The Devouring Gray(3)
“A rose? Really?” Rosie had said later, when they were in her room, examining the heap of clothes and odd art projects Rosie had received from her friends. “How basic. I mean, I’ll wear it to be polite, but it’s like one of those necklaces girls wear that have their names on them. Like a dog tag.”
Violet agreed with her like she always did, deriding the gift, but she remembered thinking at the time that even though the bracelet wasn’t really Rosie’s style, at least their great-aunt had tried to connect to them. Juniper hadn’t kept in contact with any of their dad’s family after he died, and Violet relished every clue about them she could get.
Now she stared at the filigree rose, slightly tarnished from its time in cup holder purgatory.
Oh, what the hell. Violet opened the clasp and tucked the hair into her binder. Then she fastened the bracelet around her wrist, turning the rose until it covered the purple veins that threaded up toward her palm.
It was a cheesy thing to do. Rosie probably would’ve hated it. But as they turned off the highway, Violet felt a little less alone.
The Porsche turned onto a series of increasingly empty side roads, the landscape changing from the busy highway to well-tended farmlands. The farms bled into foliage, and soon the car was surrounded by trees crowding together at the edge of the asphalt, their branches backlit by the early afternoon sunlight. Violet stared out the windshield at a landscape swathed in deep, green-tinted shadows as the music in her ears switched from Schumann to Bach to Chopin.
Something in the trees drew Violet’s attention. The definition of the trunks, the vibrancy of the leaves, pulled her focus so thoroughly away from the road and the sky that the branches might as well have been waving in front of the Porsche.
Finally, they turned off onto a winding, badly paved pathway. A sign dangled from an overhanging branch on rusted chains, welcoming them to Four Paths, New York, in scorched black letters.
“They’ve still got the sign.” A half chuckle escaped Juniper’s lips. “You’d think they would’ve replaced it with something a little more professional by now.”
Violet tugged her ear buds out. “This has been here since you were in high school?”
“It’s been here for as long as I can remember.”
This was the first piece of information Juniper had ever voluntarily offered about Four Paths. Violet’s throat swelled with a lifetime of unanswered questions as the Porsche rambled past a series of worn-down houses. Reddish-brown bells hung beside every front door, sometimes one or two, sometimes close to a dozen. The wind tossed the bells back and forth, but Violet heard no sound, even when she rolled down her window.
She peered at them, trying to get a closer look, but the car moved on into what had to be the main part of town, if only because the ramshackle houses had turned into ramshackle buildings.
There was no such thing as a chain store here, only a small collection of shops ripped out of a black-and-white photograph. Violet identified the building on the corner as a general store from the peeling gold letters emblazoned across its front. There was a secondhand clothing shop, a dive bar, a grocery store, a public library with a sloping gabled roof. People loitered in front of a fifties-style diner, tossing cigarette butts onto the pavement. Their heads snapped to attention as the Porsche rolled past them.
Although they’d only left Westchester County five hours ago, Violet felt as if she had been beamed onto an alien planet.
Juniper pointed out the town hall, which was gorgeous and imposing and utterly out of place among its shabbier brethren. The forest spread out wide behind it; stray branches snaked across either side of the roof, reaching for one another. Back in Ossining, Violet’s hometown, every tree had felt like an interloper, sprouting stubbornly from loose gravel or growing in fenced-in little boxes on the street. But here, it was the buildings that didn’t belong; they merely interrupted the woods.
The only place the trees were absent was a small field behind the town hall. A lone building stood between the meadow and the trees, some distance back from the main road. There was a symbol she didn’t recognize on the door: a circle with four lines extending through it, not quite touching in the center, like a target.
“Is that a church?” asked Violet, examining the way the scalloped marble embedded into the front of the building arched up into a point at the top.
Juniper shook her head. “Four Paths doesn’t have churches. It’s a mausoleum. Around here, everyone is cremated and buried underground. This serves as a memorial for everyone.”
“Creepy,” Violet muttered.
Juniper shrugged. “It’s efficient.”
But Violet couldn’t shake her unease at the thought of a town with no church and no graveyard.
After the field, there was another small street of stores; then Main Street receded to houses once more.
“Wait.” Violet turned around to stare. The town hall disappeared behind a waving branch. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
They were in the thick of the woods now, the car barreling through a tunnel of greenery. Violet tried to take a picture on her phone, but the branches kept coming out blurry.
The Porsche broke through the line of trees. Violet squinted against the sudden assault of sunlight streaming through the windshield. She was still blinking away dark spots when the building before them came into view.