Strange Alchemy

by Gwenda Bond

  Miranda’s frown is back, only now she’s puzzled. “Where’s my dad? Is he in your office?”

  Dad says, “You’d better come with me.” He touches her arm with one hand and extends his other to indicate which direction for her to go.

  Miranda deals me another surprise when she hesitates and says, “If it’s okay, can Grant come with us?”

  Dad’s forehead wrinkles slightly in confusion, but he says, “I guess.”

  I follow Miranda across the lobby and along the hallway into Dad’s office. The space hasn’t changed much. Dad closes the blinds on the tall, narrow windows to the outside, turning the room into a cave. He peers at me from the other side of his desk. “How are you holding up? Any… problems?”

  “Good, actually,” I say. “Fine.”

  “When we finish here, call your mother. You can drive the car home to her. She’ll bring you back here.”

  “I’m just here to give Miranda and her dad a ride home,” I say. “Besides, what am I supposed to do here?”

  Dad cringes at the first part, but he only speaks to the second. He lowers his voice. “You know. What you do.”

  “There’s nothing,” I say. I do not want to talk about this with Miranda in the room. I may have mentioned the spirits to her way back when, but that’s a little different from discussing the extent of my gift in front of her. Especially given that it’s currently MIA. “Not since I got back.”

  Dad frowns. That isn’t what he wants to hear.

  Miranda coughs to interrupt. “Where is he?” she asks, the question small in the high-ceilinged room.

  I don’t fully understand why I want to protect Miranda, but I do. Dad is taking too much time on this. It can’t just be about releasing her father on a drunk and disorderly or a public intoxication charge.

  “You might want to…” Dad gestures to the chairs in front of his desk and sits down in his own. Miranda and I slide into the vacant ones. I attempt to catch Miranda’s eye, but she’s staring straight ahead.

  “I have some bad news,” Dad goes on.

  “Where’s my dad?” Miranda asks.

  Dad laces his fingers together on the desk. His expression settles into one I’ve seen before. “I understand this will be hard to hear,” he starts.

  “What… what’s hard to hear?” Miranda asks. “You found him, right? He wasn’t missing.”

  There’s a strained hope in her voice. I reach out and touch her arm. She flinches.

  “We did find him,” Dad says. “But —”

  “So where is he?” she interrupts. “I want to see him. Is he okay?”

  Unfortunately, by now I can guess what’s coming. It’s all in the grim set of Dad’s face, easy to decode for someone like me who knows how to read it.

  “Miranda,” I say as gently as I can, “let him tell you what he needs to.”

  Miranda gulps in air, and then says, “No, you don’t understand. I promised Mom I’d take care of him.”

  Dad and I exchange a glance. So Miranda suspects what’s coming too.

  “Well,” Dad says, “I know this won’t be easy. I’m glad that my son is here with you.” He pauses, probably wondering why the two of us came together. “You’ve had a tough time of it, Miranda. You’ve been such a devoted daughter, and I didn’t want to tell you alone, but there’s no one else to call… our social worker is among the missing, and I know you wouldn’t want that, anyway. You’ve been running your household for a while now, and you deserve to know, especially with everything going on. But there’s no easy way to say this…”

  Miranda remains motionless. I’m not even sure she keeps breathing.

  “Your father was murdered.”

  I anticipated dead, or maybe seriously injured, but not… “Murdered?” I ask.

  “His body was discovered in an alley downtown this afternoon. He’s the only one of the missing we’ve recovered so far. But he brings the reported number down to one hundred and fourteen.”

  Miranda puts her head down, her hair falling forward to hide her face. I want to do something, anything, to comfort her. But I don’t know how. Instead I sit, useless and in shock, fixated on the number of missing — 114. The same number John White left behind in 1587.

  That can’t be a coincidence. Dr. Whitson implied there’s a connection between the two events, but what could it be?

  Miranda speaks, head still down, her voice muffled by her hair. “What happened? Do you know who did it?”

  “The coroner is having some difficulty determining what happened to him, but it’s not anything that could be considered accidental or self-inflicted,” Dad says. “We’ve ordered an autopsy, and we’ll know more once that’s finished. We don’t know who’s responsible for his death yet.” He squints sympathetically at the crown of her head. “If you want to see the body, we can arrange that. I’m so sorry, Miranda.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I say, the only words I can find for her. I have questions for Dad, but they’ll wait.

  Miranda lifts her head. “I understand,” she says, her voice as steady as a flat line on a hospital monitor.

  I’ve heard Dad talk to Mom about notifications before. How most people fall apart before you even get through the facts about how the person died. He always says that the ones who don’t are the ones who usually end up taking it hardest.

  Miranda rises from the chair, then seems to think better of it and drops back into it. “Do you need me to sign anything?”

  Yeah, she’s not going to take this well at all.

  Chapter 7

  MIRANDA

  While Grant drives me home, I stare out the car window, feeling lost. As lost as the missing people, maybe. Chief Rawling agreed to let Grant leave with me, but he’s supposed to end up back at the courthouse. Grant told his dad again there’s nothing he can do to help there, making me wonder what the chief even thinks he could do, though I have my suspicions.

  For some reason, Grant seems reluctant to leave me. I’m grateful for the company now, though I wasn’t earlier. Silly as that is. But then I didn’t know that soon I’d be alone for good.

  The way the chief described Dad’s death was so strange, but that only occurs to me now. At the time, all I could think was, Dad is gone. I failed him. Worse, I failed Mom. All she wanted was for the two of us to be okay, for me to look out for him. And I didn’t.

  But now I wonder how the state of his body could clearly indicate murder, but the coroner not know how he died? I can’t process the concept that someone murdered my dad. Who? And why? Dad was a drunk, but a harmless one. And he was so nice to me last night, telling me I’m a good daughter, that he wanted to be better. Did he know something was up?

  The distraction of all these questions keeps me from losing it. They’re the only thing.

  Grant hasn’t said much. He keeps his eyes on the road, his knuckles tight in a death grip on the steering wheel.

  “What your dad was asking you before… you hear voices still?” I ask.

  He doesn’t as much as glance over. “You remember.”

  That’s the understatement of the century. Of course I remember. The voices talked to him about me. I was in eighth grade, thirteen years old. It happened on the first day of school, not long after the Rawlings moved in from Nags Head. They took possession of the house belonging to the chief’s mother — aka the Witch of Roanoke Island — after she died of cancer. Back then Grant possessed the glow of celebrity all new kids have in a town this small.

  I was standing against the section of lobby wall that belonged to loner misfits. Grant walked toward me like he was in a trance. The other kids laughed as he reached out a hand and touched my hair. He said things to me, about me. Things that didn’t make any sense but that scared me. He called me a bad thing. He called me a liar. A traitor. A snake.

  The other kids loved that — a snake. T
hey thought he was being funny. The funny new kid, picking on the Blackwood girl, something most of them had wanted to do for a long time.

  Eventually the principal stepped in to pull Grant away and called my dad to pick me up. But the damage had been done. What people whispered about our family had only gotten worse since my mom died. Her death confirmed our bad luck curse. And then this.

  Dad ripped through a half-case of beer when we got home, getting angrier with each can. Then he loaded me into the car and drove to the Rawlings’ house.

  Chief Rawling tolerated Dad yelling and taking a swing at him, though he didn’t let it connect. Grant must have heard the commotion, because he came downstairs and stood at the screen door. When he saw me, he ran outside.

  “I hear the spirits talking,” he whispered. “They talk to me all the time. They said those things about you. They were too loud. But they’re just spirits, and I hate them.”

  Then he gave me that look. I could tell he was sorry. Even then, I didn’t believe he had humiliated me in front of everyone on purpose.

  Finally Chief Rawling sent Grant back inside and drove Dad and me home in our Oldsmobile. His pretty wife with the black hair followed us in his police cruiser. I was surprised that Grant didn’t show up for school the next day. Or the next. Or any of the days that followed. His mother home-schooled him for half the year, rumors of his criminal escapades around the island traveling the halls. Then he left.

  Now I study his profile, just inches away. Part of me wants to ask him if the spirits said anything else about me back then. That part wants to know. Maybe.

  “Is that why you’re helping me?” I ask. “You still feel guilty? It was a long time ago. You were just their excuse. They’d have found a reason to go after me.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better,” he says. “I don’t know why I want to help you. I just do. It feels… right.”

  Never in a million years will I understand this boy.

  “Do you still hear them?” I ask again. “Can they tell you what happened to my dad?”

  “I haven’t heard them since I got back.” He sounds regretful. “I’m sorry.” He gives a half smile that looks nothing like a real one. “They’ve never told me anything useful. I know it must sound crazy — the whole thing.”

  “When you come from a family like mine, you don’t judge.” I stare out the windshield and realize we’re fast approaching a place I haven’t been in a while. A place I suddenly desperately need to go. I need to apologize to Mom for my broken promise, and since Grant can’t do it for me…

  I point straight ahead. “Do you mind if we stop by there?”

  A thick black fence thrusts from the ground like jagged teeth, a forbidding boundary of painted iron. The evening light makes shadow spears that thrust toward the gentle slope of tombstone-dotted ground the fence protects.

  “I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” he says, “but why not?”

  He slows and turns up the dirt drive that will take us into the graveyard, dust ghosts trailing the car.

  *

  I get out of the car first and wander through the chalky white tombstones, some carved with angels or winged skulls. There aren’t many recent burials in this part of the cemetery.

  Grant doesn’t follow me. I don’t ask him to. I figure he’ll join me if he feels like it.

  I walk up the slope, and grass that could use mowing tickles my ankles. I look back, and Grant is still inside the car.

  It’s sinking in that I’m truly alone now. Alone in the world.

  I start down the other side of the small hill, out of sight. Here the markers change to reddish marble and gleaming black. There are plain gray stones mixed in, but not many of the older, paler kind.

  I don’t care for modern headstones. When Mom died, we were only able to afford a smallish marble rectangle to mark her grave. I wished for something large and sweeping that captured Mom’s spirit. Or at least something small and noble, like those old ones. I’m pretty sure the guy at the Outer Banks Monument Company who sold us our stone cut us a deal. There wasn’t any way to ask for more charity.

  I reach the not-so-special gray stone. Kneeling, I trace the letters of my mother’s name with my fingertips. Anna-Marie Blackwood.

  The tombstones on either side are close. There’ll be no room for Dad’s marker to go next to Mom’s. Not that we — I — can afford one.

  Now that I’m here, I don’t bother to ask for Mom’s forgiveness, but I crave it all the same. I ease down on the hillside next to the headstone and pull up a yellow dandelion growing on the top of the grave. I hate the idea of my mom down there in the cold, damp dark.

  I lean against the stone and say, “I didn’t forget my promise to watch out for Dad, but I wasn’t able to keep it. Not good enough.”

  The only response I hear is Grant climbing down the hill to join me. He must be stomping as loud as he can through the grass to give me fair warning to compose myself. He isn’t turning out to be anything like I would have expected.

  I pat the ground beside me as he arrives. He kicks at the grass, then sits down.

  “Grant Rawling, meet Anna-Marie,” I say.

  Grant doesn’t say anything.

  “She was great,” I tell him. I want him to know that, for some reason.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “Last one, promise.”

  We stay like this for a few minutes, not talking. Low gray clouds pass overhead. The rolling hills of the cemetery grounds are dotted with purple-flowering bushes and a few trees. This is a peaceful place, even with the highway.

  I hope wherever Dad is now is a peaceful place too. He deserves that.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone,” I say, my heart heavy in my chest. I feel weary. Can someone who’s seventeen feel weary? I do. “Sometimes I still can’t believe she is.”

  “What was he like?”

  I shrug, not sure what to say. Before Mom got sick, Dad was different. He was quieter, not so much of a crazy talker or drinker. He held a steady job, more or less. Mom could make him smile with such little effort. She used to read me book after book — Narnia and Alice and Spiderwick and Harry Potter — while he drank a beer or two, no more, content to listen to us.

  I pluck another dandelion. This one has already transformed to a head of white cotton spokes. “He wasn’t able to be himself anymore after she died.… Losing someone, sometimes it’s too much. He couldn’t shut out the dark. He gave up.”

  “I’m — I’m not going to say I’m sorry.”

  I blow on the dandelion, scattering the white particles all over Grant’s shirt.

  “Thanks,” he says, brushing them off. “You have a thing for coating me with random substances you want to tell me about?”

  I lie back instead of answering, grass brushing my ears, and watch the clouds drift over us. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I always dream about leaving, but I never really thought about what life beyond taking care of Dad might look like. Never made any plans.” I pause. Grant doesn’t know the full extent of the legendary curse. “I never figured there was any point making them.”

  Grant takes a moment to respond. “That part might be a good thing, though. Right?”

  Is it? I’m not going to tell him that I’m doomed to Roanoke Island. Spirits or no spirits, he’ll think I’m silly for believing in the curse, and — suddenly — I do not want him to think that about me.

  He hauls himself up onto his knees and reaches over me. He touches the headstone. “Nice to meet you, Anna-Marie,” he says.

  I smile up at him, without meaning to. I should be too sad to smile at all. This is a boy who lends himself to wondering about. Especially when he jolts upright, an uneasiness overtaking his whole body.

  He gives me a stricken look.
“I don’t think you should go home…” He hesitates.

  “Spirits tell you something about me?” I ask, mostly kidding.

  “No,” he blurts. He doesn’t seem to find the question funny in the least. “You… you shouldn’t be alone. Come to my house? You can meet my mom.”

  I nod, despite the fact he’s wrong. I am alone. I’ll be that way for the rest of my life. Eventually, I’ll have to go home and mourn Dad. I’ll have to come to terms with how badly I failed on my promise.

  But there’s no reason to rush home and embrace that pain. It’ll wait for me.

  That much I know.

  *

  Grant angles the car up the driveway toward the white two-story house that originally belonged to his grandmother. It’s the most perfect, normal, comfortable house I can imagine. His mother sits on the front porch swing.

  “Like something straight out of house and beach garden, huh? My mom should be cool, but if she’s not, I’ll just drop my stuff, and then we’ll get you home,” Grant says.

  He’s rambling. He must be nervous about seeing his mom. Or maybe about me meeting her.

  “I should probably warn you. My mom might be mad at me,” Grant continues.

  I follow his eyes to where his mother gets up in a smooth motion. She walks to the top of the steps and waits, arms crossed.

  “Why?” I ask, because he is obviously right.

  “I kind of, well, borrowed this car. Without asking. From the airport parking garage.”

  I gape. “You stole your mom’s car is what you’re saying?”

  “Um, yes, but now I’m returning it. It’ll be fine.” With that, he opens the car door and gets out.

  He stole his mom’s car. I’m familiar with the legends of his exploits around town, but to be confronted with one in real life.

  Wow.

  We drag lead feet across the lawn toward the porch. I should just go home.

  “Grant Rawling,” his mother says, when we reach her. “I should kill you right now.”

  He ducks his head. “You probably should.”