Crooked River: A Novel (6 page)

“But maybe she does see ghosts.”

“There’s no such thing.” I sat down on the raised wheel hub, grabbing hold of the side for balance.

Zeb started the engine. He shouted, “Maybe there is. Maybe you’ve just never seen one is all.”

I looked at Bear, wanting him to defend me, to say I was right and Ollie didn’t need to hear any more made-up stories about spirits and souls and life going on after you’re dead, but his head was tipped back and he was staring at a vulture circling high above us. If Mom was here, she’d agree with me. She’d tell Ollie the truth: Once you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s just no coming back from that.

We bumped along the dirt road and then down another single track toward the apple orchard. Ollie stuck her arm out the open passenger window and moved her hand up and down, a rising and falling wave in the wind.

It only took a few minutes to get there. Zeb parked the truck twenty feet from the tree where the swarm gathered and turned off the engine.

“Hear that?” he said to Ollie, holding his head out the window and cupping his hand around his ear. “Bunch of old souls singing about heaven.”

“It’s just bees, Ollie,” I said. “Moving the air so fast with their wings we can hear their vibrations.”

“Sounds like music to me,” said Zeb.

I grabbed the sugar water and my bee suit and jumped out of the truck. Bear unloaded the rest of the equipment and joined me under the apple tree. Ollie stayed behind with Zeb.

Bees swarm whenever the colony grows too big for the hive and they get to feeling like they need more elbow room. The queen and thousands of workers fly off together to find some new place to call home, while the ones who stay behind in the original hive hatch a new queen and carry on about their honey-making business. Bear’s colonies had swarmed only a few times, but he’d always caught them and set them up in newer, bigger hives before they’d gotten too far away. Sometimes, though, swarms showed up out of nowhere, maybe from another keeper’s hives, maybe from a wild colony. Even though bees were their most gentle selves during a swarm, there was still something ominous and disturbing about the way they clumped together on a tree limb or under the eaves of a house. A shifting, dark mass sending out a low and constant drone, the sound of ten thousand wings beating an uncertain rhythm.

This swarm was balled together, hanging from a thin limb about fifteen feet off the ground. It could have been worse. Once Bear had to capture a swarm that was trying to make its new home in Zeb and Franny’s chimney. I wasn’t there, but Franny said it was quite precarious and Bear was crazy for trying.

Bear leaned the ladder against the trunk of the tree as close to underneath the swarm as he could get. “Ready?”

I zipped my suit, cinched my gloves, pulled the veil down over my face, and gave him a thumbs-up.

I was halfway up the ladder when he said, “Did everything go okay with Deputy Santos today?”

I missed the next rung and almost slipped off. I balanced, found my footing again, and kept climbing.

“Yeah,” I called down to him. “She was a little mad at first, but she thinks the jacket could be helpful for setting up a timeline. Anyway, it’s out of our hands now.”

Bear nodded. “Good.”

I was surprised at how easy and quick the lie came. Surprised, too, that Bear believed me.

He passed me the bucket and handsaw. “Watch it now. This part can get a little tricky.”

8
ollie

M
y sister adjusts her helmet, her veil, her gloves.

Bear points at her empty bucket and says, “Set it right under that branch and hold it steady.”

Papa Zeb offers me a sip of his Coke. “Think we’re far enough away?”

The bees fly around the one from the river, outlining her shape in the air. She is trying so hard to make my sister notice. But my sister sees only what is right in front of her and says all the rest is fake, just light playing tricks, summer bending the sky. Impossibilities, imaginary friends, and all in my head.

Maybe she’s right.

I wish she was.

A
s far back as I can remember I’ve seen them. In dim light, they seem almost solid. In bright light, barely visible. If I touch them, it’s ice and fire, energy burning. They are glints and specks, here and then gone. Shimmering. Like heat rising off pavement.

W
hen I was four, at the zoo with my sister and mother, I grabbed Mom’s sleeve and said, “Who is that man over there?”

“What man, sweetheart?”

“The one beside the tiger cage. Under that tree. He’s wearing a funny hat.”

“I don’t see anyone.” She put her arm around me and squeezed. “Honey, there’s no one.”

W
hen I was six, the night before Grandma and Grandpa came to stay with us for two weeks, Mom sat on the edge of my bed and told me Aunt Charlotte had an accident while climbing a mountain. She fell. She died. I would never see or talk to her again. She was gone.

And then she wasn’t.

Then she was here at our house, coming through the front door behind Grandma and filling the rooms with cold and ice. But I was the only one who noticed, the only one freezing. I started to cry and Mom said, “Oh, honey, what’s wrong?” and lifted me onto her hip. But I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone. Aunt Charlotte’s voice smothered mine. Her words, trying, failing to escape, became trapped inside me. For days after, I kept my mouth shut tight.

Mom said, “Sweetheart, talk to me.”

But I was too afraid to try, knowing that the voice I’d hear would not belong to me.

When Grandma left a room, so did Aunt Charlotte. When Grandma came into a room, Aunt Charlotte came in right behind her. Ice crystals formed on the inside of the windows. Snowdrifts piled in the corners. At night, I shivered beneath the covers.

When Mom tucked me in, she added another blanket, saying, “I hope it’s not the flu.”

During the day, my sister rolled her eyes and said, “Stop being a baby.”

The first time I figured out they could speak, and that I could hear them, was at the funeral. Aunt Charlotte’s voice, a fog-whisper across the back of my neck,
I’m not even in there, you know. They left me up on that godforsaken mountain. Said it was too dangerous to bring me down. That’s just an empty box they’re burying.

Grandpa and Grandma and Aunt Charlotte left a few days later, and the house warmed up and the hand around my throat unclenched and my own voice returned. I asked Mom if the coffin was empty and why we’d had a funeral if there was no body.

Mom looked surprised. “Who told you that?”

“Aunt Charlotte.”

“Your aunt Charlotte’s gone, sweetheart.”

“But she was at the cemetery with Grandma,” I said.

Mom started to cry then and pulled me into the chair beside her and told me about heaven, how people went to live there after they died and Aunt Charlotte was smiling and singing with the angels. I let her say what she needed to say, even though I worried some of it might not be true.

I
asked my sister once if she saw them too.

“What?”

“Shimmering. The shiny, light parts people leave behind when they die.”

“You’re talking crazy.”

“Do you think they’re ghosts?”

My sister rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“What about angels?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Don’t believe in them, either.”

“Then what happens after you die?”

“Nothing.”

“Something happens,” I said.

“Nothing and nothing and nothing.” She spun tight circles in the middle of the living room. “You get buried in the ground like Aunt Charlotte and then people come and cry over you for a while and then things go back to the way they were before. And that’s what happens.”

“But what about your soul?”

“If there is such a thing as a soul, it probably gets buried too.”

“Of course there’s such a thing as a soul,” I said.

“What’s a soul if you don’t have a body?” My sister stuck out her tongue.

I stuck out my tongue too. I said, “What’s a body if you don’t have a soul?”

“I’m telling Mom,” my sister said.

T
he doctor wore a plaid skirt and a red blouse and smiled too wide and called me Miss Olivia. One foot tapping, tapping, in constant motion.

“Tell me about these . . . Shimmering. How often do you see them?”

“Sometimes.”

“Every day?”

“No.”

“And how do they make you feel? Scared? Excited? Happy? Nervous?”

“Like someone’s trying to open my chest and slip inside,” I told her.

She wrote something on a yellow notepad, then smiled at Mom and said, “This kind of fantasy play is typical for kids her age, especially after losing someone they love in such a traumatic way. She’s filling in the gaps. Try not to worry. She’ll grow out of it. But just in case . . .” and handed her a slip of white paper.

In the car on the way back home, my sister pinched me and said, “You’re a freak.”

T
he one who follows me floats like a cloud above us. She flickers soft pink and rose red, sky blue and honey gold. She likes it when we’re all together—my sister, my father, and me. She’s pretending she’s here with us too and that makes her happy. But she’s not here. Not in the way that counts.

The one from the river coils tight and tighter around the leather satchel my sister left in the bed of the truck. She hisses at me, but I ignore her.

My sister uses the handsaw to cut the branch from the apple tree. Some of the bees fly close to her veiled face, but she keeps working, carefully, slowly, the way she’s seen Bear work. She sets the cut branch and swarm gently into the bucket and covers it with a mesh lid.

“Good work,” Bear says.

Papa Zeb shivers. “Makes my skin crawl.”

My sister climbs down the ladder with her bucket of bees and brings it to the truck. The buzzing is so loud, I cover my ears.

9
sam

F
riday breakfast at Zeb and Franny’s was a standing tradition for Bear, and me when I was visiting, and now for Ollie, too. We were supposed to be at the house, sitting down at the table, by nine o’clock sharp, but when Ollie and I woke up that morning, Bear was gone. He’d left a note pinned to the inside of the teepee flap:
Be back soon.
I turned it over, looking for more of an explanation, but the other side was blank. Ollie and I waited until we couldn’t wait any longer, then we walked the quarter mile to Zeb and Franny’s without him.

They lived in a two-story farmhouse with a wraparound front porch and rooster-red shutters. Wind chimes and hummingbird feeders dangled from the eaves. They’d bought the house and eighty acres right after they were married. The plan, Franny told me once when I asked her why she and Zeb lived all alone in such a big house, was to fill the extra space with kids, and eventually grandkids, and, if God saw fit, great-grandkids, but their first daughter died of pneumonia when she was still a baby, and their second daughter died, too, when she was older, after falling off a horse. Though they didn’t have any more of their own kids after that, they were foster parents for a long time, and Franny said all those kids had filled her heart with more than enough love to last until she died and then some. Besides, they had us now.

I opened the screen door. The hinges squealed.

Franny called from the kitchen, “Come in, come in! My babes from the meadow, come in!”

Ollie and I took off our shoes and crossed through the living room toward the back of the house. Framed photographs cluttered the walls, the shelves and end tables, even the top of the piano. Here were pictures capturing nearly a century of well-lived life. A sepia-toned portrait of Zeb in a suit and Franny in her wedding dress, holding hands, heads inclined toward each other. Black-and-white and color photographs of so many children I wondered how Franny and Zeb remembered all their names.

One photograph stood apart from all the others on an end table beside the couch. Taken three years ago, it was of Bear and Mom and Ollie and me bunched together on the front porch steps. Bear had his arm around Mom’s waist, and Mom had one hand on my shoulder, one hand on Ollie’s. Our smiles were silly and huge. Zeb stood by himself behind us, tall and straight and serious. It was Franny’s idea to take the picture. She’d said she wanted all the people she loved most staring up at her from a single frame. I stopped in front of it and brushed my fingers across all our faces.

In the kitchen, Franny was busy plunging soft dough into a pan of hot oil, frying up her famous French crullers. The room smelled of warm cinnamon and powdered sugar.

She smiled when we came through the doorway. “My beautiful girls.”

Ollie went over and hugged her.

“Papa Zeb could use a little help outside with the blueberries.” She kissed the top of Ollie’s head and pushed her toward the open sliding glass door.

A few seconds later, I heard Zeb outside talking and laughing, carrying on a one-sided conversation. I wondered how much Bear had told him about Ollie, if he knew it had been almost five weeks now since she last spoke.

Franny pulled a cruller from the hot oil and set it on a paper towel to drain. She said, “Papa’s been out there for nearly an hour. Won’t have any fruit for breakfast the way he’s been picking. Slow as molasses on a January morning, that one is.”

Though we both knew she didn’t mind as much as she made it seem.

“I still can’t get used to your new haircut,” she said. “Reminds me of a 1920s starlet.”

I touched my bare neck. “It’s easier this way.”

She nodded, gesturing to her own short hair, and then asked, “Your father back from his interview yet?”

“What interview?”

She frowned and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, streaking her brow with flour. “He didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head.

Franny dropped another raw piece of dough into the oil. It sizzled and popped. “Maybe he meant for it to be a surprise.”

“What’s he interviewing for?” I asked.

She hesitated, pinching her lips between her teeth and squinting up at the ceiling.

“Come on, Franny. Just tell me.”

She let out her breath in a rush. “A janitorial position at the mill.”

She lifted the golden brown cruller from the pan and continued, “That’s what he told Papa yesterday afternoon anyway.” She smiled at me, and I thought she looked a little sad. “Maybe he didn’t want you girls to get your hopes up, and here I am flapping my gums. Forget I said anything.”

I slumped against the counter and shoved my right hand into my pants pocket, wrapped my fist around the key I’d found last night in a small side pocket of Bear’s leather satchel.

I was alone in the teepee, stuffing the satchel inside my duffel bag where no one would find it, promising myself that as soon as I had a chance, I’d get rid of the jacket like I’d originally planned. In my rush, the bag tipped on its side and a silver key fell out onto the ground. It had a narrow, rectangular head engraved with the word
Toyota
. I didn’t know anyone who drove that make of car. I’d turned it over in my hand, feeling the weight of it, the coldness against my palm, then I put the key in the pocket of my jeans to ask Bear about later. But between last night and this morning an opportunity had never come up.

I took my hand out of my pocket, turned, and opened the cupboard above the sink. Right there in front, like someone wanted me to find it, was Mom’s favorite mug, the one she always used when she was here. It was round, almost as big as a soup bowl, ruby red with tiny white polka dots and a small chip on the handle. It had fit perfectly in her cupped hands. I started to reach for a plain, blue mug that wasn’t important to anybody, but then stopped and took hers down instead. It was heavier than I remembered and looked strange with my small, stubby fingers wrapped around it instead of her long, graceful ones. I poured myself hot water from the kettle on the stove, stirred in three heaping spoonfuls of hot cocoa, and sat down at the table. The key jabbed sharp into my thigh. Maybe I didn’t know Bear as well as I thought I did.

I sank low in my chair and blew across the surface of my mother’s mug, curling the steam in wisps around my face.

A
fter breakfast, after we’d finished washing the dishes and were separating the extra blueberries into pint boxes, Zeb cleared his throat and said too loudly, “Well, Mother, I suppose now’d be a good time for me to take little sister out to see the new chicks.”

Franny wiped her hands on a dish towel, then slowly untied her apron and hung it on its proper hook beside the stove, taking her time like she was trying to figure out the best way to answer. Finally, she said, “I suppose now’s as good a time as any.”

“I thought Ollie could help me work the honey stand this morning,” I said and shrugged. “But I guess we can see the chicks first.”

Zeb and Franny exchanged the kind of glance that said nothing and everything at once. Then Franny said, “Why don’t I help you get things set up at the stand and then when Ollie’s had her fill of those chirping yellow fluff balls, Zeb can bring her out to join us.”

That’s how I knew Franny wanted to talk to me about something important, something she didn’t think Ollie was old enough to hear, because in the three years I’d been selling honey at the end of her driveway, Franny had never come out to help. “This old body just doesn’t work the way it used to,” she’d say, by way of explaining, and pat her swollen joints. “I’d barely get halfway and then you’d have to carry me and I know you’re not strong enough for that.” Then she’d laugh and shoo me away. But today was different. Today, Franny insisted.

I brought up two full boxes of pint-size honey jars from the basement and loaded them onto the wagon with three flats of blueberries, a metal cash box, and a plastic folding chair for Franny. She came out the front door wearing large rubber boots and a wide-brimmed straw hat and took her time coming down the porch steps.

“You sure you want to come, Franny? It’ll be boiling out there so close to the asphalt.” I offered my arm for support, but she waved me away.

“It’s about time I see what you’ve been up to out there, don’t you think?” She reached the last step and paused a moment to catch her breath before stepping down to the ground.

We started up the gravel driveway, slow and shuffling, and this time when I offered my arm, Franny took it.

The stand had been my idea. People bought lemonade and flowers from the side of the road, so I figured they might buy other things too. Better, tastier things like honey. Zeb had built the simple wooden stand and painted it bright yellow. Bear had helped him carry it to a patch of grass at the end of the driveway that was set far enough back from Lambert Road to be safe, but close enough to be seen. I’d come up with a name and a design for labels that Franny helped me stick onto pint jars. Then we tied red ribbons around the lids, and she said it was the most beautiful honey she’d ever seen. That first summer, we didn’t sell very much. Maybe a half-dozen jars, mostly to people who were friends with Zeb and Franny. But the next year those same people came back for more, saying Bear’s was the best honey they’d ever eaten and their allergies weren’t coming on nearly as bad this year, and you know what, come to think of it, they hadn’t come down with a single cold all winter. Not even the sniffles. Those people told their friends, and those friends told their other friends, and by the second weekend, we were sold out.

Bear started taking special orders and making deliveries to keep up with demand, and sometimes he even sold honey down at Potter’s Grocery Store where they kept shelf space for his jars between the jam and peanut butter. But he always saved some jars just for me. He told me whatever I earned at the stand was mine to keep. It seemed like a lot of money when I was younger—fifty, sixty dollars for a few hours’ work. I’d been saving all of it, plus the money I got on my birthday and for doing odd jobs around the house, for a car when I turned sixteen. Last week I’d counted, and I had almost a thousand dollars. Last week, too, I’d decided the car could wait. Whatever money I had saved up already and whatever I earned this summer was going to pay for the first month’s rent on an apartment or a new winter coat for Ollie or a new suit for Bear for job interviews. I had to start being more responsible now, pitching in where I could.

When we reached the stand, Franny collapsed into the folding chair and fanned her hat in front of her face. She exhaled, long and loud, more groan than sigh, and fanned under her arms too, where large patches of damp were visible against her pale green cotton dress. I started to unload the wagon, and when Franny made to help, I shooed her away.

“Sit,” I said. “Relax.”

She settled her hat atop her head again, crossed her arms over her chest, and stretched out her legs.

I arranged the jars in pyramids at just the right angle where when the sun hit them directly, the honey sparkled. The county road was empty, no cars coming in either direction, but it was early yet. Soon enough someone would come rolling over one or the other of those hills.

Franny said, “Deputy Santos stopped by the other day.”

I unstacked the jars and spread them in a straight line across the top of the counter to see if they looked better that way. They didn’t. I restacked them, three pyramids all in a row.

“Shame about that poor girl they found,” Franny continued. “I can’t even begin to imagine . . .” She shook her head. “Anyway, Deputy Santos was asking a lot of questions about your father.”

“Like what?”

“Like if we’d seen him the day before,” Franny said. “What he said to us. How he acted.”

“What did you tell her?”

“The truth, of course.”

A dark blue minivan appeared on the horizon, coming at us from the south. Closer, closer, it slowed as it passed, but then went right on by, picking up speed again on the hill headed toward Terrebonne.

Franny shifted her weight in the folding chair. The brim of her hat shaded her face, and I couldn’t see if she was smiling or frowning or wearing any kind of expression at all. She said, “Your father borrowed the truck that night, Sam.”

“I know. He told me.” I turned one of the jars so the label faced the road. “He went to Bend to pick up supplies.”

Franny nodded. “That’s what he told us too. But then after Deputy Santos and that detective came around, I got to thinking about it again and there’s things about it that just don’t sit right with me.”

Some two hundred feet south of us on the opposite side of the highway and set back a little from the road was Blue Heron Pond. A man-made reservoir used by farmers to irrigate crops, the pond was rectangular in shape with sloped dirt retaining walls and a gravel driveway and a chain-link fence guarding the perimeter. Sunlight brushed the surface of the water, glinting radiant white. I stared at the reflection until my eyes hurt. When I looked back at Franny, she was a blur, a thin, paper-white ghost. Blink, and she was solid again, her hands worrying the tops of her knees, the brim of her hat dipping lower like she was trying to think of the gentlest way to say whatever it was she’d been holding on to all morning. I imagined her thinking,
Poor girl’s been through enough already.
But I needed to know.