Blackwood (7 page)

  "Good, actually," Phillips said. "Fine."

  "When we finish here, call your mother. You can drive the car home to her. She'll bring you back here."

  Phillips ignored the part where his dad was allowing him to drive the car, and instead bristled at the command. "What am I supposed to do here?"

  His father lowered his voice. "You know. What you do."

  "There's nothing," Phillips said. "Not since I got back."

  That wasn't what his dad wanted to hear.

  Miranda coughed to interrupt. "Where is he?" she asked, the question small in the high-ceilinged room.

  Phillips didn't fully understand why he wanted to protect Miranda, but he did. It just didn't make sense that his dad would want to see her in person with everything that was happening, not to release her father on a drunk and disorderly or a public intoxication charge.

  "You might want to…" Phillips' father trailed off as he sat, and Miranda and Phillips slid into the chairs in front of the desk. Phillips tried to catch Miranda's eye, but she was staring straight ahead.

  "I have some news," he went on.

  "Where is he?" Miranda asked.

  "I understand this is hard–"

  "What's hard? You found him, right? He wasn't missing."

  Phillips touched her arm. She flinched. He said, "Miranda, you have to let him tell you."

  Miranda gulped in air, and said, "No, you don't understand. I promised to take care of him."

  Father and son exchanged a glance.

  "Well," his dad said. "You've had a tough time of it, Miranda. You have been a devoted daughter, and this news will not be easy. I'm glad that my son is here with you." He paused. Phillips figured he wanted to know why the two of them
had
come together. "I hadn't wanted to tell you alone, but there's no one to call… Our social worker's among the missing and I know you wouldn't want that anyway. You've been running your household for a while now and you deserve to know, especially with everything going on. There's no easy way to say this."

  Miranda remained motionless. Phillips wasn't even sure she kept breathing.

  "Your father was murdered."

  Phillips had expected injured, maybe even dead, but not… "Murdered?"

  "His body was discovered in an alley downtown this afternoon. He's the only one of the missing we've recovered so far. But he brings the reported number down to one hundred and fourteen. Meaning his death is probably
not
related to the missing persons."

  Miranda put her head down, her hair falling forward. Phillips wanted to do something, to comfort her. He didn't know how. So he sat there in shock, fixating on the number, teasing out his father's logic. Miranda's dad was probably unrelated
because
now it was a hundred and fourteen people gone. The same number John White had left behind in 1587.

  "The coroner is having some difficulty determining what happened to him, but it's not anything that could be considered accidental or self-inflicted. We've ordered an autopsy, and we'll know more once that's finished. If you want to see the body, we can arrange that. I'm sorry, Miranda."

  "I'm sorry, too," Phillips said, the only words that made sense. He had questions for his father, but they'd wait.

  Miranda lifted her face.

  "I understand," she said, steady as a flatline on a hospital monitor.

  Phillips had heard his dad talk to his mom about notifications before. How most people fell apart before you even got through the facts. How the ones who didn't were the ones that took it hardest.

  Miranda rose, then seemed to think better of it and dropped back into the chair. "Do you need me to sign anything?"

6

Mothers

While Phillips drove her home, Miranda stared out the car window feeling lost. As lost as the missing people, maybe. Chief Rawling had agreed to let Phillips take her, but he was supposed to end up back at the courthouse. Phillips had told his dad again that there was nothing he could do to help there. For some reason, he seemed reluctant to leave her.

  She didn't know what she should feel, or what she should say.

  But Phillips didn't have much to say either. He kept his eyes on the road, his knuckles tight in a death grip on the steering wheel.

  "What your dad was asking you before… you hear voices still?" she asked.

  He didn't as much as glance over. "You remember."

  The grass blurred to a soft green outside the car window. "Yeah."

  Of course, she remembered. He'd heard the voices talking about
her
. She'd been in eighth grade, thirteen years old. It was the first day of school, not long after the Rawling family moved in from Nags Head. They took possession of the house belonging to the chief's mother – aka the Witch of Roanoke Island – after she died of cancer. To Miranda, it seemed like everyone eventually died of cancer. Phillips had possessed the glow of celebrity all new kids have in a small town. She'd been standing against the section of lobby wall that belonged to loner misfits. He walked toward her like he was in a trance. The other kids in the lobby laughed as he reached out a hand and touched her hair. He said things to her, about her. Things that didn't make any sense, but that scared her. He called her a bad thing. He called her a liar. A traitor. A carrier. A snake.

  The other kids loved that – a snake. They thought he was being funny. The funny new kid, picking on the Blackwood girl, something most of them had wanted to do for a long time.

  The principal had stepped in to pull Phillips away, and called her dad to pick her up. What people whispered about their family was bad enough, and had gotten worse since her mom died. Their curse had been confirmed. Her dad ripped through a half-case of beer when they got home, getting angry. He loaded her in the car at midnight and drove to the Rawlings' house. Two months later and he wouldn't have been able to – that was when his license got grabbed for good, and he sold the car for drinking money.

  Chief Rawling tolerated her dad yelling and taking a swing at him, though he didn't let it connect. Phillips came downstairs and stood at the screen door. When he saw Miranda, he ran outside and whispered to her, "There were voices talking in my head. They said things about you. But they're just
voices." And then he gave her that look. She could tell he was
sorry. Even then, she didn't believe he'd done it on purpose.

  Chief Rawling sent Phillips back inside. Then he drove her and her dad home in their Oldsmobile. His pretty wife with the black hair followed them in his police cruiser. Miranda had been surprised that Phillips didn't turn up at school the next day. His mother home-schooled him for half the year, rumors of his escapades around the island traveling the halls anyway.

  She studied his profile, just inches away. She'd always wanted to ask him if his voices had said anything else about her. She wanted to know. Maybe. But she didn't ask that. Instead she asked, "Do you mind if we stop by there?"

  A thick black fence thrust from the ground like jagged teeth, a forbidding boundary made of painted iron. The evening light made shadow spears that thrust toward the gentle slope of ground the fence protected.

  "I can't believe I'm about to say this," he said. "But, why not?"

  He turned up the dirt drive and drove them into the graveyard, dust ghosts trailing the car.

Miranda got out first and wandered through the chalky white tombstones, some carved with angels or winged skulls. There weren't many recent burials in this part of the cemetery. Phillips didn't follow her. He stayed in the car. She figured he'd join her if he felt like it.

  She
was
alone now. Alone in the world.

  She walked up the slope, grass that could have used mowing tickling her ankles. She turned back and saw Phillips still inside the car. She started down the other side of the small hill, leaving his sight. The markers changed to reddish marble and gleaming black. There were plain gray stones mixed in, but not many of the oldest pale ones.

  Miranda didn't care for modern headstones. When her mom died, they'd only been able to afford a smallish marble rectangle to mark her grave. She had wished for something large and sweeping that captured her mother's spirit. Or at least something small and noble, like those old ones. She was pretty sure the guy at the Outer Banks Monument Company who sold them their stone had already cut them a deal though. There hadn't been any way to ask for something more.

  She reached the not-so-special gray stone. Kneeling, she traced the letters of her mother's name with her fingertips. Anna-Marie Blackwood. Miranda leaned against the stone, and said, "I didn't forget my promise, but I wasn't able to keep it."

  Miranda didn't ask for her mom's forgiveness, but she wanted it all the same. She eased down on the hillside next to the headstone and pulled up a yellow dandelion growing on the top of the grave. She shivered at the idea of her mom down there in the cold, damp dark.

  The tombstones on either side were close. There'd be no room for her dad's marker to go next to her mom's. Not that they – not that she – could afford one.

  She heard Phillips climbing down the hill to join her. He must have been stomping as loud as he could through the grass, to give her fair warning to compose herself. He wasn't turning out to be anything like she expected.

  She patted the ground beside her. He kicked at the grass, then sat down.

  "Phillips Rawling, meet Anna-Marie," Miranda said.

  Phillips didn't say anything.

  "She was great," Miranda said.

  "I'm sorry."

  "You say that a lot."

  "Sorry," he said, then, "Last one, promise."

  They stayed like that for a few minutes, not talking. Low, gray clouds passed overhead. The rolling hills of the cemetery grounds were dotted with purple-flowering bushes and a few trees. This was a peaceful place, even with the highway so nearby.

  "I can't believe he's gone," she said. "I still can't believe she is."

  "What was he like?"

  Miranda shrugged. Before her mom had gotten sick, he'd been different. Quieter, not so much of a crazy talker or drinker. Able to hold a steady job. Her mom could make him smile with such little effort. She read Miranda book after book, Narnia and Alice and the first couple of Spiderwicks, while he drank a beer or two, no more, content to listen.

  She plucked another dandelion, this one already transformed to a head of white cotton spokes. "He wasn't able to be himself anymore. Not after she died… Losing someone, sometimes it's too much. He felt it too much. He couldn't shut out the dark."

  She blew on the dandelion, scattering the white particles all over Phillips' shirt.

  "Thanks," he said, brushing them off. "You have a thing for coating me with random substances you want to tell me about?"

  Miranda laid back instead of answering, grass brushing her ears, and watched the clouds. "I don't know what's going to happen to me. I never really thought beyond taking care of him. Never made any plans." She thought. "Never figured there was any point making them."

  Phillips took a moment to respond. "That part is a good thing though. Right?"

  Miranda didn't answer. Was it?

  Phillips hauled himself up on his knees and reached over her. He touched the headstone. "Nice to meet you, AnnaMarie," he said.

  Miranda smiled up at him, without meaning to. This was a boy who lent himself to wondering about. Especially when he jolted up, a sudden uneasiness overtaking his whole body – she wondered why.

  He gave her a stricken look. "I don't think you should go home…" he hesitated. "You shouldn't be alone. Come to my house? You can meet my mom."

  She agreed, despite the fact he was wrong. She was alone. But she'd be that way for the rest of her life. There was no reason to rush home and embrace it.

Phillips heard the words the moment after he touched her mother's headstone, the moment he looked down and found her smiling at him with the first genuine approval he'd seen cross her face. One voice, low and right in his ear, glass clear:
Curse-bearer. Curse-bearer, she is a curse-born child.

  He couldn't figure out how to tell her.

  So, he didn't. Not yet, at least. He angled the car up the driveway toward the white two-story house that had originally belonged to his "gifted" grandmother. It was the kind of house that should feel comfortable to anybody – the sort of place pictured in Webster's next to the word home. Maybe that was why he felt nothing when he saw it. The normal white and normal wood and normal shape were too normal to be connected to him.

  "Like something straight out of house and beach garden, huh? My mom should be cool, but if she's not, I'll just drop my stuff, and then we'll get you home," Phillips said, aware he was rambling. Now that he was about to see his mom again, he worried he'd underestimated how ticked she'd be about the whole 'stealing her car and leaving her at the airport' thing. "OK?"

  Miranda straightened. "Oh, frak, it's after nine. I missed curtain."

  He turned off the car. Where did the fake-curse frak come from? He couldn't remember. He'd have to look it up later. "They'll cancel, won't they?"

  Her shoulders slumped. "Right. They already did. I forgot. Everyone's left town. No show to go on. But Sidekick will need food at some point soon."

  Her disappointment about the cancellation was clear and he wished he'd kept his mouth shut. He had never seen
The Lost Colony
and vaguely wondered what it was like: he pictured cartoon savages wampuming around a set, overdone Elizabethan stuff. He managed to keep these ideas quiet as they left the car, since the show was clearly important to her.

  There was one interesting thing about the house besides its history. His mother. She swung back in the porch swing and then rose from her perch in a smooth motion. She waited at the top of the steps, arms crossed, as they dragged lead feet across the lawn.