I put my fingers to my hair and spun around so I could see myself in the mirror again. I pictured River as a little boy, with his straight nose and crooked smile, but also with soft, hairless cheeks and a small boy’s body, like Jack’s. I pictured him helping his mom pin her hair up for a party. It was a damn sweet image, and it kind of nullified the feeling I’d been working on since the cemetery.
Luke came over to the mirror and pushed me out of the way so he could see himself. He smiled at the way the pinstripes were pulled tight across his chest and arms. And then his smile faded, and his fingers flew to his forehead.
Luke had a deep widow’s peak, and he was already worried about going bald. I would often catch him looking at himself in mirrors and window reflections, moving his head this way and that, trying to figure out if his hairline was receding.
“Vi, look,” he said, pointing to his head. “Look. It’s moved. I swear it’s moved.”
“No, it hasn’t,” I replied, without looking.
“Are you sure? I can’t go bald, Vi. I just can’t. I’m not a bald guy. I wouldn’t wear it well.”
I sighed, and kind of laughed. “Your hairline hasn’t moved. I promise.”
“Okay,” Luke said. He took a deep breath, let it out, and turned away from the mirror. “I trust you.”
I laughed again and then turned to look at River, who had just come out of the wardrobe in what looked like Italian peasant clothes, complete with a red kerchief around his neck. Something left over from my parents’ bohemian friends, no doubt. He had even scrounged up a ukulele, and he sat down on one of the torn velvet sofas, strumming the chords to Moon River, in honor of my dress.
Jack searched around until he found a checkered vest and a tweed cap. He was smiling, and I think he was having a good time, but he was so quiet. I got the impression that he was used to keeping still and silent. He just didn’t give off the feeling that other kids gave off—of recklessness and innocence and mischief. And I wondered why.
Jack took his costume into the wardrobe and came out looking like a street kid selling newspapers on the corner in an old movie. It was damn adorable. And I don’t consider myself particularly susceptible to adorable-ness. I had the urge to sit down and paint him, right there, on the spot. And I hadn’t wanted to pick up my brushes in a long time.
Luke and I had been painting since before we could talk, and, while other kids had crayons, Luke and I had a box of acrylics. But after watching my parents prioritize art over us for so many years, I’d kind of gotten sick of it. I’d quit cold turkey last fall when they’d left for Paris. Luke hadn’t painted in years, not since around the time Freddie died, as far as I knew. And he’d been a lot better than me too. He was good, really good, like our dad.
I remembered the damp paintbrushes in the guesthouse.
“Luke, are you painting again?” I looked at him, sitting in the dashing suit next to Sunshine on a pile of dusty old velvet throw pillows. He ignored me and began to nibble on her ear.
I kicked his leg. “Just tell me if you’re painting again. It’ll make me happy.”
But he didn’t answer me, just continued kissing Sunshine. Maybe he considered it too important to talk about. I kicked him again, but then let him be.
Jack sat down between River and me. It made me feel motherly, to have this kid around, even if the kid was kind of stoic and silent and hardly acted like a kid at all. Still, it made me think. It made me think about how, if I was a mother, I wouldn’t spend all my afternoons with my artist friends, talking about Renoir and Rodin. Or take off for Europe, and disappear for months at a time. No . . . I would sit with my kid and make him maple syrup iced tea and tell him stories. It wouldn’t have to be all the time. Just once in a while. Just so he would know I wanted him around.
Jack started yawning. Which made sense. He’d spent the last few nights in a cemetery, looking for the Devil. I thought about what Jack had said earlier, in front of the Citizen. About wanting River to show him how he did it.
River felt me looking at him, and looked back. His fingers were still on the uke and his eyes were open and happy and content.
I decided to go back to pulling a Scarlett and not think about the cemetery devil until tomorrow.
Freddie once told me that I was the worst sort of stubborn—because I wasn’t stubborn at all. I was patient. Patient, but determined. A stubborn person could be distracted, or tricked. But not me. I just held on and on and on, never giving up until I got my way, long after everyone else stopped caring. I don’t know if what Freddie said was true. Maybe she was just frustrated with me at the time for something.
Jack yawned again. He had high cheekbones that popped out when his mouth opened wide, and I thought he would be kind of an elegant-looking man when he got older—debonair, like a George Sanders–voiced movie star in the 1940s.
Jack closed his eyes . . . and fell asleep.
I turned my head and looked out the window. My gaze drifted, and my eyes followed a sunbeam to where it covered an old trunk in the corner, making the black leather look lighter, almost brown. I realized that it was the trunk with the gin bottle and the red card. I’d forgotten that I wanted to search through that thing again.
And I almost got up to do it right then, but Jack was leaning against me, and he looked soft and sweet. I didn’t want to move and lose the peaceful moment by starting up my Freddie yearning again.
I would check it later. And I wouldn’t forget this time.
“So there’s this story by Faulkner. ‘A Rose for Emily,’” I said, to no one in particular, after River finished the song he was strumming and everything was quiet except for the soft sleep-breathing of Jack next to me. I felt like talking, which was unusual—I had all these thoughts going through my head and I didn’t want to think them. So I opened my mouth and just let it run. “It’s about a woman named Emily who falls in love with a man, but he doesn’t love her back. Then one day he goes missing. Disappears. Years later, when Emily dies, the people in her town find the decomposed corpse of the man in her bed, a strand of long gray hair on the pillow next to him.” I paused. “Emily poisoned him with arsenic and then put him in her bed, to lie there, forever.”
I paused again. “I know it’s supposed to be a horror story, but I always thought the whole thing was sort of sad, and beautiful. She really loved that man. That’s rare in life, I think. More rare than people think. Everyone thought she was insane, but I think she was just really, really in love.”
River stopped fiddling with the ukulele and looked at me.
Then Luke stretched out his leg and kicked me in the shin. “God. Please tell me you don’t go around saying crap like that to everyone. No wonder no one in town ever talks to us. Wealthy families always have a crazy person or two. Is that really the role you want to play, Vi?”
“We’re not wealthy anymore. Remember? So if I’m insane, no one will care.”
Luke turned to River. “What the hell do you see in my sister, anyway? I’m curious.”
“Siblings, stop squabbling.” Sunshine reached into her glass of tea, took out an ice cube, and started running it over her neck and upper chest. Slowly. “It’s too hot up here for fighting.”
“It’s not hot,” I said. “It’s not remotely hot. It’s sixty-five degrees at the most.”
Sunshine stopped moving the ice cube, grinned at me, and then popped it into her mouth and began chewing on it.
I got up and started the record over. “You know, some people think Robert Johnson was poisoned,” I said. “With strychnine. He was only twenty-seven years old when he died, and no one ever figured out what killed him, so who knows? Strychnine is a mean poison. Death is horrific and painful. Someone must really have hated him. Otherwise they would have used arsenic, or cyanide. If I was going to kill someone, it would be with cyanide.”
I went through an intense Agatha Christie phase
when I was fourteen.
Luke glared at me. “Now you’re just pissing me off. Stop being eccentric, Vi. It wasn’t cute when you were younger and now it’s just plain disturbed. This is why you don’t have any friends.”
“Speaking of,” I said, “can you clear some of your many, many friends out of the attic, Luke? It’s getting so crowded up here.”
River leaned back into the couch and put his hands behind his head. He was grinning. My fighting with Luke amused him, I guess, though I felt a bit ashamed about it myself. Not that it would stop me the next time.
“Wasn’t Robert Johnson the blues singer who brought his guitar to the crossroads at midnight and sold his soul to the Devil for the learning of it?” River asked a moment later.
“Yeah, that’s him,” I answered. “Man makes a deal with the Devil. It’s a Faustian myth—a classic. Johnson said it was true, apparently. But I guess the Devil collected early and dragged Johnson down to hell before he’d even reached thirty.”
“Faust. We all know you’re a smug bookworm, sister. Stop showing off.”
“Stop fighting,” Sunshine scolded again. “Both of you. It interrupts my flirting.”
“I wish people would spread a Faustian rumor about me.” I leaned over and knocked Sunshine’s hand out of Luke’s hair. “A Faustian myth,” I repeated. “It’s so much more interesting than just being that nouveau-poor blond girl who lives in a big house with nobody but her jackass brother with pecs bigger than his brain. Sunshine, if I ever disappear, please tell people that I ran after the Devil, trying to get my soul back.”
Sunshine batted her sleepy eyes at me. “Whatever, Vi.”
Next to me, River took off Jack’s cap and rumpled his hair. Jack slowly opened his blue eyes.
“So . . . aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?” River asked him. “You’ve been running around a cemetery for the last two days. Doesn’t anyone care where you are?”
Jack rubbed one eye, not looking at River. “My mom left when I was a baby. And my dad is . . . working. Nobody cares where I am.” Jack looked up at River then, his freckled face serious as usual. “Are you going to show me how you did the magic now?”
River stood up. “Time to take this kid home.”
I nodded. River leaned over me, wrapped his fingers around my neck, and pulled my ear to his lips. “I’ll make you dinner when I get back, and afterward, I’ll be answering questions,” he whispered.
River kissed my earlobe. And my whole body started tingling with something exotic and foreign and bittersweet and kind of world-shaking. I went speechless from it, as I suppose he knew I would.
CHAPTER 13
RIVER AND JACK left, and Sunshine followed Luke to his bedroom. I went outside to watch the night sky and wait for River to get back.
I sat out there, listening to the waves beat themselves against the rocks below, and the pine needles rustle on the trees, and tried to ignore the chill that was building back up inside me. A suspicious, River-lying, Devil chill.
And then a squeal pierced through the peaceful night sounds.
It sounded like Sunshine. And it was coming from the direction of Luke’s bedroom window.
I contemplated going up there and putting a stop to the squealing, but I didn’t feel like having my brother yell at me.
The minutes passed. My River chill grew worse. So did the squealing. I got to my feet and followed the sound of Sunshine’s laughter to my brother’s room on the third floor.
I opened Luke’s door without knocking. I didn’t even care that much what I would walk in on, which shows what kind of mood I was in. “What’s going on in here?” I shouted, loudly, like some stupid character in some stupid play.
Silence. Luke and Sunshine were sitting on the floor of his bedroom, fully clothed.
“We found an old Ouija board in the attic,” Sunshine said. She flipped her brown hair over her round shoulder. “Your brother is trying to convince me the Citizen is haunted.”
Luke crossed his arms and glared at me. “Don’t you knock? You hypocrite.” But he wasn’t really mad. I could tell, because his green-brown eyes were sort of laughing.
My anger fizzled.
Luke’s bedroom looked like an Edward Hopper painting. It used to be our grandfather’s study. The Citizen had plenty of spare bedrooms (seven or eight—I could never remember), but Luke liked the study the best. Probably because of its inherent manliness, what with the wood paneling and the bookshelves and the art deco black leather couch and the hint of cigar smoke that never seemed to leave. So when Luke turned fifteen, he and Dad replaced Grandpa’s desk with a bed.
I sat down between Sunshine and Luke on the green Turkish carpet, right underneath a leather-bound row of Dickens novels (that I’m sure Luke had never opened) and in front of several blank canvases, all sizes.
I looked at the Ouija board. “Where was it in the attic?”
“At the bottom of one of the wardrobes.” Sunshine shivered, in an obvious way. “We contacted a spirit. A girl. She fell into the sea and drowned when she was ten years old, and now she floats around the Citizen, watching all of us.” Sunshine’s sleepy eyes grew large. “Scary, huh?”
“Since when do you believe in ghosts, Sunshine?” I asked, allowing more contempt to sneak into my voice than I probably should have. Sunshine thought that boys liked girls who were easily scared. And hell, maybe she was right. If a boy could get a girl squealing, maybe she would crawl into his arms for comfort. And once she was in his arms, second base was probably right around the corner.
“Vi, isn’t there a small painting of one of our dead relatives hanging in the ballroom, some blond-haired girl?”
I caught my brother’s eye. “Yeah. Her name was True. She was Freddie’s daughter . . . Dad’s younger sister. Freddie never talked about her, but Dad told me that she drowned when she was a girl.” I paused. “Dad must have told you too. Apparently.”
Luke threw his hands up in the air. “I’ve never heard of her before now. I swear. She spoke to us through the Ouija board.” He nudged it with his knee and the pointer shifted in an ominous kind of way.
I stared my brother down, but his innocent expression didn’t falter. “Fine. Let’s go to the ballroom.”
The ballroom was now the family art gallery. No one had danced on the gorgeous hardwood floors in years, excepting the time my parents brought down the record player from the attic late one night and decided to teach me and Luke some of the flowing debutante dances my mother had learned, back when she was a coiffed, rouged, beautiful southern belle, and not my long-haired artist mother who never wore makeup but always had paint underneath her fingernails and Degas on her mind.
My parents started off teaching us the steps, but ended up dancing with each other, me and Luke sitting on the floor, watching them slide up and down the ballroom hardwood until dawn arrived.
That was one of my good memories.
“It’s over there,” I said, pointing to the portrait in the far corner. The walls were covered in paintings. Most had been done by my parents, or their artist friends, but a few had been around since the beginning. Freddie, being rich, intelligent, and charming, had known her share of paint-splattering people. There were over a dozen portraits of her, done by various men and women. Most featured Freddie when she was young, her bright blue eyes beaming with derring-do and looking like they’d shine forever.
But, of course, they hadn’t.
My dad hung Freddie’s portraits high up, almost too high to see. Probably because she was nude in most of them, and he didn’t dig looking at his mother naked, day in and day out.
Sunshine, Luke, and I gazed at True’s portrait. I hadn’t turned on the ballroom lights, because the three chandeliers hadn’t worked in years, but the moon came through the windows, and Luke had a small flashlight in his pocket that he’d found in the attic, and we could see
all right. The portrait was a small thing, only some six inches square, and stuck between an early Chagall-esque painting by my mother and a stoic portrait of my grandfather Lucas White, complete with cigar and flowered lapel. True was very young. Just a girl, with yellow, yellow hair, like me, and fair skin, and pink cheeks, and a faraway, fairy-tale look in her eyes. The style was pastel impressionistic, down to the soft blue dress she was wearing, which exactly matched the color of her blue eyes, and which contrasted nicely with the two red poppies she clutched, one in each hand.
“She said she was watching out for you,” Sunshine whispered. She took the flashlight from Luke and shined it on the painting. “The Ouija board spelled it out, plain as day. She said that she watches you and Luke.”
I had goose bumps now. Big fat ones. Hell, I believed in Luke’s ability to bullshit more than I believed in ghosts, but still. I glanced at him and back at Sunshine. “Did the board say anything else?”
River had found us by this time. He snuck into the ballroom like a shadow and came up behind me. “What’s going on?” he asked.
I leaned into him, so my back touched his chest. “Luke’s trying to scare Sunshine with a Ouija board. It’s such a teenager cliché. I feel like I’m in an Agatha Christie mystery. Prepare yourself for the board to predict one of our murders next.”
Luke turned around and glared at me. “I can’t believe you aren’t taking this seriously, sister.” He pointed at the painting. “True spoke to us. She’s trying to warn us. Something bad is about to happen.”
Sunshine nodded, unable to take her eyes off the painting. “Yeah. The board spelled out: BE CAREFUL. SOMEONE IS COMING. That was right before you flew through the door, Vi, shouting. Pretty darn scary.”
Sunshine pulled her gaze away from the portrait and shivered again. Luke put his arms around her. She smiled, tucked herself deeper into his shoulder, and winked at me.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea Page 9