Between the Spark and the Burn (3 page)

“Night, Violet.”

I didn't fall asleep, though. My mind raced with thoughts of devil-boys and heroes and River and not-River. I picked up Freddie's diary and started to read. My new necklace kissed the skin of my neck, and Neely's soft breaths whispered to me from across the room.

This time I got a whole lot further than the first sentence.

September
Can still feel Will's lips on me. On my neck, stomach, back, hips, thighs.

If his burn is bad, if he is bad, then why does he feel so good?

It wasn't the first time. I can't talk about the first time yet. Because it all happened, everything all at once—the burn, the pain, the pleasure, the fear—and it's still jumbled up inside of me. I was a fairy-tale girl locked in a tower, waiting for the white knight to save her, but taking the first burned-up boy that came along.

Glenship Manor. The library. The smell of books mixing with the smell of Will. His brown-sugar-scented slicking-back pomade. The citrus-smelling cologne he slapped on his beautiful face. The sea salt deep in his skin.

Lucas's steps. While we were behind the green curtains. I knew it was him. I knew it by the way he walked. Soft, but determined. If he'd guessed where we were, and what we were doing, he was smart enough to leave it alone. He was smart enough to know he didn't want to know.

Lucas.

Lucas.

Your love is gentle. Gentle as cool night breezes on hot skin. I wish I could absorb your gentle love and send it right back to you. But I can't.

I knew Will Redding would be beautiful. He was pretty at fifteen, prettier than me. But then he grew, and his soft angles sharpened. And now looking at him . . . I almost hate him, he's so damn breathtaking.

He's using the burn more and more. It's stealing his mind, his wits, his sanity, bit by bit. I feel the loss of them, small but tangible, like a missing button in the middle of a shirt.

What will happen if he doesn't stop? If we don't stop?

But then he kisses me, and I stop caring.

Even when he's done kissing me, sometimes I still don't care, not for hours.

Or days.

I'd do it again. I'd do it this minute if he asked me. With or without his burn.

I don't even care.

October

Chase never knew, about Will, and the burn. Not for certain. Though if he'd been observant, like Lucas, he would have guessed that All Was Not Right. But paying close attention had never been Chase Glenship's strong point.

One brisk, clear night, Chase and Will had some of their friends up from New York City—other Bright Young Things. They came up on the train and we threw an All Hallows' Eve party. The moon was big and fat and full and orange-er than pumpkins. Its bright glow made the night midnight blue, instead of boring old black. We ignored the Glenship's electricity and lit hundreds of candles until the swanky ole place was singing with light, all the long, tall windows glowing like the harvest moon above.

We dressed in costumes and painted the subterranean walls of the Glenship. In the lower levels, off the stone tunnels that led to the swimming pool and the bowling alley, there was a nothing room with no purpose. We splashed paint and filled up every last corner with green, blue, white, yellow, red, orange, black. Chase set up his Ouija board and gave us all the heebie-jeebies when he called up the spirits and they answered. Everyone went mad with fear and ran around howling with it. I gave myself up to three Aviations before the gin took hold and I fell into the pool. Lucas rescued me, but it was Will who helped me out of my wet clothes and into bed.

I loved him. God help me, I loved him more than a girl has ever loved a boy. More than anyone has ever loved anyone.

I slid out of bed. I grabbed a flashlight from my dresser, climbed the stairs to the third floor, went past Luke's bedroom, and entered the former-ballroom-now-an-art-gallery. I went first to the painting of my grandfather, and switched on the flashlight. It was the flower-lapel-cigar portrait. Once upon a time I thought I looked like Lucas White. Just a little bit. I'd go to the ballroom and stare at him and the proud way he tilted his chin . . . I tilted my chin up just like that. Didn't I? I had that same noble gaze. Didn't I?

But then I found some letters last summer, letters to Freddie, and learned some things about my grandmother, about her affair with an auburn-haired painter, and I guess those similarities between Lucas White and me were just the imaginings of an ex-wealthy, ex-grandmothered girl hoping to find blood and clan and kinship where none actually existed.

It took me a few minutes to find the other painting. A Freddie nude, an early one. She sat on the floor, one leg up and one elbow on her bent knee, looking directly at the viewer. I hadn't been able to place the background before—it wasn't the Citizen, or the guesthouse.

Two men stood near her, fully clothed. I'd never known who they were, until now. I stood on tiptoe and grasped at the bottom of the frame with my fingertips until I got it off the wall. Then I sat down on the ballroom floor and held the square, fifteen-by-fifteen-inch frame in my lap.

The setting was the Glenship attic. I was sure of it. I'd been inside Glenship Manor since I'd last taken a good look at this picture. The abandoned mansion was full of dust and dirt and cobwebs, but you could still see it, see its grandness, like the Citizen's. The way it stood arrogantly at the other edge of town, near the sea, like it had been cast off by Echo but couldn't have cared less, hadn't even noticed, in fact.

Yes . . . I was sure. That was the attic. The pointed roof. The heavy wooden beams. The air of architectural confidence.

One of the boys in the painting was Chase Glenship. Tall. Delicate, aristocratic features. An unruly look in his eyes. He was the boy that River and Neely's grandfather Will Redding had wanted Freddie to marry . . . even though Will Redding had been in love with Freddie himself.

Chase was also the bright-eyed eldest son who had killed a girl in the Glenship cellar with a knife. That girl had been Rose Redding, Will's sister. River and Neely's great-aunt. She was only sixteen when she died.

Rose was buried in my family's mausoleum in the Echo cemetery. That had been Freddie's doing.

My grandmother's life had more twists and turns and tangles than even I'd guessed. And I'd known her better than anybody.

Hadn't I?

I leaned over the painting, so close that my nose almost touched Freddie's bare torso. A lean boy with wavy brown hair and brown eyes stood next to Chase. Will Redding. He had a straight nose and a crooked smile and he looked so much like River that it made me feel melancholy.

It had all happened before. And it would all happen again.

Where had I heard that line before?

Some fairy tale, maybe.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I told Luke and Sunshine that Neely and me were going Devil hunting in Virginia.

“Devil hunting. Right.” Luke smirked at me and sipped at his cup of steaming espresso. “As if that devil-boy story is true, sister. You just want to go on a road trip with Neely. Well, I want to go on a road trip too. Don't you, Sunshine?”

Sunshine's eyes went from Luke, to me, to Neely. And then she . . . fidgeted. Sunshine never fidgeted. But here she was, shifting from one foot to the other. “A winter road trip sounds fun. But I . . . I don't want to hunt any devils.”

Luke set his cup down, reached forward, and pulled Sunshine into him. “There aren't any devils. Vi is being melodramatic and paranoid and we are all humoring her because that's what you do to crazy people.”

I opened my mouth—

But Neely put his hand on my arm, and shook his head.

Sunshine was looking up at my brother, her eyes wide instead of hooded and sleepy like usual. Then she smiled her old, lazy smile. “All right,” she said. “A road trip does sound like fun. And I'll do anything to help out my poor, mad friend Violet.”

And even though Sunshine was smiling, I still saw it. The flicker behind her eyes.

I had a feeling Sunshine would regret her decision to come with, down the road. But it was her choice, and I let her make it.

It was fourteen hours to Virginia and we would take Neely's car. We would avoid the cities and spend one night on the road in the cold wilds of southeastern New York.

I wasn't even worried.

About what we would find, I mean.

I just wanted to do something. Go somewhere. Anywhere.

That's the kind of person I'd become.

≈≈≈

I stood outside in the snow as Luke and Sunshine loaded Neely's new BMW with gear cobbled together from the Citizen's cellar and Sunshine's house. I slipped in my brown suitcase—an old one of Freddie's—and a snow shovel, and a filled-to-the-brim picnic basket. We were going to camp. Yes, camp. Neely's father had frozen his credit cards and checking account in a failed attempt to get him to come home, and all I had was the origami money River had left me for a rainy day. There would be no four-star hotels for us.

Not that they had those where we were headed, anyway.

My parents came out to tell us good-bye. Luke said we were going to Virginia to inspire the muse, and they asked no follow-up questions, which was typical. Sunshine's parents put up more of a fight, one with quotes and big words and bookish hues, which was also typical.

Sam: “Sunshine, peanut, you are unaccustomed to traversing the wider world unaccompanied. While travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, as the wise man Twain once said, I still believe you are too young to go romping about in foreign places by yourself.”

Sunshine: “Dad, you are being very condescending.”

Cassie: “
Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room, and hermits are contented with their cells.
William Wordsworth. A brilliant man.”

Sunshine (batting her sleepy eyes): “Mom, I don't even know where to start with that one.”

A pause.

Sunshine:
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the road less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.”

Sam, to Cassie: “We've created a monster.”

Sunshine sealed the deal by telling them the road trip was for “personal edification about the Civil War” and they backed right down. Sunshine had never been very scholarly, but her parents were both librarians and readers and knowledge-seekers, and she knew how to hit them where it counted.

Jack was still sulking in his room. We weren't letting him come with. I wasn't going to put him within a hundred miles of Brodie, or anything that sounded like it could be Brodie. Not on my life. But at the last minute he ran down the steps of Citizen Kane and threw himself into my arms in a giant bear hug.

I was going to miss the kid, damn it.

Luke tried to take the front seat, but Sunshine made him get in the back with her. So I got to be up with Neely. I waved good-bye to Jack and my parents and the snow-covered fountain girls and the frostbitten Citizen Kane. The wheels beneath me crunched over snow and gravel. We turned out of the driveway, and it began.

River, I'm leaving the sea. Can you even picture me without the ocean nearby? We're going to Virginia. Maybe you're there right now. Maybe you're glowing up all of Inn's End even though you promised not to. We'll find you in a cemetery, making a group of kids see dragons or witches or madmen, and then Neely and you will get into a fight and then me and you will get into a fight . . . But then we'll both forgive you because we always do. You'll make espresso and tell me some lie about how you own an island in the middle of the ocean where children run wild and live on nothing but coffee beans and I'll half believe you and then you'll lean over and kiss my neck and I won't care about anything anymore.

We listened to Billie Holiday and Skip James and Robert Johnson and Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt, and the white snow and brown, bony trees went on and on.

When we started curving away from the coast, I felt it. The tug that meant I was leaving the sea behind.

Freddie took Luke and me on a trip to Montreal when I was little. She went to visit an old friend and we were taken along to “experience some culture.” I remember feeling the tug back then too, when we started going inward . . . like the moon pulling in the tides. If you're born near the sea, you're bound to it for life, I guess.

We stopped in a couple of quiet small towns to stretch our legs. We ate lunch sitting on the freshly shoveled steps of a small white church in some quaint Connecticut town. The sun was shining and it wasn't as cold as it could have been—it was warmer away from the ocean. I'd packed a lot of food in the large wicker picnic basket. Butter and radish sandwiches, and olives, and Gouda, and dark chocolate, and apples and pears, and all sorts of things. We cut pomegranates in half and ate the tart seeds with some of the small spoons that were strapped to the lid.

“This is fine Devil-hunting food, sis,” Luke said, and laughed. “I'll be ready to take on any number of hoof-footed devil-boys, after this.”

“It's not a joke,” I said, though I kind of felt like it was. There was something so impulsive, so careless, about picking up and going after the missing Redding boys based on nothing but some story on a late-night radio show. “River could be there. It could be him. This is as good a lead as any. Better than the tabloids, because the stories came from real people, not hack journalists. And even if it's not River, it could still be Brodie. Odds are it's probably one of them.”

Sunshine jerked when I said Brodie's name, and dropped her pink-red apple in the snow.

Brodie had made me take off my shirt and kiss him like I meant it and stand still while he slit my wrists and left me for dead. But Sunshine . . . Having your own sparked-up parents take a bat to your head, and beat you into a coma . . . that probably did something bad to a person, deep down inside.

Sunshine must have felt pretty sure we wouldn't find Brodie in Virginia, or she never would have come along.

“Don't listen to Vi,” Luke said, sliding his arm around Sunshine's hips and picking her apple out of the snow. “She'll believe anything.”

I scowled at that and Neely laughed. We sat in snowy silence for a few more minutes, and then Luke pulled Sunshine to her feet. They headed to the little cemetery by the church and began to point out the cool old names on the stones as they walked by.

I finished my pomegranate just as the bells started chiming above me. A sweet older couple walked by, all dressed up in their warm winter finery.

I looked over at Neely, and he had a glint in his blue eyes. It wasn't the “I'm up to no good” one that he shared with his older brother. It was a worried glint. An “I'm thinking a lot but saying little” glint.

But when Neely opened his mouth, all he said was, “I wish I had some coffee.”

He'd already finished off the thermos that we'd brought. I shrugged at him, and then he looked at me and smiled his Neely smile. His blond hair was blowing in the chilly breeze, as was mine. He had on a chunky brown sweater and expensive dark trousers, and was just sitting on the steps with an earth-green scarf around his neck, looking like he was posing for the cover of a magazine called
Wintry Rich Boys
.

I sat there a minute longer on the steps, and that was all it took for the restless feeling to start crawling up my insides again.

“Hey,”
I shouted at Luke and Sunshine.
“It's time to go hunt some devils.”

A local heard me as he was passing by, and raised his white eyebrows at me, but I just smiled at him until he smiled back.

I slid my mittens on—another gift from Sunshine's mom—and packed up the lunch. I didn't have the heart to throw the used-up pomegranate halves away. They looked so pretty, the bright coral color against the white snow. So I left them turned upside down by the church steps.

≈≈≈

It was cold. So damn cold.

We had three tents. Luke and Sunshine were sharing one and Neely and me had the other two. We were in a tree-filled campground somewhere north of Washington Irving territory. I was surprised it was even open—we were the only people there except for a shy caretaker in a small cabin near the entrance.

It was cold. But the stars were amazing.

Sunshine built the fire, and it roared out its voice into the quiet black night. Sunshine and I had gone camping a few times since the summer—after Brodie she'd begun to take an interest in the natural world and she'd started teaching herself wilderness survival. There was some correlation, I supposed, between what happened to Sunshine last summer, and her need to stare Mother Nature in the face. But she never spoke about any of it, not to me, so what did I know.

We sat on logs to keep ourselves out of the snow, and talked about little things like constellations and scary campfire stories from our childhoods. Our backs faced the dark and shivered, while our fronts faced the fire and glowed with warmth.

I pulled out Freddie's diary and started reading. Luke asked me what the hell it was, mainly because he was bored and probably hoped it was some torrid romance he could tease me about.

“It's my diary,” I told him, making sure to meet his eyes so he wouldn't think I was lying. “Oscar Wilde said he never traveled without his because one should always have something sensational to read.” I paused. “It's mainly a series of sonnets and free verse about my feelings for River . . . how our first kiss felt and how much I loved it when he held me in his arms. Things like that.”

Luke squinted his eyes and folded his mouth into an expression of pity mixed with disgust. And then he dropped the subject.

Neely knew I was lying, but he didn't flinch or wink or do one damn thing to give me away, bless his heart.

I'd shown Luke Freddie's letters last summer, after everything had quieted down. And it had kind of destroyed him for a while. I hadn't guessed how much he'd relied on her being everything he thought she was. He marched around the house and sulked for a good week. He even put away the small portrait he'd done of Freddie three years before she died. The one he'd always kept in his bedroom.

But at the end of the week it was back up again.

No, I wasn't going to tell him about the diary.

Before we went to sleep we crawled into the car so we could listen to
Stranger Than Fiction
with the heat cranked. But there was nothing of interest—an update on the teenage grave robbers in California, and two boys in Alaska who said their mother was in love with the ghost of a gold rusher who haunted their house.

“I'd rather be in California, looking for some corpse stealers,” Sunshine said, after I turned off the radio. “It would be warmer. And there would be wine. California is full of wine. Besides, grave-robbing is more interesting than dream-stealing mountain boys.”

“Robbers or devil-boys, what difference does it make?” Luke tugged his wool coat tighter across his big, stupid pecs, and buttoned it up to the top. “It's just lies, anyway. All we're going to find in Inn's End is some backward town with no plumbing where the prettiest girl is the one with all her teeth. Count on it.”

Neely grinned. “You know, I once heard a story that kids in a town named Echo were hunting the Devil in the local cemetery.”

“I heard that story too,” I said, staring Luke down, rubbing it in. “Turns out it wasn't really a lie.”

My brother's eyes narrowed, but he didn't answer. He opened the car door and got out. The cold wind burst in and I shivered so hard I bit my tongue.

We left the fire blazing when we went to bed, and I huddled in my sleeping bag, watching the flames dancing outside the wall of my tent because it was too damn cold to sleep. I had thick wool socks on and black tights under a wool skirt and a cardigan, plus my scarf and mittens. The sleeping bag was Sunshine's, and it was high-tech and built for low temps, and
still,
I was cold to my bones. The snow underneath the tent seeped up and into me like icy fingers pushing at my skin.

I opened my mouth and watched my breath fog in the air.

And then the howling started.

Wolves. Or coyotes. But probably wolves.

They sounded close.

There was a light on in Neely's tent and he was sitting up when I unzipped the front flap and let myself in.

“Hey, Violet,” he said, and laughed his low, chuckling laugh. “Was it the cold or the howling?”

“Both,” I said back.

“Don't worry. Wolves don't attack people.”

I shrugged. “Have you ever read that part in
My Antonia
about Russia, and the bridal party, and the wolves? Maybe we should go sleep in the car.”