The Tramp (The Bound Chronicles #1) (20 page)

“Oh—a real ghost story, then,” Candy sighed with relief, the unsettling tale suddenly making sense to her. “Good one. I think I’ll have a hard time turning out the light tonight.”

John tweaked her nose in an avuncular way, like he was ten years older than she was. “Glad you liked it.”

The odd spell over their side of the campfire was dispelled like a soap bubble popping against a cashmere sweater, delicate and evanescent no matter how gently handled. Hard to remember the point of blowing soap bubbles once you’re older, but you can call up an image of one like a physical thing in your brain. Something about that seemed important to Candy just then.
So fleeting, but there’s always a wet soap mark on your clothes after a soap bubble dies. Like a dream you can’t quite remember, but casts a weird mood over your whole day.
A shiver ran up her spine, but she shook it off and smiled. “Loved it. That was one of your best yet.”

“Thank you.”

Candy tried to replay all the details of John’s story in her head, figuring she would have to hear it a couple more times before she knew it by heart. She sat next him trying to get her thoughts together, like osmosis was possible between humans, until she realized John was unnaturally quiet. “Are you okay, John?”

He remained still for a moment, before he looked up at the sky. His eyes focused on clusters of stars, a planet, the moon—just as hers had—before he confessed, “That story actually came from a dream I had last night.”

“Really? Tell me about it—”

“Hey, there you are,” Reagan popped around to their side of the fire. “I thought I saw you guys talking all serious over here. We’re doing s’mores, come on.”

John took her hand and they followed Reagan around the fire. As predicted, the Bennett kids did brave the party for their share of the gooey, melted chocolate desert sandwiches, a bonfire requirement at the Robinsons’s. They trouped out as a group, but Candy noticed one was missing.

“Where’s Gage?”

John shrugged. “Sulking upstairs. Grandma thinks he stole one of her china dolls.”

“One she made?” Grandma Pearl’s baby dolls were beautiful, every meticulous detail handmade, from the delicate porcelain faces to the crocheted eyelet collars on their dresses. “Whoa, she must be pissed.”

John nodded; his expression dire. His grandma was known to be strict. Candy wondered if she still kept a paddle and couldn’t help but feel sorry for Gage. Fourteen was a little old for paddling, but she wouldn’t have put it past Grandma Pearl.

“Did he really steal it? That’s weird,” she lowered her voice. “The Bennett’s are usually so…disciplined.”

“And weird,” John whispered, pulling her to a seat at the fire opposite his cousins after they got their marshmallow sticks.

Uncle Pat was strumming some acoustic spirituals on his guitar. After several refrains of “Awesome God,” and “How Great Thou Art,” which everyone knew or at least hummed, he closed with “Amazing Grace.” But, when John’s Aunt Beth started singing just a little too fervently, raising her hands to the sky and closing her eyes in exultation, the rest of the crowd fell silent. By that time, Carol and Zoë had already licked their fingers clean enough to pick up their instruments, and the three launched into “Oh Susanna” again, a tune which Candy knew the girls were attempting to perfect.

“Just one more, Zoë, and time to get into your jammies,” Aunt Cammy reminded her daughter, just as her husband began picking along on his banjo next to her. “Garrett—when did you bring that out?”

“I just got it from the car,” he shrugged, and then composed a hopeful question on his face.

“Okay, two more times.” Cammy relented, knowing how the two brothers, Pat and Garrett, loved to play together. “Don’t make it too long of a jam…until after the girls go to bed, anyway.”

Grinning widely, Garrett blended into the rhythm with gusto. Even the Bennett kids stayed huddled together by the fire watching the musicians for a while.

“Hey, John.” The little boy Peter tapped on John’s stomach. “Are you going to stay at our grandma’s tonight?”

“Oh. I don’t know, buddy.”

“We’re all sleeping in the bunk bed room. And we have sleeping bags, too,” Peter said, clearly not thrilled to be the only boy bunking together with a bunch of girls. The babies, Joshua and Alex, didn’t count. They would probably sleep with their mothers anyway.

“Yeah, John. You don’t want to sleep alone after that ghost story, do you?” Candy chimed in. “I’m staying here, too.”

“Wonder how long Grandma Pearl’s will be overrun with Bennetts,” John said under his breath, watching his Aunt Beth hustle her kids inside to get ready for bed. Secular time was over. Their dad was kicked back by the beer cooler, absorbed in discussion with Candy’s dad, and a discussion with George Vale could last until everyone passed out. “Easy decision. Let me just get a few things.”

§

Candy padded through the living room, bleary-eyed. If she was so tired, why couldn’t she just sleep? Maybe staying out late with Sam was catching up to her. She didn’t care.

“Sleep’s over-rated anyway,” she yawned, plopping down on the cozy sectional. “Ow.” Something hard poked her in the rump as she sat, and she turned to investigate. It was one of the photo albums they had been looking at, sticking out from under a pillow.

Selkie eyes…
Candy opened the book to the page of her mother that Reagan had turned to earlier.

“Where
do
we get them?” Candy searched her memory, trying to think of any other family members that had the same dark eyes she shared with her mom. No one she could recall. She scanned the top of the bookshelf, wondering how far back the pictures went. Her grandma had once shown her the faded black and white photographs from her own babyhood, from the 1930s. There weren’t many.

“Can’t sleep, Miss Candy?”

“Candy, Candy, Candy.”

Her Uncle Tommy and his nurse were descending the carpeted stairs, he holding onto her arm with a goofy grin plastered on his kind face. Tommy usually stayed in an assisted living facility, ever since Grandma Catherine had gotten too old to care for him properly. Grandma liked to have him spend the night whenever there was a large family gathering, though.

“Oh, yeah. You, neither Uncle Tommy, huh?” Tommy didn’t answer, but walked over to look at the photo album Candy held in her lap. He craned his neck to see the picture of her mother.

“Suzy.” He smiled and began petting her hair in the picture. Candy wondered whether he understood that his sister was dead.

“Suzy touch my head,” Tommy said and brought his hand to his forehead. He started petting his own hair.

“She touched your head, Tommy?” his nurse asked, looking at the photo of Candy’s mother. “When you had a headache?”

Tommy nodded. “Suzy touch my head.” Candy looked at the nurse, her brows knitted together in question.

“Tommy gets headaches a lot,” she supplied with a shrug.

Candy sort of remembered that from when she was little and Tommy still lived at home. Sometimes he would cry at night because of it. “Oh yeah...”

“Suzy touch my head,” Tommy confirmed, then began to wander toward the kitchen.

“Looks like someone wants a midnight snack,” his nurse said, catching up to him and taking his arm. “You hungry, Tommy?”

Candy could hear her uncle repeating “Suzy,” his voice echoing as they entered the kitchen. She looked down at her mother’s face. The photograph was beginning to fade. She ran her finger down her face, petting her hair as Tommy had done.

“Suzy touch my head,” she heard him say from the other room.

“Weird,” Candy murmured. But there was a thought, nagging at the edge of her consciousness. What was that thing Grandma Catherine said about Candy’s mother?

“Suzanna was always a little touched, I’m afraid.” “Touched” was Grandma’s euphemism for crazy. Still, what a coincidence.

“The gift is usually passed down, mother to daughter,” that fortune teller lady said. I wonder if the crazy was passed down, too. If she was crazy.

After Candy’s mom had thrown herself in the Tenakho River, that was most of the family’s estimation—Suzanna McBride was crazy. That was how everyone explained her mom’s death to Candy when she was little. It always seemed a rather flimsy explanation. Suddenly deciding she wanted to be gone before Uncle Tommy reemerged from the kitchen, Candy snapped the photo album closed and shelved it next to a book that looked much older.

Hhhmmm…

She plucked out the older book and flipped it open to find her grandma’s careful scrawl inside the front cover, “McBride, 1900-1930.” Candy tucked it under her arm and glanced around to make sure she was alone, then stashed it in her backpack by the door before heading back upstairs.

chapter twenty-three

“Amanda, wait up,” Gracie bleated, then tripped over a tree root. “Shoot! Your flashlight is better than mine.”

Amanda also already knew the way to the Blue Spring; she scouted the path earlier by herself, before the daylight faded, to make sure the ritual went off without a hitch after midnight. The Witching Hour. Her mom had picked up the group of friends from Gracie’s house that morning and took the girls to the Jameson residence to hang out, while some of the other parents went to the festival. Amanda and her friends had no interest in attending what they called the Hippie Hillbilly Show, and her mom hadn’t minded missing it that year either, for some reason.

They had planned to each go their separate ways that evening, but then Amanda heard her mom and dad arguing about some shack in the mountains where kids—including Sam Castle—went to smoke pot. After hearing them mention the famous Blue Spring, she knew that shack must be close to Lindsay’s house and quickly cooked up a scheme for a nighttime adventure. She could tell Lindsay’s mom was annoyed to have them over, but they all begged that it was the last Saturday of the summer. Aunt Meghan really couldn’t refuse gracefully after Amanda’s mom had watched the girls all day. The only missing piece was Jessica, who was never allowed to spend the night anywhere but home on Saturdays. She always had to attend the sunrise Catholic mass the next morning. She was welcome to invite friends to her own house, but any guest would also be required to rise and shine early (a mistake Amanda had only made once).

“You’ll just have to miss out, Jess,” Amanda had taunted her friend, while she begrudgingly helped them compile the clearest pictures of Antonio from Il Vagabondo’s fan page. “I’ll put in a good word to the gods for you.”

“How much farther is the spring?” Gracie whined.

“Here’s where the path goes down around the bluff and then the spring’s right over there.” Lindsay shone her flashlight down a steep path through some sparse trees. “Be careful guys, it’s kind of slippery.”

Amanda peered over the edge of the bluff in the opposite direction and saw the shack, but she decided to keep that knowledge to herself.

For now…

She had investigated the musty hideout when she came alone earlier. There wasn’t much inside but a few barely homey touches, like a kerosene lamp, an old loveseat and a folding chair. Really ugly drawings all over the walls. A wooden spool had been made into a table, with an ashtray and some magazines lying on top. It all looked very masculine and sort of dirty.

Nothing wrong with a dirty boy, though, Mr. Castle.

“It’s smaller than I imagined it, from the reading Ms. Collins gave us,” Gracie said when they finally reached their watery destination. Amanda knew she was attempting to calm her nerves by making light of their errand. There was nothing small or inconsequential about the Blue Spring.

Amanda glanced beyond the tallest pines overhead, at the glowing orb dancing in and out of billowy clouds. “Good, the moon is full tonight,” she remarked with satisfaction. “That will make our spells even more powerful, ladies.”

“Can’t we call them ‘wishes,’ please? It sounds so much less evil.”

“Gracie, there is nothing evil about working with the natural forces of our universe,” said Amanda. “Come on, it’s just a lark.”

Lindsay crouched down by the water. “It’s kind of glowing, you guys.”

“The moon?”

“No, the spring,” Gracie pointed out in a quavering voice.

“Whatever, Nervous Ninny.” Amanda squatted down by a boulder to pull their occult items out of her backpack, placing each one on the rock with care.

“Isn’t that cool?” Lindsay grew up near the queer body of water and had played in the surrounding woods with her two older brothers all her life, so she didn’t seem nervous in the slightest. “There’s some kind of bioluminescence that happens in the algae. Or maybe it’s the bugs that eat the algae, I can’t remember.”

“It’s haunted, that’s why it’s like that.”

“What? Gracie, don’t be silly.”

“No, I’m serious. My mom said this is where the Indians met right before they were forced to walk the Trail of Tears.”

“Your mom is full of it,” Lindsay chuckled.

“Hey…”

“I bet a full moon makes the spring glow even brighter.” Amanda handed the others each a candle taper, a photo print-out of Antonio, and an index card with the moon chant she had found on her Wicca website. “We read this by the light of the moon.”

Gracie tried to hand the index card back. “It’s too dark, I can’t see it.”

“Hold on a minute.” Amanda pulled a lighter out of her pocket and lit each of their candles in turn. “We need fire to bind the incantation.”

“The
wish
,” insisted Gracie.

“Abundant Mother, moon so bright,” Amanda began, and the other girls followed along with her, reading their cards. “Hear my plea upon this night. Your fertile power lend this spell,” she shot Gracie a warning look for substituting ‘wish’ for ‘spell’ and finished, “Make it potent, strong, and well.”

Each of the girls stated their plea for what the new school year should bring them, while lighting the picture of Antonio and letting it burn as far as they dared, before tossing the blazing paper into the spring. Each was extinguished with a loud hiss. Amanda held onto hers the longest and finally threw her wish into the spring. She watched the blue water glow brighter around the flame before the fire went out, and added, “With this wandering soul, the tramp Antonio di Brigo, let arrive also our dreams.”