Under the Boardwalk: A Dazzling Collection of All New Summertime Love Stories (60 page)

"The hot-air balloon pilot said there were lots of streams back here."

He nodded. "There's a whole network of them farther in, back in the swamps. I used to know the streams like I know the streets in D.C. now. like the back of my hand."

"You grew up back here."

"That's right"

They drove in silence for a very long five minutes.

"How does a boy from the Pines get to go to Princeton?" she asked.

"It's a very long story, Jody," he answered without looking at her.

She was about to ask when he'd be telling her that story, when they rounded a bend in the road that broadened into a clearing, beyond which stood an ancient cabin of wood that seemed to grow out in all directions from a central square.

All Jody could think of was Hansel and Gretel.

Jeremy stared ahead at the cabin for a long, quiet time, his left hand on the door handle. Jody kept waiting For him to open the door, but he did not. Finally, from around the side of the cabin, an old woman appeared, her Brillo-like gray hair partially hidden by the dark blue scarf around her head. A faded brown dress that must have had a belt at one time hung on her slight frame. She leaned on a thick walking stick of white birch.

Jody's eyes widened. Hansel and Gretel indeed!

Upon seeing the car, she stopped and stared intently at them, her eyes seeming to dismiss Jody's presence as she appeared to focus solely on Jeremy.

"Who is that?" Jody whispered.

"That's Miz Tuesday," he said softly.

"Miz Tuesday?" she repeated.

"My stepfather's great-grandmother." Jeremy pushed open the car door and stepped out without waiting for Jody and walked slowly to where the old woman stood.

Jody opened her own door, and forgetting the bubbly appearance of her face, followed behind.

"Jeremy." The old woman said. "
Jeremy
."

He nodded slowly, and they eyed each other without speaking.

" 'Bout time." The old woman turned toward the house and pointed the stick in Jody's direction without turning to look at her. "Bring your friend."

Jody touched Jeremy's arm. He looked back over his shoulder at her and said, "She hasn't changed in sixteen years. She hasn't changed at all."

"Are we going inside?"

"Yes."

He held the door for Jody, and she stepped into a darkened parlor. The shapes of furniture loomed here and there around her, but there was no light. Jeremy led her through the dim room into the kitchen, where the light was only slightly better.

"Miz Tuesday, this is my friend, Jody Beckett." Jeremy said as they crossed the worn threshold.

The old woman nodded to acknowledge the introduction but did not turn around.

"I'm makin' you a dish of tea." The old woman told them as she placed a few short pieces of wood into the big woodstove that dominated one whole wall. Thanks, Miz Tuesday."

She nodded that they were welcome.

"You ever get electricity, Miz Tuesday?" Jeremy asked.

"You been away a long time." She turned and smiled slyly. "Even stump jumpers got elec-tricity these days."

Jeremy laughed for the first time that day.

"How've you been, Miz Tuesday?" Jeremy's face softened as he watched the old woman fill a teakettle with water from the spigot of an old porcelain sink.

She nodded her head briskly. "Pretty middlin' smart."

"I'm glad to hear that."

The old woman pointed to the wooden chairs that sat around the old round table in a corner of the room.

"Set there," she told them as she cleaned the dust from mismatched teacups, long unused, and placed them on the table.

He sat where he was told to and said, "You haven't changed much, Miz Tuesday."

"Not much do back here." She nodded. "Roads been science'd, some 'em. 'Bout all. You bein' a Clam Towner, wouldn't know."

"I don't live in Tuckerton anymore," Jeremy told her. "I haven't lived there in a long time."

"Then where?"

"Outside of Washington, D.C."

Her eyes widened. "All that far?"

He nodded.

"Lotsa folks going from here, but me, I beant going nowhere." She sat and leaned back in her chair. 'Our Martha, she bent down to Mays Landing, and her son John, he bent all the way to Trenton, to a school to learn to be a teacher. I always figured him for a weighty man. like you, Jeremy Noble. You grown up to be a weighty man? A schoolteacher? A bookkeeper, maybe?"

"I'm an investigator. I don't know that what I do makes me 'weighty,' Miz Tuesday, but I guess sometimes you have to be smart enough to find people who don't want to be found."

Her eyes narrowed and she studied his face.

After a long minute, she turned and leaned over to cup Jody's face in her hand.

"You're here for a curin'," she said, and underneath her sunburn, Jody blushed.

Drawn in by the unknown drama unfolding around her, she had forgotten just how awful she looked.

Self-consciousry, Jody raised a hand to cover the blisters on her chin.

"Aloe." Miz Tuesday pronounced.

"Tried that."

"Where'd you find aloe in D.C.?" She pronounced the letters as if they were in quotation marks.

"Not in D.C. In Ocean Point. In the drugstore."

"
Boughten
?" She raised her eyebrows. "From a store?"

"Yes. They sell it in bottles."

"Fancy that." She shook her head. "Next thing you'll be saying they sell turpentine and Jersey lightnin' too."

Jeremy laughed.

Miz Tuesday stood up and went to a cabinet that hung from the wall next to the stove.

"Turpentine and Jersey lightnin'?" Jody whispered. "And what the hell's a 'stump jumper'?"

"Stump jumpers are the backwoodsmen." He grinned. "Turpentine, in one form or another, has been the traditional treatment of choice here in the Pines for any number of conditions. And there are some that maintain that Jersey lightnin'—homemade applejack whiskey— can cure just about anything. If, of course, it doesn't kill you."

Miz Tuesday shuffled back to the table with several small vials in her hand. After reinspecting Jody's face, she turned her attention to the shoulder burns, then to those on her chest. She nodded to herself, then went to the sink, refilled the teapot, and turned the burner back on.

"First thing you need is to get out of that dress. Then you soak in the tub in flower water…"

"Flower water?" Jody mouthed the words silently.

"… then you have salve, then later, some pure aloe." Miz Tuesday gestured for Jody to follow her through a doorway to the right, muttering under her breath, "Boughten aloe. Hmmph!"

"Jeremy, you can cut me some short pieces for my woodstove.' She pointed to a woodpile about ten feet from the back door. "And you can stack 'em right here, near the door."

"Yes, ma'am," Jeremy stood, an amused expression on his face. The lost look he'd had all day seemed to have faded slightly.

"I'll be findin' you an old something of Martha's to put on," Miz Tuesday was telling Jody. "The marigolds might stain your clothes."

' Marigolds?" Jody asked.

"In the flower water." Jeremy heard the old woman say as she closed the door behind them, shutting Jeremy out and leaving him alone here for the first time since he was fifteen years old.

Miz Tuesday wasn't the only thing that had not changed. The old cabin remained exactly as he remembered it. One room had been tacked on to another until the small house was five or six rooms deep or wide. The room where Miz Tuesday had taken Jody had been added two years before Jeremy left, and boasted an old claw-foot tub that John, Jeremy's stepfather, had salvaged from a boardinghouse that had been torn down in Waretown. Jeremy could dose his eyes and recall every detail of the day they had brought that tub into this house. It had taken six of them to carry it in and put it in its place in the newly constructed room off the kitchen. Miz Tuesday had been very pleased with her new bathroom.

He walked to the back door and looked through the carefully mended screen to the small herb garden a step or two to the left, around what they called the door yard back here in the Pines. He pushed the door open and walked outside and drew in a deep breath. The overwhelming scent was, well,
pine
. Oh, there were flowers that grew wild in the nutrient-poor sandy soil—mountain laurel and wild indigo, sweet goldenrod and goat's rue, and farther down along the waterways, sweet pep-perbush with its fragrant white flowers. But it was pine, above all, that saturated the air. The smell of it brought back a flood of memories from a lifetime ago.

A trail worn in the gray sand parted the shrubs and wound deep into the forest, and without choosing to do so, Jeremy followed it to its end, three quarters ofa mile away.

"Now, what's this?" Jody sniffed at the fragrant lotion that Miz Tuesday was applying to the blisters on her shoulders. The bath had been pleasant enough, and she could almost feel the blisters begin to shrivel under Miz Tuesday's gentle ministrations.

"Flax seed, plantain, maybe. Red clover. Some others. Maybe."

"Maybe?" Jody raised a questioning eyebrow.

Miz Tuesday shrugged. "Sometimes one, sometimes another."

"Umm, not that I doubt that you know what you're doing, of course," Jody looked down at the pale yellow tincture that was being smeared onto her shoulders, then held still while Miz Tuesday patted some on the blisters on her face and tried to be tactful. "But shouldn't it
not vary
?"

Miz Tuesday just smiled and held up a worn cotton shift.

"This won't rub on your blisters."

"Thank you." Jody took the dress, in style akin to a hospital gown without the back opening, and slipped it over her head. "I really do feel better, Miz Tuesday. Thank you."

"He be the one that bringed you."

Miz Tuesday opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. She was not surprised to find the house empty, nor did she expect to find Jeremy still chopping wood. Neither did she wonder where he had gone. She knew.

He was, in her opinion, long overdue.

Jody watched the old woman return her vials of herbs to the cupboard and asked, "Miz Tuesday, how do you know what herbs to use for what ailments?"

"You just know, sometimes." She shrugged. "My mother and her mother and
her
mother were healers. They taught me as they did."

"Is that what you are, a healer? Like a doctor?"

Miz Tuesday shook her head. "I don't know about doctors. But I can heal, all right."

Jody was about to ask if Miz Tuesday grew all of her own plants when she glanced out the back window and realized that Jeremy wasn't there.

"Where do you suppose Jeremy went?"

Miz Tuesday rinsed out the small bowls she had used to mix her lotions and debated whether or not to tell her. How might Jeremy feel, after all these years, once he arrived at the end of the path?

She watched Jody out of the corner of a cloudy eye. The young woman must mean a great deal to Jeremy. After all, it was only to seek help for her that he had, finally, come back. Once here, he would deal with all that had been left behind, Miz Tuesday was certain.

She turned to Jody and said, "There's a path through the woods there, out back. It ends in a clearing. He's there."