Long Black Veil (11 page)

Gil pulled into the space and put the car in park. He turned off the ignition before he answered her. “She said that if he wanted to get his freak on with mountain trash, he’d picked the right girl since she’d been taught by a professional.” He glanced over at her. “Or something like that.”

Devon made an effort to relax hands that had balled themselves into fists. God, she hated this town. She would always be judged by the things her mother had done—or rumors of those things. Devon didn’t know how Gammy stood it. “Is that it?”

“Pretty much.” He ducked his head.

“Gil!” She hadn’t meant to shout, but she was frustrated and angry and hurt, even though she knew none of it would do any good. “If there’s something you’re not telling, then you’d better ‘fess up. I don’t want to be blindsided at school.”

He sighed. “She named names of guys who’d been with you.”

Devon wanted to punch out the window next to her head. “What guys? There have been no guys. Even if I wanted to get with any of the mouthbreathers in town, where would we do it? Pretty sure Gammy’s not just going to look the other way while I have sex on her sleeper sofa!”

Gil looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole and pull the earth up over his head. She couldn’t blame him. This had to be awkward for him, telling his best friend that she’d been branded the town slut. “Look, I know you haven’t! And most of the kids like us know it too. It’s just…” he trailed off and Devon glared at him.

“It’s just what?” She knew she was snapping at him but she couldn’t help herself.

“You may have a new nickname come Monday.” The reluctance in his voice made her stomach drop.

Devon rolled her eyes. “Out with it.”

“Pocahontas.” He swallowed. “On account of you having to do it in the woods.” He looked down, fiddling with his keys. “Micah Landsdown was the one who started it. He told Brock that he’d experienced it firsthand.” He looked at her carefully. “I told Brock that you wouldn’t have sex with Micah even using someone else’s vagina, but, you know.” He shrugged half-heartedly.

Devon unhooked her seatbelt and swung the door open. If she didn’t get out of the car, she didn’t know what she’d do. The cool air hit her like a slap. She took a deep breath, trying to get her anger under control. It wouldn’t matter that none of it was true. It wouldn’t matter that she denied it; it wouldn’t even matter if she could prove Skylar and Micah were lying. Her mom was in jail for drugs and prostitution, so that meant Devon had to be just like her. Up here the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree.

The bite in the air stung her nostrils as she took a few more deep breaths. Devon began to climb the steps that led up to the library’s front entrance. She could hear Gil getting out of the car. His feet pattered on the stone as he followed her.

“Are you gonna be okay?” he asked when he caught up with her.

She hitched her messenger bag higher on her shoulder. “Maybe.” She shook her head, willing herself to focus on why she was here. “I’ve got work to do. I’ll be in the microfiche room. Come get me at five?” That would get them back in time for stew at Gammy’s.

“And hey,” she said, stopping at the top step. Gil looked up at her. He cocked an eyebrow. “I’m proud you didn’t flinch when you just said the word vagina.” She managed a wan smile, hoping the joke would show him that she was okay.

She didn’t wait for his response. She wended her way to the back of the large open space where the reference librarian’s desk sat. Mrs. Dotson smiled at her as she came closer. Devon had been spending most of her free time here since Gammy first brought her back, so the people who worked here felt like a kind of extended family to her. Mrs. Dotson was the weird maiden aunt that would probably turn into a crazy cat lady of that family.

“Well, hello Devon,” Mrs. Dotson greeted her as she came abreast of the large half-moon desk. “What are you looking for today?”

“Hi, Mrs. D.” Devon pulled her notebook out of her messenger bag. “I need to research something in 1914. Do you have records going back that far?”

“Some.” She stood up slowly, her arthritic bones making her move cautiously. “Do you need local, regional, or national?”

“Local. Obituaries at first, I think.” Devon figured the man’s date of death was a good place to start.

Mrs. Dotson stood up. “It will be on microfiche then. Come along.” She led the way to a large room behind her where the readers were.

Devon followed. She knew where the microfiche records were housed—in the grey metal filing cabinets downstairs. She set her bag down in a chair at the back of the room while Mrs. Dotson turned on the reader for her. Devon didn’t need the help; she’d done enough research papers and assignments that required her to use the machines that she was probably as well-versed in their use as the librarian, but she didn’t want to seem ungrateful.

“If you need help finding anything, just let me know. I’ll go unlock the archives now.” Mrs. Dotson disappeared out the door holding a ring of keys.

Devon took out her notebook and pen, arranging them to the side of the microfiche machine. She checked her dates again, making a mental note to pull everything in the two months before and after April. The she followed Mrs. Dotson’s path to the archives.

Her insides were still roiling over what Gil had told her. None of this was even remotely funny anymore; not Skylar’s costume, not the insults to her family, and especially not her new status as class slut. The fact that anyone, let alone Brock, would believe it made her want to hit someone. Preferably someone whose name rhymed with Hylar.

Not that it would make any difference. Devon could beat up the entire senior class and it wouldn’t prove anything except that she belonged in jail. Just like her mother.

Devon could feel her mouth turning down into a hard frown. It always did when she thought of her mother. She had vague memories of her from when she was very little, before the drugs and alcohol and men took hold of her mom. Her dad had still been alive then, and while Devon never really thought her mother was happy, she wasn’t self-destructive either. Mostly, Devon just remembered her as being sad. Even when things were good, Lorelei always carried sadness with her.

Devon didn’t remember many of the fights her mother and father had. They weren’t loud arguments, and they were usually started after she’d gone to bed, but she always knew when one of them had taken place. Her mother was almost a mute following an argument with her father, her silence a weapon, one that hurt all of them. Her father would spend a lot of time outside, doing whatever projects were needed on their small house, letting Devon tag along behind him. She’d only been four when her dad died—killed in a car accident where he crashed through a guardrail and plunged down a mountainside to land in a ravine.

She pulled the microfiche boxes for the year she was looking for, trying to put thoughts of her mother and father from her mind as she returned to the viewer. Thinking about the past wouldn’t bring her father back from the dead, nor would it make her mother any less…her mother. It was better to let the past sleep.

So why was she so worked up about the headstone? Devon sifted through the film sheets in the box until she found the ones she wanted. She took the first one—from the month of April—and stuck it in the viewer. She spun the dial until she had the April first paper in focus, then began to skim through the articles. Since the paper was so old, she wasn’t sure where the obituaries were in the sections, or even if they had obituaries.

But before she had gone very far, she’d found what she was looking for. Daniel Holfsteder had been hung on April 1 for murder. Devon felt her eyebrows take root somewhere above her hairline. Murder? She read on, eager for the rest of the story. The case had been resolved quickly, though the motive was still unresolved. Holfsteder was accused of shooting a man in front of the town hall one night. Witnesses said that the killer who ran away bore a resemblance to the accused. Holfsteder could not provide an alibi, and so was found guilty of murder. He was hung for the crime.

Devon skimmed the editorial pages. There were a few people who didn’t believe Holfsteder had been the killer. They expressed their opinion, some of them vehemently, that he had been a convenient scapegoat and that the killer had managed to frame an innocent man. One such man was Keaton Winchester, a lifelong friend of the accused. She made a note of the trial dates so she could go back and find whatever coverage the newspaper had.

There was a photograph at the bottom of the page. Devon scrolled to it so it was in the middle of the screen and rolled the knob to magnify it. The photo was a picture of the crowd of people gathered to watch the hanging. It didn’t show the platform or anything like that, so it must have been shot from right in front of it, with the photographer facing the crowd. Devon scanned the crowd of faces, then caught her lip between her teeth. She leaned forward, squinting at the picture.

There she was. Devon could swear it was the same woman from the gravestone. She was wearing a black dress and had a veil partially covering her face. Devon spun the knob until the picture was as big as it would go. The quality was pretty terrible at the resolution, so she couldn’t make out the woman’s features, but Devon would swear it was the same woman she saw.

How was that possible? This was a photograph taken in 1914. The woman she had seen at the gravestone seemed young—far younger than if this was actually the same woman. Devon didn’t understand. And why was Gammy warning her away from her? Had the laws of time and space been changed and no one told her?

Devon jotted down all the facts of the case: names, dates, locations, presiding judge—everything that she thought she could use to find more information. She wasn’t exactly sure why she wanted to know more—maybe it stemmed from Gammy’s warning from earlier, or maybe it was something else. There was something familiar about this case, something that she couldn’t quite recall, but it niggled at the back of her mind like a termite gnawing at a house. Why did she think she’d heard of this before? She had to know more.

Chapter Thirteen

School on Monday was as bad as she was expecting. The whispering started on the bus, but that Devon could handle. She just sat in her seat, pretending to read a book. She could turn a deaf ear to the murmurs and muffled laughter; at least those were relatively unobtrusive. But things just got worse when she got to her locker. Black spray paint had been used to scrawl a word across the front of her locker and the ones next to hers.

Gil had come by to see her before her first class, and he found her staring at the offending word. He cocked his head as he read it. “I don’t get it. They spelled it wrong.”

Devon sighed. “I think that was on purpose. Poc-HO-hontas. See how the HO part is underlined?” She gathered up her things and swung her bag over her shoulder. A few guys made that Indian woo-woo sound with their hands over their mouths as they passed her by.

“That’s just stupid,” Gil said, falling into step beside her. “And I think you might be giving them too much credit. They probably just misspelled it accidentally and made the best of it.”

Devon shrugged. It didn’t matter, it was still humiliating. What few students didn’t know about the party on Saturday night and the rumor started there would know about it now. “Whatever. It’s not like it makes a difference either way.”

Gil tried to put his arm around her, but she shrugged him off. She didn’t want his comfort or his pity. She knew that the torture would last a couple of days, maybe a few weeks, and then something new would pop up to distract everyone. She just had to get through it until then. And she had to do it without showing a hint of weakness. This was high school. Weakness was like chum to an ocean full of hungry sharks.

She got two proposals to go off into the woods behind the school for a little lunchtime action, a couple of lewd notes describing some truly depraved physical acts which made her wonder about the future of her generation, and more catcalls and wolf whistles than if she was passing a construction site buck naked. It wasn’t until the end of the day, though, that things got really bad.

Devon had decided to cut through the student parking lot on her way to the town’s Hall of Records. She still had to collect some more information about her family tree, plus she wanted to see if there was anything about Daniel Holfsteder. What she’d found in the library had certainly made her more curious about his death and the strange woman who still mourned for him.

Most of the lot had cleared out, many of the students having fled to other hangouts like the Burger Shake at the other end of town. She had stayed behind to wrap up a layout in yearbook class, so she had missed the mad rush at the final bell. She was crossing the lot when she heard someone shout her name.

Devon turned around, her eyes scanning the lot. From a few spots away, Micah Landsdown lounged in the front seat of his Mustang, his driver’s side door swung wide. Terrific. Just what she needed at the end of this day from hell. Micah. “Yeah?”

“Come here for a sec!” He waved her over with a lazy hand.

She rolled her eyes. Really? “What do you want?” She took a few steps toward him but still maintained a safe distance.

He pushed himself out of the seat. “I want to talk to you.” He leaned against the back panel of the car, his arms folded over his chest.