The Steep and Thorny Way

by Cat Winters

  Fleur wound one of my spiraling curls around her right index finger, gently tugging at my roots in a way that felt nice. “I thought we were going to move to New York City and become artists.”

  I gave another sigh. “I wonder if there’s ever been a black female lawyer. I should look in that book Mrs. York gave me. Noted Negro Women.”

  “You want to become a lawyer?”

  “Maybe.” I rubbed my lips together and contemplated that potential plan. “To keep from feeling so helpless . . . maybe.”

  Fleur released my curl and let it spring against the side of my left arm. “Mama hopes I’ll find a fiancé soon, probably so I’m one less mouth to feed. She says I’m getting too old for that little one-room schoolhouse.”

  I grunted. “I wouldn’t allow you to marry any of the goofs here in Elston if my life depended on it. Can you imagine, always having to pretend to like all those terrible farm jokes?”

  Fleur laughed so hard, she shook the bed.

  I smiled, but the expression was so forced, it made the muscles in my cheeks hurt. “I mean it. I’m scared to death we’ll get stuck here.”

  “We won’t get stuck. I won’t let us.”

  “I’ll be trapped with my mother and a potential murderer.”

  Fleur grabbed my shoulder. “Dr. Koning didn’t kill your father, Hanalee. Don’t let that terrible thought cross your mind ever again.”

  “But—”

  “Ignore Joe. Naturally, he’s going to put the blame on someone besides himself.”

  I shifted onto my right side, away from her, and the mattress whined and rocked us about as if we were afloat on a raft at sea.

  “If Joe doesn’t genuinely possess a need to avenge himself”—I wiggled my right arm and shoulder into the spine-shaped space I’d made—“then why is he here? If his family doesn’t even want him, why doesn’t he simply run off to some other place?”

  Fleur didn’t answer, although I strained my ears to hear a response.

  “Fleur? Why else would he be here, living like a rat in a shed, if he didn’t genuinely believe he suffered in jail for someone else’s crime? If he wasn’t furiously seeking justice?”

  “Go to sleep—and stop worrying,” she said in a voice so quiet, it sounded like the wind whispering through the curtains of that open window that looked out at the stills and the empty highway.

  CHILDREN IN RURAL AMERICA, 1921.

  CHAPTER 4

  SOMETHING IS ROTTEN

  WITH MY VALISE STILL IN HAND FROM MY stay at Fleur’s, I wandered up the brick front path that led to Mildred Marks’s house, a brown bedraggled thing that seemed to have nudged its way out of the ground alongside the weeds and wildflowers that shot from the earth around it. Vines of bloodred roses curled around the porch rails, clinging tightly, as if prepared to yank the structure straight back into the earth if anything inside those walls ever required concealment. A plain white cross stood among the dandelions and the browning tufts of grasses in the front yard, although no actual body rested in that unhallowed ground, as far as I knew. Mrs. Marks’s husband lay in a grave in a field in France, buried with other fallen Great War soldiers.

  I climbed up the steps to the front porch and smelled fresh bacon in the air, a scent that reminded me that I had ventured out of Fleur’s house before most people sat down for breakfast. The brightening sun warmed away the chill that hung close to the ground.

  I set my valise beside me on the whining boards of the porch, where the wood looked cracked from the sun and black with winter mold. Before I could even raise my hand to knock, one of Mildred’s younger sisters, Bernice—another redhead, just like all the girls in the family—swung open the door.

  Her shoulders fell when she saw me. “It’s not the sheriff,” she called behind her, and she flipped one of her braids onto her back, as if her hair disappointed her as much as the sight of me had.

  Behind her, in the shadows of the long front hall, Mrs. Marks and Mildred tucked wads of money into their apron pockets and plodded toward the doorway. Poor Mildred’s hair, despite all the pins holding it down, stuck out all over the place, like an explosion of fire.

  I smelled something sour and peculiar beneath the whiffs of bacon.

  “What do you want, Hanalee?” asked scrawny Mrs. Marks, her hair more cinnamon-brown than red. She massaged the side of her neck and rose to her toes to see over my shoulder.

  I glanced behind me. “Are you expecting Sheriff Rink for breakfast, ma’am?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind Hanalee.” Mildred yanked me inside by my wrist. “I know what she’s here for.”

  “Her daddy’s ghost?” asked Bernice.

  “What?” asked Mrs. Marks, the color draining from her cheeks.

  “Nothing, Mama.” Mildred wrapped her arm around my shoulders and ushered me farther inside the house. “I’ve got a book in the library that I told Hanalee she could borrow. I’ll just be a moment before helping with breakfast.”

  “Don’t scare that poor girl with talk of her father,” her mother called after us. “No ghost stories in this house, you hear?”

  “I hear, Mama.”

  Mildred guided me toward the back of the house, in the direction of some sort of machine that produced an obnoxious thumping commotion behind a closed door, down on the right. The sour aroma grew so powerful, my entire mouth tasted fermented. I covered my nose and was about to ask if the thumps and the smell came from their whiskey still, but then Mildred steered me to the left, into some sort of library or study, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of books that reeked of age and dust.

  On the right-hand side of the room, beneath the sole window, stood a wide mahogany desk smothered in envelopes and official-looking papers stamped with black seals. A stuffed crow watched over the mess from its perch upon a stack of ledgers, its beady glass eyes glinting in the sunlight that slipped through the sheer curtains. The coldness in the air, the neck-prickling silence, gave the impression that I’d just stepped into a mausoleum that held the remains of the Markses’ prewar prosperity.

  Mildred closed the door behind us, muffling the ruckus of the still and the chatter and footsteps of the other children. She turned toward me and smoothed out the wrinkles in her apron. Brown stains—food maybe, or blood, or some other foul fluid—speckled the white linen of the garment.

  “Mama hasn’t seen your father’s ghost,” she said, “as you might have guessed by her befuddled expression when Bernice flapped her mouth about him.”

  I swallowed and nodded and didn’t really know what to say other than a meager “Oh.”

  “She believes in spirits; she sees them.” Mildred headed over to the desk and that beady-eyed crow. “She just doesn’t like to hear about them wandering around inside our house. Neither do I.”

  I shivered and rubbed my bare arms. “What’s in that Necromancer’s Nectar you told me about?”

  She pulled out the chair from the desk. “I had a feeling that’s what you were here for.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Can’t tell you,” she said. “All our elixirs are family secrets.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “Fleur says there’s no such thing as any herb or flower that would allow a person to see the dead.”

  “Fleur doesn’t know anything about black magic, does she?” Mildred scooted the chair toward me, the legs scraping and screeching against the floorboards. “Her granny might have been a healer, but mine was an occultist.”

  I shrank back. “An occultist?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that at all.”

  Mildred stopped pushing the chair. “And I don’t like the sound of your father pacing the floorboards of my house when he should be resting in a grave.”

  My eyes stung at those words. I blinked and clenched my hands by my sides.

  “You need to tell him to stop coming here, Hanalee,” said Mildred. “He’s making me feel as th
ough I’ve done something wrong, and I don’t like it one bit.”

  I squeezed my hands tighter. “Did you do something wrong?”

  Mildred stepped back. “Of course not.”

  “Then why is my father able to find his way to your house and not mine? Why am I not the one seeing him?”

  “B-b-because . . .” She straightened her apron so it didn’t hang so cockeyed over her chest. “You’re probably too busy looking for him in the church . . . or at all your favorite shared places. He’s searching for you along the road, where all that trouble occurred, and it’s high time you look for him there. Here”—she patted the back of the chair—“have a seat. I’ll fetch you that bottle.”

  “I feel wrong about taking something for free,” I said.

  “This is a gift. An emergency.”

  “But . . .” I glanced at the room’s faded elegance—the dust, the darkness, the bills scattered across the desk. My eyes dropped down to my right hand, where a gold band with an emerald stone glistened on my ring finger. The heirloom had belonged to my late grandmother in Georgia. My father gave it to me on my twelfth birthday.

  Mildred’s eyes also veered down to the jewel.

  “I’m wearing a pink satin step-in my mama made me,” I offered instead, tucking my right hand behind my back.

  Mildred’s eyes brightened. “Satin?”

  Using my left hand, I raised the hem of my dress well past my knees for a peek at the pink lace of the undergarment’s bottom edge. “It’s made with lace on the bodice, one-inch-wide straps, and a small pearl button that fastens to create the closure between the legs.” I dropped the skirt. “Makes a girl feel less like a backwoods bumpkin.”

  Mildred chewed her bottom lip and released a vibrating Hmm from the back of her throat. “I’d have to sell it after I wore it once or twice,” she said. “You can’t eat satin.”

  “No, I suppose you can’t.”

  She gave a brusque nod. “All right. I’ll make the trade.”

  “I’ll slide off the undergarment while you go fetch the bottle—just as long as no one is about to barge in here.”

  “The door locks.” She turned a built-in knob on the door to show me. “I’ll knock when I’m back with the bottle.”

  “All right, then.” I clenched my hands again.

  “I’ll be right back.” Mildred swung the door closed with a force that rattled the bookshelves.

  I heaved a sigh of regret for promising one of my nicest unmentionables for a wicked bottle of hope. I wasn’t even supposed to wear the satin step-in on a day that wasn’t the Sabbath. But my regular cotton one smelled too much of sweat after I shot at Joe’s head in the woods, so I’d chosen to wear the pink one when I packed up for Fleur’s.

  I slid both my brown dress and the step-in over my head—a feat I accomplished with lightning-fast movements—and I kept thinking how fragile and terrorized Joe must have felt when I pulled the gun on him while he was naked. Vulnerable was the word that came to mind. A once-fine grape with the skin peeled off.

  Mildred knocked on the door no more than three minutes after she’d left. “Are you decent?”

  “Just a moment.” I fastened up the white buttons of my bodice. Without that step-in between it and me, my dress felt like flimsy layers of leaves hugging my skin.

  I unfastened the latch, and Mildred hustled inside and shut the door behind her. I handed her the undergarment, and in exchange she gave me a little brown medicine bottle with a dark liquid sloshing about inside it. NECROMANCER’S NECTAR, said the label on the side, penned in an elegant, cursive hand. Pentagrams and other diabolical symbols encircled the words.

  I held the bottle an arm’s length away. “What in blazes is a necromancer?”

  “A person who raises the dead . . . or the spirits of the dead”—Mildred stroked the pink satin in her arms, as if the step-in were a long-lost cat—“to divine the future and explore unresolved matters. I wouldn’t chat with Reverend Adder about this concoction, but there’s nothing dangerous about it, I swear. It’ll allow you to communicate with your father.”

  My arm slackened. “How do I use it?”

  “Take one spoonful at midnight, and then head immediately out to the set of crossroads on the highway. Draw a circle in the dirt. Step inside.”

  I frowned. “You want me to wander down the highway on my own? After dark?”

  “Going to him in the place where he’s been spotted the most is the surest way to guarantee a strong connection.”

  My shoulders sank.

  “He looks so lost, Hanalee.” She took hold of my left elbow. “So goddamned desperate. Pardon my French, but there’s no delicate way to phrase it.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want to see him like that another night.”

  I nodded and tucked the bottle into my right pocket. “If this makes me sick—”

  “It won’t.”

  I chewed my bottom lip and fingered the smooth glass.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the closed door. “Sheriff Rink’ll be here soon.”

  “Why’s he coming over?”

  “Just a friendly visit.”

  “All right.” I slipped my hand out of my pocket. “I’ll get going. Thank you for trying to help.”

  “You’re welcome.” She opened the door and led me past the smells and the racket of the whiskey-production process, and she steered me through the traffic of children darting through the house with toys and breakfast dishes.

  Out on the front porch, I leaned over and picked up the valise. “Hey, Mildred, did you know Joe Adder very well when he lived here?”

  She snorted and pulled at her stained apron. “Do you honestly think he and I would have been chums?”

  “I just—”

  “Don’t you remember how he looked in church, Hanalee? The slicked hair? The handsome suits? Those big brown eyes?”

  I stood up straight. “He’s also the snake who hit my father with a car, don’t forget.”

  She hunched her shoulders. “Why do you ask?”

  “He’s back in the area.”

  “I’ve heard that.” She peered down at her boots and scraped her right sole against one of the boards of the porch. “But w-w-why’d you ask that question? What’s he got to do with me?”

  “Robbie Witten told me he’s not right in the head.” I shifted my bag to my other hand. “He said Joe’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous to himself, maybe. Not to you or me.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “How do you mean?”

  Before she could answer, I heard an automobile motor puttering in our direction. Mildred’s eyes strayed to the drive in front of her house.

  I turned and spotted the sheriff’s black patrol car cruising toward us, rocking back and forth from all the dips and potholes in the Markses’ dirt drive.

  “Sheriff Rink’s here,” said Mildred. “Better go.”

  I nodded and scampered down the steps of the porch.

  Now, it should be noted that Sheriff Rink, nicknamed “Sheriff Rinky-Dink” between Fleur and me, possessed the highest male voice known to mankind—a wheezy, breezy squeak of a tenor that matched his short stature but not his sturdy build.

  “Good morning, Hanalee,” he chirped in a decibel that I had never once reached in regular conversation. He stopped the car beside me with the motor still running. “Did you spend the night with the Markses?”

  I glanced down at my bag. “Oh . . . Well, no. I stayed at Fleur’s house and made a detour over here before I head back home.”

  “Why?” he asked. His tiny gray mouse eyes peered at me from beneath his blue cap.

  “Why?” I repeated.

  He smiled. “What were you doing at the Markses’?”

  I peeked over my shoulder, but Mildred had gone from the porch. The distant thumping of the whiskey still chugged like a heartbeat behind the house’s outer layers.

  “Mildred told me . . .” I turned back toward him, hoping he wouldn’t hea
r the brown bottle sloshing inside my valise. “She . . . offered me a book to borrow.”

  The sheriff readjusted his backside in his seat. “Well, just be careful wandering around on your own right now. The Oregon State Penitentiary released Joe Adder over the weekend”—he darted a quick glance over his right shoulder—“and he’s currently hiding out somewhere nearby.”

  I cleared my throat. “Why do you suspect that he’s hiding?”

  “His father won’t allow him back in his house. Keep an eye out for him, but don’t speak to him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” The sheriff crinkled his graying eyebrows. “He was a convicted man, Hanalee. He killed your poor father by violating Prohibition and driving around like a hellion. Why would you want to talk to him?”

  “I don’t. I just wondered if you thought he might be mentally unstable.”

  “That boy is definitely unstable. Don’t ever let him near you, and don’t listen to a word he says.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good girl. Now go on home.” Sheriff Rink released the brake and steered his car to a patch of dead grass directly in front of Mildred’s house.

  A second later, Mrs. Marks threw open the front door and called out, “Oh, hello, Sheriff Rink. So nice to see you this morning.” She smiled and waved the sheriff up to the porch, and I saw a wad of cash poking out from her apron pocket. “Won’t you come inside?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” The sheriff—a man twice divorced and not typically popular with the ladies—climbed out of his car and removed his blue cap to reveal his head of silvery-brown hair, cut close to his scalp, combed to the left like waves breaking over a riverbank. He swaggered up the porch steps and followed Mildred’s mother inside.

  Mrs. Marks leaned her face out the door. “Go on home, Hanalee. I’m sure you’ve got something better to do than to linger around here, gaping like a fish.”

  Without a word in response, I swung my bag and myself in the direction of the highway and meandered away from the little scene of illegal moonshine production and police bribery. I envisioned Sheriff Rink driving away from the house with a bundle of hush money stuffed inside a pocket and a jug of booze stashed in the backseat for himself.