The Curse of Crow Hollow (14 page)

“Now I don't mean there's nothing emotionally wrong, Bucky. There certainly is.” Doc shut his eyes, whispered, “Scarlett's poor arms.” Then, louder and more to Bucky, “But physically? I simply don't see it.”

“What about Scarlett's arms?”

“Nothing. Look, all I'm trying to say is this can't be what everybody thinks it is. I don't doubt those kids stumbled across Alvaretta. I'm even willing to say they followed something they thought to be footprints to her cabin. But a curse? That stretches things beyond rationality, don't you think?”

“No,” Bucky said. “I don't think it does. It's like you said, Doc. You didn't come up here. In the Holler we know there's more to the world than what you can find in books.”

And that was true. But I'll say this too: Bucky also knew if Danny was right, it meant Alvaretta might not have a grip on them girls at all and Cordelia could be fixed. Come down to it, Bucky was smart enough to take crazy over cursed any day.

He asked, “If it ain't a curse, Danny, what is it?”

“My guess? A delusion. Not a mass one, at least not yet. It's been known to happen. Happened in New York State a few years ago. And for reasons unclear, young women seem most susceptible.”

“Alvaretta Graves ain't no delusion,” Bucky said, “and neither is what she can do. Now I appreciate all you've done for Cordelia and the others, Danny, and I thank you for taking care of all them sick folk waiting outside, so I'm going to give you a nickel's worth of free advice: You best keep your opinions quiet. It gets out this is what you think's happening, nothing good will come of it.”

“But Bucky—”

“Nothing good. I mean it. I know these people, Danny. You say something like that, it'll sound more like witchcraft than anything Alvaretta can say. And speaking of which, I got to ask you something. Maris said all them out there know what Cordy and her friends did Sunday morning. You tell them?”

“No.”

“You need to tell me the truth, Doc,” Bucky said.

“I swear, Constable. Wasn't me.”

“Then who was it?”

“I did.”

Bucky turned in his chair to see Raleigh Jennings coming through the door like he'd been listening on the other side the whole time. His jaw was set and his chest puffed out.

Bucky stood up and said, “You tell me that ain't right, Raleigh.”

“Something in the water, Buck? That what all y'all decided?” Raleigh came on into the office.

Maris tried shooing away the few who'd tried following Raleigh in, first with kindness and then with harsh words.

“Those are lies. Wilson shoulda been straight with me. I'm on the dad-blamed
council
.”

“Wilson's trying to protect the town,” Bucky said.

“Wilson's trying to protect his
own
.”

Danny put himself between the two men, trying to get things calm.

Bucky would have none of it. “Who told you, Raleigh? Who told you it was the witch?”

“Was on the prayer chain, if you got to know. I was the first person the Reverend called. He trusts me, not like you. Preacher told me everything.”

“And you told everybody else.”

Raleigh sighed and spread his arms wide, like he was surrendering. “It's a prayer chain, Bucky. That's how it works.”

Doc shook his head. “So now everybody in town knows Scarlett and her friends were up at the mines and had a run-in with Alvaretta Graves? That some . . . demon . . . cursed them and the town both? And now everybody's girl is coming down sick and everybody in Crow Holler is blaming them, and you're okay with that because it was a
prayer chain
? They ain't safe now, Raleigh.”

“The girls.” Bucky looked at the doctor first, then Raleigh. “They're headed this way. They're coming home from the hospital.”

He fumbled for his phone and flipped it open. You ever pushed the buttons on one a them things? Tiny, especially for a big man who's just realized his wife and daughter might be driving into danger. Bucky hit a 2 when it should've been a 3, a
4 and a 5 instead of just the 5, cussing as he did. Danny slid the phone off his desk over and dialed the number himself, handing Bucky the receiver.

It was too late. Angela never answered.

-8-

“No.”

The mayor took a hand off the wheel and placed it over what Scarlett had taken from her purse.

“No, just . . . let's leave that alone for now. Okay? Please?”

Scarlett barely gave her daddy a glance before easing his hand away and turning the phone upside down on her knee.

“Mine's off too,” Wilson said. “In my jacket pocket right here, and here's where I mean to leave it.” He tapped at his chest and tried to smile. I know that was a hard thing for that man to do, shutting that phone off without knowing what Bucky had found down at the clinic. If Wilson had taken just a moment to reach for his phone and flip it on, he'd've found plenty of messages waiting for him—Chessie and Raleigh and Ruth Mitchell, along with four texts from Bucky begging the mayor not to go home just yet. “I just thought . . . you know, long ride and all, we could . . .”

Talk
. That was supposed to be Wilson's next word. But then Scarlett couldn't do that now, could she? No, all the talking she could do was chained to the pen and pad sitting on her other knee, a tongue made of cheap plastic and lips of thin paper with
Stanley Medical Center, Where the Patient Comes First!
written acrost the top. That was how Scarlett would talk for now and maybe forever, thanks to Alvaretta Graves.

“. . . we could just be together for a while,” he finished. “You know, just us. We don't do that near often enough, Scarlett.”

We don't do that ever,
Scarlett's eyes said. She tugged her sleeves down, like that would do any good at all now.

“I'm so glad you're okay, pumpkin.”

He winced before the words were out, but too late to pull them back. Why's it so hard to talk to your kids sometimes?
Pick up your room
or
Take out the trash
or
Cut the grass
can roll off a parent's tongue, but anything deeper comes out like trying to describe color to a blind man.

“You're not,” Wilson said. “Okay, I mean. You're not okay. I mean, you are, but there's still a ways to go.”

Wincing again. And now Scarlett winced too.

“I'm sorry, Scarlett. I just can't say anything.”

He took his eyes off the road. It was the interstate and those slow hours just after the morning rush. Traffic wasn't bad. Scarlett tried smiling and gave a little shrug—
I can't say anything either
.

“Why'd you do that, Scarlett? Not go up to the mines, though I've always told you to keep far away from that place. But why take off through the woods like that? Why keep going when you and the rest said how things got so weird? You should've turned and run soon as you
knew
that was Alvaretta's place down there. That was just so
stupid
.”

The words came so fast that the sun caught the little drops of spit flying from Wilson's mouth, forming a shiny rain. Scarlett reached for her pen. She wrote two words and held the page where Wilson could see it:

I'm sorry

Wilson bit the inside of his lip, blinking away tears that made everything look foggy. A rig blew past them, washing the inside of the car with diesel and exhaust.

“No,” he said. “I'm the one who's sorry. This is all because of me.” He looked at Scarlett's arms, covered with the long sleeves of the denim shirt she'd left the house wearing the day before.
“Do you do that because of me? I need to know, Scarlett. I promise I won't get mad.”

He kept staring at that pad of paper, wanting so much for the pen to start moving and for those words to come. Words to prove Wilson's innocence, some far-fetched explanation of why his daughter would ever think such a thing as maiming herself would be necessary, would think it
good
. It would be school or friends or the godforsaken hole in the mountains where they'd all been fated to spend their lives. Anything but himself. Please, don't let it be himself.

Scarlett shook her head. Not her daddy. She ran a finger over her shirt, down by her wrist where the newest scar was healing (
new
meaning months old; Scarlett had promised Cordelia she would stop and she'd meant it). For the first time, she looked to wonder just how close to something important that cut had gone. Were there arteries in that place, right above her forearm? Were there veins or tendons?

“You sure?” her daddy asked.

She nodded and held the pen over the page, unsure what to write. And you know what, friend? I don't blame her. Not a bit. Because it would've taken more pens and paper pads than Scarlett could ever get hold of to explain the real reason she cut herself, and even then I doubt she thought it would all come out right. How can you explain such a thing? How can you attach to something like that any sort of rational meaning?

How could Scarlett ever tell her daddy that the reason she'd taken a blade to her own skin was to get the bad out?

-9-

Wilson and Scarlett Bickford weren't the only ones knee-deep in silence just then. Six miles up ahead on that same stretch of
Interstate 64, Angela and Cordelia were mired in an awkward conversation of a different sort, one that had grown quiet after miles upon miles of screaming. Cordy had known they couldn't put off forever talking about the baby growing inside her, had known Angela would ask exactly where and why it had been that her daughter had opened her legs for Hays Foster.

For her part, Angela weren't exactly looking forward to that conversation herself. But she had fired the first salvo, a sharp
How could you?
that made the healthy side of Cordelia's face slump to match the sick one. It didn't help when Cordy responded there really wasn't much her momma could say, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Or, as it had come out of Cordy's numbed face, “Peefle in gass howfes fuldn't fow phones.”

Angela had looked to be ready for that, saying times were different back when her and Bucky had been in high school. And even if times weren't, Cordy had no idea how hard it had been for the two of them, how many dreams had to be put on hold or die altogether, and couldn't she see that? Couldn't Cordelia see what a mistake that had all been?

“Tho I'm a mithtake?” Cordy had said. “Wow. Fanks.”

So sure, friend. It had all gone downhill from there. Miles of silence after that, until the same rig that had blown by the mayor and Scarlett now blew by Angela and Cordelia, washing enough diesel smell through the open window to mask the stench of trash caught in the upholstery.

“You're keeping this baby,” Angela now said.

Cordy looked at her in horror, as though any alternative had never been considered.

“We're keeping it, even if it's part Foster,” her momma said. “We'll make this right, even if it's all so terribly wrong. I don't know how I'll face them. Does Hays know?”

“No.”

“Then you won't tell him. Not yet. Not until your father and I can wrap our heads around this. Do you understand me?”

“I wu—
l . . . uhve
him,” Cordelia said, even as I imagine she remembered the way Hays had looked at her the day before, the frantic look of fear in church that withered along with the side of her face to a look of near disgust; the way he'd leaned his body away as Doc Sullivan had bent over her; how Hays's mouth had hung open and his tongue had pushed against his teeth when he'd visited Cordelia's hospital bed that morning. You can't blame that boy, acting as such. Was a horrible sight to look upon Cordelia and see what the witch had done.

“You don't know what love is,” Angela said. “And you didn't answer my question. Do you
understand
?”

“Yethum.”

Angela reached under her sunglasses to wipe her eyes. “Why did you go up there, Cordelia? Why did you have to spend the night at the mines? Spreading your legs for a boy like Hays Foster is one thing—a
stupid
thing, and one you'll spend the rest of your life regretting—but crossing Alvaretta Graves? That's even worse.”

“I had to get your bwacelet back.”

And so that was it. That was when Angela understood that none of what had happened was the fault of Alvaretta Graves. Wasn't some curse. It was Angela herself. It was the way she'd thought of her daughter all those years, like Cordelia was less a light for Angela's future than she was a broken and tilted signpost in Angela's past, forever marking the spot where her life had gone astray. Cordelia had grown up, learned to crawl and then stumble and finally walk, sprouting the dark hair of the Vests and that perfect face that had once been her mother's. A quiet child, always in need of touching and holding hands, always so scared to be alone. Like she had been born into the
world knowing how thin the bond between her and her momma was, and that it was up to her to make it stronger.

And all that while, Angela had believed those thoughts were locked away and hidden. They were buried in a suffering part of her that had been kept covered over by smiles and I love yous, and she was either unable or unwilling to see that all of our secrets are bound to leak out through the cracks in the walls we build to hide them. She could blame her daughter for what had happened with Hays, but what had happened with the witch could be placed only upon Angela's shoulders. Because in the end, Cordelia had decided that facing the witch was a better choice than facing her own mother's wrath.

Angela stared through the windshield and set her sunglasses closer to her face, not wanting Cordelia to see her hurt. A car passed in the next lane. Husband and wife in front, three kids in the back. All of them smiling and, it looked, singing.