“One of the great mysteries of our time. And the kiss?” Evie asked, biting her lip.
“I’m getting there. He walked me to my door. He was very quiet and—”
“Regular quiet or brooding quiet?”
“Evie, please.”
“Sorry, sorry. Go on.”
“He said, ‘Good night, Mabel,’ and then he… just… kissed me.” Mabel gave a little squeal.
Evie closed her eyes and pictured Jericho’s face in the first light of morning.
“I can’t stop playing it over in my mind like the best Valentino picture ever, except that I’m Agnes Ayres, and Jericho is Rudy.”
“Well, he’s no Rudy,” Evie grumbled, “but I get the gist.”
Mabel was telling her something else, but Evie didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She’d done the right thing by Mabel and, most likely, by Jericho. She’d thrown him over. Why did doing the right thing feel so awful? Did that mean it wasn’t the right thing, or did right things always feel awful, which would in fact be a terrible deterrent to doing right?
“Evie?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Oh. Sorry, Mabel. There was a, um, a spider. On the floor. Dreadful!”
“Eek! You’d think such a fancy hotel wouldn’t have spiders.”
“Yes, I’ll… uh… I’ll just call down for a bellhop. Sorry, Mabesie.”
“Wait! What do you think I should do?”
“I wouldn’t rush into anything. Boys like girls who seem to have other beaus. They’re fickle that way.” Evie sniffed. After all, she’d been pretty easily forgotten.
“Jericho isn’t that sort of fellow,” Mabel insisted.
“Trust me, they’re all that way.” She was mad at Jericho. She had no right to be, but she was anyway.
“Gee, Evie, you really don’t seem very happy for me.”
“Oh, Pie Face, I’m sorry. I am excited for you. Why, I’m pos-i-tute-ly throwing a party for you here,” Evie said brightly, feeling guilty. “I think you should go to the pictures with him and just be your charming self.”
“But I’m not charming. That’s the trouble.”
“Then… this will be good practice?”
Mabel laughed. “You’re the worst friend ever, Evie O’Neill!”
“Yes, I know,” Evie said.
The land has a memory.
Every stream and river runs with a confession of sorts, history whispered over rocks, lifted in the beaks of birds at a stream, carried out to the sea. Buffalo thunder across plains whose soil was watered with the blood of battles long since relegated to musty books on forgotten shelves. Fields once strewn with blue and gray now flower with uneasy buds. The slave master snaps the lash, and generations later, the ancestral scars remain.
Under it all, the dead lie, remembering.
Adelaide Proctor had been on this earth for eighty-one years. She, too, had a history. She was a distant relation of John Proctor, hanged during the Salem witch trials. Witchcraft was her birthright, and as a young girl, Addie had read the accounts with great interest. There had been witchcraft, of course—the simple provenance of cunning folk, midwives, and herbalists: Superstitions practiced in the interest of safety. Curses muttered or occasionally offered with a bound lock of hair and cast into an evening fire to be regretted in the morning or not regretted, depending. But none of it had anything at all to do with the Devil and everything to do with the frailties of the human heart. Here were spells for healing loneliness. Curing the sick. Ensuring good fortune. Assuring safe passage on rough seas. Delivering babies into the world with a boon upon their brows. These tales comforted Addie, for she needed comforting.
Sometimes she’d fall into a dreamy trance. Then she could see into another world of spirits or read messages in the remains of the tea leaves in a cup as clearly as words in a book. She dared not tell anyone these secrets, though she was a little in love with her ability. It made her feel special—almost as special as Elijah Crockett made her feel.
A fine boy was he, her Elijah, with eyes the gray-brown of a river rock. “I’ll take you to wife, Adelaide Proctor,” he’d said, slipping a daisy chain on her head. He kissed her sweetly and marched off to fight in a war of brother against brother.
She could hear the cannon fire and the screams from Harris Farm. The battle raged for two weeks. In the end, thirty thousand casualties littered Virginia’s farmland. A chain of dead boys lay side by side across the field. The boy she loved most lay among them. In his shirt pocket was her last letter to him, caked in blood.