What I found in those woods was not a cursed land, but a magical one. An oasis in our desert of fields, those ugly scars that sprouted endless, backbreaking toil. When I had to spend all day working the fields, I’d sneak into the woods for respite. There, I became a forest nymph, dancing through the trees and tramping through the stream, freer than I ever was outside them.
I also ran into the forest when my father told me to go play. To me, alone, without brothers or sisters, those adventures were play. Then I went to school, and I learned that play meant games. Play meant rules. Play also meant interaction with other children, who mocked my dirty fingernails and patched dresses and lunches wrapped in handkerchiefs.
One day, when I was ten, I was supposed to be inspecting the crop for weevils. I did until my vision blurred and my head ached. Then I slipped into the forest to clear my head with the rich scent of pine and spruce.
I wandered through the woods, eyes half-closed and resting, making my way by memory. I was nearly to the stream when I caught a glimmer of movement in the trees. I went still, hoping to spot a fawn I’d seen the week before. Instead, a flash of pink and white whirled through my fairy glade.
I didn’t mistake the creature for a fairy. I knew there was no such thing. My mother was very, very clear on that. When she caught me reading a book of fae lore I found in the village shop, she threw it into the fire. Wicked words, she said. A good girl needed nothing but Scripture.
I managed to rescue my book after my parents went to bed. Yet I knew Mother would notice it missing from the fireplace, so I replaced it with the only other book we had in the house: the Bible. I burned it beyond recognition and left it there, a changeling child for my fairy tome, which seemed appropriate. I had no illusions about the severity of what I’d done, but if reading about fairies made me wicked, then one must expect me to do wicked things. It took a month for my mother to notice the Bible missing, and even then she only thought she’d left it at church.
After that, I kept my fairy book hidden under the floorboards. Most of the pages were scorched but intact, and I reread it often. I understood, though, that the mysteriescontained within its blackened covers were mere stories. Calling the clearing my “fairy glade” amused me. I knew it didn’t contain actual fairies. But on that day, it did contain something that should have been equally impossible.
It contained a ghost.
From the moment I saw Amelia Carter pirouetting around my fairy glade, I realized she was a phantasm. The sun shone right through her pretty pink dress. Her white Oxford shoes danced inches above the ground. Otherwise, she looked as perfect as always. Even in death, her cheeks glowed, and her dark hair hung in ringlets that twirled out as she spun.
She noticed me and stopped mid-twirl.
“Hello!” she called. “I see you behind that tree. Come and talk—” Her pretty face twisted, as if she’d bitten into an unripe apple. “Oh, it’s you.”
I walked over, staying in the shadows to hide my filthy work dungarees and my cousin’s oversized boots. Her lips still made that grimace I knew well.
“Aren’t you ever clean?” she said.
I wanted to shoot back that I was always clean. I probably bathed more often than she did. The difference was that a lawyer’s daughter didn’t need to dig in fields after school. She didn’t need to do anything except dress her dollies in pretty clothes and whisper hateful things about other girls.
Last month, Amelia Carter had disappeared from a church picnic. For a week, the entire town searched for her. I’d wanted to join. Even if Amelia never had a kind word for me, it seemed only right to help find her. My father refused to let me. I’d overheard my parents talking about what they thought had happened—that a traveling laborer had stolen Amelia and done terrible things to her. My father feared what horrors the searchers might find, and so he refused to allow me to join them.
I heard other talk, too. People saying that whatever horrors befell Amelia Carter, they came from much closer to home.
Tommy Lyons. That’s the name they whispered. Tommy was fourteen and lived on the farm beside ours. At the picnic, he’d been overheard telling Amelia how pretty she looked in her pink dress. He’d been seen walking with her. Whispering with her. After she disappeared, the searchers combed his parents’ property, but they found no sign of Amelia.
Soon, the story changed, and people started saying someone passing through must have snatched her. She was such a pretty child that some poor childless rich woman could not resist her, and now Amelia was living like a princess in a big city. That’s what people wanted to think. But her ghost in this glade told a very different story.
“Where am I?” Amelia asked, looking around.
“On our farm.”
Her face screwed up. “This doesn’t look like…Oh, it’s that horrible forest. My father came to see your mother again, didn’t he? To get his darning done. He has so much of it.” She rolled her blue eyes. “We’d best get back to the house. He’ll want to leave as soon as she’s done.”
“Your father isn’t here. Do you remember…anything?”
She flounced down on a log.
“Amelia?” I said when she didn’t answer.
I waited, and finally, she whispered, “I think something’s wrong.”
“What do you remember?”
She ignored the question and said, “I can’t leave.”
I inched closer, careful to stay out of her reach. I knew much of fairies, but nothing of ghosts, and I feared what she might do if I came too close.
“What do you mean you can’t leave?” I asked.
She pushed to her feet and strode toward the edge of the clearing. The moment she reached it, she bounced back, as if she’d struck a wall.
