Devil's Oven (2 page)

He was tall enough that he could watch her in the mirror as she scraped neat rows with the hand razor into the lime-scented lather. Her clear green eyes were serious, and her breath was light on his skin as she bent close, steadying herself against him. At the end of every row, she shook the lather off into the sink and tossed her head to keep her loose red curls back behind her shoulders.

With her slender legs so near, and her denim cutoffs tickling his back, he couldn’t resist reaching behind and running his hand up her delicious sculpted calf. But he paid for it when she jumped, squealing, and the razor sliced his skin.

Damn it, Bud! she said. That was your own fault.

You shouldn’t ought to put that so close to a man’s face, he said, sliding his hand up into her shorts.

Look, you’re bleeding, she said. Her voice was scolding, but she spread the remaining cream over the cut. In the mirror he could see a trail of pink foam above his right ear. It stung, but he would never tell her so.

You’re much better at other things, he said, tugging her shorts down over her hips to expose her white lace thong. Things I can’t do for myself.

•  •  •

In fact, Bud had a hard time denying anyone anything that sounded vaguely reasonable: Claude and the sales guys at the office, the rig drivers, Danelle the housekeeper. Everyone at The Twilight Club, the strip joint he had bought to diversify things a few years back when he was flush. Dwight, who managed the club for him, and the revolving cast of dancers and waitresses who worked there. They were all under his skin.

He knew too damn much about the women at the club: their childcare problems, eating disorders, abortions, drug habits. He felt for their lack of privilege and worried that they didn’t care enough about themselves. If they wept in front of him, as they so often did, he had to turn away so they wouldn’t see the emotion on his face. It was his greatest weakness, this emotion, and he knew it.

How many times had his old man mocked him, calling him a
goddamn nelly boy
? When he was a kid, it didn’t matter if he was standing at the end of the diving board, ready to show his dad the dives he had learned at summer camp, or suited up in his school uniform—navy blazer, gray wool slacks, shirt, and club tie—he had always felt naked and small around his father. Now his father, who had built a coal business from nothing, was eighty years old, and Bud, at forty-five, stood half a foot taller. He even shaved away his beard and the remains of his wiry blond hair every day so that there was nothing soft about him but his blue eyes and slight middle-aged paunch. But despite being bedridden, nearly deaf, and tended to by a nurse who changed his diapers, his father was still a bully who, with a single word, could make Bud feel like a loser.

If his father would go ahead and die, like the doctors had been predicting for the past three years, all Bud’s problems would be solved. Olney Tucker was a bastard, but he had never threatened to write his only child out of his will. Up to now, Bud had managed to hold out, keeping a reasonable cash flow going to cover the needs of the people who surrounded him, suffocated him. But he had really screwed up this time, and was going to have to get the old man to bail him out. And although he knew it was a stupid and juvenile thought, he wondered if it wasn’t what he deserved for all those times he had wished his father dead.

•  •  •

At the trucking office, Bud exchanged nods with Claude Dixon, who was at his desk talking earnestly into his telephone headset. He had hired Claude as a clerk, not knowing he would eventually turn into the best logistics guy Bud had ever had. Claude was thirty-nine, and still looked like a kid. The drivers and clients all liked him, loved his jokes. But his choice of a wife was a hell of a puzzle.

 Sheryl Dixon had graduated from Monroe Consolidated the year after Lila, had gotten a job at the Git ’n’ Go Mini-Mart and never left. Unlike Claude, who was skinny, tip-nosed, and always energetic, Sheryl was ponderous. She spent most of her time on a high stool behind the counter, maneuvering her bulk through the store’s narrow aisles only when she absolutely had to. She was only quick with her gossip. If it happened in Monroe County, Sheryl knew about it first. But when she and Claude stood side by side, they were a sight gag.

•  •  •

Bud closed the door to his private office and dialed Dwight’s cell phone. Dwight answered immediately.

“What’s up, boss?” It didn’t matter what time it was, or if he had spent a whole day and night working at the club, Dwight always sounded alert, ready for whatever came at him.

Sometimes Bud worried that Dwight was a little too alert, too ready to fix things.

“Hate to wake you, man.” Bud absently slid the framed snapshot of Lila on the deck of their beach condo out of his direct view.  Was there something he didn’t want her to hear? To see? Maybe he didn’t like the reminder that he couldn’t tell her everything. “I’ll be out of town for a day or so.”

“Sure,” Dwight said. He hesitated. “Truck business?”

They both knew better.

“I need to take care of some things,” Bud said. “It’ll all be fixed up when I get back.”

“Did something happen?” Dwight was agitated, as Bud had known he would be. “We can take care of it.”

“Just look after the club,” Bud said. He liked Dwight, appreciated him. But he had let Dwight’s enthusiasm get him in too deep. “When you do the payroll, be sure to slip an extra fifty into Skye’s envelope. Her mother’s in the hospital.”

“Bullshit,” Dwight said. “Skye’s jerking us around. I saw her old lady at the House of Waffles falling all over some drunk guy.”

When Bud didn’t respond right away, Dwight sighed.

“A day or two,” Bud said. As he hung up, he heard Dwight’s regretful
shit
on the other end of the line.

CHAPTER THREE

Ivy found Thora sitting on the front porch swing, smoking her morning cigarette. Thora didn’t look at her but kept staring out at the wet highway.

Despite her heavy frame, Thora’s face had retained its sharpness. She still had their father’s strong nose and blocky jaw. Her eyes were clear, always questioning, always interested. She kept her shoulders hunched forward, as though she were ashamed of her large bosom. With the exception of the fine cotton nightgowns that Ivy made for her, Thora wore mannish, unadorned clothes. Before her weight and diabetes had forced her to start using a cane, she had towered over Ivy, intimidating her both mentally and physically. But Ivy remembered that Thora had been almost pretty once. Certainly far prettier than Ivy had felt before her own harelip was repaired. Thora had had dignity. Thora had carried herself like a queen. The young Ivy had very much admired queens.

Ivy had only had a couple of hours’ sleep and she was anxious, but she made herself sit down on the top step and pretend she was getting on with her day and that her pulse wasn’t racing, ready to propel her off the porch and up the hill to the trailer.

 Anthony (that was his name, surely; the words
Saint Anthony
were tattooed in ornate blue and gold letters across his back, with a delicate white lily floating beneath them—
how perfect
) had begun to seem like a dream to her, but she clung to a grain of certainty that he was real. She even had the small bandage on her thumb as proof of how she had spent the night. When she left him, just before dawn, she had covered him with a light blanket in case he got cold. She tried to tell herself she was being silly, that he couldn’t feel anything.
Still. Just in case.

“What do you want for dinner tonight?” Ivy said. Sitting, she folded the sides of her wide skirt over her knees so it wouldn’t drag on the rain-spattered stoop.

 “I miss lamb chops,” Thora said. “We never have lamb chops anymore. When Daddy was alive, we used to have them all the time.”

“All you have to do is ask,” Ivy said. “The grocery lamb isn’t bad. We’ve got a package I picked up on sale a couple of weeks ago. And if you want fresh, the Hutsenpillars are sure to have lambs by now. There’s plenty of room in the big freezer.”

Thora took a final drag off the cigarette and stubbed it into the sand-filled bucket at her feet. As she blew out the last of the smoke, she began to cough. The brutal sound made Ivy want to cover her ears. It hurt her to see Thora struggling for breath. She had begun to need oxygen several times a day.

So many times in Ivy’s life she had wanted to get away, to make a life for herself without Thora around to tell her what to do all the time. But she couldn’t leave the mountain. Thora wouldn’t leave, either, even though she claimed to hate it. She said she didn’t believe the stories, even though she and Ivy—with Ivy’s mother’s disappearance, and their father’s suicide—had
become
one of the stories. Ivy suspected that Thora really did believe, and was just afraid. Afraid to stay, yet afraid to leave. A lot of people felt that way about Devil’s Oven.

Thora had been fifteen years old when her father married Ivy’s mother, and just twenty-one the year Ivy’s mother disappeared up on the mountain and Thora—
poor Thora!
—found their father hanging from a hickory tree not far off the trail. Ivy hadn’t seen it, but she had pictured it in her mind a thousand times. She knew the tree—one of their few maples, just out of view of the house. Her father had helped her climb it many times. Just a few branches up. Not too far.

Hold on, Ivy! Brace your feet. Look ahead to the next branch. And her mother: Not too high! Her father laughing, standing, watching, just beneath the limb where he would later die. He didn’t tell anyone why. Left no note.

Thora could have turned Ivy over to Child Services and walked away, but she hadn’t. Sympathy had gotten her a job at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where their father had worked, and she had spent the next several years giving Ivy a grudging, reluctant kind of care. Ivy could remember a time when Thora’s approval mattered very much.

“It’s not like I can’t cook,” Thora said. “I’ll call the Hutsenpillars myself.”

Ivy picked at some lint on her apron, thinking. Thora was always telling her she attracted bits of thread like metal to a magnet.

Finally, she got up and went into the house to retrieve her canvas barn jacket and mushrooming bag from the front closet. She had wasted too much time humoring Thora. She needed to get up to the trailer.

Thora watched her come back onto the porch, her brow furrowed in disapproval.

“I’m going for a walk,” Ivy said. She pulled her muck boots from the storage bench beside the door, and sat down on the bench to change into them. “After all this rain, there should be plenty of mushrooms. They’ll be good with chops.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Thora said, stabbing a forefinger at her. “You’re acting like a ten-year-old, getting in a snit and disappearing up to the trailer or up on the mountain. You think I haven’t noticed?”

Ivy tied the mushrooming bag around her waist and dropped the knife into her apron pocket. “The Phelps girl is coming at eleven so I can fit her wedding dress,” she said. “I’ll be back before then.”

“You can’t hide up there forever,” Thora said. “Things change. They can’t stay the same all the time.”

Ivy barely heard her. Looking out over the yard, she saw how the raindrops sparkled on the dormant grass. It was like she was seeing everything with new eyes.

•  •  •

Ivy’s heart pounded as she climbed the trail. She knew she could have gone inside the trailer right away, but she didn’t want to feed Thora’s suspicions. Thora was weak but not stupid. It took every ounce of willpower Ivy had to not look back to see if Thora was watching her.

When Ivy turned seven years old, Thora had finally let her go walking on the mountain alone, as long as she promised not to go past the dirt fire road that ran about a third of the way up the mountainside. After their parents were gone, Thora had refused to take her up there, and Ivy had almost lost her memories of it.

The fire road was about a fifteen-minute climb, but there were no other trails anywhere close to their land, no other occupied homes, only the stone remains of chimneys belonging to long-crumbled cabins, or bits of rough rope tied to trees from which some kind of shelter had hung. The woods were so quiet that she could always hear the state’s Department of Natural Resources trucks or hikers coming and had plenty of time to hide from them. As a child, she had pretended that the entire mountain belonged to her and her alone. Of course, it wasn’t long before she ventured beyond the fire road, and eventually to the top of the ridge. Over the years she had seen any number of black bears and four or five bobcats. The only things on Devil’s Oven that frightened Ivy were the abandoned dogs that roamed in packs, looking for food.

The trail was mucky but passable because the spring rains hadn’t yet begun in earnest. One year, after the rains, she’d had to spend weeks clearing the trail of fallen limbs and debris carried down the mountainside.

She crossed the fire road and walked east a little way toward the cabin site she had gone to so often with her mother. Almost two hundred years of curiosity seekers had kept it relatively free of brush and trees; you could still sit on the cabin’s smooth hearthstone. The site was supposed to be haunted, but it was also a good place to hunt for mushrooms.

•  •  •

It was a clump of false morels, dense and red as cock’s comb, growing close to a log that had led her to Anthony. They were often poisonous, but they were so beautiful that she couldn’t help but bend down to inspect them. The hand lying beside them was loosely covered with dirt. It wasn’t hard to tell what it was.

How strange!

And yet…

How many voices had she heard in the wind when she was on the mountain?

How many people—like her mother—had disappeared here, or lost their way, never to be seen again?