The Safe-Keeper's Secret (8 page)

Elminstra looked over at her. “It was a help. You don't know it yet, but sometimes the weight of knowledge is almost too much to bear. Sharing it with one other living soul is enough to ease your burden. Even if no one else ever learns of it. Even if nothing changes.”

Fiona shook her head again, more violently, but she could not dislodge the bees. “I don't understand,” she said fiercely. “How could you not have done anything to help her?”

“Fiona—” her mother said, but Fiona flung her mug to the floor. It exploded into a dozen pieces and threw liquid in as many directions. Fiona ran through the door and down the lawn and out toward the streambed, without pausing to see if anyone hurried after her or even came to the door and called out her name.

She spent the next two hours sitting on the bank of the spring, watching the water gurgle past. The air was still hot enough, this early in the season, to make the notion of wading in cold water seem pleasant, but she hadn't bothered to unlace her shoes and step in. She hadn't bothered to undo the top two buttons of her dress, which she usually did as soon as she
got home. She hadn't bothered to pick up a stone and bounce it down the glittering surface of the water. She just sat there and stared, and wondered how soon the world would fall apart.

Reed came looking for her around the dinner hour. She heard him coming from fifty feet away, because he was making no effort at stealth, but he did not call to her. He didn't even greet her when he arrived at the streambed. He merely dropped to a seat beside her on the muddy bank and put his arm around her waist.

They sat there a few moments in silence, and the only thing in the whole world that seemed to have direction or motion was the creek before them. As a rule, Reed was not formed for quiet, but on rare occasions, when the situation demanded, he could sit still as a cat watching an unwary bird. That was how he sat now while Fiona continued to watch the water.

Finally she sighed and stirred. His arm tightened briefly, and then he released her. He pulled his kirrenberry whistle out of his pocket and began blowing silent melodies into the hushed twilight.

“I couldn't have kept a secret like that,” Fiona said at last.

Reed held the whistle up to his eye and peered down it as if wondering what obstruction kept its voice silent. “You didn't have to,” he said. “It wasn't told to you.”

“But someday, when I'm a Safe-Keeper, someone will tell me a story like that. I don't know what I'll do.”

“You don't have to be a Safe-Keeper,” he said.

“But I want to be.”

He shrugged and put the whistle away. Finding a handful of round stones, he dropped them one by one into the racing current. “Then you'll learn the way of it. Someday. But there's no reason you have to start practicing now.”

“What if I'm never good enough?” she asked, not looking at him.

He balanced a bigger rock on his head a moment, then jerked forward with enough force that it flew away from him and into the stream. “Well, I suppose, you tell somebody's secret, and nobody ever tells you secrets again, and then you get a different job,” he said. “Ned said he tried to be a carpenter before he was a blacksmith, but he could never understand the wood. He says he understands iron.”

“It's not the same thing,” she said impatiently.

He shrugged and threw a rock so hard that it landed on the other side of the creek, hit a tree, and rolled into the water anyway. “I don't see why not,” he said. “It's just finding out what you're good at. Most people don't know that when they're ten years old.”

“All you're good at is throwing rocks,” she said irritably.

He grinned over at her. His eyes were a freckled green, fringed with spiky brown lashes, and even when he was serious he looked like he was up to mischief. “What I want to know,” he said, “is what some of the other secrets are.”

“You can't ask that!”

“But don't you wonder? And what Angeline's secrets are? Do you think they know about buried gold? Like the cleric in Thrush Hollow had?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Or maybe they know that—that—Lacey stole a diamond ring from Elminstra's house.”

“Elminstra doesn't have any diamond rings.”

“Well, she doesn't
now
,” Reed said.

Fiona couldn't keep herself from laughing. “Maybe they know where old Josh keeps his still.”

“Maybe they know about people who've been
murdered
.”

“No! That's terrible!”

“Bad people,” Reed said quickly. “People who deserved to die.”

For a moment, Fiona heard the echo of her mother's voice.
Who killed Anya Haber?
“They probably know who killed them,” she said, entering into the spirit of it, “and how they did it, and why.”

“They might be hiding evidence,” Reed said. “A knife. Or a cup of poison.”

Fiona glanced over her shoulder. “Maybe,” she breathed, “they helped bury the bodies.”

Reed leaned over to whisper in her ear. “Maybe,” he said, “there's one buried in our root cellar.”

Fiona shrieked and covered her ears, but now she was laughing. “No! I won't be able to sleep tonight!”

“Fi-o-na,” Reed moaned in an unearthly voice. “I'm coming back to find my bones.”

She screamed again and scrambled to her feet. Reed chased her all the way home, crooning her name and making her laugh so hard she almost couldn't keep her footing.

That night, Fiona was under the covers with one candle still lit when Damiana came in to tuck her into bed. Her mother sat on the edge of the mattress and brushed her blond hair back, as always.

“So are you still upset with me?” her mother asked.

Fiona stared up at her, trying to read secrets on the smooth, composed face. She wondered if this was why Damiana always seemed so
untroubled, no matter how hectic the day; she knew of so much that was so much worse. “I'm trying to understand it,” she said at last.

“Everybody has a part to play,” her mother said. “Bart Seston raises cattle, the butcher slaughters them so we can have food. A midwife brings people into the world, an undertaker buries them when they die. Life is good sometimes, hard sometimes, bad sometimes, and good again.”

“I don't always understand your part,” Fiona said.

“I am the voice that says ‘I know' when someone tells me ‘This is too hard for me to hold on to by myself.' I am the soul who reminds other souls that they are not alone. I cannot bring them solutions, I cannot make their troubles disappear, I can only say that I hear them and I understand. Sometimes that's enough.”

“Sometimes it's not,” Fiona said.

“Sometimes it's not,” her mother agreed. “And then they look for help from someone other than me.”

“You said you knew other secrets, even ones worse than Madeleine's.”

Damiana was quiet for a moment. “One or two,” she said at last.

Fiona shook her head against the pillow. “But aren't they ever too much for
you
to know?” she asked.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I have to hear someone say ‘I know' when I have a secret too great to hold on to in silence. And then I tell Angeline. Or the Safe-Keeper in Thrush Hollow. Someone else who understands silence.”

“You can't tell Thomas, though.”

“Thomas is the last one I would tell.”

“It's strange that the two of you would be friends, then.”

Damiana smiled. “Ah, but Thomas is my mirror image, don't you see? Or perhaps it is stronger than that. He brings light where I create darkness. He gets to say aloud all the things I have kept to myself. When the time for secrets is past, and the time for truth has arrived.”

Fiona turned on her side and folded her hands together under her chin. “I think it would be hard,” she said. “To hide the truth or to tell it. It would be so hard.”

Damiana leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “Any task worth doing is.”

Chapter Five

T
hat fall, Fiona's greatest secret was that she was desperately in love with Calbert Seston. He was two years older than she was, a swaggering, honey-blond farmer's son with an angular face and the well-developed muscles of a laborer. He could beat up any boy in the schoolhouse, both older and younger, and he had a fine, defiant way of answering Miss Elmore when she asked him a question in class. All the girls in the second classroom blushed and sighed when he looked their way, but he was not much interested in girls. He would rather win a footrace from the quarter-mile marker to the schoolhouse door than spend five minutes making conversation with the prettiest girl in class. Even Megan Henshaw, who was fourteen and beautiful, could not hold his attention for long, though it was an accepted thing that they were destined to marry. Megan's father owned a slaughterhouse near the Seston property, and Calbert's father owned the biggest herd of cattle for miles around. Megan was bored and possessive when Cal was sitting near her, familiar with him through years of family dealing and somewhat blinded to his magnetism. But she knew all the other girls adored him, and so she wanted him, and made sure to touch his arm or address him directly at least once a day, even when he appeared to be ignoring her.

Fiona told no one, but she was sure, she had a preternatural certainty, that she and Calbert Seston were destined to be together. Everything about him appealed to her, from the shape of his face to the stance of his body. She would grin to herself when he made some obscure comment that no one else in the room, not even Miss Elmore, understood, because
she
had understood it; it had seemed clever to her. She knew his wardrobe by heart. She could often guess, half an hour before he arrived at school in the morning, whether he would be wearing his blue shirt or the plain cotton white one with the tiny tear by the collar. She could distinguish his voice in any group, no matter how many were talking at once or how far down the road they might be. His laugh delighted her. His smile haunted her. She wanted to be with him forever.

Often she was amazed at how well they had been designed for each other. His father's farm—which Cal, an only child, would inherit—was situated just outside of town on the northern edge. It was private enough for someone who wanted to consult with a Safe-Keeper, but close enough to town that it was not hard to reach. His steady income from farming and raising cattle would mean she would not have to worry when troubled visitors arrived at her door, whispering, “I cannot pay you. I have nothing to give.” And since farming was a job that took a man's time, often from sunup till sundown, Fiona would be alone enough to make visitors feel comfortable about creeping in to tell their secrets.

They were truly meant for each other, although Calbert did not seem to know it yet.

Fiona sometimes thought she should wait till they were both much older—eighteen and sixteen, perhaps—before she let him know how much she loved him and how well suited they were. But then she worried that some other girl might snatch him up first—Megan Henshaw, most likely, because all you had to do was look at her smooth, scheming face and know that she was already planning her wedding down to the last fall of lace. Therefore, most of the time Fiona thought she should tell him now, as soon as she could, so he realized where his future lay and began to prepare for it. Even so, she might not have approached him that day in late autumn except that circumstances combined to put them alone together for a few moments, and Fiona seized the opportunity when she had it.

It had not, on the face of it, been a propitious day. Cal had arrived late that morning, sauntering in with a little half-sneer on his face, nodding in acknowledgment when his friends greeted him with whistles and cheers. Miss Elmore, who had been outlining a mathematical problem to the ten-and eleven-year-olds, did not at first respond to his arrival, just finished her long explanation. Fiona reacted, though; her breath caught slightly in her throat and her heart fluttered a moment behind her ribs. From the corner of her eye, she watched Cal take his seat, stretch out his long legs before him, and toss out a laughing comment to his admirers.