The Steep and Thorny Way(75)
“You do realize, Sheriff Rink,” I said, forcing my voice to leave my throat with a deep and confident sound, “my father’s spirit roams this highway late at night.”
“Hogwash!” He shifted the vehicle into gear. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“Daddy called such spectral apparitions ‘haints,’ which always sounded to me like ‘hate.’”
The sheriff laughed with a wheezy whistle and sent the vehicle rumbling forward onto the black road ahead of us, lit only by the twin beams of the headlights. We passed the burning cross and Mildred, bending down over Joe.
“I sure hope you see him out here,” I said, peering out the windshield beyond the sheriff’s round head. The glow of the headlights brightened the outstretched tongue of the highway. “I hope you see Hank Denney’s face staring straight into your guilty soul.”
The sheriff didn’t chuckle at that comment and instead increased our speed, sailing the car past the tree-lined stretch of highway where the Adders and several other Elston residents lived, where Daddy had stumbled into the road. We rode beneath the boughs of trees that arched over the highway like the arms of ancient crones.
“Up ahead,” I continued, “in the crossroads—that’s where I’ve seen him myself.”
“Stop it,” said the sheriff, and he sped us through the junction of the roads. “That’s not funny in the slightest.”
“And farther along, through that next patch of trees—I’m sure he’s been there.”
“Hank Denney’s body and soul left Oregon back in 1921,” said the sheriff with a glance back at me. “We made absolutely certain, when we hoisted him off the ground, that no part of that godforsaken Negro would linger in this state—that’s for damn sure.” Only he didn’t say Negro.
The sheriff turned back around in his seat and gave a start, for just ahead, smack-dab in the middle of the road, stood my father in the light of the patrol car’s headlights.
“Holy Mother of—” The sheriff steered us off the road, to the right. Brakes screeched. The car reared and bucked. A fir tree rose up ahead. I opened my mouth to scream, but before any sound left my throat, my body slammed against something hard amid a deafening crack of thunder.
“HANALEE,” SAID A VOICE RICH AND DEEP. OAK AND honey. Woods and river waters. “We need to get you out of this car before the fire reaches the backseat, darling.”
My eyes refused to open. Pain awakened across my body, from the top of my forehead all the way down to the muscles of my legs—a dull ache at first, then a roar of agony. I coughed on smoke and believed my bones to be blazing with fire inside me.
“Hanalee,” said the voice again, and I knew it was my father, offering comfort.
I lifted my eyelids and found Daddy poking his head into the open doorway of the backseat of the sheriff’s car. His black derby sat far enough back on his head for me to see his big brown eyes, which glistened with concern. My body, wedged between the front seat and the backseat, lay in a tangle of bleeding legs and arms, in a space that seemed too small to be the interior of an automobile. Smoke blackened the nighttime air and stung my eyes, and I heard the sputter of flames.
“Wrap your arms around my shoulders, honey”—Daddy leaned into the vehicle and maneuvered his left arm behind my sore back—“and I’ll carry you home.”
“Can’t,” I said with a grunt. “Handcuffs.”
Daddy reached his free arm under my legs, and before the fire licked its way across the front seat, he scooped me out of a burning mass of twisted steel that hugged the trunk of a tree that no longer stood upright.
“The sheriff?” I asked, remembering our flight into that trunk. “Sheriff Rink?”
“Don’t pay any heed to him.” Daddy steered me away from the wreckage, while the flames snapped and sparked into the air with flashes of unnatural light. “Now he’s the one wandering the highway, looking for redemption.”
Out by the road, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the movement of a shadow—the stocky figure of a man who carried a white hood beneath his arm. I closed my eyes, and the orange glow of the flames shone against the backs of my lids.
Though I must have been heavy—a grown sixteen-year-old girl with a body weighed down by pain and fatigue—Daddy held me as though I were still no more than four years old. I pressed my face against the fresh whiskers on his cheeks and the coarse wool of his shoulder, and I fell asleep, thinking of wading in creek water and childhood nights when Daddy told me to love the world, even when it didn’t love me back.
CHAPTER 28
REST, PERTURBED SPIRIT
I OPENED MY EYES TO THE SIGHT OF sunshine streaming through my bedroom window, between the ruffles of my ivory curtains. A robin chirped in one of the trees beyond the panes. A hazy blur of white lingered by my red desk, and I smelled lilacs.
I blinked several times in a row, and the haze brightened and shifted into the shape of a girl with blond hair and a lace dress.
“Hana-Honey?” asked the girl, who sounded an awful lot like Fleur. “Are you awake?”
I blinked some more and lifted my right hand in front of my face, unsure if the appendage would be made of solid flesh.
“Hanalee?” she asked again, and she hurried toward me with her skirts swooshing, her blue eyes gleaming. “You’re awake. You’re awake!”