Lost Lake (Lost Lake, #1)(44)

At first Selma had been giddy with her power and had married foolishly, just as Ruby had said. Her third husband was stolen from a cocktail waitress who had spilled a drink on her. The later ones had been for more practical reasons.

But with all that Ruby had told her, there had been two things Ruby had failed to share. The first was that the effect of the charms was fleeting. She could get any married man who was attracted to her to leave his wife and marry her, but she couldn’t make him stay. Five years was the upper limit, though there was a rumor among their kind that one of them had managed seventeen years on a single charm. Information was hard to come by. While they instinctively knew one another when they crossed paths, women like her didn’t share their secrets easily.

Selma went to the window in her cabin and watched Kate walk away. Kate threw a look back over her shoulder. Selma knew that look very well. Hundreds of women had given her that look over the years. She wasn’t immune to it.

That was the second thing Ruby had failed to tell her. That those looks would always hurt.

And that, by choosing to be the woman she was, she would never again have female friends.





10


“Lisette and I brought in the rest of the groceries. Can I go down to the lake?” Devin asked her mother, running up the path toward Kate as soon as she came out of Selma’s cabin. That heavy, beautiful-lady scent hung in the air around her. Selma’s cabin was surrounded by it, like a force field. Devin imagined that if she threw rocks at it, they would just ricochet off.

“No,” Kate said, shifting the towels in her arms. “Stick with me for a little while. I don’t think Eby has done any laundry lately. It might be backing up.”

From behind them on the path, someone said, “I’ll watch over her.”

It was Bulahdeen. Devin liked her. She wasn’t much taller than Devin, so Devin had a weird impression of her being a very old little girl. She was wearing dark sunglasses that took up half of her sweet, wrinkled face.

“Please, please, please?” Devin said, jumping up and down.

Kate smiled. “Okay. You two keep an eye on each other. Thanks, Bulahdeen.”

Kate walked into the main house, and Devin turned to Bulahdeen. She held up the root the alligator had given her and said, “To the cypress knees!”

“You want to see the cypress knees? Okay, this way,” Bulahdeen said, directing her to a trail that led around the lake, so close that the water nearly reached the bank in places. Cypress trees leaned over it, draping moss to the water like a curtain.

Devin walked backward in front of Bulahdeen as Bulahdeen peppered her with questions about her school and her family, which Devin didn’t want to talk about, because that was her old life and things were different since leaving Atlanta. Her life had changed so much, had been in a constant state of flux for almost a year. It was like spinning around in circles with your eyes closed. Once you stop, the world still feels like it is going too fast. Then, after a while, you realize nothing is spinning anymore—that everything is perfectly still.

That’s what Lost Lake felt like.

Bulahdeen stopped a lot during the walk—to toss branches out of the pathway or to show Devin a mushroom or a nest. Everything that shone attracted her attention like a magpie. It seemed to take forever to get even halfway around the lake. Devin became anxious to get to the cypress knees, so she ran ahead of Bulahdeen. Bulahdeen called her back in a tone that brooked no defiance. Devin slowed down and matched her pace to Bulahdeen’s, learning it, making sure she remembered it.

Finally, Bulahdeen said, “There they are! The only place on the lake where you can see them.”

Devin looked out over the water. They didn’t look like knees. They didn’t even look like roots. They looked like the ancient spires of Gothic buildings sticking out of the top of the water, like there was a church under the lake and she and Bulahdeen could only see the top of it. They were clustered in a section close to the bank, no more than a foot or so out of the water. She got as close to the edge as possible and looked down. The water moved slightly, and she thought for a moment that she saw a flash of something electric blue at the bottom. But, then again, the water was so murky that it was hard to tell just where the bottom was. She didn’t see any evidence that the alligator had been here, or that whatever it was he might want her to find was hidden anywhere. She even put her hand over her good eye and looked around.

She thought it would be more obvious than this.

Her shoulders dropped. She was tired. Fatigue suddenly settled over her like someone encasing her in glass.

The alligator had kept her up most of the night, tossing things up against her window. Tic tic tic. It had driven her crazy. She’d finally turned on her light and gone to the window. When she’d opened it, the humid nighttime had air rushed at her, as thick as soup. The light from the window had spread a fan of light on the ground below, and there he’d been. When he’d seen her, he’d opened his mouth and turned his head, giving her a sideways glance that was almost mischievous.

“Don’t you sleep?” She’d asked him.

He’d made a hissing sound and flung his head around again.

“I can’t come out. I promised my mom.”

He’d walked a few steps away. His strange, scaly feet with toes that ended in long claws had scratched against the dirt.