Willa’s nightshade was more dangerous than most. Her tears could fill oceans if she let them. They could drown men and overflow rivers and turn the forest to water.
The depth of Jackjaw Lake was forever unknown after that day, and Willa’s mother made her carry a handkerchief wherever she went, the thin cotton meant to catch every teardrop that fell from her cheeks. To prevent the world from drowning.
Willa fell in love twice, and twice suffered a broken heart.
She died on the second night of Beltane, after her twenty-third birthday. Cause unknown.
Cure for Heartache & Unexplainable Weeping Fits:
Two pinches skullcap
Powder of lemon balm and Saint-John’s-wort
Nectar from a milk thistle bee
One horsehair, burnt at both ends
Combine in wooden mortar. Drink or place beneath tongue.
NORA
Ishouldn’t care.
It shouldn’t matter that Oliver was gone from the couch when I woke and came downstairs—just like the morning after I found him inside the woods.
But still, I stand on the porch looking out at a trail of deep footprints cut through the fresh layer of snow, veering around the twin pines that stand guard beside my house, then wandering down toward the lake. A ripple of déjà vu passes through me, just like before—the snow falling in familiar waves, every blink of my eyelashes is a second I’ve feltonce, twicebefore. Time swivels and then lurches back into place.
Tick, tick, thud.
I steady myself against the porch railing, hands gripping the cold wood, and focus back on the footprints leading through the snow.
This is the second time he’s slipped out of the house while I slept, and maybe I should feel angry. But something nags at me instead, a disquiet that won’t go away—a pulsing curiosity just behind my eyes that wants to follow his path, see where it leads. I can’t be sure what time he left the house, but when I touched his pillow, the scentof woods and earth still lingered against the cotton. Yet the warmth from his skin was long gone.
Fin trots down the porch steps and out into the snow, sniffing at the ground.
The sunrise is a sickly pale glow on the horizon, and maybe I shouldn’t follow his footprints, maybe I don’t want to know where he’s gone. Yet, I push my hands into my coat pockets and clomp down the steps into the snow anyway.
A boy is dead.And maybe Oliver decided to leave in the middle of the night, tried to hike down the road to town. He’ll never make it if he did. Or maybe he’s gone somewhere else. Perhaps he has other secrets he’s trying to hide—a deep well of them.
Fin leaps through the snow happily, trailing Oliver’s tracks, and when we reach the lake, the footprints turn left, toward the southern shore.
The air whirls with flecks of ice; the morning sky is velvet—like fabric that was handwoven, marred by deep clouds and imperfections. Not machine made. And Oliver’s path around the lake takes me to the small marina, where docks sit frozen in the ice, waiting for spring. Canoes rest with their bellies to the sky.
In summer, tourists converge on this side of the lake, children sprinting down the docks to fling themselves into the water, orange and cherry and watermelon Popsicles dripping onto toes and down sunburnt arms. Normal kids with normal lives—a thing I never knew. The air always smelling of sunblock and campfire smoke, the afternoons burning so brightly that nothing dark and shadowy can possibly survive.
But now, the boathouse store sits boarded up for the winter, aCLOSEDsign hanging crooked above the turquoise-blue door—the wind thumping it against the wood, athwap thwap thwapthat reminds me of a woodpecker searching for bugs in the trunks of spruce trees.
“Hello!” someone calls, and I whip around to face the lake.
Old Mr. Perkins is out on one of the docks, his green rain boots kicking through a layer of snow, the hood of his yellow slicker pulled up over his head—as if it were spring, as if the air were mild and drizzling.
“Morning,” I call back to him.
When Grandma was still alive, she and Mr. Perkins would often sit on the docks at sunset, chatting about the years that lay behind them—back before the tourists came, when you’d find gold on the bottom of your boots just walking around the shore, and fish swam in the lake as thick as mud. Now, from time to time, Mom and I will make the walk down to the marina to check on Mr. Perkins, especially in winter. We’ll bring along a thermos of hot cinnamon-apple tea, a sweet pumpkin cobbler straight from the oven, and jars of freshly sealed honey.
But this time, I haven’t brought pie.
Mr. Perkins tips his head to me, and in front of him is a broom he had been sweeping side to side, brushing the dock clean of the snow. An odd thing to be doing in winter. But Floyd Perkins has never been ordinary.
