Chapter Two

The train gave a shrill whistle, huffed to life and belched out a thick cloud of white steam before lurching forward. Slowly, haltingly, it chugged through our small town, gaining speed and certainty until it broke free onto the open plains. As we passed each farm, children spilled from the small houses, chased along beside us until they could no longer keep up and fell away one by one. Faster still we moved, until the homes and farms and the land that I held dear were only a blur, a memory of a hope that I once carried in my heart. If only the train could go backward and deliver me to earlier, happier days. But I had to be more practical than to indulge in fantasy.

I looked around and saw in the faces of the passengers an assortment of suffering. I recognized the floral pattern from my dress on no less than three other women and felt a kinship with them. For all of us had a secret. Our dresses were cut from the cloth sacks of government flour, decorated just for the needy so that we might clothe ourselves.

We traveled a dull patchwork of bare earth fields stitched together with fences of barbed wire. Tumbleweeds huddled at the seams. The land was as ravaged as my own heart, my own faith in the world. I closed my eyes. I could take no more. Perhaps a fresh start would do me well. Perhaps the invitation from my aunt to live with her in Florida offered me a new beginning.

Uneasiness settled over me, a feeling that I was hurtling toward a murky future and that it was too late to change course. When night fell, I took solace in the darkness, in the sheet of glass that reflected back only my own likeness. Weary blue eyes, far too old for an eighteen-year-old, stared back at me. Hastily pulled-back hair, strands bleached white from the sun, formed a halo around my face. Smooth skin was the only sign of my youth.

Soon enough I slept. In the morning, the rising sun revealed a very different world than I was familiar with. The washed-out palette of the prairie was gone. Everything had turned from ashen brown into provocative shades of green. Trees were everywhere and vines tumbled from them. Lush grasses carpeted the fields. I marveled at how quickly things changed. The only constant was my uncertainty.

As the day wore on we grew closer and closer to our destination, and I opened the letter from my Great-Aunt Cleo. The words were written hurriedly and in an uneven scrawl that spread erratically across the paper.

∗ ∗ ∗

I will take Zara. She may be some comfort to me now that I am old. I am an old timer, not a penny to spare, even before the hard times came. There’s no running water or electricity. But if you’re in a bad way that doesn’t matter. Please remember to send the payments from your paychecks, cash if you can. I have stopped using banks since mine went under. From the train station, she should follow the road south until she comes to the bridge over the river. It is halfway down, and there is a sign with my name—Delaney.

Make sure she understands that once she crosses the bridge she is not to go to the gate, but come down the path. She must never go to the gate.

—Cleo

∗ ∗ ∗

I tucked the letter into my suitcase. My grandmother’s sister. I tried to remember my grandmother, but I could only recall vague memories of sitting in her lap before she died when I was seven.

Suddenly, our train came close to a great river. The land rose and fell in gentle hills, dotted by large oak trees whose limbs swung low to the ground. Every now and then we passed a copse of swampland, covered in cypress trees, their fists plunged into the dark water as if they hung on for dear life. The conductor came and let me know that we would soon arrive at my destination. I looked out the window again, at the secretive, tumbling foliage that would be my new world. I was surprised to find that I missed the simplicity of the prairie. The flat and broad land of the plains kept no secrets hidden, as I suspected this land did.

Finally, the train slowed down and then stopped, and I looked out the window at the lonely train station. It was more of a covered platform, and completely empty save for one man napping on a bench, a hat covering his eyes. He didn’t even bother to look up at the train, which told me he anticipated no passengers would disembark.

I saw a sign hanging from the wall. “Welcome to Suwannee, Florida, Fertilizer Capital of the World.” I stood and disembarked, and I was the only one to step from the train. A wave of moist heat enveloped me, and even though my coat hung limply in my arms, the heat was such that I could hardly stand to hold the coat any longer.

The small ticket window was shut tight. I hadn’t considered that possibility, and it caused a new worry as I had no real directions other than to follow a road to a bridge. Looking at the man, I saw he wore a police uniform. Though I didn’t want to be rude, with the sun dropping in the sky, I had no choice but to wake him and ask directions. He was stout, middle-aged and his uniform pulled tight across his chest.

It turned out that I didn’t need to wake him after all because as soon as I drew close, he pulled the hat away and squinted with one eye open and one closed. He ran his lazy gaze over me. I distrusted him right away. A man who can’t spare a full glance for a person doesn’t deserve my trust.

“What can I do for you, sugar?” he said in a low, rolling drawl.

“I’m sorry to wake you. I’m here to visit family. I’m hoping you could help me with directions.” I read the return address of the envelope aloud to him. “Do you know where that is?”

His other eye finally popped open. “Why are you headed that way?” Apparently, I said something that interested him and he sat straight up. “Don’t tell me you’re one of them?”

“One of whom?” I said. I didn’t understand his question, but I heard the anger in his tone, and something deeper beyond even that. “Do you question all visitors like this?”

“When they’re headed in that direction I do. That’s how I keep out the unwanted folk who come here for…ill reasons.” He took another look at me, and I felt uncomfortable.

“Ill reasons? I’m coming to live with my Grandmother’s sister. My great-aunt.”

“Your aunt?” He looked at me again. “Who’s your aunt?”

“Cleo Delaney.”

He laughed out loud, a huge guffaw that seemed almost obnoxious. “Thank God,” he said and laughed again. “Why didn’t you say so, sugar?”

I ignored his question and decided to ask for help once more. “If you could help me with some directions, I would appreciate it.”

“I’ll do one better than that.” His meaty fingers nabbed the hat from his chest and then with a flick of his hand he tossed it expertly on his head and tapped it into place. “I’ll escort you myself.” Then, he stood up and hitched his belt higher over his belly. “What did you say your name was again?”

“I didn’t.” I quickly shifted my suitcase and held out a hand. “Zara. Zara Pendleton.”

He took my hand in his, and it was clammy. “Pendleton. Hmm. Now I know exactly who you are. I read a letter to your aunt from your pa a few weeks back.” He scratched his forehead thoughtfully. ”

“Thank you, Sheriff, for offering to give me a ride.”

He led me to his police cruiser and opened the passenger door for me. We travelled north with the windows open. I marveled at the warm weather, and the thick trees all around us. We came to a river, the same large one I had seen from the train, I thought. He said, “Your great-aunt lives just off the river there, down past the bridge. I check in on her now and then and every Sunday I pick her up for church services.”

The river widened a bit, and the course of it drew farther away from the road. A brick fence, perhaps ten feet high, ran along beside the river. Far off in the distance, I could see a strange white spire piercing the sky. But if there was anything else to see, it was hidden behind the trees.

“What is that strange tower?” I asked.

“It’s hard to ignore, isn’t it?” the sheriff said. “That tower, sugar, is living proof that there are plenty of crazies in the world. That is the compound of the Lucians.”

“The what?” I asked

He laughed. “That’s what everybody says. Until they find out more about them. Their leader, a man named Navarre, fashions himself a reincarnated mythic god, and all his followers think he walks on air.”

We were getting close to the bridge now, but he slowed down and I could see his sinister delight in trying to scare me. “They’re heathens. They worship sins of the flesh. They dance beneath the moon. And if he wasn’t the most powerful man in the state, I’d have his ass up in Georgia, or out in the Gulf of Mexico, swimming with the fishes, if you know what I mean.”

I was confused. “How is he so powerful?”

“Dumb luck. He owns thousands of acres of junk land around here. Except, it turns out, it’s not worthless after all because underneath the ground they found deposits of phosphate.”

“Phosphate.” I thought he was about to say gold or silver, and I was surprised to hear the word phosphate.

“You know. Fertilizer. The whole world gets its fertilizer from this little town. And he owns almost all of it.”

We had come to the bridge. He stopped the car, turned and handed me my suitcase. “Here we are.”

“Thank you,” I said, opened the door. His arm shot out and grabbed me. “I will tell you this. Stay away from him. He eats pretty young girls for breakfast, I hear.” Without meaning to, I shook his hand from my arm and climbed from the car.

After I had slammed the door, he leaned across the seat. “Now, Zara,” he yelled after me, “once you cross the bridge, just take the road that doesn’t have the gate. Just to the left. Can’t miss it. You tell your aunt I said hello, and stay out of trouble.” The car peeled away and left me in a small cloud of dust.

∗ ∗ ∗

Those were the events that brought me to where I now stood, with my foot hovering over the first slat of a wooden bridge. Underneath me, a river, dark as coffee, slithered along. Sweat covered me from head to toe. I felt so very Northern at that moment, so out of place in the swampy Florida landscape. Still dressed for a brisk spring day in the plains in my woolen hose, and with my coat still hanging uselessly over my arm.

The bridge was exactly as my aunt described in her letter. Right at the curve in the road, and with a sign that read Delaney, her name and my mother’s maiden name. The bridge was crafted from old railroad ties, and the structure looked ancient as it stretched across the river. Just on the opposite bank the road forked in two directions. On one side, the road stretched on away from the marshy grasses at the bank of the river toward the trees—cypress and pine—which were hidden behind the fence and iron gate. My aunt was oddly clear, as was the sheriff, that I was not to go anywhere near the gate.

My path lay in the opposite direction and threaded from the grassy banks by the bridge, onto a raised knoll that wound beneath tree cover and then disappeared out of sight.

Tentatively, I stepped onto the first slat. Once my feet were over the water, a strange sensation settled over me. It was a feeling wholly unfamiliar, a sense of disconnect from the world. It made me very uneasy and my usual determination evaporated. I hesitated, and then wobbled, and fought the sudden urge to run back to the train station and spend the last of my money buying a return ticket home.

But, no, it was too late. Pulling my bag to my chest for balance, I tried again, and somehow made it halfway across before pausing to look around.

From my vantage point, I could see upriver, along its slow, snaking course. Trees crowded all the way to the edges of the bank. Only a bit farther north of the bridge, the river widened and part of it ran free over flattened ground. Even the aroma in the air was pungent and damp. In the middle of the bridge, unable to move, I simply gaped around like a fool, like a tourist in the city staring open-mouthed at all the sights.

Somewhere far off an engine rumbled. Another train, I thought to myself, and tried to focus on my balance. When there were only a few steps left, the rumbling grew louder, throatier, and I dared a quick glance in the direction it came from. A motorcycle sped along the road I had just walked down. The bike drew closer, slowed down and I saw the silver glint of chrome as it turned onto the very bridge that I was trying to cross. Vibrations rattled the planks.

Fear seized me. My feet could not be trusted. Foolishly, I halted and turned around. With the afternoon sun sloping down, I saw only a shadow of dark hair and the outline of a very tall, very masculine body. The man revved the engine, reminding me not so gently that I was blocking the path. But, still, I had trouble convincing myself to move.

A booted foot came down. “I don’t care how you do it, but get off the bridge,” roared the man, all bristle and swagger, and yet I couldn’t see his face, which unnerved me. I jumped in an awkward leap over three boards and landed on the bank where I wobbled for a moment before righting myself. Then, as I watched, he came forward slowly, and when his bike slipped into the shade I could make out his features clearly.

He was in his late twenties if I had to guess, with hair black as jet. Ice-blue eyes boldly assessed me and under his lazy perusal I felt myself blush. He rolled off the bridge and stopped just in front of me before cutting off the engine.

Silence. Only the whisper of light ripples from the water.

“You look lost.” His voice came to my ears with an almost dreamlike quality, deep and sonorous.

“I know exactly where I am.”

He was getting off the bike and now stood in front of it, and the man was certainly tall. He had a thick five-o’clock shadow and an easy, almost insolent grace about him.

An eyebrow raised. “Do you?” He took a few steps toward the gate. “Because you have the look of a fish out of water.”

I felt a tightening in my throat. “You’re quick to judge,” I said, more sharply than intended.

“Not a judgment. Just an observation.”

“I’m heading to my aunt’s.” My tone was a bit defiant. I nodded down the lane. “She lives just over there and I’m already late.”

He ignored my hint. “Cleo’s your aunt? Then who are you? I thought there was no family other than her.”

“Zara Pendleton.”

He seemed surprised. “Zara?” He seemed very interested in me all of a sudden. “Where did you get that name, Zara?” He seemed very interested all of a sudden.

I realized at that moment whom I might be talking to, and I felt a traitorous thrill spread inside me. “From my mother,” I said in a voice that might get me into trouble. “Where else would I get it? What’s your name?”

He regarded me steadily. “Navarre,” he said finally.

It was him. I swept my eyes behind him, down the lane past the gate, trying to catch a glimpse of that white tower, of something, anything. But what started as a simple peek turned into something else, as I had trouble looking away. “Navarre,” I repeated softly. Finally, I had the presence to turn away, and I went in the direction that my aunt directed in her letter. I continued along the shaded lane, all the while my ears glued to the sound of chains rattling and the creak of the gate as it swung open. Finally, when I could take it no more, I acted as if I lost my balance and tripped, and as I righted myself I peered back at Navarre.

I saw him, all hard muscles and lean power, bathed in the soft light of the late afternoon sun. It was a study in opposites. He unlocked the gate, swung it open, and my eyes swept past him and down the shaded lane once more. A longing filled me like never before, a yearning that I couldn’t quite make sense of. I think that somewhere deep inside me, I knew that mysteries and delights waited for me down that road. But he looked up at me just then, and I understood exactly what his eyes had been telling me our whole encounter: keep away.

As if the message wasn’t clear, he spoke. “Zara, you look down that lane as if it’s calling to you. If I were you, I would be very careful and keep far away from us.” His voice easily carried across the distance between us, and I knew then that he completely understood that strange longing I felt, and was putting an end to it. He jumped onto his bike, fired the engine to life. I turned away quickly.