The Steep and Thorny Way(9)

I sketched a portrait of Fleur, who sat across the way in her window seat, half hidden behind the tendrils of two creeping Charlies that dangled from pots hanging above her. Fleur’s favorite grandmother had died when Fleur was ten and bequeathed to her a stack of Gertrude Jekyll gardening books and a journal of handwritten herbal folk remedies. So Fleur lived in the Garden of Eden and served as mother to dozens of potted children.

“You always sketch when you’re nervous,” she said from behind those lanky vines that brushed at her right shoulder, for she sat half-turned toward the window.

“What are you talking about?” I lowered my left knee and, with it, the pad of paper. “I sketch whenever I feel like sketching.”

“But you always seem to be pulling out a pad of paper whenever something’s troubling you.”

“Hmm. Well”—I adjusted the arch of her eyebrows on the paper to mimic her worried expression—“at least it’s not as bad as you biting your stubby little nails whenever you’re nervous.”

She peeked over the brim of her teacup, her eyes smiling. “Just drink your tea.”

“Yes, dahling,” I said in a poor imitation of a British-born woman named Mrs. Hathaway, who attended our church—a woman who liked to ask Mama if she’d consider bleaching my skin. “Quite right.”

I set my paper aside and took a sip of my chamomile tea, fragranced with a hint of lavender, tempered with a splash of hot milk. Warmth spread through my insides.

Downstairs, Deputy Fortaine’s muffled voice still accompanied Mrs. Paulissen’s titters. I cradled the cup against my chest and wondered if I could trust the deputy enough to tell him Joe’s story.

Fleur pulled her pale pink curtains open, inviting the moonlight inside with us. “You see it out there?” she asked.

I craned my neck forward. “See what? The moon?”

“The brightness from all the whiskey stills lighting up.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t see anything but stars and evergreens.”

“It’s an orange glow that hovers over the trees. I overheard Laurence tell Robbie it’s even brighter in Oregon’s eastern outback, where the land is flat and you don’t have pines and firs hiding everything.”

I took another sip and let the heat travel down to my toes. “I’m afraid to look out my window at night.”

Fleur turned her face toward mine, her eyebrows raised. “Why?”

“You’ve heard the stories”—another sip, more of a gulp—“about his ghost.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “Well, but . . . wouldn’t you want to see him, though, if he were out there?”

“No. He’d be a ghost, not my father. That’s not the same at all.”

She squirmed on the window seat and tucked her legs beneath her in the nest of pillows.

“Mildred Marks claims she saw him in her house last night,” I decided to add, even though the thought of Mildred and her devil’s moonshine made the tea taste sour. “She said Daddy wouldn’t speak to her, but she told me if I drank some concoction she brewed up, I’d be able to talk to him. ‘Necromancer’s Nectar,’ I think she called it.”

“Hmm.” Fleur frowned. “It sounds like something that might make you hallucinate.”

“Do you know of any local plants that would allow a person to speak with the dead?”

“Not at all.”

“That’s what I thought.” I clanked my cup onto the ivory saucer sitting on the bedside table and grabbed my sketch pad again. “I just wish people would keep those ghost stories to themselves.”

Fleur’s face crumpled, as though she might cry. She shifted back toward the window and squeaked the tips of her right fingers down the glass.

“What’s all that about?” I asked. “You look like you’re about to burst into tears.”

She sniffed.

“Oh.” I shrank back against the wall and remembered Mr. Paulissen, killed overseas in the war, just like Mildred’s father. “I’m sorry no one ever talks about your father still existing somewhere out there. But, honestly, Fleur, it’s for the best.”

“I think I saw him, too.”

I shuddered. “You saw . . . who?”

“Your father.” She ran her fingertips down the windowpane again. “Just last night. After I helped Joe with his scrapes from that fence, Laurence took Mama and me to the Dry Dock to celebrate Mama’s birthday. On the way back home in the truck, just for a fleeting moment”—she pushed aside one of the vines and met my gaze—“I saw your father in the moonlight, walking down the road, toward our houses.”

The tip of my pencil quivered against the paper and made an ugly, dark smudge. I couldn’t formulate a single word in response.

Fleur twisted a clump of her hair between her fingers. “I’m sorry, Hanalee. Maybe telling you about it only makes things worse . . .”

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.” I scratched out my drawing, disappointed with the results. “I’d have to be a fool to wander out on the road at night, all alone, looking for him, so there’s no use dwelling on ghost stories. I’m sure you just saw moonlight and shadows.”

She nodded, and we closed that chapter for the night, sitting in silence for a good long while before unpinning our hair, changing into nightclothes, and climbing beneath the covers of her bed.