“Willie, I need you to tell me everything about this place. Everything you wouldn’t tell me today when we were in the shed looking at those holes.”
He can see the resistance again in Willie’s furrowed brow, in the long and deliberate way he looks back at his supine daughter.
“Spring House is falling apart, Willie. You don’t need to carry it on your back anymore.”
“What did she do?” Willie whispers.
“Nova? She didn’t—nothing. She’s a—”
“Miss Caitlin. What did she do?”
Only when his vision of Willie wobbles and splits does he realize his own eyes have filled with tears. He blinks them back, listens to his shallow breathing as if it is the gentle ticking of a clock and he’s all by himself, trying to meditate.
“I ain’t got no secrets ’bout dis place,” Willie finally says. “It was like she said today in the shed. More of a feelin’ than much else.”
“A feeling?”
“Plants never act right ’round here. They move when you ain’t looking.”
“Those are events, not feelings.”
“Maybe… Maybe not. But they always happen when you ain’t looking, so it’s not like they can be proved. But what they gave me—dat was the feelin’.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“I ain’t never seen no lady in a white dress floatin’ over da yard or some slave draggin’ her sad old behind ’round the attic singin’ some kinda spiritual. But maybe… It makes me think, maybe ghosts, they don’t act like they do in the movies. They don’t jes move the dishes and the chairs when we ain’t looking. They move everything and everyone. They like air and water. ’Cause they everywhere is where they are. They in the ground, they in the leaves. They sideways and all through everything… and waitin’ to be fed.”
Every monstrous surge that bore down on him over the past hour—from the vines that suckled his chest to the clouds of determined insects that literally carried away Caitlin’s soul—seemed possessed by a single predatory force, and Blake can think of no better description for it than the soft poetry Willie just whispered.
“Miss Caitlin… she fed ’em, didn’t she?” Willie asks.
Blake can only nod.
“I always thought it was magic, not ghosts. The way the flowers here would move and dance. And I thought it’d be good, Mister Blake. I thought it’d be a good thing for her…”
“For who? Caitlin?”
Instead of answering, Willie cups Nova’s forehead, and Blake realizes the her in Willie’s last sentence must be his own daughter, Nova. Somehow the magic in the soil here would be good for Nova, but how?
“Caitlin…,” Willie says quietly, but his attention is focused on his daughter, and Blake feels like the mention of Caitlin’s name is just Willie’s attempt to distract him. “Where’s Caitlin?”
“Gone,” Nova answers, in a clear and steady voice that sounds free of both tears and shock. And then she begins to tell her father what happened.
29
In room 14 of the Hibiscus Inn, Taletha Peterson distracts herself from the dry and passionless thrusts of her latest customer by doing a mental inventory of the cars she passed on her way in. In her mind’s eye, she tries to re-create the scattering of pickup trucks parked around the motel’s sad, lightless swimming pool and its wilting chain-link fence. The battered Nissan Sentra, the one with the faded SAVE OUR LAKE bumper sticker, is probably her best bet if things go south. Too bad she can’t remember exactly where it is.
She’d wager her stash the car belongs to Clay, the quiet, pimply kid who works the graveyard shift and always smells like bug spray no matter how much body powder he uses. Hell, maybe the body powder is what makes Clay smell like that white pickup truck that used to belch through Taletha’s old neighborhood late at night, rank smoke billowing from the pipe in back, smoke that sent spiny buck-moth caterpillars tumbling to the hood of her mother’s car. Or maybe Taletha’s just too damn sensitive, which is what her daddy always used to say right before he’d mess with her. She’s sensitive when it comes to smells, that’s for sure. She prefers the men in her life to smell like nothing at all. That way they’ll be easier to forget.
Clay’s a nice guy. Clay lets her bring johns to empty rooms as long as she slips him a few twenties every now and then. Twenties, not fifties. And not hand jobs like most of the motel managers she works with. There was a time in Taletha’s life when a man had to do more than not demand sex for favors for Taletha to consider him a nice guy, but that’s a hazy period now, so far from this dingy motel room that it’s a distant country. A faraway land beyond vast, deep lakes dug by a glacier named Phil, a drummer who took her for everything she was worth—which wasn’t much—but not before treating her to the first suck of lung-burning, head-clearing bliss from a glass pipe.
Where the hell was that Sentra parked? Close to the front office so Clay could keep an eye on it? It’s only been ten, maybe fifteen minutes since she walked past the thing, her latest customer, Mr. Lawyer Pants McUptown, hot on her heels and smelling of whiskey, and still she can’t place that damn car.
If she could shut her eyes maybe, try a little astral projection, or whatever her sister used to call it. But Lawyer Pants—on his first visit, he said his name was Charles, but that was probably bullshit—is taking her missionary, and with each graceless thrust he stares down at her with the pained intensity of a man trying to take a dump.
She remembers another vehicle parked outside, one of those mini-RVs you can rent these days, the kind with the rental company’s logo painted in bright, cheery letters along the side, letters that seem to scream, Been out of my element for months! Please rape and murder me!
But Taletha doesn’t know if those things have an alarm, so the Sentra’s going to have to be her fail-safe. If for some reason things go to shit inside this mildew-smelling little room with its plaid curtains and growling window-unit air conditioner, she’ll run for the Sentra and kick its rear bumper hard enough to set off the alarm.
Sometimes that’s all it takes. Sometimes the alarm is enough to freeze a psycho where he stands, the belt still raised over one shoulder or the gun she didn’t notice aimed at her disappearing shadow, his head still swarming with sick-fuck ideas he didn’t have the balls to mention when they were arranging a price. And sometimes that’s not enough, sometimes a few people will have to pop out of their rooms first. And then other times, times she wants to forget, she just has to run like hell and grab for the nearest handful of rocks. But whatever the case, a car alarm in the middle of the night has saved Taletha Peterson’s ass (and her face and her breasts and her fingers) on more than a few occasions.
Suddenly Lawyer Pants flips her over like she’s a sack of potatoes, slides one arm under her waist, and pulls back until she’s on all fours. She’s afraid he’s sensed how far she’s slipped from her own body, from their passionless rutting, but she also needs to give him a gentle little reminder—doggy style’s cool but the backdoor’s off-limits. But before she can address either issue, she’s distracted by a dark flutter in the lamp’s frail glow. Suddenly Mr. Lawyer Pants is back inside of her—the traditional way, thank God—and Taletha is staring at the giant bug that’s just landed on the man’s wedding ring.
Last time the guy took care to stuff the little gold band in his jeans pocket before he stripped down. But tonight he’s drunk, so he left it out on the nightstand. It looks tiny and insignificant now, but maybe that’s because the bug resting on it is about the length of Taletha’s index finger.