Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (20 page)

I married recently, a girl from Echo. Ann Marie Thompson—yes, the pretty blond girl that worked for you as a maid, some time back. We ran into each other at a dance in New York, a few months ago. She’s a ducky shin-cracker, Freddie. You’d never believe it. She’s almost as good as you.
 

We will be moving back to Echo in the next few weeks. As I said, I won’t cause trouble. We will be like strangers. 

But it will make me happy, to see the boy, once in a while, just in passing. 

—John 

P.S. You named him after me. That was kind. 

“Does this mean what I think it means?”Sunshine and I had walked back to my bedroom in silence. Now we were sitting on the bed, the letters handed back and forth between us as we read them over and over and over. 

“Yeah, I think so,” I said, but my voice wasn’t working right. I cleared my throat. 

“Your dad’s name is John,” Sunshine said. She was watching me closely,trying to figure out what I was going to do—if I was going to stomp around or throw things,or what, though I knew that she knew I wouldn’t. 

“Yes, I know what my dad’s name is, Sunshine.” 

“And this ‘John’was an artist, and your dad is an artist, and you and Luke are artists.” 

“Yes, I
know
. So what?” 

Sunshine threw her arms up in the air. “Rich people.” 

I gave her a sidelong glance, and I supposed my sowhat expression was kind of fragile-looking, because she stood up and went to the door without another word. 

But then she stopped and turned around, and her face was . . . sad . . . and thoughtful, and very un-Sunshine. “Vi . . . I think you’d better see if Freddie hid any other letters.” She watched me a moment. 

I nodded. 

She left. 

Freddie looked at me like that sometimes.Sad.Thoughtful. Mainly when she was worried about Luke beating on me, or my hating him, or my parents being gone too long. 

I went to the ballroom.I sat under my grandpa Lucas’s painting until the sun set, just thinking about things and feeling like I could probably start crying, if I let myself. 

But I didn’t. 

T 
here was another movie in the town square that night. 

Luke and Jack were still painting. I wanted to talk to 
them about the letters, both of them,but didn’t have it in me yet. 

Besides, there were more. I was sure of it. 

But where? 

Where had I seen another black cross?
 

River was still nowhere to be found, which meant a kind of ache was starting in my insides.I didn’t know what it meant, or why it was there. I tried to ignore it. 

Sunshine invited us for supper. Her parents had cooked up a roast chicken with fingerling potatoes and crème fraîche. Luke and Jack went, but I stayed behind. I didn’t feel like small-talking. What I felt like doing was sitting on the front steps and staring at the sea, which is how Neely found me. 

“Want to go to an old movie?” I asked. 

“Yes,” he said. “More than anything.” 

I packed a picnic for Neely and me, just like the one River had packed for me and him and
Casablanca
. But it wasn’t the same. Now there was a devil, and a ghost, and a murdered man, and twenty-three dead people in a nowhere town called Rattlesnake Albee. 

I considered telling Neely about the tunnel when we passed by it on our way into town. I considered telling him what River showed Sunshine while they were inside it together.But I didn’t say anything,in the end.I figured Neely would either laugh, or get into a fight with someone. I wasn’t sure which was worse. 

“So River’s run off before?”I asked,after a few minutes of silence. 

“Yep,” Neely said. He slid his arm under mine and took the handle of the picnic basket from me. 

“And you always have to come get him?” 

“ Yep.” 

“And then the two of you get into a fight,and he disappears for a while, and then you both go home.” 

“That’s the way it works.”Neely glanced at me.“He won’t stay, Violet. I don’t know what he’s told you, but he won’t stay. He never stays anywhere, not for very long. Including home.” 

I tried to look like I didn’t care.I kind of hated River,so I should have been better at it. 

“You’re the first girl, if it’s any consolation,” he said, noticing my expression. He stopped walking, grabbed my hand, and turned it over. Then he leaned over and kissed my palm. 

I sucked in my breath,stunned.He’d done it as natural and easy as smiling in the sun. 

And I’d thought River was smooth. 

Neely laughed when he saw my expression.“I’ve never caught River sleeping next to someone before. Look, there’s no doubt that he’s fed you some lies. That’s what River does. My brother has . . . problems. But, as far as I know,you’re the first girl he’s ever noticed.And it’s got to be a good thing. So . . . thank you.” 

“You kissed my hand to say thank you?” 

“ Yep.” 

I’d spent the last few days with a rich boy who had a glow he couldn’t stop using and an inclination for vigilante slaughter. But all I could think about, the rest of the way into town, was how I could still feel Neely’s kiss in my palm. 

≈≈≈
 

I looked around the park after we arrived, my eyes peeled for River. But nothing. 

The night had gotten cool, and I could feel the warmth coming off Neely where he sat on the quilt next to me. On the screen, a train went by, and Rachmaninoff began to play. The movie was
A Brief Encounter
.I’d seen it before, last summer in the town square.Crisp British accents and a damn heartbreaking end. 

To my left, two girls whispered in each other’s ears, while a little kid shared a dripping ice-cream cone with a very polite border collie. To my right, a tall, skinny boy with deep red hair—almost purple, in the fading light— cut an apple into slices with a small,thin knife,and offered it to a blond girl sitting with her family nearby. A bearded man stepped over a pile of dirt and threw a blanket down beside it. I knew why the dirt pile was there. Someone had dug up the bloodstained grass where Daniel Leap . . .fell. 

“Are you a philanderer?”I asked Neely,under my breath, as the horrid, chatty woman with the hatbox interrupted the doomed lovers on the screen in front of us. 

“A what?”he whispered back, throwing me an amused, puzzled look. 

“A . . . a man who has many love affairs.” 

Neely’s laugh burst through the movie-night stillness. People turned around to look at us,but he didn’t stop,not for a while. 

My face turned red. Thank god for the dark. 

“I get it now,” Neely said, whispering after his outburst. “River. You. I get it. River’s always been so picky about girls.But this”—he pointed at me—“this makes sense.
You
make sense.” 

And then he smiled at me, and it was crooked like his brother’s,and I thought about how I’d been sitting in this same spot, doing this same thing, with River, just a few days ago.
_≈≈≈
 

Halfway through the movie, right after the rowboat scene, I felt a hand on my elbow.I looked up into Gianni’s brown eyes. 

“Come,Violet,” was all he said.“I need to talk to you.” “Okay,” I whispered. I was curious, but not all that worried. He probably just wanted to show me his new coffee pour-over thing. 

I got to my feet. Neely looked up at me, his eyebrows raised, but I just pointed at Gianni and shrugged my shoulders. 

Neely frowned at Gianni. “Hurry back,” he whispered. 

I followed Gianni away from the square. He stopped under the oily yellow glow of the streetlamp near the Antiquarian Bookstore, and shook a black curl out of his eye. He had a scratch on his right cheek that looked fresh. 

“Gianni, how did you hurt your face?” I asked. He ignored me.“Violet, I want you to see something.” A cool sea breeze hit me out of nowhere. I began to 

button up my yellow cardigan. “All right. But can it wait until after the movie?” 

“No. You have to see it now.” 

It was strange.It was.And if I hadn’t been so distracted, thinking about River, and Neely, and the Devil, and the suicide, and Jack, and the letters, and the glow, I would have noticed it at the time. But, instead, I just let Gianni slip his fingers through mine and pull me down the street. Down, down, into the dark dead end. 

I should have told someone that I was following Gianni into the great unknown. Like Neely. The bearded guy. The kid with the apple. Anyone. But I didn’t. I trusted him. Hell, I’d known him since sixth grade. 

So I let him lead me, calm and serene as a nun saying her prayers. 

We came to a stop on the road outside Glenship Manor. Gianni pointed. “The thing I need to show you is in there.” 

Finally, the first tingle of fear rustled inside me. “But the Glenship is boarded up,” I said. “We can’t go inside. And I wouldn’t want to. No one has been in it for years. There must be rats, and bats, and ghosts, and . . . other things.” 

Normally I wasn’t such a coward.But the night was dark, and Glenship Manor looked big and black and imposing and haunted as hell. And Gianni was staring at me in an odd way. His bright brown eyes looked different in the moonlight . . . kind of dull, and blank. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a small hammer. 

“Come,” he said. 

He led me over to the Glenship, and his fingers didn’t release mine, not for a second. I saw that two planks of wood were lying on the ground. One of the Glenship’s floor-length windows was exposed, and I saw a dim light flickering inside the building, low to the ground. Gianni ripped another plank back, one-handed, and threw it on the ground. The window was broken, but Gianni made sure all the sharp glass was clear before he pulled me inside after him. 

He dropped the hammer and picked up the lantern. It was the kind that needed oil. Using the moonlight that streamed in through the now un-boarded window, he found the knob on the side and turned. The room filled with light. 

I was standing in the dusty, ramshackle library. Peeling wallpaper, a lonely leather chair, ripped and ragged, all the books gone, and the shelves looking naked and empty. I fought an overwhelming urge to run around and explore. I hadn’t wanted to come inside, but suddenly I wished I would have broken into Glenship Manor years ago.I was dying to compare it to the Citizen,to see what things had been left behind, to dig in drawers, oh, all sorts of things. Gianni was still looking at me strangely, but damn, I wanted to see the bedrooms, and the kitchen, and the cellar where the girl was murdered. Freddie said once that the Glenship had an underground swimming pool, and six secret passageways, and— 

Gianni tugged on my hand. “Come, Violet. He’s up here.” He motioned with the lamp toward the staircase. 

My eyes stopped scouring the room and focused on Gianni.“Who’s up where, Gianni?” 

He blinked at me,his fingers still wrapped tight around mine, his eyes still holding that eerie, lifeless look. “The witch, of course.” 

Even then, after he said
that,
I wasn’t really scared. I thought Gianni was joking. Poorly, and in bad taste, after that Jerusalem Rock story. But still. I let him pull me out of the library, across a black-and-white tiled floor, up the grand Glenship staircase, so like the Citizen’s, up and up past the second floor,past the third.The staircase got narrower and narrower, and then we were in the attic. 

I caught my breath. The Glenship attic looked so much like my own sweet attic that for a moment I forgot where I was. The full-length mirrors, the wardrobes, the trunks, the cobwebs. 

Who had left all these things behind? Was there anyone still alive to claim them?
 

My fingers itched to dig into the dust and see what I could find; I imagined photographs and old records and maybe even a mention of Freddie in some letter— 

Jack.
 

His auburn hair was tangled and dirty, matted with dust and god knew what. His skinny arms were raised above his head; his hands were tied with ropes that hung down from the support beam stretching across the slanted ceiling. He had on a pair of jeans, no shirt, and his bare feet looked small and porcelain-white against the dirty floorboards. 

His freckled face was turned to the side. I could see tracks through the grime where he’d been crying. 

“Help,” Jack said, his voice cracking. “He keeps saying I’m a witch.What does he mean? What’s wrong with him?” He pulled on the rope above his head. His wrists looked impossibly small, pressed together underneath the knots. 

I turned to Gianni. All the fear that wouldn’t come before, it came bursting through me now.“Gianni? What is this? What are you doing?” But my throat closed up as I spoke and my voice got smaller and smaller until I wasn’t even yelling, only whispering. 

Gianni smiled and nudged me with his elbow. “Someone tipped me off that you had cornered a witch at Citizen Kane. So I went to your house and tempted him out of your lair.What do you think,Violet?
Look at that red hair
. What wickedness. Red-haired Devil-loving monster.” He paused, bent down, and picked something up. “I had to show you,Vi.It is a rare kind of girl that could appreciate what I am about to do. And you are rare,Vi.” 

“What are you going to do, Gianni?”
 

That’s when my eyes caught sight of what Gianni had in his right hand. I reached forward, yanked the lantern out of his left, and shined it around the attic. 

There was a pile of rocks in the shadows to my left. Next to a wheelbarrow-red can of gasoline. 

Gianni looked at me with his dead eyes. “Make him confess, of course. You can watch. Or help, if you want. I’ve got the rocks over there. But if they don’t work, I found a rusty old jackknife in the cellar. That will do the trick. We just have to make sure to leave a little juice in him, at the end. He’ll need to feel the flames. I’ve heard that you’ve got to burn the Devil out of witches,and you can’t do that if they are already dead before you put them in the fire.” 

Jack was screaming by this time. Writhing against the ropes and screaming.