Suki pulled her hands loose. “Mrs. Owen, these are my friends, Edmund Reynolds and Matt Black. Edmund, Matt, this is Mrs. Owen. She was my mom’s beautician.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Edmund.
“Likewise, said Mrs. Owen, not as though she meant it. “Susan, are you living in town again?”
“Yes, I am, I’m looking for work.”
“You’re a brave girl to come back.”
Matt watched ice enter Suki’s eyes. Two seconds, and Suki transformed from someone friendly and relaxed into someone distant, cold, and a little scary. “Really,” she said.
“Perhaps I said that badly,” said Mrs. Owen. “I’ve waited a long time to express my sympathy, my dear. Please know you have it, whether it means anything to you or not.” She turned and left the restaurant.
Maris peered after her, then came over to their table. “You chasing away my customers?” she asked. “Cindy just poured her some coffee.”
“I’m sorry.” Suki was still in distant mode. She gazed out at the sea.
Maris studied her a second, shrugged, then headed back to the reception area.
“Okay,” Matt said, “snap out of it. You’re creeping people out.”
Suki turned cool eyes to Matt. Her face was perfectly composed and emotionless.
“Drop it,” Matt said. “Come on.” Like trying to talk a terrier into dropping a rope in a tug-of-war. Silly!
Suki blinked three times. She sighed and came back to life. “That’s the one bad thing about living here. What about people who used to know me? What about people who used to know Mother and Father? I don’t want to deal with any of them. I just want to start over, get some job, have a life and see what that feels like, make enough money to buy food and get some actual electricity piped into the house without having to hit my savings accounts again. The magic electricity is great for heating water and making light, but it confuses the heck out of my laptop.”
“You were doing fine until she called you a brave girl,” said Matt.
“So damned patronizing.” Suki checked her watch. “Can you talk to Maris for me? I didn’t mean to upset anyone. I’ve got to go.”
Matt set down her knife and fork. “Will you be home soon? We’re leaving today to go find Deirdre.”
Suki collected her purse, handed Edmund some money, and stood up. “That’s right. You might be gone by the time I get back. I wish you luck in the journey, guys.”
“Is there anything you want us to tell her for you?” Edmund asked.
“Won’t I be able to tell her myself?”
“What if she doesn’t want to come back with us? She’s had a long time to build a life of her own. We don’t know whether she wants to hear from us. She might tell us to get lost.”
“You’re too cute,” Suki said with a smile. “Who could resist that face?”
Edmund shook his head, smiling too. “That never worked on Dee.”
“Little do you know.”
“What?”
Suki just smiled mysteriously and slipped away.
“Good luck with your interview!” Matt called after her.
“She’s got to be kidding,” Edmund muttered.
Matt thought back to the night’s crop of dreams. “I do think she’s making it up,” she said, after considering Deirdre’s actions as interpreted by Julio. Not the slightest hint that Deirdre had any particular interest in Edmund, or in boys at all.
Matt thought of an image Nathan had shown them after their first night in the haunted house: Deirdre all grown up, with a boyfriend in the background. The boyfriend was nobody that Nathan recognized, either. Clearly Deirdre hadn’t waited around for Edmund to get back to her.
“I really want to see Dee,” Edmund said. “I did a bad job of leaving. I want to see if I can apologize to her about that, and ask if there’s anything she needs from me. But what if it’s a mistake for me to try to find her?”
Matt ate the last bite of her pancakes. “Let’s go to the beach and ask.”
they sat side by side, shoulders, elbows, and hips touching, on a drift log where it had been tossed by one of the winter storms above the normal waterline. Wind gusted over them, cooling them before the sun could overheat them. Sea smell was strong.
Matt held quiet and still. She tried to remember the last time she and Edmund had waited for spirit to speak to him. Before they came back here, she thought. Probably by the lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills, when they were searching for Suki’s father. No, Edmund had done that meditation by himself. Must have been in the basement at Edmund’s sister’s house.
Since arriving in Guthrie, they had spent most of their days exploring the town together, or walking along the beach, sometimes talking, sometimes silent. More and more often, Matt found her hand seeking Edmund’s as they walked. Sometimes in sheltered spots, below a cliff on the beach, behind a building, in the shadow of a doorway after dark, she pulled him close, or he pulled her close. The kisses started slowly.
It had been such a long time since anybody held her, and this time was different from all the other times. This time she had her head on straight, and this time the man was paying attention too: he never pushed her farther than she wanted to go. She hoped she was as sensitive to his cues as he was to hers; for the first time in a long time she was running blind, not watching his dreams, not looking for answers from anyone but him, just waiting for him to let her know what was good, what was safe, what he didn’t like.
At the house, nothing was private. The house watched. Normally Matt didn’t mind if things watched—everything had some kind of awareness; she lived in a many-peopled world. She liked to watch other things, and she understood that things were aware of what she was doing. But the house could talk to other people. Matt didn’t know what the house told Suki. Sometimes she suspected it told Suki everything. Maybe Suki didn’t care, and maybe the house didn’t talk. Matt still felt paranoid.
Much as she loved the house, Matt had some hesitations about how present and awake it was. Part of that was just great. Part of it was like living with a very caring parent.
Matt slept with Edmund most nights, but they had confined their activity to hugs and comfort so far.
Maybe on this trip to find Deirdre, they could …
Matt stared out to sea, past the place where waves hushed up across the beach and then retreated. Her fingers meshed with Edmund’s. He laughed.
“What?” she said. She looked down and realized what she had done. “Oh, man. Did I mess you up?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Did you get an answer?”
“I didn’t ask yet.”
“Well, come on. Let’s ask! If we’re going at all, we should leave pretty soon so we can get there while it’s still light.”
He lifted her hand and pressed his lips to it, then let go and pulled his rolled-up silk devotions kit out of his pocket. He untied the red cord and let the kit roll open to reveal the white pockets on the inside, each with a tiny zipper.
He laid the kit across his thigh and watched it. For a long crystal while, they breathed slowly while the wind ruffled their hair, waves scoured sand, gulls cried, sun touched them. Matt felt everything slow down inside.
One of the zippers on the devotions kit flickered in the wind.
Edmund opened that pocket and took out a pinch of something.
“Please,” he said, his voice touched with silver. “Give us a direction.”
He put the pinch of whatever in his left hand and held it up. For a moment the wind stilled. The pinch of gray dust lay in his palm. A breath of wind lifted it. It took a shape in the air for an instant, then flowed back over their shoulders toward the cliff: inland.
They sat silent, calm containing them.
“Did you see that?” Matt asked.
“I saw something. What did you see?”
“It was like a wolf,” she said.
“Or a fox,” said Edmund.
“We’re going, right?”
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He nodded.
Matt jumped up and danced on the sand. She kicked off her shoes and ran down to the water, waded until the cuffs of her jeans were soaked, then danced back up to Edmund.
He grinned. “I didn’t realize you felt this way,” he said.
“Come on.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. “No, wait. Take your shoes off.”
He unlaced his hiking boots, slipped out of them and his socks.
They ran along the water’s edge for a while, breathless, laughing, kicking up surf and playing pounce kitten with the waves. People and dogs passed them on the beach. Some smiled.
Eventually they went back to their log and their shoes.
“Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to leave?” Edmund asked.
“I don’t want to,” said Matt. “And then, I really do. I love the beach. I love the ocean. I love the air here, and I love the house, Nathan, Suki. And I totally feel caged up.” She held her hands out to him, remembered how he’d said a spell over them that showed blue diamonds of light in her palms. He’d been looking to see if she had a wanderlust spell on her. Results were inconclusive. “I have to go somewhere new.”
“So why did you say ask spirit? Why didn’t you just say let’s go?”
She thumped his arm with her fist. “Gotta go for the right reasons.”
He kissed her. He smelled like campfire smoke, sagebrush; he tasted like salt and sunshine. He felt big and warm and comfortable, and then exciting. They lay on the sand behind the log for a while, fooling around, until sand got into her hair and down the neck of her shirts. Edmund guarded while she took off her shirts and shook them out. The mood broke.
Matt didn’t care. They’d have more time. They were getting away! Going places she had never been before. It was all exciting.
They put on their shoes and headed back to the haunted house.
nathan appeared as they carried their bags downstairs.
“Thanks again for everything,” Matt told him.
“Even the dreams?”
“But that wasn’t your idea, was it?” Matt could not work out how the house and Nathan were connected, even after her Julio dreams. Sometimes the house and the ghost acted in perfect concert, and sometimes they seemed like completely separate people. She loved them in different ways.
“No, not my idea,” Nathan said. “I think you’re right. We don’t know if it’s okay with Julio that the house told you all those things.”
Matt shrugged. “Well, now I know all that stuff whether he likes it or not. Hope I get a chance to talk to him about it someday.”
“Any message for Deirdre if we find her? Looks like we might,” Edmund said. “The trail is straight.”
“Tell her hi. Tell her I’m still here, and she’s welcome to come back if she likes.”
“Okay.”
“You will come back?” Nathan asked. He stared at Matt.
“Yeah, of course.” Matt looked around. She hadn’t known she was going to say that, even after the words left her mouth.
“Good.” He faded from sight.
Chapter Eight
they stopped at the bakery in Guthrie and picked up a bag of doughnuts for the road, then drove inland, over the coast range into the Willamette Valley. Sun shone on green hills. Fog still drifted among shaggy, wet, dark-branched winter trees. The road dipped down out of the mountains and then wound along the rain-swollen river before dropping them into downtown Salem.
As Edmund negotiated traffic, Matt looked around. Sky bridges a story above the street connected the big department stores and downtown malls. Useful in wet or rainy winters.
It was a confusing town to drive through; there weren’t enough signs that told you how to find the highways. Edmund didn’t stay confused very long. He had probably driven through here when he was younger. Pretty soon they were driving on Center Street. They passed the state mental hospital.
Matt thought about the town where Terry Dane had kept her prisoner, an hour to the south.
“What about the twins?” she asked suddenly.
They stopped at a red light. Edmund glanced at her.
“We’re catching up with all these people you used to know. What about the twins? They weren’t your best friends, but they were there for an important part of this. You want to find them now, too?”
He stared at the sky through the windshield, then checked his dashboard, with its scatter of juniper berries, eucalyptus buttons, skeletonized leaves, seashells, water-smoothed driftwood, feathers from a crow and an owl, Mardi Gras beads and a couple of Krewe coins, a few plastic figurines from vending machines, a religious medal, a twist of gardening twine, the shed skin of a snake, pale blue eggshells something had hatched out of, dried moss, the foot-long cone from a sugar pine.
Nothing moved.
The light turned green. Edmund released the clutch and set the car rolling. “When you and I started traveling together, I just wanted to check up on my best friends. Nathan, Susan, Julio, Deirdre,” he said. “Would they recognize the spirit-seeker me? So different from who I used to be. But I’m a lot more like my old self now.
“I still want to find my missing friends. How could I have let all this time go by without talking to them? Guess that’s what happens when you switch personalities. The twins, though …”
Matt said, “When you guys were fighting that demon-guy, Nathan said the twins were his witches. You too. He was ordering you guys around.” She felt mixed up about that. She had seen everything from Julio’s perspective. He wanted to be saved, but he had felt a little troubled by Nathan’s take-charge attitude. She had wanted to ask Edmund about it ever since.
“Not a problem. He’s older and more experienced in magic matters than we are. He knew a lot more about what was going on than we did. I liked Tasha. I think I liked Terry too. We didn’t spend enough time together for me to get to know them. You saw Terry more recently than I did. Did you see Tasha too?”
“Nope. Never met her. Terry was lonely because Tasha left her. That was why Terry caught me. She didn’t know how to make friends.”
Edmund turned left on Hawthorne and made his way onto Interstate 5, heading south. “Did Terry tell you what happened between her and Tasha?”
“No. She was just mad at Tasha. It seemed like they must’ve had some kind of fight.”
“Terry put a spell on you—”
“She called it a tether spell.”
“Nasty,” said Edmund, “especially for you.” He frowned and shook his head. “That’s so wrong. It’s hard for me to picture her acting that way. I don’t remember her being mean. She was shaping up to be a really good witch. How’d you get away from her?”
“I blackmailed her into letting me go. I also told her I’d be her friend if she wouldn’t put spells on me. I didn’t go back to see her, though.”
“She put a tether spell on you! I wouldn’t go back either.”
“You’d do it if you said you would.”
He touched her hand. “Do you want to find the twins?”
“I sort of do. I did say I would talk to her again. And I’ve got you now. You won’t let her hurt me, will you?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Do you think you can’t help it?”
“Who knows what she’s learned since then? One thing Terry always had was a lot of discipline. She could study a thing to death. If she kept that up, she’s probably learned lots more craft than I have, though I don’t imagine she knows as much about following spirit.”
Matt frowned and picked up a leaf from the dashboard. “I think your spirit and mine will protect me. I don’t think it’ll be that hard to find her. either. If we can’t, the house knows where she is.”
They headed east on Highway 22, up into the Cascades. On their way up to the Santiam Pass, they ran into ice and snow, but Edmund’s car cruised happily over it, talking with the road beneath. They drove down through snow-dusted Ponderosa pines into the town of Sisters, which wa
s low enough in elevation to be free of snow but still very cold. They stopped for a late lunch at the Bronco Billy Saloon in the old Sisters Hotel.
Even though it was late afternoon, the restaurant was lively and noisy with tourist traffic. Warm food smells filled the air with welcome. Conversation provided a thick quilt of sound. Flatware scraped on dishes. In the back, dishes banged into each other. Light came from old-fashioned ceiling fixtures with bouquets of lily-shaded bulbs. A cow skull hung from a red-and-brown-papered wall, and above the door that led from the restaurant to the bar hung a pair of longhorns.
Their table looked like an old swinging saloon door turned sideways and topped with gingham and glass.
Matt ordered a messy hamburger full of extras like avocado and swiss cheese, with home fries. She loved it. She still found the experience of eating in restaurants novel and exciting after years of Dumpster-diving and trashcan-fishing out back of places like this.
When their waitress brought the check, Edmund spent a moment looking into the currency compartment of his wallet, fingering the bills there. He glanced up at Matt.
“Oh, wow. We ran out of money?” She reached into her pockets, searched for change. Nothing. She hadn’t used money in days. Edmund or Suki had paid when there was anything to pay for, and Matt hadn’t given it a thought.
He smiled at her. “We can cover this and a tip,” he said, “but from now on we need to find other ways to eat. I’ll get a job when we get back to Guthrie.”
“Me too.” Matt’s whole being shifted to survival mode with an almost-audible thunk. She grabbed the sugar basket, took six packets of sugar and hid them in one of the pockets of her army jacket, then checked the bottle of Cholula hot sauce on the table. It only had about an inch of sauce in the bottom. She thought about taking it, decided no. She ate the last lettuce leaf on her plate and grabbed a few more sugar packets.
As they headed back to the car, she stopped to check a trash can. Edmund walked on ahead.
—Hey, you got anything edible inside you?—she asked the trash can, looking down into its plastic-lined cavity.
—What?—It sounded sleepy and surprised. Not a very conscious life-form.
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