The Silent Strength of Stones (2 page)

I finally talked them into buying the brand we carried by pitching it harder than it deserved. When at last they headed out, I breathed out a whew and turned to find Willow watching me.

She grinned.

“What?” I said, annoyed. I hated discovering that people were watching me without my knowing it. Go figure.

“You have a way with words,” she said.

“Thanks. I think.”

“They turn slippery when you use them,” she said, “and they taste like fresh bread.”

This was definitely the weirdest thing anybody had ever said to me directly. I raised my eyebrows at her, not knowing how to answer.

“Say something to me,” she said, and there was a nudge in her voice stronger than the ones I used to get from my mom when she still lived with us.

“Uh—would you come to the dance Friday with me?”

Willow cocked her head and frowned. She ran her index finger over her lips. She shook her head.

“You don’t dance?” I asked.

“You’re not doing it,” she said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She came and leaned her elbows on the counter, propping her chin in her hands, her dark yellow eyes staring into mine. “Nick,” she said, her voice deep and velvety, “will you come to the dance with me on Friday?” Promises lay in her voice like baited fish hooks on a line.

I said yes before I even thought.

She grinned, dimples dancing in both cheeks. “See?” she said. “You could do that.”

I locked the register and went out to straighten the magazines, not looking at Willow. Something about what had just happened made a hot lump lodge in my throat. I knew that when I really pushed, I was a hell of a salesman. A kind of energy filled me, a heat that brightened my brain until words slid from my mouth, smooth and elegant, convincing people of things they didn’t want to believe. When I first figured it out I had a great time selling people things they didn’t want. The problem with that was they came back later, upset, or they didn’t come back at all because they didn’t want me to do it again. Besides, it made me feel hollow and echoey and a little sick inside. So now I reserved the extra push for special occasions; but I didn’t want anybody else to know about it.

“When should I pick you up?” Willow said from behind me. Her voice sounded subdued.

“Seven-thirty,” I said. When I turned around, she was gone.

Mariah, a wild-haired forty-eight-year-old artist who spent the winters painting pictures and the summers selling them, came by at noon to spell me on the register, as she did every day. I went back past the storeroom to Pop’s and Granddad’s and my living room/dining room/kitchen and built myself a sandwich. A few minutes later Mariah ducked in to hand me the mail. There was another letter from Mom. I folded it in half and stuck it in my back pocket. When I finished eating and washing up I put the other mail where Pop would find it when he got back from his thrift-store raiding trip to town.

With half an hour of lunch break left, I went upstairs to my bedroom. It was narrow, just wide enough for a bed, a dresser, and a small carpeted space where my barbells sat. I used to have pictures of wild animals all over the walls, ones Mom had bought for me or taken out of nature magazines and helped me pin up. When she left I took them all down and lived with blank white walls pricked with tack holes.

I opened the bottom drawer of the dresser, got out the stack of letters Mom had sent me, and stuck the current one under the rubber band. When I had held the first one in my hand, I could scarcely breathe, I was so angry. I had had to put it down before I could get any breath. It had reminded me of the panic attack I’d had the day she left. Spooked, I had burned that one, and for a while I burned them every month as soon as they arrived, but they kept coming, and eventually I started saving them. I hadn’t read any of them. Didn’t know if I ever would. Each time one came, though, about once a month, I felt faintly reassured. At least she was still alive somewhere. I didn’t any longer wish she were dead.

I picked up the third volume in the Lord Calardane series and read for a little while. My watch beeped just when he discovered a nest of monsters in the sewers and realized that they were actually nice and might help him get the all-curing elixir from the Castle of Infinite Illusion. I always liked that about Calardane, that he didn’t slice anybody’s head off with his sword until he was sure they were mean.

Mariah took off as soon as I got back. Something was missing from the things hanging on the back wall behind the register where Pop had mounted antique fishing equipment. I had to study a bit until I figured out it was the wicker creel Granddad used to use ages ago until he couldn’t mend the leather strap any longer.

No wonder Mariah had run off. She knew she wasn’t supposed to sell that stuff, but she couldn’t say no to some people, especially light-haired men with sun crinkles next to their blue eyes and wide smiles full of teeth. She had been in love with somebody like that once, I figured, and she kept hoping he would come back. Or maybe she thought if she gave one of these guys what he really wanted she would get a reward.

I leaned against the counter for a while with my eyes closed. I could try to rearrange everything so there was no broad blank spot. Maybe Pop wouldn’t notice the creel was gone. I had managed to fool him when Mariah had sold the bamboo rod, but that hadn’t been anywhere near as important as the creel.

I sighed and ran out a register tape to see if she’d actually entered the sale. The first time I caught her at this, she had showed me that at least she hadn’t kept the money. This time there was a sale labeled “misc” for twelve dollars, and I knew we didn’t have anything in the store that cost twelve dollars. Everything cost something ninety-five, as if that fools anybody into thinking it costs a whole dollar less.

For a minute there I really wanted to hit Mariah. Twelve dollars couldn’t buy a replacement for family history. It was a stupid amount. She’d sold me out to Pop for twelve dollars. I wanted to hit her—and kill the guy who had talked her into selling it. Instead, I just finished my shift and closed up the store at five, like always, leaving the big blank spot on the wall behind me, where Pop would see it right away. I ran out the end-of-day register tape and put it with the account book and sales graph paper on Pop’s desk in the living room/dining room/kitchen in back, straightened stuff, restocked whatever I could from the storeroom, and then headed out for my evening prowl.

This time I decided to go the opposite direction. I checked out the tumbledown cabins on Old Man Fortrey’s property (nobody home), took a look at the lawyer’s weekender up the ridge (nobody home), and cruised past some other places. Smelled steaks cooking over an outdoor grill at Benningtons’ and wished I was invited. But I never had been.

There were a few other places up at the end of the road, but I was too curious about Willow and her family to finish out my route. None of the usual suspects who took those cabins had been by the store yet, anyway.

So I turned around and headed toward Lacey’s again, stopping at the Venture to put three big baking potatoes in the oven at 425 degrees. They’d keep for an hour. Pop hated me to turn the oven on and leave, but with no backup—Granddad had gone on the trip to the valley with him—I didn’t have much choice. I set my watch alarm for forty-five minutes.

This time I went right by Willow’s cabin and on to Kristen’s. She was sitting on the patio, looking out at the lake, and some big muscular guy in tennis whiles and a crew cut was sitting next to her.

I watched them for a while. The guy talked to Kristen, but Kristen didn’t even turn to look at him when he spoke. So maybe there was hope. Eventually Kristen’s mom came out with a tray of iced tea glasses and a plate of cookies.

I decided they were boring and went to check the other Lacey cabins. Four of them had families in them, and one had a couple who obviously weren’t married to each other. Up at the tennis courts I saw Paul rallying with some new guy. I decided to wait until he came into the store before I said hello; that would give me some idea of where we stood this year. I didn’t want to assume something stupid, like we were still friends, if it wasn’t true.

I should have gone on to check the Hidaway, but somehow I couldn’t stay away from Willow’s cabin any longer.

This time there were three grown-ups, the two men I’d already seen and a red-haired woman, and all four kids standing out on the back patio facing the lake. I didn’t see the white wolf anywhere. A cooking smell drifted up from the cabin, but it didn’t smell like meat, more like some sort of stew that included a few turnips and lots of onions.

The family wasn’t talking. They just stood there, staring. Then the woman stretched her arms out in front of her, palms up, and said something. The rest of them murmured. Not a conversation. More like the statement/response part of the church services my mom used to take me to. The woman said something else, and the rest of them answered. I couldn’t even move while this went on. There was something so intense about it. The phrase “true believers” drifted through my mind.

Suddenly all the others lifted their arms, too, holding their hands toward the sky. They sang something in harmony, and something shimmered around them all, maybe flickers of light reflected from the lake water. Maybe not.

I couldn’t take it anymore, and I lit out running, which was a good thing, because my watch peeped about ten seconds later. I ran so fast that by the time I got home all I was thinking about was breathing, which was a relief.

Pop and Granddad hadn’t made it home yet. I threw together some Dagwoods for them. The truck pulled up just as I poked the potatoes with a fork and discovered they were done. I turned the oven off and went outside.

It didn’t take any time at all for Pop to figure out the creel was gone. He waited until we’d unloaded the odds and ends of stuff he’d picked up at thrift stores for resale before he lit into me, though.

“You should have gotten the guy’s name from her—I got a quarter says she wormed it out of him—and gone after him,” he yelled when I told him Mariah had sold the creel.

I set a plate loaded with sandwich and steaming potato in front of him and got the butter dish out of the cupboard.

“What do you call this?”

“Dinner,” I said. I never could control my mouth when it really counted.

Granddad was just as happy. He bit into his sandwich and chewed, then grinned at me.

“You go up to that woman’s cabin and get that name from her! Ten cents says he’s visiting her right now. You make him give you back that creel! She can’t sell things like that, she just can’t. Can’t you make her understand a simple thing like that?”

I had only explained it to her twenty-six times, and no, I couldn’t get her to understand it.

“If there was any single other person loose who would cover your danged lunch break I would fire Mariah in a minute!” But of course in the summer everybody else was working at a service job that paid at least minimum wage; Mariah was the only one who’d watch the store for three dollars an hour and a ten percent discount on her food bill. “Why don’t you just eat your lunch behind the register?”

“Wouldn’t look good,” I said. It was the only way I had gotten him to give me a lunch break in the first place, by convincing him, really hard, with every slippery, bread-smelling word in me, that customers seeing me eat would not come up and try to buy something and we’d lose business.

“Tell you what,” he said, his voice quieting just a touch from the full-scale yell, “from now on, you eat sitting right behind the curtain, and if you hear her bargaining with somebody for anything off the wall, you come out and fire that bitch right out on her ass! We can close up for half an hour while you eat!” Then he started chomping on his sandwich. I ate in silence.

After about ten minutes, he said, “Okay, you’ve eaten enough. You get up to her cabin and get her to tell you what she’s done, dammit!”

I slid my plate into a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator, hoping the rest of my sandwich would be there when I got back. Pop didn’t like me taking anything from the store unless he authorized it first, and I had thrown together supper from the last things he’d authorized. Sometimes when Pop was mad he got especially hungry, and tonight looked like one of those times. He’d eat anything he could find, including my leftover sandwich.

The way my stomach was clenching, I wasn’t sure I’d be hungry later anyway.

Mariah lived in a shack up on the ridge, reachable only by footpath. She had a small parking area below where her rusty old VW bug stayed. She used the car so seldom she usually needed a jump to start it. I had crept up close to her house, but I’d never been inside it; she had never invited me. She liked her privacy, and she was generally pretty boring to watch, so I granted it to her.

I took a flashlight.

What if Pop was right, and she had some guy with her? He’d never told me I had to go accost Mariah before. Other than training her on the register at the beginning and telling her what she was doing wrong later, I hadn’t exchanged many words with her, actually; what I knew about her, I knew from observing her interactions at the store.

I started for her place, flashing the light on fallen pine needles and gravel, dreading the confrontation. I reached her parking lot before it occurred to me that I could lie: just tell Pop I had gone to see Mariah, and she had sold the creel to a passing stranger whose name she didn’t know, there was no chance of retrieval, we could kiss the creel good-bye, end of story. Mariah had no telephone. He wouldn’t be able to check the story unless he stormed up the mountain himself, and I wasn’t sure he even knew the way, for all we’d lived here half my life. I could catch her when she came to relieve me at lunch break, brief her before Pop could check with her.

Less psychic stress on all of us.

I switched off the flashlight and sat in Mariah’s parking lot, studying the stars and listening to the silence of the night. A faint whiff of wood smoke in the air, a stronger scent of pine needles. Owls hooted somewhere nearby. Something more distant screeched, maybe its tiny death cry as a night hunter killed it. And even farther away, the quavering howl of—of what?