Garden Spells (3 page)

“Why didn’t you call me on my cell phone? I could have picked these things up.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I don’t know why.”

“Stay the night. Let me make you some warm sugar milk.”

“No,” Evanelle said curtly. “I want to go home.”

After those feelings Tyler had stirred in her, Claire wanted to fight even more for the things she had, the only things she wanted in her heart. “Maybe these sheets mean I’m supposed to make up a bed for you,” she said hopefully as she tried to turn Evanelle toward the door. “Stay with me. Please.”

“No! They’re not for me! I don’t know what they’re for! I never know what they’re for!” Evanelle said, her voice rising. She took a deep breath, then said in a whisper, “I just want to go home.”

Despising herself for feeling so needy, Claire patted Evanelle gently, reassuringly. “It’s okay. I’ll take you home.” She set the sheets and the Pop-Tarts on the wicker rocker by the front door. “Come on, honey,” she said, leading the sleepy old lady down the stairs and to the van.

When Tyler Hughes got home, Claire’s house was dark. He parked his Jeep on the street and got out, but then he stopped on the walkway to his house. He didn’t want to go in yet.

He turned when he heard the clicking of small dog feet on the sidewalk. Soon, a tiny black terrier skittered past, hot on the trail of a moth that was popping from one streetlight to the next.

Tyler waited for what was coming next.

Sure enough, Mrs. Kranowski, a spindly old woman with a hairdo that looked like vanilla soft-serve ice cream, appeared. She was chasing after the dog, calling, “Edward! Edward! Come back to Mama. Edward! Come back here now!”

“Need help, Mrs. Kranowski?” Tyler asked as she passed.

“No, thank you, Tyler,” she said as she disappeared down the street.

This neighborhood spectacle, he’d quickly discovered, happened at least four times a day.

Hey, it was good to have a routine.

Tyler appreciated that better than most. He would be teaching classes that summer, but there were a couple of weeks between the spring and summer semesters, and he always got restless when he didn’t have a routine. Structure had never been his strong suit, though he took a lot of comfort in it. Sometimes he wondered if he was made that way or simply taught. His parents were potters and potheads, and they had encouraged his artistic streak. It wasn’t until he started elementary school that he realized it was wrong to draw on walls. It had been such a
relief
. School gave him structure, rules, direction. Summer vacations had him forgetting to eat because he spent hours and hours drawing and dreaming, never moderated by his parents. They had loved that about him. His had been a good childhood but one where ambition ranked right up there with Ronald Reagan as taboo subjects. He’d always assumed that, like his parents, he could make a meager living from his artwork and be happy with that. But school was nice, college even better, and he didn’t like the thought of leaving it.

So he decided to teach.

His parents never understood. Making good money was almost as bad as becoming a Republican.

He was still standing there on his walkway when Mrs. Kranowski came back down the sidewalk with Edward now wiggling in her arms. “That’s a good Edward,” she was saying to him. “That’s Mama’s good boy.”

“Good night, Mrs. Kranowski,” he said when she passed him again.

“Good night, Tyler.”

He liked this crazy place.

His first position after getting his master’s was at a high school in Florida, where they were so desperate for teachers that they were paying premium salaries, living expenses, plus moving expenses from his home in Connecticut. After a year or so, he also started teaching night art classes at the local university.

It was serendipity that eventually led him to Bascom. He met a woman at a conference in Orlando, an art professor at Orion College in Bascom. There was wine, there was flirtation, there was a wild night of sex in her hotel room. A few years later, during a restless summer break, he found out about an opening in the art department at Orion College, and that night came back to him in beautiful and vivid images. He interviewed for and got the position. He didn’t even remember the woman’s name, it was simply the romance of the thing. By the time he arrived, she had moved on, and he never found her.

The older he got, the more he thought about how he hadn’t married, about how what brought him to this town in the first place was another restless summer and a dream of a life with a woman with whom he’d had a one-night stand.

Okay, was that really romantic or just pitiful?

He heard a thud come from around the side of his house, so he took his hands out of his pockets and headed to the backyard. When he’d mowed a couple of days ago, the grass had been high, so there were big wet clumps of grass clippings all over the yard.

He should probably rake it all up. But then what would he do with all that grass? He couldn’t just leave it in a big clump in the middle of his yard. What if all the cut grass dried and killed the live grass under it?

One day out of school and he was already obsessively preoccupied with his lawn. And it would probably get worse.

What was he going to do with himself until the summer session started?

He had to remember to make notes to himself to eat. He’d do it tonight, so he wouldn’t forget. He’d stick them to the refrigerator, the couch, the bed, the commode.

The light from the back porch illuminated the backyard—a small yard, not nearly as large as the one next door. The Waverleys’ metal fence, covered with honeysuckle, separated the two yards. Twice since he’d moved in, Tyler had pulled kids off the fence. They were trying to get to the apple tree, they said, which he thought was stupid because there were at least six mature apple trees on Orion’s campus. Why try to go over a nine-foot fence with pointy finials when they could walk to Orion? He told the kids this, but they just looked at him like he didn’t know what he was talking about. That apple tree, they said, was special.

He walked along the fence, taking deep breaths of sweet honeysuckle. His foot hit something and he looked down to see he had kicked an apple. His eyes then followed a trail of apples to a small pile of them close to the fence. Another one hit the ground with a thud. This was the first time he’d ever had apples fall on his side of the fence. Hell, he couldn’t even see the tree from his yard.

He picked up a small pink apple, rubbed it to a shine on his shirt, then took a bite.

He slowly walked back to his house, deciding that he would put the apples in a box tomorrow and take them to Claire, tell her what happened. It would be a good excuse to see her again.

It was probably just another instance of following a woman to a dead end.

But what the hell.

Do the things you do best.

The last thing he remembered was putting his foot on the bottom step of the back porch.

Then he had the most amazing dream.

CHAPTER

2

Ten days earlier
Seattle, Washington

S
ydney walked over to her daughter’s bed. “Wake up, honey.”

When Bay opened her eyes, Sydney put her finger to the little girl’s lips.

“We’re going to leave, and we don’t want Susan to hear, so let’s be quiet. Remember? Like we planned.”

Bay got up without a word and went to the bathroom and remembered not to flush the commode, because the two town houses shared a wall and Susan would be able to hear. Bay then put on her shoes with the soft, quiet soles and dressed in the layers Sydney had set out for her because it was colder that morning than it would be later, but there wouldn’t be time to stop and change.

Sydney paced while Bay dressed. David had gone to L.A. on business, and he always had the older lady in the town house next door keep an eye on Sydney and Bay. For the past week, Sydney had been taking clothes and food and other items out of the house in her tote bag, not deviating from the routine David held her to, the one Susan kept watch over. She was allowed to take Bay to the park on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays and to go to the grocery store on Fridays. Two months ago she met a mother at the park who’d had the nerve to ask what the other mothers couldn’t. Why so many bruises? Why so jumpy? She helped Sydney buy an old Subaru for three hundred dollars, a good chunk of the money Sydney had managed to save in the past two years by taking one-dollar bills out of David’s wallet every so often, collecting the change in the couch cushions, and taking back items for cash that she’d bought with a check, the account for which David kept a sharp eye on. She’d been taking the food and clothes to the lady in the park, to be put in the car. Sydney hoped to God that the lady, Greta, hadn’t forgotten to park the car where they’d agreed. The last she’d talked to her was Thursday, and it was Sunday. David would be back that night.

Every two or three months, David would fly to L.A. to check in person how the restaurant he’d bought into was running. He always stayed to party with his partners, old college buddies from his UCLA days. He’d come home happy, still a little buzzed, and that would last until he wanted sex and she wouldn’t compare with the girls he’d been with in L.A. She used to be like those girls, long ago. And dangerous men had been her specialty, just as she always imagined it had been for her mother—one of the many reasons she left Bascom with nothing but a backpack and a few photos of her mother as a traveling companion.

“I’m ready,” Bay whispered as she walked into the hallway where Sydney was pacing.

Sydney went to her knees and hugged her daughter. She was five already, old enough to realize what was going on in her house. Sydney tried to keep David from having any sort of influence on Bay, and by unspoken agreement he didn’t hurt Bay as long as Sydney did what he said. But it was a terrible example Sydney was setting. Bascom, for all its faults, was safe, and going back to a place she despised was worth Bay finally knowing what security felt like.

Sydney pulled back before she started crying again. “Come on, honey.”

She used to be good at leaving. She used to do it all the time before she met David. Now the fear of it was making it hard to breathe.

When she first left North Carolina, Sydney had gone straight to New York, where she could blend and no one thought she was strange, where the name Waverley meant nothing. She moved in with some actors, who used her to perfect their Southern accents while she worked on getting rid of hers. After a year she went to Chicago with a man who stole cars for a living, a good living. When he was caught, she took his money and moved to San Francisco and lived on it for another year. She changed her name then, so he wouldn’t find her, and she became Cindy Watkins, the name of one of her old friends from New York. After the money was gone, she went to Vegas and served drinks. The girl she’d traveled from Vegas to Seattle with had a friend who worked at a restaurant called David’s on the Bay, and she got jobs for them both.

Sydney had been wildly attracted to David, the owner. He wasn’t handsome, but he was powerful and she liked that. Powerful men were thrilling, until the point that they turned frightening, and that was when she always left. She became so good at touching fire and not getting burned. Things with David started to get scary about six months after she started seeing him. He would bruise her sometimes, tie her up in bed and tell her how much he loved her. Then he started following her to the grocery store and to friends’ houses. She made plans to leave him, to steal some money from his restaurant and go to Mexico with a girl she’d met at the Laundromat, but then she found out she was pregnant.

Bay arrived seven months later, named by David after his restaurant. The first year of Bay’s life, Sydney resented the quiet baby for everything that had gone wrong. David disgusted her now, frightened her well beyond the limit she thought there was to being scared. And he sensed it and hit her more. This hadn’t been part of her plan. She didn’t want a family. She’d never counted on staying with any of the men she met. Now she had to stay because of Bay.

One day everything changed. They were still living in the apartment she and David had shared before moving to the town house. Bay was barely a year old, and she was playing quietly with the clean laundry in the basket on the floor, draping washcloths on her head and towels over her legs. Suddenly Sydney saw herself, playing alone while her mother wrung her hands and paced the floor at the Waverley house in Bascom, before her mother left again without a word. A powerful feeling surged through her, and her skin prickled and she let out a deep breath that came out like frost. That was the moment she let go of trying to be her mother. Her mother had tried to be a decent person, but she had never been a good mother. She had left her daughters with no explanation, and she never came back. Sydney was going to be a good mother, and good mothers protected their children. It had taken her a year, but she finally realized that she didn’t have to stay because she had Bay.
She could take Bay with her
.

She’d been so good at running in the past that she’d been lulled into a false sense of security, because no one had ever come after her. She actually made it through beauty school before walking out of the salon in Boise where she’d gotten her first job and finding David in the parking lot. Before she noticed him standing there by his car, she remembered turning her face into the wind and smelling lavender and thinking she hadn’t smelled that since Bascom. The scent seemed to be coming from the salon itself, as if trying to get her to follow it back in.

But then she saw David and he dragged her to his car. She was surprised but didn’t struggle, because she didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of her new friends in the salon. David drove off and parked behind a fast-food restaurant, where he hit her with his fists so many times she lost consciousness, and she woke up while he was fucking her in the backseat. He rented a motel room afterward and let her clean up, telling her how it was all her fault as she spit a tooth into the bathroom sink. They later went to pick up Bay at daycare, where David had discovered Bay was enrolled and was how he found them. He was charming and the teachers believed him when he said Sydney had been in a car accident.

Back in Seattle, his anger would come on so suddenly. Bay would be in the next room and Sydney would be making her a peanut butter sandwich, or she’d be in the shower, and suddenly David would appear and hit her in the stomach or pin her against the counter and rip down her shorts, then he’d pound into her, telling her she would never leave him again.

For the past two years, ever since he’d dragged her back from Boise, Sydney would walk into a room and smell roses, or she would wake up and taste honeysuckle in the air. The scents always seemed to be coming from a window or a doorway, a way out.

It was only one night while watching Bay sleep, crying quietly and wondering how she was going to keep her child safe when they were in danger if they stayed and in danger if they left, that it suddenly made sense.

She’d been smelling home.

They had to go home.

She and Bay walked silently downstairs in the predawn dark. Susan next door could see both the front and back doors, so they went to the window in the living room that overlooked the small strip of side yard that Susan couldn’t see. Sydney had earlier popped out the screen, so all she had to do was quietly open the window and lower Bay out first. Next she tossed down her tote bag, another suitcase she’d packed, and Bay’s small backpack, which she’d let Bay pack on her own, full of secret things that brought her comfort. Sydney crawled out and led Bay through the hydrangea bushes and into the parking lot by their house. Greta from the park said she was going to leave the Subaru in front of the 100 block of town houses one street over. She was going to put the keys above the visor. No insurance and a dead tag, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it would get them away.

It was drizzling as she and Bay jogged along the sidewalk, skirting the shine of the streetlights.

Sydney’s bangs were dripping into her eyes when they finally stopped at the 100 block of town houses. Her eyes darted around. Where was it? She left Bay and ran up and down the parking lot. There was only one Subaru, but it was too nice to be worth only three hundred dollars. It was locked too, and there were papers and an Eddie Bauer coffee mug inside. It belonged to someone else.

She ran around the parking lot again. She checked one street over, just to be sure.

It wasn’t there.

She ran back to Bay, out of breath, appalled that her panic made her leave her daughter even for a minute. She was getting sloppy, and she couldn’t do that. Not now. She sat on the curb between a Honda and a Ford truck and buried her face in her hands. All that courage wasted. How could she take Bay back, back to the way things were? Sydney couldn’t, wouldn’t, be Cindy Watkins anymore.

Bay came to sit close beside her, and Sydney wrapped an arm around her.

“It will be okay, Mommy.”

“I know it will. Let’s just sit here for a minute, okay? Let Mommy figure out what to do.”

At four in the morning, the parking lot was quiet, which was why Sydney jerked her head up when she heard a car approaching. She scooted Bay over as close to the pickup as possible to avoid detection. What if it was Susan? What if she’d told David?

The lights from the car slowly approached, as if searching for something. Sydney shielded Bay and closed her eyes, as if that would help.

The car stopped.

A car door slammed.

“Cindy?”

She looked up to see Greta, a short blond woman who always wore cowboy boots and two large turquoise rings.

“Oh, God,” Sydney whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Greta said, kneeling in front of her. “I’m so sorry. I tried parking here, but the guy living over there caught me and told me he was calling a tow truck. I’ve been driving by every half hour, waiting for you.”

“Oh, God.”

“It’s okay.” Greta pulled Sydney to her feet and led her and Bay to a Subaru wagon with plastic over a broken window on the passenger side and rust spots from fender to fender. “Be safe. Go as far as you can.”

“Thank you.”

Greta nodded and got into the passenger seat of the Jeep that had followed her into the parking lot.

“See, Mommy?” Bay said. “I knew it was going to be okay.”

“Me too,” Sydney lied.

The morning after Anna Chapel’s party, Claire went to the garden for a basket of mint. She was going to start on the food for the Amateur Botanists Association’s annual luncheon in Hickory on Friday. Being botanists, they liked the idea of edible flowers. Being a bunch of rich eccentric old ladies, they paid well and could give a lot of referrals. It was a coup to get the job, but it was a big job, and she was going to have to buck it up and hire someone local to help her serve.

The garden was gated by heavy metal fencing, like a gothic cemetery, and the honeysuckle clinging to it was almost two feet thick in some places, completely closing in the place. Even the gate door was covered with honeysuckle vines, and the keyhole was a secret pocket only a few could find.

When she entered, she noticed it right away.

There, in the cluster of Queen Anne’s lace, tiny leaves of ivy were sprouting.

Ivy in the garden.

Overnight.