The Gilly Salt Sisters (16 page)

Keeping her salt rake steady, Jo gathered the fragile flakes into a cluster at her feet, then leaned down and scooped them into the shallow wooden bowl she’d brought with her. Only after she was sure she had collected all the crystals did she push the underlying gray sludge into a pile at the edge of the pond. She would let it dry overnight and then move it into yet a larger pile to sit for the rest of the season before she transported it all into the barn.

The barn reminded Jo of a kind of chapel. It was very old, original to the farm, in fact, and it was really more shed than barn. It didn’t have the typical vaulted roof of a cheerful storybook structure, nor did it have a hayloft, but it did have room for animals (though the stalls were empty now) and wide double doors. Inside, it was gloomy, dusty, and dry. Over the years saline had stained the wooden walls and floor in patches and rings, giving the wood a diseased appearance that matched the beetles and
potato bugs that crawled in the crannies. Jo emptied the flakes from her bowl into the season’s pile and turned to hang her rake up in its place on the pegboard on the wall. Those actions were as familiar to her as brushing her teeth or polishing her boots and she performed them the same way every time. Even when Jo had nothing else, her mother had taught her, she could still have order.

That’s why she didn’t see Whit right away. He was standing in the shadows in the back of the barn. At first she thought he was a ghost. She jumped and dropped the rake before she could hang it. Then she recognized the familiar cock of his head, and her heart settled back in her chest. He whistled the three-beat trill they’d come up with as one of their private signals the summer he was ten and she was twelve.

“What on earth are you doing in here?” she said.

His voice shook a little, as if he were fighting back tears, but that couldn’t be, Jo figured, because Whit Turner never cried. “I came to say good-bye to you. My mother just told me we’re leaving early for boarding school.”

Jo bit her lip, refusing to be sorry. The people she loved always left: Henry, her father, and now Whit. The summer was ending, after all, and they were getting another year older. They never did see each other much in the winter anyway. As Jo was trying to gather her thoughts, Whit let go of her hands and fumbled in his pocket.

“I brought you something.” He pulled out a small package wrapped in shiny paper and waited while Jo opened it. Underneath the wrapping was a small velvet box, and when she lifted the lid, Jo saw a heart-shaped locket threaded on a silver chain. Whit took the necklace from her hands and stepped behind her so he could fasten it around her neck.

“It reminds me of you,” he said, tapping the locket with his fingernail. “Hard, but still pretty all the same.” That kind of sweet talk was new between them, and Jo wasn’t sure if she liked it. She reached up and grasped the necklace.

“What’s this?” she asked, squinting.

Whit blushed. “I had it engraved. I put a
W
on it so you’ll always remember me.”

Jo caught her breath. Was Whit crazy? She couldn’t walk around town with his initial strung around her throat. Ida would kill her if she ever saw, not to mention her own mother. It was the kind of thing a girlfriend would wear, and Jo wasn’t Whit’s girlfriend. She reached up and unhooked the necklace as fast as she could, dropping it back into Whit’s palm. “I can’t keep it.”

Whit’s fingers curled around hers like a question mark. “Why not?” His face was as open and soft as a baby’s, but his eyes were as clear as she’d ever seen them. Suddenly, without warning, his lips found hers, and his tongue pressed against the seal of her mouth until she felt herself leaning into him and opening her jaw just a little. “Relax,” Whit whispered. “It’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re in love,” and Jo wanted to, but something seemed terribly wrong. She had always assumed that kissing Whit would be as natural as running down the beach with him barefoot, but it didn’t feel that way. It was a little like running barefoot, all right, but with sharp stones cutting her feet.

She jerked her head away. “Love is for fools, Whit Turner,” she said, because she couldn’t think of anything better. Then she took off.

“Jo, please!” Whit’s voice rose up, but she was already running, obeying the urge to put as much distance between them as she could. She sprinted through the darkening marsh and brushed the back of her hand against her lips. The taste of Whit—a milky, wet flavor she couldn’t name—still filled her. She spit into the mud.

She ended up at St. Agnes. Worried that Whit would come after her, she pushed open the sanctuary doors and slipped inside. Tonight only a single votive flickered at Our Lady’s painted feet, and so Jo lit a second candle and knelt. The loose floorboards gave a little under her knees. The familiar smell of dry plaster and dust tickled her nose, but this evening the comfort of the familiar did little to ease her.

Up close, in the gathering dusk, the blank oval of the Virgin’s
missing face was even more pronounced, a puddle with no bottom. Maybe that’s why the figure inspired confessions, Jo thought, but before she could follow that line of reasoning, Father Flynn’s voice rang through the sanctuary, as if she’d conjured him. “Hello, child. This is quite a surprise.” He stepped through the sacristy’s open door and squinted at her. “Is everything fine?”

Jo blinked back her tears and bowed her head. “Not really.”

Father Flynn took a seat in the pew behind her. He had a way of lurking that always made Jo want to spill her guts to him.

“I just made a mess of things with Whit Turner. He tried to give me something I couldn’t take. And worse, he’s going off to boarding school early. Did you know that?”

Father Flynn nodded. “What did he want to give you?” he finally asked.

“A locket with his initial on it.”

She heard Father Flynn exhale sharply. “And why didn’t you accept it?”

“I don’t exactly know…” She trailed off. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Whit, she realized. It was that she liked him far too deeply for a summer romance. “I don’t guess Gillys and Turners are the best match,” she said at last.

Father Flynn leaned back in the pew and looked at her gravely. “The thing about you and Whit is that you’re a bit like mustard and vinegar. Good on your own, but a little overwhelming when paired up. And you’re in the sweetest part of your life, my child. Try to remember that.” He hesitated, his eyes growing filmy. “You can come to me, you know, with anything that’s in your heart. I know… well, I know you sometimes must miss your father.” Before Jo could respond, Father Flynn stood up and waved a hand at her. “You’d best be getting back to the marsh, my dear. It’s almost dark.”

Jo headed home, suddenly regretting returning the locket to Whit. It would have been a perfect token for Our Lady, she realized. As she picked her way along the edge of the marsh, she weighed the heft of the silver locket again in her mind, turning it
one way and then another, like a stone dragging along a river bottom. What
would
Ida do if she caught Jo wearing something like that? Jo wondered. It was hard to know. Ida was a woman who had everything—jewels, furs, not to mention a husband she held on to like he was the outgoing tide and a son she’d do anything to protect.

But Ida had a few other things as well—namely, a past she’d never gotten rid of. And when a woman had too much, Jo mused, placing one careful foot in front of the other, what would she do? Why, she’d give some things away, that was what, whether they were last season’s clothes, a set of dishes she no longer cared for, or—dared Jo even say—the illegitimate child no one could ever prove she’d borne, but half the town whispered that she had. Jo stepped onto the farmhouse’s shambling front porch, glad for the single bulb’s weak glow.

“Where the tarnation have you been?” her mother asked when Jo appeared in the kitchen. She nudged Jo’s supper across the table. “Here. Soup’s cold and the bread’s hard, but you need something for your stomach.”

“I went to St. Agnes,” Jo said, sitting down. “Whit and I had an argument. I wondered if Father Flynn could help.”

This elicited mere silence from her mother. She opened her mouth as if to tell Jo something, then changed her mind and clattered dishes into the sink. “And did he?” she finally asked, and Jo shook her head. Mama turned the tap on full force. “What does he know anyway?” she said eventually. “Father Flynn’s just a priest. And worse than that, he’s a man. He should keep his blasted nose out of women’s business if he doesn’t want it bitten clean off.”

I
n the morning Jo woke groggy and tired, and she saw that the weather had grown chilly and dark. When she came downstairs for breakfast, her mother handed her a loaf of brown bread and told her to deliver it to Father Flynn. “And after that,” Mama said,
“you can walk into town and stop at the post office for me. We’re fresh out of stamps.”

When Jo arrived at St. Agnes, the sanctuary was empty. It was so early that no one would have come out that way yet, Jo knew, and she appreciated the solitude. But as she edged down the center aisle, she saw that she was wrong. Someone had been here already, and that person had left something, too.

Despite the earliness of the hour, there was already a votive burning in front of the Virgin, and beneath it sat a cream-colored envelope with interlocked initials on the front.
IMT.
Ida May Turner. Jo stepped closer, puzzled. Out of all the women in Prospect, Ida was the only one who didn’t openly adore Our Lady. “Pagan nonsense,” she always barked whenever some poor fool asked her about it. “I didn’t get where I am by groveling on my knees in front of some beat-up painting.” In Jo’s entire life, she’d never once seen Ida give the Virgin anything.

Lying next to the envelope was a necklace that looked vaguely familiar to Jo. It was the single pearl on a silver chain that Ida sometimes wore, in marked contrast to her showier jewels. Jo dropped the bread and salt in front of the Virgin without even bothering to genuflect, and then she committed a sin so deep she never did confess it.

There was an unwritten law that whatever was left out for the Virgin would remain undisturbed until after Mass on Sunday, when Father Flynn would collect all the items. The slips of prayers and written confessions he burned without reading. Words to the Virgin, whether scribbled or spoken, were for her alone, and no one—not even clergy—would have dared to violate that covenant. But that day Jo did. Looking around to see if anyone was coming, she reached out and stuffed first the letter and then the pearl into her pocket.

“Child.” She half choked on her own breath and whipped her hand out of her pocket. Father Flynn had the quietest feet in Christendom. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him out of the sides of her eyes, but he didn’t seem to notice she’d done
anything wrong. “You’re here awfully early,” he said, kneeling next to her.

“Yes,” Jo replied, her heart hammering. “I brought you some bread.” She shoved the loaf at him.

“Thank you.” He reached down and scooped it into his broad hands with no trace of suspicion. “You seem quiet this morning. Missing a certain young man, no doubt?”

Jo frowned. “No. We just have a lot of work to do yet in the marsh, and the weather’s changing fast.”

The father clapped a friendly palm on her shoulder. “Well, don’t let me keep you.” Jo waited until she was sure he was gone, and then she tiptoed out of the sanctuary, her hand anchored on the treasure in her pocket.

She wandered down the lane, constantly checking over her shoulder, though who she thought would have followed her, she didn’t know. The bluff was about as deserted as a widow’s house in February. Nevertheless, heart in her mouth, Jo kept walking, all the way to the bottom of Plover Hill. She stopped when she got to the pear tree. It wasn’t a place she ever had the occasion to frequent, it being a spot for lovers’ trysts. The leaves had all turned brown and fallen off early, but Jo crunched through them anyway and sat under the canopy of bare branches, gazing up at the clapboard monstrosity that was Turner House. She put her hand on the letter again, thinking she had a good idea of what was inside it, but she had to be sure. Before she could change her mind, she ripped open the envelope, pulled out the pages, and read the words that would alter the rest of her life.

It was a simple story about a late-season storm and a pair of babies born—a tale Jo thought she knew, but never quite like this. She scanned the words three times to make sure she understood them, and when she was finished, she was certain of two things, the first being that she wished she hadn’t stolen the letter, for she didn’t desire the terrible knowledge about herself that it held, and second that even though they involved her, the words Jo held so loosely under that tree weren’t hers to keep.

She should have done the proper thing and returned both the pearl and the letter to the Virgin, of course, or, barring that, she should have either buried or burned the evidence. But she was young, and secrets can be a weighty burden to carry when you’re not used to them. She should have turned to Our Lady for solace, but the thought of her—faceless, faded, her skirts rubbed thin—made Jo’s blood go cold. And more than anything, Jo wanted to know that another living heart was as nicked as hers, and she knew exactly whose heart she wanted it to be.