George had taught her the names. They had foraged together, sipped nettle tea, ate the greens of dandelions, dug for wild onions in spring.
But this day, she was not in the Stoneroot Forest with George.
Instead, she walked near the Dead Stream toward the big house filled with beautiful, untouchable things.
The house loomed before her. A curtain in an upstairs window billowed out, but there was no breeze. Behind the sheer curtain, Liv could see a figure, a dark shape. She stopped, heart racing, her body awash in goosebumps. The figure watched her. She felt its eyes boring into her, beckoning her forward.
“No,” Liv whispered.
But suddenly she was there, at the base of the grand staircase. Candles glittered, just as they had that Halloween night. Six-foot-high candelabras stood positioned on either side of the staircase. Red wax dripped and pooled on the gleaming wood floor.
The purple dahlias were thick, and their floral aroma concealed a smell of decay.
At the top of the stairs, the figure stood in the shadows.
Liv tried to back away, but the figure rushed toward her. A black blur streaked down the stairs.
Liv woke, sticky and heaving for breath. She fought the blankets from her waist and sat up in bed. Her hands shook as she turned on the little bedside lamp.
A yellow glow cast away the darkness, but not the dream. The dream remained, sharp and solid. It did not waver and slip away.
The second dream besieged her seconds after she closed her eyes.
She stood at the train station in Gaylord, Michigan, her single brown suitcase clutched in her hand. A man stopped beside her, and when she turned, she saw George.
Elation swept over her, swallowed by guilt. She burst into tears.
“There now, Volva.” He patted her back and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “It’s time to come home.”
She woke for the second time in her little bed and gazed at the ceiling, feeling the warmth of her father’s hand on her back.
She did not say goodbye to the children in the orphanage. Their clinging hands and cheeks shiny with tears would have crippled her.
For too long, she had run from her mistakes, and it was time to make amends.
She took the bus to the train station at midnight and boarded a train for Michigan.
Chapter 5
Jesse
Jesse hitched a ride into Gaylord on a rainy afternoon in early September.
The heat of the day radiated up from the pavement, and Jesse felt it through the soles of his worn shoes.
The man in the truck had dropped him at an intersection, and Jesse gazed for a long time down the road that the man said led to town. He’d been travelling for two days. His eyes were red-rimmed, he stank of his own filth, and something deep inside him was rumbling for a fierce howl.
He needed to be alone.
He turned away from town and plunged into the trees. The bit of light from the gray sky disappeared.
When he’d walked a half-mile, he dropped to his knees and buried his face in the wet grass and bellowed. The sound erupted from his body like a mighty roar. Tears poured from his tired eyes into the mossy earth beneath his face.
He babbled through his cries. Mostly he said their names, Nell and Gabriel, but sometimes he called out for his father or even his old dog, Bruno.
After a while, he slumped forward and slept.
He woke to a crow pecking at his coat pocket.
“Scat,” he shouted, rolling away from the bird.
He sat up, his back damp with sweat.
The bird did not fly away, but stood a few paces back, watching him.
“I don’t have anything for you. See?” he shouted.
He turned out the pockets of his coat. A box of matches fell out, but nothing else.
Still the bird remained.
When Jesse stood, the bird flew into a tree just over his head. He huffed, considered which way to turn. When the bird flew deeper into the forest, Jesse followed it.
He was a stranger in a strange wood. The bird’s direction was as good as any other.
Jesse had been walking for a long time when he spotted the house.
In the darkness, the moon only a whisper between drifting clouds, he gazed at the silhouette. Pitched roofs and tall black windows reminded him of an enormous slumbering creature rather than a deserted house. Thick overgrowth from bushes and trees crawled onto eaves and trickled across the long, wide porch that encircled the lower level.
No light burned in the house, and as he walked closer, Jesse smelled the air of abandonment. Everything had a scent — the air when a storm was brewing, a woman preparing for her first date, a place left and forgotten. He’d come to rely on his smell to know a bit about a man. Violent men smelled like fire, the sharp soot of the match striking flint. A kind man gave off an odor of freshly tilled soil.
Jesse put his hand on the bannister, sturdy wood with paint flaking away, and crept slowly up the steps. He perked his ears and waited, counting the seconds, and then minutes.
He knocked on the heavy wooden door. The sound rang hollow, muted by the dense summer foliage. It was an odd place for such a grand house, tucked deep in the woods. Made stranger by the foreboding silence that blanketed it.
He tried the knob and found it locked. Of course it was locked. It might be empty, but it was a big house, a wealthy man’s house.
Jesse was not a thief nor a criminal, but he hadn’t slept beneath a roof in half a month. Rain was on its way, and he didn’t want to greet the morning with his pants soaked through.
Walking the perimeter, he found a window low enough to reach if he stood on the cellar doors. He clambered up the diagonal red-brown doors and attempted to raise the window.
It stuck.
Climbing back down, he surveyed the house, sure that he should walk away. If the owners appeared in the night, they’d call the police. He’d be carted off to jail. Though jail offered a cot and a tray of food at sunrise.
“Nobody lives here,” he told the night.
In its silence, the house seemed to confirm his statement.
Jesse considered breaking the glass, but dismissed it when he realized no lock and chain snaked through the cellar doors.
He reached down and pulled, surprised when the door opened on its rusted hinge. The screech made his flesh crawl, and his apprehension deepened when he gazed into the yawning black hole of the cellar.
Ignoring his knee-jerk desire to avoid dark, unknown places, he plunged down the stairs, leaving the doors wide behind him to let a dribble of moonlight through.
Once in the cellar, the blackness grew impenetrable.
Jesse blinked, shuffling his feet and holding his arms out in front of him. By sheer dumb luck, his shin smacked into a hard wood lip.
The stairs.
He leaned forward, finding the stairs with his hands and monkey-walking up the dark staircase. The stairs were not hard and splintery, but softened by a layer of filth that revealed the house had been abandoned for a long time, indeed.
On the first level, a shimmer of moonlight through half-open curtains lit his way to a large sitting room thick with furniture.
Exhausted, he lay on the floor and drifted into sleep.