“Yeah,” he sighed and looked toward the woods.
“She did it,” Margaret Bell, Rosemary’s mother, screamed, clawing at the pearl necklace hanging from her slender neck. The necklace broke and pearls fled down her cream dress and across the dirt driveway. Red welts appeared on the pale skin of her chest.
Margaret was not an uppity woman, but for Sunday’s church service she always wore a neatly pressed cream dress and the pearls that had passed through her family for generations. Now the men chased them along the dirt and stones. Her husband Paul swore under his breath as he watched the most valuable item in their household vanishing into the dust.
Heather squared her shoulders, her chin high, as Sophia cowered in the barn behind her. Watching her mama staring down all those townsfolk made her knees clack together so loud she clamped them shut with her hands.
“Margaret Bell, our girls have grown together. My Sophia has been haulin’ fresh tomatoes and pumpkins from our garden to your house for ten years. You’re going to stand here and accuse my little girl of murder?”
Margaret’s eyes narrowed, and she leaned forward.
“She was born with the devil’s mark. Everybody in town knows it!”
Sophia frowned. The devil’s mark? She slid deeper into the barn as the voices outside grew louder. When she reached the back of the barn, she opened the door a crack and found Grimmel standing just outside.
“Go up in the tree, Sophia,” he whispered.
“Where’s Timmy?” she asked, using her older brother’s pet name, which he hated.
“He’s headin’ out there to meet the mob.”
Sophia heard Timothy’s voice join the fray. She ran into the forest, finding their climbing tree and crawling to the highest branch. From there she could no longer hear the voices. If she looked toward home, she could see her mama and Timothy amidst the crowd, but she didn’t look, instead tilting her face into the afternoon sun. A dry, hot breeze blew in from the south. Her daddy had called those sandstorms and said rain would soon follow. When the sand got agitated, it needed a bath to calm down. The thought of her daddy sent a spasm of pain through Sophia’s belly.
A shriek came from the crowd of people, and Sophia turned straining to see. Someone strode from the barn holding something high. It agitated the other townspeople. Margaret Bell collapsed onto the ground.
Sophia could not see what the man held, but cold wet fingers seemed to reach deep inside her and grab hold of her heart.
They had found the knife.
Chapter 8
September 1965
Hattie
“Hi Camille,” Hattie kissed their aging housekeeper on the cheek. “I’m going to run out to the barn and see if I can’t find a picture I want.”
Camille kissed back and caught Hattie in a half hug.
“Ain’t the same without you Hattie Girl,” Camille told her, catching her with those big sad eyes. Jude nicknamed Camille Ms. Cow Eyes. “Your Gram Ruth’s like a ghost haunting her own house.”
“Now don’t make me feel bad Camille,” Hattie scolded, teasing. “I do miss you and your cinnamon cookies though. Gram will be fine, she just needs a bit of time to get used to things.”
“Well, maybe you’re wise beyond your years, my little lamb,” Camille murmured. “I sure hope so. I have a plate of those cinnamon cookies waitin’ for you in the pantry.”
Hattie promised to stop back in and hurried out to the barn, running to catch a green maple leaf as it drifted down from a tree.
She put all her weight into the heavy barn door. The rusted hinges groaned, but gradually gave way and the door slid open. In the bright light of day, the interior looked ominous. The skin along Hattie’s arms prickled, and she rubbed her hands over her biceps to cast away the foreboding. She dug out the oil lantern that Camille had given her and lit it, stepping into the darkness before good sense told her not to.
The fire cast a soft circle of light and Hattie held the lamp in front of her as she walked. On the ground floor, the barn held her grandfather Andy’s antique cars. Covered in sheets, once white, now thick with gray dust, the cars felt like something loved and then forgotten. She remembered her daddy once asking Gram Ruth if he could drive the cars out and tune them up. He would take their mother on an old-fashioned date, he’d said, so excited that even Hattie, only four at the time could hear the enthusiasm in his voice. “Absolutely not!” Gram had told him with such a sour look on her face he dropped the subject.
Hattie surveyed old farm equipment and tools. The barn had mostly belonged to her grandfather. He tinkered, her daddy told her, much to Gram Ruth’s dislike. Gram prided herself on being upper class and she expected her husband to behave in the way of wealthy, sophisticated men. Cigar lounges and golf games, not greasy hands and oil stained britches.
After her grandfather died, before Hattie was born, Gram Ruth left the barn to the elements and time. Hattie once overheard her daddy say Gram crammed everything she wanted to forget in the barn.
The ladder into the loft hung in a pocket of gloom. As Hattie climbed she craned her head back and looked high where the roof steepled and a thousand cobwebs hung like shimmering gauze. The lofts were the only part of the barn still in use, kind of. Gram sent Frank to the barn once a month to store unwanted furniture, old paperwork, and anything else she had tired of looking at.
The summer Mama died, Hattie’s daddy stored some of their things in the loft. In a blink they transitioned from living in their farmhouse in the country to living in Gram’s cold mansion.
In the beginning, before the deaths, Hattie loved staying in the house. Every room held secrets - old trunks and hat boxes, locked drawers and deep closets. She explored tirelessly, prowling the house and the grounds, in a perpetual state of wonder.
Gram Ruth, despite her stony demeanor, coddled Hattie. Sometimes she even opened her bed and allowed Hattie to climb onto the high mattress, covered in an antique silk coverlet. She would not tell Hattie stories, but would sit patiently as Hattie told her own. Every day Hattie offered a new story about chasing a red squirrel or capturing a minnow in her palm. Jude and Peter didn’t have time for her stories, and that summer, with her parents away, Gram Ruth had been her most avid audience.
Hattie had assumed they would move home at the end of the summer, but then Daddy died - fell from the loft she now climbed into. Hattie barely remembered the months after the deaths of her parents. When she tried to look there, a dark veil of sorrow coated her memories.
The loft floor was littered with holes from broken planks. Furniture and boxes were stacked on the solid areas. Hattie could see footprints in the dust and mouse droppings. She walked carefully, avoiding the soft boards that gave when she placed her weight on them. The furniture stood along the barn wall, and Hattie smiled noticing that Frank had even hung some of her family’s pictures. She saw a picture of a moon rise that her mama had painted for her daddy as a gift. Another, a photograph, showed her mama cradling her baby twins, Jude and Peter, in her arms and laughing at the ground where their family dog Howdy stood staring up at her. Hattie had never known Howdy, a black and white mutt that her daddy found on the side of the road. He died of sadness Jude told her after their pet cat Boots ran away.
Hattie took both pictures and stacked them on the floor. She would have to fight the urge to take most of their stuff. A collector, a pack rat maybe, Hattie’s love of material items could quickly overwhelm her new apartment. It was not value she coveted, at least not the monetary kind, but nostalgic value. She wanted to wrap up in an afghan her mama once draped over her shoulders. She longed to smell her daddy’s cologne on one of his old sweaters.