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“He did?” Evie said, surprised. She didn’t imagine Will being sentimental about children. Funny the things you didn’t know about people until it was too late.
Evie waited until she was on Central Park West before turning on the flivver’s headlights, just in case anyone was watching. “Let’s get to Hopeful Harbor.”
“Hey, I thought we were going to Bountiful to find Sarah Beth,” Isaiah said.
“We are. But first we’re going to rescue Sam,” Evie said and pressed the gas so hard that Theta had to hold on to her hat.
NOT ALONE
Homestead, Kansas
Vera Mathers hurried to gather her laundry from the backyard clothesline before the rain set in. There’d been so much of it this spring. Every day, the papers reported on the swollen Mississippi River threatening to break through the levees from Cairo, Illinois, all the way down to New Orleans. This morning, there had been a nice April breeze, warm enough that Vera opened all the windows and hung the washing to dry on the line. Now, though, the back of her tongue tasted like a rusty nail
. The sky was graying up again. So Vera left her five-year-old daughter, Becky, upstairs in the nursery to play with her dollies while she came outside to tend to the wash.
Vera’s husband was a Fuller Brush salesman. He was on the road rather a lot. It was just Vera and Becky most of the time. Becky had been acting so funny lately. Sometimes the girl would stare off into nothing. Just yesterday, Vera had asked her what was so interesting about that spot on the wall and Becky had said “Ghosts,” then gone right back to staring until Vera told her to leave the table if she was going to act so silly.
Vera had put in a call to the doctor anyway—a mother couldn’t be too careful. He told her it was nerves; it would pass. Vera’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Mathers, had died ten months earlier from a broken neck. The old woman had tried to get out of bed in her room up in the attic even though she could barely walk. She’d fallen headfirst down the attic steps and was dead before she hit the bottom. Vera could still see the way her mother-in-law had looked, all broken in a heap. Her eyes open and that little gold cross she wore settled into the hollow of her throat. At the funeral, people said nice things about Mrs. Mathers (wasn’t that what you were supposed to do about the dead?). “Why, Vera, you are a saint, an absolute saint to have cared for that bedridden old woman all these years,” they told her with a sympathetic pat on the arm. Vera had thanked them and never let on how overjoyed she was to be lowering that witch and her little gold necklace into the ground once and for all. She’d hated her mother-in-law. Hated the way that thankless biddy complained about Vera’s housekeeping, hated how she’d wrinkle her nose when Vera brought up the breakfast tray, telling her that the milk tasted sour or the eggs were too soft or the coffee was weak.
Maybe Vera had forgotten to give the woman her heart pills that day. Maybe she’d even forgotten for a few days. Look here, she couldn’t be expected to remember everything, could she? What with Becky to raise and a house to run and her husband gone most of the time? Maybe she had taken too long to bring the old woman down to the toilet. Maybe she’d decided, this time, to ignore the woman’s grating voice shouting her name. Maybe that was why the old woman had gotten out of bed on her own and tried for the steps. If Vera was supposed to feel shame about it, well, she did not. The past ten months without that criticizing harpy had been some of the best of her life.
With the first crack of lightning, wind lifted the bed linens on the clothesline. Vera jumped back, startled. Somebody was standing out in the tall grass behind the house. With trembling hands, Vera parted the swaying sheets. The field was empty. Nothing but grass bending in the wind. But she could swear she’d seen him in the flash of light—a man in a tall black hat watching her with cold eyes, with hunger. Just the glimpse of him had given her the feeling of some unimaginable horror bearing down.
If her husband were home, she’d call for him. But he was in Topeka or Wichita or god only knows where with god only knows whom. She didn’t feel safe. Who did anymore? Just that week at bridge club, Mona Miller had said she’d felt a presence—yes, that was it, a presence—and she’d started locking the door and sleeping with a pistol by her bed. “This country’s going to the devil,” Mona had said, lips pursed. “Anyhow, that’s what Reverend Carden says, and I couldn’t agree more.”
Mona Miller, that little hypocrite. All those visits to the Reverend Carden while his wife was at her sister’s over in Lawrence? Did she think no one noticed?
A rumble of thunder brought Vera back to her task. The sky looked like a boxer’s face halfway through a fight, bruised and scowling, hinting at more violence. The laundry. Vera moved quickly, removing the clothespins and dropping the sheets into her basket, though her speed had less to do with the angry sky and more to do with some fear crawling up her spine, making her knees a little wobbly, fumbling her fingers. She had seen somebody; she was sure of it. She’d seen something.
Now, why did she think that? Why did she think what she’d seen wasn’t entirely human? Her heart was beating very hard. The clouds groaned. She hurried, tearing the clothes from their pins, not caring whether they wrinkled in the basket. Vera had made it to the very last sheet when the back door to the kitchen banged shut. She clutched the last sheet to her chest and watched as, one by one, the first-floor windows slammed closed—kitchen, then powder room, then sunroom. Vera stumbled backward with a cry. Because a gray blot passed behind the last of those windows. A thing so quick it registered to her mind as fog.
“It’s nothing,” she whispered. “You’re seeing things, Vera.”
She glanced fearfully at the second-floor windows, which were still open. The filmy white curtains of the nursery fluttered out and sucked back in on a snore of wind. Her little girl was upstairs in that nursery all alone. Not alone, Vera’s mind screamed. The house slid sideways as Vera fought not to faint. She did not want to go inside. She wanted to leave her child and run down the newly paved road to her neighbor’s house a mile away.
No. She was a mother. She had to go inside, had to get her girl.
Vera bolted for the back steps. Thunder growled, coming closer. It sounded like a living thing on the hunt. Vera tugged on the back door. The knob wouldn’t turn. It won’t let me in, she thought. Everything in Vera Mathers’s body went tight. She ran into the yard and screamed Becky’s name. Oh, where was her girl? The second-floor window in her bedroom squeaked down slowly with a deliberateness that she knew, deep down in the dark place where reason loses its voice, could not be blamed on the storm. It was as if some unseen force had pressed it shut. Vera ran around to the front porch. Before she’d even reached the porch steps, the front door opened with a sigh, as if welcoming her. Vera stared straight into the foyer, at the staircase leading up to the second floor, to the bedrooms out of sight, the nursery all the way up past the shadowy stairwell.
“B-Becky,” she said, barely a whisper. Then louder: “Becky! Rebecca Jean Mathers! You come downstairs this instant! Your mother wants to see you!”
The floorboards on the second-floor landing creaked.
“Becky! Becky Jean!”
The girl did not answer. Another sharp crack of thunder broke. Vera raced into the foyer and a gust of wind slammed the door shut behind her. The house was unnaturally still. Sealed like a tomb. Vera had never been so frightened. She wished her husband were home to tell her she was being ridiculous, wished he were going up the stairs instead of her. Her eyes came even with the second-floor landing. She peered around the banister. The door to the nursery was closed. She could hear the girl talking to her dolls. Vera tiptoed toward the nursery. This was the moment she thought she might die of fright. “Please, please,” she whispered. Vera burst into the room. The girl looked up, surprised. She had made a tea party for the dolls and was dressing the last one. The floor was littered with her daughter’s artwork, another mess to clean up.
“Rebecca Jean, didn’t you hear me calling you?” Vera sounded nearly hysterical.
The little girl continued to dress her dolly in its fine blue velveteen dress. “Yes, ma’am. But I needed to get Baby Lucy ready for the tea party.”
Vera’s fear transformed into anger. She had half a mind to turn Becky over her knee and spank her. Why, she would! The girl would learn to mind, by god. She took a step forward and stopped cold. Muddy streaks marred the clean floor. Clumps of dirt dotted the braided rug. There were worms crawling in all that dirt.
“Did you track all this dirt in on my clean floor, Rebecca Jean?”
“No, ma’am.”
Liar. The little liar. Oh, she would get such a whupping! Something shiny showed itself in all that dirt. Vera looked closer and clamped a hand over her mouth to stop the scream. She stumbled backward, away from the gold cross necklace on the rug. In horror, she took in the girl’s artwork on the floor: crude pictures of Vera hanging laundry on the line, and in the field beyond, under a sky full of blue lightning, was the man in the tall hat pulling the dead from their graves.
