The Gilly Salt Sisters (8 page)

She didn’t know what she was expecting to see from the top of the dunes. More beach, perhaps, or maybe another big pile of rocks or a road, but that’s not what she found. Instead she saw that she was standing at the mouth of Jo Gilly’s salt marsh. A wide channel of seawater separated her from the dunes on the other side. It flowed into what looked like a big pond, and from there the channel got narrower and fed into smaller pools, and then it spread out into a confusing series of ditches and squarish basins separated by earthen levees. Dee thought it was the strangest landscape she’d ever seen—busy but desolate, orderly but messy at the same time. It didn’t look like a human kind of spot at all, but rather something that devious fairies might have built.

There were only two buildings in the distance. The closest one
looked like some kind of storage shed or barn. It didn’t look too old. But the second structure, all the way on the other side of the marsh, was ancient. It was clearly a house—not very big, with a generous porch and covered in shingles like everything else in Prospect. It had more windows than the barn but was just as plain in the end. Joanna’s beat-up red truck was parked there, but there were no signs of life, and for that Dee was half glad. Joanna’s scars had been scary enough in the middle of town. Dee didn’t want to have to confront them in the middle of nowhere all by herself.

She hiked along the top of the dunes, taking in the watery spread of the marsh below her. The pools, which were really just shallow scoops with mud at the bottom of them, were the craziest colors: violet, rust, an iron green, and in one of the ponds the salt was bloodred. She’d never seen anything like it.

It was a little warmer once she got down level with the marsh. The dunes blocked the wind, and the air just felt odd down there, like it was heavier. Judging from the decades’ worth of junk heaped around the place, the farm didn’t seem like a place that change ever came to. She circled the barn, making sure no one was around the place first, and tried the double doors. They opened easily, but she didn’t have the guts to slip inside. She just got a glimpse of shadows and some equipment, then a blast of air that was surprisingly dry. She breathed in, and the back of her throat tingled and burned. She shut the doors quickly.

On the other side of the barn, the side that had been hidden from her up in the dunes, she saw that there was a little graveyard—nothing like the formal gated cemetery where they’d buried her mother, but a few raggedy headstones of different materials and sizes, half hidden by the marsh reeds and grasses. Curious, she wandered toward them.

There were four of them laid out in a loose semicircle, and they all seemed to be boys or men.
HERE LIES LYFORD GILLY, ETERNAL HUSBAND OF HEPHZIBAH, 1839,
the first one read in severe letters on unpolished granite.
SILAS GILLY, BELOVED SON, BELOVED CHILD, ANGEL NOW
, read the second, but there was no date on it. The
third stone was just a plain square of white marble, but the script carved on it was so full of flourishes that Dee had trouble reading it in the flat sunlight.
SIMMS MASON GILLY DIED IN BRAVE BATTLE, 1918,
it said.
HERE LIE HIS REMAINS. MAY THE WOUNDED FIND ETERNAL PEACE.
The last gravestone—another chunk of granite, but polished and thinner than the first one—was the most recent.
HENRY SILAS GILLY
, it said.
1942–1950. EARTH TO EARTH, DUST TO DUST, GIVEN TO THE SALT FOREVER.
Dee shivered. On top of that grave, there was a small pile of the bloodred salt she’d seen earlier.

Suddenly she heard a bang in the distance. She jumped and looked over her shoulder at the farmhouse. Joanna Gilly was limping down the porch steps, and she didn’t look happy. Dee stood up and started heading back toward the dunes, but then she saw a break in the grasses where the sandy lane scraggled to an uncertain end. She hadn’t been able to spot it from the beach, but she figured it must be the same path that led from town and passed the church. It probably ran parallel with Drake’s Beach on the other side of the dunes. At least she hoped it did as she sprang from the cluster of reeds and set off at a run back toward what now seemed like the lesser evils of her father, the diner, and the gray windows of Prospect.

T
he next morning a strange and urgent kind of sound woke her before dawn. It was a pounding or drumming she couldn’t place in her half slumber. She sat up in her bed under the dormer and pulled back the curtain just in time to see a huge white horse pass with a red-haired woman clinging to its back. Dee let out a little cry and started away from the glass, though she couldn’t say why. Claire wouldn’t have been able to see her even if she’d cared to look, Dee knew, which she clearly didn’t. She was crouched low over the horse’s neck, her hair caught in a loose braid, dressed in nothing but a pair of breeches and a thin blouse. There was a light mist falling, and almost as soon as they appeared, Claire and her
horse disappeared again into it and the street once again fell silent. Dee shivered and let the curtain drop.

She didn’t say anything to her father about what she’d seen as they set up service that morning in the diner, but the memory of the vision distracted her, and she broke two coffee mugs before they even opened the doors. The second time a shard of glass caught her thumb, and she ended up bleeding in fat drops all over her apron. The color reminded her of the weird red salt she’d seen in Jo’s marsh, and she almost swooned, but her father put an end to that. He slammed a fistful of napkins down on the counter and nodded at her to take them. “Damn it, Dee, that’s a dollar fifty you just wasted before I’ve even unlocked the register.” He sighed. “Go upstairs and see if Timothy Weatherly needs any help fixing the toilet up there, why don’t you. You’re just a menace down here.”

She untied her apron and left it on the counter, stepping around her father the way she’d avoid a bear with a thorn in its paw. To be honest, she didn’t really mind being banished to the leaky water closet with Mr. Weatherly. At least he wouldn’t call her a stupid waste of a girl. In fact, getting him to say anything at all was like trying to pedal a rusty bicycle through gravel. He’d answer questions civilly enough, Dee noticed, but even then he used the least amount of words to do it.

He looked up at Dee when she entered the small bathroom and then down to his open toolbox. “Hand me that wrench,” he said, jutting his chin toward the tools. “No, not that one. The big one.”

She handed it over and watched him tinker with the pipes. “I saw something weird this morning,” she finally said. Mr. Weatherly gave a savage twist to the plumbing but didn’t respond, so she continued. “I saw Claire Turner riding her horse right down the middle of the street. It was almost like a dream. She just came out of nowhere and then disappeared again. Does she always do that?”

Mr. Weatherly held out the wrench, and Dee took it from him.
He picked up a rag lying next to him and wiped his palms, but he didn’t answer her question. “Now the pliers,” he said. Dee rummaged in the toolbox, found them, and then squatted down on her heels and wrapped her arms around her knees. Talking to Mr. Weatherly was about as satisfying as talking to herself, she thought, which was to say not very.

“I walked out to Salt Creek Farm yesterday,” she muttered. “That’s sure a strange place. Why is the salt red in that one pool? And what about all those graves?” She wrinkled her forehead.

Mr. Weatherly stopped fiddling around with the pliers and fixed Dee with his flinty gaze. “You said you walked to the marsh. You didn’t say you went down in it.”

For someone who didn’t reply to a thing she said, Dee thought, Mr. Weatherly sure did seem to pay a lot of attention to tiny details. She shrugged. “So?”

“Who told you to go down there? Did Jo invite you?”

Dee remembered Jo’s lurching walk as she’d headed down the porch steps of the farmhouse. The woman had only one good eye, Dee knew, but it had seemed sharp-sighted enough. Dee blushed and shook her head. “No. No one asked me.”

Mr. Weatherly picked up his pliers again and resumed whatever he was doing to the toilet. He stood up and bent over the tank, and though Dee couldn’t see his face, his words rang clear enough. “Stay the hell out of that marsh if you know what’s good for you. And tell your father to quit being so pigheaded and buy some of the damn salt already. This place isn’t going to see a penny turn until you do, and it just might clear up all the trouble you’re having with these pipes.”

Dee stared at him wide-eyed, her thumb still oozing. “So it’s true? Jo Gilly’s salt could really curse our diner if we don’t buy it?”

Mr. Weatherly looked at her like she was an idiot, a classification her father would have confirmed, Dee suspected. “Heavens,” he drawled. “The stuff’s not that toxic, no matter what nonsense Claire Gilly spouts off about it. I just meant to suggest you might want to flush the plumbing out with a little brine, that’s all. It
works wonders.” And before Dee could say anything else, he collected his tools and went down into the diner’s kitchen to see about the drippy taps, leaving her with her bleeding thumb, to pick at her wounds alone.

D
ee turned her eyes away when she told her father what Mr. Weatherly had said about buying Joanna Gilly’s salt. He paused, his face coloring a faint pink, and finally he put his hand on the counter and said, “Fine. Next time she comes around, we’ll buy her damn salt. But
you
do it. There’s something about that woman that puts me off.”

Dee didn’t have to wait long. Jo showed up the next afternoon, her truck rattling and wheezing to a stop outside the empty diner. When Cutt heard it, his face flushed all over again, and he thrust a wad of bills at Dee, then stomped into the storeroom, where she knew he kept a spare bottle of something with a kick for situations like these. The bell above the door tinkled as Jo entered. Her right eye might have been glass, but her left eye was just fine, and it sized Dee up quickly. Dee caught her breath and tried to look busy with the ketchup containers as Joanna slung three small burlap bags of salt on the counter. “Are you ready to buy yet, girl?”

Dee felt in her apron pocket to make sure she still had the money her father had handed her. Without saying anything, she nodded. Joanna smiled, or at least Dee assumed that’s what her mouth was doing. It was kind of hard to tell.

“Good. I knew you’d come around. This ought to be enough to last for a few weeks. Put some out on every table and the place will fill right up again.”

Dee wondered if Jo was going to mention her sneaking around in the marsh. She’d run away before Jo had gotten in close, but Dee was sure Jo knew it was her out there all the same. She fumbled the wad of bills over to Jo, trying to keep her fingers from shaking. She didn’t even count them. Jo did, though, and she gave Dee back a third of them.

“Salt isn’t that dear,” she said. “Not even mine.” Dee folded the money back into her pocket. She’d keep it, she decided. It would be her personal fee for being forced to conduct this transaction.

Jo watched her closely. “You’re going to put that money back in the register, right?”

Dee felt her face go hot. She was starting to think the townspeople might have a point when it came to Joanna Gilly. There was something about her that rubbed a person the wrong way. “Sure,” she said, taking her hand out of her pocket.

Jo nodded. “I thought so. That’s a good child.”

Dee scowled. If there was anything she hated more than being caught red-handed, it was being called a child. All her life she’d had features rounded with puppy fat that inspired old women to squeeze her cheeks and boys to grab her ass. She just didn’t have the kind of looks that anyone took seriously.

She lifted one of the bags of salt now. It felt heavier than she expected it to, and lumpier as well. Jo watched while Dee opened the sack and stuck her finger in. The substance was coarse and grayish, like gravel crushed with quartz. It reminded Dee of the stone dust from the quarries at home. She brought her finger to her mouth, sucked the salt onto her tongue, and a wave of longing immediately swept over her for all the things she’d left cradled in the Green Mountains: her mother’s memory, her childhood bedroom with the dotted-swiss curtains, the heart-shaped pond where she’d learned to swim. She closed her eyes to keep her tears pressed in. “The taste of it takes me back to something,” she choked.