by Selena Scott
Peter, an orderly soul to his core, was driven to near madness in his frustration with her. And so, over the years, she’d taught herself systems and habits that seemed to quell the worst of her absentmindedness. To be honest, the advent of iPhones had been of huge advantage to her. There was, after all, an app for everything. And the only thing that Caroline had to remember to do these days was consult her phone for what she was supposed to do next. Ah! Pick up the dry cleaning! Don’t forget to set the timer on the rice maker! Call back the painters about that fresh coat for the living room!
She’d been doing so much better recently. Everything in its right place. Which kept Caroline busy while Peter was spending long hours at work. Which was nice, because it kept her from being too lonely.
Caroline scrubbed the hotel shampoo into her scalp and hair just a bit too hard and she winced. It wasn’t a particularly fancy hotel that she’d booked on the border of Ohio and Michigan. And the pedestrian smell of the off-brand shampoo they’d provided in the shower both delighted and depressed her. It delighted her because, quite honestly, all pretty things delighted her. And this shampoo was the loveliest shade of pearly white and smelled clean. But it depressed her because were Peter here, he would have criticized her for forgetting her own shampoo and then told her she smelled like a man. It was a rather mannish scent, but Caroline didn’t mind.
She swallowed the lump in her throat, and when it didn’t completely clear, she did what she always did to get herself breathing easily again. She sang a little tune. Nothing special, just a few familiar notes strung together. Though she sang quietly, her full, melodious voice echoed around the shower, rising up with the steam, taking her spirits with it. Singing, the most private thing she ever did, never ceased to buoy her.
Besides. She had just forty-eight little hours before she found this thing that she’d apparently been seeking all her life. She didn’t have time to be down on herself for all her mistakes and shortcomings.
She was the seventh soul, for goodness’ sake! And she’d driven all the way from New Jersey (she’d had no idea that Pennsylvania was such an unforgivingly wide state). And now there was the simple matter of a six-hour drive to Northern Michigan. Which would put her in the general area of the star on that map. And then all she had to do was find the clearing between the river and the swamp, which wouldn’t be too hard, considering the phone, the compass, the GPS device, and the five other maps of the area that Caroline had ordered off the internet.
And then she’d have what she desperately desired. Answers. Answers to the questions Caroline was barely brave enough to ask herself.
***
Jean Luc LaTour sat in a rather dingy motel room, clothes on, shoes on, over top of the bedspread. The blue of the television flickered across the room and so did the light from his phone, which was blowing up with phone calls practically every two minutes.
He knew who was calling and he didn’t want to talk.
Even sitting halfway up, his colossal feet threatened to hang off the bed. He would have been better off saving the money and sleeping in his car. Rich as he was, he was just as frugal and hadn’t wanted to spring the extra cost for a king-sized bed. So, here he was, all 6’6” of him, basically slipping off each edge of the bed. He shifted and could have sworn the damn thing creaked under his weight.
But he definitely wasn’t going back out there to ask for a better or bigger room. The clerk who’d checked him in had definitely recognized him. Jean Luc didn’t want to give the kid another chance to work up the courage to ask for an autograph or a selfie with the famous Jean Luc LaTour. He didn’t have enough energy to deal with a fanboy tonight.
All he wanted was to sleep and wake up tomorrow. Tomorrow. Finally. The day that Jean Luc used to dream about, and now he only dreaded. He’d spent so much of his life thinking about July seventh, the day of the total lunar eclipse. Jean Luc almost laughed, realizing that what he was really looking forward to was July eighth. When all this was finally over.
He almost laughed. But his body simply didn’t remember how to do that. He hadn’t laughed in two years. Actually, he could remember the exact moment of his last laugh. In the passenger seat of his brother’s broken-down boat of a Lincoln Continental. Hugo, his little brother, was singing dumb, fictitious lyrics to the country song that was on the radio, making Jean Luc shake with laughter, the way only Hugo could. Jean Luc had still been laughing when the semi-truck had plowed through the intersection and destroyed his life.
He’d woken up in the hospital two weeks later with not a molecule of family left in this world. And only one working leg. Too much money and nothing to do with it. No one to share it with.
It had taken two years to get his leg back in working order. And it was a real miracle that he was able to walk on it. The doctors said it was because he’d been such an impressive physical specimen before the accident that he’d been able to recover. His body was strong and his will was stronger. He had quite the hitch in his step, but he could walk. He even forced himself through jogs every few days.
The rest of him, though, had never healed. Hugo was gone. And all that was left of him was the map.
Funny, when they were kids, the two of them used to argue about which of them was the ‘you’ from the verse on the back of the map. Which of them was really the seventh soul. It couldn’t be both, they knew. Hugo had been convinced, utterly convinced, that it was him. Jean Luc used to argue, just for fun, but secretly he’d thought that it was Hugo, too.
Jean Luc had the obvious talent in the family, but Hugo had always had that little special something. A magic about him. He could make anyone laugh. He was a good listener. People used to tell Hugo secrets that they’d never tell anyone else. And Hugo kept them. He was confident and brave and everything that a hero in a story should be.
Jean Luc had known his whole life that his little brother was destined for great things. But that was before the accident. And now, Jean Luc was here, on this motel room bed by process of elimination.
He wasn’t the seventh soul.
But he knew that Hugo would have kicked his ass if he hadn’t at least checked it out. They’d dreamed their entire lives about the July seventh that would have a total lunar eclipse. They’d dreamed about what would wait in that clearing for them.
Jean Luc had made this promise to Hugo. He’d see it through. He’d go to the clearing tomorrow. And perhaps he’d finally be able to lay his brother to rest.
CHAPTER TWO
Thea stepped out of the old pickup truck, taking care to shake hands with the older man who’d offered to give her a ride from the airfield where she’d landed. Staunchly refusing to use her phone for more than phone calls, Thea had foregone the Uber app her brother had downloaded to her phone and just found someone in the parking lot who she hoped was heading in the same direction as she was.
“There it is,” the man nodded his head toward the all-purpose store across the two-lane highway.
“Thanks,” she called, slipped a few bucks into the cupholder on the door, gave him a wink and slammed the door, before jogging across the road. Thea liked the look of the area, if the town of Haver’s Creek left a little something to be desired. Lush, green trees bore down from everywhere except the two-lane road itself, but Thea could see that though the canopy was thick, the forest floor was fairly clear. There wasn’t a ton of brush or bushes, just a lot of green gloom punctuated with patches of sunlight. That boded well for hiking. She wouldn’t have to hack through a bunch of obstacles.
She did see some wild blackberry bushes with their silvery spines and the flirty red of fruit not yet ready to be picked. She knew that they would pack an awfully painful punch if she were to wander into their thorns and made a note to steer clear.
She could also hear, but not see, the creek for which the town was named. She heard shouts of laughter from that direction and detoured away from the store she’d been aiming for and headed instead to a small overpass that straddled the creek. She sa
w, with a bit of surprise, that it was more of a river than a creek, and fast. She could clearly see the stony bottom and as she watched, a group of ten or so people, lounging and laughing and shouting to one another, floated out from under the underpass on bright yellow inner-tubes the size of La-Z-Boy arm chairs. The kids wrestled and attempted to flip their comrades off their tubes while the adults lolled, their faces turned toward the alternating patches of sun and shade, beer cans resting on their bellies.
Thea meditated on the momentary burst of embarrassment that had run her through when she’d seen the inner tubes. Her grandfather had come to Haver’s Creek nearly fifty years ago, looking for the same star on the map that she was looking for, and a part of her, a small, childish, wonderfully naive part of her, had expected Haver’s Creek to be the same as it had been for him. Fifty years in the past, quaint and old-fashioned.
She certainly hadn’t expected, she ruminated as she turned a 180 from the creek and peered across the highway, a falling-down bar with a half-lit neon sign out front. The used bookstore slash antique dump looked about right; that had probably been there, in some iteration of itself, when her grandfather had looked upon it with his own eyes, but the all-purpose store would definitely have changed.
It was a beautiful, old, timber frame building, maybe eighty years old, if she had to guess. There were heritage pines on either side of it and a stack of what looked to be handmade canoes to complete the effect. The effect that was completely and instantly ruined by the fact that the old building had been divided in two and half of it was currently housing a McDonald’s. Half the parking lot was taken over by inner tubes of a bright green color, and Thea surmised that there must have been a few competing rental businesses from which to choose.
Though she was hungry, she avoided the fast food half of the store and instead walked in the side that would be more useful to her. She was discouraged by the lack of charm she’d found in a place that her grandfather had long talked of as being quaint and idyllic. Oh well. Time marches on. Things change. Nothing she could do about it but finish the task he’d asked of her.
The bell above the door wasn’t, in fact, a bell, but an electronic box that let out an exaggerated ‘moooooooo’ when she entered the store. Thea raised an eyebrow at it and surveyed her surroundings. The store was bigger than it looked from the outside and, to her relief, looked like it was actually going to have a lot of what she was hoping for. There was a camping supplies aisle that she headed right toward.
“I’m sorry,” said a bored-looking teenager from behind the counter. “You want to… rent… a horse?” He was talking to a woman with a fall of shiny chestnut hair, perfectly expensive-looking jeans, what appeared to be a cashmere sweater, and—well, I’ll be damned, Thea thought—English riding boots.
“Well,” the woman paused. “I suppose I could buy one, but I’d rather not have to go to all the trouble of selling it afterwards. I’ll only need it for a day or so. Plus, I think it would confuse an animal, to switch owners so quickly! I wouldn’t want to do that!”
“Right,” the kid said, looking at the woman like maybe she had her own YouTube channel where she spoofed people and he was currently the featured rube. “Ah, I guess I can give you my neighbor’s phone number. She keeps horses. Though I’m not sure—”
“Oh, that would be so kind of you!” the woman said, her voice bubbling and joyful in a particularly attractive way.
The woman didn’t turn when Thea passed, but Thea figured she must have been pretty, the way the teenager’s face was blushing a healthy pink at the woman’s overflowing happiness.
An obvious city chick renting a horse for a few days. Just when she thought she’d seen it all.
Thea turned into the camping aisle and found it occupied by a mid-twenties blonde wearing the same green employee vest that the teenager behind the counter was wearing, and a man who Thea could only see the back of.
He wore jeans that were white with wear at the seams and a blue T-shirt. He was tall, maybe lanky, but there was some definite muscle to him as well. An old camping backpack sat at his feet. He had one hand on the aisle divider next to the blonde’s left ear and his other hand was playing with a lock of her hair as he whispered something in her ear. The blonde giggled and blushed.
Thea frowned as she realized that the selection of camping cookware was directly behind the girl. She had nothing against canoodling, but she’d rather not be a third wheel to it.
“Excuse me,” she said in a clear tone. She’d prefer if she only had to say it once.
It worked. The man, without even looking up, moved the blonde about three feet to the right and cleared a space for Thea to drop her pack and crouch, choosing between camping pots. With a single-minded concentration that Thea came by naturally, she completely blocked out the canoodlers and went about inspecting the pots, then the canteens, and finally, the canned goods. It was then that she noticed that she had an audience.
The man, sans the blonde employee, was leaning against the same Swiss Army knife case that she was currently inspecting, only he appeared to be inspecting her.
She glanced up at him and then away. The strange, tugging jolt she felt hit her about three seconds after her first glance at his face, when she was already looking back at the knives. She turned, in a kind of delayed double take, and looked him full in the face.
The man had a sort of worn-in look, much like his jeans, or maybe like a much-used baseball glove. He wasn’t old, but he was probably pushing forty, older by a decade or so than Thea’s 29. His face was long and tan and lined with life. There were the ghosts of thousands of smiles in lines like that, beside his eyes and on either side of his mouth. One of his eyebrows was cut in two by a scar, white against his tan skin, and added to the lined effect of his face. She could see the evidence of a golden beard on his face, maybe a day and a half past needing a shave. He had gold hair to match the beard, peeking out from beneath an old baseball cap that Thea supposed had once been blue. It was more of a gray now, and white with the salt of sweat at the brow.
She raised her eyebrows at him, as if asking him what the hell he was looking at. He grinned at her, as if to tell her that she knew exactly what he was looking at.
The smile elicited that same strange, tugging feeling within her and Thea got the feeling that she’d met this man before, somehow. She knew she hadn’t, though, having one of those brains that never forgot a face, and this was a hell of a face. Straight nose, firm mouth and eyes that Thea guessed were green if she were to get close enough to really look.
The door of the shop mooed again and Thea looked to see the woman in the riding boots practically skipping out of the store. The teenager at the far end of the counter gallumped his way down to the knife display case, halfway caught between looking like this was his lucky day to be talking to Thea and like he’d rather sit naked on a block of ice than embarrass himself in front of another pretty stranger. This tall, black-haired, freckled goddess would make three in two days.
“Can I help you with something?” he mumbled, his eyes on the case and on her pretty hands, which looked clean and competent.
“I’d like to see that one.” Thea pointed to a jackknife with a wooden handle, exactly like the one she kept at home, but wouldn’t have been able to fly with. She’d decided to ignore the stranger who was staring at her.
The kid started unlocking the case.
“That one has a can opener on it,” the strange man said, pointing to a classic red Swiss Army knife with enough attached components to make Thea dizzy.
“A jackknife can be a can opener if you know how to use it,” she responded, looking up at the stranger with one eyebrow raised.
“Fair enough,” he chuckled. “But that one sure is cute.”
This time he pointed to a little pink knife no bigger than her pinky finger. “Right,” she replied drily. “My life goal. To be cute.”
The kid handed her the jackknife and she flicked it open, inspected the blade and t
he hinge, and flicked it closed with an ease and comfort that had both men raising their eyebrows.
“I’ll take it.”
Thea piled the rest of her things on the counter and the kid began to ring her up. While she waited, she turned her attention to the stranger. He wasn’t the only one who could inspect somebody around here.
She opened her mouth to say something but he beat her to the punch.
“Jack Warren.” He told her his name figuring that there were women who liked to give information and there were women who liked to get information. He also figured, correctly, from her direct manner and air of competence, that she liked to get information, not waste time answering some stranger’s questions. “I’m doing some hiking and camping around here over the next few days.” She eyed him and said nothing in return. He didn’t mind. Hell of a view from where he was standing. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen eyes that clear, or that uninterested in him. “There’s no chance you’d like to show me around the area, now, is there?”
He had things to do tomorrow, important things. But that wasn’t until nightfall anyhow, and he figured he wasn’t harming anybody by spending time with a beautiful woman in the meantime. He looked her over again. And maybe for a few days or weeks afterwards. He had the feeling that this one might take some time.
“She is definitely not from around here. Trust me. I’d have noticed,” the gawky cashier said, and then instantly went a startling shade of red halfway to purple. Yup. 3/3. There’d been three gorgeous strangers and he’d made a fool of himself in front of all three of them. Great.