by Gina LaManna
In the back of my mind, I heard Abigail’s voice: He’s buttering you up, Evian. Why on earth would he ever chase after someone like you? Look at that bump on your nose, Evian. You wouldn’t understand beauty pageants, Evian.
I tried to push Abigail out, but she was still there, mouthing off in the back of my mind. The truth was that it was just too difficult to separate fact from fiction. Between the lies and twisted truths surrounding the murder investigation, coupled with the strange and new fascination I felt toward the island’s mechanic, I was swimming in misgivings and uncertainties.
“Mason, I just think the timing for us isn’t right. I’m trying to find out what happened to Mary, and —.”
“— you don’t want to have feelings for someone you consider a suspect.” He spoke evenly, sadly. “I understand. I’m sorry to hear it, but I get it. Well, if it makes you feel better, I won’t pursue you. Heck, I won’t even get coffee at the same time anymore. Oh, and your scooter will be ready in a few days. I had to order a part from the mainland. It should be here tomorrow. Sorry about the delay.”
“Mason ... .”
He raised an eyebrow, waiting for me to say more. After a long moment, when I couldn’t think up the proper words to explain myself, he gave a weary sigh.
“See you around, Evian,” he said, and walked away from me to the golf cart.
I stood frozen in place, shocked by how much hurt I felt from his sudden burst of coldness, the resigned disinterest that he’d forced over the layer of warmth and humor that had drawn me to him in recent weeks.
“Hey, is that you, Evian?” Zola’s voice startled me as she called from behind. “Oh, that’s right. I heard your scooter got busted up. Got a minute? I hear you got a sludge monster eating your plants.”
I chanced one more look at Mason, but he pretended valiantly that he hadn’t heard. He continued tinkering away at the golf cart despite his shoulders inching up with tension.
“Yeah, sure,” I told Zola, spinning on my heel and stepping through the still-open door of the front office. “Thanks for offering to help. I thought we’d better fix it before Paul has a cow.”
“A toad having a cow,” Zola cackled. “Funny.”
“It’s nice of you to help me out,” I said. “Did Kenna bribe you?”
“Absolutely.”
Eleven
“So, what do you get?” I asked as Zola scrounged around the flower bed in mud up to her elbows. “You know, for calling a truce to help me out.”
“I’ve been hired to do all the arrangements for the beauty contest.”
“It’s a pageant.”
“Whatever. I’ll probably do them for Mary’s funeral, too.”
“That’s morbid,” I said. “Have fun with it. Say, what do you think about her death?”
“Isn’t the whole purpose of me being here to get you to stop asking questions about that?”
“Whoa, whoa. Who said anything about stopping? I’m just supposed to be discreet.”
“Yeah, okay. See how much Kenna appreciates that.”
“Why’s she not getting on Skye’s case? She’s asking around too.”
“Yeah, but that’s her job. Also, people are annoyed with you because Skye’s been talking to them first.”
I strolled over and sat on the front steps. As she worked, I watched her hands and knees get muddier and muddier, and noticed an ugly sort of scent that seemed to expand the more she turned up dirt. “What is wrong with my garden?”
“I don’t know.” Zola sat back crossly on her heels and wiped her hands on a pair of filthy jeans. “What the heck did you do to it? I’ve never seen this before. It’s disgusting.”
“My flowers are all turning to sludge.”
“Everything’s turning to sludge. Even the grass will be rotten soon. What are you doing home, anyway? Don’t you work?”
“Wednesdays are my day off!” I said. “You’d know that if you listened to my show.”
“Nobody listens to the show except a few creepy old guys and that one lady who somehow likes the nonstop calypso music.”
“Well, I work weekends, so I make Leonard handle Wednesdays. Say, I think Bertha’s watching,” I said. “She’ll be here in a second.”
The whole time Zola had been working, my neighbor had been peering conspicuously out of her side window. Bertha liked to think she was the sneaky neighborhood gossip, but in reality there was nothing sneaky about her, nor did she know a thing about what anyone was doing. She was the worst neighborhood gossip I’d ever known. Most of the time, she just made stuff up if she didn’t have anything to talk about.
“Well, what do we have here?” Bertha crept up to my gate and wrinkled her nose. “Smells horrible!”
“Sure does,” I said cheerfully. Sometimes Bertha fed Paul if I couldn’t make it home in time for lunch, so I did my best to keep her on my good side. “That’s why Zola’s here.”
“Finally. It’s about time you got someone who knows about flowers over here,” Bertha said. Someone needed to tell her that gossiping often happened when the subject of the conversation wasn’t directly before her. “What’d Evian do to her yard to make it so nasty?”
“I don’t know. It’s very bizarre.” Zola had plunged her arms back into the flowerbed and was digging up the roots of something that had wilted. “Whatever it is seems to be rising to the surface from below. Something underground somehow.”
“So it’s not my fault?” I asked hopefully. “Could just be the dirt?”
“Dirt doesn’t just turn into sludge,” Zola said, dashing my hopes. “I don’t know what you put in here — did you buy any cheap fertilizer?”
“Nada. I don’t really do much of anything to my garden.”
“Well, it’s probably something you did unknowingly because it’s isolated to your yard.” Zola stood, glancing at the sky in the distance. The afternoon sun had begun to wane. Quite some time had passed without either of us realizing it. The oncoming darkness reminded me that we had a full moon this week — always a fun time for a water witch. “I have to get to the shop and get to work on funeral preparations. I’ll … . I don’t know, I guess I’ll look into this more tomorrow. I have some research to do first.”
“Research quickly,” Bertha said, thumbing over her shoulder toward the white picket fence that divided our properties. “I think her sludge is sliding over to my side of things and starting to swallow my raspberries. I don’t appreciate that.”
“I’d think not.” Zola nodded toward my neighbor. “Let me take a few samples from around here that I can process back at the shop. Do you have a jar or something?”
I buzzed in the house, flustered as I looked for an empty jar. There was just one of me, and I wasn’t a huge cook, so I didn’t keep many supplies on hand.
Give her a cup, Paul said. She can scoop dirt in there.
I reached up for a spare margarita glass and pulled it down, then rushed outside to hand it over. “Here.”
Zola gave me a strange look. I shrugged and she took the glass and dropped a pile of slop into it.
“Thanks, I guess,” she said. “This should do. But if anyone sees me walking around holding a margarita glass of mud they’ll think I’m nuts.”
“Oh, honey,” Bertha said, slapping her thigh. “Everyone already thinks y’all are nuts. The other two of you, as well. There must’ve been something funny about that convent they kept you in.”
Someone — I don’t remember who’d started the rumor — had explained that the magical school to which the four of us belonged had been a school for aspiring nuns. So, not only were we the odd four girls with a history nobody quite understood, but they all thought we’d been nuns-in-training until something went wrong. No wonder I hadn’t had a date in years.
“Yeah, must have been,” Zola said, standing. “Don’t water your plants until I figure out what’s going on — it’s wet enough underground to drown most of them already.”
I nodded my thanks. “Do you need
a shower or something before you go?”
Zola glanced at her filthy jeans, her mud-streaked arms and the dark splotches on her shirt. “Nah. Part of the uniform. Anyway, I kept up my part of the deal, Evian, so ... .”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll keep up mine. I’ll try to. But let me remind you that you haven’t exactly fixed the problem yet, so I’m not going to stop asking questions.”
“Asking questions about what?” Bertha wedged her nose tighter into the conversation. “This is that girl’s murder y’all are talking about, isn’t it?”
“We’re not supposed to be talking about anything at all,” Zola grimaced. “Isn’t that right, Evian?”
“Fine,” I muttered. “Thanks for your help. Let me know when you figure out what I need to do with these plants.”
“I don’t know that this is my area of expertise,” Zola said, heading down the front walk with a mud margarita. “I don’t know what’s attacking your plants, Evian, but it’s not looking good.”
Twelve
The evening was already on the horizon so I decided to continue most of the intense sleuthing another day. The business with Zola had taken a few hours longer than I’d thought, and even though she hadn’t been able to completely solve my problems, I hesitated to irk Kenna again so soon.
Bertha finally left sometime after Zola, realizing there probably wouldn’t be much more gossip with just me and Paul. She wasn’t aware that Paul was my familiar and could “talk” to me in his own way. Mostly, she just thought I was a weirdo who let her pet toad sit in margaritas like hot tubs.
Paul was just easing out of said tub. He gave a burp that told me he’d swallowed more than his fair share of the bathwater and gave a few clumsy hops toward me.
“Are you drunk?” I asked, looking up from the couch. “I thought I told you not to drink more than you could handle.”
Nooope, Paul said, but even his thoughts were slurred.
I flicked my eyes back to the television and ignored Paul as he aimed a leap for my shoulder, missed, and ended up in my lap. “Paul.”
“It’s genocide out there,” Paul said. “All the plants are dying. That’s my home.”
“You’re a spoiled old toad who lives in a house and eat bon bons. You have a human at your beck and call. Don’t pretend to be all nature-loving on me — you hate to get your feet dirty.”
They’re all dying, he moped. If you don’t find out what’s happening, everything will die.
“It’s only my yard so far! I don’t know why I’ve been the target.” I pondered that for a moment, wondering why, indeed, it was only my yard. Normally I’d suspect a prank from one of the other witches, but because two of the three were involved in fixing the problem, they couldn’t be behind the sludge in my yard. I might suspect Skye was using it to distract me from the case, but her specialty involved air, not dirt or water.
“You know what? Maybe it’s not only my yard. Maybe it’s affecting everything else.” I stood up abruptly, sending Paul flying across the room. “Maybe we just can’t see it.”
Paul stuck to the metal part of a floor lamp and scowled at me. Sure, go do more detective work. Who do you think you are, Nancy Drew?
“If only I were as cool as Nancy Drew.” I shrugged on a sweater. The sun had just dipped past the horizon and the chill would come on quickly. “I’m going for a walk — don’t wait up for me. In fact, why don’t you hop in bed and sleep things off?”
Sleep what off? Paul asked, his eyes unfocused as he looked at me. Yeah, okay. I’ll go to bed.
I offered an olive branch by extending a hand and letting Paul jump into my palm. His bed was in the small porch area, so he had a nice breeze to keep him cool. Apparently he ran warmer than most toads because he complained his feet got hot when he slept inside, though that might have been due to the fact that I tucked him in with a miniature down comforter. Kenna liked to say I needed to cut the umbilical cord with Paul. On days like today, I tended to see her point.
I settled him into the doll-sized bathtub that he preferred for sleeping and watched as he hunkered down.
When I was sure he was settled for the night, I let myself out of the front porch and made my way down the sidewalk. Bertha was watching from the window, so I made a big show of waving in her direction before heading toward Coconuts. I’d purposely orchestrated my route so she’d think I was heading down for another drink (she probably thought I was the one who bathed in margaritas). It was better she thought I was headed to the bar than finding out my real itinerary: a night walk through Cottonmouth Copse.
Most people wouldn’t dream of walking through a forest at night. And especially not the day after a murder had occurred. But I knew the forest better than most, and though it wasn’t my favorite place, I needed information.
I made a hard turn to the left and split from the main path once I was out of Bertha’s sight. A smaller footpath led the way from behind my house, through a series of fields, until the trees loomed ahead of me.
The trees of Cottonmouth Copse could talk. These particular varieties weren’t exactly known for their friendliness, but they were known for their gossip. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to wander among them, to listen to the whispers and sift through the information. There was a chance they’d know who — or what — had become intent on killing my plants.
“Haven’t gotten a new haircut yet, hmm?” Agatha, one of the trees, shouted as I entered the shadowy woods. “You’ve had the same ’do since the nineties.”
Have I mentioned these trees thrive on sarcasm? Trees and cats. When the incident at our school sent witches fleeing to the mainland, many of their familiars had been lost and abandoned. Some of them could still be found slinking through the underbrush while the trees cackled at us from above.
“Your shirt’s on backward,” one of the oaks said, then gave a childish cackle. “Made ya look.”
“I didn’t look,” I said. “The joke doesn’t work if I don’t fall for it.”
That shut up at least one of the trees. The rest continued to mumble and groan as I entered beneath their curved boughs, the silence dampening and all-consuming, the shadows deep and heavy. By the time I’d reached the center of the copse, all I heard was the creaking of branches swaying in the wind and the scratch of dry leaves as they clashed against one another.
Apparently the sarcasm gene hadn’t traveled this far because the voices were silent — until one spoke in a deep, rumbling sort of echo, a sound that radiated from the depth of its roots.
“What have you brought on us?” The tree intoned. “And why have you come into our midst?”
“What have I brought on you?” I asked, glancing at my feet to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any tender roots. “I came to ask you questions. I didn’t bring anything on you.”
“You did, years ago,” he said. “If it weren’t for you ... we would not be dying.”
“Dying? You’re dying? You all seem pretty chipper, actually. Especially Agatha.”
“It takes longer for the blackness to reach our core. We are trees with roots that go deep, with years of protection. Not like your little daisies and grasses that shudder at one touch of the shadow and shrivel.”
“So you feel it too? That sludge?”
“Of course — and soon it will spread. From your yard, from the depths of the ground, to all. The island will cease to produce living plants of any sort if you don’t stop the progression.”
“How do I stop it? What is it? I just thought I had a black thumb.”
“You do have a black thumb, but that’s not the reason your plants are dying.” The tree swayed closer to me. “It’s to do with the incident that opened the portal years ago.”
“Are you saying this sludge, or whatever it is, came from the open gate?”
“Yes.”
I raised a hand, scratched at my forehead as I stalled, thinking. “But how? We are watching the portal. There’s not a huge mudslide pouring out of it. We might have a reputation f
or being oblivious, but we would’ve noticed that.”
“Whatever is causing the problem is not from this realm,” the tree said. “It feeds on life and magic, and leaves behind death and destruction and decay. The more it kills, the stronger it grows.”
I shuddered. The tree sensed my movement because he bent his branches in a way that reflected a nod.
“Indeed,” he said. “It is terrifying. Now, go, guardian of the portal, and fix the mess you and the others have made.”
“The portal opening wasn’t my fault!” I argued. “All four of us were on duty the night of the incident. All of us should have been watching it, and instead ... .”
“Go,” he commanded. “Swiftly!”
I stopped making excuses, turned, and made a quick exit. The trees had begun to creak louder, as if itching to get their hands on the witch who’d started this mess.
“Get a haircut!” Agatha yelled as I stumbled back under the moonlight. “Try a new style. Have one of them beauty pageant ladies to give you a makeover!”
“And while you’re at it,” a second male tree shouted, “send some of the ladies this way. We don’t see much in the way of outsiders anymore. Something about people saying this place is dangerous.”
“Creep,” I muttered. “You just want to ogle beautiful women.”
“Hey, I might be a tree, but I’m still a male,” he said, and cackled. “Get out of here, witch. And take the thing that’s out to kill us with you. If we die, you die. We’re taking you down with us.”
Another shudder. I picked up the pace and hurried back down the path, retracing my steps. When I re-emerged onto the main road, I instinctively turned toward home, and then caught myself.
It was still early enough to swing by the Beauty Cottage. While I was out and about, I could grab the names of the vendors who had been scheduled to show up the morning of Mary’s murder. I couldn’t do much else tonight, and Paul was sleeping off his bath at home. With no real technology on the island, I’d be stuck watching a DVD of Boy Meets World because I was feeling too lazy to pop it out of the machine and change it for something new.