The Steep and Thorny Way(26)

Down below me, between the mattress and the box spring, hid the sketch pad I’d grabbed back from Mama before my bath. And in the drawer of my bedside table, no more than two feet to my right, hid the sheet of newsprint from the night before, alongside the bottle of Necromancer’s Nectar.

I could feel my words—my father’s words—captured in black ink, beyond the table’s wood. I squeaked open the drawer and stared at the phrase I’d scrawled across the paper.

I put full blame on the doc.

The longer I looked at the words, the more the ink seemed to bleed across the pores in the newsprint, growing thicker, blacker, stronger. The letters curled into vines that could strangle a neck—or serpents that could sting a body with a flick of a poisonous tongue and a bite of needle-sharp teeth. I saw my father staggering toward me on the highway in the dark with his busted leg, his eyes illuminated by moonlight.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t a stronger man,” he’d said, “and that hate won out that night.”

I grabbed the bottle and the note and buried them in a box of old toys beneath my bed. A dented cardboard container of bullets also hid in the hiding spot, beneath a canister of Tinkertoys and my Raggedy Ann doll.

A knock came at my bedroom door. I started and shoved the box beneath the center of my bed with a clatter of blocks and bullets.

“Hanalee?” called Mama from behind the door.

“Yes?” I jumped back onto the mattress.

“Fleur came over to see you. Are you dressed?”

“Yes.”

The door opened, and Fleur—lovely Fleur in pink cotton and a satin hair ribbon—slipped into the room with the look of a person encountering a wounded cat with blood matted in its fur. Her sky-blue eyes turned wide and dewy. She carried a small sprig of purple flowers.

“Keep the door open, Hanalee,” said Mama from behind her.

“Why?” I asked.

“You know why. I’m worried about you.” She set her hand on Fleur’s left shoulder. “Stay with her as long as you’d like, Fleur. I think she could use your company right now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ll be down in the kitchen.”

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

I sat as still as a member of our church choir, my hands folded in my lap, my posture impeccable, so that Mama would wander away.

Fleur sat down beside me on the bed with the little floral bouquet nestled against the folds of her skirt. The staircase creaked during my mother’s descent.

Once Mama reached the bottom floor, Fleur rested her chin against her right shoulder and looked at me. “How are you?” she asked.

I pushed my hands against the tops of my thighs and bent forward at the waist.

“Are you all right?” She laid her hand on my back, above my left shoulder blade, just as Joe had done in the woods.

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“Are you still troubled by what Joe said about your father? Or what I said about”—she hesitated—“your father . . . on the road?”

“Well . . . to be most honest . . . I . . .” I took hold of Fleur’s hand and squeezed it.

“What? What’s happened?”

I swallowed and sat up straight. “I spoke to my father last night.”

Fleur’s hand grew still beneath mine.

Mama ran the sink down in the kitchen; I knew there’d be no chance of her hearing the words I longed to say, so I continued in a whisper. “Don’t ask me how I communicated with him, but he told me he blames Uncle Clyde for his death. He said his body couldn’t take what it was given that Christmas Eve and that hate won out that night.”

Fleur’s fingers tightened around mine, and her eyes watered. “Are you positive you spoke with him? Or did—did you merely dream that you saw him?”

“I swear to God, Fleur, he talked to me. The more I think about the encounter, the more I remember how real it all felt—and what he looked like, standing just a few feet away from me in the moonlight. He said he doesn’t blame Joe. He blames the doctor.”

“Oh,” she said—a small whimper of sound. She knitted her eyebrows and rocked a little. “I don’t . . . Are you certain? Are you sure Joe isn’t just planting wicked ideas in your head and tricking you into believing he’s innocent?”

I slid my hand out of hers. “I don’t think so.”

“Joe seems in an awful hurry to accuse others of faults and crimes, when he was the one driving around blotto.”

“‘Blotto’?”

“That’s what Laurence calls people when they’re drunk.” She gripped the edge of the mattress. “Joe’s brought so much tension into this town over the past few days. It feels like an explosion’s about to blast through the entire community because of him.”

I cast a sidelong glance at her. “How do you mean?”

“Laurence keeps yelling at Mama and me, telling us to watch our behavior and spend more time with church groups, to mind how we look to the community. Deputy Fortaine and Mama had a spat, and now he’s keeping an eye on Laurence, making sure he’s not bootlegging. And those Wittens and some other boys are over all the time now, whispering about Joe, making accusations.”

I stiffened. “What are the boys saying?”