“A tiger in Scandinavia?”
“Okay, fine. A bear, then, or some mythical beast with the head of a mountain goat and the body of a bear.”
“Who do you pray to, Stephen?” Liv asked. She had never doubted George’s stories of the Norse Gods, but she was suddenly curious who Stephen worshiped.
“Your question implies I pray at all. I’ve never suffered that common affliction.”
Liv looked up, startled.
“You don’t believe in any gods?”
Stephen did not return her stare.
“I don’t believe in the God of the church. I went to Catholic school, Liv. Do you know what God is? Eternal damnation if you covet your neighbor's wife?” He chuckled. “Hell must be packed.”
Liv laughed despite herself. She too did not believe in a Catholic God, but she believed in the old Gods, she believed in the balancing of good and evil, and she’d never been around anyone who openly mocked the common faith. George disagreed with most religions, but he deferred to a need for belief in a higher power. His ancestors came from Norway. Thus, he worshiped those Gods, but worship them he did.
Liv’s mother followed a Christian faith. A crucified Jesus hung above the bed she shared with Roy. Simple wooden crosses hung in every room in their small house.
When Arlene had gotten pneumonia, Liv’s mother spent every night on her knees at Arlene’s bedside, repeating the Lord’s prayer. She rarely attended church. Working six days a week didn’t permit it, and on Sundays she did the washing, worked in her garden, and mended clothes.
“Do you think we were meant to meet, Stephen?” Liv asked, wishing she could keep the hopefulness from her voice.
His eyes flicked up, and at the look in her eyes, he stopped.
“Like destiny?”
“Sure,” she shrugged.
“Does George believe in destiny?” he asked.
Liv glanced toward Stephen’s bag and imagined the book inside.
“Yes, he does.”
Stephen nodded.
“I saved your life, Liv. What could it be, except destiny?”
* * *
Liv held the torch high.
“Freya, Goddess of love, healer of the afflicted, giver of sensual pleasures and beauty,
Join us in this sacred place, the forest of our ancestors, as winter edges in, fierce and unforgiving,
Bless us with your bounty, your goodness, your magic,
Surround and fill us with your gifts, exalt us on our path ahead.
Freya, we invoke you.”
Liv watched Stephen’s face in the firelight. His eyes glowed like the delphinium that grew tall and wild in the summer.
He gazed at her with reverence, and Liv’s voice shook as she spoke, her voice rising high, carried into the night on the smoke of their pyre.
Chapter 22
August 1945
Liv
Liv watched her mother brush Arlene’s hair. The brush made the girl’s blonde curls light and fluffy.
Liv tried to remember the days when her mother, Polly, had brushed her own hair, but could not. Surely there had been some.
Yet Liv mostly remembered her mother curled in the bed, arms wrapped across her bony ribs, crying into the jacket that had belonged to her dead husband. Liv’s brothers took care of the house. Danny had dropped out of school to drive a tractor for the Morrison Family Farm. Her second brother, five years her senior, had taken over the household duties.
Liv had been a wandering child who wasn’t naturally inclined to women’s duties. When Liv’s mother remarried, both her brothers enlisted in the army and were gone within a year. They never returned to Michigan, but they’d survived the war. Letters from Germany and France still trickled in.
As a child, Liv had subsisted on George’s love. He had visited often before Liv’s mother married Roy. He took Liv to the Stoneroot Forest and told her stories of the five siblings he’d left in Norway. He described their winter nights and summer harvests.
What she loved most of all were stories of his mother, a short woman with blue-gray eyes who went to the sea every morning to divine the future. Not only the big things, George would tell her, but she would plan her dinner because in the waves, she saw the day’s catch and which berries would be most ripe. She taught her children to forage with their eyes closed, learning the language of the plant so they could find it even when it went dormant in the winter.
Liv’s mother loved her, but she looked at her differently than her other children. In Arlene, Liv’s mother had found a kindred spirit. A beautiful little girl with soft curls who let you coddle her and dress her in pretty things.
Though Liv’s family rarely had pretty things to provide. But when a little extra money was squirreled away, Liv’s stepfather often took it prematurely and arrived with a doll for Arlene, or a new dress. Liv’s mother would scold him, but she too delighted in her youngest’s joy at the gifts. And though Liv might have resented her baby sister’s special treatment, in truth, she too grew warm in the light of her sister’s smile.
“Liv, I need you to go to town for bread,” her mother said, not looking up from Arlene’s head.
“I want to go,” Arlene chirped, trying to pull away from her mother’s hands.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Polly whispered, catching her daughter’s shoulders and pulling her back. “You’re due for a bath tonight. The water’s already warming on the stove.”
Arlene growled and frowned, but leaned back into her mother.
Liv knew Arlene loved her baths. Sitting in the basin as their mother poured pitchers of warm water over her hair. Afterward, she’d rub Arlene with the oil and lavender Liv had made. Arlene would be shiny and sweet-smelling, and everyone would be happy.
* * *
Liv stepped into the bakery but didn’t make herself known. She heard the baker’s wife and her friend talking in the kitchen.
For a few moments, she pressed herself against the wall and inhaled the scents of yeasty bread and apples simmering in sugar and butter.
“That Adele Kaiser is a trollop,” the baker’s wife snapped.
“Candace!” the second woman reprimanded, though her voice was filled with malicious glee.
“What?” the woman asked. “I don’t care if you dress her in silks and paint her gold, it’s a cryin’ shame how she runs around with all those men. She thinks nobody knows because she lives in that big house in the woods. People know. I’d have half a mind to run her out‘a town if she didn’t have a boy to raise.”
Liv turned to the glass window and saw Stephen’s mother on the sidewalk outside the bread shop. She cast her head back and laughed at a man who’d stopped to talk with her. Liv studied the woman’s red lips against her pale face. Her silky dark hair was short, and the curled wisps blew in the afternoon breeze.
“I heard they just about expelled her son from that fancy private school last year. Something about killing the headmaster’s bird,” the second woman continued.
“I believe it. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And if ever there was a tree bound to produce rotten apples, it’s that one right there.”
Stephen’s mother gave the man a wave goodbye and climbed into her shiny black car.
Liv felt a little flare of anger at the woman’s comment about Stephen, but she swallowed it. Her family depended on the bread shop’s charity. She couldn’t afford to anger the owner’s wife.
Liv cleared her throat and stepped up to the little counter.
The second woman, small and thin with a pointed bird-like face, poked her head out.
A little shadow of distaste crossed her features before she slipped back, not bothering with a greeting.
“The Hart girl is here,” the woman said.
Candace let out a huff and lumbered into the kitchen. She was perpetually red-faced, with a thick chin that hung over her neck like a rounded melon. She narrowed her brown eyes at Liv and left her mouth set in a line of disapproval.
A
pparently, the woman hated the rich and poor alike.
“My mom sent me for a loaf of bread,” Liv told her. “Please.”
The woman made a show of pulling a little card from her files beneath the counter. She laboriously flipped though. The mere flicking of her fingers seemed to wind her. After she found their name, she added a tick mark next to a long line of tick marks for all the loaves of bread she’d given to the family. The shop owners could tally up the cards at the end of the month and receive reimbursement from the town.
Liv left the bakery with her face burning.
Adele Kaiser’s black car was gone.
As Liv headed for home, she wondered about the women’s conversation. Stephen held no great love for his mother. Liv could plainly see that, but were her relationships with other men the cause, or something deeper?
As she hurried down the sidewalk, she didn’t see the group of girls on the corner. They drank from glass bottles of Coke. As Liv passed them, a familiar voice called out.
“Liv Hart!”
Liv looked up to find Veronica and her girlfriends watching her. They looked clean and pretty, hair curled and lips red. Veronica wore a red and white striped dress.
She extended her arm, and Liv gazed at the bottle of Coca-Cola she held out.
“Want one?” Veronica asked.
Liv clutched the warm bread to her chest, grossly aware of the pocket hanging loose from her worn shorts and her t-shirt stained from berries she’d picked that morning.
“It’s for you,” another girl beamed. Her name was Rosie, and she was short and slim with limp brown hair she tried to curl in the fashion of the day that ended up flat on the top and frizzy at the bottom. When she pulled her red lips back in a smile, she reminded Liv of a snarling raccoon.
“No thanks, I better not,” she murmured, taking a step away.
“Oh, come on,” Veronica begged. “We want to share.”
Liv paused and turned back. She didn’t want to take it, and yet she did want to. She wanted them to like her. She hated it, but the inclination sent her back a step and another, until she reached out and took the Coke.
They watched her, and she smiled.
“Thanks,” she told them, taking a sip.
Rosie spurted laughter, almost choking on a swallow of her own pop.
The other girls snickered, but Veronica’s smile had slipped away, replaced by a sneer.
“It’s a pity to waste the spit at the bottom of the bottle. We combined it for you. How does it taste?”
Liv hadn’t swallowed the sweet liquid. It sat in her mouth, and she wanted to spit it in Veronica’s face.
Instead, she turned and spat in the gutter.
She walked away from the girls, listening to their laughter at her back.
Chapter 23
September 1965
Mack
Mack trudged through a torrential downpour. His boots stuck in the mud, and each step made an audible slurp as he pulled his foot free. A few times he had to jerk one so hard, he feared the boot would come clear off.
It wasn’t just rain either, but cold rain, icy rain that gnawed through your clothes in an instant and started working its way into your bones.
“Damn weather reporters, don’t know their ass from a hole in the wall,” he grumbled, pulling his ball cap further over his head. He’d checked the weather before he drove to the Stoneroot Forest that morning.
‘Nothing but sunny skies,’ the jovial weatherman had announced, donning a pair of sunglasses. ‘Can anyone say Indian summer?’
Mack had parked at his cabin, packed his bag with a compass, water, dried beef, and the hag stones.
He stopped every few feet, lifted the pouch, and fumbled the stones from their leather sac. His large fingers, numb with cold, struggled to grasp each stone without dropping it.
He placed the stone to his eye and turned three-hundred and sixty degrees, gazing through the tiny hole at the blurry forest. He repeated the process with all six stones, and then returned them to the satchel and the satchel to his bag. It was a painstaking process, and by his fifth stop, he could barely feel the stones in his stiff fingers.
As he lifted one to his eye, it slipped from his hand and disappeared into a puddle of muddy water.
“Damn it!” he cursed, hunching over.
He sank his hands into the watery hole, digging into the mud, but couldn’t find the rock. He brushed over sodden leaves and twigs.
The torrent of rain continued, casting leaves from the trees and sending branches plummeting to the earth.
Above him, a crow squawked.
He shielded his eyes from the rain and stared at the dark bird perched in an ancient-looking oak tree. The tree’s limbs were fat and gnarled.
Mack studied the bird. Something white poked from its mouth, and after several seconds, he knew it was the white stone he’d dropped in the puddle.
“How the-” he started, but the bird took flight and disappeared into the forest.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he grumbled as the bird vanished.
Lightning cracked the sky and a boom of thunder shook the trees. Mack half-expected to see a tree burst into flames.
“A forest fire,” he grouched. “That’d just make my day.”
Though no fire could take hold in the rain drenching the Stoneroot Forest. A spark would vanish before it ever lit orange.
As he trudged on, Mack missed his dog. He’d left her at the cabin, fearing she’d get lost or worse in the woods. But now, as the rain fell and the wind began to howl, he dreaded continuing alone.
He’d set off in the late morning when the sun had been high and the day promised blue skies. But now, evening approached. He had an hour before the sun would set.
“Just a little further,” he decided. He checked the compass, continuing north.
The temperature had dropped, and Mack’s teeth chattered as he walked. He flexed and released his toes, trying to drive the icy numbness out of his extremities.
He stopped again, fumbled through the stones, pressing each to his eye. Wilderness in every direction.
“This is a fool’s mission,” he mumbled, and turned back.
Diane had implied the same thing when he’d told her of his plan to trek into the woods and search for Corey’s cabin with the hag stones. She insisted that finding George Corey’s daughter would be a better use of his time, but he disagreed. Now he wished he’d listened to her.
He turned back toward his cabin, but the needle on the compass continued to point due north. He shifted in a circle. Every direction read north.
“Rain must have got it,” he mumbled, needing to say the lie out loud. He tucked the compass in his pocket and shuffled in the direction he believed his cabin stood.
After several minutes, he pulled out the compass. Again, no matter which direction he aimed it, the little needle pointed north.
Another flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder, split the sky, and Mack jumped, startled. He slipped on the wet leaves and went down on his butt.
He sat, stunned, gazing into the slowly darkening forest.
The shadows beneath the trees deepened and Mack realized with the night, the deeper cold would come. The killing cold, his Uncle Byron used to call it when they hunted the Stoneroot Forest in the winter.
Mack knew he could die in the forest.
In the spring, someone would find him much the same way as he had found George.
Mack, at least, would not have a knife in his ribs.
The cold earth seeped through his saturated pants, and he had the hysterical notion of lying down and taking a nap. He would drown.
He thought of Diane then, and the tilt of her eyes when she’d said goodbye to him the day before. He saw fear in her expression.
“Should ‘a kissed her,” he said. And had he known he might never get another chance; he would have done just that. “But I’m grateful,” he told the sky, water running into his eyes and
mouth. “I’m grateful for every second I had with you, Diane. Even the bad times were some of the best of my life.”
He took out the stones and lifted one to his eye, but his numb fingers dropped the bag and he watched the flat, white stones disappear into the mucky earth.
He swore, but his curse had no heart.
Mack had grown tired, wet and heavy, and too exhausted to care if he ever made it out of the Stoneroot Forest.
He lifted the final stone to his eye and gaped at the scene beyond the hole.
A small cabin hunched in the forest before him. A curl of smoke floated from the chimney, mingling with the rain above.
When he took the stone from his eye, the cabin vanished and an endless, murky forest reappeared. He lifted it back up and squinted through the tiny hole at the cabin.
Struggling to his feet, the other stones forgotten, Mack walked toward the log house, not daring to remove the stone pressed to his eye for fear it would disappear.
Only when his hand closed upon the doorknob did he take the stone away. The cabin door remained before him, real and solid. He turned the handle and fell inside.
The cabin was rustic, but warm. A woven red rug lay in the center of a wood floor. A bed of straw covered in blankets, the frame fashioned from large knobby branches, stood against the wall. Two crude chairs sat near a crackling fire.
Mack found a basin of drinking water in the kitchen and dipped a copper ladle into the dark water, drinking several cups before stumbling to a chair and collapsing into it.
A sound startled him, and he turned to see the crow from the forest watching him from its single good eye. In the firelight, Mack could see the milky glaze over its other eye.
The bird stood on a branch inside the cabin.
As Mack watched, it dropped the stone from its mouth onto the table, where five other similar stones already lay. The small leather pouch rested beside them.
Mack blinked at the stones, his eyes growing heavy in the heat. He peeled off his soggy clothes, dropping them on the floor and glancing again at the bird. It shuddered, its wings slick from the rain dripping from its shining black feathers.
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