“That may be. But it’s not up to me anymore.”
“It’s all right,” Jake said. “Really. I want this, Savannah. Can you understand that?”
She started crying, because all she understood was that the people she loved most would not let her save them.
Cal led them to the squad car, and Jake turned to her. “Have faith,” he said.
Savannah shook her head. It had taken her thirty-six years to realize that, at times, faith alone was not enough. Sometimes you had to do a little more than hope for the best. Sometimes you had to stack the cards.
Monday morning, Savannah wore a blood-red dress and the most colorful hat she owned—a green velvet bowler, smothered with red silk peonies and purple feather plumes a foot high. She told her mother what she wanted to do, and Maggie squinted at her. Finally, she broke into a slow, satisfied grin. “I knew you’d come around.”
They went into Cal Bentley’s office and shut the door behind them. Cal had been bent over paperwork, but now he leaned back in his chair. “Ladies?”
“We’d like to talk to the witness,” Maggie said. “Just for a few minutes.”
Cal stared at the papers in front of him. Half of his photographs had already been packed in boxes, his inbox was nearly cleared out. But more than that, the sheriff didn’t grow outraged or order them to leave; in every way that mattered, he’d already retired his badge.
He got up from his desk and walked to the window. He kept his back to them while he spoke. “You wouldn’t do anything stupid, would you? Because foolishness, at this point, could land Jake in prison without parole.”
Savannah walked up beside him and put her hand on his arm. “Ten minutes. Isn’t he worth that much of a risk?”
The anteroom outside the lineup chamber reeked of stale tobacco and nerves. Three torn black vinyl chairs had been pushed to the walls, the floor was orange and brown linoleum, an old paisley design Savannah was fairly certain her mother had once had in a bathroom. A brown-haired woman and her five-year-old daughter sat fidgeting in the chairs, the woman flipping through a three-year-old copy of Good Housekeeping. Savannah took a deep breath and sat down beside Bethany Appleton, while her mother stood watch at the door.
“They called me in for a lineup,” Savannah said. “Can you believe that?”
The woman stiffened. She was wearing a tight skirt and oversized black sweater. There was a single bead of sweat in the hollow beneath her ear. Her daughter was grabbing cigarette butts out of the ashtray and popped one in her mouth.
“Good God.” The woman expertly inserted a pinkie into her daughter’s mouth and swiped out the stub. “Don’t be gross.”
She turned back to Savannah, but didn’t smile. “For that murder?” she said. “The one fifteen years ago?”
“Well, I don’t know if it was a murder. They just want me to look at someone I saw a lifetime ago. Like I can remember. Like anyone can be sure.”
The woman hesitated, then shook her head. “I’m Bethany Appleton. I thought I was the only witness.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but I’m glad you’re here too. I don’t want it all on my conscience. I don’t want a man’s fate riding on my recollection, which believe me, can change according to mood and time of day and what I had for breakfast.”
“I remember,” Bethany said. “Some things are, like, etched in your brain.”
The girl reached out to touch one of the feathers in Savannah’s hat, but her mother grabbed her hand.
“Tara, for God’s sake.”
“That’s all right.” Savannah took off her hat. “She can have it.”
Savannah smiled at the girl, while Bethany beat the arm of the chair with her purple fingernails. “This is fucked. I mean, sorry, no offense, but I thought I was, like, this star witness. The Enquirer even called me. Did they talk to you? Have you been getting crank phone calls?”
Savannah reached into her purse and took out her cards. She got down on the scuffed vinyl floor. When the girl came over to look, she turned the cards over briefly, but didn’t let her touch them.
“Tarots,” she said. “I’m a fortune-teller.”
Bethany sat forward. “So did he talk to you? That guy at the Enquirer? Because I don’t know what fortune-tellers make, but I’m a single mom on welfare. I’ve got to get a job by November, and you tell me who’s gonna hire a thirty-one-year-old with no experience and a kid who gets sick every other day. If someone wants to pay me five grand for the rights to my story, well then, I’m gonna take it. I’m not gonna feel guilty about it. Especially when all I have to do is tell the truth.”
Savannah turned the cards back over and didn’t shuffle. She could hear movement in the room next door, possibly the sound of a row of black-haired men being aligned. She looked at her mother, then tucked the cards into her lap when she began to shake.
“They didn’t offer me anything,” Savannah said, and Bethany unclenched her fists. Her daughter was pulling the feathers out of the hat one by one. “I wouldn’t have taken it anyway,” she went on. “It’s been so long. I mean, fifteen years. Even if something did happen all those years ago, would you want to be held responsible for what you did in your teens, when you were just a stupid kid? A man can change a lot.”
“Not that much,” Bethany said. “Believe me. I know men.”
Savannah lifted the cards. “You want a reading? Want to know how this all comes out?”
Bethany touched the cards, then quickly drew back. “A friend of mine went to a psychic and the woman told her she’d be a young widow. Two weeks later, bam, her husband was dead from a drug overdose.”
“That was no psychic. That was plain old awful coincidence.”
Bethany shook her head. “No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.”
Savannah began laying out the cards. Bethany picked up her magazine, turned a few pages, then set it back down.
“What is all that?” she asked.
“It’s a Celtic spread.” Savannah had bought a dozen new bracelets, and they jingled all up one arm.
When she tried to still them, the rest of her body took up the trembling.
“Are you all right?” Bethany asked.
Savannah glanced up, but didn’t meet her gaze. “Oh, sure. Just nervous about the lineup. See this?” She pointed to a card with a snarl of different-colored crystals. “That’s the Six of Crystals. The card of confusion. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s what.”
She laid out a few more, and right after the six came the Nine of Crystals. “Narrowness. That’s weird. This is the Voyager. It’s really a very positive deck. I’m surprised you could get this many bad cards in a row.”
“I told you I didn’t want a reading.”
Savannah could hear Cal Bentley’s voice in the other room, and then the scratching of chairs. “Considering you’re about to go in there and maybe sentence a man to life in prison, I’d have to say this is a sign to watch yourself. It would be awfully easy to just pick somebody out and say, ‘That’s him.’ To not even consider the consequences, especially if you’re figuring on getting some kind of reward in the end.”
“Look, lady—”
“Well, look at that,” Savannah went on. “Your final result is the Hanged Man. That’s the card of an upside-down world. Some fortune-tellers call it the dark night of the soul.”
She started picking up the cards, but Bethany grabbed her arm. “Wait. What does that mean?”
Savannah looked at her now, even though Bethany would see the tears in her eyes. “It means you’re running the risk of ruining not only someone else’s life, but your own. It means the world’s not perfect. Sometimes one quick horror is the kindest thing a man can do.”
She gathered up the cards and put them back in her purse. She put her hand on Bethany’s shoulder, then got to her feet. Bethany jerked, her mouth formed an O. Where she’d touched her, Savannah knew, the skin burned. Savannah walked past her mother, then kept right on going. She w
as shaking, but she wasn’t about to break now, not when she’d finally mastered the art of the curse.
Savannah was still trembling when she walked out of the station. She lit a cigarette and walked around the block. By the time she got back around, her mother had come out. She and Cheryl Pillandro were standing on the front steps.
Maggie plucked the cigarette out of Savannah’s fingers and ground it out. “You don’t smoke.”
“Please. Like that matters.”
“It’ll matter once Jake gets out.”
Savannah lit another cigarette.
“I think I liked you better happy,” Maggie said.
“No, you didn’t.”
Cheryl was pacing, her high heels clicking on the stone steps. She had done herself up that morning, set her short hair with curlers and put on bright red lipstick, but that lipstick was now dribbling along the creases of her mouth. She kept jerking whenever a police car pulled out of the lot.
“I can’t believe you two,” Maggie said finally. “I can’t possibly be the only one here who believes everything will turn out fine.”
“I’ve got to walk,” Savannah said.
She’d gone around the block two and a half times when she saw Bethany Appleton and her daughter being escorted out the back door of the station. Bethany’s face was set, unreadable. Then Savannah started to run.
Halfway around she was crying; she was so agonizingly slow. Love had filled her with the heaviest things—longing and fear and the dense core of desire. Even worse, it had upset her equilibrium, so she stumbled over seemingly nothing, over microscopic cracks in the sidewalk and the words he most needed to hear.
It seemed half a lifetime before she turned the corner and looked down the street. Then she saw him. Jake stood alone on the top step, staring at the painfully blue sky. His hands were behind his back, and for a moment she thought he was in handcuffs, then he swung his left hand around, palm up.
She looked around for her mother and Cheryl Pillandro, then spotted them down the street. They were opening the back door of Cheryl’s car to let out the dogs. Rufus and Gabe came barreling down the street, barking joyously, but this once Savannah moved faster. She was not going to let anyone beat her to him. No matter what else happened, she would be the first one to tell him he was free.
In late September, when the heat finally broke and autumn rushed in on a cold, startling wind, Maggie Dawson packed the last of her things. She had piled boxes near the front door for the movers, then put an even bigger stack near the back for Jake. He was going to take her castoffs to the women’s shelter, and she had a stunning amount of gleaming castoffs. Mountains of steamers and sweaters and amazing apple corers, none of which she’d used even once. She had the number of Williams-Sonoma in her phone book, and her eye on a Chasseur Dutch oven, but for now she was packing light.
All she needed was a winter parka, a couple of sweat suits, and an evening dress. She and Cheryl were setting sail tomorrow from Vancouver, on a Royal Caribbean cruise to Alaska’s Inland Passage. After that, she was headed up north to a rented house in northern Idaho. Coeur d’Alene was a place she hadn’t even heard of until Cheryl mentioned she’d once vacationed there with her first husband, and that was exactly why Maggie had chosen it. Cheryl might cry when remembering how Paul Grey had admired Idaho’s lush forests and alpine lakes, but the state was nothing to Maggie. Memory-free and therefore powerless. Just a place she might be able to stand looking at alone.
She walked downstairs and out into the yard. The For Sale sign had been sunk a foot deep in the rich soil, and in the back, Jake had just finished the bench.
He stepped aside to let her see his work. Maggie brushed her hand across the carving of the Star, then drew back, as if he’d left a sharp edge. She’d felt sparks fly through her fingers, though she wasn’t going to admit this to anybody, and the fact that Doug’s ghost came to her every night was going to be her secret for as long as she lived.
She looked around the garden, now rich in crimson and gold. The house would sell quickly, she was sure, to a couple who didn’t mind putting a little work into the things they loved.
“He was a damn fool,” Maggie said, but nevertheless when the movers arrived, she directed them to wrap the bench carefully in blankets, and place it in the van first.
Jake took her elbow and led her to the porch. He was still huge, but without the beard, she just couldn’t picture him killing anybody. That was disappointing. She had rather liked the glamour of living with a psycho.
“You never told me what I owe you,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maggie, Cal told me he let you and Savannah in to talk to Bethany Appleton. He was fairly certain he saw money changing hands. Bribing a witness is a felony.”
“Only if you get caught.” She laughed out loud. She had felt positively marvelous ever since she’d given Bethany Appleton those crisp hundreds. She wasn’t about to trust fate to one of Savannah’s feeble curses. If she couldn’t have her husband, then by God she would commit a few crimes. She would get a little crazy. She would live the rest of her life as if she were eighteen years old and slick as slime.
She looked past Jake to Savannah, who was in the back, deadheading Doug’s prize roses. She had no idea what would become of her daughter and this man, and she liked it that way. It left her with something to think about. Savannah could not live far from Emma, and Jake could not breathe anything but mountain air. One of them would have to make a sacrifice, and she wondered if Jake knew it would be him. She wondered if he would fight the way she had, or simply give in and accept that love took as much as it gave. Aim for forever, and you’re in for a wild, bumpy ride.
She squeezed Jake’s arm, then went into the garden. She would never have another one. There was no way she was going to torture herself any longer with the smell of lilacs and honeysuckle. One garden a lifetime was enough.
She took her daughter by the arm and led her to the Juneberry trees near the curb. The leaves had turned yellow three weeks ago, and were now deepening to crimson. Doug would have been thrilled to see that, beside them, the stalks of his ensete were three feet high and still growing.
Maggie reached into her pockets, where she’d stuffed Doug’s poems. She had thought about bringing them with her, but they were all committed to memory anyway, and a woman alone had to travel light. She handed half to Savannah, and kept the rest for herself.
“All those years,” she said, “he was ashamed of his poetry. He was worried about syntax and sentimentality. He thought they gave away too much.”
Savannah looked down at the poems in her hand. The swirling wind was scented with cider and wood smoke and other people’s tender evenings, and Maggie would be relieved to be rid of it. She wanted to smell things she’d never come across before. A surprising mix of spice and someone else’s desire, a stranger’s cool, exotic dreams.
She waited until the wind aimed skyward, tugged at her fingers, then she lifted one arm in the air. “All right. On three.”
Savannah blinked until the tears slid down, but she leaned into her mother and raised her arm.
“One,” Maggie said.
It was better this way. The wind would yank the poems up over the Juneberry trees, then scatter them in the tidy backyards of her neighbors. Some might get trapped in juniper hedges or in the slats of committee-approved brown siding, but one might very well land on a tortured widow’s front step and change everything.
“Two.”
A few, it was certain, would get snagged on the rose-like Juneberry branches, stuck to the juicy purple fruit. Sometimes, no matter what your plans, you just got stuck. Sometimes getting stuck was a good thing.
The wind yanked at the edges of the poems, and one slipped out of Maggie’s hand. She opened her palm, and Savannah did the same. Together, they said, “Three!” and let the love letters fly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRISTY YORKE was born and raised in
the Los Angeles area, where she married and went to college, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in psychology. Craving quiet and a view of trees, she, her husband, and their two children moved to the mountains of southern Idaho.
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