When Jasmine and Katrine heard the story, they’d cried, and then spent hours planning tortures for the perpetrator. He or she was never caught, which was their good fortune as the girls had settled on a mixture of battery acid, razors, and a turkey baster.
“You’re going to go over!” Jasmine would squeal every time Katrine took on the river in chicken drop, her voice drowned by the rumble of the falls. Once Jasmine realized her sister was going to do it, was really going to let the current take her, she’d shadow her along the bank, her colt legs poking out of her dripping shorts as she darted downstream.
Katrine heard her sister every time but dared not open her mouth or the river would rush in and through her, embracing her inside and out. Instead, she would flash the thumbs up, feet poised forward to allow her to bounce off of rather than crash into rocks. Her target, a low branch ten yards on the safe side of the falls, rushed to meet her. Each pass she had one chance to catch it. Every time she did.
“Goll, you’re crazy!” Jasmine complained one day the same summer the puppies had been dumped in the river. She watched as her sister hauled herself hand over hand along the length of the branch, white foam swirling around her soaked shirt. The rapids gnashed their teeth in thunders of frustration, but Katrine ignored them, towing herself along the branch until it was shallow and calm enough for her to stand.
Katrine laughed when she reached the shore. She stood, her breath short from the work of it, and shook herself like a dog, her heart thumping pleasantly. The sun warmed her summer-tanned skin. “It’s fun. You should try it.”
Jasmine never did. She was the older of the two, a rule-follower since she was born. At nine, that meant grown-ups listened to her more than regular kids, talking to her instead of around her. Her constancy shaded Katrine like an umbrella, protecting her from adult eyes and giving her the confidence to skin her knees and pop up to try again, to ring doorbells and run on a dare, to make up ghost stories featuring fairy princesses and hook-handed pirates, and to wear too-short dresses because she liked how free they made her feel.
Even at a young age, Katrine recognized this gift her sister gave her, generous Jasmine who possessed more magic than anyone in their family, Ursula included. Katrine barely had a spark in comparison, but she had Jasmine.
“At least swim with me,” Katrine begged. “You were already in the water, anyhow. We can walk back up where it’s shallower.”
Jasmine shook her head, shoving her toe in the mud. “I don’t want to.”
“We could make a Popsicle raft and float a frog down on it?”
Jasmine’s eyes widened before she erased the expression. “You wouldn’t.”
“I might.”
“You’d never hurt a frog. Everyone knows that. Anyway, I’d tell Ursula.”
“Would not. Anyhow, I wasn’t going to do it. I just wanted to keep you away from that bitchy hole you were falling into.”
Jasmine stuck her tongue out. Nine wasn’t too old for that, as long as no one else was watching. “It’s time to get back. Ursula’s taking us to get our hair done for the dance. Remember?” They’d always called their female relatives by their first name, even their mother. Especially their mother.
“I probably remember better than her.”
But Jasmine was off, grabbing her picnic basket before striding upstream toward the house. She’d been a constant presence in the kitchen since she was old enough to walk, asking Ursula what she was stirring or Helena why she boiled toffee longer than caramel. She baked her first pie at age seven, an apple tart with homemade crust that tasted like autumn and cured Xenia’s allergies.
It was Jasmine’s gift, her magic, to create food so delectable that it made you forget your pains, which was all Jasmine wanted it to do. Katrine sometimes wished she possessed a powerful magic like that, but all she had was a fritzing, unreliable ability to read some people’s emotions, and sometimes their thoughts. Jasmine, on the other hand, had the whole world of food, and the power to make the eater do anything she desired. For today’s picnic, she’d packed creamy egg salad sandwiches accented with bright dill and celery, spread it on homemade wheatberry bread, and complemented it with a side of crunchy salt pickles that she’d canned herself.
The meal was the perfect mix of textures and flavors, and eating it made Katrine feel precious, as well as gave her a vision of where she’d left the amber ring she’d been seeking for over a week. Not for the first time, Katrine was grateful that Jasmine loved her, because she could really mess a person up with her witchy cooking if she wanted to.
Katrine walked behind her sister, following the bank, listening to the song of the river, watching water bugs slide and skate across the surface. Her nose itched, and she wondered what it would feel like to be able to fly. “See, I knew you thought the same. She won’t be there.”
“What?” Jasmine had stopped for her sister to catch up and was scowling.
“I was agreeing with you. I don’t think Ursula will be there either. She has that client coming over tonight, and you know how she gets with new clients. Always in her workshop.”
“You stop that, Katrine Catalain.”
“Stop what?”
“Get right outta my head.” Tears gleamed in Jasmine’s eyes, crystal drops escaping the sheltered pool around her heart. “If Ursula isn’t there, Helena will take us. We’ll still get our hair done.”
Katrine shrugged. She wasn’t a mind reader, not really. She only caught scraps of other people’s thoughts, the punch line to a joke here, a secret shame there, each thought fleeting but written across her frontal lobe as plainly as a newspaper headline. She knew she had the weakest gift of the family, but it didn’t take a mind reader to understand that her sister was worried their mother would let them down. Again. Ursula tended to her daughters like the sun tends to the planets—distantly, almost as an afterthought, by nature of proximity rather than intent. Katrine knew Jasmine felt it like a new hurt every time their mother chose a customer over them.
“I don’t care about any fucking haircut,” Katrine said, trying out this particular swear word for the first time. It tasted delicious and a little bitter, like dark chocolate. Her goal had been to shock her sister out of one of her sad tempers, but once uttered, she thought she might like to drop the f-bomb more frequently.
But Jasmine was gone, running toward the house. Katrine didn’t follow, instead searching and stooping to collect the translucent red river agates that always cheered up her sister. Her fingers grew muddy digging for the stones, and she bent more than one fingernail back trying to pry them loose from the earth. When she had a handful, she rinsed them in the river. The water burbled its approval.
At some point, the cushiony claws of sleep coaxed adult Katrine from these river memories, pulling her down, through the mattress, outside the room of musty wallpaper and crown molding, high school yearbooks, a treasure box brimming with smooth stones, bits of river glass, a dusty bird’s nest. She found herself in a smoky bar, a place she’d never been before yet was as familiar as the tops of her knees. She smelled cigarettes and sour whiskey fermenting in the floorboards.
A man was beckoning to her, a tall figure wearing a cowboy hat, a guitar slung over his shoulder. She elbowed her way through the laughing crowd, weaving around people who were clinking their beer bottles and twirling the ice in their sweating glasses of bourbon, but the man never seemed to draw closer.
When a door slammed open in front of her, she knew that’s where the cowboy had gone. She strode through, instead discovering her husband Adam on his knees, his head between the thighs of a familiar woman. She screamed herself awake, ripping open her eyes and embracing the merciful gray of twilight.
She’d gone from a girl who’d play chicken with waterfalls to a woman afraid to leave her bedroom.
She needed Jasmine. It was Jasmine who had called her home. But why now?
Chapter 6
Jasmine
On a sunny day, Jasmine’s lawn held the shad
ow of Our Lady of the Lake’s mighty spike, the tip of it pointing toward her house like an accusation. The planned neighborhood she lived in with her husband and daughter had defined the edge of town after World War II, row upon row of tiny identical bungalows ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalog and erected by the newly-hired employees of the Samaras Motor Company. Tivadar Samaras had arrived in America from Greece in 1942, oblivious to the war, following a black-eyed girl with hips like a lyre. The affair didn’t last long, but he stayed where he’d landed—New York.
The woman with dark eyes turned out to be one of many beauties he fell hard for, but he had the good fortune to impregnate only one: the daughter of a wealthy hotel magnate, whom he met while cleaning the elevator of the New York Hilton. She encouraged his dreams, including his passion for developing a car with seats that folded into a double bed. They drove west to Minnesota, the land of cheap real estate, mosquitoes, and abundant water, and the Sam Car was born.
Tivadar filled his Faith Falls factory floor with World War II veterans and his office and bed with their wives. His business went great guns for the first five years, until his investors caught up with him and realized that only 947 of 10,000 cars had been sold. Apparently, Midwesterners wanted to keep their beds in their bedrooms, where the Good Lord intended. Tivadar fled back to New York with his wife, leaving behind 145 unemployed and an empty factory with an underground tunnel system leading from it to each two-bedroom bungalow on Sam Street. The tunnels had been another of his dreams. He’d envisioned a workforce that was never late because they could walk under the weather, avoiding the slicing winter cold. Like all of his ideas, it was still searching for its time.
Over the years, many of the original Samaras Motor Company employees had sold their houses. Some of the new homeowners boarded up their basement entrance to the tunnels. Rumor had it others left theirs open, and that each generation of Faith Falls’ teenagers had completed the rite of passage of sneaking through the creepy passageways to the abandoned factory with its shattered windows and cavernous rooms to drink sweet, syrupy liquor and smoke menthol cigarettes.
Before Jasmine and her husband moved into their single-story, pale-green bungalow on Sam Street, she’d ordered him to brick over the already-boarded-up entrance in their basement, worried a criminal might sneak in while they were sleeping. She’d had bouts of curiosity about what lay beyond the portal, but the antidepressants shushed those thoughts.
August was a slow month, and today, rather than working, she was staring out the kitchen window at the shadow of the church spike, preparing supper and planning Tara’s next geology unit, when the phone rang. The unexpected trill turned her breasts cold, which is what passed for nervous with the pills driving her brain stem. She was surprised by the emotion. She’d been jittery all day. Jasmine pulled her white cardigan tighter and rested the knife she’d been using to mince garlic. She was preparing chicken alfredo, Dean’s favorite. He preferred the store bought version, but she’d discovered that if she added a sprinkle of sautéed garlic to the generic sauce, he didn’t know the difference.
It wouldn’t matter as he wouldn’t be joining them, hadn’t eaten a meal at his own table in three months. It was her unhappiness, he’d said. He couldn’t take it anymore. She’d protested, explaining that she had everything she wanted. He’d shaken his head, his eyes so deep and sad. And he’d left. To Tara, she explained that her dad would be traveling more and so she wouldn’t see him as often. To everyone else, she said everything was fine.
She rinsed her hands under warm water and tensed, waiting for the phone to stop.
Besides chicken alfredo, she was preparing his favorite sides: crisp head lettuce with ketchupy Western dressing and uniformly square garlic croutons and fresh-baked Pillsbury breadsticks. The house smelled like store-bought bread. It was a canned smell, no match for the rich aroma of the hand-kneaded bread she used to make, but it would do. She’d even picked up a frozen cheesecake for dessert.
Heather Lewis should be dropping off Tara soon as well. It had taken five years of hard work and personal sacrifices for Jasmine to win Heather’s confidence, but it had been worth it. Heather hailed from the most powerful family in town, and befriending her ensured Tara’s popularity. Jasmine drove their daughters to religion class, and Heather drove them home. With both girls starting viola lessons, the routine had transferred to their Sunday night music classes.
Even so, Jasmine was afraid that the mooring that was Tara would cleave from her if she didn’t watch over her child, as if without active attention, her daughter would float off into the ether. Jasmine reminded herself that there was more to her than being a mother, and when the day came for Tara to move out and on, she would remember what that was. Until then, she home-schooled her daughter, ferried her to Immanuel Lutheran Church on Sundays and Wednesdays and music lessons on Tuesdays, and provided Dean updates when he called from the road and asked to schedule time with his daughter.
The machine clicked over. “Jasmine? It’s Xenia. You’re probably busy, but, well…Katrine is back in town. Can you believe it? We’d all love to have you and Tara stop by tomorrow for supper. Dean too, if he’s home. No need to call, or to bring anything. Just show up if you can make it.”
Jasmine returned to her cutting board and took up the chef’s knife, mincing the already tiny garlic flecks until they were juice and the board was etched with grooves. Her sister was back in the path of danger. Even worse was the unexpected electric surge of betrayal: Katrine broke the spell on her own, which meant she could have come back at any time and had simply never wanted to enough.
Chapter 7
Tara
As Tara watched her mom brutalize the garlic, her stomach knotted. Here’s what she knew: her mom had had one best friend in the world and it was her sister, Katrine. Then something terrible had happened to Jasmine. That awful thing had somehow sent Katrine across the globe and driven Jasmine to antidepressants. It was also the same reason Jasmine wouldn’t talk to Tara about her Catalain magic, wouldn’t even acknowledge that Tara might have some.
Might have a lot, in fact, enough for her to know things about people that they didn’t even know about themselves. Enough to know that her dad had left three months ago. Enough to know that if her mom didn’t open the door on her heart and release the secrets that were poisoning her that nothing would be all right again.
Tara had been watching her mom all day, noticing her jerky movements, the way she snapped and then apologized, how she forgot what she’d gone into a room for. Even now, as Tara watched her mom cook, she understood that Jasmine was strung as tense as a piano wire, so taut that she didn’t even notice Tara on the other side of the breakfast nook.
When the phone rang, they’d both jumped. Tara had itched to answer it, but she sensed she’d learn more by watching her mom. Jasmine stood rock-still.
The ringing ended, and Jasmine had exhaled a shaky breath.
Then Xenia’s message had played out. Jasmine had begun to obliterate the garlic.
And Tara had stopped breathing. I get to meet Katrine.
Chapter 8
Katrine
She held a snowglobe in her hand, turning it upside down, letting the flakes whirl around a diorama of Faith Falls, then turning it rightside up so the snow could settle. She’d received the gift from her aunt Xenia for her eighth Christmas.
There had been so much food and so many people—clients of Ursula’s, Helena and Xenia and Velda’s lovers—that they’d had to move into the Queen Anne’s massive drawing room to hold it all. The table was creaking under lavender-infused Duck L’orange covered in crispy, sweet-salty skin, tiny quails stuffed with sage dressing, wild perch drizzled with onion jam, garlic soup with poached eggs, freshly-dug garden potatoes in browned parsley butter, their skin so tender that it melted when you bit into it, haricot verts in a lemon-almond sauce, roasted butternut squash, delicate mushroom caps filled with salty bacon, wild rice, and poached raisins, fresh spinach dressed
with poppyseed vinaigrette, a wild lettuce salad speckled with sunflower nuts and bits of bright, fresh orange, platters of grapes, apples, nuts, and cheeses, and two loaves of oatmeal bread and another two of crusty French, all four loaves steaming. Ten-year-old Jasmine had cooked it all, and everyone who tasted it felt safe and loved.
Conversation had been lively, flowing as sweetly as the wine.
Katrine remembered being so happy that she’d felt like the color pink. She’d missed her family desperately. She couldn’t wait to see Jasmine again, Jasmine who had called her back, who was in crisis but who would also make everything right, like she always had.
Chapter 9
Ursula
The woman reached toward the cool doorknob of the cottage tucked behind the Queen Anne, and then let her hand dangle in the air. She wore slouchy suede boots, a matching skirt, and a navy blue blouse that made her eyes appear almost black. At her wrists and neck, chunky, blue plastic jewelry deflected the sunlight. Ursula watched the woman from the kitchen window. She arrived at the back gate as they all did—tentatively—and had made her way to the cottage before standing in front of it, uncertain.
This visitor owned the Chinese restaurant in town. Probably, she’d overheard customers talking about Ursula. Most of her marketing was whispered word of mouth. Ursula speculated briefly on what had brought the woman here, and whether she would have the courage to approach the back door of the Queen Anne once she realized there was no one in the cottage.
She did.
Ursula waited several beats before she opened the back door of the house. The woman stood there, a scared animal ready to bolt, her eyes on her feet.
The Catalain Book of Secrets Page 4