First Frost

by Sarah Addison Allen

  Despite the attention, the Great Banditi’s sexual preferences had run in an entirely different direction. His eye, his real eye, had always been on the young boys who helped assemble and disassemble the booths, the ones who cleaned the midway at night and picked pockets for the owner, Sir Walter Trott himself.

  Russell had been one of those boys, left at the carnival by his mother the snake charmer, after she herself had been charmed by a local man with some money. No one had been surprised when she’d left Russell behind—he’d been a wild boy with a mean streak, and she hadn’t been what anyone would have called nurturing—but everyone had been absolutely stunned that she’d left behind her beloved snake, an old albino python named Sweet Lou, who had slithered away a week later.

  The Great Banditi had lured Russell into his trailer with kindness and taffy the night after his mother left and Russell had no place to sleep. Russell never dwelled on the details of that night. Or on the many details afterward. Almost ten years’ worth.

  But when Russell had been seventeen, he’d seen the Great Banditi, drunk in that field in Arkansas, and something had snapped. The aging magician was with one of the orphans they’d picked up in Mississippi, a pretty boy with tan skin and dark eyes and no idea what was coming. It was dark and quiet, the rides shut down for the night, and most of the boys were cleaning the midway and feasting on discarded popcorn and half-eaten candy apples, glad at least it wasn’t them in that field that night. Russell had followed him into the field, for no reason he could ever explain.

  When the Great Banditi had been found in the field in the morning, it looked like he’d gotten fall-down drunk and hit his head on a rock. The tan-skinned boy had run far away. Perhaps he was still running.

  Everyone knew what had happened, but no one said a word. The original Banditi had been a horrible man, one who had cast a pall over the entire carnival, making it a bitter, fearful place to everyone on the inside. He raped and he stole and he cheated, and the owner could do nothing about it, because Banditi had something on him. What, no one would ever know.

  Out of unspoken gratitude, Sir Walter Trott, a tiny man with very large ears, who said he’d been born in a logging camp in Oregon and that all his brothers were tall and strong and could fell trees with a single swipe of an ax, had offered Russell the position of the new Banditi. The original Banditi had taught Russell many tricks, after all, most he wished he’d never had to learn.

  Russell Zahler had no heart, and very little conscience, but he’d never physically harmed another human being after that night. He was just a simple con man now, old and dreaming of soft beds as he stole from people who had enough to spare.

  He was not the best person in the world, of course.

  But, as anyone from Sir Walter Trott’s Traveling Carnival could tell you, he was far from the worst.

  * * *

  Sydney’s wayward receptionist, Violet, didn’t show up at work the next morning at the salon. Sydney tried to call her several times, but got no answer.

  Vexed because yet another teenager was taking the wrong path no matter how hard Sydney tried to steer her in the right direction, Sydney hurried through her last appointment and told Janey to close up, then she drove out to Violet’s place before Sydney picked up her daughter. Part of Bay’s punishment was no extra time between working at Claire’s and coming home with Sydney in the evenings. No extra time to spend with Josh. And no phone to talk to him, either.

  All day Sydney had felt dark and off-kilter. One of her clients today, Tracey Hagen, who had wanted a style to make her Tupperware sales go up, ended up with a style that made people too afraid to say no to her instead of charming them into buying. The end result was the same, but not exactly what she’d wanted. Sydney bought a sandwich keeper from her out of guilt.

  The sun began to set as Sydney left the city limits. There was a difference between provincial and rural, a fine line you don’t even know you cross until you’re on that road. And everyone knows that road, the one leading out of town into a deep green expanse of pastures and old farmhouses, which at first makes it seem like you’re entering a fairy tale, something sweet and old-fashioned and lost in time. But, like all fairy tales, the beginning is always beautiful, a ruse to draw you into something you aren’t anticipating. That long stretch of farmhouses turns into a barren landscape of trailer parks, rusting and decaying slowly from the rain and leaves in the gutters.

  Sydney knew the area well, from long rides with Hunter John Matteson in high school, a daring sort of excursion to see just how far they would go, in more ways than one, before turning back.

  She’d tried calling Hunter John today, too. There was part of her that was almost too proud to do it, because she knew his and his wife Emma’s inevitable disappointment in Josh would mean they didn’t think her daughter was good enough for their son. But if their parental intervention would nip this thing in the bud, then that’s all that mattered. Her daughter’s heart would stay a big, red, beautiful, joyful thing, full of love for someone who deserved her. She tried Hunter John’s workplace first, then his home, where she was informed by the housekeeper that Hunter John and Emma were on an anniversary cruise.

  Sydney felt both disappointed and relieved. Probably a little more relieved than disappointed. In the ten years she’d been back, she’d barely said a passing hello to either of them. That is, when they weren’t completely ignoring her. She remembered vividly, one of the first weeks she’d been back in Bascom ten years ago, Hunter John confronting her and telling her that he loved his wife and wasn’t leaving her. Apparently, the whole Matteson family had been in knots about it, thinking Sydney had returned to try to get him, and his money, back. It had amused her. As if you can do what he did to a Waverley heart and expect it to go unchanged.

  The trailer park where Sydney’s headstrong receptionist lived was appropriately called Wild West, with road names like Wyatt Earp Drive and Doc Holliday Court. She stopped at an old white trailer with a faded green and white awning over the front door. The yard was tidy enough, with some concrete gnomes and painted toadstools decorating it.

  She went to the door and knocked. It was opened by an overweight, elderly man wearing only boxer shorts. The heat emanating from inside the trailer rushed out at Sydney, blowing at her like opening an oven door. It had to be ninety degrees in there.

  The man looked Sydney up and down in her black tights and black heels, her short plaid trench coat, and her hair pulled up into a doughnut bun. “What do you want?” he asked over the blare of the television.

  “Who is it?” a woman who was either seventy, or a very old-looking fifty, asked from her recliner.

  “I’m here to see Violet,” Sydney said. “She wasn’t at work today.”

  “Violet!” the old man yelled.

  A door off the living room opened. “What?” Violet said angrily, then saw Sydney standing in the doorway. “Oh. Come on in here,” Violet said, hurriedly waving Sydney into her room.

  Sydney crossed the living room.

  “Sorry it’s so hot in here. Roy and Florence like the furnace turned up,” Violet said as she closed her bedroom door. The single window in the room was open and the cool air coming in clashed with the hot air from the heating vents, creating a swirling breeze that made the room feel like it was in motion. Violet was wearing only a tank top and shorts. “Charlie kept me up all night. Sorry I couldn’t come in today.”

  “You should have called,” Sydney said, going over to Charlie, who was sitting on the floor, playing with old plastic blocks. Sydney went to her knees in front of him. She put her hand to his forehead as he put a block to his mouth and looked up at her with those beautiful dark eyes. “Hey, baby. Are you sick?”

  “He feels better now,” Violet said quickly, as if maybe there had been nothing wrong in the first place.

  Sydney looked around the small bedroom. There was a bare mattress on the floor, covered with an old Native American blanket. No furniture. Toys and clothes were scattered e
verywhere.

  There was a set of matching blue luggage behind the door. It was the only thing in the room that looked like it had been treated with any sort of reverence. “What’s with the luggage?” she asked.

  “It’s for when I leave. This isn’t my home. I’m not treating it that way. This is temporary. It’s always been temporary.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Sydney said. “You’re just in a rut. Everyone gets in a rut. Ever thought of beauty school?”

  Violet sat on the mattress and scooted back to the paneled wall to lean against it. “Maybe.”

  “I could help you out with a work-study program. And you could probably get a scholarship.”

  “Maybe. But if I do go to beauty school, it’s going to be somewhere far away.” She held up her bare, skinny arm so her hand could feel the cool air coming from the open window above her.

  “Bascom is actually a pretty nice place.”

  “You left,” Violet pointed out.

  “I came back.”

  Violet shrugged, bringing her arm back down, her hand in a fist, as if she’d caught the cold air inside it like a bird. “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”

  “When I left, it was just me. And that was fine. It was my time to learn, my mistakes to make. When I had Bay, everything changed. It was no longer all about me. I came back so she would have a stable place to grow up, where I had a support system.”

  “Charlie is a good baby,” Violet said. “He won’t give me any trouble.”

  “I know he’s a good baby,” Sydney said, smoothing down his thick, dark hair. “But the challenge is to raise him into a good boy, then a good man. You think you can do that when you don’t have a place to live? What exactly do you think is going to happen once you leave this place? That you’re going to find the perfect job, the perfect home, the perfect man?”

  “Yes!” Violet said. “I know I will. Because I’ve already looked here. They’re not here.”

  “Everything will be the same, no matter where you are, if you don’t change first.”

  Violet scooted off the bed and walked around Sydney and picked Charlie up in front of her. “Am I fired?” she asked, putting him on her hip. He started fussing. “Because I need this job. I almost have enough to buy Roy’s old Toyota.”

  Sydney stood. “No, you’re not fired.”

  “Why are you so nice to me?” she asked, bouncing Charlie when he started to cry. Sydney resisted the urge to take him from her.

  “Because I was you, once,” Sydney said.

  Violet snorted. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me.”

  “Are you coming in to work tomorrow?” Sydney asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

  With one last look at them, Sydney left the bedroom. The older couple in the living room watched her with suspicious eyes as she crossed in front of the televison toward the front door.

  Once back in her Mini Cooper, Sydney sat in the cold, feeling frustrated because, no matter how hard she tried, she knew she couldn’t catch someone who didn’t know they were falling.

  * * *

  When Sydney arrived at the Waverley house, it was already dark. She hated these shorter days. She jogged up the steps to the door, pulling her trench coat around her in the chilly breeze. She was going to have to bring out her heavier coats soon. She wondered if Violet had a winter coat, or if Charlie had winter clothes.

  Stop it, she told herself.

  There was only so much she could control.

  But that was just it. She was trying so hard because she felt so out of control. Violet could have a baby at the drop of the hat, and Sydney couldn’t. How was that fair? It had been so easy to get pregnant fifteen years ago, something so unconsciously done that it had been like waking up, something her body did naturally, telling her it was time. Now it took such effort, such energy.

  Claire had warned Sydney about this. About her attachment to Charlie. Sydney told her sister everything. Too much, probably, but Claire was always there, always listened, always said the right thing, whether Sydney wanted to believe her or not. Sometimes Sydney felt like she took too much from Claire. When Claire called her, it was simply to ask how Sydney was doing. Claire never asked for help, never seemed to have problems she didn’t already know how to fix. As much as Sydney loved Claire, that could be pretty frustrating. It would be nice if, every once in a while, Claire could have a problem, too. It wouldn’t have to be a big one. Just something small that would allow Sydney to show up triumphantly with a bottle of wine and say, “I know just what to do!”

  Sydney reached the front door and tried to open it. It didn’t budge. She got out her Waverley house key and tried to unlock it. It still wouldn’t open. She tried the doorbell, but it didn’t ring. Confused, she crossed the porch and looked in the sitting room to see Bay and Mariah watching television. The curtains closed on her suddenly, leaving her in darkness on the porch.

  Oh. Now she understood.

  Sydney went back to the door. She looked over her shoulder to make sure no one could hear, then she whispered, “I don’t care if you’re unhappy that I grounded her. I’ll come back and paint you an ugly green color if you don’t open right now,” she said. She felt ridiculous, as she always did when she had to face this kind of Waverley stuff.

  But the door opened.

  The house had always been a little vain.

  As soon as she walked in, she heard Tyler yell from upstairs, “I forgot. What was I supposed to do up here?”

  Claire called from the kitchen, “Caulk around the attic vents!”

  “Right, right,” Tyler said.

  Sydney went to the sitting room and said, “Ready to go?”

  Bay nodded and stood.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Sydney said, walking to the kitchen.

  Claire was taking fried chicken out of a box Tyler had obviously brought home. She looked up from setting the pieces on a plate when Sydney came in.

  “KFC? This is a new low,” Sydney joked, walking over to her. “Start cooking again, please.”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Really?” Sydney said, surprised. This was the first she’d heard of it. Everyone in the family had been trying to get her to start cooking again, and not just because they loved to eat. Well, that was most of it. But something about Waverley’s Candies was turning Claire inward again, and that was never a good thing. Sometimes Sydney feared if Claire went inward too long, she might not ever come out again, like their grandmother, who’d hidden under the staircase when someone knocked on the front door, not wanting anyone in her house.

  “Evanelle stopped by today and gave me a spatula. Maybe it’s a sign.” Claire shrugged, and Sydney knew that was that. Claire wasn’t going to say any more.

  Sydney turned and leaned against the counter. “How is Bay?”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

  “I should. I will,” Sydney said with resolve. “There are things I’ve never told her that I need to say. I just don’t know how to say them.”

  Claire wiped her hands on a nearby towel. “Speaking of things we were never told, Evanelle told me today that Grandmother Mary’s husband was named Karl.” Claire walked into her small office attached to the kitchen and came back out and handed Sydney an old photo. “As in this Karl, from the photos we found on Saturday. How did we not know that?”

  “We never asked, I guess. You can tell he’s trouble. Look at that smile.” Sydney looked closer at the black-and-white photo. “Mom had his chin.”

  “You do, too. Karl is the name on this kitchen journal we found, too,” Claire said, holding it up. “The one all blacked out.”

  “Looks like you’ve stumbled upon a mystery.”

  Claire started to say something, then paused and looked at Sydney, tilting her head curiously. “Is your hair getting more red?”

  She’d put her hair in a bun, hoping to make it less noticeable. “I swear I’m not doing it,” she said, touching the b
un. “Every morning I wake up and it gets worse. I’m going to try to dye it tomorrow. I can’t wait for first frost. Everything will calm down again then.”

  Claire nodded. “Five more days.”

  “You seem to be faring pretty well,” Sydney said. “No first frost trouble for you?” That was the thing about Claire, you never really knew for sure. You had to rely on her to tell you. Sometimes Sydney wished she could contain herself as well as her sister, so that everything didn’t spill out. Then again, she knew the price her sister paid for those walls.

  “Don’t jinx it,” Claire said.

  “Don’t go looking for it, either,” Sydney said pointedly, handing the photo back to her sister as she left the kitchen.

  * * *

  That next day at the salon, Violet still hadn’t turned up as noon approached, which irritated the stylists because they had to take turns answering the phone and making appointments, which took forever, keeping their clients with wet hair dripping in sinks or in foils that needed to be checked.

  “You said Violet would be in today,” Janey said, as she checked out her client at the reception desk.

  Sydney walked into the sunlit reception area where Bea McConnell was waiting on the white couch next to the windows. “You can go on back, Bea. I’ll be with you in a minute,” Sydney said to her. Then she turned to Janey. “I went to see her yesterday, to make sure everything was all right. She said she’d be here.”

  “She’s trouble,” Janey said, sitting back in the swivel chair at the reception desk. “My little sister was in school with her, before Violet dropped out. She was rough. She would steal. And not just other girls’ boyfriends, although she did plenty of that.”

  “Those Turnbulls breed like bunnies and steal like magpies,” Bea McConnell said. Sydney turned to see that Bea was still in the reception area, not wanting to miss out on this piece of gossip.