Outrun the Moon(86)

“Don’t say her name!” Elodie squeals, giving me a hard look. She lowers her voice to a whisper. “She wears a dirty white dress, and her hair is long and wet, like she just came out of the lake. Sometimes she sings to her baby.”

“Who?” asks Katie, coming up behind us.

“The White Lady,” says Elodie. She clamps a hand over her mouth. “The Saints! I said her name again. That’s twice. Someone talk about something else!”

Harry and Katie fall behind, and in the dark, I can’t see them, but I can hear their footsteps. Francesca lags behind, too. The hill rises sharply, and even I am getting winded. I stop to let the others catch up, and suddenly, Francesca is beside me. She bends and grabs at her boot. “Oh! I’ve caught a stone. Elodie, bring the light closer.”

The light returns as Elodie re-treads her steps. She brings the lantern down, and I hold Francesca’s arm while she shakes her boot.

“Aha, I got it.” Francesca takes the lantern from Elodie. “Let me carry it. I’m not afraid of the White Lady.”

Elodie goes ashen at the third mention of her name. The air grows so thick with tension, you could pop it with a pin. My pulse beats to quarters in my ears as Francesca leads us up the stairs.

A soft singing begins from somewhere ahead, so soft I think I imagine it at first. Then the voice sharply rises to a shrill high note, stopping all of us in our tracks.

A figure stands at the top of the stairs, but only her face is visible, illuminated by candlelight. The face hangs to one side, eyes rolled back and tongue lolled out in a gruesome expression of death.

“Have you seen my baby?” shrieks the Lady of Stow Lake.





39



ELODIE TAKES ONE LOOK AT THE APPARITION and screams loud enough to wake the mummies in ancient Egypt. She whips around and starts to bolt, but I rein her back.

“Let me go!” she cries.

I double over, unable to answer.

“What . . . why are you just standing there?” she demands.

The apparition begins laughing in a hearty voice. “You were so skeered!” Katie gasps.

Next to her, also convulsed in giggles, stands Harry of the eerie singing voice. Francesca hides a smile with a hand to her mouth.

Elodie spends a moment with her face frozen into a guard lion’s stony grimace, but hilarity, like fear, has a way of getting under your skin. By the time we crest the top of Strawberry Hill, Elodie is giggling with the rest of us. I guess the other girls needed to even the score with the old shark before officially letting her swim beside us.

A coliseum for viewing stars crowns Strawberry Hill, but the stonework has cracked and the columns that once held it up now lean to one side, like a line of dominoes mid-fall. My good mood fades. While the only light comes from the stars and our small lantern, it’s enough to see that neither Forgivus nor the deaf man are here.

The girls fan out around the small hilltop, but I settle on top of a long, flat rock that has broken off from the coliseum, suddenly weary. Francesca sits next to me. “I guess they flew away.”

I study the feather of the moon, almost expecting to see a cow jumping over it. I was mad to think a man and his cow could grant me the forgiveness I seek, anyway. I let myself believe that Minnie Mae’s delusion was real. Maybe grief is like a prison, and once you’re there, everything starts looking like a way out, patterns in the stars or the behavior of bovines. Maybe there is no way out, and you just have to serve your time.

I lean back on my elbows, letting sounds and smells fill in where the eye cannot. There is the burping of the bullfrogs, eerily in time with the frawnking squawk of a blue heron, and the gurgle of running water. Strawberries and something herbaceous cut the singed scent of the air.

Harry, Katie, and Elodie squeeze in between us, huddling for warmth. A cool wind skims across my cheeks, and I let it numb some of my sadness.

I sigh and quote one of my favorite gravestones to them. “‘One day, I shall sail into the Pacific, and wherever the winds carry me, there shall I be.’”

“You want to go sailing?” asks Katie.

“Sort of. I was planning to buy a whole fleet of ships for my global business. I was going to see the world.” The words come out sounding flat.

Maybe, after the city is rebuilt, the old rules will no longer apply. We could live wherever we want. After all, over a hundred people passed through the Kitchen of Mercy tonight, a hundred people with nothing in common except for a tragedy. The cost has been great. I implore whoever’s listening to let it not be for naught.

Harry stirs beside me. “I admire that about you. You always know what you want.”

“More like, I know what I don’t want.”

Elodie’s clear voice chimes out, “I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to see another bar of chocolate for as long as I live.”

Our gazes fold into her, sitting in the middle. She shrugs. “I’m allergic.”

“I never want to stop feeding people,” says Francesca. “I love seeing their faces after they’ve eaten something I’ve made.” She stretches her feet. “What about you, Katie?”

“Me?” Katie frowns at the blackness. “Well, I like being helpful. So I guess what I don’t want is for people to stop needing me.”

It occurs to me that’s why Harry and Katie are such good friends; Harry needs Katie’s fearlessness, and Katie needs to be needed.