The Steep and Thorny Way(53)

“I took that Necromancer’s Nectar again.”

“Oh, jeez, Hanalee.” He tramped toward me on bare feet. “Why’d you do that to yourself again? You already got your answer the other night.”

I tipped too far to my right, and my hip and shoulder slammed against the floor. No pain registered within my bones or my nerves, so I kept right on talking.

“I needed to speak to my father again,” I said from down on the ground—a roiling sea of wood and stale hay. “I had more questions.”

Joe leaned down and hooked his fingers into my armpits.

“Hey!” I called out. “What are you doing?”

He dragged me around in the opposite direction. The dark rafters above whirled in a half circle, and my brain and stomach spun.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“I’m bringing you over to my blanket so you don’t kill yourself. There’s some rusted old farm equipment stored in here, and you could smack your head on it if you’re not careful.” He pulled me over to the same blanket we had shared in the woods and draped me across the coarse fabric. The floorboards beneath dug against my spine and tailbone. The blanket scratched my bare neck.

“What’s this?” Joe uncoiled one of my curls. “You chopped off your hair?”

“I got too hot after drinking that potion. I think the rest of my curls might still be lying all over the kitchen floor.”

“Your mother’s going to kill you.”

“Better her than someone else.”

Joe plopped himself down beside me with a sigh that sounded like the hiss of one of his matches. He set the lantern between us and leaned his shoulder blades against the wall. The light of the flame danced up and down his face, showing me the brown of his eyes and the soft curve of his lips, as if to verify he still existed as a person made of flesh and bone. I liked the way he looked—liked it so much, my chest ached—but I forced myself to stay quiet about that particular sensation.

“Well,” I said with a sigh myself, “I’m awfully sorry for whoever that was who ended up in the river. Your poor father drove up to St. Johns with Sheriff Rink to identify the body.”

“I’m sure my pop was praying that body was mine.”

“I don’t know about that. I spoke to him this morning.”

He tilted his head. “You spoke to my father?”

“When I got back this morning, your parents and Sheriff Rinky-Dink were at my house with my parents, waiting to pounce.”

“Oh.” He shrank back against the wall. “Sorry about that.”

“You should be. You tossed me smack-dab into the middle of the Spanish Inquisition, Joe. I’ll have you know I both defended your honor and mourned your death, all in one day.”

He breathed out a curt laugh. “I doubt you mourned me with too many tears.”

“Stop saying things like that.”

“Like what?”

“Stop saying people would be glad about you dying. I stopped breathing when I heard about the body in the river. Dr. Koning had to help to bring air back into my lungs.”

Joe shifted his legs but didn’t say anything in reply.

“You’re welcome,” I snapped.

“Thank you. For worrying.”

I covered my eyes with my right hand and settled my breathing.

“Do you believe you spoke to your father just now?” he asked.

I nodded, my hand still cupping my face. “Yes. I do.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said . . .” I swallowed. “You’re not going to like this at all when I tell you.”

“What did he say?”

I lowered my fingers to my right cheek and peered up at the dark rafters, expecting to see the yellow eyes of a rat or a bat staring down at me. “He said he meant the Dry Dock, not Dr. Koning.”

Joe lifted his head off the wall. “What?”

“Mildred told me that my father had just become a bootlegger. He picked up a crate of whiskey from her house that Christmas Eve, and I’m willing to bet my life he delivered it to the Dry Dock.”

Joe ran his fingers through the shorter strands of hair toward the back of his head. “Are you sure this is genuinely your father’s spirit you’re seeing?”

“Jeez, you didn’t ask me that question the other night, when you thought Daddy meant Uncle Clyde.”

He grumbled and kept mussing up his hair.

“He said something about boys being there,” I continued. “Boys in ‘ungodly hoods,’ as he called them. And today at the picnic, Laurence told me—”

“Why were you talking to Laurence?”

“He came after me when I was speaking to Fleur, and he told me what was meant by the ‘necktie party’ line on those Junior Order of Klansmen notes. He said a person gets hoisted off the ground with a rope around his neck—not long enough to kill him, but enough to scare him out of town.”

Joe didn’t respond. I craned my neck to better see him and found his eyes haunted, his breathing shallow.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He blinked. “Did Laurence say that’s what people are planning to do to me?”

I nodded and exhaled an erratic breath that made the lamp’s flame jump. Shadows streaked across Joe’s face.