisher or a fox.
Helen curled herself tight into a ball, put her hands over her ears, tried to silence the screams.
CHAPTER 27
Ann Whitcomb Gray
MAY 23, 1980
Miss Vera with her blue hair in a tight perm comes every Friday at three, asks me to read the tea leaves, the cards, to gaze into my scrying bowl and see what the future holds for her, to see if she has any messages from the beyond.
“What do you see, Ann?” she asks. “What do the spirits show you?”
I gaze into the black water of the bowl, concentrate, furrow my brow and let my eyes go glassy by not blinking.
“Is my darling Alan trying to reach us?” she asks.
“Oh yes,” I say, peering into the bowl as if Alan were a goldfish circling in the murky water. “He’s calling from the Great Beyond. He wants you to know how much he loves you and that he’s okay.”
I don’t really see any of this, of course, but I’ve learned to tell the ladies of Elsbury what they most want to hear. Especially the old, the lonely. Poor Miss Vera with her humped back, her swollen arthritic fingers. The diamond engagement ring and white gold wedding band that rattle around, loose now, clearly fitted for a plumper, younger finger. And though I don’t see any spirits of the present, I can clearly picture the past: Vera as a young woman on the altar, beautiful and happy with Alan by her side. He slips the ring on her finger, takes her in his arms and kisses her, and that kiss transcends time and space, fills the air in this room now, nearly sixty years later. The kiss that came before everything else: before four children, the oldest of whom would die in a car wreck; before Vera’s breast cancer, which she survived; and before Alan’s lung cancer, which he did not. Two packs a day for sixty years will get you in the end.
“He’s here now,” I say, gazing into the cut crystal bowl filled with water and black dye—a few drops of RIT poured from a bottle.
“What does he say?” the old woman asks. “Does he have a message for me?”
I squint down into the bowl and am startled by what I see. It’s not Alan’s face looking back at me (real or imagined), nor is it my own reflection.
It’sheragain. The woman. She’s come back to me, this woman from my dreams, from my nightmares. Sometimes I think she’s just a part of me: my dark side, the place all my powers come from. She’s the one who gives me my visions, whatever knowledge I may have, I understand that. My spirit guide. She’s so familiar to me, with a face that isn’t my mother’s but has certain similarities. She has the same eyes as my mother but a longer face; same dark curly hair but kept long, not cut short like my mother’s. And this woman wears a necklace, a strange design with a circle, triangle, square, and circle, with an eye in the center. I’ve been dreaming of her since I was a little girl. Since before my mother was killed in the fire, before my father remarried and carted my brother, Mark, and me off to Springfield to start another life with his new wife, Margaret, whom we were made to call “Mother,” and soon our new flock of half siblings, all blond and blue-eyed and freckled like their mother. They pretended to love us for Father’s sake but were always slightly suspicious of our dark hair and eyes, of the tragedy we wore on our sleeves.
The woman from my dreams is speaking now, trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear the words. I lower my face closer to the bowl. I can smell the alkaline scent of the black dye. My breath is making the water ripple slightly, distorting her image.
The woman in the water speaks urgently, though without sound. Her eyes bore into mine. She’s got something in her hands, something I can’t make out at first; then the image clarifies, the object comes into view.
It’s a gun. A handgun. Small and silver, like the one Sam owns.
Sweet Melissa.That’s what he calls his gun. Silly, to name a gun and to name it something you might call a lover. It gives a strange power to the object, imbues the cold metal with warmth, with emotion.
Sam is out plowing the fields now, but he’ll be home by suppertime. If Miss Vera pays me well, we’ll have a nice roast tonight. No pasta primavera with Alfredo or Cajun rice and beans—giving a dish a fancy name doesn’t make it fill your belly more or disguise that it’s a cheap meal, that we couldn’t afford better.
No money for meat, but there’s always money for Sam’s bourbon. He sees to that.
He isn’t a bad man, Sam. Just a man who’s run out of luck. Out of choices. Last year, we sold off thirty acres to pay the back taxes. Now we’re underwater again.
