“It was not fireflies and you know it,” Lisa said. Sammy gave her a scowl, then went back to shoveling cereal into his mouth, chewing like a robot. Sammy got no pleasure from food. It was sad, really.
“Tell them, Evie,” Lisa said.
Evie bit her lip, looked down at her drawing. Scratch, scratch, scratch went her pen. She’d given the coffee cup arms with claws.
“Evie!” Lisa snarled.
“Ha!” said Sam, smiling. “So much for your reliable witness.” He laughed, shaking his head, then went back to his cereal.
Lisa bit her lip. She’d show him. She’d prove the fairies were real, make Sammy Skeptic eat his words.
“You’ll see,” Lisa hissed. She reached into her pocket, touched the teeth, started to pull them out, offer them up as proof. Evie caught her and threw her a warning glance. She mouthed the word No! and gave such a menacing look that Lisa left the teeth in her pocket.
Aunt Hazel, who’d been standing with her back to them at the stove across the room, brought over a stack of pancakes, which she called flapjacks.
“Who’s going to see what?” she asked. Always the opposite of her sister, she wore an inside-out robe, scuffed-up old slippers, her hair going this way and that like an unmanageable nest of snakes. “And while we’re on the subject of seeing things, maybe one of you could tell me what might have happened to the strawberry jam I bought yesterday. You know how Dave loves his jam.”
Aunt Hazel was a little batty, but she was good at taking care of people. She cooked a big breakfast every day (pancakes, Canadian bacon, cinnamon buns from a can) and never lost her patience with Da, even when he peed himself or refused to eat. She worked in nursing homes mostly, so she was used to dealing with old, crazy people. But she didn’t seem to keep any one job too long because of her drinking. She’d call in sick too much or show up reeking of gin. That’s what Evie said anyway. And this last time was no different. According to Evie, Hazel got called in to cover an early shift at Cedar Grove Health and Rehab and was still drunk from the night before. They fired her on the spot, which, it turned out, was good luck because it meant that now Hazel was in no hurry to get back home. She could stay and help with Da until he was better.
Hazel and Evie lived only an hour away, in a dilapidated old farmhouse that was cold all winter and stifling in the summer. Hazel didn’t like to drive, so they didn’t come on a regular basis, but when they did, they’d stay for days, sometimes whole weeks, usually when Hazel was between jobs. Sam and Lisa rarely went to visit there—Phyllis didn’t approve of her sister’s housekeeping and claimed that on various occasions over the years she’d encountered bedbugs, lice, and fleas. They couldn’t go in the basement because there were supposedly rats the size of small cats down there, along with toe-breaking rattraps and poison bait. Lisa was pretty sure the real reason they weren’t allowed to visit much was because of Hazel’s drinking. When she came to their place, Phyllis could keep a tight rein on her, but in her own environment, all bets were off. She had bottles stashed everywhere—even, Lisa recalled, in the toilet tank.
“The kids say there are fairies in Reliance, Hazel,” Lisa’s mom told her.
Aunt Hazel shook her head, said, “Nonsense,” and flashed Lisa’s mother a don’t-encourage-them look. “I’d say we’ve got a bunch of kids with overactive imaginations. Call it a blessing, call it a curse, but there it is.” With this, she turned and shuffled over to the fridge for the syrup, mumbling something about the whole family needing medication, not just Da. She stood with the door open, leaning in to the fridge and banging things around while she muttered to herself.
“You should leave them something,” Mom said in a low voice so that Hazel wouldn’t hear. “Fairies like gifts. Especially sweets. And shiny, sparkly things. Not iron, though. They don’t like anything made from iron.”
Lisa smiled. She was sure her mother would understand and know just what to do.
“Tell us again, Aunt Phyllis,” Evie said. “What happened to all the people who lived in Reliance?”
Da looked up from his cup slowly, as if his head was the heaviest thing. He had a little string of drool coming from the edge of his mouth, getting caught up on the stubble covering his cheek. Aunt Hazel came back across the checkered linoleum floor, put the syrup and butter on the table with a loud thump, and gently dabbed at Da’s face with a napkin, then put a stack of flapjacks in front of him. “No jam, Dave, sorry. It’s a damn mystery.”
“Gone,” Lisa’s mom said, her voice barely above a whisper. It was her best storytelling voice. The one she used before bed each night for as long as Lisa could remember. The one that had told her “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” “Snow White and Rose Red.” “The whole town just disappeared. One day they were there, the next they weren’t. There were dinner plates left on the tables, fires stoked, cows waiting to be milked, horses in the stable. All that was left,” her mother said, her voice as hushed as she could make it while still being heard, “was one child. A baby in a cradle.”
“And what happened to that baby?” Lisa asked, though she knew the story by heart.
“He was adopted by a family here in town.”
“And he was our great-grandpa,” Evie said.
Lisa’s mom nodded. “My grandfather. Eugene O’Toole. He built this house.”
“And grew up to be the town doctor,” Lisa added.
“Went to medical school in Boston when he was just sixteen,” her mother said, a proud smile on her face. “There was nothing that man couldn’t do.”
Except explain why he was the only one left behind, Lisa thought.
Lisa’s mom and Hazel had grown up in this same house with their grandfather Eugene and his daughter, Rose, their mother. Their own father had left them. “House wasn’t big enough for two men,” Hazel always said, but Lisa never got it—the house seemed plenty big to her.
Lisa never met her great-grandpa. He died just after her parents were married. He walked out into the backyard one evening during a storm and was struck by lightning. If he was so smart, Lisa always wondered, shouldn’t he have known not to be holding an umbrella in a thunderstorm? From that point on, umbrellas were outlawed in their house and Lisa had never been allowed to own one.
Lisa remembered her grandma Rose as being delicate and smelling like the menthol rub she used for her arthritis. She had a stroke and couldn’t move one side of her face. She lived in a nursing home and died after having another stroke when Lisa was seven.
Sometimes Lisa would walk around the house and touch things—the red kitchen table, the milk-glass candy dish, the pipe that had belonged to Eugene that sat on the mantel—and imagine that each object was haunted in some small way by her grandmother and great-grandfather, by the ghosts of her mother and Aunt Hazel’s childhood selves.
Da left his pancakes untouched, dropped his head back down, gazing into his coffee. It was a white mug with a red heart on one side, Cupid on the other. Lisa had given it to him on Valentine’s Day years ago. It was full of those chalky, heart-shaped candies that had messages like Sweet Talk and Be True.
“You eat up now, Dave,” Hazel told him. “You need your strength.” Then she leaned over and started cutting up his pancakes for him.
Sammy stared, eyes locked on his father like someone who sees an accident and can’t look away. Their mother shifted uncomfortably in her seat, said, “I wish you kids could have met your great-grandfather. Sometimes,” she went on, her voice low and serious again like she was telling a story, “sometimes I’m sure I see little pieces of him in each of you.”
Da took the fork Hazel handed him, stabbed at his plate, missing the pancake entirely. Hazel took the fork back and fed him herself.
Lisa’s mother winced, but when she caught Lisa looking, she forced a smile. Then her mom folded her napkin, pushed her chair back away from the table, and said, “Well, if you’re all
set here, I think I’ll go out to the garden and do some weeding.”
“Of course we are,” Hazel said, feeding Da another bite. “Aren’t we, Dave?” Some pancake fell out of his mouth.
Lisa touched the ugly yellow teeth in her pocket. Wondered what it felt like to go crazy. If maybe it was a little like walking into a thunderstorm with an umbrella. Or maybe it started small—like thinking the kitchen table and candy dish were haunted, or insisting you’ve just seen fairies in the woods even though your brother and cousin, who were right there with you, seemed determined to deny it.
CHAPTER 7
Phoebe
JUNE 5, PRESENT DAY
They were finishing up a breakfast of strawberry pancakes, which Evie called flapjacks. “Like my mom,” Evie said, “remember?” which gave Sam a dreamy sort of smile that made Phoebe’s stomach hurt. Phoebe had very few warm, fuzzy memories from childhood, and even if she had, there was no one to share them with. No long-lost cousins to be reunited with. Before her mother’s death four years ago, she’d talk to her three, maybe four times a year, and then it was usually because her ma was looking for money, not to share memories of old family recipes.
Phoebe smiled at Evie. She wasn’t going to let her cruddy-ass childhood cloud the fact that she was happy for Sam. While it’s true that she did feel a twinge of envy when she looked at Evie and understood all she and Sam had shared, she was determined not to screw this up. Evie seemed like the golden ticket. Just what Sam needed to start opening up about his past. And as much as she admired him for being able to move on, curiosity got the better of her. She wanted to hear about Lisa. About the Fairy King and the hidden door.
Hidden doors. Trapdoors.
Like the one the old woman must have come through last night.
Stop it, she told herself.
“Do you come from a big family, Phoebe?” Evie asked, and Phoebe stammered a bit, said, “No, it was just me and my mom. She passed away just before I met Sam.”
“I’m sorry,” Evie said, giving her a doe-eyed look and leaning across the table like she was thinking of embracing her in yet another hug. “Were you very close?”
Hell no! Phoebe wanted to say. Instead, she shook her head, looked down at her half-eaten pancakes. She was saved from having to explain any more when there was a quick, frantic rapping at the door.
“Jesus!” Elliot said, throwing down his fork. “Don’t tell me she’s back again!”
“I’ll go,” said Evie, reaching over to squeeze his wrist. “Maybe she’ll be less intimidated if it’s just me. You all finish eating.”
They were all silent, listening to Evie’s footsteps on the wide plank floor. Then the door opened and she said, “Hello again. Can I help you?”
This was followed by a horrible, frantic scream.
Phoebe knew the old woman in the flowered hat was back and that she’d done something awful. She raced out of the kitchen and saw Evie clutching her side, her white T-shirt stained crimson with blood. And there stood the old woman, wielding the corkscrew Elliot had pulled from his vest pocket and left on the kitchen table last night.
Phoebe was used to blood. She’d seen some pretty gruesome things at the clinic: dogs and cats carried in after hit-and-runs; a poodle maimed by a pit bull; a shepherd that had been caught for days in a leg hold trap and had gnawed his way free.
“Let me see,” she said, reaching to pull up Evie’s soaked shirt, but the other woman kept her hand clamped tightly over it.
“I’m okay,” Evie said, looking pale. “It’s not too deep. Go get her!”
“Go!” Elliot yelled. “I’m gonna get Evie into the Jeep and go for help. Catch the bitch!”
The world was reduced to a single narrow tunnel just then, and there, at the end of that tunnel, was the only fact Phoebe could be sure of: she was going to catch up with the old woman, pin her down, and get some goddamn answers. But first, she was going to throw up.
Phoebe made it through the door just in time to vomit strawberry pancakes and coffee onto the flagstone path leading up to the cabin. Through the tearful retching, she heard the old woman singing that song in a wicked, crackling witch’s voice:
Say, say my playmate
Come out and play with me.
“Who the hell are you?” Sam was in the open door behind Phoebe. The old woman, who was standing at the edge of the woods, shifting from foot to foot like a little girl who has to pee, stopped singing and winked at him.
“Sammy, Sammy, Sammy, weak little lamb-y!” she sang. Then the old woman dropped the corkscrew and took off into the woods, Sam right behind her. Phoebe got to her feet and followed on shaky legs, stomach churning.
Running, running. Tripping on roots and stones. Branches scratching her face. She kept sight of Sam’s pale blue T-shirt through the trees. The old woman was somewhere in front of him, but she was losing her clothes.
At first, Phoebe saw the robe lying on the forest floor. Then the hat. Her dress. Shoes. At last, she saw a mass of gray hair. A wig.
The bitch had been wearing a disguise.
Phoebe pushed herself harder. Faster.
What if the wound was deeper than Evie admitted? And what if the nearest hospital turned out to be an hour away. How much damage could a corkscrew do? What if it had hit a major artery? Or an organ? Phoebe tried desperately to recall anatomy charts she’d once memorized for high school biology. What was even down there? Ovaries? Spleen? She was clueless. Damn. If she’d been a vet tech instead of a receptionist, someone with some actual medical training, she might have been able to help more.
How long had they been running? How far had they gone?
Her legs pumped, her breath whistled. Aside from the weekend hikes with Sam, Phoebe was not big on exercise. The old woman ran like a coyote. She was just a shadow in front of them. Then she was gone.
The trees were thinning. Up ahead, Phoebe saw a huge, unnaturally bright green meadow that reminded her of the plastic grass in Easter baskets. The old woman was running across it, naked.
Only she wasn’t an old woman. She had short red hair and the lean, taut body of a twenty-year-old. And she was screaming.
“Help! Oh God! Somebody help me!”
It is Lisa! Phoebe thought. And she would have said it out loud, if she’d had the spare breath required for speaking.
“Please help me!” the naked redheaded girl wailed, her arms crisscrossed defensively across her torso, covering her small breasts. Her skin was milk white and flawless. Her cheeks were flushed but not damp. She seemed, to Phoebe, too perfect to be real.
And then, across the field came three men with golf clubs. They’d followed her out into the middle of a goddamn golf course. One of the men, the tallest one, who was dressed in plaid pants, tackled Sam. Another stood over him, golf club raised like a weapon. The third man grabbed Phoebe and pinned her hands behind her back. Phoebe screamed, “Let me go, you idiot! Grab her! She’s the one! She stabbed Evie!”
The naked woman was sobbing, trying desperately to cover herself with her arms. One of the men draped a yellow sweater over her.
“What happened?” asked the man who was pinning Sam to the ground.
“They . . . they . . .” the woman in the yellow sweater sobbed and choked. “I was hitchhiking out on Route 12 last night. They picked me up. Then they took me into the woods. And they . . . they did things . . .” Her voice crumpled.
Phoebe and Sam looked at each other, stunned. “She’s lying!” Phoebe screamed. “She stabbed Sam’s cousin with a corkscrew! We’re staying at a cabin in the woods and this old woman showed up . . .”
“What old woman?” asked one of the golfers.
“Her!” Phoebe shrieked. “She was wearing a disguise!”
She only realized how absurd it sounded after she’d said it.
“They took off my clothes and tied me to a t
ree,” said the woman in the yellow sweater. She showed the men rope burns on her wrists.
This is not happening, thought Phoebe. This cannot be happening.
“What are you?” Sam asked the redhead in the yellow sweater. He looked petrified.
“I’m calling the police,” announced the man who’d given the girl his sweater.
“Good,” Sam said. “Tell them my cousin Evie and her husband are heading into town on Route 12 and that she’s been badly hurt. They’re in a black Jeep with out-of-state plates.”
Soon they were joined by two state troopers in uniform and the town constable, whose name was Alfred and who smelled like he’d just come from chores in the barn. The golfers had released Sam and Phoebe but stood by with their clubs in case any attempts were made at escape. One of the men had gone back to the clubhouse and found a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt for the naked woman. The T-shirt said FERNCREST COUNTRY CLUB.
The woman, thought Phoebe, whoever she was, was a wonderful actress. She knew just when to cry, when to look like a frightened child, and when to show anger. She had all the men but Sam hanging on her every word. She touched them each, thanked them, made them feel like her saviors. Their eyes were astonished, proud. And wasn’t there something else there, too, in their watery middle-aged eyes? Phoebe recognized it at once: they were spellbound. These men were clearly captivated by this beautiful damsel in distress.
“Shit,” Phoebe mumbled under her breath. She and Sam were screwed.
The mysterious victim showed off her rope burns and told her story once more to the police, who took notes. Phoebe looked over at Sam with a what the hell is going on expression. His eyes looked dazed and glassy. Phoebe had a sense that maybe, if she concentrated hard enough, she’d wake up back in the cabin. That she was just trapped in some nonsensical nightmare.
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