Kate sat in her truck, took another hot deep drag on her cigarette, and sighed the cloud of smoke out against the windshield. Lew's house still showed through the billows, bare plywood on the front roof and the small gable that sheltered the front door, windrows of old shingles ripped and scattered on the ground. That meant money out of her pocket, materials and Jeff's time, until and unless she could ditch the place on some sucker.
Money out of a pocket that was already down to lint and the occasional cartoon moth. If Alice hadn't picked up the hospital tab, Kate would have been in the hole until about ten years past Judgement Day. Damn fine line there between "gratitude" and "resentment." Money again, shoving itself between her and Alice.
And That Time of the Month. Might not be politically correct, but sometimes hormones shouted louder than Feminist Truth. Not a good day for a reminder that Alice was Haskell to the core. Rich. Secretive. Devious. Give that Machiavelli guy lessons in manipulation.
Add PMS on top of that . . . Hell, if one of those leash-law cases had gone to trial, you probably would have been pushing for the death penalty. Revenge for the fact that the surgeon didn't pull out your plumbing after the wreck and emergency C-section.
Scarring from the crash. She couldn't have any more kids, but she still had to live with the monthly whipsaw. Worst of both worlds. Only half a woman, and it had to be the wrong half.
Alice didn't have a fucking clue what that trust fund would have meant. Stonefort was such a Looking Glass world, where Indians were rich folk and whites lived in broken-down trailers with failing septic systems. Alice, Caroline, Elaine, Aunt Jean, the lot of them — they never had to scratch for the next meal, might not spend the money but it was always there if they needed it. They'd never have to send the kid off to school wearing Mom's steel-toed workboots for lack of shoes that fit.
Just the damned interest on that trust fund could have lifted Jackie out of "trailer trash," maybe meant the divorce wasn't necessary and left her with two parents who lived under the same roof. Instead, there were so many things a single mom could wheedle out of the government that a couple found harder — Medicaid, food stamps, you name it.
Even her cop job — probably couldn't have landed that if she was still married to the town drunk. Hell, Lew might not have drunk so much if sober hadn't looked so bleak.
Scratch that. Lew was a drunk. More money would just have meant more booze. Would’ve killed him sooner.
Still, a little more money and Mom could have spent more time Mom-ing. Worked four jobs instead of six.
Yeah. But adversity builds character. You're a better person for working hard and living thin. More spiritual. In touch with the common people. Not like certain witches we could name.
Kate shook her head. She sucked down the last half-inch of cigarette in one drag, until the glow scorched her fingers. Stubbed it out. She climbed down from the truck still holding the smoke for the last of the nicotine rush.
She blew the smoke straight and hard, like a dragon crisping the knight in shining armor. Fuck this. Like you told the lady, you've got work to do.
Jeff had stripped off half of Lew's roof, her roof, patched in two new sheets of plywood where the leaks had gone on long enough for rot, laid down valley flashing and the new metal drip-edge, and had three courses of shingles already nailed on top of the water-shield. By himself, since morning. The kid had learned to work.
First get the roof tight, then patch the ceiling underneath. Critical path construction.
Jeff Burns, a little older than Jackie, Goth-black tee shirt and jeans and spiky-green-haired image of teenage rebellion, on informal probation to her since a juvie possession charge a year ago last spring. He'd started out useless as tits on a boar, but somewhere between then and now she'd ended up with a carpenter. And he was taking night classes for high school. Up for a full diploma next spring, not a GED substitute.
Kate shook her head again, this time in wonder. Sometimes things go right. Damned rare, but sometimes. That boy's more a Rowley than Jackie ever was. Why couldn't she have turned out decent?
She glanced around the yard. With the recent rain, she'd better mow the lawn one last time before winter. After they hauled the shingles to the dump and did a magnet sweep for nails. Might want to show the place to a buyer.
Yeah, sure. "Buyer" is a rare fish in Sunrise County. Anyone who wants to live here is already here. The back roads were lined with abandoned places slowly falling into their cellar holes. Like Grannie Rowley's.
Kate grimaced. Depression was just another chunk of the PMS whipsaw. "Hey, Jeffy-Boy! Need anything up there?"
He drove another roofing nail home before looking up, tap-bang, two skilled blows. "If you're climbing anyway, bring up some more shingles."
Last spring, he wouldn't have answered. Now he'd replaced that sullen silence with the easy give-and-take of "crew." The boy's blood kin, about as close as I've got with Jackie gone. Second cousin, on Dad's side.
Closest except for Mom. Damn sure I don't want her to get that land. Maybe it's time to make out a new will.
She hoisted a couple of bundles of Frost Whites to her good shoulder and grabbed a rung of the ladder. Her hip wouldn't let her spend hours in the crouch and shuffle of shingling a six-in-twelve roof, but she could still haul twice the load that scrawny kid could carry . . . .
She took the second rung with her bad leg and woke a fire in her hip. It backed off when her weight shifted to the third, but another step fanned it into blazing pain. She froze halfway up, one hand on the ladder right at the eave and the other steadying the shingles, her eyes scrunched shut and tears leaking hot around the lids. Damndamndamn . . .
Weight lifted from her shoulder, magic cooling the fire, and she opened her eyes to a blurry, concerned face. Jeff grabbed the second bundle of shingles, bending too far out over the eave, and thumped it up on the roof. Good thing she was tall enough, shoulder brought the load to where he could reach it.
"Miz Rowley . . ."
"Shut the fuck up and get back to work. I'll be okay."
She gritted her teeth and climbed again, up and off the ladder onto the roof, too pig-headed to back down, and slumped into the gable valley where she could brace her good leg against the second slope and the foolish gutter that froze a foot deep of ice every winter. Stretching her other leg out flat across the plywood helped to ease the pain. Kate mopped her sleeve across her forehead and cheeks, sweat mostly. Big girls don't cry.
What the hell? She'd hauled three, four loads up the ladder this morning, same weight, setting Jeff up before she headed off to court. Woke a mild ache in the wound, nothing more. Nothing like this.
But Jeff had lifted the shingles for her. This time she'd bent over to grab the load, different angle, different strain.
"Miz Rowley, you kill yourself, I won't have a job. Probably end up back on the streets. Hustling for dime bags." Then Jeff grinned at her, just kidding. Maybe.
But he didn't grab his hammer and get back to pounding nails. He crouched there tense as if he expected to have to catch her before she fell. As if he cared enough to risk his own neck for her. And wouldn't that be a scene — she outweighed him by about a hundred-fifty pounds. Kate wondered how bad she really looked.
Bad enough, that was sure. It'd probably be fifteen minutes before she could find the strength to climb off the roof again. Damn sure she wasn't going to chase down kids from an underage beer party out at Stanford's Quarry. The town was getting shortchanged on the cop account.
Speaking of the cop job . . . "Jeffy-Boy, you know Grant Cage?"
Jeff's face closed down. "Older. Saw him around, never hung out with him."
Delicate dance, they had a verbal contract — he'd stay clean, she wouldn't ask cop questions. But this could be labeled "gossip" rather than "interrogation."
"Any idea why he'd end up dead in the Morgans' back yard?" Two murder cases, same town, same month, that used up Sunrise County's whole quota for the year. Coffee shops and bars buzzed with the rumors. Gossip.
He stopped and thought, rather than just shutting her out. Another step forward. Then he shook his head. "The guys I know say he'd been gone since July, August. He hung around for a bit after all the noise at Pratts', then vanished. Used to run with that crowd."
That crowd had included Jackie.
"Miz Rowley . . ."
"Yo?" Kate scanned his face. Judging by what she saw, he wasn't happy with whatever he was thinking.
"Miz Rowley, one of the guys said something. I ran into him last night, down at the game room, not looking for him, I'm still out of all that. But we got talking, waiting our turns on the machines."
Video parlor, the heart of what passed for teen nightlife in beautiful downtown Stonefort. Hit legal age, the action moved on to Larry's Bar on the other side of the pizza shop. "And?"
"Guy's still doing drugs. Even before the drugs, he wasn't bright enough to pour piss out of a boot if you wrote instructions on the sole."
Jeff really didn't want to tell this story. Kate felt a chill down her back.
"This guy thought he'd seen Jackie. Just a glance, driving through town. Big white SUV, windows tinted black but she had the driver's side rolled down. Guy's a liar, scrambled eggs for brains. Was stoned so far he barely could remember to breathe. I want you to know that before you hear it somewhere else."
So that was why Jeff had been so quiet this morning. She'd thought he'd skipped the second cup of coffee. No, he'd been chewing on the news, wondering what he should say. If he should say.
Kate stood up, numb to the fire rekindled in her hip, and swung onto the ladder. She paused. "If it looks like rain, I'll try to get back to help you with the tarp."
Then she climbed down and limped across the lawn as if she actually knew what she was doing. She hoisted herself back into the truck. She started it. She backed out into the street — even checked both ways. And then she drove off, almost like she had someplace she had to be. Like an appointment, or job, or something.
Jackie.
Kate drove the truck on autopilot, trying to leave her daughter's ghost behind. Video kept looping through her head, Jackie standing over Alice's wounded body, aiming the old Browning automatic straight down at point-blank range, firing a last shot. Firing a 9mm slug into the back of Alice's skull. Execution. Only reason she missed was magic, was illusion. Alice wasn't exactly where Jackie thought she was.
Remembering that, do you want your daughter back?
Kate couldn't answer that one. She drove, taking turns at random, checking in with Sunrise Dispatch on the cop radio, the excuse that she was on patrol. She couldn't go back to the trailer. That damned dump still smelled of Jackie, over three months later — faint memories of her bath oil and shampoo, of her softball uniforms still dirt-stained after two runs through the wash. She couldn't go back to Alice, nerves still raw over Highlands Trust and money.
The autopilot kept her moving, left and right and left again, running away from pain and memory, no place to run to. She passed Grannie Rowley's old cape in her search for sanctuary, bare gray clapboards warped loose and dangling from rusted nails, broken windows framed by shutters missing half their slats, sagging roof with dark holes showing through the cedar shakes.
A couple of aging hippies had bought house and land after Grannie's death. Now their heirs snarled back and forth at each other by way of lawyers, bickering over the estate. Most of the heirs lived in Boston or New York, anyway, none of them interested in forty acres of scrub hill-pasture and no indoor plumbing on the backside of nowhere.
Sometimes Kate thought she ought to torch the place out of pity. Put her memories out of their misery. She squirmed awkwardly on the truck seat, trying to ease her hip. Grannie stood strong in her memory, an anchor to the world, white-haired and tall and proud and gnarled like a salt-blasted spruce turned back-to the wind on a granite headland. She'd lived alone on that old farm for thirty years, died there, the sudden sharp knife of a heart attack in her sleep. Some of Kate's best memories hung around that house.
And then, two miles further on, the autopilot turned her down a woods road and along the south face of a ridge. That same ridge. She rolled down the two-track gravel, faster this time with the knowledge that cop cruisers and mobile crime lab and medical examiner's meat-wagon had already scouted out the potholes and high-center boulders.
Yes, Alice had been right. Kate had had to drive out here to show them where to go. Even the local deputies hadn't been able to find the right road on their own.
Spooky.
She slowed and then stopped, truck looking down into that final hollow, and shut off the engine. Crickets and cicadas flowed noise back to fill the silence, the survivors of the first frosts racing to breed before winter shut them down. Jays called deep in the forest, chickadees scolded back, and a woodpecker hammered away on a hollow trunk somewhere nearby. All the sounds she'd missed, that morning when she first followed this road.
She owned this. Even owned the road — no public right-of-way. God, that felt weird. Grannie had owned it, set up that trust that never dribbled through good ol' Frank's fingers to vanish like the money from the house and farm. She'd known. Sharp as a tack, into her eighties.
Kate felt tears damp on her cheeks, remembering. "Don't cut the trees, less'n you need the wood, child. Need the wood. That's your future you're looking at." "Put your hands on this lump of stone and listen to it. Not what you want to make it into, what does it want to be?" "Listen to the water and the wind, child. They know everything that happens." Snatches of memory.
So much she'd forgotten. She'd been what, seven, eight, when Grannie died? She had memories, lots of memories, but they made photos rather than movies. They didn't stitch together. No plot.
They'd taken long walks, the old woman strong enough she'd had to wait on the child. Walks in the fields, walks deep in the woods, walks along a ridge so high you could see Morgan's Castle, the bay and the open water beyond. Walks to places Kate had never been able to find again, when the old woman was dead and the house sold to strangers from away. Kate had thought those memories were from forgotten trips, or dreams.
This place.
A shiver ran down her spine.
She slipped the brake and let the truck roll down into the hollow, engine off, slow and silent. Trees, God, the trees, huge and straight and old. Cedars, white pines, spruce, tall, dark, proud. A brook ran in the bottom of the hollow, chattering clear and cold this late in the year, the forested slopes still holding water and letting it flow months after it fell as rain.
She stopped and climbed down. The road crossed on a small stone bridge, almost a culvert, old quarried slabs dark with moss and thick brown fronds of autumn fern spotted with blazing red from a few swamp maple leaves. She knew that stone — the same color and grain as Morgan's Castle. They'd cut those slabs miles away and hauled them here, ox drag in winter most likely, rather than set chisel to local stone. Shivers touched her again, the work, the care.
Back into the truck, she had to crank the engine for the final hill. The sound walled her off from the forest, the shrill buzz of the cicadas and the sharp cussing of red squirrel and chipmunk, drumming of a grouse confused as to which end of winter he faced. And then she stopped again, climbed down again, the low stone walls of the abandoned village on her right under the old oaks and the open blueberry barren crowning the ridge to her left.
All that traffic, cops in and out, barely left a trace. The tan dry grass stood straight, the red and orange and purple berry bushes spread their brilliance under the clear blue autumn sky. She paused, just inside the barren. Uncanny.
She sniffed. Blueberry barren smell, the bracken, the sandy soil, the faint spicy tang of overripe berries drying in the sun. None of that flinty warning of magic and danger in the air.
Orange caught her eye, masses of berries in a yellow flame of a tree, and she waded through the bracken to its trunk. Mountain ash, she knew it from landscaping jobs, her name-tree, rowan. And this tree was old — nearly two feet through the butt, with skeleton branches in its crown but still vigorous. Mountain ash was a short-lived tree.
It stood by itself, which also struck her as odd — those landscape jobs told Kate that rowan self-seeded like a weed, would make a thicket if left to its own ways. Then she spotted another, distant sunwards, also old. And another widdershins. They made equal spaces. No younger trees.
She climbed the slope, cold with recent memory, reluctant even though her hip behaved itself. The last time she'd made this climb . . .
Bare stones waited. No body lying on the altar.
She reached the altar stone and stared down at it. Folded biotite schist, the folds wrote words in some strange swirling calligraphy across the surface, she'd looked the stone up after staring at the evidence photos because she hadn't recognized it. Stone was as natural to her as the air she breathed. She knew stone. Stone knew her. She knew what that kind of stone was like. Hard, impervious, and damned rare in Maine — must be a glacial erratic, dragged down from somewhere on the Canadian Shield.
She climbed up on it, stiff and awkward, wondering if she was committing some kind of sacrilege. Memories again, vision matched with vision — she'd stood here as a child. There was Morgan's Castle, there was the steeple of the Congregational Church on the village green, beyond it the bay. In the other direction, the land dipped away to the salt marsh that made Stonefort an island at high tide. She'd stood here once before, felt Grannie's hands strong on her shoulders. It must have been permitted.
She scanned the horizon and the edge of the barren. More rowans, they made a circle. Each one lay on a direct line with one of the ring stones, circle within circle centered on the altar. Even the barren made a circle, no man-made rectangular field rimmed by a stone fence. Cosmic bull's-eye, a landing-zone for UFOs.
She felt power crawling across her skin, hair standing up on end like she felt in the House's cellar.
<Welcome, Rowan's-daughter. After many winters, again we welcome you.>
Kate spun around on the altar, frantic, searching for the speaker. She was alone. She climbed down and walked the stone circle. Alone. Wind teased her hair, leaves rustled, a knot of crows mobbed something in the top of a distant pine and their caws rode the breeze. Natural sounds.
Voices in her head. Warmth soaking her injured hip and shoulder, not the stabbing fire of pain but the soothing penetrating warmth of a heating pad or a hot whirlpool bath. A strong gentle hand laid on her shoulder. The smell of herbs, of lavender and rose-petal and clove sachet, in Grannie's spare bedroom.
Finding Grannie cold and still one morning.
Kate fled back to her truck.