“I wish you were working with me at Dane’s.”
“Your dad hasn’t even said he’ll let you.”
“I know, but he will. He doesn’t have any good reason to say no.” For the past two years, he’d told me I was too young for the job, but he could hardly argue now that I was seventeen.
Bess smirked. “Maybe he’s worried that if you hang around your uncle too much, you’ll wind up like Becky Castle.”
“Holly’s mom? I don’t even know if Crete’s still seeing her. And she was a wreck before they started dating.” Holly was a few years younger than us, a tiny girl so pale and white-blond that Bess used to call her an albino. The three of us had been in 4-H Club back in grade school and had done a team project together, raising rabbits to show at the fair. Holly’s mom, Becky, was always forgetting to come pick her up after club meetings.
Bess nodded. “Yeah, but have you seen her lately? She looks like a wrung-out dishrag. She was over at Bell’s one night, dancing by herself in front of the jukebox. Had jizz crusted all down the back of her hair.”
“How do you know it was jizz?” I asked, laughing.
Bess shrugged. “Just saying, if your dad thinks I’m a bad influence, I can see where he wouldn’t want you around somebody like her.”
Crete never bothered to introduce any of his girlfriends to me or Dad, probably because Dad was always telling him that he had terrible taste in women. None of the relationships lasted long enough to get serious anyway.
“All right, I need to get home,” I said, wadding up the burlap sack that had held the possums. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You know she’ll wanna drive you back.”
“Tell her you tried to stop me.” I smiled and blew Bess a kiss.
She pretended to catch the kiss in her palm, then pressed it to her lips, something dumb we’d done since we were babies. “Try not to get dismembered,” she said. Dismembered. The word came easily, like she’d said it a hundred times. It was a newspaper word, one that grew too comfortable with repetition, from countless articles in dozens of papers and broadcasts on the Springfield nightly news. It was easy to think of Cheri as dismembered. It was harder to think of someone leaning on a blade to saw through her joints, to cut muscle, windpipe, bone. It didn’t seem fair to condense what had happened to her into one clean word.
I took the long way home, crossing onto conservation land to stare into the mouth of Old Scratch Cavern, where dogs had tracked my mother’s scent when she went missing. Old Scratch, of course, was a nickname for the devil. I didn’t go in; narrow tunnels and false floors gave way to an underground river that never saw light. Things lost to the cave stayed lost, and if my mother’s bones rode blind currents in the earth, I’d never find them.
When I was old enough to hear the story, I thought the worst part of my mother’s disappearance was the uncertainty, not knowing what really became of her. The sheriff was convinced she’d killed herself, but no one could prove she was dead. The search parties Dad pulled together yielded nothing definitive. Bloodhounds followed her scent toward the cave but didn’t find her. The most worrisome part was that my dad’s pistol had disappeared with her, and she’d left with nothing else, but even that didn’t prove anything. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t take the official explanation as gospel; as with anything concerning my mother, there were rumors and stories and whispers of magic. That she haunted Old Scratch and roamed the hills at night. That she’d traded spirits with a crow and flown away, or slipped off with traveling Gypsies. Without evidence of her death, I could continue to believe she was alive somewhere, that for some reason she’d had to leave but would someday come back for me. I begged Gabby and Birdie (and my dad, before he stopped talking about her) for stories, details, any scrap of who she was and what she did. I pieced her together over time, a mosaic of others’ words: witch and ghost, woman and girl, magic and real. I wanted more, but that was all I had.
When Cheri turned up in the tree, I knew uncertainty wasn’t the worst part. It was a luxury, a gift. The worst part was knowing for sure that your loved one was dead, and I was grateful then that my mother’s body had never been found. The mystery eats away at you, but it leaves a thin rind of hope.
It was dark already among the trees, fireflies flaring and burning out like flashbulbs, but the path was familiar, and I was more cautious than scared. I’d avoided the woods after Cheri’s murder, just like everyone else, but after a while the fear dulled. I knew the land better than any stranger who might wander through. If I paid attention to my surroundings and kept up my guard, I’d be fine. I wasn’t like Cheri, who’d been vulnerable as a wounded fawn, the easiest kind of prey. No one looking out for her. Not even me.
When I got home, I fixed myself a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of tea to take up to my room. I snapped on the bedside lamp, sending shadows scurrying up the lavender walls, and turned on the fan in the window next to my bed. Fresh air flowed into the room and slowly flipped the pages of the notebook I’d left on my pillow. It was a journal of sorts, mostly lists. “Things I Know About My Mother” (almost a full page, including a strand of hair I’d found on an old nightgown of hers and taped in the margin). “Boys I’ve Kissed” (five: four from a spin-the-bottle game at a river party where I got drunk on apple wine, and one a visiting pastor’s son Dad caught leading me—willingly—toward sin on the front porch). “What Happened to Cheri?” Her death hadn’t answered that question, hadn’t narrowed the list of possibilities. She’d run away or she’d been taken, and the last year of her life was a question mark.
When I wasn’t scrutinizing Cheri’s list, I jotted down notes about places where I wanted to travel. Iowa, of course, to see where my mother had lived, but I wouldn’t stay there long. It wasn’t far enough away. Sometimes I wanted to put so much space between myself and Henbane that it would take days to cover the distance. Dad had never taken me farther than Branson, and he had no interest in going anywhere else, even if we could afford it. He had my life plotted out in three bullet points: get good grades, stay out of trouble, go to college. He hadn’t accomplished any of them himself, but he insisted it was what my mother wanted for me. He’d added a fourth bullet after the incident with the pastor’s son: Don’t let a boy get in the way of numbers one through three.
Dad couldn’t complain about my grades, which came easily. He said I must have gotten that from Mom’s side of the family. And I hadn’t been in much trouble except the occasional scuffle with Craven Sump, nephew of Joe Bill, who—if you believed the story—had slithered off into the brush, never to be seen again after my mother turned him into a snake. Dad said Joe Bill ran off to avoid paying child support, but Craven and his kin believed in black magic. He called me “witch” or “devil’s spawn” every chance he could, and sometimes I got tired of it and called him a dumbass or gave him a little shove and he’d report me to the office. The principal would sigh and tell me I had more potential than anyone else in my class, but I needed to work on my charms and graces if I wanted to get somewhere in life. Sometimes I’d glare at Craven, focusing all my energy on a mental picture of snakes clotted in a den, but he remained in his annoying human form. If my mother truly had transformative powers, she hadn’t passed them on to me.
I sprawled across the bed to eat my sandwich and pulled my paperback copy of Beloved out of the crack between the mattress and footboard, thumbing it open to a photocopied bookmark from Nancy’s Trade-A-Book. Henbane’s tiny library (“library” being an exaggeration—it was just a room in the basement of the courthouse) never had anything good, so I’d made a list for Dad, and whenever he passed through Mountain Home, he’d stop at Nancy’s and see what he could find.