The Secret of Magic (26 page)

But that thought of Skip Moseley and their rivalry—or
his
rivalry with
her
; that’s how she preferred to think of it—had clinched up her stomach good and tight. She needed to talk to Willie Willie about the case. Did he, too, believe Wynne Blodgett had killed his son? He’d never said it right out, and she needed to know what he thought, there was no more putting it off, so she tried, “Mr. Willie, I went to see Tom Raspberry about your case, and he seems . . .”

But Willie Willie shushed her right up. “There’s no talking of business on the Lord’s rest day.” Instead, he pointed out the world to her as she passed through it. “See those flowers there, that’s the spider lily. I already told you about them, the ones at the courthouse. They’re all over the place back at the house, practically take over Miss Mary Pickett’s yard this time of year. That’s the sure sign there’ll be no more warm weather. You hear that knock-knocking? That’s one ornery woodpecker noising away. And that there . . . why, that’s a wing-tipped cardinal. And that there—look quick!—that’s a little bluebird family.” He stretched out a gnarled, pointing finger. “Those like the ones make Miss Mary Pickett keep her mailbox empty. Even when she was a little girl, she was always partial to the small creatures, to the ones nobody else wanted.”

“Like Jackson Blodgett?” Regina said softly. She saw him again, limping away from Mary Pickett, up the long driveway that led out of Calhoun Place, and she
knew
that Jackson could never really have been Jack, not Jack as he’d been in
The Secret of Magic
, tramping into the forest, bold as brass, just like the others. He’d not lived
The Secret of Magic
. How could he have? Regina had seen his limp, and Mary Picket had explained it. Polio had grabbed him young, shook him over. After it finished with him, there’d been no way he could run again. Yet, with the stroke of her pen, Mary Pickett had put him where she wanted him to be, gave him the past that perhaps he himself wanted. And who knew, in years to come and in generations, when the folks who knew were all dead but the book lived on, if truth itself would be forgotten and the fiction Mary Pickett had written be believed as what had happened, as what was real?

“Hmmmm,” said Willie Willie. He was pointing out the window again, leading her eye to the bare twigs of an azalea bush and then on from there to the drying kudzu that still strangled an old oak tree, to a burdock. On and on as he pointed out things to her that she would never have seen on her own, marking out a hundred shadings of green, each with its own meaning, his fingers opening a land to her—
abracadabra!
—so glutted with foliage that she wondered how even a rabbit could wiggle through.

Regina checked her watch. They had been driving about twenty minutes now, and had come to the edge of a place that was both strange and wild. She had never seen anything remotely like it before, the lushness of green still everywhere as the calendar bore down heavily toward winter. But there was no mistaking. Willie Willie knew
exactly
where he was. He slowed the truck almost to a standstill and leaned his head close against the windshield with Regina. “See those trees there, Miss Regina? Look up! See those bare branches touching the sky? See those spiderwebs just barely hanging on at the top? There! There! Look up, then look up again!”

And she saw them! Saw what he meant!

“That’s mistletoe,” said Willie Willie, satisfied, “the best part of the forest. In the winter, when it decides and it’s ready, it floats right down on top of you. Caresses you on the cheek, touches you with magic. And when you feel that soft kiss of the mistletoe, you know the time’s come to make your wish.”

“Make your wish?”

“Anything you want. It’s gonna come true!”

Regina sighed with contentment. Maybe what Willie Willie said wasn’t real but it sure sounded good.

“But when will we
get
there? To Magnolia Forest?”

Willie Willie started up again, turned to her and winked. “We already there.” Regina looked around her. She didn’t know how it had happened, but green had snuck up all around her, and now it was everywhere.

“Never
have
left the forest,” Willie Willie continued, “you been in it since the day you got here, right there where you climbed off the Bonnie Blue bus. Revere
is
the forest. It was carved right out from the middle of it and built up in its midst. It’s always been a fight between the town and the trees, which one’s gonna win out over the other. My bet’s on the forest. Some parts it’s wider and thicker, some parts it’s thinner. But it’s always there, always ready to take back what it knows belongs to it.”

Suddenly, Willie Willie spun his truck so sharply to the right that Regina had to clutch tight to the hanging strap to keep from tipping into him.

And the path he’d turned into was twisted and narrow, the road ahead of them dark, even discreet. Immediately, the smell of the day changed from the soft scent of pine and flowers to that of rich, dark earth. Regina rolled down her window, leaned her head out.

Willie Willie said, “You gonna like Peach.”

And Regina called out, her eyes on the forest. “Oh, I already met her.”

“I know you already met her,” Willie Willie said with great patience. “Now you’re gonna get to
like
her. Meeting and liking—that’s two different things.”

Peach’s house was only a small, sly twinkle at first, but as Willie Willie drove on, it grew larger, took form. Four stout walls, then two great brick chimneys atop a dark roof. Everything coming more and more into focus, like puzzle pieces fitting together. Until suddenly the forest parted. They passed through a small clearing, and were there.

And the house was there, too, the Mottley house, just like it had been in
The Secret of Magic
.
It was a
real
house, something that Mary Pickett had obviously seen and not conjured. Behind it lay a garden and a snug brick kitchen that was not attached to the main house, which sat atop a riser of red steps that rose up like a sentry from the circular, pea-gravel drive. In front waved a filigreed sign just like the one at Mary Pickett’s, announcing to a visiting world that this was
MOTTLEY PLACE, CONSTRUCTED 1901.

Yet even from a distance Regina could see that the paint had peeled off the main walls in strips so wide they only hinted at what once must have been the original, brilliant, bright white. Still, the red geraniums were there, just like they had been in the book, a bright flash of them on each rung of the stairs and lining the path that skirted the house and led to the forest. Geraniums in terra-cotta, in Maxwell House two-pound coffee tins, in splintery wooden slatted fruit boxes. The house itself was placed at a soft angle slightly off-center of the driveway, making it look something like the top curve of a question mark.

At the apex of which stood Peach, waving to them from the open front door, her free hand shading her eyes.

Regina climbed out of the truck; she didn’t wait for Willie Willie. By the time she heard the click of his door, she was already making her way to that house. And there she was right beside her, on the porch, and it was the same porch that Mary Pickett had—green floorboards, a blue-painted ceiling. A combination, according to M. P. Calhoun, that mosquitoes just could not abide.

“Come on in, sugar,” sang out Miss Peach. But she looked at her in a singular way and, for the first time, Regina hesitated. The forest grew still, seemed to hold its breath around her. For a second she was a child again, stealing her mother’s sewing flashlight, taking it into her bedroom under her covers so she could read
The Secret of Magic
and find out with the children if Peach was a witch. If she had killed Luther, her brother, and if, after what Raspberry had told her, Willie Willie had helped her.

But that wasn’t why she was here, not to solve that long-ago mystery—if it was a mystery, if any of it was true at all—but to unravel a real-life present-day puzzle. To find out who had killed Joe Howard and to get Willie Willie some justice for his son. So in the end, she reached out to Peach, to the warm honey-fruit smell of her, to her flowered apron hanging like a picture over a flower-on-flower silk dress, to her sachet-powdered bosom that looked like a tea cake dusted with sugar, and she kissed her warm, scarred cheek, while around them the forest sighed.

“Thank you for inviting me,” said Regina.

“Glad for the company,” said Miss Peach heartily, sounding like she meant it.
A woman alone, used to being alone. Months, years, decades of loneliness.
The thought sobered Regina.

“Glad for it,” Peach repeated. “Few are the folks now who turn up out here.”

“I thought she might like going into the house,” Willie Willie said to Peach. He was beside them both, a gentleman opening the faded wooden screen door. “I thought it would be a treat for her, since she read that Miss Mary Pickett book.”

“But the house wasn’t in the book; the inside of it wasn’t! At least not like it is,” said Peach, looking pleased yet shaking her head.

“Still, I thought it’d be mighty nice if you showed it.” And then to Regina, “You’re in for a treat. Peach lives in the very best showing place of how things used to be in the South. She worked many a year for Miss Charlotte and Miss Luisa and Miss Hunnicutt Lindleigh, and for their mother before them. Did all their laundry. Other folks’, too.” He winked at her. “Best you remember that. It’s part of her story.”

A smile gathered up the wrinkles on Peach’s full, biscuit-colored face. “I was always one for being independent. Independent of Daddy. Independent of Luther. I wanted my own livelihood for myself.”

She laughed at this, and Willie Willie laughed along with her, and then Regina joined in because they seemed to be having a good time. Peach reached over and tenderly ran a finger down the length of Willie Willie’s shirt. Touched his hand, as he flourished open the door so she could pass through.

How could anyone describe Peach’s house, the absolute profusion of it? The gaudiness, really. It reminded Regina of an overloaded Victorian Christmas tree. Turkey carpets overlapped one another on the floor, sometimes three deep, while up the green brocade walls marched portrait after portrait of gilt-framed American soldiers, some of them old enough that the men were in blue uniform, but the most, and by far the largest of the pictures, memorializing them in gray. One of the pictures had been hung sideways, the only way it could fit. Banners—
OUR GLORIOUS CAUSE! HAIL FALLEN HEROES!
—
waved in a draft from the door. And flags, too, at least two regimental ones, shading down from the ceiling, their colors dim, their edges frayed. But still . . . there.

On Peach’s walls, the men were segregated on one side, corseted women hung on the other, the ladies holding tightly on to children or to lace handkerchiefs or to nosegays of African violets. But always clutching at something, at least that’s how it looked to Regina, and the children doing it, too, their hands wrapped around a doll, resting small fists on a rocking horse. The only thing they had in common was that they were, all of them, white. Which meant they couldn’t have much to do with the Mottleys, so why were they here?

Regina looked over, and there was Peach, with her eyes wary but her head nodding, and behind her, Willie Willie nodding as well. Peach raised her hand.

“Please step into my parlor,” she said with great formality, sounding like the spider in a children’s picture book.

Six sofas had found a crowded home in a snug little room with gold-green walls. One a rich burgundy velvet, one a green damask, one filigreed gold on black silk. Regina couldn’t tell anything about the other three because these were hidden under scarves so bright they looked like something Peach might wear, and probably did. Chippendale chairs stacked carelessly up one wall and down another.

“Didn’t have space to put not one more thing over there. Had to crowd the rest of it here,” said Peach, coming up and throwing a gesture toward a closed door. “There’s two long tables and sixteen high-back chairs in the dining room already. Not to mention the sideboards and the butler tables and the silver flatware and the china plates. My goodness, how those Lindleighs could eat!”

Not everything was in the best of shape, though. Some of the chair cushions were patched with fabric that didn’t quite match the green damask on the sofa nearest Regina. Still, what did a patch or a worn spot here or there matter in the face of so much? In a room with claw-foot tables and brass-legged tables, glass- and marble-topped mahogany, walnut, oak, mother-of-pearl inlaid on ebony tables—an
opulence
of them, an obstacle course!—Regina decided she’d better watch her step.

“My house,” Peach said with a pleased sigh. “My home. All mine. My very own.”

“This here is Stream Run, the Willman place,” said Willie Willie in dignified explanation. “Well, technically maybe not Stream Run
itself
.”
He took a moment to ponder over this. “But surely what you might call the idea behind it. You see, Old Mottley, Miss Peach’s departed daddy, always hankered after that house. Had a crush on it.
Loved
it. He made all his own store deliveries to Mr. Roger Willman’s; he wouldn’t send one of his working boys. And while he was in the kitchen putting things up, he’d look around a corner, peep on in, see just enough to figure things out.”

“Daddy was good at that,” said Peach, her smile now pouring like sunshine onto Regina. “I already told you how he built that new jail, put together everything in it, from the foundation up. Even forged the iron for the cells.”

“Good
enough
,” corrected Willie Willie. “Mottley got his mind around the downstairs, even figured out the wainscoting and the medallions and the brass chandeliers. But there was no way the Willmans were going to let him go up into the bedrooms. No way in this world was that going to happen. That’s why the whole of this place is only one story tall.”

He moved aside so that Regina could peek at a curving stairway, stare at it as it arched gracefully upward, straight to the ceiling and its abrupt end.