I can’t tell which of us is more surprised. We stand blinking at one another, neither of us bothering to smile. Distantly, I notice my fingers are gripping the cuff of Arthur’s coat.
I turn away, fighting the urge to run before I make any other bad choices or worse enemies.
Baine’s voice reaches out after me. “Mr. Gravely knows about your situation.” I stop walking. “It pains him.” Her tone has a triumphal undercurrent, like she’s pulled a winning card, except I don’t know what game we’re playing. The only Mr. Gravely I know is the man with hands like boiled eggs and hair the color of raw liver, the man who owns the power company and half the county. It’s difficult for me to imagine that he even knows my name. Is this supposed to be another bribe? Or—my chest contracts—a threat?
I look back over one shoulder, hard-eyed. “I don’t know what situation you mean, but we’re just fine.”
Baine makes a face that’s probably supposed to be sincere. “He wants to help you, Opal.”
“Why exactly would Mr. Gravely give a shit about me?”
“Because . . .” Her eyes move over my face, slightly narrowed. I have the impression she’s performing a number of quick calculations. She swallows them with another smile. “Because he’s a good man. He really loves this town, you know.”
I doubt it. The Gravelys have that big house on the edge of town, but they’re always vacationing and traveling.11I bet Don doesn’t know which dogwoods bloom first or how the train whistle sounds at night, hollow and lonesome. I bet the tap water tastes like blood to him, because he’s not used to all that metal in his mouth. I don’t know if I love Eden, either, but I know it all the way down to its rotten bones.
I shrug one shoulder at Baine and say, “Sure,” in a tone of voice that rhymes withfuck off.The fog swallows her silhouette before I hit the main road.
Arthur is even more sullen than usual that morning. The flesh beneath his eyes looks bruised and swollen, like overripe fruit, and he limps slightly when he walks away. I don’t ask about it, and I don’t mention Elizabeth Baine or her profitable arrangement.
It’s easy to forget about her while I work. I bury myself in dusting and sweeping, scraping mold off window frames and dumping mud dauber nests out of drawers. The only thought that surfaces, again and again, is that I am no longer the only person interested in Starling House.
NINE
Ishould head straight back to the motel after work, but insteadI text Jasper working late again and take a right before the old railroad bridge. This is the best view of the power plant, the towers lined up across the river like the turrets of a castle, the ash pond like a tarry black moat. After that there’s a pitted, scrubby stretch of Gravely land, where nothing much grows.
Bev says that’s where they buried Big Jack, because it was against twenty or thirty regulations to do it on company land.12
I make it to the Muhlenberg Public Library an hour before closing time.
Charlotte is bent over the computer banks, blond braid draped over one shoulder, glasses perched on her head, explaining to a patron that color copies cost twenty-five cents a page. The tone of her voice suggests she’s explained this several times already, and expects to explain it several more, so I lurk in the New Arrivals section until she heads back to the front desk.
She greets me with a drawled “Well look who finally decided to turn up,” but there’s no malice in it, because Charlotte is constitutionally incapable of malice. She forgives late fees before the notices even go out and never calls the cops on drunks that fall asleep in the library armchairs; she personally tutored Jasper before his PSAT and she’s the one who marched into the principal’s office when one of his classmates told him to go back to Mexico. Even Bev sits up straighter and runs her fingers through her hair when Charlotte comes by.
“Hey Charlotte. How’s things? School treating you well?” Charlotte has been taking online grad classes for years now. God knows why—they hired her with nothing but an English degree from Morehead State, and after more than a decade in Eden it seems unlikely that she’ll be fired, no matter how many assholes complain about her rainbow decorations every June.
“Well enough. Where you been?”
I tuck my hair behind my ear. “Lots of extra shifts lately, is all.”
“And how’s Jasper?”
“Great. Fine.” I elect not to tell her about the weird mood he’s been in, or that we’re in between inhaler shipments, so he’s been waking up wheezing at two or three every morning, running salt water through his nebulizer until he can breathe again. Sometimes he can’t fall back asleep afterward, and I wake in the morning to find him hollow-eyed and wan, hunched over his laptop. He still hasn’t let me watch whatever he’s working on.
“Anyway, I was just wondering . . .” I walk my fingers across the desktop and bounce them on the stapler.
Charlotte slides the stapler out of my reach. “Yes?”
“Do you have anything on the Starlings? Like, local history stuff?”
I’m expecting her to faint with joy—she’s been working on a history of Eden for years now, and spends her weekends looking at microfilm and photographing old gravestones—but a pair of creases appears around her mouth. “Why?”
“Bev told me a story about it and I just got curious.” I do a casual shrug. Her eyes follow the expensive lines of Arthur’s coat, and the creases around her mouth are joined by a third between her brows. She taps a coworker’s shoulder. “Morgan, can you cover the desk? Come on back, Opal.”
I follow her to the oversized storage closet she refers to, somewhat aspirationally, as the archives. Craft supplies and book donations are piled between cardboard boxes and old issues ofThe Muhlenburgerand the GreenvilleLeader-News.
Charlotte thumps a tower of plastic totes labeledGravely Estate.“Do you remember when Old Leon Gravely died? It’s been ten or eleven years now—liver failure, I heard. Pretty sudden. Anyway, when his brother took over the company he gave all his papers to the Historical Society, along with a generous donation. If we’ve got anything about the Starlings, it’ll be in here. Both those names go way back.”
I look from the totes back to Charlotte. “Okay. Would you maybe like to give me a hand? Or some tips?”
