by Erica Waters
I step back instinctively. “What kind of lies, Frank?”
“Of course, I believed him,” he roars over my head. “I saw how you looked at Marlene.”
“What’s your wife got to do with this?” Ena asks, but Frank’s not listening. He’s still advancing toward me, the bowl lifted in one meaty fist, his eyes focused on Jim’s ghost.
“Shady, go get in the car,” Ena says, her voice shrill.
Slowly, I pick up my bow and put it in the case with the fiddle.
“Don’t touch that,” Frank yells. His eyes are dark and wild and lost. “It’s your creepy, freaky family that cost me my brother. That’s why I—” A strangled sob stops his words.
I slam the lid down and snap the clasps. “That’s why you killed him?” I ask, the truth settling into my chest with a horrible certainty. “That’s why he’s haunting you?”
Frank moves toward us again. “I—”
“You killed him,” I interrupt, fear filling my entire being. I’m face-to-face with the man who bashed Jim’s head in with a hammer. My eyes take in the heavy glass bowl in his hands, the horrible strength of his arms.
My legs feel numb, but I back toward the door with the fiddle held to my chest. My heart beats hard against the case, and I swear I feel another heart inside the fiddle, matching mine beat for beat. “If you killed him, you’ll never be free until you confess, until you’re punished. He’ll cling to you until you die. That’s what ghosts do to their murderers.”
But now Frank’s eyes are locked several inches above my head, his face pleading. Then his features twist with rage. “Get out,” he screams, so loud his vocal cords must burn inside his throat. He draws back his arm and hurls the glass bowl in my direction.
Aunt Ena and I throw ourselves to the floor as glass rains down on our heads. He wasn’t aiming for us; we aren’t the ones he’s trying to drive away. But that doesn’t mean he won’t hurt us. Not in the state he’s in. I grab Ena’s arm and we scramble from the building, Frank’s screams propelling us forward.
The rain’s still pouring, the gravel parking lot turned to gritty puddles. We splash through them, and I yank open the driver’s-side door and throw myself in, fumbling to latch my seat belt with shaking hands. Frank is running toward the car, so I back out before Aunt Ena even has her door closed. We shoot backward from the parking lot and squeal onto the empty road.
I don’t know if he’s coming after us, but I’m not waiting to find out. This is the man who murdered my stepdad. Who killed his own brother and then blamed it on mine. I can’t take any chances.
As I’m speeding away, the car hits a stretch of standing water at the bottom of the hill, and my tires lose traction, making the car skid across the drenched pavement into the other lane. I yank the steering wheel to pull it back, and the car swerves into the correct lane and then keeps swerving. Aunt Ena screams and reaches for the steering wheel, but we plow into the ditch with a roar, heading straight for a stand of trees.
The world shatters into glass and blood and finally into darkness.
Twenty-Four
When I come to, sirens are wailing around me, shrill and insistent. A wave of pain makes me close my eyes again.
After a few moments, I remember where I am. In my mama’s car, surrounded by glass and twisted metal, wet tree leaves brushing my face.
Blood drips down my cheek. With agonizing slowness, I turn my head to the right.
Aunt Ena is unconscious, her face nicked with a dozen tiny cuts, her head slumped against the passenger-side window, which is cracked but not broken. I watch her chest to see if she’s breathing. I whisper a relieved prayer when I see it rise and fall.
We’re alive.
I lay my head against the headrest and wait for the sirens to reach us. The rain falls and falls and falls. Frank’s nowhere to be seen. I don’t know if he was even chasing us. Maybe he was running too.
Somehow, despite all the blood and glass and smashed metal, I walk away with only a fractured rib and a nasty laceration across my forehead, courtesy of a branch that smashed through the window when we hit the trees. I get eight stitches and some ibuprofen, and the doctors say I can go home. The fiddle is unharmed—I made the EMTs put it on the stretcher with me before I’d let them take me from the wreck.
But Aunt Ena has a concussion. It turns out her head is what caused the crack in the passenger-side window. The real problem though is that she can’t stop panicking. She’s wild with fear, and they can’t sedate her because of the concussion. They gave her something for anxiety, but it’s not working. She’s stuck in a tortured panic, and the hospital is a thousand times worse than the grocery store. I’ve tried holding her hand, talking to her, even singing, but she doesn’t even seem to recognize me. She keeps whispering to herself. I can’t make out most of what she’s saying, but she has mentioned a tea party a few times, which makes no sense to me.
I dash to the door of the examination room when her doctor walks by. “Dr. Yamamoto, please let me take my aunt home,” I beg. “She’ll feel better once she’s out of here. She’s afraid of the fluorescent lights and all the space and noise.” What she needs is the quiet of her house and the comfort of her ghosts.
The doctor gives me a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry, but I can’t release her to you. You’re a minor. You’ll have to wait a little longer.” Dr. Yamamoto has been really kind to us even though the ER is so busy, so I just nod and let her go back to her other patients.
Mama’s car is totaled, but even if I did have a vehicle, would Aunt Ena get into it? I texted Mama but haven’t heard anything. What if Frank decides to go after Mama now? Or Honey? What if he—I won’t let myself think it. But he’s out of his mind, and Jim haunting him isn’t helping any.
I turn off the lights in the room and sit next to Aunt Ena on the bed. She’s lit by the glow of various machines, her hair long and wild, freed from its pins. Her eyes, when she looks up at me, are like a cornered animal’s.
When I put my hand on her shoulder, she shudders. But at least she has stopped gasping for air like a fish on a hook.
“It’s all right,” I say. “You’re safe. It’s okay.” I repeat the words over and over again, until they have lost their meaning, until they’re just sounds, a shushing lullaby. Aunt Ena stops shaking.
“I want to go home,” she whispers.
“I know. We’ll go soon,” I promise. “You were really brave,” I add.
She reaches up and touches my bandaged forehead. “I won’t let him hurt you again, Brandy. I swear it.”
That’s the second time she’s called me Brandy, but this doesn’t seem like the right moment to ask about it. “It’s Shady, Aunt Ena,” I say, “and Frank won’t hurt me. The police will catch him.”
I’ve already given them my statement about Frank and the crash. I told them Frank threatened me and scared me, and that’s why I ran off the road. I told them some of the things he said to us made me think he was involved in my stepdad’s murder. Aunt Ena was still unconscious when they came by, and I was too worried about her to say much more. They dutifully wrote down my statement, but they didn’t say what they would do about it. They probably thought I was the one with a concussion.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. When I pull it out, the screen illuminates Aunt Ena’s face, and I can see she’s much calmer than before. She’s almost herself again.
“Look, Mama’s calling,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. With a shaking hand, I accept the call.
“Shady,” comes Mama’s tremulous voice. “Thank God. The hospital was trying to reach me, but I didn’t hear my phone. They said you were in a car accident. Are you all right?” Her words come out in a panicked rush. I can hear the engine of Jim’s truck in the background.
“Yeah, I’m okay. Just some stitches. But Aunt Ena has a concussion, and the doctors won’t let us go. Are you—are you okay? Is everything—”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be there soon,” Mama says. “I’m on my wa
y. Stay right there.” Her voice is laced with fear, but it’s fear for me, not anything to do with Frank.
“All right. Love you.”
“Love you, baby,” she says before hanging up. I imagine her flooring the truck’s gas pedal, desperate to reach me. Poor Mama—how many more calls like this can she handle?
But when Mama bursts into the hospital room, with Honey on her hip, I put on a brave face for her. I let her hold me close and fuss over me. I promise her I’m all right. I say all the things she needs to hear.
And then I pull back from her and meet her eyes. “It was Frank, Mama. Frank killed Jim.”
“What?” she says. “What are you talking about?”
I tell her about our confrontation—how out of control he seemed, how guilty and lost. Her eyebrows furrow as she listens, like she’s trying to find some sense in my tale. When I get to the part where Frank throws a glass bowl, her eyes go wide.
“That son of a bitch, I’ll kill him,” she says, clenching her fists. “Threatening my child.”
“Then . . . I thought he was chasing us,” I say. “That’s why we wrecked. I thought maybe he was trying to keep us from telling the police what he did.”
“Shady, Frank might be an angry drunk, but that doesn’t mean he killed Jim,” she says, once I finish. “Did he actually say to you that he killed him?”
“Mama, you can’t be serious. It’s so obvious that he did it.”
She shakes her head. “He’s grieving. People do strange, scary things when they grieve.”
“The day Jim died, at the police station, you told Frank that he had never loved Jim.”
“Sometimes the worst grief comes from not loving people the way we should,” she says, her voice sure.
“But Jesse—”
Mama holds up her hand. “We need to get Ena home. We’ll talk more in the car.”
But once we get into Jim’s truck, Mama doesn’t speak again. Aunt Ena’s panic grows as we drive, and she grips my hand hard, singing and muttering to herself. Most of it is incoherent, but I catch phrases here and there. “One day . . . we’ll grow up . . . never hurt us again . . . never never neverland. Here, I’ll . . . cup of tea. Shhh, shhh, shhh.”
Mama glances at her nervously, but doesn’t say anything.
The fiddle lies silent in my lap, but it doesn’t feel like an instrument at rest. It’s longing to be played—I can feel it, its need the same as the need in my chest. We’re like two magnets being drawn together. The shadow man is what stands in our way, but there has to be something I can do, a song I can play or sing or something—I’ll find a way around him. If Mama’s not going to listen, and Frank’s not going to confess, and Jesse’s going to keep hiding all his secrets, leaving the rest of us to suffer . . . the fiddle’s the only one on my side.
We get Aunt Ena settled into the downstairs guest room, and Mama turns to me. “Is there someone we can call to come stay with her? Does she have a friend who would come?”
“We can’t leave her here alone. And I don’t want to go home. Frank might come looking for us there.”
“Baby, Frank’s not coming after you. He just wanted to scare you.”
“Why won’t you call the police?” I burst out. “He killed Jim. He did it—I know he did. They won’t listen to me because I’m a teenager, but they’ll listen to you. You were Jim’s wife.”
“You’re overexcited from the wreck. You need to calm down,” Mama says, her voice firm.
“I’m not,” I yell. “Why won’t you listen?”
“Shady, you can’t prove anything. They’ll think you’re trying to get Jesse out, and you might even get in trouble for harassing Frank. He has friends on the police force—Gary Jones for one.”
“Yeah, and he’s the one who arrested Jesse. Kenneth told me he—his stepdad made him lie about where he was the morning Jim died. Kenneth was there, at the construction site that morning. His stepdad made him say he wasn’t.”
“I already knew that,” she says. “Jim told me he was having Kenneth come by there.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I yell, throwing out my arms.
I’m staring her down, my eyes as steely as hers for once, when my phone starts ringing.
“Answer that goddamned phone. It’s bothering my nerves,” she says, turning away from me. I could scream.
Instead, I hit the green icon to accept Cedar’s call. “Shady,” he says, his voice relieved.
“What’s wrong?”
“Kenneth told me you were in an accident. Are you okay?”
“How’d he know?”
“His stepdad responded to the 911 call.”
“Of course he did,” I spit, glaring at Mama’s back.
“Are you okay?” he says again.
“I . . . I went to see Frank, and . . .” My mind stutters. Why is Cedar calling me? He’s supposed to be pissed off.
“What happened?”
“I’m fine. I’m at Aunt Ena’s,” I say, my head throbbing. If Kenneth’s stepdad responded and Frank is his friend . . . maybe Mama’s right. Maybe there’s really nothing I can do. Frank has everybody in this town on his side, including the police. “I have to go, sorry,” I say. I hang up before he can try to stop me.
I walk back into the guest room, and Mama stands up. “I’m going to call Miss Patty and see if she’ll come stay with Ena. I want to get you home.”
“No,” I say. “No. I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not leaving Aunt Ena here with that horrible woman. Frank is out there and he’s dangerous. He might want to kill us like he killed Jim,” I say, beginning to shake again. Today has been too much. Too much. How can Frank—the one who gave Jim a job, who was always so sweet to Honey—how can he be the murderer? And if Frank’s a murderer, what does that make Jesse? Another innocent victim.
Mama’s eyes soften. “Okay, we’ll stay,” she says. “Is there a teapot around here somewhere? Ena’s been going on and on about it. Maybe if she holds it, she’ll calm down.”
I stride to the parlor and grab the chipped and yellowing tea set off the mantel. The cups are so small, I can fit two in one hand.
When I settle the teapot in Aunt Ena’s lap, her eyes go distant and calm.
“Honey, you want to play tea party with Aunt Ena?” I ask, hoping my baby sister’s soothing superpowers will work on Aunt Ena as well as they’ve always worked on me. I set her on the bed and give her one of the teacups. She holds it in one little hand, and Aunt Ena automatically reaches out to pour her some invisible tea.
“See,” Aunt Ena says. “I told you we didn’t need any cookies.”
Mama shudders and then strides from the room. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m going to get some clothes and things for all of us.”
When a knock sounds on the front door, I assume Mama must have locked herself out. But instead it’s Cedar standing on the front porch. He steps back in surprise when the door swings open, like a ghost’s going to come jumping out at him.
“Hey,” I say, squinting at his silhouette against the glare of late afternoon sun.
“What’s going on?” he asks, but then he catches sight of my bandage and the blood on my clothes. His hands immediately go to my face, his eyes searching the rest of me for more injuries. “Shady,” he whispers in the tenderest voice I’ve ever heard, and I feel the tears I held off for Mama’s sake start to come.
So I pull away and tell him to come inside, blinking away my tears and trying to make my lips stop trembling before he sees.
I head to the living room, and Cedar follows, shutting the door behind him. Before I can reach the couch, though, he pulls me back toward him by my waist. He cradles my face, studying my forehead. I try to avoid meeting his eyes, try so hard to hold back the tears, but then they are spilling over my cheeks, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So finally, I just let them fall. Let the sobs escape my chest.
Cedar doesn’t say anything; he pulls me gently against him, his hands soft against the b
ack of my neck and hair. I lay my cheek against his chest and breathe in his smell, wrap my arms around his waist, twist my fingers into his shirt. He holds me and lets me weep. Every shudder makes my fractured rib scream, but all this fear and rage and anxiety needs to leave my body somehow.
When I finally pull away to wipe my eyes, he kisses me gently at the corner of my mouth, just once, and then leads me over to the couch.
His eyes glimmer strangely, and I realize he’s struggling not to cry too. That makes me smile a little, knowing a rodeo boy like Cedar is brought to tears by a girl’s crying.
He touches my cheek again. “Did Frank hurt you?” he says, his voice husky.
“Mostly it was the tree we hit.”
His eyes go even more glimmery, and I’m afraid he’s actually going to start crying. “I’m fine,” I say. “Just some stitches and a fractured rib.”
Cedar touches my side with feather-light fingers. “Is Ena all right?”
I nod. “A concussion and a lot of little cuts all over her face, but she’s fine too.”
“I don’t understand what happened. I thought you were going to see your brother today. How did you . . . why’d you go see Frank?”
“We went to confront him after seeing Jesse.”
“You did what?” Cedar says, leaning back from me. “Why would you do that? You knew he wasn’t in control of himself—after we saw him at the construction site. You knew there was something off. You should have asked me to come. I would have helped you. I would have kept you safe.”
I wave away his concern. “He did it, Cedar. He killed Jim. It wasn’t Jesse,” I say.
Cedar can’t seem to take his eyes off me. “But he didn’t get arrested yet?”
“Mama doesn’t think the police will believe us. I guess I don’t think they will either.”
Cedar’s eyes widen. “So he’s still out there? He could come back and look for you? You shouldn’t be alone in this house. I’m going to stay here tonight. I won’t leave you alone until he gets arrested.”
I start to say no, but I’m scared and exhausted, and having a rodeo boy watching over me actually sounds pretty good right now. When I nod, Cedar puts an arm around my waist and pulls me against him, gentler now that he knows about my rib. We sit, side by side, in silence for a long while, our beating hearts the only sound.