by B. T. Alive
Even for a perfect spring Saturday evening in a tourist town, there seemed to be a lot of people walking this pedestrian mall. Maybe I’d just forgotten how different the feel is when a street’s full of people instead of cars.
Then I noticed something that shocked me, even for Wonder Springs.
Right down the center of the street, in a groove set in the cobblestones, ran a stream.
It was only a couple feet wide; an adult could step across it, and a group of kids was having a lot of splashy fun trying. But the gurgle was as lively as if it were coursing through the heart of the forest, and in the low southern evening sun, the water sparkled like dancing stars.
I turned and looked, tracing the water’s path back up the slope. It led straight up to the Inn, where a wide front plaza circled a fountain at its heart.
Wonder Springs… had a real spring.
I watched all these people sauntering in a murmur of peace and contentment… an older Asian woman eagerly window-shopping a pottery store with shelves of gleaming vases… a middle-aged white hipster couple holding hands as they studied an outdoor menu… a younger Hispanic couple laughing with their kids as their towering cones of ice cream began to tilt and slide…
… and for the first time, I really worried if Nyle’s death could break this.
Something about Wonder Springs was different. I didn’t know what it was, but I caught myself caring whether it got hurt.
The mom, who was crouching beside her toddler and his teetering cone, looked up and caught my eye. “Hi there!” she said. “Oh my gosh, I love your shirt.”
“Thank you!” I said, startled and pleased. “It’s a loan, actually.”
“Really? From where?”
We chatted for a bit, but I was feeling anxious to find that quiet spot to think. All this sweet Wonder Springs goodness was only giving me more to lose if I failed. Besides, I still had that cop in my bedroom, convinced he had the proof that the killer was me.
I excused myself and scanned the shop signs, squirming a bit at the over-the-top cuteness. Finally I settled on a candidate: Namaste with Natisha (Yoga and Tea). A cup of coffee and a solitary corner sounded perfect.
As I hurried up to the door, trying to look preoccupied and unapproachable, I realized what made Wonder Springs feel so different.
Or at least, I realized one of the reasons: a total stranger had talked to me on the street.
I mean, an actual conversation, not street harassment. These days, that was kind of weird.
I’d always thought the South had this reputation for hospitality, but the few times before that I’d ventured into these small Southern towns, I’d been lucky even to catch someone’s eye. And it wouldn’t be some mom enthusing about my shirt; you were way more likely to trade eye contact avoidance with some sullen pasty woman venturing out into daylight with greasy hair, a stained undershirt, huge faded pajama bottoms, and an oversupply of tattoos that she’d probably regret.
But here? It was different.
Why?
I bustled into the Natisha shop, and even in my rush, I had to take a second to enjoy the space. The interior was all natural light and walls in soothing blue, with menus carefully chalked on boards that had whimsical frames. A faint incense mingled with a symphony of fragrant teas.
Also, the “yoga” part of Yoga and Tea was for real; at the back, a studio was connected by a glass wall, and I could see very mature ladies holding poses that made my muscles cringe.
Behind the wooden counter, a black woman in her forties welcomed me in with a high-watt smile. I guessed this might be Natisha herself; she wore yoga pants and a tank top, and though she was a bit more curvy than me, she was a healthy weight and glowing with vitality. I’m pretty religious with my workouts, but just from how she held herself, I had no doubt that if we both tried to hold a pose, I’d pass out before she even broke a sweat.
Seeing her, I realized something else about Wonder Springs: this crowd was super diverse. Other Southern small towns I’d seen tended to be a sea of white, but there was a mix here of races that was more like what you’d see in the city. It was refreshing, even a relief.
But I had to wonder… how had that ever happened? Out here, that kind of mix didn’t seem to happen by accident.
“Hello! I’m Natisha,” the woman said, graciously confirming my name theory. “Welcome to Namaste. What can I get you?”
“I was just thinking a coffee?” I said, scanning the menus. At which precise moment, I remembered…
How much coffee did I expect to get for forty-seven cents?
Crud.
“Oh, I’m sorry, honey, the coffeeshop is across the street,” she said, probably for the fiftieth time that day. “But if I may entice you… many a coffee drinker enters this realm and discovers a whole new universe of flavor and delight.”
“Oh, um…” I hemmed.
But it was too late. Natisha launched into a passionate declaration of the unknown virtues of tea…
… for about thirty seconds.
Then she stopped. She scrutinized my face with a curious stare.
Great. For all I knew, the town was plastered with Most Wanted posters starring the Murdering Redhead Substitute Waitress.
“I feel rude saying this,” she said. “But have I seen you before?”
“I doubt it,” I said, trying to smile. “This is my first time in Wonder Springs.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“You know, this place looks busy,” I said. “I’m really looking for a spot where I can escape. I mean, be alone! Think. You know. Thanks!”
I turned to go, and nearly plowed into an older woman who’d been hovering two feet from my shoulder.
“Hi!” she boomed, as I managed to regain my balance. “I’m Vivian!”
Vivian had to be in her sixties, but she had such a youthful face and a trim physique that I couldn’t be sure. The makeup job on her pale face struck me as… adventurous… and her long gray hair had the casual bounce of a teenager’s.
“Sorry!” she said, with a smile, and she took a step back. “Didn’t mean to crowd your aura.”
“Aura?”
Natisha cut in, talking across me to Vivian. “Not everyone knows your lingo, hon.”
“Oh, an aura’s your energy field,” said Vivian, matter-of-fact, like this was totally normal. “I’m all into that stuff. I run a New Age gift store over in Back Mosby.”
Back Mosby? I thought. Really? I’d heard my share of goofy town names, but what kind of parents got together and said, Hey, let’s raise our kids with “back” actually slapped into the name of their hometown! Way to boost that confidence! Had there already been a Front Mosby? Probably… and coming up with a brand new name from scratch might have taken a whole fifteen minutes…
I must have shown more snark than I intended, because Vivian’s smile tightened.
“Sounds great,” I said.
“I love it,” she said. “Though I definitely need my time to recharge in Wonder Springs.” She glanced at Natisha, and they shared a smile.
“Back Mosby’s not like this?” I said.
Both she and Natisha snorted in unison. It was kind of amazing.
“It is not,” Vivian said. “But enough about me, I came over to see you.”
“Me?”
“What’s your name?”
“Um, Summer, but—”
Natisha cut in. “Doesn’t she look familiar?”
Vivian cocked her head. “Maybe… but Summer, you just seem like you could use a friendly ear. I have this feeling.”
“A feeling?” I blurted. “What, are you an empath too?”
Now both women startled. Hard.
Natisha’s stare hardened till I could almost feel it. She looked inscrutable, a well of secrets.
But Vivian spoke in an entirely different voice, quiet and confidential. “You know an empath?”
I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. I had half a mind to zap her, but I didn’t want
to risk it with Natisha watching so hard.
“Forget it,” I said. “I didn’t mean—”
“You do,” Vivian said. Her eyes were round with wonder.
“I didn’t say that,” I blustered. “Please just forget it. It’s a freaking secret, okay? She’s like the nicest person in the world.”
“An empath? Really?” Vivian looked shocked.
I frowned. “Wait, do you know an empath?”
Vivian flicked a glance at Natisha, then said, “Summer, I think you and I should get tea. Now.”
“Look, thank you, and you’re both super great,” I said, “but is there anywhere in this town where people aren’t so aggressively… friendly?”
They looked confused.
“I’m just kind of in the middle of something,” I rushed on, “and I really need a quiet place to be alone and think.”
“There’s the orchard,” Natisha said. “It’s private, though.”
Vivian lit up. “Oh, the orchard! Yes! It’s beautiful right now! And the man who works it is absolutely hunkalicious.” Her smile faded. “But he does keep to himself.”
“Perfect,” I said. “I’m sure he won’t notice me.”
“Oh, you should at least try,” she said, wistful. “I already did.”
At first, I thought she was joking. After an awkward pause, I realized that she was completely serious. She also seemed totally unembarrassed at both the attempt and the fail with a guy who was probably less than half her age.
Well. You go, girl. Maybe if I was lucky I’d grow up to be like her.
They gave me directions, and I thanked them and made my escape before they could ask any more questions. I cut between two shops and found the little mulched path they’d described, wandering away down a grassy slope. Fruit trees soon surrounded me, and in that last golden hour of sunset, the cherry and apple blossoms engulfed me in a luminous, fragrant paradise.
But, like the original paradise, there apparently had to be a dude.
He was crouched by a tree, his back toward me, and at first I couldn’t tell what he was doing. Then I saw that the trunk was infested with blight; it looked like a black mold, evil and deadly. The blight had smothered most of the trunk, and some of the larger branches were withered and dead.
The man was moving his hands along and above the branches, not quite touching them, and softly humming. The tune sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was like some lullaby my mother might have sang that my mind forgot, but could still shake my heart.
My eyes went moist. Though part of me felt silly, the rest of me ached.
The light was starting to die, and the shadows were long, and I stopped a bit too far away from him to clearly see what was happening. It occurred to me that the whole scene was exceedingly odd, even for Wonder Springs. Even if the song was strangely moving, what was a grown man doing out here singing to a dying tree?
Even as I asked that, my skin prickled and warmed. Because I saw.
As his hands passed, the blight vanished.
First the trunk cleared, and the bark gleamed fresh and new. Then the dead branches began to lift and straighten, and buds sprouted and whorled into bloom.
I think I gasped. I made some kind of noise, because the man startled, and he twisted to see me. His face opened with surprise, and I flushed, castigating myself for getting caught there staring when I should totally have known his voice.
Yes, it was Cade.
Chapter 22
“I was just trying to be alone,” I said, talking fast to fill the sudden silence. “This old lady said there might be some hot guy here, not you.”
His lips twitched. “Sorry to disappoint.”
As he crouched there easily by his miraculously healed tree, he looked infuriatingly comfortable. I didn’t know why it bugged me so much. After all, it was probably his orchard.
I suddenly wondered if he spent most of his time around trees, if he were more used to plants than people. That would help explain his total lack of a bedside manner; it’s not like you could ask a tree how it felt about its medical options. At least, as far as I knew.
This would also explain why, in a town that catered to tourists, especially middle-aged and up, he didn’t spend every waking hour healing a constant stream of health complaints. Just like with Tina and the parrot, his whole healing thing was secret.
Unless, of course, he spotted me with a zit.
What was I doing defending this guy? And not clamping down harder on this stupid trembly lightness in my chest? Think, Summer, I scolded. With your brain, not your… other parts. This guy was all about Tina. If I was going to survive the rest of my stay in Wonder Springs without further humiliation, I needed to make it crystal clear to this man that I had zero interest. None. Nada. Zip. Even if I did keep swiveling back toward his smile.
“Sorry to interrupt your tree magic,” I said. “I’ll let you get to it.”
He frowned and stood. “It’s not magic,” he said. “Not exactly.”
“Right,” I snapped. “Tina said the same thing. Super helpful.”
Was it my imagination, or when I said Tina, did he flush a little? Of course he did. I mean, yes, the sun was setting in earnest now, and his face was partly in shadow. But I was still sure he’d flushed.
“Really, it’s not,” he said.
“Then I don’t know what I’m supposed to call it when you freaking cure a tree.”
He smiled, and he looked over the tree with deep satisfaction. “Yes, she’s going to be just fine,” he murmured. A tender love softened his lean face, and I glimpsed an affection I’d barely seen on parents rocking their babies, or a girl with her new puppy, let alone a dude with a plant.
Then it flicked out as he turned back to me. I wilted a little.
Politely, he said, “Have you ever heard of morphic fields?”
“Nope.”
“Well,” he said. “That’s kind of a long conversation.”
He turned and sauntered ahead on the path, clearly expecting me to drop whatever I was doing and tag along beside him through the twilight. Which I did. But I kept a wide, disapproving space between us, enough so that the crackle along all my skin on the side facing him was subdued to a medium throb.
“So, you probably have heard of genes,” he said. “Thing is, when they first started mapping the genome, what they thought they’d find—”
“Hold up,” I said. “I’m sure this is super fascinating, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m really kind of preoccupied.”
“Oh?” he said. “With what?”
NOT your dimples, which I now just noticed for the first time, I chided myself. “You might not have heard this out here in your personal Walden,” I said, “but up at the Inn, a guest was poisoned. Murdered.”
“I did hear about that,” he said. “I’m sorry. The tragedy itself is bad enough, but with it being a guest and everything, that must be incredibly hard on you all.”
“What do you mean you all?” I said. “I just got here.”
“Oh. Aren’t you with Tina and Grandma?”
“No, I’m not with ‘Grandma’,” I snapped. “Grandma sent me this letter out of nowhere, and then right after I got here, I handed this guy a poisoned plate. So now while Grandma and Tina and you and a gazillion tea-slurping tourists are having the time of their lives here in lovely magical Wonder Springs, I’m trying to catch the killer before your butt-sniffing sheriff gets me convicted for murder!”
To my surprise, he snorted… and even giggled. It was so adolescent it was almost not attractive.
“Sorry,” he said, as he got control. “Just that bit about the sheriff. An apt description.”
“It’s funny for you,” I said, stepping closer as we walked to make the point more aggressive. But my treacherous skin spiked with proximity, and I backed off again. “I’m the one on track to spend the rest of my life in prison.”
“Right, I see,” he said. “I had, ah, heard a bit about that…”
From Tina, I thought, abruptly seething.
“…but you know, the sheriff’s bark really is worse than his bite.”
“You did not just say that.”
“It’s true!” he said. “Trust me. Everything’ll be fine.”
“A guy got killed,” I snapped. “Look, I know Wonder Springs is this gorgeous little bubble and everyone lucky enough to live here has this sweet pretty perfect life, but out in the real world, everything is not fine. People get hurt. They lose their job, or their family, or their own health—I mean, honestly, what the heck are you doing hiding out here with trees? For all you know, there are people down the street with cancer!”
I hadn’t meant to get so mad, but I guess it had all been building up. I’d been looking straight ahead into the dying sunset as I spoke, but as I finished, I turned. Cade was grim, and sad, and on that final word cancer, he winced.
We walked in silence through the deepening shadows.
Then he said, his voice low and quiet, “It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?” I said, but gently. “Sure, I’m a big hypocrite… I’ve mainly been using my power to sell long-term software contracts with obscene commissions. But I also didn’t grow up in Wonder Springs. When I was way too young, I lost my mom—”
“Really?” he said. “Me too.”
“You did?” I said. “When? How? I’m so sorry.”
“It was…” He cleared his throat, and he looked ahead as we walked. The light was nearly gone now, and in the twilight gray, I was losing his face. “It was cancer,” he said. “Really bad.”
“Oh, Cade,” I said. “I am so sorry. I can’t believe I said that, I didn’t know—”
“No no, it’s fine,” he said. “The thing was… I was ten. So I was only just discovering this whole… talent. I’d found a robin with a broken wing, and my dad kept saying it had healed on its own, but I knew, when I’d picked it up, I’d felt it… the change…”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So when they finally told me Mom was sick, I thought, I can fix this…” He gave a short, hard laugh. “Yeah… no. My skills were not up to the challenge. I’m still not sure I didn’t make it worse.”
“Oh my gosh!” I said, horrified. “Don’t say that! You were just a kid, you were trying to help—”