The Lost Coast

by Amy Rose Capetta

  “I . . . don’t remember.”

  “You’re afraid to remember.” Imogen smiled, privately. “I’ll bet you were soft and had the smoothest skin. I’ll bet you were lovely.”

  Imogen visited Emma in the woods often, sitting by her side with little more than a whispered greeting when someone else was near — most often Imogen’s friends, the Grays. Imogen asked, more than once, if she could tell them about her. Emma didn’t want that. She was afraid the Grays wouldn’t believe in her, and it would break her heart all over again.

  What do you want?” Rush says, not to me, but to the girl in the picture, running her hand over the article, using one fingertip to blot out Emma’s face for a moment before she pulls it away.

  I flatten my palm on the page with the news clipping about Emma’s disappearance and pull it away from the binding of the book, wincing as the tear goes jagged. I make sure that the book is tucked back where it came from — not that I can imagine anyone noticing a single page being gone.

  Rush and I leave the visitors’ center without bothering the employee in the back room. Outside, the sky has committed to darkness.

  I pull out my phone. Two dozen texts, half as many missed calls. It’s a good thing I kept it on silent. Mom wants to know where I am. She wants to know who I’m with. She wants me to come home. Now. And then she unleashes the threats. She’s getting better at them.

  I never promised this would be permanent.

  If this isn’t working, we have to leave Tempest.

  Back to Michigan?

  I can’t go back. Not now that I have the Grays. Not with my dowsing rod pulling me closer and closer to the truth of what’s happening in Tempest. But there’s also no way I can explain any of that to Mom. I fumble the phone into my pocket, lodging it there and trying to forget.

  But Rush has noticed the state of my face. “Should I take you home?” she whispers, her soft disappointment cutting deeper than any nasty comment would have.

  I stare at Rush, not even bothering to hide the force of how I feel. I might not have many more chances to look at her like this.

  “No,” I say. “If we’re going to find Imogen, we have to do it now.”

  “Where to?” Rush asks.

  I let the dowsing rod make that decision. I can tell from the feeling that I get inside, a long, stretched-out feeling, that we’ve got to cover some distance, so we get back into the car. As Rush drives, I text the Grays, telling them to meet us at the entrance to the nearest trailhead.

  I let myself imagine that Rush and I might get a minute alone before everyone else shows up, but Lelia and June are already waiting for us at the turnstile with the NO WALKING AFTER DARK sign. Rush’s headlights spill over them — Lelia’s leather shorts and fringed tank top, June’s star-spattered dress and navy knee-highs.

  Hawthorn pulls Ora’s truck in behind us and starts unloading bags of magical supplies from the back. Bottled cuttings of flowers snipped at just the right time of moon, pungent homemade oils, ten different kinds of salt.

  I want to grab Rush’s hand, gather some of her soft confidence, but I don’t know what we are in the context of the Grays. Alone, there are certain rules, and ways to warp them. When we’re with everyone else, it’s probably best to keep this quiet. Which makes me want to shout that I’m about to kiss her.

  I wait until everyone is slightly settled, and then I lean back against the metal bars that separate us from the woods.

  For the first time in my life, I don’t feel like wandering away from the topic. I explain what I know about the why of Imogen leaving. I tell them the strange cut-short story of Emma Hart. “I’m going to dowse for Emma,” I say. “I think that’s what I did after I found her grave.”

  “What about Imogen?” June asks. “Wouldn’t finding her be easier than connecting to a spirit? I mean, she’s still alive.” The hope in her voice could destroy a small town.

  I finger the dowsing rod, the new combination of bow and raven feather. “I tried to dowse for Imogen, but the trail went in loops and circles.” I skip over the part where my dowsing kept throwing me headfirst at Rush. “It led me here, to Emma. I think if we find Emma, we find Imogen.”

  “How does this work?” Hawthorn asks. It’s the first time she’s looked to me to explain and not the other way around. It reminds me exactly how much I’m making this up as I go. I’m not the expert they need, the witch they wanted. I might not even be here tomorrow. There’s a good chance Mom is furiously emptying her bank account to buy us plane tickets.

  I open my mouth to tell them all of this, but then I look around at Hawthorn’s pressed lips, Lelia’s cutting stare, June fiddling with the zippers on her backpack. Rush lights one of the votives from Hawthorn’s stash as she waits for me to reveal the plan. When I first got here, I thought the Grays were perfect, that they always knew the right thing to say or do. Now we’re all huddled around a tiny black candle, trying to invent the next minute.

  “Emma Hart died a long time ago,” I say. “Searching for someone who’s been gone for a hundred years is going to be hard. Her grave helped, but that can only do so much.” I had the hermit’s bones, but Emma’s grave is empty. It’s not really a physical piece of her that I need, though — more like a piece of her past.

  I turn to Rush on a fresh wave of realization. “That book we found in Imogen’s room,” I say, grabbing her hands and hoping the other Grays think it’s just overexcited Danny. Rush’s fingers are warm, stirring, ready. “That wasn’t just Imogen spilling her lovesick guts. It was a spell.”

  Rush shakes her head, not understanding. Or maybe she’s still too afraid to let in the truth.

  “Think about the likenesses we made,” I say. “They required a piece of us. But . . . if you wanted to do that for someone who’s been dead for a long time, and you didn’t have anything left of them physically, you would need a symbol.”

  “Emma’s name,” Hawthorn says. “Imogen charged it like atoms in a storm, gave it power.”

  “We don’t have time to build up to that.” I slip my hand back into my pocket to make sure the flimsy page from the visitors’ center is still there. I rub it between two fingers, in circles, the way you’d rub a charm. “But I have Emma’s picture now. And . . . I might be better at this kind of spell. Imogen isn’t a dowser.”

  It feels like blasphemy, admitting that there might be something I’m capable of that Imogen isn’t. But whatever doubts the Grays are feeling, they bury them under six feet of longing.

  I jump the metal bars onto the hiking trail and walk into the dark welcome of the woods. The massive trees seem more like living creatures at night, not just scenery. They stay awake and vigilant while the rest of the world sleeps.

  I hold out my dowsing rod and chant, “Emma Hart, Emma Hart, Emma Hart.”

  The dowsing rod pulls me with a certain, almost vicious wrenching. A mile later, I’ve been keeping up an impossible pace, and I don’t know how much farther this hunt will take me. I look back at the Grays, catching slips of them in the fog.

  I’m leading them to Emma, but she could be the one who killed Sebastian and Neil. Who stole Imogen. She could be stealing us now. I do desperation math, hoping that five witches against one will keep us safe. That the Grays will forgive me if I’m making every wrong call.

  The dowsing rod pulls until I’m breathless and my calves want to snap with the effort, but eventually dullness arrives in my chest, and I stop. I’m standing on the verge of a bowl of earth, shallow and wide, a place where a great tree used to stand.

  “Death,” Lelia says coldly. “This is where things come to die.”

  My heart suspends all beating.

  “How do you know that?” I ask.

  “Believe me,” Lelia says, and I remember her mother. She knows the rough texture of the quiet here.

  Lelia drifts away from the Grays and curls up in the basin. Her stillness scares me.

  “Lel,” June says. “Lelia, come back.”

  I�
�ve been sticking close to a tree with a thick, alive smell, loam and lemons. I step into the basin. I take out the thin sheet from my pocket and press it to the earth. “June, can I use your knife?” I ask.

  She’s behind me in a wordless second. “Pin it there,” I say. “Please.” She spears the page through the center, leaving Emma’s picture untouched beneath the blade.

  “Are you there, Emma Hart?” I ask. “Can you hear me?”

  Fog moves in fast, rolling over the lip of the basin. The Grays disappear into it, one by one.

  “Emma.” My voice strains. Tips toward breaking. “Help me find you.”

  The space around me floods with fog, white as mushrooms and rich with damp. I blink, but I can’t find any kind of balance as light swallows the darkness. I feel a strange prickle on my right arm. I look down, but I can’t see my own body past the hollow spot where my neck meets my chest.

  And then the fog snatches back, leaving the world a clean, starry black.

  There is a map on my forearm. A map made of simple black lines. And up near my wrist, at the end of the path, is a juicy black X.

  Emma was born on the rainiest Tuesday in the bounds of memory or belief. Pellets of water left dents in the earth, turned the redwoods a sullen black. It ate the banks of the Eel River, but by some grace the river didn’t flood. The town of Prospero, California, clung to life on the verge of the water.

  Tiny Emma clung to life, too.

  She grew into a red-faced child, prone to harsh moods as well as cyclones of glee. Her parents would come to wish, in quiet moments after she was abed and darkness had beset the world, that one of her brothers and sisters buried in the yard, marked by nameless stones, had lived in Emma’s stead.

  Her mother looked for ways to put things right. She found hope at the end of the lane, in the form of Ada Moore, a girl her daughter’s age with straight pale hair and a disposition to match. She treated Ada like medicine for her sickly daughter. A dose for bad days. Two doses for impossible ones.

  Emma and Ada took long walks, tracing the river from Prospero to the nearby town of Tempest. Emma wore her best shiny black shoes and her most intent frown. She handed Ada pebbles, but only the ones that glowed yellow or pink when they were wet. Like magic. She tugged the collar of her dress away from her sticky neck. She was not allowed to take her shoes off and splash in the water.

  She was never, never allowed to go in the woods.

  At school, Emma and Ada shared a desk, their hips fitted together snugly. When the teacher struck an iron bell and the students of Prospero carried lunch pails outside, Emma and Ada sat on the same stump in the schoolyard, their arms touching from shoulder to wrist. They spoke only to each other, always in whispers.

  Emma’s mother began to worry that she’d given her daughter too much medicine. “Is this typical?” she asked the schoolteacher. “Should we be troubled?”

  “Girls are soft, sensitive creatures, prone to close friendships,” the schoolteacher said, clasping her hands around Mrs. Hart’s as if gifting her some natural truth. “Soon enough, you’ll remember these days fondly. A girl like Emma is destined to become a handsome woman.”

  The teacher’s prophecy came true with a frightening quickness. A year later, Emma walked arm in arm with Ada down the main street of Tempest, holding her sharp chin high but casting her eyes down whenever a young man looked at her. They checked to see if her cheeks had gone that telling rhubarb pink.

  They hadn’t.

  “It’s one thing to be humble and chaste, but you can’t look away from every one of them,” Ada said one night as she stabbed a pin through Emma’s hair. It did nothing to restrain the great pool of it.

  “You don’t smile at any young men,” Emma challenged.

  Ada’s frown thickened to a paste. “I’m needed at home.” Ada’s mother had died two springs ago of a fever that also took her brothers. “I don’t have to worry about marriage. I won’t have time for it.”

  The next day at school, Emma traced the word spinster on her paper over and over, though it wasn’t one of the spelling terms.

  That night, the schoolteacher paid the Harts a visit. Over dinner, when Emma had gone to the kitchen to fetch a plate of rolls, she leaned toward Mrs. Hart and said, “You might have cause to worry.”

  Less than a month later, Robert Mason, a young man from town who Emma barely knew, arrived at the Hart house for dinner. After stew and potatoes and pie, Emma found herself in the parlor with this stranger and his sickly pale face as he lowered himself to one knee. Her parents hovered in the background, donning masks of happiness so Emma would know how to look.

  Before they took the engagement photograph, Ada spent an hour on Emma’s hair and fussed over the mother-of-pearl buttons on her collar. She stood beside the photographer and blinked a little too often, blaming it on the great flash of the camera, rising in a puff of smoke.

  Robert kissed Emma on the cheek. She shuddered. Girls in the schoolyard said that shuddering when a boy touched you meant that you were destined to be his wife. It meant Emma would love him soon.

  Later, in Emma’s childhood bed, she cried with her head in Ada’s lap, her body curled tighter than a young fern. Ada stroked her hair and told her in a low voice that everything would be fine, and Ada would help Emma raise her babies.

  “We’ll never be apart,” Ada vowed, her hands cupping Imogen’s face as she thumbed tears away. She kissed the most perfect one, and it tasted as salty as she imagined the sea. Neither Emma nor Ada had seen the Pacific. It was thirty miles away, through untamed redwood forest.

  “Will I be happy?” Emma asked.

  She waited for Ada to say Of course. When the pause drew on too long, her hopes narrowed. A simple yes would do. Emma looked up at Ada from where she lay on the bed, so that Ada’s face took up the entire world.

  Ada’s fingers trickled through Emma’s stubborn hair. When a few minutes had wafted past, Ada pressed a kiss to Emma’s lips, and with it, she sealed every one of Emma’s hopes. “I choose to believe you will,” she whispered. “Someday.”

  It’s a good thing we came prepared,” June says, tugging her backpack straps. Her bag is deceptively large, fitting worlds of helpful items. She brought her athame, a tumbled piece of pinolith to keep her third eye open, black candle stubs to banish bad energy, a matchbook from the diner, one steel flask filled with water, another with gut-twisting cheap whiskey, and enough snacks to keep them going on a long, uncertain hike.

  Lelia grabs Danny’s arm and takes stock of the situation. She knows this map, or at least other maps like it. It’s the shape of the Lost Coast. “Look,” she says. “The X is more than halfway to the water. That”— she runs a finger along a dark, craggy line —“is the Pacific coast. Between Tempest and the Pacific is one of the oldest and most important stands of coastal redwoods in the world. Only trees. No towns, no roads.”

  “What does the X stand for?” Danny asks.

  The Grays look at one another and take stock. They’re all pretty sure they’ve made an important connection, but they want to check with one another before they share it. It’s getting harder to give away pieces of Imogen. It feels like the pile is dwindling, and soon they might run out.

  “Imogen drew a map like that once,” Lelia says. “It led the hermit to the tree where he . . .”

  The words lived and died blossom in the air.

  “I’d call it a coincidence, but witch logic says otherwise,” Lelia adds.

  “Are we sure it’s Imogen who drew the map?” Danny asks. “I mean, she’s not the one I’m dowsing for.”

  “You think Emma did this?” Hawthorn asks, pushing her doubts around her face, twisting her features.

  Danny stands there, clearly waiting for one of the Grays to tell her that she’s ridiculous. Even if they’re witches — Emma Hart has been dead for almost a hundred years, and there’s no such thing as a dead girl drawing a map on your arm, leading you into the deep, deep woods.

  June pulls o
ut a granola bar and chases down a bite with whiskey. She definitely shouldn’t have skipped dinner. Her confidence is not holding up to the notion of chasing a spirit into the depths of the Lost Coast. “Why would she draw a map exactly like Imogen does?”

  “Maybe Imogen taught her,” Rush says, trying to keep her words light. But it’s all weighing on her — the secrets, the kisses, the places where the two overlap.

  “Let’s move,” Hawthorn says. “If we’re going to find anyone tonight, we have to get started.”

  The Grays head away from Tempest, their sandals and sneakers and boots marking the earth in a way that will be instantly brushed over, forgotten. They take turns using their cell phones as flashlights until the batteries start to die. They decide, one by one, to save their last sliver of a charge, just in case they need the phones in an emergency. Not that there’s any service where they’re headed.

  Danny leads them down a slope into a great valley, each step plunging them deeper into a place that shouldn’t exist in the modern world. This is one of the last places that people don’t trespass, don’t harm, don’t scratch with their steps and clutter with their lives.

  If the Grays get lost here, they are well and truly lost.

  They’ve been walking for over an hour when Danny stops.

  “We’re looking for a special tree?” June asks, inspecting the tree trunks. Some are breathtakingly high, others are as wide as buildings. A few have bark that grows in straight strips, while the patterns on others twist in a tortured spin. Needles cluster high overhead, thickening into clouds. “They all look special to me.”

  “I don’t think we’re even close yet,” Danny says, and the Grays’ frustration gathers around her. “It’s hard to be exact with an arm map.” She pulls out the dowsing rod and holds it out, straight and certain. The Grays can tell she’s been practicing without them — the way Danny carries the rod is starting to look natural, balanced.

  But June thinks there might be something missing.