Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea Read online

  “Do you know where Jack is?” I asked. “I need to talk to him.”

  She nodded again. “He’s up by the Glenship mausoleum. He’s been there since last night.” She talked fast and quiet, like she didn’t want to be overheard. “Jack figures it’ll be the first place the Devil will go, because that’s where he saw him last. But it’s been light out for hours. And I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for. All Jack would say is that he had red eyes and that he wore pilgrim clothes, but what does that mean?”

  The girl looked over her shoulder, up at the gray sky, and shivered.

  I looked at the gray sky too. I wondered what Freddie would have said, if she heard the Devil was a red-eyed man in black who flew across the night sky and kidnapped kids. I couldn’t decide if she would have laughed at the story, or believed it.

  Believed it, maybe.

  I shifted my gaze to River, but he was watching a group of six policemen coming through the gates. A tall blond man in his forties lifted a megaphone to his lips and began to speak.

  “LISTEN UP KIDS. EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU NEEDS TO GO HOME. NOW. WE’VE GOT A MISSING GIRL ON OUR HANDS, AND WE DON’T NEED ANY MORE TROUBLE. ANYONE CAUGHT LINGERING IN THE CEMETERY WILL BE ARRESTED. I REPEAT: GO HOME OR YOU WILL BE HANDCUFFED AND TAKEN TO JAIL.”

  It was an empty threat, obviously. But the kids believed it.

  Dozens of small shapes started walking out of the fog and making their way to the exit. Their small faces looked upset and agitated, though, and I noticed that they took their stakes with them when they left.

  I watched for Jack, but didn’t see him. He was the least likely to believe the cop’s bluff, anyway.

  A white van pulled up and parked outside the gates. A short woman with long hair jumped out. She walked through the gate, and aimed a CHANNEL 3 NEWS TEAM video camera right at us.

  “Ah, hell,” River said. “That’s all I need. Come on, Vi. Let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE SEARCH PARTIES continued looking for Isobel throughout the day. Luke and I joined one and hunted through the woods behind our house with a group of earnest retired people and a couple of old hound dogs. But nothing.

  I prayed to Freddie that Isobel was okay. That everything would turn out all right. But I was pretty damn worried.

  River disappeared. He walked me back from the cemetery, right after seeing that news camera, got in his car, and drove off.

  I didn’t know if he would come back. I didn’t know anything. After I returned from the search party, I just sat on my front steps. Not reading, just waiting. Just waiting, and praying to Freddie.

  Luke told me that I had scared River off, with my know-it-all gaze and my being-a-girl-ness, and thank God we had already gotten the rent in cash. But I ignored him.

  The hours dragged by.

  No Isobel.

  No River.

  The kids returned to the cemetery once it got dark. They crawled back when their parents were asleep. I knew this because I was there too. I scraped up the bravest bits inside of me and walked to the graveyard after night fell. I figured Jack would still be there, waiting for the Devil. But what I found, after I crept past the front gates, were dozens of kids returned to their posts—their pale faces shining through the dark. It was just silence and shadows, the dead buried below and the distant sound of the sea in their ears for all eternity. I crept from tree to tree, kid to kid, always keeping the ocean on my left side so I knew where I was.

  Again and again, I would feel him, the Devil, breathing down my neck. I would spin around and no one would be there . . . except a quiet, creeping little kid, holding two sharpened twigs in his hands. I tried asking some of them if they knew where I could find Jack. I called up trees and knelt by headstones and asked and asked. But they were so hollow-eyed and focused. They wouldn’t give me a straight answer, and after a while I started to think they were following me. Stalking me. Scaring me on purpose.

  My heart started hitting my chest so hard, it drowned out the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks below. It was time to leave.

  And then I heard something behind me. Feet. Small feet on stone.

  I spun around, and there they were. Two boys, one girl. Standing in a line, ten feet behind me. They were holding the sharpened twigs. Staring at me.

  “You don’t have any stakes,” the girl said. “The Devil is going to get you.”

  She took a step closer and the other kids followed. We stood face-to-face, not moving, just staring. A breeze lifted my hair as it brushed past my cheek. The salty wind was soft, but cold. Cold. Like swimming in the sea at night. Like clammy fingers crawling up your neck.

  I shivered.

  “Do you feel him?” the girl asked. “The Devil?”

  I nodded.

  “You’d better run,” she said.

  I ran.

  When I got home, I shoved the huge front door closed behind me, and locked it. I slunk down, my back against the wood. I felt stupid and ashamed. But damn, the image of those kids in the dark, holding stakes, staring at the sky, following me from gravestone to gravestone . . . My chest hurt, and my ears ached, as if I’d been swimming deep underwater. I took three breaths. Then I started the search.

  I did this sometimes, after Freddie died. Wandered Citizen Kane in the dark. I’d already searched through her bedroom countless times, and the library, and the kitchen, and the attic.

  I started in the cellars this time, digging in corners dripping with mold, looking for loose bricks and trapdoors. I went upstairs into bedrooms that hadn’t been used in years and pulled open dressers and wardrobes and crawled under beds. I tapped on walls, hoping to hear a hollow sound, and turned over paintings. I’d done this many times before. And would do it again.

  I let the dust and the forgotten bottles of wine and the worn rugs and disintegrating curtains dig their way into my soul until I was as paranoid and as stirred up as Daniel Leap raving in the town square. I wanted to find Freddie’s old letters, but I would have been satisfied with anything. A diary. A half-started cocktail murder mystery. Bits of bad poetry written on a yellowed napkin. Anything of Freddie’s. Anything to bring her back, even for a second.

  There had to be something left, besides the clothes hanging in her closet. No one lives a whole life and leaves not a bit of it behind but a handful of dresses. Had she burned all of her private things in those last weeks before she died? I refused to believe it.

  There must be something.

  And there was. But it wasn’t what I wanted, because it asked new questions and gave no answers.

  Citizen Kane had an attic that ran the length of the house. I used to spend hours up there as a kid, exploring all the odd old trunks and chests that came from who knew when. It’s where I found the black trunk, the one with the empty bottle of gin and a small red card that, when opened, said: Freddie—you were the first to know, and the last to judge. I promised I’d never burn you. I meant it then, and I mean it now. No matter what. Love, always. Me.

  It was written in a man’s elegant, educated hand. Underneath the card were three white summer dresses, folded neatly, a black wooden cross, and two locks of hair—pale blond, and brown. But no letters from Freddie herself. Not one. I remembered that trunk well, because I had opened it on a hot summer afternoon a few days after Freddie had died, but the air inside the chest felt cool. I put the empty bottle and the red card back, pushed the trunk in the far corner, and left it alone.

  But I’d tried everything else by now, so what the hell.

  I was climbing toward the attic when I realized I’d woken Luke up with all my noise. I could hear his feet tromping around above. He caught up to me on the third staircase—the one that had been the servants’ back before I was born and we still had servants. It was narrow, with worn wooden steps and no banister. Luke stood at the top, looking down
at me on the second-floor landing, his reddish brown hair sticking up. He looked tired, and younger, and more like the brother I’d known five years ago, when Freddie died.

  “Violet,” he said, blinking, “why on earth are you running around and slamming doors at three in the morning?”

  “Exploring. I’m exploring.” I climbed to the top step, sat down, and sighed.

  “Exploring. Right.” Luke sat down beside me, squeezing himself onto the narrow step. His bare feet lined up next to my bare feet, and both glowed an eerie color in the skinny shaft of moonlight coming through the window above—it didn’t let in much light because half of it was blocked by the rickety spiral staircase that led to the attic.

  “You were looking for Freddie’s letters again. You’re that upset over River’s leaving?” he asked, when I didn’t say anything.

  I put my arms on my knees and let my hair fall over my face. “No,” I lied. “I’m wondering where the little girl is.” I turned my head and looked at Luke. “But now that you mention it, River’s leaving does make me kind of furious.”

  Luke laughed.

  I caught his eye. “You know, River said I was capable of violence, if pushed far enough. Do you believe that?”

  Luke didn’t answer for a while. Then he shrugged. “I’d normally want to beat the hell out of some guy who shared a bed with you and then disappeared. But I like River. There’s something about him.”

  I nodded. “There is.”

  A pause.

  “I went back to the cemetery,” I said. “The kids were in there again, and creeping up on me, with their stakes and their haunted little faces. It was terrifying. I couldn’t stand it. I ran.”

  Luke laughed again, a soft sort of chuckle that I rarely heard from him. “It’s been a long night for you, sister.”

  I smiled a bit at that, because it was true. “Are you always this nice in the middle of the night? Maybe I should wake you up more often.”

  “Please don’t. Some of us get up early.” Luke smiled back at me, and then stood, and yawned, and started walking back to his bedroom. “River will come back, eventually,” he said, over his shoulder. “Count on it.”

  My brother was right.

  River drove into the driveway in the early stillness of pre-dawn. Which I knew because I was stupidly awake and waiting for him.

  He got out of his car, swaggered up to me, and smiled his damn crooked smile. His brown eyes weren’t as cool and easy as they had been that last time he met me on the steps. And his hair wasn’t parted to the side, vintage-style . . . it was messy and tangled, like he’d been running his hands through it a lot. He was still River, nonchalant and graceful, but there was something odd in his expression, something that hadn’t been there before.

  “Hey, Violet,” he said. His voice was as lazy as ever, though.

  “Hey,” I replied, just as lazily, though what I wanted to do was stand up, tilt my head back, and scream at the sky because of the kids and the cemetery and the Devil and the missing girl and the fact that River had taken off without a word when he was the first boy I’d ever kissed and damn, that gets to you.

  But I refused to let River see me that . . . moved. I had the idea that he would like it, like seeing me get that mad. Besides, he’d already noticed the happy, traitorous sparkle in my eyes.

  “Those kids go back to the cemetery?” River didn’t waste time with chitchat. But that was all right, because neither did I.

  “Yeah. Once it got dark again.” I didn’t tell him how I knew.

  River held out his hand. “Well, I think it’s gone on long enough, don’t you? Want to help me put a stop to it?”

  I nodded and grabbed his hand.

  By the time we reached the cemetery gates, I still hadn’t asked River where he’d gone, and why. And he didn’t offer the information. But then, he probably would have just lied anyway. And his hand was all up in mine now, his long fingers weaving between my own and making my insides go from black-and-white to Technicolor.

  Dawn was taking off its clothes, kicking up its pinks and purples on the horizon. I saw the girl again. The one with the frizzy black hair from before. She was curled up behind a headstone belonging to a young boy—a young boy who had Drowned at Sea so long ago, the letters of his name were almost eroded to oblivion.

  River went down on his knees beside the girl, put his hand on hers, and gently took a stake out of her clenched fist. “Go home,” he said. “We’ll find Isobel. Your parents are going to wake up soon and be worried. Go home. There is no Devil.”

  The girl got to her feet, gave River a long look, and then took off at a run in the direction of the gate.

  River broke the stake in half and threw it into the trees. We began to walk up the hill to the mausoleum. Early morning mist had started blowing in from the ocean again, and some of it was so thick it felt like walking through a wet, woolly gray sweater. Fog had never bothered me before, but for some reason I started to feel as if I was being suffocated. I focused on taking deep breaths of sea air, and the feeling went away.

  There were some twenty boys by the tomb. They gave us tired, haunted looks as we neared, like a photograph of war refugees in the pages of a mildewed National Geographic.

  I had looked for Jack in the cemetery six hours ago, but hadn’t seen him. Yet, there he was now, standing on top of the Glenship mausoleum, a pile of stakes at his feet, his gaze trained on the sky. River called out his name, and he looked down at us but didn’t move.

  “Jack, can you come down?” River asked. “I want to talk to you.”

  Jack pointed a finger at one of the boys. “Danny, I’m leaving my post. It’s your turn to watch.”

  Jack grabbed a handful of ivy and swung himself down. The blond-haired Danny then climbed up and planted himself in Jack’s spot, head tilted toward the sky.

  Jack rubbed his eyes and glanced around. He looked pale and tired. His russet hair was tangled, bits of leaves stuck to it like he’d been rolling on the ground. There was a streak of dirt blending with the tiny brown freckles that covered his face, and his thin shoulders sagged.

  “Nick,” Jack said, looking at a small boy with dark brown hair, “you can replace Jenny out in the southwest corner. Logan, go check on Holly, would you? She gets scared if she’s left alone too long.”

  The boys darted off. Jack rubbed his red eyes again. “Hey,” he said.

  I nodded a hello. I was distracted by the small mountain of stakes at the base of the mausoleum. There were dozens. Hundreds, maybe.

  Jack turned to River. “You’re that guy we almost stabbed.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re the guy that taught us how to work the yo-yos. And the one that told us to go to the cemetery and look for the Devil.”

  I jerked my head up. I looked at Jack, and then at River, hard. But neither would look back at me.

  “Well, what do you want?” Jack asked, in a soft, weary voice. “Are you going to try to get us to go home too? It won’t work. The police kicked us out, but we just came back.”

  River put his hands on his knees so he could look Jack straight in the eyes. “Jack, do you know the old tree house? The one by the ocean, behind Glenship Manor?”

  Jack’s brow furrowed. “Yeah. Everybody knows that tree house. Why?”

  “Go there, Jack. Now. And take Charlie with you.”

  They stared at each other for three, maybe four seconds. Then Jack shook himself and spun around.

  “Tell everyone to go home,” he called out to the group of boys behind him. “Tell them I know where Isobel is. Tell them . . . tell them there is no Devil.”

  CHAPTER 11

  WORD SPREAD QUICKLY. River and I watched small bodies fall out of trees and ooze out of shadows.

  Fifteen minutes later, the cemetery was near empty. Only one boy remained. He had yellow hair and thin arms;
he stood by the gate and fidgeted, as if unsure whether to leave. He eyed the sky, and the trees, and didn’t move. But then River took the boy by the shoulder and gently pushed him out onto the road.

  The fog had cleared and I could see the ocean far, far below the graveyard. It was bright and blue and full of promise. River and I stared at it for a while.

  I wondered how he knew where Charlie’s sister was. And how he got Jack to believe him so fast.

  I wondered what Jack meant when he said that River told him to look for the Devil in the cemetery.

  I wondered where that beautiful, buttery, fluttery feeling I felt in River’s presence had gotten itself off to.

  Because it was gone now. Completely gone.

  River pulled on my hand and we headed out of the cemetery and down a trail through the woods that skirted the main road. The woods were dark and silent, none of the dawn able to reach through the thick trees. Children wove in and out of the shadowed path in front of us, always keeping their distance.

  Seven minutes later we were in downtown Echo. I turned to go to the café, which opened really damn early—but then I saw a group of the cemetery kids heading down one of Echo’s side streets, with Jack leading the way. They were following River’s orders. They were going down Glenship Road. And Glenship Road only led to one place. Glenship Manor, and the tree house.

  Chester and Clara Glenship had been the wealthy folks in town, back at the turn of the last century, along with my grandpa’s parents. They also built a big mansion on the ocean, closer to town than Citizen Kane, and threw rollicking parties for all their city friends up from Boston and New York, like characters in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. But the Glenships ran out of money before my own family. And, to make matters worse, Chester and Clara’s charming, bright-eyed eldest son brought his young lover down to the wine cellar and slit her throat with a jackknife. For reasons unknown. It was lurid and the papers loved it, and the grand manor had sat empty and abandoned for decades, with overgrown ivy and broken windows, and an air of long-ago happiness.