“Who, dear?”
“She’s not alive.”
“A ghost?” the woman said. She laughed, and when she did another woman—a younger one—appeared.
“Come on, Mom,” she said. “Let’s get back.” She hooked her arm into her mother’s elbow. “I’m sorry,” she said to me.
“Don’t be,” I said. Then: “Not a ghost. Just a gravestone, maybe. Someone who was buried here.”
“Mound Hill,” she said. “Just east of town. That’s where we all go, eventually.”
Mound Hill was a sloping plot of land along the river with a maze of grave markers. I could see Gallipolis down the river, in the distance, just a scattering of houses tucked into the hillside.
The snow had stopped and all but melted. The heels of my bootssank into the soft earth. I walked through the cemetery until the grave markers looked darker and greener from moss. I read the dates marked on the gravestones. How odd it is to mark the range of time one lived, as though the hyphen summarizes the blur of events between birth and death. The little dash contains our whole lives. The woman on the phone said Jagr Doucet was buried next to his first wife. I wondered what kind of name Jagr was; it reminded me of the Jägermeister that Halley and I used to drink in bars when we were young. It tasted like black licorice.
As I turned down another row, I spotted it. A plot with an obelisk like a rocket ship pointing upward. A giant phallus. I thought of the shuttle that’d be heading into space soon, of the comet only weeks away, how all the answers to life seemed to be contained in the sky. I looked up. No sun, no clouds—just a low-hanging expanse of gray. A concrete sky.
I removed my gloves and touched the letters that spelled out Jagr’s name. The stone was cold, damp from the weather. The monument faced the Ohio River. I remembered from our field trips to the public landing in elementary school that the first settlers of Ohio rode flatboats down the river, filled with supplies. The river flowed southwesterly. If I dropped a coin into the water here, it’d drift all the way back to Cincinnati.
I didn’t see a smaller marker—not like the woman on the phone had described. I got down on all fours and rooted around in the grass until I felt something hard. I dug through denser dirt than the kind Stella was buried beneath. Finally, I unearthed a white square stone, the etched name now dark with grime: Opal Doucet.
Who was Opal Doucet?
I still didn’t know. Just a name written on a block of stone. A name written on a plaque in front of an old factory and also in an old notebook. Looking up, I could see the river’s strong currents carrying branches downstream. The last time the river froze over was nine years ago, 1977. Back then the news warned of gas and food shortages because barges couldn’t travel. The river was solid and lumpy; the waterhad iced midwave. After another heavy snow, Halley and I crossed the river on foot into Kentucky, slipping the whole way, clinging to each other because of the cold, laughing. “We’re walking on water!” Halley yelled. “We’re walking on water!” I yelled, too, because it seemed like we’d performed a miracle, standing on that river. We felt unbound by the laws of nature. Free. Wyatt got mad afterward.You could have died, he said. I was younger then. I didn’t think much about death.
I wiped the dirt from the grave marker. I traced theOinOpal, over and over, making little loops with my finger. With each loop, I tallied what I knew of the woman: She died in the Earthshine factory fire. She had written a formula for Comet Pills. Her pills made people happy. She was a witch. She killed people with her cures. She could talk to the dead. Bertie knew her, somehow, had kept her book of medicines locked in the safe with the soap formula. But why? What did this have to do with the Jane Does? Or with Halley? Or with me? That’s what I needed to find out.
I sat six feet above her bones. By now, they’d turned to dust. I thought about Halley as an urn of ash. She requested her ashes to be scattered in France, and I wondered if the Tuttles would honor that wish, after the deposition, once they’d found out what Halley had left me.
I sat back on my heels and examined the stone. Stamped beneath the name Opal Doucet were the years she lived and died, that hyphen of her life adjoining her birth and death. I looked at the numbers. I rubbed the stone again with my coat to be certain I was reading it correctly: Not the year of the fire, 1910, the last time Halley’s Comet could be seen, but later, much later.
1939. The year Halley was born.
CARL JUNG SAID LIFE DOESN’Treally begin until you turn forty—that everything up until then is research.
Research.
The storefront of the five-and-ten appeared small, but the insideopened to high ceilings, the shelves stacked taller than I could reach, with a hodgepodge of items in no immediately perceivable order. Kitchen strainers and candy and cabinet hardware. Dish towels and electrical tape and WD-40 and Christmas ornaments and little plastic toys, green soldiers, like the ones Wyatt still had somewhere in one of his boxes in our basement.
“Can I help you?” The woman had a pretty face, though she wore too much makeup. Her name tag read:ROXANNE.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Not from around here, are you.”
I shook my head. “How’d you know?”
“Your hair,” said Roxanne. “Only freaks and sick people have hair like that, but you don’t look sick. Are you sick?”
“No,” I said.
“You know, I wore a wig when I was Miss Gallipolis in 1967. You’re in the presence of a beauty queen.”
“Oh. That’s neat,” I said, but the moment I spoke the word, it felt wrong, insulting, like when people said it was neat I was an actress.
“You don’t have to call me your highness. Royal majesty will do,” Roxanne said, then turned down an aisle and started straightening a mess of sorted-through winter hats.
I followed her, watched for a few minutes as she tidied the shelves, then explained I was doing some research. Her bangs fell over her eyes, and she moved them by blowing one strong poof of air upward. “I thought you might know something, seeing that you’re Miss Gallipolis and all,” I said.
