Death in the Cards (7 page)

The answer made no sense to me, but even with all my tweed, it sent a shiver creeping over my skin, as if something had crept up behind me and breathed down my neck. Still, I pressed on.

I wouldn't get my nickname—Nosey Josie—for another nine years. And what some people call nosey, I call curious. I like to think of my natural curiosity as a gift that I was born with, a gift that lay dormant in me just waiting for the right moment to spring forth. And somehow, when I heard my aunt's devil saying the first time, it sprang.

“What's that mean, Aunt Clara? How can you tell if he's in or out? The devil, that is? And how can you have no doubts about such a thing? And—”

Aunt Clara gave me a hard look over her shoulder, her bun still aquiver. “Never you mind, Josie Toadfern. Just never you mind. Finish up and get to your homework . . .”

I told Owen about this memory that night, after the Serpent Mound trip, on our corn maze date. When I finished my story, Owen repeated the devil saying thoughtfully, mulling it over.

Somehow, now that he was musing on Aunt Clara's old adage, I felt better, safer, more relaxed. So relaxed, that I
sighed contentedly as I leaned into Owen's shoulder. I was warm, because of my heavy coat and hat, because of the toasty fire flickering before us, because (best of all) of Owen's presence. I was sated—we'd dined on roasted weenies, at one of the fire rings in the field by the Crowleys' corn maze, and from a thermos sipped cups of spiced cider I'd prepared. And now I was also relieved, having told Owen about Aunt Clara's statement, my first memory of it and how it came back to me when I met Ginny Proffitt, and about having to lead the tour at Serpent Mound, and about seeing Ginny and Dru there, together, embracing.

What more could a girl want?

Another s'more, I decided.

I leaned away from Owen just long enough to pick up the confection, roasted marshmallow and chocolate square sandwiched between graham crackers. Then, I leaned back into him and bit into the s'more. Mmmm. Yummy, gooey, crunchy chocolaty bliss.

Owen Collins is not only adorably cute—long, blond ponytail, blue eyes, lanky build—he is also extremely bright. And even though he has three PhDs—in religion, philosophy, and psychology—his smarts don't just come from book learning. (Not that I don't appreciate his love of books. I love books too. In fact, our shared book mania was part of what drew us to each other.) He has deep-down, peer-into-yoursoul, stay-up-late-and-ask-lots-of-what-if-questions smarts.

So I knew if there was sense to be made out of my day—and my weird reaction to Ginny—Owen would tap into it.

“On the one hand,” Owen was saying, “your aunt's quote is a classical conundrum. Do our downfalls come from our inner demons—metaphorically speaking, of course—or from outer demons, such as temptations?”

I swallowed and was tempted to take another bite of the s'more without commenting, but overcame my temptation
and said, “I'm not sure my aunt was speaking metaphorically. Before becoming a Methodist, she was a member of the nondenominational Paradise Church of Almighty Revelations, a very fundamentalist group.” Then I took another yummy bite of s'more. Some temptations are not meant to be resisted for too long.

“And what bugs me about that is that Dru Purcell still pastors that church, as he did when Aunt Clara attended,” I went on. “And for the first time in years I remembered my aunt's saying when I met Ginny Proffitt. And it turns out Ginny Proffitt has some connection to Dru Purcell even though Dru claims to hate Ginny and all the psychics. But before he saw our bus, he was hugging her most tenderly. Then he looked so horrified when he saw us, and she looked so pleased. I think she set him up to be seen with her, that she wanted us to see them together.”

Owen sighed. “All right. Let's back up a minute. Do you agree that your aunt's saying is best interpreted figuratively?”

I gazed at the lazy tongues of fire lapping up into the night, then into the darkness beyond the fire circle. My gaze swiftly returned to the fire. I snuggled closer to Owen. “That surely is my preference,” I said. I ate the final bite of my s'more and longed for another, but I'd eaten the last one. We were down to just graham crackers. Those, I thought, would make a good snack later with peanut butter.

“Good,” Owen said. “Some psychologists interpret so-called psychic phenomena as a highly tuned subconscious ability to notice and interpret subtle clues in a person's mannerisms, tone of voice, and so on. Maybe you just subconsciously picked up on clues that indicate Ginny's struggling with an inner, or outer, figurative demon, and that's what brought the saying to your mind.”

I pulled away and stared at Owen. “Are you sayin' I'm psychic?”

A playful grin teased up the corners of his mouth, eroding his studious and serious expression. “Never! Just highly intuitive. And sensitive.” He trailed his fingertips over my brow. “Mmmm, yes, very sensitive, I'd say . . .” Yum. I liked this. S'more, s'more, I thought.

His grin widened. “Plus . . . you're nosey.”

I groaned and gave him a playful punch on the arm, and he laughed. He knows how much I hate my old high school nickname—Nosey Josie. Even when it fits. Which in this case, it surely did. Just what was the connection between Ginny and Dru?

Suddenly, Owen looked serious again. “But I think there's something else about Ginny that bothered you. You said she somehow knew about a particular dream you've been having. I'm here to listen if you'd like to talk about it, Josie, if that would help.”

I looked away. Sally had asked me earlier what my dream really was about. I'd been saved from answering by Karen coming up the steps to the observation tower. Now, there was no one nearby. We had this particular fire ring to ourselves. A group of Ranger Girls was at the nearest ring, but they weren't likely to come over to interrupt us. Ranger Girl–cookie-selling season wasn't until next spring, after all.

Here was my chance. I could open up to Owen about something that was, on the one hand, so silly, and yet, on the other, was so disturbing to me, much more than recalling my aunt's saying upon meeting Ginny. How did she know about my dreams about Mrs. Oglevee? And why did I have those dreams, anyway? I'd sloughed them off as just a bizarre glitch in my subconscious, but now, the fact of them bothered me.

And I'd been hurt that Owen had held back the truth about his past for so long, even wondering if he'd ever have told me if he hadn't essentially been forced to by his own slip of the
tongue, when he'd told a mutual acquaintance a tale about his past that didn't fit with the past he'd told me. So, if I expected openness and honesty from him, shouldn't I give him the same?

Of course.

So I opened my mouth to speak. And here's what came out: “It's just this silly dream I have about wearing an orange bikini in public.”

I pressed my eyes shut. Oh crap. That was Cherry's spin on my previous lie about the dream. I'd said navy one-piece. She'd said orange bikini. And in any case, apparently I couldn't bring myself to open up to Owen.

He was silent for a long moment. “I think you'd look great in an orange bikini, Josie,” he said softly.

It was a compliment, and yet there was something sad in his voice—as if he knew, somehow—thanks to his own highly tuned subconscious ability to notice and interpret subtle clues in my mannerisms and tone of voice—that I wasn't telling the truth.

Our mood, thankfully, lightened once we were inside the corn maze.

The maze was cut out of an acre of corn, then divided into nine sections, each section marked by plastic ribbon of a different color or design (hot pink, white with blue polka dots, bright green, and so on). At the start of the maze, you got a piece of paper, with a key at the bottom (for example, hot pink equals section one) and a large three-by-three grid, which would form the base of the maze map. In each section was a mailbox, which contained that section's “map” and rolls of tape. The idea was to tape that section's map onto the correct spot of the grid. Eventually, you'd have an entire map of the corn maze—the “reward” for the challenge.

One of the tricks to navigating a corn maze—or, I reckon,
any maze, although I've never been in a non-corn maze—is to stick to only left-hand or right-hand turns. We'd right-hand-turned our way past a witch, a goblin, a princess, a ghost, and a Dracula, who was really Lenny Longman. He was one of the stars of the East Mason County High School basketball team and the dreamboat of the Paradise Methodist Church youth group.

Lenny had on an old basketball jersey that had been muddied and cut with slits, rubber bloody fangs, streaks of dirt on his face, and twigs and leaves sticking out of his hair, to signify his rising from his burial site. He was also wearing a huge grin, mostly because several members of the basketball cheerleading squad kept getting “lost” over and over in his section. It didn't seem to frustrate them, though. They giggled every time they walked past Lenny, who made a big show of lunging at them.

We'd just gotten our second-to-last map piece from Lenny and were in the next section. For the moment, we had this corner of the maze to ourselves.

Owen widened his eyes and wiggled his fingers at me. “I vant to suck your blood,” he said in a bad Dracula imitation, “so you can be my cheerleader forever!”

I giggled, and pounded at him as he pulled me to him and then started to dip me. “You know I never made the squad!”

“But you have such delightful pom-poms, my darling . . .”

My next wave of giggles was thwarted by his kiss. Not bloodsucking, thankfully, but definitely blood-heating . . . until we heard the proverbial bloodcurdling shriek.

But it wasn't playful, or coming from Lenny's quadrant. It was coming from outside the maze. And was followed by the words, “Get off of our property! Or we're callin' the police!”

Owen and I stood up quickly. I shone my flashlight on the map. “We're here,” I said, pointing to the northwest corner of the maze on the map, “and the hollering's coming from right
about here—which is right by the road.” I grabbed Owen's arm. “Come on. Let's see what's going on.”

“We don't know our way out of the maze yet,” Owen said. “Whatever's going on will be over by the time we get there.”

“Short cut,” I said, folding up the maze map and stuffing it into my purse. Then I turned my flashlight to a break in the back wall of corn. It was bad corn-maze etiquette, but someone had obviously gotten tired of trying to figure out the maze, and had crashed on through. Several stalks of corn were bent backward, leaving a gap just wide enough for a person to edge through sideways.

I went on through and trotted a few steps before stopping to look around and gain my bearings. We were right by the road, near the entrance to the Crowleys' corn maze.

And then I saw what all the hollering was about. “Oh, for pity's sake, would you look at this, Owen?”

Dru Purcell and a dozen or so others had gathered at the entrance with signs. The entrance was well lit, so I could make out the wording—
HALLOWEEN IS EVIL! BE A-MAZED BY GOD, NOT CORN-MAZED BY THE DEVIL! JUST SAY NO TO PAGAN HOLIDAYS
!

I gasped.

“This is private property,” Hugh Crowley was hollering at Dru. “You have no right to be here, messing with our fundraiser and scaring our customers! What do you have against our corn maze, anyway?”

“If it were simply a corn maze, that would be fine,” Dru shouted back. “Or if it were populated by people dressed as Bible characters, say.”

“Jesus and Moses in a corn maze?” Hugh sounded incredulous.

But Dru took his comment seriously. “Yes, my brother, yes, Amen! Young people dressed as Jesus and Moses, passing out Bible scriptures . . . what a testament of faith that
would be . . .” His voice started to tremble with the wonder of a biblically populated corn maze until his wife, Missy, poked him.

“But instead, you have young people dressed up in costumes of the devil!” Dru shouted.

“Now, look, Pastor, let's go talk quietly as two men of God.” I recognized the voice of my own pastor, Micah Lamb, although I couldn't see him. I had to smile. Pastor Micah had a gift for finding common ground among people. “We don't want to disturb this fundraiser for these good people . . .”

“I don't recollect any of the volunteers dressing up as a devil.” That was Rebecca Crowley. I couldn't quite see her, either. Her voice was trembling. “Just some ghouls and princesses and witches . . .”

“It's the holiday of the devil,” Dru said, his voice stretching with infinite patience. Poor lost soul, his tone proclaimed. His followers shouted “Amen,” and Dru was off, sermonizing, shouting “tonight we protest this evil corn maze, tomorrow night the evil psychic fair!” His voice drowned out Hugh and Rebecca, and even Micah.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “Owen, let's go see if we can help Pastor Micah to get Pastor Dru and his cronies to leave the poor Crowleys alone.”

Owen didn't say anything. I turned back to look at him.

And gasped again—but this time, not in consternation. In surprise.

I'd hurried out through the split in the corn, my gaze focused straight ahead. Owen had sidled out more slowly and had seen what I had missed in my hurry: two feet, sticking out of the corn in the corner of the maze. Owen was shining his flashlight on the feet wearing hot-pink high-top tennis shoes.

Where had I seen shoes like those before? And then I remembered. On Ginny Proffitt's feet. Just that morning.

I ran over to Owen's side, stared into the corner of the corn maze, all sound—the ruckus just down the road, the night bugs' chattering, the corn shocks' dry papery rustling in the wind—giving way to a high buzzing in my head.

I forced myself to breathe slowly, to focus on the body in the corn stalks, lit by our high-powered flashlights.