When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae (20 page)

She turned around. It was Bo, bounding toward her, knocking down about six of her half-grown Swiss chard plants.

Dean was nowhere to be seen.

Libby stroked the dog’s head for a bit. Then he left her and padded over to the campers. She looked back toward Dean’s property again. Still no sign of him.

Must be nice to be able to hide.

Some of the pack was heading back down the hill. Thank goodness. The rest of them had broken into twos or threes and were talking amongst themselves.

“You’re welcome to join us, of course,” Gina said. “Tonight.”

“Gina, I haven’t agreed to any of this.”

“You don’t have to agree to anything. It happened. Of course, it should have happened to me. And Farley. But it happened to you, and now you have to deal with it.”

Gina turned and went to catch up to the campers. One of the women smiled at her. Gina murmured something into the woman’s ear while glancing back at Libby.

“Excuse me,” said another of the campers. She was slightly overweight and dressed in jeans despite the heat. “Were you serious—about the Thai food?”

Libby hesitated. Now that her distress had faded a bit, guilt was taking the upper hand. Again.

“Because—I’m going into Rochester anyway, this afternoon. So I wouldn’t mind.”

Thai food did sound good. “Okay. If you’re going anyway. Stop by the house and I’ll give you some money.”

“Oh no, we’ll pay for it. I’ll take up a collection.”

“I insist.” If these people wanted to believe they needed to feed the fairies, there wasn’t much Libby could do about it. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to make them pay for it.

She looked at the camper’s face. She seemed so normal. Libby wondered if she had any family or a job. It didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem possible that any of them had lives. They’d all given their responsibilities the slip. Otherwise, how could they be spending so much time here? “Really, I’d like to pay for it,” she said.

“Okay. You said masuman chicken?”

Bo thrust his nose in Libby’s hand and she looked down at him. And suddenly what she wanted more than anything in the world was to talk to someone who could appreciate how much she hated this. All of it.

“I’m sorry. What’s your name?”

“Carla.”

“Okay. One order of masuman chicken, Carla, but please pick out something else for me, too. A beef dish. Something stir fry. And a couple orders of spring rolls.”

“Oh, I should go write this down!”

“It doesn’t need to be—just use your judgment . . . you did say you were going to Rochester anyway, right?”

She nodded.

The rest of the campers were half-way to the house now, and Libby watched as they disappeared through the hedgerow, and then Carla was gone, too, and she sighed with relief.

So quiet. Just the buzzing of insects and the occasional chirp of sparrows as they flitted through the bushes at the edge of her garden.

She walked over toward the woods.

“Dean?”

He moved, then, and she saw him. He’d been standing next to a thick-trunked tulip tree about 20 feet in from the property line.

“You need to get rid of them,” he said.

“I wish it were that easy.”

“Just tell them to get the hell off your property. It is your property, you know.”

“They just keep coming. And now my sister’s in on the act . . .”

He shrugged. “It’s your life,” he said. “It would drive me crazy, though.”

“Oh, it’s driving me crazy.”

“She pushes you around.”

“She always has, my whole life. It’s the price I pay to keep the peace.”

They were silent a moment.

“You know that Alex is my half-sister, right?”

“Maisey told me.”

“Families can be okay.”

Libby nodded.

“Well, I’ll leave you to your work. C’mere, Bo.”

“Wait. There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

He turned around.

“Can you come by later? For dinner?”

He frowned.

“Make it after dark. They won’t know. You can tap on the window out back—”

“Sorry, Libby. But I don’t want anything to do with all this.”

She must have looked pretty miserable. She certainly felt pretty miserable. But then, instead of walking away, he suddenly made a counteroffer.

“Can you sneak out?”

She considered it. She’d failed to pull it off this afternoon. But if Gina wasn’t around, tonight—

“I could try.”

“Then why don’t you come to my place?”

“I don’t know the way—not through the woods.”

“I’ll meet you right here.”

“Okay. I’ll bring the food. Thai okay?”

“You cook Thai?”

“No. One of my devotees is making an offering.”

“You’re kidding me.” He laughed. Had she ever heard him laugh? It was nice.

“It will have to be after dark, if I’m going to get away without them seeing.”

The days were long. The sun wasn’t even setting until well after eight.

“Say about ten o’clock?”

“Sounds good.”

30

At least one thing went right. When she got back to her place and checked her mail, the lab results on her horsetail brew were finally back.

No trace of anything prohibited.

She checked the data three times just to make sure. Kind of silly to be so nervous. After all, she’d made a living once looking at lab results. But she wasn’t quite ready to trust it, that something was actually breaking in her favor.

And there it was, in black and white.

Which meant that now, chances were excellent that her farm would get its certification.

Maybe things were changing for the better. Maybe, maybe. Finally.

♦ ♦ ♦

Carla was late. It was nearly 9:00 when she finally delivered the food.

Libby invited her in—she couldn’t bring herself to leave the woman on the stoop as she took the food.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Oh, nothing. We took up a collection,” she said.

Libby set the bag of food on her counter. “Okay,” she said. “I guess that’s okay.”

Carla looked at her expectantly. “What’s next?”

“Well. Uh. I have some things to do. To prepare. Then I’ll . . . you know. Take the food up back.”

“So they really do eat Thai food? Some of the guys were saying . . .”

Best not to answer at all. . . she really didn’t want to lie outright. So she busied herself taking the to-go boxes out of the bag and setting them on the counter. “This is perfect,” she said instead, as she folded the bag. “Thank you so much.”

Then she walked to the door and Carla followed. “I’ll, um, let you know, tomorrow. If I see them.”

“When are you going?”

Again with the direct questions. “I’m not exactly sure.”

“They wanted me to ask you.”

Libby held the door open and saw that “they” had gathered at the foot of the front steps.

“Are you going to use Kip’s altar?” Carla asked as Libby let the screen swing shut behind her.

“I might. I’ll figure that out . . . later.”

“Okay.”

“Uh, everyone.” Libby looked at the circle of faces lit by the porch light. “Sometimes, you know, it’s helpful if I have a little privacy. Please?”

“Hear that, guys?” one of them said. “We need to keep our distance. We’ll keep at a distance, okay, ma’am?”

Not exactly what she had in mind.

She shut the door and hit the porch light switch, then went to the living room window and carefully lifted a corner of the bedspread. She could see campers silhouetted by the bonfire, and then, as she watched, the group that had been at her door strolled over to join the others.

She let the bedspread drop, shut off the light in the kitchen, went upstairs and pulled her backpack off the hook in her closet.

She’d have loved to leave right that minute. Get out of there, even if it meant she’d beat Dean to their meeting spot. But the campers might be watching for her. She needed to be patient. If she waited a bit, surely they’d let down their guard.

Plus she was grubby from working. She stopped into her bathroom and glanced at herself in the mirror. A dirt smear was streaked across her left cheek. Hopefully she’d applied that touch of grimy rouge after she’d talked to Dean, not before.

Time for a shower.

Then after she was dressed again, back downstairs to peek outside. One of the campers had brought out a guitar and she could hear the strumming, faintly, through the window.

She packed the food into the backpack and tiptoed to her dining room escape hatch.

♦ ♦ ♦

It was dark. Darker than she’d expected it to be, only a quarter moon, and of course she didn’t dare switch on her flashlight, and of course she’d turned off the lights in the rooms on the back side of the house—to avoid accidentally illuminating her escape.

She hadn’t expected it to be quite that dark.

She leaned up against the house, listening, hugging her backpack to her chest, waiting for her eyes to adjust, and suddenly smelled the coconut and curry boxed up inside and realized she was ravenous. When had she last eaten? Lunch time?

Argh.

She could hear the guitar more clearly now, and talking, rising once in awhile as the conversation became animated and broken by a burst of laughter.

She stepped away from the house and strode swiftly across the lawn.

The brushy hedgerow between her lawn and her field was tricky in the dark. She slung the backpack into position so her hands would be free and felt her way with her feet. Then reached the field. It was a shadow overlain with shadows, and the woods to her right were beyond shadows, pitch black. She stepped cautiously over the little ditch. A tangled mat of bedstraw was growing along the ditch’s edge, and she lifted her feet high so she wouldn’t trip. The bedstraw was in bloom and smelled spicy and fragrant, and she noticed now, beyond the sounds of the campers, the faint hum of traffic on 390, way down at the bottom of the valley. And the trilling of the field crickets, but only the ones that weren’t near her—if she got close to one, it fell silent, so that she walked in a little pocket of silence.

Only not for long.

“Hey! I think I saw something move.”

“Where? Where?”

Libby froze.

Unbelievable.

They had staked out her field.

She dropped into a crouch, her heart thudding. A flashlight beam switched on and began playing over the ground in front of her.

“Hey, is somebody there? . . . Lisa? Is that you?”

“Maybe it’s one of the fairies,” said the other voice.

“Yeah, well if it is, you hold the torch, cuz I’m going to catch it.”

“Can’t, don’t wanna spill my beer.”

The light danced over the hedgerow to Libby’s left—it was her chance and she knew it. Keeping her back bent so she’d be as low as possible, she made a break in the opposite direction of the flashlight beam—she needed to make it to the stone wall, to Dean’s property. If she could do that, she could hide herself in the trees.

By some miracle, she didn’t trip. By some miracle, she didn’t step on a stick or something that would make a loud noise.

It helped that the two campers on sentry duty were still talking to each other.

She stood behind one of the trees on Dean’s property, struggling to calm her breathing, listening.

“I gotta pee.”

“Not on the gardens, man.”

“I wouldn’t do that. What do you think I am, a rude pisser?”

“You’ve walked on them, like, twenty five times.”

“I told you to just turn on the light.”

“That would kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it, doofus?”

Doofus didn’t answer, presumably because he was now relieving himself. Hopefully not anywhere Libby would need to step tomorrow.

She moved deeper into the forest, still feeling her way with her feet. This would have been easier before the ice storm. The ground was littered with branches. One caught her left ankle and she started to go down, catching herself at the last minute by grabbing a nearby tree trunk—her fingers touched something slimy and she yanked her hand away, gross, gross, pulled a tissue from her pocket to wipe away whatever-it-was. Stood and listened again. They were still talking, something about one of the other campers, was she hot or not. Libby took another step, and another, angling uphill as she walked. Slowly, slowly . . .

At long last she judged she was far enough in that she could turn on her flashlight without them seeing. She pulled off the backpack and leaned against a tree. She wasn’t in terrible shape—she’d been doing hard physical labor all summer—it was the stress of escaping the sentries that had winded her.