Wink Poppy Midnight(24)
I knew I’d have to tell Midnight about the unforgivables now. I needed to warn him about how they feed on you if you’re not careful, how they’ll turn your heart into red dust and make you go hatter-mad.
“I WAS LITTLE,” Wink said, voice soft, eyes staring down at the rotting Roman Luck floorboards. “As little as Bee Lee. Leaf was the same age as the twins. We were playing in the woods, a game that Leaf made up called Follow the Screams. I was hiding in a dead tree trunk and listening, and that’s when I heard them, real screams, not Leaf-screams, coming from the Roman Luck house.”
We had some time before Poppy showed up. She wasn’t a ten-minute-early kind of girl. I was sitting on the green velveteen sofa, and Wink was sitting next to me, our knees touching. She was wearing a skirt with little acorns all over it. I held the flashlight in my hand, the light toward our toes.
The wind picked up outside. Branches scraped the broken windows and it sounded like someone’s fingernails clawing at the glass.
I slid closer to Wink, until our thighs were touching.
“Mim told me that a woman named Autumn used to live here. This was a long time ago, before Roman Luck. Autumn wasn’t right in the head. She married the handsomest man in town, a man named Martin Lind, and they had four children, two boys, two girls. But as time went on Autumn became paranoid and suspicious, and she accused her husband of being in love with another woman. She thought he was going to leave her.”
Wink paused. She was rubbing the hem of her skirt between two fingers, and not looking at me.
“And then one day Autumn stabbed Martin in the stomach with a kitchen knife and left him in the music room to die.”
I looked at Wink, looked at her innocent green eyes and her earnest, heart-shaped face. “Is that really true, Wink?”
She smiled suddenly, soft lips, cute ears. “You keep asking me that. Of course it’s true. All the strangest things are true. Autumn hanged for it, hanged by the neck until dead, and her children grew up with strangers, orphaned and alone like in one of my hayloft stories. The house went up for sale, and Roman Luck bought it. But Autumn’s bad thing, her unforgivable thing, had soaked into the floorboards, and creeped into the walls.”
“You told me Roman didn’t leave because of a ghost.”
She shrugged. “Mim said he didn’t. She read his cards sometimes, so she would know. Sometimes people just . . . leave.”
An owl hooted somewhere out in the night. The hoo-hooing swept right through the broken glass, right into my ears, like a whisper from Poppy.
“I was hiding and I heard the screams and I went closer to see. There was a man in this room, Midnight, and he was screaming, and bleeding. He was dying. He was handsome, and beautiful, like a prince in a fairy tale. He didn’t see me, not at first. I was little, and had to stand on my tiptoes, and I could still barely reach the windowsill. He was all in shadow and kept clutching his side and saying something, over and over.”
Wink was using her Putting the Orphans to Sleep voice. But I wasn’t getting sleepy this time.
“What?” I asked, when she didn’t continue. “What did he say?”
“Tell my children I love them. That’s what he said, again and again. And oh, Midnight, his voice was so raw and sad.”
I looked around the room, and then slammed my eyes shut, thinking that the ghost of Martin Lind was going to appear in front of me, bleeding and clutching and crying out in the dark.
Had Wink really seen that as a girl? What would that do to a little kid’s head?
I didn’t even believe in ghosts, not really. But I did believe in Wink.
“I got scared then, and lost my footing,” she said, still using her soft, sleepy voice. “I stumbled, and when I stood up again he was gone and the music room was empty. There is a ghost here, Midnight. But he didn’t have anything to do with Roman.”
The owl hooted. The branches scratched. The sounds scurried. The room smelled like night and dirt and neglect.
Wink leaned over and put her mouth on mine. I dropped the flashlight, clunk, creak. Her red hair fell over my ears and neck and shoulders.
She smelled like cinnamon, and her lips tasted like dust.
I didn’t think about the man who had died in this room.
Or the unforgivable thing that Autumn had done.
Or what I was about to do to a girl I’d once loved.
I just thought about Wink.
She pulled away. Stood up, smoothed her acorn skirt. Her hair was tangled and beautiful and red, red, red in the flashlight’s beam. “You can do this,” she said. “You’re Thief. You’re the hero.”
I nodded.
I nodded even though this didn’t feel heroic.
It just felt wrong.
Wink left. Into the woods to wait.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
Poppy arrived.
I WALKED OUT my front door at eleven, boldly, with a swagger, my parents were gone anyway, off to rub elbows in Chicago with other doctors at some boring convention, I could just picture them in a long carpeted room, expensive furnishings and chandeliers, looking smug and overly educated and really f*cking proud of themselves.
I ran away once, after Grandpa died. I went to his cabin up on Three Death Jack Mountain and stayed there for two days, not giving a thought to my parents or anyone else. It was beautiful and quiet, so quiet. The cabin was kind of run-down by then, but I did what I could to fix it up and I was having the time of my life, catching fish and not talking to anyone, when Mom and Dad finally found me. They were panicked and angry, they just couldn’t understand why I’d run off, why I’d want to live in some rat-hole cabin instead of our nice house in town, they gave me everything I wanted, hadn’t they given me everything I’d ever wanted?