The Storycatcher (35 page)

He pushed that boat out to open water.

“Where are we going?” I touched his arm. A heat came into Faith’s fingers. I’d been real careful not to touch many humans, just the missus. For some reason she didn’t drain my power. Probably because her heart was the purest I’d seen, besides Mama’s. Not even Will could match Missus.

“Brunswick. Nobody knows you there.”

“You’re not going to make me let her go right now. It’s not time.”

He frowned. “I know what happened to you, Arleen, was unfair and hard, but taking Faith’s body hostage won’t change that.”

I laughed. I had to laugh. “I loved my life, hard or not. You and
Faith get to walk around doing what you want. Not me. So don’t go telling me about unfair.”

“But Faith didn’t ask you to take over her body.”

“You’re wrong. She accepted my help. She had to ask me to come. That’s the rule.”

We were in the ocean water and the boat rocked and bumped. The air was so salty I could almost taste it. Maybe I could stay here. Missus was thinking she’d stay. She told me. I liked her, the new her out there in the marsh away from Pastor. Maybe she cared. I closed my eyes and allowed the wind and spray from the waves to move over me. What would happen to Faith? “Will, I already know why you left. I know the lies and the truths. There are no secrets where my spirit lives. Pastor Dobbins is not the only rotten apple in this big barrel of lies.”

Will looked over at me. “Maybe you do know.”

“Let ye not judge.” I closed my eyes again.

Faith struggled to the surface, but I pushed her down. The salt washed over my skin. “I know everything,” I whispered.

M
ISS LYDIA STOOD
at the window. “That tree reminds me of an old woman.”

I looked out. There stood the old woman spirit in the backyard by the big twisted oak Miss Lydia was talking about. “Lots say that.”

“Where’s Shelly?”

“She’s changing the sheets on the beds, ma’am.”

Miss Lydia frowned. “Faith took the car early this morning. Has she come back?”

The wind was whipping the treetops. “No, ma’am.”

“Ada, I’ve never seen a quilt like the one she’s working on. Have you? I can’t imagine where she got the idea for this one. There doesn’t seem to be a real pattern.”

“Don’t need a pattern for that kind of quilt. You make it up as you go.”

“I would have to have a pattern.”

“Lots of women work better with a pattern to go by. We need some direction. Miss Faith strikes out on her own. That be both a good and bad thing.”

The old woman was still waiting.

“I’m going out for a walk before it rains.” Miss Lydia turned from the window. She left out the front door. Shelly bumped around upstairs. Girls now just didn’t move silent like they did in my day. The old woman hadn’t moved. I took off my apron and threw it on the chair. Enough was enough. I charged out the back door before I lost my nerve.

The old woman kept her sight on the upstairs windows and didn’t pay me no mind. Pure sadness mixed with a little anger showed on her face.

“We got to talk.”

She kept looking at the house. “I don’t like this house. It was too hard to live in.” She waited. “I ain’t here for you, girl.”

This flew all over me. “What do you mean too hard to live in?”

Still she watched the bedroom window that Shelly must have been in. “You don’t know me. You should. I be from the island a long time before you was born. I’ve been gone from this earth since the walk.”

“So you lived here,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.” She still didn’t look at me.

“You need to listen to what I got to say to you. It’s been a long time coming. I’m sorry you was a slave and died away from home, but we got to settle what’s between us.”

This made her look at me. “I don’t reckon we could ever settle what’s between us, Ada Lee Tine.”

“You leave Shelly alone.”

“That’s what you had to tell me? That’s what was between us?” She cackled.

“You took the only thing that ever matter to me. Did you know that? Roger was mine, and I loved him with my whole heart. You hear? Part of me is missing and always will be ’cause of you.”

“I didn’t do nothing.”

“You caused him to die. You could have saved him. He was mine.”

“Girl, how could I save him?” She came closer.

“It was you messing with other people’s lives that caused this whole mess.”

“How you figure that, Ada Lee? I was here because of Mary Beth Clark, not him. She was and is tied to me ’cause I was close to the woman that helped raise her, Celestia Clark. Helped her real great-grandmama, Liza, out of a story. Celestia was like my sister. We was raised together. Close as two peas in a pod until Liza came along, but she turned out to be okay. It was you that caused him to die. He came looking for you, not her or me.” She laughed.

“I loved Roger.” My voice cracked.

“That’s what you say, but girl, why you never tell him that?” She waited a minute. “I’ll tell you why. ’Cause you thought you had the whole world in front of you, that you could be slow and settled. Life ain’t about being slow, girl. You dragged your feet and he left this world. Not by me. Folks leave when they are finished, when their job be done.”

“No. That ain’t so, ’cause he left me unfinished.” The tears was there. Tears I had held in for so, so long.

“Lordy, girl, he finished you. Can’t you see that? His job was not to be your man but to teach you how to reach out and love. He opened the door for the boy that came to you. Before him, you wouldn’t have been so trusting, so eager to love that boy.”

My heart cracked open out there by that big old oak tree.

“You can’t own something that’s not yours to have, girl. He wasn’t yours. He was the doorman.”

The marsh grass rustled in the wind. A storm was coming, but there was time before it hit. Maybe it would go around.

“Good and bad things happen in our lives. We can’t control either. Bad will come to you, girl. It always does. How you think you could outrun it? But here’s how it is, you walk right through.”

“I miss him.”

The old woman nodded. “He was a good soul. You come from good family. The Tines be caring, loving folks. I know. See, they be my family. Your granddaddy was my boy. I loved him with my whole heart and he lost me, Ada Lee. He lost me out there walking. My name be Emmaline.”

I shook my head. “Why you want Shelly?”

“You think you was part of that killing. You got it in your head because of your old auntie that you might have helped me. You thought I killed them two and you was part of it. You had it wrong. I used you to get here and left you at the door. You never stepped foot in the house. Lord, girl, they did that killing mess to themselves. Mr. Benton T. Horse of New York City was evil to the bone. Devil bound. You felt it. He killed Mary Beth Clark. He was so mad about her talking to Roger that he finished losing his mind. He killed Mary Beth before I could get to her. Mr. Benton T. Horse was standing over her with a knife. I just whispered in his ear, and he took his own life. He took Mary Beth out of this world before I could set her story straight.” The woman spirit was quiet a minute and then in a low voice she finished what she had to say. “Celestia and me had a long story full of lies told to protect. Those be the best kind of lies ’cause they aren’t mean and hateful. Celestia, me, and Liza was all friends. That be Liza Lolly. I don’t reckon I was always friends with Liza, but Celestia held us together. We was slaves on Sapelo. They was sold to Black Mountain, North Carolina. I was sold to Darien. Shelly is going to finish the story for my friends Liza and Celestia. She’s got to. Then they will all rest.”

“Leave Shelly alone. I don’t want her hurt.”

“You going to talk to me that way?” She gave me a mean look. “Your Roger was avenged when the man took his own life. That you owe me for.”

“I want Shelly to go home to her mama.”

The woman laughed. “I ain’t got no control over that. Death is a being that roams this earth. You got to take that up with him. We sure can’t control him. I’m here to finish a story. You go on, now. Take care. Remember what I said about Death. He be of his own mind.” She walked right into the house and left me standing there.

I
WAS STRUGGLING
with putting new sheets on Faith’s bed up in the small room at the top of the house. The roof slanted near the little bed, and I’d done bumped my head three times.

I looked up and saw Mary Beth Clark standing in the doorway. “The hot, steamy rain that falls at the end of June always lifted my spirits when I was alive,” she said.

“I like the rain on the mountain. It always cools the air,” I said.

“You know that horrid man killed me, cut my throat from behind. I never even saw him coming.”

“Who was he?” I stopped what I was doing.

“A banker from New York. I hated him, but I was determined to have a better life.”

“How, with a man you hated?”

She laughed. “You have a lot to learn, little girl.”

“Maybe.”

“So you’re just stuck here because you was killed here?” I thought of Armetta’s book and how it just stopped, how she was tangled up with a bad white man too.

“You’re thinking about her. The girl who wrote the book you were reading the other day.”

“Yes.” I don’t reckon I would ever get used to a haint reading my every thought.

“I’m still here because of her.”

Now, this got my attention. “What do you mean? Armetta?”

“I never knew her name. Ma Clark didn’t talk about her, but she was my grandmother. I found out about her after Daddy and Ma Clark died.”

“She’s a right hateful ghost.”

“Really?” Mary Beth Clark thought on this a minute. “I got my own story, just like you.”

“Well, I don’t have a bit of time for listening.” I started back in on the sheets.

“I’ll finish before you’re through with this room.” She smiled.

I just huffed.

“My daddy was the prize of our family. It was easy to see why, because he was an only child who came to Ma Clark late in life. My mama always said Daddy couldn’t live up to Ma Clark’s expectations. And Mama also pointed out that Ma Clark’s whole story about Daddy’s birth was suspicious. See, Daddy had light skin like me. He could have passed. Ma Clark said that could come from way on back in the family, but like my mama, I had to wonder. Then one day Ma Clark looked at me out of the blue—this was after Mama passed from a blood disease—and let a truth slip. I was chopping onions for hushpuppies, and Ma Clark was simmering a gumbo. It was an old recipe she brought from her island.

“ ‘You love to cook just like her. It breaks my heart,’ Ma Clark said with the sweetest expression on her face.

“ ‘Who?’ I honestly thought we were talking about my mama.

“ ‘Liza Lolly.’

“The name didn’t ring a bell with me. For a long minute all I could hear was the sound of my knife cutting the onions. ‘I don’t remember her,’ I said.

“Ma Clark shook her head. ‘You didn’t know her. She was buried a long time before you come into this world. She was one of my best friends from the island. We got a story together.’

“I kept quiet when I should have asked for more. Not long after that I found a box in Ma Clark’s old keepsake trunk. The thing felt warm when I picked it up like maybe there was a promise inside.

“Ma Clark walked in, looked at me kneeling at her trunk, and slapped my face so hard I dropped the box. ‘You’re headed down the wrong road, Mary Beth.’

“In the second our stares met, I knew I would outgrow Black Mountain, that somehow I didn’t belong there, never had, and I wasn’t connected to Ma Clark. I left home as soon as I turned seventeen. I didn’t even come back when Daddy died. I couldn’t. I was afraid I would be stuck there. Turn out like your daddy, Shelly.”

I looked at her funny.

“Yes, I played with him as a child. Anyway, I made my own life with fine things and money. Men are just waiting to give you money, Shelly, if you’re pretty like you are.”

“I ain’t pretty.”

“You’ll find out one day.” She took a step toward me. “Not long before I left on the trip that brought me here to Darien, I had a dream about Ma Clark. I hadn’t seen her in too many years. I kept dreaming about the box. Dreaming so much, I asked the man that brought me to Darien to stop at Black Mountain on the way down from New York. He did. Ma Clark had died, and no one knew how to find me. I talked to your mama. She didn’t like me one bit. Most women didn’t because of my looks. She told me to go up to Ella Creek Settlement because no one lived there anymore. Ma Clark’s house looked like always. All her stuff was right there like I remembered.