The Steep and Thorny Way (23 page)

I inched forward inside my circle and heard my soles scraping across bits of gravel—a sound that made the surfaces of my teeth buzz. “You've got to tell me, Daddy. I've got to know.”

“It was supposed to have been a peaceful night. Christmas Eve.” He rubbed his neck with the hand that didn't hold his hat, and a tear rolled down his left cheek, landing on his lips. “People should have been in church, or at home with their loved ones, but hate won out that night.”

“Oh . . . Daddy . . . what did they . . . ?” I covered my mouth and muffled my own tears. “What did someone do to you?”

“Go far away from Elston, darling.” He put his hat back on his head. “Get yourself educated. Come back with weapons of justice and truth that will kill off the ignorance and fear. Help the innocent live in peace.” He shook his head with a look of warning in his eyes. “But don't you dare murder anyone. Don't become like one of them.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“You understand me?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Don't forget me, Hanalee.”

“I won't.” I pressed my hot hands against my cheeks. “Of course I won't.”

“But don't kill for me, either.”

I nodded again. “All right.”

“Now go home. It's not safe out here. Stop coming out to find me all by yourself.”

“Haven't you been trying to find me? Isn't that why you've been wandering this road?”

“I've been trying to . . .” He swallowed and cast his eyes toward the stretch of highway behind me, while the fog spilled over his shoulders. “To make it back home. To protect your home from those boys.”

“Which boys?”

“I'm not entirely sure,” he said, and the fog closed around him like a fist.

All I saw were his legs and his shoes.

“Daddy?”

“There's nothing worse,” he said from within the haze, “than luring boys who aren't yet even men into a life of hatred.”

The mist snaked around his legs and swallowed him up entirely, robbing me of my view of him. I stood alone on the road, in the devil's circle, racking my brain to remember if Laurence had been sitting in the Paulissens' pew that Christmas Eve that Daddy died. As hard as I tried, as much as I strained to remember Fleur seated beside both her mother and her brother, I couldn't help but think Laurence wasn't there.

“Was Laurence at the Dry Dock?” I asked into the darkness. “Was he one of the boys?”

“Maybe,” I heard my father say in a voice grown distant and hushed. “They covered their faces in those ungodly hoods. I'm sorry. I should have been stronger.”

CHAPTER 19

NEVER DOUBT I LOVE

I TORE THROUGH THE WOODS TO
the Paulissens' shed, intent on telling Joe what I'd gleaned from my encounter. I'd forgotten all about the body in the river and Mrs. Adder howling with grief against her husband's side. I'd even forgotten that Joe had had to leave the shack.

I threw open the door, and a cold streak of remembrance shot through my veins. The little building sat in darkness. A small strip of moonlight showed me the cot, empty and bare, parked against the right wall. The rectangular card house still stood on the floor by the foot of the bed, but nothing else—no books nor blankets nor carpetbags—indicated signs of a recent habitation.

“Oh, Joe.” I covered my face with my hands. “I forgot. Oh, God.”

I turned and whisked myself back over the creek and through the trees and hedges to my family's property. The white sliver of a moon ducked behind treetops and the traveling fog, which rolled across the land, blanketing the world in a mist that chilled and smothered. To find my way, I relied on my memories of the pathways, as well as the strange golden luminescence of the woods that Mildred's potion always offered. Gray-green moss dangled like fringe-covered sleeves from the arms of the branches overhead.

I pushed down my fears and pressed onward.

On the easternmost edge of our land stood the weather-beaten stable I'd mentioned to Joe. I sprinted toward its dark silhouette, my feet clapping across the ground and hope surging through my blood. The roof sat crooked; the boards of the walls had warped from summer suns and nine long months of rain each year. Yet the structure remained upright, intact enough to hide Joe.

I grabbed the handle and hoisted open the door with a whine of rusted hinges. The scent of horse manure hit my nose, despite the animals' long absence. Mama had sold off our mare and stallion the summer before, to make ends meet, before Uncle Clyde proposed to her last fall.

“Joe?” I asked into the dark void in front of me.

Something moved from within—a rustle in the hay.

I jumped back and asked, “Who's there?”

“It's me.”

Joe's voice
.

“Holy hell!” I grabbed my throat. “Are—oh, God. Oh, Christ.” I sank to my knees in the all-consuming blackness. “You're not a ghost now, too, are you?”

Joe struck a match and set his kerosene lantern aglow in a far corner, brightening his face and a blue button-down shirt.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“They found a body—one that looked like you—up by the river, by St. Johns.”

“Well”—he shook out the match—“it's not me.”

“You're not a ghost?”

“If I were, don't you think I'd find a better place to haunt than a rickety old stable that reeks of horse shit?”

I shoved the door closed and stumbled toward him across hay. A floorboard buckled under my weight, tripping me, and I had to hold my arms out to my sides to keep from falling.

Joe pushed himself off the ground. “Are you all right?”

“I took that Necromancer's Nectar again.”

“Oh, jeez, Hanalee.” He tramped toward me on bare feet. “Why'd you do that to yourself again? You already got your answer the other night.”

I tipped too far to my right, and my hip and shoulder slammed against the floor. No pain registered within my bones or my nerves, so I kept right on talking.

“I needed to speak to my father again,” I said from down on the ground—a roiling sea of wood and stale hay. “I had more questions.”

Joe leaned down and hooked his fingers into my armpits.

“Hey!” I called out. “What are you doing?”

He dragged me around in the opposite direction. The dark rafters above whirled in a half circle, and my brain and stomach spun.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“I'm bringing you over to my blanket so you don't kill yourself. There's some rusted old farm equipment stored in here, and you could smack your head on it if you're not careful.” He pulled me over to the same blanket we had shared in the woods and draped me across the coarse fabric. The floorboards beneath dug against my spine and tailbone. The blanket scratched my bare neck.

“What's this?” Joe uncoiled one of my curls. “You chopped off your hair?”

“I got too hot after drinking that potion. I think the rest of my curls might still be lying all over the kitchen floor.”

“Your mother's going to kill you.”

“Better her than someone else.”

Joe plopped himself down beside me with a sigh that sounded like the hiss of one of his matches. He set the lantern between us and leaned his shoulder blades against the wall. The light of the flame danced up and down his face, showing me the brown of his eyes and the soft curve of his lips, as if to verify he still existed as a person made of flesh and bone. I liked the way he looked—liked it so much, my chest ached—but I forced myself to stay quiet about that particular sensation.

“Well,” I said with a sigh myself, “I'm awfully sorry for whoever that was who ended up in the river. Your poor father drove up to St. Johns with Sheriff Rink to identify the body.”

“I'm sure my pop was praying that body was mine.”

“I don't know about that. I spoke to him this morning.”

He tilted his head. “You spoke to my father?”

“When I got back this morning, your parents and Sheriff Rinky-Dink were at my house with my parents, waiting to pounce.”

“Oh.” He shrank back against the wall. “Sorry about that.”

“You should be. You tossed me smack-dab into the middle of the Spanish Inquisition, Joe. I'll have you know I both defended your honor and mourned your death, all in one day.”

He breathed out a curt laugh. “I doubt you mourned me with too many tears.”

“Stop saying things like that.”

“Like what?”

“Stop saying people would be glad about you dying. I stopped breathing when I heard about the body in the river. Dr. Koning had to help to bring air back into my lungs.”

Joe shifted his legs but didn't say anything in reply.

“You're welcome,” I snapped.

“Thank you. For worrying.”

I covered my eyes with my right hand and settled my breathing.

“Do you believe you spoke to your father just now?” he asked.

I nodded, my hand still cupping my face. “Yes. I do.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said . . .” I swallowed. “You're not going to like this at all when I tell you.”

“What did he say?”

I lowered my fingers to my right cheek and peered up at the dark rafters, expecting to see the yellow eyes of a rat or a bat staring down at me. “He said he meant the Dry Dock, not Dr. Koning.”

Joe lifted his head off the wall. “
What?
”

“Mildred told me that my father had just become a bootlegger. He picked up a crate of whiskey from her house that Christmas Eve, and I'm willing to bet my life he delivered it to the Dry Dock.”

Joe ran his fingers through the shorter strands of hair toward the back of his head. “Are you sure this is genuinely your father's spirit you're seeing?”

“Jeez, you didn't ask me that question the other night, when you thought Daddy meant Uncle Clyde.”

He grumbled and kept mussing up his hair.

“He said something about boys being there,” I continued. “Boys in ‘ungodly hoods,' as he called them. And today at the picnic, Laurence told me—”

“Why were you talking to Laurence?”

“He came after me when I was speaking to Fleur, and he told me what was meant by the ‘necktie party' line on those Junior Order of Klansmen notes. He said a person gets hoisted off the ground with a rope around his neck—not long enough to kill him, but enough to scare him out of town.”

Joe didn't respond. I craned my neck to better see him and found his eyes haunted, his breathing shallow.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He blinked. “Did Laurence say that's what people are planning to do to me?”

I nodded and exhaled an erratic breath that made the lamp's flame jump. Shadows streaked across Joe's face.

“What about Dr. Koning?” he asked. “What about the medicine he shot into Hank Denney's veins in my bedroom?”

“I don't think there was any medicine, Joe. Daddy told me not to blame Uncle Clyde—or to murder him. He begged me not to kill anyone and insisted I leave town and better myself. He said to come back to Elston when I've got the tools to change things.”

Joe's brow creased. He curled his lips and slammed the back of his head against the wall, jangling a harness hanging above him. “How the hell would something that occurred before I hit your father have caused his death?”

“The other night, my father said that his heart wasn't strong enough that Christmas Eve. I think the Klan might have terrorized him. Do you remember what he looked like when you saw him walking down the road? Was he holding a crate of whiskey?”

“No, there weren't any crates.”

“Did he walk strangely, like he was hurt? Or scared?”

“I didn't even see him until I hit him.” Joe rubbed his face with the palms of his hands, stretching his cheeks and his eyes in the flickering light. “He just sort of sprang out from nowhere in the dark. I was already out of sorts.”

“Because Deputy Fortaine caught you in your father's car with that boy.”

Joe's hands froze on his face. His eyes turned a liquid shade of brown, and I sobered up enough to realize I had trod into delicate territory. I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes to dull an awakening pain.

“If Clyde Koning didn't kill your father,” said Joe, sounding out
of breath, “then even if something did scare him before I saw him that night . . .”

I waited for him to continue. My hands stayed shoved against my eye sockets.

He sniffed. “If Dr. Koning didn't kill your father, then that would mean that I did, after all.”

My palms slid down to my temples. “I don't entirely believe that to be the case.”

“My mind has always insisted that Koning killed him behind the closed bedroom door,” he said, his voice cracking, “but what if I've only been lying to myself? What if I caused your father more than a busted leg and a sore arm? I drove home after drinking, for Christ's sake.”