JESSE’S MORNING CLASSES WERE PARTICULARLY BORING. In English, Mrs. Bender asked Honor to read some of the myth about the Garuda. Honor’s tan had faded to a jaundiced color. New pimples had broken out on her forehead. She mumbled about a winged creature with the torso of a man and the head of an eagle who stole some sacred water in order to save his mother’s life. He hated snakes and mocked the wind and carried one of the Hindu gods into battles. The students had zero interest. Nobody cared about stories from some strange people on the other side of the world. Jesse felt some sympathy for Honor. Poor girl, she was more lost in her parents’ hometown of Longview than he, the true outsider. She really should be back home in Bali.
Between classes, twice he caught Allyn glancing at him, and each time embarrassment rose up through his bones and flooded out on his face. What a fool he’d made of himself, a fact that Wesley reconfirmed during lunch. “But don’t worry, dude, hang in there, a new fool will come along.”
After lunch, he checked in with his art teacher and then headed for the darkroom in the basement. He was just reaching for the darkroom door’s handle when he heard steps behind him. God, not Honor again. He opened the door, pretending not to hear a thing. Maybe if he shut it quick and hard behind him she’d get the hint and go away.
“Jesse?”
He stiffened. It wasn’t Honor. He turned around. God, it was Allyn, right there in front of him, her arms wrapped around her books, holding them to her chest. He took a step back into the darkroom, as though that would make him invisible.
Her lips flickered in a smile. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he said, squeezing the word out as a croak.
“Don’t tell a soul, but I don’t have a hall pass to be here.”
“I won’t tell.” Three more croaks, delivered with all the wit of a first grader.
She drew a deep breath. “You still have those two bicycles?”
“Yeah.”
“You still want to go riding out to Dead Man’s Lake? Saturday? Supposed to be nice weather. God, this summer. Doesn’t seem to want to end, does it?”
“This Saturday?”
She clutched her books tighter. “If you want.”
“Yeah, sure.” More croaks, this time dazed ones.
She relaxed and gave him a dazzling smile. “I’ll come by your place at ten o’clock. I’ll bring the snacks; you get the drinks. Diet Coke for me.”
“Diet Coke, you got it.”
She left him with another smile that was even more dazzling.
Saturday arrived, with warm blue skies. Allyn showed up just before ten, in shorts and a sleeveless blouse, her skin already fragrant with coconut sunscreen. Jesse wheeled the bikes out of the garage. He put their backpacks, towels, and a small cooler of Diet Cokes and bottled water in the baskets.
As they rode off, they chatted casually about the weather. Once they were riding past Back Bridge Road’s quiet cornfields, he asked one of two questions that had popped up to trouble him.
“Does Stuart know about this?”
“I can do whatever I want,” she said, “and this is what I want to be doing.”
They crossed the county road and turned down a shady lane and passed the lake’s parking lot and campgrounds. Jesse noticed Kellie’s bright red convertible parked in the lot. She was on the small hill by the lake, the one with the pioneer cemetery, sweeping weeds away from old tombstones. Spotting Jesse, she gave him a wave, and he waved back.
“My caseworker,” he said to Allyn. “She’s cool.”
“I know her. She’s pretty.”
“You’re prettier,” Jesse said.
Allyn smiled, the flush of exercise on her neck rising another inch.
Dead Man’s Lake was really a pond, left behind by a retreating glacier and stocked for fishing. A dozen fishermen were taking advantage of the Indian summer, sitting in folding chairs that ringed the shore, but there were also benches and tables shaded by cottonwoods. Jesse and Allyn put their backpacks on a table and spread towels on the grass to lie on. How her skin glowed! She asked him about growing up in LA, and if he’d gotten to see any movie stars. Juvenile centers weren’t exactly movie-star rich environments, he said, but he had spotted a few here and there. A couple of times, he’d hung around to watch them on location sets.
Allyn sat up, her arms around her knees. “Tell me everything,” she said, and listened avidly.
“It’s really a whole lot of nothing going on,” he concluded. “Like watching ice melt. It’s not at all what you see on the screen.”
Allyn said she was tired of small-town life, that she was going to be an actress. “I know, I know, just like a million other girls,” she said. “But if I don’t try, I’ll always regret it. My parents would kill me if they knew. They expect me to be a lawyer. What about you? What do you want to be?”
A cloud fell across the sun and across Jesse’s happiness. “I don’t know,” he said. “My options right now are pretty limited.”
Stay out of trouble. Don’t get deported.
A car pulled up in the parking lot, disgorging a bunch of students from the drama club. They waved at Allyn and headed over. She frowned. “Damn it. I’m sorry, Jesse. This wasn’t planned. I wanted to be alone with you, to get to know you a little bit better.” She grinned and reached out to run her fingers through his hair. “I’ve been wanting to do that for ages. You have the softest curly hair.”
That gave him the courage to ask the other question that had been lurking in the background of his mind like a mangy dog, scratching its ear and waiting its time. “This is going to sound weird, but did you by any chance find this strange coin with a hole in it in your school locker?”
“My locker’s a disaster zone,” she said. “It’s like every time I open it, avalanche! But a coin with a hole? No. Why?”
His relief felt outsized. He didn’t want Honor gloating and telling him I told you so. He was saved from further explanation as the others settled in around them, laughing and joking. They looked curiously at Jesse but didn’t say anything, and Allyn didn’t enlighten them. Somebody set up an iPod with speakers, and music blared. They talked about the play. After a while Jesse caught Allyn’s eye and pointed over to Kellie in the cemetery. Going over to say hi, he mouthed. Allyn nodded back with a smile.
He followed his shadow across the path and made his way through the weeds, which rustled in a breeze. Crickets chirped loudly. Kellie knelt in a pair of jeans before a broad tombstone topped with three arcs. She’d taped paper over the tombstone and had just finished taking a charcoal rubbing, her fingers black from the stick. She leaned back on her knees to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand.
There were three names on the tombstone. Ira had been seven, Emma five, and Cora four. They had died on the same day, October 12, 1882.
“Do you know about these children?” Kellie asked. “Jane Volter told me. Their mother murdered them, the poor innocents. Poison. The first and only murders in Longview. The town hung her. That’s her grave.” Kellie nodded at the next tombstone over. “Right beside her own children who she killed.”
The crickets’ cheerful racket seemed to stop.
“Still happens today, human nature without fail,” Kellie said, as she sprayed fixative over the charcoal.
Jesse helped her clean the mother’s tombstone, using a soft brush. The date of her death was October 15, 1882. Justice was swift in those days. He was picking the moss off the engraved year when he had a sense of darkness pooling around him like coagulating blood.
And of something staring at him.
If you stare into the darkness, the darkness will stare into you.
He jumped to his feet and pushed his way uphill through the weeds, brambles scratching his legs. At the top of the hill, he closed his eyes and stuck his face in the breeze, taking several deep breaths to clear his head. The sun beat hard on him, as though trying to wake him to some sort of different consciousness.
When he opened his eyes, his gaze drifted down to the large tombstone in front of him.
Col. Hiram Clarke
7th Illinois Infantry
died April 6, 1862
In front of the tombstone, on a bed of wilted weeds, lay a dead blue jay tied to a cross made of sticks woven together. It was a parody of a crucifix, with the wings stretched out to the arms of the cross and the broken legs yanked to the foot. White bone stuck out from the joint of one wing, which had been ripped and stretched wide.
The tombstone had recently been scrubbed clean, no dirt or mold on its gleaming granite. Daubed on its surface was a wavy symbol that looked something like a figure eight balanced on a zero. Not paint, but blood, already dried to a rusty brown with some down stuck to it, as though the bird itself had been used as the brush.
Jesse backed up a step and turned around. “Kellie, come up here; you got to look at this.”
“Just a second.”
“Come up now!”
Kellie strode up the hill. “Good lord, Jesse. What is it?”
He pointed.
Kellie studied the grave, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. “Probably a hoax.”
“I don’t think so. I get this feeling—” He stopped. He wasn’t sure how he felt. Mostly confused. The sun was warm and very bright.
“Stay here,” Kellie said. She retreated and returned a moment later with her large tote bag. With the brush and a bottle of drinking water, she scrubbed the symbol off the grave. She used a plastic bag as a glove to pick up the mutilated bird and turned the bag inside out and tied off the top. “I’ll get rid of this somewhere else.”
“Do you think it’s black magic?”
“Jesse,” she said sternly. “Pass it by.”
From behind a neighboring tombstone strolled the Siamese cat. It rubbed up against Kellie’s leg with a little meow. Kellie sidestepped away and held up a hand. “Stop. I’m allergic.” To prove it, she sneezed.
The cat sat down on its haunches, its tail tucked neatly around its paws. It mewed again.
“You know this cat?” Jesse asked.
Kellie shook her head as she wiped her nose with a tissue. She regarded the cat with interest. “She must have a name, though. She looks like a cat that would have a name.”
“It hunts birds. I think it’s wild. Isn’t there an animal control officer you can call?”
“Those guys? They’ll just use her for target practice. Shoo, go on, now.”
The cat stretched and rubbed up against the tombstone of Colonel Hiram Clarke, purring loudly. With a twitch of its tail, it sauntered off into the weeds.
Jesse picked his way down the hill to rejoin Allyn. His mind still felt strangely clouded, but that began to clear when he reached the edge of the cemetery. Allyn. She was what mattered. Not cats and bird sacrifices.
He heard a loud angry voice and looked up. Stuart’s black SUV stood skewed in the parking lot, the driver’s door still open, and Stuart himself stood by the picnic bench, yelling at Allyn.
“You said you were going to the mall with me.”
Allyn shook her head. “I never said that. You assumed that.”
The others were standing back and watching with interest. One of them lowered the music’s volume. Across the pond, a fisherman whooped as he reeled in a wriggling fish. Gravel crunched under Jesse’s slowing steps.
“Instead, I find out you came here with him,” Stuart said, jerking his chin in Jesse’s direction.
Allyn crossed her arms. “It’s a free country. I don’t like you making all my decisions for me.”
“Like what? You’re the one who wants me to drive you everywhere, do everything for you.”
“Like the Homecoming Dance. You never asked me. You just took it for granted. Jesse, though, he did ask. Very sweetly.”
Jesse stopped on the grass, several yards away from Stuart and Allyn. Birds flitted in the cottonwoods. Blue jays.
Stuart glanced at him, his jaw rigid, his fists clenched. “So let him take you.”
“I will.”
Stuart spun to face Jesse, his handsome face dark with anger. Jesse let his arms dangle by his sides, relaxed, but ready. He returned Stuart’s stare. “I don’t want to get in a fight,” Jesse said quietly.
“Coward, are you? Like a lot of your kind.”
“I grew up with street kids. I learned that fighting doesn’t solve anything.”
Jesse could see caution sneak into Stuart’s furious eyes. Stuart was a golfer, not a street fighter. He snapped at Allyn, “Fine. Let him take you to the mall, too.” He stalked back to his car.
Allyn watched him go and then uncrossed her arms to perch her sunglasses on her forehead. She looked at Jesse, her green eyes deep and clear. “I hope you haven’t asked anybody else.”
He shook his head.
Her brows rose. “Well?”
“I should tell you I’m not a very good dancer.”
Her smile bloomed. “But you can swing from buildings, right?”