Hiders

by Meg Collett

  Hale nodded at his brother’s explanation. “Teller Morgan Group is already working on a few other projects on the island. They’re deep in the mayor’s pocket.”

  “These larger development companies do this in tourist hotspots with good profit margins,” Cade added.

  “So you’re saying it won’t work? Even if we do all this work?” Arie asked.

  “No,” Cade said, “We’re saying it may take more than just some construction. We might need the entire town behind us on this.”

  Violet’s stomach turned over. “What for?”

  “Hale and I have dealt with condemnations. This land is next to a private preserve. If we can get a petition to nominate it as a historical property before this ever gets to court, we might have a solid chance, but it’ll take the entire town supporting it.”

  Violet wilted. If it had to come to that, to the town caring enough to save her tired, old house, then it was already too late. The thought of trying anyway, of sitting and waiting for their rejection and the laughter that would inevitably come when she asked them to sign a petition, was too much for Violet to swallow. Her throat tightened with tears. “You all should just leave then,” she managed to say.

  Everyone turned to look at her, frowning, their mouths hanging open and frozen around the words stuck on their tongues.

  “Violet,” Arie said.

  She shoulders slumped. “It’s not worth it. Everyone should just go.”

  “We can do this,” Kyra said, her voice soft, her eyes kind.

  “Yeah, we just got here,” Stevie added. “And I thought there would be macarons.”

  Violet ducked her head so no one would see how she was blinking back tears. “If it comes down to the town rallying around me, we should just stop now. It’ll never happen.”

  “Why not?” Arie asked, clearly the most perplexed because he wasn’t from Canaan. He didn’t know the history. Everyone else understood.

  “Because,” Violet explained in barely more than a whisper, “I’m their Ghost of Canaan.”

  No one responded to that. In Violet’s mind, there was nothing else to say. If all this came down to the town’s vote, then they really were screwed. The excuse of the broken-down ambulance the night of her parents’ wreck was at the forefront of her mind, followed closely by all the jeers, the pestering and trespassing, the mockery on the streets. The people of Canaan didn’t care about her. They thought her barely more than a myth.

  “So give them a ghost,” Stevie said, shrugging.

  Her words startled them all, but Violet most of all. She looked up at Stevie, her tears forgotten.

  “Um, what?” Kyra’s nose wrinkled in confusion.

  “I don’t think that’s what Violet meant,” Hale said.

  But Arie leveled Stevie with a serious gaze that suggested he might know what she was proposing and asked, “What do you mean?”

  “If Canaan wants a ghost, give it a ghost. Let the people have what they want, but make them care about it. Look,” she said to Violet, “I get it. It sucks having that shit on your back. I’m the drunk has-been reality star on my street. But you can turn the tables on all of this. You can make them love you, not fear you. You can make them care about this house and you. If they did, the mayor would never condemn the house, because they would sign whatever petition you needed them to. Give them a reason to rally around you.”

  “How?” Violet asked skeptically.

  “With a Halloween party, of course. What did you think I meant?”

  12

  Kyra had a knack for planning parties, as did Stevie. Their efficiency was mind-boggling. With their phones in hand, they’d already rented lights resembling spooky streetlamps, bought an obscene amount of fake cobwebs that Kyra assured Violet were bio-degradable and avian safe, and texted Tooty about DJing the event.

  Violet wrote a list of treats she would bake along with Maggie’s help, and Kyra pored over it, filling in other foods they would need to pick up on the day.

  Halloween was one week away, but even if it were tomorrow, Kyra and Stevie could have pulled off the event without a hitch.

  By the time Violet caught her breath, Kyra was sketching a mock-up of the invitation and Stevie was making a Facebook event and inviting everyone. There was no going back at that point. Just thirty minutes after Stevie had voiced her idea, half the town knew of the party next Saturday night.

  Violet’s teeth ached from clenching them, her nerves strung tight from the rapid back-and-forth way Stevie and Kyra communicated, asking questions and giving answers without really using complete sentences. It spun Violet’s mind like one of those merry-go-rounds that used to sit in the middle of children’s playgrounds.

  The rusty kind that often cut you if you held on too tight.

  They’d moved on to designing a pamphlet, when Hale, Cade, and Arie trooped back inside the house. No one had mentioned the graffiti-tagged walls, though Violet had all caught them exchanging concerned glances. They were waiting on her to bring it up. She didn’t.

  “Violet, do you mind showing them around? We got a pretty good idea of things from the outside, but Hale wants to see the cellar,” Arie asked.

  “Oh.” Her heart sank. “Is that necessary?”

  “To assess the lean. We need to figure out if it’s the footers or the walls,” Hale said, but he didn’t look at her. His eyes were scanning the rooms he could see, his vision tracking the slope of the hall, the cracks along the walls, and the draft coming in through the windows where the sills didn’t quite seal against the glass panes.

  But if they fixed the drafts, the record player would never randomly come on, and she could no longer imagine that the house wanted to play a song for her, or that her parents did.

  “I can show them,” Arie offered when she hesitated too long. Everyone was watching her, even Hale, her silence off-putting to them.

  “No.” She stood. “It’s all right. I’m not much help when it comes to party planning.”

  “Don’t worry.” Stevie waved a hand at her. “Kyra and I will take care of everything.”

  Cade chuckled. “Actually, Violet, you might want to stay up here with them. They might have all of Georgia invited by the time we get downstairs.”

  He was trying to ease her nerves, but her stomach only dipped deeper with fear. “How many people do we think will come out?” she asked Stevie.

  “Before or after I say we’ll have an open bar?”

  Kyra tensed. Stevie was an alcoholic; she’d been to rehab earlier this summer. Things hadn’t been easy for her of late, and the worry showed on her best friend’s face as Kyra said, “Uh, maybe we should—”

  Stevie held up her hand. “Don’t worry, guys. I’ll be fine. This is for Violet. And if we want people to sign a petition, then we’ll need to get them a bit drunk. They have to see this place through the haze of a few stiff drinks. Not saying it’s bad, Violet. Not at all. But we want people to leave remembering they had a great time. And drinks can go a long way in doing that.”

  Cade smiled at her. “You’ll be fine, babe.”

  “Oh, I know I will be.” She winked at him and purred enough that the rest of the people in the room wondered if she was still talking about the party.

  Hale backed out of the kitchen, saying over his shoulder, “Let’s go see this basement before I gag.”

  “Don’t act like you haven’t pictured it, Hale Cooper!” Stevie called after him.

  Violet hurried after the guys. The low heels of her boots clicked across the floor. She swept past them toward the narrow door along the hall.

  “Your house is beautiful, Violet,” Cade offered.

  She glanced back at him, thinking he was just being kind, but she found him truly taking in the chestnut wood flooring, the wainscoting along the walls, and the patterned plaster ceilings that looked similar to something from The Great Gatsby. A once great, but now mostly dusty chandelier hung above their heads, the glass bits twinkling against each other as they passed
beneath it.

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  “How old is it?”

  “Early nineteen hundreds.”

  Violet took the iron door handle in her hand and pulled. The door stuck. Finally, it opened with a pop and a whoosh of stale air. “This used to be the cellar before my grandparents turned into a wine cellar. They used to throw all these parties out here before my dad took over the estate,” she said as she started down the stone stairs. “Not many people lived on the island back then, and all the Southern socialites would drive in from Atlanta and Charleston. It was the highpoint of their year to be invited out here.”

  “Shit,” Hale said as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “You’ve still got some wine down here.”

  Violet glanced around at all the dusty bottles stored in their little wooden nests along the walls. “Some are a nice vintage. My mother and father saved them for celebrations.”

  Her throat thickened, and while Hale and Cade moved off to inspect the beams, she turned back to look at Arie, who was still navigating the last of the steps, his face creased in concentration. There wasn’t a handrail, so he used the stone wall as a guide down.

  “I don’t think I ever apologized.”

  He turned a frown on her. “What do you mean?”

  “For overstepping. Most of the time, when I help people, it’s little things. Stuff they won’t exactly notice unless they dig through their insurance statements.”

  “It’s funny you’re apologizing,” he said, propping himself against the wall to ease his weight onto the other leg.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think I ever actually thanked you for it.”

  There were no windows down here, and the only light came from the low-slung fluorescent lamps strung along the middle of the room. Arie offered her a slight smile, and the tension in her shoulders eased. “You’re welcome,” she whispered.

  No one had ever thanked her for her contributions.

  Not that she’d wanted them to. Not that they’d ever been given the chance to know who to thank if they’d been so inclined. But now, in this moment, it mattered tremendously that he was kind enough to thank her, even though she’d massively overstepped her bounds.

  He didn’t need her to make his life better, and she didn’t need him to repay her. But it didn’t hurt.

  He straightened off the wall and the motion brought his chest within a few inches of hers. They were close enough she could smell him, and when he exhaled, his breath softly rustled the fine hairs along her temples. She looked up at him and waited, because for a moment, it appeared as if he might lean down and kiss her.

  “Oh, shit,” Hale said from the other side of the cellar.

  Cade murmured something in response Violet didn’t quite catch. Arie stepped back from her.

  “What’s up?” he asked, walking toward the guys.

  “We’ve got problems.” Hale was bent over next to a beam on the west-facing side of the house.

  “What is it?” Arie asked.

  Violet joined them but kept on the outskirts of their group.

  “See this?” Hale pointed to the bottom of the beam. It looked as soggy and soft as the flooring up in the attic, where the water had done so much damage. “This beam is the only support for all the walls on this side of the house, and it’s completely rotten at the bottom. There’s literally nothing holding up this side of the house.”

  Violet grimaced. “How much longer will it hold?”

  “It’s not a question of how much longer,” Hale said. “It could go straight over the bluff at any minute.”

  * * *

  Violet visited the cemetery on Sunday. Her eyes stung from the cold air as she rode her bike into town, and she pedaled faster just to get her blood flowing and warm herself back up. She wore a knit cap pulled down over her ears, though it was only useful in ruining her hair.

  Canaan’s resting place was quiet, as she’d expected. Most of the funerals happened on Thursdays for some reason Violet had never guessed. It was an odd, meaningless day for something so grave.

  She couldn’t remember what day her parents had been buried on. She hoped it hadn’t been a Thursday.

  The Relend part of the cemetery was a sprawling section in the back corner, nearest the eastern sector and thus closest to the sunrise. Even from the entrance, as Violet passed through the always-open wrought-iron gates, she could look across her shoulder and spot the tall mausoleum where her parents had been laid to rest. The trees in that part of the cemetery were older and their bare, white limbs reached farther, brushing against each other similar to touching fingertips. In the spring, they created a canopy of dense leaves, casting the sector in deep, cool shade. Spanish moss hung in droves back there.

  It was Violet’s most favorite place in the world.

  She walked down the central, pebble-lined walkway that led through the cemetery straight to the ground’s keeper shed, to which she carried the key—an old iron piece with a C embossed on the head for Canaan. The key had been around since the graveyard, and the graveyard had been around since the very first Relend needed somewhere to rest after they died. To say it was merely old would have been an injustice.

  As she walked, she ticked through the tasks she needed to accomplish today, which included pruning nearly every perennial on the grounds and deadheading the late fall bloomers. She let her mind drift through the peaceful monotony of planning, this place her second home and as familiar as her kitchen.

  When she was almost at the shed, movement from the corner of her eye caught her attention and tugged her to a stop. A flash of blonde hair disappeared along the corner of a side trail, heading off into the middle sector of the cemetery, toward the newer additions.

  Violet hesitated, but in the end, she decided to follow.

  At the mausoleum, she slipped into the side garden surrounded by tall, thick evergreen hedges. In the corners of the garden were four weeping angels, all with their faces turned away from the raised grave in the middle of the juncture of two paths—a crossroad and an old tradition in Southern graveyards for suicides.

  Kyra looked up as Violet stepped inside. She’d laid yellow roses on the granite lid. Her hand trailed off the edge of the smooth surface, where it had rested as if she were saying hello. “Violet! You startled me. I didn’t realize anyone else was in here.”

  Violet sucked in her cheeks. “Sorry. I thought I should say something.” The words fumbled out of her mouth, because who was she to talk about social conventions? She had no clue. “I just got here to do some work.”

  “I meant to ask you if you were the one leaving the irises on Mom’s grave.”

  “I noticed you liked her to have bright colors.”

  Kyra’s smile looked pained. “I do,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  Violet just nodded, too nervous to say anything else.

  The young woman put her hand back on the grave. “Stevie told me you lost your parents in a car accident.”

  Violet had a flash of the back of the old Lincoln, the roiling clouds above it, and her father’s head slouched against the passenger-side window. Her mother had lifted her face to check the rearview mirror as she’d pulled away, and though it had been too dark to know for sure, Violet had felt her eyes on her, checking on her, the last time she would see her daughter.

  “Oh,” Kyra said, snapping Violet out of the memory. “I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No. It’s okay. They did. My father had ALS. He would have died anyway.”

  Kyra’s lips parted, and Violet watched her recover from the words Violet only now understood weren’t quite right. Normal people didn’t say things like that. Yet again, she’d realized too late. She wiped her hands on her jeans, high-waist Levis she’d cuffed above her sneakers. She wanted to curl up inside her baggy turtleneck and hide.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Kyra offered, something Violet never would have thought to say. She stored it away for future
use.

  “Thank you.”

  “You know, I wanted to say sorry for yesterday. I think Stevie and I might have swooped in and taken over with the party.” Kyra bit her lip. She wore jeans that were from this decade, and her shirt was cute in a casual, throw-on-and-head-out-the-door kind of way that Violet could never achieve. “Do you still think it’s a good idea? Because if you don’t want something, we can change it. Or we can call the entire thing off. We want you to feel completely comfortable.”

  Violet wanted to laugh. She would never feel completely comfortable around people, much less a horde of strangers gathered at her house for a party. Her entire life was a string of uncomfortable events strung together with beads of awkwardness and social ineptitudes that even her grandmother’s most ardent etiquette lessons could never cure.

  Instead, she said, “I appreciate it. I never could have planned it all myself anyway.”

  Kyra watched her for a moment. “Just let me know if we need to adjust anything. Not that we have long to do it. I can’t believe Halloween is next weekend.”

  To Violet, holidays were just another day to get through, but she nodded as if Kyra’s words had meant something.

  Kyra’s hand went from the grave to the slight swell of her belly. It seemed to be a moment Violet shouldn’t interrupt, and when it continued to stretch out, she considered slipping away and leaving Kyra alone. But then Kyra sniffed, and when she looked up at Violet, Violet was horrified to see she was crying.

  “Ah,” Violet stammered. “Are you okay? Is the baby okay?”

  “I’m fine. Just a mess,” Kyra laughed. She swiped at her cheeks. “These hormones, you know?”

  “Uh . . . no?”

  Kyra’s embarrassed smile crumbled, and she stared at Violet with a helplessness that scared Violet more than the tears. “I wish my mom was here to see the baby when she’s born. I wish they could know each other.”