Fiendish (16 page)

“You should go,” she said again. Her voice was low and toneless.

“Don’t you get lonely around here? I’ll stay and keep you company awhile if you want.”

“I’m not supposed to go around with any Blackwoods,” she said to the countertop. “My dad thinks it doesn’t set the right tone for the family.”

It seemed like quite a rude thing to say, especially considering that she had been down to see Myloria and get her dogwood tattoo just the other day, which in itself went a long way toward showing that she did not always do what her father said.

“You were just at our place,” I pointed out. “Getting work from Myloria.”

“That was for business,” she said. “It’s different if you go to someone crooked for a fortune. I wanted to know mine, and now I do.”

“Myloria doesn’t tell fortunes. She does tattoos.”

Davenport shrugged. “Not every fortune comes from a crystal ball or a deck of cards. Your aunt’s supposed to have a good hand with ink, is all.”

The dogwood branch hung limply in my hand. It was still wet, even though I’d been carrying it around for most of the afternoon. I held it up. “I found this stick, and it’s got blood on it, and I was worried. You really don’t know anything about it, even though it’s like what’s drawn on your back?”

“No. I don’t. Maybe someone bagged a deer.” The way she said it was flat, and her eyes flicked to the door again, making it very clear she was done with me.

I wondered what her father would say—what he’d
do
—if he knew about the dogwood tattoo, but all I said was, “I’ll go if you want, but if something happens, you know where to find me.”

Davenport looked up, cutting her eyes to the ceiling. “I don’t have a single idea what you’re talking about. Ain’t nothing going to happen around here.”

Her voice was trembly, though, sad and lost, like she was a balloon tied to a railing and waiting for someone to come back for her.

Out on the street, I stood under the striped awning of Reedy’s, feeling stupid and confused, like maybe I’d just invented myself some trouble because Fisher wasn’t around to make the real thing.

I was about to call it a day and start back home when someone said my name, and I knew it was him before I even turned around.

He was standing in front of the Shop Mart, carrying two sacks of groceries and looking unreadable.

“What?” I said. It was strange to say a word and have it fly through the air at someone like a slap. I thought how if I were Shiny, I would be heating up, getting ready to burn down everything. Instead, my throat hurt like I’d been sucking on an ice cube, and all I wanted was to look away.

“I need to talk to you,” Fisher said, stepping down from the curb and crossing the street to me. “About what happened at the fair. About last night.”

“Well, then you’ll be disappointed that I have nothing to say to you.”

“What happened last night,” he said again. “That wasn’t what you think.”

I turned on him, holding the branch like a weapon. “You don’t know
what
I think.”

He bowed his head and looked away. “Well, I know what I’d think, then. I’d think if someone acted how I did last night that they were ashamed of who they were and didn’t want to people to see them having anything to do with anything like craft.”

“And you’re saying if you thought that about a person, you’d be wrong?”

“No, that part’s true. But why I walked away rather than just sit there being ashamed and honest is something else. Mike and them don’t have a cool head about craft, and not about the Blackwoods. If the Maddox boys told Mike or anyone what they’d seen, it would get pretty ugly pretty fast, so I took them out there and talked them down. They listen to me, but only as long as they don’t have to think too hard about what I really am.”

“You’re telling me Mike Faraday and them are so scared of craft that if you didn’t talk them out of it, they’d come after
me
over something
you
did?”

I thought Fisher would laugh at the ridiculousness of that, but instead, he just nodded. “People around here are happiest when they can blame everything on the Willows. Your being there would mean you getting blamed. Who knows, maybe they’d feel that way about me if it wasn’t for Isola, but how can I say? She’s around and she’s in charge.”

“She must be scarier than she looks.”

Fisher leveled me with a long, steady stare. “You have
no
idea. Look, I can’t explain it right, but she’s something else.” He glanced up the street and hoisted the groceries higher. “Okay, here’s what. I know Myloria, and she isn’t going to feed you anything worth eating, so you might as well come over and get a real meal. If you come for supper, I’ll show you something so you understand.”

“Are you sure? I mean, about me going over there to visit with Isola?”

He nodded. “As long as you can stand her being like she is.”

We stood on the sidewalk, facing each other. The canvas banners were hanging over the empty stores, making the whole block into an out of order comic strip. They gave the street a still, eerie feeling, like it was dressed up for Halloween.

“Fisher?” I said when we’d stood so long it seemed indecent, the dogwood branch dripping to eternity in my hand. “How’s your craft?”

“How do you mean?”

I looked up at him. “How do you think I mean? Has your craft been acting up all over the damn town lately?”

He hung his head so his hair covered his eyes. “No,” he said finally. “I think last night was nothing but a fluke. I just need to make sure to keep it low, is all.”

I nodded, pretending an ease I did not feel, more certain than ever that this was all another part of the mess we couldn’t see, all the histories and secrets that lay buried under the years.

He raised his eyebrows. “Now, you want to tell me what you’re doing walking around town with a broken stick?”

“I found it in the creek below the hollow, and it was all snarled with blond hair and I got scared something had happened to Davenport.”

“And had it?”

I shook my head and then glanced back toward Reedy’s.

In the window, Davenport stood in her white paper hat, ice cream scoop clutched in a pale hand. I raised my own hand to wave, because it was what polite people did, then caught sight of her face. The way she looked at me—at us—was this strange, sad, wanting look, like her heart was somewhere off in the distance. I let my hand fall back down.

THE SECRET ROOM

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A
t his house, I followed Fisher through the long front hall and into the kitchen.

He thumped the groceries down on the table and Isola looked up from the stove. She’d been poking at something with a wicked-looking two-pronged fork, but as soon as she straightened and saw us, she gave Fisher a look like someone had set her hair on fire.

She dialed it back fast, though, and said to him, “Well
there
you are. Thought I was going to have to send out the search party. Now run and get me the big dish off the top of the china dresser.”

As soon as he was out of the room, she turned on me with the meat fork in her hand. “Did I not tell you to stay good and far away from this place?”

I stood with the table between us. “Fisher invited me for dinner.”

“And does this face look like I got a welcome mat laying out for Blackwoods? You keep away from my house, and keep
far
away from that boy.”

“If you’re so worried who Fisher goes around with, maybe you should tell him to stay away from
me
.”

Isola raised her eyebrows. “Do not sass me. Do you think I’m stupid? I know what you’ve brought home to us just by being loose in the world.”

The way she said it made a shiver run through me and I hugged my arms around myself. “And what is that, exactly?”

Isola turned to the sink and began trimming a pile of string beans. “Craft and craft and
more
craft. I know who you are,” she said, pinching the ends off the beans like they’d done something to offend her. “Clementine DeVore.”

The words were fierce and full of blame. I stared at the back of her head, trying to work out how she was the only person in the whole town, apart from a couple of girls I’d played with when I was little, who had any very clear idea of who I was.

When she glanced over her shoulder at me, her face was like stone. “When I tell you to stay away from that boy, do you think I’m joking?”

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“Then do you mind telling me why it doesn’t seem to stick?”

“Fisher dug me out of the cellar of my house because he heard me breathing,” I said, and my voice was husky. “I know he’s got a powerful kind of craft and the more we’re together, the more it seems to get away from him, but we can’t seem to stay apart. I don’t
want
to stay apart.”

Isola nodded, but it was heavy. She started scooping the beans into a pot by handfuls, like she needed something to do with herself. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, I guess—craft calls to craft, and trouble will always find trouble. And your cousin and that little Dalton, well of course you’ll be thick as thieves with them. Things is getting bad around here, same as last time. All I got to say is, five is a terrible number.”

“How do you know about that?” I said, coming around the table.

Isola put the lid on the pot and turned to face me. “Because I know a thing or two about the past, and a thing or two about what they call sympathetic magic. Only really works when you get together, don’t it? And more is better, although how you all could have got to that Heintz girl is a mystery to me.”

“Heintz?” I repeated it dumbly, flat and empty like a word I didn’t know.

Isola nodded. “It seems to me her daddy would do everything in his power to keep her from going around folks like you, and don’t you deny it.”

“He doesn’t just try,” I said, thinking of how nervous she’d been of me at Reedy’s. “She minds him, too.”

At that, Isola threw back her head and laughed a nasty little laugh.

“Well, she
does
.”

Isola turned away and shook her head. “Minds him! As though any one of you sorry young creatures ever minded anyone.” She was still laughing when Fisher brought the plate back in.

The dinner was better than anything I’d had in a long time—maybe better than anything I’d had in my whole life—even though Isola and Fisher were making rather a performance of being hateful to each other.

“Why don’t you ask your little friend whether she runs around with you ’cause she’s playing daredevil or ’cause she just don’t know any better?” Isola said, stabbing at the roast with a fork.

Beside me, Fisher closed his eyes. “Could you not? Please.”

Isola clucked at him and started spooning up mashed potatoes and dishing it out onto the plates. She slammed one down in front of me with an icy sniff that seemed mostly for show. I put butter on my biscuit and ate it.

Isola watched me devour my supper with the bright attention of a sparrow. “Well, I’d like to say I’m surprised to find a Blackwood in my house, but I guess it’s what I could expect. Wouldn’t any halfway
decent
girl run around with trash like that one.”

I was sorting my peas out from the carrots, which I knew was bad manners, but my hands wanted something to do. “Eric’s been nice. He took me to Greg Heintz’s animal zoo the other day.”

Fisher snorted and shook his head, reaching across me to take the gravy boat.

“I kind of thought you took
me
to the zoo,” he muttered in my ear.

I cut my meat into pieces, trying not to smile at the warmth of his breath on my cheek.

“Nothing funny about any of this,” Isola said, watching us both. “So you can just quit smirking, missy. I heard from Betty Lind at the laundromat that her Nathan seen a cougar in the Willows on his way back in from the city. Now, what do you say about that?”

I suspected she knew I had several things to say to that, but I elected not to say anything at all.

Fisher dropped his head into his hands. “Isola, what are you doing? Why can’t you just act decent and have some kind of civil conversation?”

Isola narrowed her eyes at me like I was a piece of machinery and she was studying out the best way to take me apart. “What have I got to say to a stranger?”

“
Isola
,” Fisher said, staring hard at her.

“If you’re hurting for a subject, you could mention the weather,” I said in my sunniest voice, mixing up my peas and gravy with the back of my fork.

Isola gave me a vexed look, but her eyes were flashing like she might laugh. As soon as the beginnings of a smile crossed her mouth, though, she reined it in and scowled instead. “You have got the table manners of a starving cat. Don’t that Blackwood woman ever feed you?”

“Shut up,” Fisher said, and his voice hung in the hot, humid air of the kitchen.

Isola pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Mister, you want to get your mouth straight. What do
you
care what anyone says about any of that trash out in the Willows?”

He gripped the edges of his plate with both hands. “Isola, if you don’t shut up, I’m going turn over this whole table, swear to God.”

Isola threw her head back and laughed a dry, crackly laugh. “I’m only telling the plain truth, mister. If you don’t like it, keep it to yourself.”

Fisher scraped his chair back. “Come on,” he said, jerking his head toward the door.

I got up to follow him, folding my napkin and laying it next to my plate. “Thank you for dinner, Mrs. Fisher. It was good.”

Isola just stuck her chin out and gave me a mean, ornery look that I suspected was an inch away from a smile.

Fisher was out in the front hall by the stairs. When I came up next to him, he took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out, but didn’t say anything. Then he reached for my hand and pulled me into the sitting room.

It was stale and dusty, the way rooms get when no one ever uses them for actual sitting, and taken up by a couch and two matching chairs, patterned in the most unfunny sort of plaid so that the whole place looked like a tablecloth. The lamps were colored glass, and the bookcases were full of china figures with oversized heads and big soppy eyes. Most of them seemed to be tending some kind of tiny sheep.

There weren’t many other knickknacks around—just the sad children and the sheep—but there was a photograph of Fisher on the back of the piano. He looked younger, thirteen or fourteen. He was holding a caught fish and looking very unhappy to be there.

“That in there,” I said finally. “She does it a lot, right?”

He shrugged but didn’t answer, so I knew the answer was yes.

“She’s a good cook, though.”

“Yeah. She is.”

“Well, that’s not nothing. I mean, I’m about to starve to death over at Myloria’s.”

He looked at me with his head ducked down so his hair hung in his face. “You know, it’s no problem for you to come by. If you want.”

“
Oh
, I think it’s a problem for Isola.”

“Then she can deal with it. Look, come over whenever you want—as long as you don’t mind her picking on you over every stupid thing and taking some kind of shot at you whenever she gets a chance.”

“I don’t mind.”

The look he gave me was sidelong and strange. “Everybody minds Isola, but not you. Why is that?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know how to explain how the hard, unguarded edge in her could seem so true and so familiar. It seemed honest. “Maybe somebody who cares enough to scrap with you—cares enough to notice you’re actually in the room—is not all that bad.”

At that though, Fisher looked away. “That thing I was going to show you,” he said, and he jerked his head toward the upstairs. “You might as well see.”

He led me up to the top of the house. The attic was just as dusty and cluttered as it had been the morning after I’d brought him home from the hollow, piled high with broken spindle chairs and stacks of newspaper.

As we passed, Fisher stopped halfway along the hall and put his hand against the bare wall directly across from his bedroom. He left it there a second before leading me back into the tiny sewing room.

“You’re showing me the Singer machine?”

“Nope,” he said, crossing the room and shoving up the window.

“So, showing me the roof.”

He looked back at me, swinging one leg out over the sill. “Kind of.”

We clambered out across the shingles. The roof was warm, leaving bits of tar and grit stuck all over my hands. We crawled around to the other side of the house from Fisher’s room, where he stopped at a gable window and pressed his hand against the glass. For a second, it looked like it wasn’t going to open. Then he gave it a shove and it went, the wood screeching where the frame had swelled tight.

The room was the same size and shape as Fisher’s bedroom, with the same sloped ceiling. There wasn’t much furniture in it, just a stained card table and a dusty mattress lying on the floor.

The built-in bookshelf across from the window was mostly empty, but there were a few stray pens and dead spiders here and there, and on the middle shelf, a stack of photo albums—matched memory books in different colors and a wedding book made of white and gold leatherette like a bible.

Fisher stood in the middle of the little room, looking around himself.

I kept waiting for him to say something, explain what it was he was showing me, and when he didn’t, I wandered over to the shelf and picked up one of the albums.

I was kind of hoping to see pictures of Fisher when he was little, but the first page was all black and whites, printed on slick, heavy paper and mostly square. The girls in them were young, barely teenagers maybe, with short, curled hair that made frames around their faces. In the photos, their lips were so full and dark they looked black, but I knew that in the light of the flash, they would have been wearing starlet-red lipstick.

The next page showed a couple standing in front of a flowered archway. The woman was one of the girls from the early pages, older now, and wearing a ruffled formal dress with a corsage of lilies pinned to the shoulder. The man wore a white shirt and a pair of black dress pants held up by suspenders, but that was about all you could tell about him, because someone had taken scissors and cut his face out of the picture.

“Not too forgiving, then,” I said, staring at the faceless man.

Fisher snorted. “If there’s one thing Isola knows about, it’s holding a grudge.”

As I flipped through the book, a picture began to come clear, a strange, mysterious version of New South Bend, filled with secrets and hard, knowing stares.

I turned to the last page, where the only picture was a photo of a bunch of girls sitting together up on the bed of a pickup, glamorous in black and white, even though their knees were scraped and the one balanced up on the curve of the wheel well wasn’t wearing shoes.

Fisher frowned, bending over the album. “That one’s Isola,” he said, pointing to the girl with the floppy hat and the sailor dress. Her arms were bare and she was smiling a sly, hell-raising smile, cocking one eyebrow up into the low-slung curl of her hair.

“And that’s Emmaline Blackwood,” I said, pointing to the dark-haired girl who was sitting next to her, perched on the edge of the turned-down tailgate, her face hard and proud, her chin up. The way she caught the sun, it lit her bones, showing off Spanish and Irish and Choctaw, and under that, something else. The dark of her eyes glowed hungrily, already taken up with the power of the hollow. She was fiercer than Myloria and my mother. The kind of girl who might grow up to run wild through the hollow and keep company with things best left alone.

It was a shock to see her there, my own grandmother sitting so comfortably with Fisher’s, arm slung around Isola’s waist. The two of them leaned into each other like sisters, and I remembered the look on Isola’s face when she studied me in the hall that first morning and then backed away. Like someone had just walked over her grave.

Behind me, Fisher had started to pace, crossing the floorboards in long strides like the room was making him restless. His boots thudded hollowly, and every now and then I heard a little jingle. There was something under the mangy rug, but when I went to turn back the corner with my foot, he went still, his hands closed into fists.

“Don’t,” he said, and his voice was so choked that I could hardly make out the word.

I pushed the rug back anyway. Under it, the floor was marked by a rectangular trapdoor with a metal ring for a handle. I sat on my knees next to the wadded-up rug, looking down at the door.