I followed the sound of their voices back through the hall. Lucille was sitting at the other end waiting for me, her head tilted to the side. She sat straight like that until I was inches away from her, and then she stood up and sauntered off.
Thanks, Lucille.
She’d done her job, and she was through with me. Probably had a saucer of cream and a fluffy pillow waiting for her in front of the television.
I guessed I wasn’t going to be able to spook her again.
As I rounded the corner, my dad was pouring himself a glass of sweet tea. “Did Ethan call?”
Amma stiffened, her cleaver poised over an onion, but my dad didn’t seem to notice. She started chopping. “Caroline has him busy waitin’ on her. You know how she is, classy and sassy, just like her mamma was.”
My dad laughed, his eyes crinkling in the corners. “That’s true, and she’s a terrible patient. She must be driving Ethan crazy.”
My mom and Aunt Prue weren’t kidding. My dad was under the influence of a serious Cast. He had no idea what had happened. I wondered how many of Lena’s family members it took to pull this off.
Amma reached for a carrot, lopping the end off before she even got it on the cutting board. “A broken hip’s a lot worse than the flu, Mitchell.”
“I know—”
“What’s all that racket?” Aunt Mercy called from the living room. “We’re tryin’ ta watch Jeopardy!”
“Mitchell, get on in here. Mercy’s no good at the music questions.” It was Aunt Grace.
“You’re the one who thinks Elvis Presley is still alive,” Aunt Mercy shot back.
“I most certainly do. He can dance himself a mean jive,” Aunt Grace shouted, catching every third word at best. “Mitchell, hurry on up. I need a witness. And bring some cake with you.”
My dad reached for the Tunnel of Fudge cake on the counter, still warm from the oven. When he disappeared down the hall, Amma stopped chopping and rubbed the worn gold charm of her necklace. She looked sad and broken, cracked like the bottles lined up on the shelves in her bedroom.
“Be sure and let me know if Ethan calls tomorrow,” my dad shouted from the living room.
Amma stared out the window for a long time before she spoke, barely loud enough for me to hear. “He won’t.”
CHAPTER 9
The Stars and Stripes
Leaving Amma behind was like stepping away from a fire on the coldest night of winter. She felt like home, safe and familiar. Like every scolding and every supper I’d ever had, everything that had been me. The closer I was to her, the warmer I felt—but in the end, it made the cold feel that much colder when I walked away.
Was it worth it? Feeling better for a minute or two, knowing that the cold would still be out there waiting?
I wasn’t sure, but for me it wasn’t a choice. I couldn’t stay away from Amma or Lena—and deep down, I didn’t think either one of them wanted me to.
Still, there was a silver lining, even if it was a little tarnished. If Lucille could see me, that was something. I guess it was true what people said about cats seeing spirits. I just never figured I would be the one to prove it.
And then there was Amma. She hadn’t exactly seen me, but she’d known I was there. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I had been able to show her, just like I’d been able to show Lena I was at my grave.
It was exhausting, taking a chunk out of a cake or moving a button a few inches. But it had gotten the message across.
In a way, I was still here in Gatlin, where I belonged. Everything had changed, and I didn’t have the answers for how to fix that. But I hadn’t gone anywhere, not really.
I was here.
I existed.
If only I could find a way to say what I really wanted to say. There was just so much I could do with a Tunnel of Fudge cake and an old cat and a random charm on Lena’s necklace.
To tell you the truth, I was feeling downright woebegone. As in, stuck in the doldrums without a map, Ethan Wate.
W. O. E. B. E. G. O. N. E.
Nine across.
That’s when it came to me. Not so much an idea as a memory—of Amma sitting at our kitchen table, all hunched over her crossword puzzles with a bowl of Red Hots and a pile of extra-sharp #2 pencils. Those puzzles were how she kept things right, figured things out.
In that moment it all came together. The way I saw an opening on the basketball court or figured out the plot at the beginning of a movie.
I knew what I had to do, and I knew where I had to go. It was going to require a little more than scooping out a cake or pushing around a button, but not much more.
More like a few strokes of a pencil.
It was time I paid a visit to the office of The Stars and Stripes, the best and only newspaper in Gatlin County.
I had a crossword puzzle to write.
There wasn’t a single grain of salt lining any window at The Stars and Stripes office, any more than there was a single grain of truth in the paper itself. There were, however, swamp coolers in every window. More swamp coolers than I had ever seen in one building. They were all that remained of a summer so hot that the whole town had almost dried up and blown away, like dead leaves on a magnolia tree.
Still, no charms, no salt, no Bindings or Casts or even a cat. I slipped in as easy as the heat had. A guy could get used to this kind of access.
Inside the office, there wasn’t much more than a few plastic plants, a reenactment calendar that hung crookedly on the wall, and a high linoleum counter. That’s where you stood with your ten dollars when you wanted to put an ad in the paper to hawk your piano lessons or new puppies or the old plaid couch that had been sitting in your basement since 1972.
That was about it until you got behind the counter, where three little desks stood in a row. They were covered with papers—exactly the papers I was looking for. This was what The Stars and Stripes looked like before it became an actual newspaper—when it was still something closer to the town gossip.
“What are you doing in here, Ethan?”
I turned around, startled, my hands up at my sides as if I’d just been busted for breaking and entering—which, in a way, I had.
“Mom?”
She was standing behind me in the empty office, on the other side of the counter.
“Nothing.” It was all I could say. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She knew how to cross. After all, she was the one who’d helped me find my way back to the Mortal realm.
Still, I hadn’t expected to find her here.
“You’re not doing ‘nothing,’ unless you’ve decided to become a journalist and report on life from the Great Beyond. Which, considering how many times I tried to get you to join the staff of The Jackson Stonewaller, doesn’t seem likely.”
Yeah, okay. I had never wanted to eat my lunch in there with the school newspaper staff. Not when I could be in the lunchroom with Link and the guys from the basketball team.
The things I thought were important back then seemed so stupid now.
“No, ma’am.”
“Ethan, please. Why are you here?”
“I guess I could ask you the same question.” My mom shot me a look. “I’m not looking for a job at the paper. I just want to help out on one little section.”
“That’s not a good idea.” She spread her hands on the counter in front of me.
“Why not? You were the one sending me all those Shadowing Songs. It’s practically the same thing. This is just a little more—direct.”
“What are you planning to do? Write Lena a want ad and publish it in the paper? ‘Wanted, one Caster girlfriend. Preferably named Lena Duchannes’?”
I shrugged. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it could work.”
“You can’t. You can barely pick up a pencil in this realm. You don’t have physics working on your behalf as a Sheer. Around here, picking up a feather is harder than dragging a two-by-four down the street with your pinkie.”
“Can you do it?”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
I looked at her meaningfully. “Mom, I want her to know I’m all right. I want her to know I’m here—like you wanted to let me know when you left the code in the books in the study. Now I have to find a way to tell her.”
My mom walked around the counter slowly, without saying a word for a long minute. She watched as I moved across the room toward the piles of newsprint.
“Are you sure about this?” She sounded hesitant.
“Are you going to help me or not?”
She came and stood next to me, which was her way of answering. We began to read the next issue of The Stars and Stripes, laid out all over every surface. I leaned over the papers on the nearest desk. “Apparently, the Ladies Auxiliary of Gatlin County is starting a book club called the Read & Giggle.”
“Your Aunt Marian is going to be thrilled to hear that; the last time she tried to start a book club, nobody could agree on a book, and they had to disband after the first meeting.” My mom had a wicked glint in her eye. “But not until they voted to spike the lemonade with a big box of wine. Just about everyone agreed on that.”
I kept going. “Well, I hope the Read & Giggle doesn’t end up the same way, but if it does, don’t worry. They’re also starting a table tennis club called the Hit & Giggle.”
“And look at that.” She pointed over my arm. “Their supper club is called the Dine & Giggle.”
I stifled a laugh, pointing. “You missed the best one. They’re renaming the Gatlin Cotillion to—wait for it—the Wiggle & Giggle.”
We went through the rest of the paper, having about as good a time as two Sheers stuck in a small-town newspaper office could ask for. It was like a scrapbook of our life together, all glued onto a whole bunch of newsprint. The Kiwanis Club was getting ready for its annual pancake breakfast, where the pancakes were raw and liquid in the middle, the way my dad liked them best. Gardens of Eden had won Main Street Window of the Month, which it did pretty much every month, since there weren’t all that many windows on Main anymore.
It only got better as we read on. A wild hen was roosting in the Santa’s sled that Mr. Asher had put up as part of his light-up lawn display, which was awesome, because the Ashers’ holiday displays were infamous. One year Mrs. Asher even put lipstick on Emily’s Baby Cuddles Jesus because she didn’t think his mouth showed up well enough in the dark. When my mom tried to ask her about it with a straight face, Mrs. Asher said, “You can’t just expect to shout hosannas and have everyone get the message, Lila. Lord have mercy, half the folks around here don’t even know what hosanna means.” When my mom pressed her further, it was obvious Mrs. Asher didn’t either. After that, she never invited us to her house again.
The rest of it was the news you’d expect around here, the kind that never changed even when it always changed. Animal Control had picked up a lost cat; Bud Clayton had won the Carolina Duck-Calling Contest. The Summerville Pawnshop was running a special, Big B’s Vinyl Siding and Windows was shutting down, and the Quik-Chik Leadership Scholarship competition was heating up.