Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (3 page)

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. I think there’s two bottles somewhere in the cellar.” 

“Good. Then we’ll all get drunk, and I will let the stranger in your backyard kiss me, anywhere he likes. Meanwhile, I’ll steal his wallet.” 

“Or I could just ask him if I can see his ID.”I didn’t like the thought of Sunshine kissing River. Or doing anything else with him. At all. An entire summer of the two of them sweating and moaning in my guesthouse filled me with a cold kind of horror. Besides, River was mine.And by mine,I mean I saw him first.And by saw him first, I mean he didn’t seem like the kind of boy who would get drunk on homemade wine and try to kiss Sunshine. 

Sunshine laughed. “Where’s the fun in that? Violet, you’re scowling.” 

“No I’m not,” I said, though I knew for certain I was. 

I heard feet on gravel and looked up. 

Luke. He was walking up Sunshine’s dark, tree-lined driveway, jeans hanging low on his narrow hips and a tootight T-shirt hugging the stupid muscles in his stupid chest in a way that, I’m sure, poor Maddy loved. And Sunshine too. 

Luke had our mother’s hazel eyes.But he mainly looked like our dad, with his auburn hair, and his wide forehead, and his square face. 

The crow cawed again overhead, and a strong sea wind came in and burst through the trees, making the green pine needles shake themselves all over the place. That sound always gave me goose bumps, the good kind. It was the sound an orphan governess hears in a book,before a mad woman sets the bed curtains on fire. 

“Hey, Sunshine. Hey, sister.” 

Luke smirked at Sunshine, tossed his hair back, and tried to look cocky and reckless. I thought it came off stupid, but Sunshine didn’t. She lowered her eyelids, then reached back and pulled her long hair over one shoulder so it would swing across her ribs in the way she thought was sexy. 

“Hey yourself, Luke. How’s Maddy?” Sunshine squeezed closer to me so that Luke could sit down on the other side of her. 

“Maddy smells like coffee. But that’s good, because I like coffee.Violet,why don’t you go on home and make me some.” 

“Shut up, Luke. You should be the one making
me
coffee. I just got us enough money to buy some food. And get the phone back.”I paused, for effect.“Someone answered my poster, and we’ve got a renter for the guesthouse.” 

“You’re kidding. That dumb idea actually worked?” Luke raised a hand and then let it fall back down to settle on Sunshine’s thigh. 

Sunshine smiled. 

I reached over and knocked it off. 

If Sunshine had been a boy, she and my brother would have been best friends. But Luke would never be friends with a girl
,
even if they were into the same things—like locking me in closets with brutish boys from school, or setting the books I was reading on fire. 

Sunshine and Luke had been teaming up since she moved here. Before that, she’d lived in Texas, Oregon, Montana . . . wherever her librarian parents were needed, apparently. Five years ago, right after Freddie died, my parents got so broke,they had to sell off six wooded acres of our estate.Sunshine’s dad had grown up here,and so he bought the land, built a little cabin on it, moved back to Echo with his family, and started running the little library in town with his wife. 

Sunshine squished closer to Luke and he put his hand back on her thigh, higher up than it was before. 

“Stop it. Both of you. I’m sitting
right
here.” 

Luke laughed. “Who cares? I want to hear about this stranger in our cottage. Girl? Guy? Did you get paid already? Where’s the money?” 

“Yes, he paid. And no, you’re not going anywhere near it. I’m getting groceries this afternoon.” 

“His name is River West,” Sunshine slipped in. “And Violet’s decided she’s going to be mad as a hatter in love with him.” 

“That’s not remotely true,” I said, looking at her with my penetrating, know-it-all gaze. “That couldn’t be less true.” 

But Sunshine was dead right, and we both knew it. 

T
he three of us walked back to Citizen Kane, squeezing through the jungle path that led around the house, trying not to let the branches scrape up our arms and legs.
 

Sunshine had decided that we should all go grocery shopping together, and we should invite River to come with us. So I went up to the door of the guesthouse and knocked. I heard River call, “Come in,” and so I did. I found him in the kitchen with his hands deep in soapy water. 

“Thought I would clean up a bit. The dishes were dusty.” He looked at my brother.“Are you Luke?”River pulled his hands out of the water, reached into a drawer, and grabbed a white towel embroidered with a smiling lamb. 

I watched him dry his hands and it occurred to me that the towel he was using was probably a thousand years old like the rest of the guesthouse, and the fingers that stitched the red grin on that sheep were nothing but bones in the ground. 

The dead are all around us,
Freddie used to say.
So don’t you go being afraid of the dead, Violet. And if you aren’t afraid of the dead, then you aren’t afraid of dying. And if you aren’t afraid of dying, then the only damn thing you have to be afraid of is the Devil. And that’s the way it should be.
 

I missed my parents. I missed the sight of my mom’s fingers, covered with splotches of paint, and her dreamy green-brown eyes that weren’t like my eyes at all, because mine were, as I said, blue and staring. I missed the way her teeth showed too much when she laughed, and how her nose seemed just a bit too big if you looked at her from the side. 

And I missed my dad. I missed standing in the dark doorway of the servants’entrance and watching him carrying a canvas around the backyard as he tried to find the best light. I missed the way he sighed whenever he looked at the crumbling greenhouse, then shook his head and went back to his painting. He was a lot older than my mother, and his brown-red hair was thinning. I missed the way it looked copper in the direct sun. I missed the way he would drink sherry after supper in the library, and then snore so hard, I could hear him all the way upstairs. I missed the wrinkles by his eyes, and his wide forehead. 

But it was nothing to the ache I felt inside my insides for my gosh-darn always-around-because-my-parentsweren’t Freddie. Always around until she died, that is. I missed her white-blond hair, bobbed and wavy and unchanged since the ’30s. I missed the woolly berets she wore even when it was warm out, and the way her clothes sometimes smelled like lemons and sometimes like expensive French perfume.I missed the soft skin of her face, peachy-white and clear, with no wrinkles. Some women were like that—their faces stayed young, and their eyes bright, no matter how old they got. I wanted to look like Freddie when I hit the upper decades. 

Luke fidgeted. I pushed the sad, missing-Freddie thoughts out of my head and caught River’s eye. “Yeah, this is my brother, and our neighbor Sunshine. She lives in that cabin down the road.” 

River shook Luke’s hand. I noticed that Luke was several inches taller than River, which surprised me, since I remembered River being really tall. 

Or did I? No, when I first saw him, I thought he was very not-tall. Average. River had grown a foot in my mind, just in the last hour. 

Sunshine eyed River, and then looked over her shoulder at me and ran her tongue over her lips. I ignored her and watched Luke. My brother treated all girls pretty much the same, but he did one of two things when he met a guy. He either talked down to him, using a special, condescendingly hateful Luke tone. Or he worshipped him, with all the pent-up fervor a fatherless boy could muster. 

“River. Glad you found Violet’s poster.” Luke paused and scratched his elbow, all forced nonchalance and faux easygoing. “It’ll be pretty cool having you around. Nice to have another guy. I usually have to spend my summers with these two.” He thrust his chin at Sunshine and me. “I need someone who can drink whiskey without whining. And I could use a spotter when I lift weights. I got a set in one of the rooms on the third floor of the Citizen.You lift?” 

Worship it was, then. 

River smiled at Luke but didn’t answer. 

“We’re going to the grocery store.Want to come?”Sunshine sidled her way in front of Luke,and flipped her hair, and seemed to take up the whole kitchen all of a sudden. 

“Yeah,” River said. “I just plugged in the fridge. I need some food.Hence,I’ll come with you to the grocery store.” River looked at me and winked. 

I stared at him,and then kind of laughed,and he flashed his crooked smiled at me. My cheeks started going red again, so I ducked out and went back to the Citizen to grab a few canvas bags. Then the four of us walked down to the apple trees. White apple blossoms were blowing around in the sea breeze, and a few fell on River’s shoulders as we passed under the trees. He left them on, didn’t brush them off,and I liked that.Our feet hit the dirt path, and we started toward Echo. 

Luke kept asking River questions about where he came from and what he liked to do, but River somehow managed to avoid giving my brother any direct answers in a way that seemed casual but was actually pretty brilliant, if you were really paying attention. Which I was. 

Sunshine walked along beside me, all long hair and round butt and round thighs, curving and sliding against each other, happy as a clam that she had two pretty boys to flirt with.I smelled dirt,and leaves,and forest things,and felt in a pretty good mood too. 

When we’d gone about a half mile, we came across the old railroad tunnel, lurking back in the green trees. No trains ran through there, and hadn’t for years. The tracks were all gone, but the tunnel still stood, pitch-black and winding for a mile or so into the hill. Where, I guessed, it ended in a cave-in. I’d gone maybe twenty or thirty steps inside, but never coughed up enough courage to go in all the way and find out what was in there,in the dark,at the very end. 

It had always surprised me that no joy-killing adults had ever tried to board up the entrance. Maybe the tunnel was too far from town for any group of stupid teens to have gotten lost in it and died. Or broken a leg. Or smoked pot. Or knocked up some poor straight-A student and set the town afire with moral certainty and antitunnel evangelizing. 

Or maybe the lack of tunnel interest was because of Blue Hoffman. And the rumors. We all came to stop in front of the tunnel and stood there, staring, like four people facing down an old foe. 

“You know,” Luke said, “no one even knows how far back that thing goes. I say we men skip the grocery store and go check it out. What do you think, River? Should we send the girls to get us food while we go exploring?” 

Sunshine groaned. “Right. I’m a girl, so I’m too scared to go in the tunnel. Screw you, Luke.” 

“They say a lunatic lives in there,” I said, turning to River. I put my hands on my hips and swayed them a little so Freddie’s yellow skirt would move against my legs in an engaging sort of way.Then I realized it was something Sunshine would do, and stopped. 

“Go on,” River said, and he was smiling and his brown eyes were amused and cool, but also kind of dancing and eager. 

“The story’s been going around since we were kids, maybe longer,”I said.“There was a man named Blue Hoffman, who went to war and killed people. It made him crazy.He came home,and then kids starting disappearing. The cops finally went looking for Blue, but by that time he’d disappeared too. They never found the missing kids. They say Blue lives deep in the tunnel and keeps the missing kids as slaves, and they never see the sun, and they run around like bats in the dark, and they’ve gone practically blind, and they live on raw rat meat, and they’re all mad as the Devil.” 

Luke shook his head. “I can’t believe you remember all that, Violet. I stopped believing that story in kindergarten.” 

I shrugged, and refused to feel stupid.“It’s Echo’s own personal urban legend. It’s not about whether or not you believe it. You just have to keep the story going.” 

Despite what Luke said about not believing, I knew the tunnel scared him.It was so dark inside that a flashlight barely dented the blackness. And the thought of some poor missing kid with clammy white skin and halfblind milky eyes following you as you stumbled around, waiting for the right moment to drag a moist finger down your face before sinking two sharp bat-like teeth into your neck . . . well, it was enough to keep everyone, even my brother, out. 

Sunshine,Luke,and I had spent five summers together, counting this one, and we’d walked past the tunnel hundreds of times on our way into town, but not once had any of us gone in more than a few dozen feet. Not even that time last year when Sunshine dared me to go to the end, and then threatened to make out with Luke in front of me if I didn’t.They had kissed,a long,loud kiss,and
still
I didn’t go in, though I was squirming. 

The thing is, they both knew I was as un-touched and un-kissed as a nun, and they both figured that I probably preferred not to be. Besides, their kissing made things two against one all of a sudden, instead of all for one and one for all. 

But anyway, now River was watching and Luke was looking to impress and the tunnel was sitting right there. 

River shot an arm out and wrapped it around Sunshine. “How about me and Sunshine go check it out, while you two twins stay here and hold down the fort. What do you say,Sunshine? Should we try to find this rat-eating lunatic?” 

Sunshine grinned, and Luke looked pissed. I wasn’t happy, either. River led Sunshine to the mouth of the tunnel. They took one step in, and another, and then disappeared into the damn murk. 

Luke stomped around, his light skin turning pink in the heat, and his red-brown hair looking redder in the sun, like our dad’s.Finally he just lay down on the ground and looked up at the sky. 

I plopped down on the ground too, on a little bit of grass off the path, near the tunnel. I slipped off my flipflops and wondered what the hell River meant by taking Sunshine into the tunnel. Alone. 

Luke turned and blinked pissed-off hazel eyes at me. At my clothes.“I see you’re wearing Freddie’s skirt. Why do you do that? It’s weird, sister. It’s so damn weird. That thing looks a hundred years old. It makes you look crazy.”