First Frost (3 page)

Claire looked over her shoulder at Tyler, blankets kicked off of him, his bare chest emanating heat in waves. He never got cold. The man even wore his Birkenstocks, without socks, all year round.

“I'm going to finish up some work,” she said softly. The words barely took form, because she didn't want to wake him up. If he woke up, he would draw her back into bed with him, telling her that it could wait until morning.

She turned, just missing Tyler opening his eyes as soon as she left.

But he didn't stop her.

They had been married for almost ten years now, and Claire would still wonder, when she was tired and particularly short of temper, why he was still here, why he still loved her so much. He wasn't from here—he'd moved to take a job here at Orion College a decade ago, a time in Claire's life she always referred to as the Year Everything Changed—so he'd never fully invested in all of Bascom's superstitions and eccentricities. He'd never put much stock in the fact that everyone in town believed there were things about the Waverleys that couldn't be explained. In fact, deep down, she knew he didn't believe in any of it. He loved what
wasn't
special about her. Her hair, her laugh, even the way she walked. And it was confounding. Who she was without her gift was someone she couldn't even imagine. Being a Waverley, she used to think, back in the old days, back when she was alone, was her one redeeming quality.

She loved him with a force that could bring tears to her eyes, and the thought of losing him felt like standing on the edge of an endless black pit, about to fall in.

She shook her head as she walked down the hall. She was catastrophizing again. Tyler wasn't going anywhere. She knew her husband was as patient and happy as a leaf in the wind, blowing in whatever direction Claire went. But Claire had long ago realized, even after those constant dreams of her mother leaving faded away, that when you are abandoned as a child, you are never able to forget that people are
capable
of leaving, even if they never do.

Claire stopped at the end of the hall. She opened their daughter Mariah's bedroom door and saw that Mariah's window was open, too. Mariah was sleeping in a position similar to Tyler's, arms and legs outstretched, like she was dreaming of floating in warm water. She was so much like her father, and so little like Claire, that sometimes Claire thought it felt like loving another piece of him, wholly unattached from herself.

She picked up Mariah's ballet clothes and backpack as she crossed the room, looking around and feeling her child's normalcy like a crossword puzzle clue that made no sense to her. Mariah had wanted a pink room, perfect pink, the shade of watermelon cake frosting. She had wanted white furniture and a tufted princess comforter. She hadn't wanted old wallpaper or antiques or handmade quilts. Her daughter took ballet and gymnastics and was always invited to sleepovers and birthday parties. She even made friends easily. Just this week, she'd said she made a new best friend named Em, and Em was now all she talked about. That kind of normalcy never came so easily to a Waverley. And yet, here Mariah was, as normal as her father, as happy as he was, as oblivious to the eccentricities of Claire and this house as he was.

She reached the open window in Mariah's room and pulled it down. She thought of all she needed to do downstairs. She would make sure all her Friday candy orders were boxed and labeled. Then she would answer business emails in her office and save them in a draft folder to send during business hours so no one would know she was awake at 2:00
A.M.
, worrying about things that didn't need to be worried about.

Everyone was excited about Waverley's Candies, how much it was growing, how it was bringing so much attention to Bascom. Tyler, his brows raised when he'd found out what the profit margin had been over the summer, happily remarked that the new business was definitely good for Mariah's college fund. And even Claire had to admit that it was thrilling—seeing the Waverley name on the candy labels for the first time; the unfamiliar, but not unpleasant, jangle of nerves the moment she truly realized there were untold numbers of people out there, buying something she'd made. Claire. A Waverley. It was so different from catering, no longer personal, opening her talent up to a wider pool. It felt like the precipice of something big, and she wasn't immune to the idea of success. In fact, she was overcome with it, putting all her effort into the candy, thinking how proud her grandmother would have been. Grandmother Mary had been an intensely withdrawn woman who had sold her wares—her mint jellies and secret-love custard pies and rose geranium wine—only to people who would come to her back door, like it was a secret to be kept by all.

But as first frost approached, bringing with it that noticeable uncertainty, Claire could no longer deny that something about Waverley's Candies was distinctly off.

When orders from gourmet grocery chains and specialty stores around the South flooded in after the
Southern Living
article, Claire couldn't keep up with making the flower essences that flavored the candy herself. The demand became too great for what she could harvest from her garden, so she'd had to quickly make the decision to buy the essences, instead of making them.

And no one noticed
.

As the labels on the backs of the jars attested, the lemon verbena candies still quieted children and eased sore throats. The lavender candies still gave people a sense of happiness. And everyone still swore the rose candies made them think of their first loves.

But the candies now contained nothing from the Waverley garden, that mystical source of everything Claire held true.

In weaker moments, she found herself thinking, What if it wasn't real? What if Tyler was right and Waverleys were odd just because everyone had been told that for generations, because they just happened to live next to an apple tree that bloomed in the wrong time of year? What if the little girl Claire used to be, the one left here as a child, clinging to her grandmother Mary's apron, had latched on to the myth of this family simply because she'd so desperately wanted roots? What if the flowers weren't special? What if
she
wasn't? Instead of keeping the Waverley name local and mysterious like her grandmother, she'd opened it up to wider speculation. She'd wanted the attention, she'd wanted more people to know her gift, as if the more people who knew, the more real it would be. But she'd begun to wonder if she had betrayed a secret her grandmother had entrusted her with.

It didn't help that, at this time of year, Claire felt the loss of her grandmother Mary the strongest. Claire had been twenty-four when she'd lost her. That had been twenty years ago, but Claire could still smell Mary's fig and pepper bread sometimes, and there were times she was sure Mary was still here, in the way a carton of soured milk would tip over into the sink, or the mixing bowls on the shelf would seem to coordinate themselves by color overnight. She missed how natural everything felt with her grandmother around, how substantial.

She stepped away from Mariah's window to go to the kitchen. She paused, then turned back. Across the street, on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Kranowski's house, she thought she saw a shadow. She squinted, her nose almost pressed to the glass, and the shadow began to take form.

There was someone standing in the darkness between the streetlights. He was tall and wearing something light, like a gray suit. His hair was silver. Everything else was obscured, as if his skin were invisible.

But he was definitely staring in this direction.

She made sure Mariah's window was locked, then she quickly went downstairs and pulled a flashlight out of the drawer of the table by the door.

She unlocked the door and opened it, stepping onto the porch. The chilled floorboards made her toes curl.

There was no one across the street now.

“Hello?” she called.

She flicked on the flashlight and aimed the light on the front yard. A breeze flew through, picking up some leaves and swirling them around, the sound like fluttering pages in a quiet library. Mrs. Kranowski's dog barked a few times. Then everything was quiet.

There was a scent of something familiar in the air, though, something she couldn't quite place, a combination of cigarettes and stout beer and sweat and, strangely enough, cheap cherry lip gloss.

Everything meant something, in Claire's experience. And this vision of a man made the hair on her arms stand on end.

First frost was always an unpredictable time, but this year it felt more … desperate than others.

Something was about to happen.

 

2

Earlier that day, when the old man had stepped off the bus and onto the green in downtown Bascom, he had looked around with dismay, wondering how his life had gotten to this point.

He was usually one step ahead of the colder weather as he traveled, doing jobs as he made his way from the north to Florida every year. Hoards of carnival people wintered there. Mostly old-schoolers like him, who never referred to the past as the good old days.

But he needed a quick infusion of cash first, which was why he'd stopped here. It wouldn't be a lot, but it would get him through the next few months. Business had been slow this year. There were fewer and fewer people on his list and, truthfully, he didn't have the skill he used to have. He once was able to blackmail people so smoothly he could make them believe giving him their money was all
their
idea. But his heart just wasn't in it anymore.

Or so the expression went.

He was fairly certain he didn't have a heart anymore. The only thing that kept his blood flowing through his veins was the thrill of the heist, and even that felt like going through the motions these days. The last time he could remember feeling an actual beat to his long-ago heart was when he'd been eight years old and his mother, the Incredible Zelda Zahler, Snake Charmer from the Sands of the Sahara, had left him during the night, never to be seen again. Her name had actually been Ruthie Snoderly, and she'd been from the tiny town of Juke, West Virginia, about as far away from the sands of the Sahara as one could get. She'd been neither pretty nor nice, but he had loved her. Under her thick pancake makeup, her skin had been pockmarked, but he would stare at her adoringly from his cot at night and imagine her scars were constellations, a secret map to a far-off, happy place. Her accent had been thick and rural, and sometimes when he heard that deep Appalachian accent even today, he found himself longing for something he'd never really had in the first place: home.

He set his suitcase down. It was a strange place, this North Carolina town. There was a huge gray sculpture of a half-buried head in the park. One of the eyes on the sculpture had a monocle, and the hair had been so expertly molded even the comb marks looked real. He sighed, thinking this almost wasn't worth the effort. If he hadn't put so much research into this already, he would wait for the next bus and go to Florida right now. Maybe he would get a job at Taco Bell for the winter.

The Great Banditi working at Taco Bell.

No, that was something even he couldn't foresee.

So, first things first. He had to find Pendland Street.

He turned and noticed a teenager across the street. She had long, dark hair and a steady gaze. She had stopped to stare at him. Not everyone could hold a stare that long and not seem rude. He quickly summed her up: too observant. He smiled to put her at ease.

“I was wondering,” he called to her, “if you could tell me where Pendland Street is?”

She pointed west and he thanked her, picking up his suitcase and hurrying away. Best to be a mystery to some. Confusion was always the best way out of an unfamiliar situation. Any magician worth his salt knew that.

He found the street easily and walked slowly past the rambling old houses. Decent enough, he supposed. But the neighborhood didn't give him hope that he could make more money here than he'd already figured.

He had no idea where he was going to stay. He never did. Oftentimes it was in a park or a patch of woods somewhere. But his bones weren't what they used to be. He longed for softer things these days. Softer bus seats, softer beds, softer marks. And there was a chill in the air here that he didn't like. He wasn't moving fast enough to avoid the cold touch of autumn as it marched steadily from the north, and it made his joints stiff.

Halfway down the winding street, he stopped. His feet were already aching because, even though his shoes were so highly polished that they made perfect star-point reflections in the sunlight, there were holes forming on the soles, and he could feel every pebble he stepped on.

He looked up and saw that he had stopped in front of a house with a large sign on the front lawn that read,
HISTORIC PENDLAND STREET INN.

He looked at the address number. It was a mere nine houses away from where his latest mark lived. This was fortuitous, indeed. Perhaps things were looking up.

Instead of walking to his mark's house to scope it out, which was better done under the cover of night, anyway, he walked up the sidewalk to the inn. The house was painted pink with brick-red shutters. The gingerbread trim along its arches was white, as was the porch. No fewer than four pumpkins were on each step leading up to the porch, each of varying sizes and colors; some pumpkins were even white, one was purple. Dried pampas grass was in an urn beside the door. Someone had put a great deal of effort into the autumnal decorations.

He opened the door, which had a wreath made of bittersweet on it, and entered.

It looked as most old houses turned into inns did, lots of shiny dark wood, a sitting room to the left, a dining area to the right, and a staircase leading to the upper floor. A check-in desk was in the foyer. More pumpkins were in here, too, and displays of dried silver dollar plants and Japanese paper lanterns. Someone had also taken their floral arranging class very seriously.