Beautiful Creatures(61)

I stared at the door handle, looking down the hall in either direction. Balancing my cookies precariously on top of my milk carton, I reached toward it. Before I could so much as touch the handle, I heard the click of the lock moving. The door unlocked, all by itself, as if someone inside was opening the door for me. The cookies hit the floor.

A month ago, I wouldn’t have believed it, but now I knew better. This was Gatlin. Not the Gatlin I thought I knew, but some other Gatlin that had apparently been hiding in plain sight all along. A town where the girl I liked was from a long line of Casters, my housekeeper was a Seer who read chicken bones in the swamp and summoned the spirits of her dead ancestors, and even my dad acted like a vampire.

There seemed to be nothing too unbelievable for this Gatlin. It’s funny how you can live somewhere your whole life, but not really see it.

I pushed on the door, slowly, tentatively. I could see just a glimpse of the study, a corner of the built-in shelves, stuffed with my mom’s books, and the Civil War debris she seemed to collect wherever she went. I took a deep breath and inhaled the air from the study. No wonder my dad never left the room.

I could almost see her, curled up in her old reading chair by the window. She would’ve been typing, just on the other side of the door. If I opened the door a little more, for all I knew, she might be there now. Only I couldn’t hear any typing, and I knew she wasn’t there, and she never would be again.

The books I needed were on those shelves. If anyone knew more about the history of Gatlin County than the Sisters, it was my mom. I took a step forward, pushing the door open just a few inches farther.

“Sweet Host a Heaven and Earth, Ethan Wate, if you’re fixin’ to set one foot in that room, your daddy will knock you clean into next week.”

I nearly dropped the milk. Amma. “I’m not doing anything. The door just opened.”

“Shame on you. No ghost in Gatlin would dare set foot in your mamma and daddy’s study, except your mamma herself.” She looked up at me defiantly. There was something in her eyes that made me wonder if she was trying to tell me something, maybe even the truth. Maybe it was my mom, opening the door.

Because one thing was clear. Someone, something, wanted me to get into that study, as much as somebody else wanted to keep me out.

Amma slammed the door and drew a key out of her pocket, locking it. I heard the click and knew my window of opportunity had slammed shut, as quickly as it had opened. She crossed her arms. “It’s a school night. Don’t you have some studyin’ to do?”

I looked at her, annoyed.

“Goin’ back to the library? You and Link finished with that report?”

And then it came to me. “Yeah, the library. As a matter a fact, that’s where I’m headed right now.” I kissed her cheek and ran past her.

“Say hi to Marian for me, and don’t you be late for dinner.”

Good old Amma. She always had all the answers, whether she knew it or not, and whether or not she would willingly give them up.

Lena was waiting for me at the parking lot of the Gatlin County Library. The cracked concrete was still wet and shiny from the rain. Even though the library was still open for two more hours, the hearse was the only car in the lot, except for a familiar old turquoise truck. Let’s just say this wasn’t a big library town. There wasn’t much we wanted to know about any town but our own, and if your granddaddy or your great-granddaddy couldn’t tell you, chances were you didn’t need to know.

Lena was huddled against the side of the building, writing in her notebook. She was wearing tattered jeans, enormous rain boots, and a soft black T-shirt. Tiny braids hung down around her face, lost in all the curls. She looked almost like a regular girl. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to be a regular girl. I was sure I wanted to kiss her again, but it would have to wait. If Marian had the answers we needed, I’d have a lot more chances to kiss her.

I ran through my playbook again. Pick ’n’ Roll.

“You really think there’s something here that can help us?” Lena looked over her notebook at me.

I pulled her up with my hand. “Not something. Someone.”

The library itself was beautiful. I had spent so many hours in it as a kid, I’d inherited my mother’s belief that a library was sort of a temple. This particular library was one of the few buildings that had survived Sherman’s March and the Great Burning. The library and the Historical Society were the two oldest buildings in town, aside from Ravenwood. It was a two-story venerable Victorian, old and weathered with peeling white paint and decades worth of vines sleeping along the doors and windows.

It smelled like aging wood and creosote, plastic book covers, and old paper. Old paper, which my mom used to say was the smell of time itself.

“I don’t get it. Why the library?”

“It’s not just the library. It’s Marian Ashcroft.”

“The librarian? Uncle Macon’s friend?”

“Marian was my mom’s best friend, and her research partner. She’s the only other person who knows as much about Gatlin County as my mom, and she’s the smartest person in Gatlin now.”

Lena looked at me, skeptically. “Smarter than Uncle Macon?”

“Okay. She’s the smartest Mortal in Gatlin.”

I could never quite figure out what someone like Marian was doing in a town like Gatlin. “Just because you live in the middle of nowhere,” Marian would tell me, over a tuna sandwich with my mom, “doesn’t mean you can’t know where you live.” I had no idea what she meant. I had no idea what she was talking about, half the time. That’s probably why Marian had gotten along so well with my mom; I didn’t know what my mom was talking about, either, the other half the time. Like I said, the biggest brain in town, or maybe just the biggest character.