Sharpie and lemons and rosemary.
All the things that were Lena.
TRY.
I will, L.
I promise.
CHAPTER 7
Crosswords
As I watched Link and Lena disappear toward Ravenwood, I knew there was one more place I needed to go, one person I had to see before I went back. She owned Wate’s Landing more than any Wate ever would. She haunted that place even in full flesh and blood.
Part of me was dreading it, imagining how torn up she must be. But I needed to see her, all the same.
Bad things had happened.
I couldn’t change that, no matter how much I wanted to.
Everything felt wrong, and even seeing Lena didn’t make it feel right.
As Aunt Prue would say, things had gone cattywampus.
Whether in this realm or any other, Amma was always the one person who could set me straight.
I sat on the curb across the street, waiting for the sun to go down. I couldn’t get myself to move. I didn’t want to. I wanted to watch the sun dip behind the house, behind the clotheslines and the old trees and the hedge. I wanted to watch the sunlight fade and the lights in the house go on. I watched for the familiar glow in my dad’s study, but it was still dark. He must be teaching at the university, as if nothing had happened. That was probably good, better even. I wondered if he was still working on his book about the Eighteenth Moon, unless restoring the Order had brought an end to that, too.
There was a light in the kitchen bay window, though.
Amma.
A second light flickered through the small square window next to it. The Sisters were watching one of their shows.
Then, in the dwindling light, I noticed something strange. There were no bottles on our old crepe myrtle. The one where Amma hung empty, cracked glass bottles to trap any evil spirits that happened to float our way and to keep them from getting in our house.
Where could the bottles have gone? Why wouldn’t she need them now?
I stood up and walked a little closer. I could see through the kitchen window to where Amma sat at our old wooden table, probably doing a crossword. I could imagine the #2 pencils scratching, could almost hear them.
I crossed the lawn and stood in the driveway, just outside the window. For once I figured it was a good thing no one could see me, because peeping in windows at night in Gatlin is what made even decent folks want to get out their shotguns. Then again, there were lots of things that made folks around here want to get out their shotguns.
Amma looked up and out into the darkness, like a deer in the headlights. I could have sworn she saw me. Then real headlights flashed behind me, and I realized it wasn’t me Amma was looking at.
It was my dad, driving my mom’s old Volvo. Pulling right through me and into the driveway. As if I wasn’t there.
Which, in a whole lot of ways, I wasn’t.
I stood in front of the house that I had spent so many summers repainting, and reached out to touch the brushstrokes next to the door. My hand slipped partway through the wall.
It disappeared inside, kind of like when I shoved it through the Charmed door of the Lunae Libri, the one that only looked like a regular old grating.
I pulled my hand out and stared at it.
Looked fine to me.
I stepped closer, into the side wall of the house, and found myself trapped. It kind of burned, like walking into a lit fireplace. I guess slipping my hand through was one thing, but getting my body into the house was another.
I went around to the front door. Nothing. I couldn’t even kick a foot partway through. I tried the window above the kitchen table, and the one over the sink. I tried the back windows and the side windows and even the cat door that Amma had installed for Lucille.
No luck.
Then I figured out what was going on, because I went back to the kitchen window and saw what Amma was doing. It wasn’t the New York Times crossword puzzle, or even The Stars and Stripes one. She had a needle, not a pencil, in one hand, and a square of cloth instead of paper in the other. She was doing something I’d seen her do a thousand times, and it wasn’t going to improve anyone’s vocabulary or keep anyone’s mind New York City sharp.
It had to do with keeping people’s souls safe—Gatlin County safe.
Because Amma was sewing a little bundle of ingredients into one of her infamous charm bags, the kind I had found in my drawers and beneath my mattress and sometimes even in my own pockets. Considering that I couldn’t step foot in the house, she must have been sewing them nonstop since I jumped off the water tower.
As usual, she was using her charms to protect Wate’s Landing, and there was no getting past any one of them. The salt snaking its way across the windowsill was even thicker than usual. For the first time, there was no doubt that her crazy protections kept our house haint-free. For the first time, I noticed the strange glow of the salt, as if whatever powered it leaked into the air around the windowsills.
Great.
I was rattling the screen out back, when I caught a glimpse of the stairwell leading down to Amma’s canning pantry. I thought about the secret door at the back of that little room of storage shelves, the one that had probably been used for the Underground Railroad. I tried to remember where the tunnel came out—the one where we’d found the Temporis Porta, the magical door that opened into the Far Keep. Then I remembered the tunnel’s trapdoor opening to the field across Route 9. It had gotten me out of the house before; maybe it could get me in this time.
I closed my eyes and thought about that spot, as hard as I could. It didn’t work before, when I’d tried to imagine myself somewhere. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t try again. My mom said that’s how it worked for her. Maybe all I had to do was picture myself somewhere hard enough, and I’d find my way there. Kind of like the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz—only without the actual slippers.
I thought about the fairgrounds.
I thought about the cigarette butts and the old weeds and the hard dirt with the imprints of long-gone carnival booths and trailer hitches.
Nothing happened.
I tried again. Still nothing.
I wasn’t sure how your average Sheer did it. Which left me ten kinds of stuck. I almost gave up and walked, figuring if I could make it out to Route 9, I could hitch a ride on the back of an unsuspecting pickup truck.
Just when it seemed impossible, I thought about Amma. I thought about wanting to get inside my house so badly I could taste it, like a whole plate of Amma’s pot roast. I thought about how much I missed her, how I wanted to hug her, take a good scolding, and untie her apron strings, like I had my entire life.
The minute those thoughts formed clearly in my mind, my feet started to buzz. I looked down, but I couldn’t see them. I felt like a seltzer tablet someone had dropped into a glass of water, like everything around me was starting to bubble and fizz.
Then I was gone.
I found myself standing in the tunnel, right across from the Temporis Porta. The ancient door looked as forbidding to me in death as it had in life, and I was happy to leave it behind as I made my way through the tunnel and toward Wate’s Landing. I knew where I was going, even in the dark.
I ran the whole way home.
I kept running until I shoved my way through the pantry door, up the stairs, and into the kitchen. Once I got past the problem of the salt and the charms, the walls didn’t seem like a big deal—or feel like much of one either.
It was like walking in front of one of the Sisters’ endless slide shows, where you step in front of the projector during the hundredth photo of the cruise ship, and suddenly you look down and the ship is cruising right over you. That’s what a wall felt like. Just a projection, as unreal as a photograph from someone else’s trip to the Bahamas.
Amma didn’t look up as I approached. The floorboards didn’t squeak for the first time ever, and I thought about all the times I would’ve appreciated that—when I was trying to sneak out of that kitchen or my house, out from beneath Amma’s watchful eye. It required a miracle, and even then it usually didn’t work.
I could have used a few Sheer skills back when I was alive. Now I would give anything for someone to know I was actually here. Funny how things work out like that. Like they say, I guess you really do have to be careful what you wish for.
Then I stopped in my tracks. Actually, the smells coming from the oven stopped me.
Because the kitchen smelled like Heaven, or the way Heaven should smell—since I was thinking about it a lot more these days. The two greatest smells on earth. Pulled pork with Carolina Gold, that was one of them. I’d know Amma’s famous golden mustard barbeque sauce anywhere, not to mention the slow-cooked pork that gave up and fell to pieces at the first touch of a fork.
The other smell was chocolate. Not just chocolate, but the densest, darkest chocolate around, which meant the inside of Amma’s Tunnel of Fudge cake, my favorite of all her desserts. The one she never made for any contest or fair or family in need—just for me, on my birthday or when I got a good report card or had a rotten day.
It was my cake, like lemon meringue was Uncle Abner’s pie.
I sank into the nearest chair at the kitchen table, my head in my hands. The cake wasn’t for me to eat. It was for her to give, an offering. Something to take out to Greenbrier and leave on my grave.
The thought of that Tunnel of Fudge cake laid out on the fresh dirt by the little wooden cross made me want to throw up.
I was worse than dead.
I was one of the Greats, but a whole lot less great.
The egg timer went off, and Amma pushed back her chair, spearing the charm bag with her needle one last time and letting it drop to the table.
“Don’t want your cake to dry out now, do we, Ethan Wate?” Amma yanked open the oven door, and a blast of heat and chocolate shot out. She stuck her quilted mitts in so far I worried she was going to catch fire herself. Then she yanked out the cake with a sigh, almost hurling it onto the burner.
“Best let it cool a bit. Don’t want my boy burnin’ his mouth.”
Lucille smelled the food and came wandering into the kitchen. She leaped onto the table, just like always, getting the best vantage point possible.
When she saw me sitting there, she let out a horrible howl. Her eyes caught me in a fixed glare, as if I’d done something deeply and personally offensive.
Come on, Lucille. You and me, we go way back.
Amma looked at Lucille. “What’s that, old girl? You got somethin’ to say?”
Lucille yowled again. She was ratting me out to Amma. At first I thought she was just trying to be difficult. Then I realized she was doing me a favor.
Amma was listening. More than listening—she was scowling and looking around the room. “Who’s there?”
I looked back at Lucille and smiled, reaching out to scratch her on the top of her head. She twitched beneath my hand.
Amma swept the kitchen with her eagle eye. “Don’t you be comin’ in my house. Don’t need you spirits comin’ around. There’s nothin’ here left to take. Just a lot a broken-down old ladies and broken hearts.” She reached slowly toward the jar sitting on the counter and took hold of the One-Eyed Menace.
There it was. Her death-defying, all-powerful wooden spoon of justice. The hole in the middle looked even more like an all-seeing eye tonight. And I had no doubt it could see, maybe as well as Amma. In this state—wherever I was—I could see plain as day that the thing was strangely powerful. Like the salt, it practically glowed, leaving a trail of light where she waved it in the air. I guess things of power came in all shapes and sizes. And when it came to the One-Eyed Menace, I’d be the last one to doubt anything it could do.