Widow's Tears Page 5

  “Oh dear,” Ruby said.

  “You bet yer boots.” Monica nodded vigorously. “So Mr. Hoover, he hired some folks from around here—Sam and Kitty Rawlings, Sam used to run a gas station over in Ledbetter—to live in the hired man’s house and keep an eye on things. Caretakers, y’know.” She paused, eyeing Ruby with a curiosity. “You goin’ out there to see yer friend?”

  “That’s the plan,” Ruby said, summoning a cheerful tone. She smiled. “That’s who I’m getting the pie for.”

  “Yeah.” Monica picked up the empty dishes. “I’ll get it for you, hon. But you wanna be careful, now—d’ya hear? Can’t prove it by me if that place is haunted or not, but whatever’s goin’ on out there, it ain’t good.” She cocked her head to one side. “And then there’s the drilling.”

  “The drilling?” Ruby frowned.

  “I guess you ain’t heard. Oil shale, is what it is. The oil companies have been coming in here like a flock of buzzards, gobbling up leases like they was roadkill. BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, Shell, you name it, they’re here. Two hundred an acre for two years with a two-year option and royalties if there’s production. Some folks want to cash in, and I guess you can’t blame ’em. But where there’s drillin’, there’ll be frackin’.”

  “Uh-oh,” Ruby said. She had read enough about fracking to know how environmentally damaging it could be.

  “Uh-oh is right,” Monica said darkly. “The lady from the Railroad Commission says it’s all hunky-dory, no problemo. Frackin’ is money in the bank for Texas, and it won’t hurt the water, neither. But most people ’round here feel like we don’t have enough water as it is. They don’t want the oil companies suckin’ up what little we got and pumpin’ it down the gas wells. They figure the bad stuff is goin’ to start comin’ out of our faucets, too.”

  “I can see why everybody’s upset,” Ruby said.

  “Yeah. Anyway, there’s a piece about it in the Record, if you want to know more.” She nodded toward the red-painted newspaper rack at the front of the café. “You enjoy your coffee, hon. I’ll go’n getcha that pie. Yer friend is gonna love it. It’ll take her mind off those ghosts, fer sure.”

  While she waited for the pie, Ruby bought a copy of the Fayette County Record and scanned the front page. The lead story was about the robbery of the Schulenburg branch of the Fayetteville Bank, apparently one of an ongoing series of small-town bank robberies—no indication of how much the robbers got, although the sheriff’s office said it was a “substantial amount.”

  But what she was looking for was the next story, below the fold. The four-column headline read, “Fracking, Groundwater Issues Explained.” The spokeswoman for the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates drilling, reported that the Eagle Ford Shale formation in Fayette County could be an “economic supernova.” So far, she said, over $3.5 billion in energy investments had been poured into South Texas because of oil companies’ interests. There would be increased job opportunities, higher salaries, greater sales tax revenues, higher property tax revenues, and overall increases in local commerce, and all because of the Eagle Ford Shale. “I’m here to assure all of you that fracking is safe for you and your drinking water,” she said. “You have nothing to fear.”

  But a citizens’ group affiliated with Food & Water Watch was being formed to organize opposition. “Texas should be looking at wind and solar,” the spokesman said. “Fracking wastes water, contaminates our groundwater resources, and fouls the environment.”

  “Here’s your pie, hon,” Monica said, handing her the box. “Don’t eat it all in one sitting now, y’hear?”

  Ruby frowned down at the newspaper. “I thought I heard that there were going to be some rules about fracking,” she said.

  Monica heaved a heavy sigh. “So did we,” she said sadly. “So did we.” Her face darkened. “Folks around here aren’t in favor of the frackin’, I can tell you that.”

  “You said that the oil companies are buying up leases,” Ruby said. “Do you know where?”

  “Not ’xactly,” Monica said, fishing in her apron pocket. “But I heard they’ve been talking to a couple of ranchers south of the Blackwood place.” She pulled out the check. “Here ya go, hon. I’ll take it at the register.”

  Ruby tucked the newspaper into her bag and paid the check, giving Monica a nice tip to thank her for the service—and the information. She carried the boxed pie out to her car, noticing that the pickup trucks parked on either side of hers wore No Frickin’ Frackin’! bumper stickers. Obviously, this was a hot-button issue.

  While Ruby was eating lunch, a billowy bank of thunderheads had built to impressive heights in the eastern sky and the sun was veiled by skeins of silvery clouds. It looked like they might get some rain that afternoon. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, Ruby thought as she climbed into her car, putting the pie box carefully on the seat beside her. It had been a dry spring across Central and South Texas. A little rain would be welcome. She had to smile when she turned on the ignition, the radio came on, and she caught Judy Garland in the middle of “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.”

  A few minutes later, the song lyrics still echoing in her mind, Ruby was driving south and east, past red barns and neat ranch-style houses, past brown-and-white cows with their noses buried in green grass and young foals kicking up their heels in swathes of wildflowers. As she approached a small, white cottage embraced in a glorious border of roses and a tidy patch of garden, and the sun broke out momentarily. She slowed. My goodness, she thought, as the awareness blossomed in her mind. It’s for sale!

  And in confirmation, the next thing she saw was the For Sale sign. She pulled over to the shoulder of the road and gazed at it, thinking. If she did sell the shop and her interest in the tearoom and all the rest of it, maybe she could buy a cottage like this one, out in the country. She could put up a discreet sign beside the door—Tarot and Birth Chart Readings—By Appointment Only—and spend her days quilting and baking bread and raising vegetables and a few chickens for eggs. Oh, such a lovely way to live.

  The sun faded behind a cloud, and Ruby sighed. She was chasing rainbows, of course—and most of her dreams were as elusive and ephemeral as the clouds building against the horizon. She paused a moment longer, gazing at the cottage, reluctant to leave. But then she heard Claire’s words in her mind, desperate words. Come and help me understand…Please come. It was time to move on. Reluctantly, she put the car in gear and pulled back onto the two-lane highway.

  A few miles farther on, she came to the county road that Claire had mentioned in the postcard that had followed her phone call, and the sign that read “Cedar Creek Methodist Church Camp.” Claire had sent directions because, as she said, it had been a great many years since she and Ruby had visited the house together, and Ruby had likely forgotten the way.

  But she hadn’t, of course. She would have recognized it even without directions. It was bordered on each side by a lace of tall white prickly poppies, graceful on gray-green stems, their ruffled paper-white blossoms fastened with bright yellow buttons. White poppy, Ruby thought, remembering that Kathleen Gips had mentioned the meaning of the plant in her workshop—it signified forgetting and consolation, Kathleen had said; a sleep of the heart—although if China were here, she would no doubt point out that Kathleen was actually referring to the opium poppy, a powerful narcotic that had long been used to put people to sleep.

  But still, this was a white poppy, Ruby told herself, and that’s what it meant to her. She needed a sleep of the heart, a forgetting, a consolation. If she were living in that pretty little cottage, she would surround it with a whole field of white poppies. She would forget Colin altogether and be consoled and content—not happy, perhaps, but content. Wouldn’t she?

  The sun hadn’t reappeared. The thunderheads off to the left seemed higher and nearer, the clouds overhead lower and darker. She shivered and took her foot off the accelerator, feeling suddenly that she was in no hurry to get where she was going. Silly Claire, to think that
her friend might have forgotten the way. It was true that she had been here only once, a very long time ago. But the image of the house was indelibly imprinted in her memory, like the image left on the retina after a powerful flash of lightning. She couldn’t have forgotten it.

  Another familiar mile went by, and then another, and then on the left she saw the black mailbox on a red-brick pillar, heaped over with wild purple morning glory. The box bore the name Blackwood, hand-lettered, very small, as if it wished not to call attention to itself or perhaps supposed that it would be recognized even if it did not bear a name.

  She loosened her hands on the steering wheel—she had been gripping it so tightly that her knuckles were white—then braked and turned carefully between formal-looking red-brick pillars, head high, leaning crookedly like twin Towers of Pisa on both sides of the graveled lane. The pillars looked alien and out of place in this Texas landscape, where most of the ranchers put up cedar poles topped with cows’ skulls and signs formed from rusted barbwire: “Bar-B-Q Ranch” or “The Double D.” The space between the pillars was so narrow: surely they had been built when cars were smaller, or even before cars came into everyday use. The Blackwood house was at least a century old, Ruby remembered. It wasn’t hard to imagine a horse and buggy moving smartly along this old road.

  The lane was a rutted two-track with grass growing down the middle, bordered on both sides by a six-foot hedge of untrimmed holly bushes. The branches grew into the road, and their sharp-pointed leaves threatened to scratch the paint off any vehicle brave enough to run the gauntlet. Three hundred yards farther on, the lane took a turn, a sharp one. The holly bushes were left behind, and now there were open meadows on either side, the patchy grass studded with Ashe junipers and wild lantana and prickly pear. The lane was strewn with rocks and the ruts were deeper here. At the end of seven jolting miles, it snaked through a long S curve, climbed a slight rise, and headed down again, more steeply down, and down some more. Ruby shifted into a lower gear.

  And then she saw the house, and her foot came off the accelerator with a jerk. The car lurched, stalled abruptly, and died. She didn’t try to start it again. She lowered the window and just sat there, chewing on her lip. On her childhood visit, she’d been riding in the backseat of Claire’s mother’s car, and she hadn’t seen the house from this angle. The view was…disquieting.

  Built on the lower slope of a hill and surrounded by several spreading live oaks, the Blackwood mansion overlooked a shallow, spreading stream that looped through a green meadow. Whoever constructed the house must have considered it grand, but to Ruby’s eyes it was an out-of-proportion hodgepodge of Victorian towers and turrets that reminded her uneasily of Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. Or Shirley Jackson’s wretched Hill House, with its “maniac” juxtapositions and “badly turned” angles. Or the old English nursery rhyme that began “There was a crooked man” and ended “And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”

  Except that this crooked house wasn’t little. It was huge, a Victorian mansion, and in terrible need of repair and repainting. The somber brown walls had been scoured by the wind and bleached by the sun, and the chipped slates on the precipitous roofs—there were many roofs, all at strange angles—glinted dully, like broken teeth. A widow’s walk, bizarre and alien in this land-locked place, extended the length of the central spine of the house, its railings broken and hanging. Oddly, the house was raised above the ground on tall piers, as if to avoid flooding—certainly an unlikely event on this hill. A pair of equally unlikely lions flanked the steps up to the gallery at the front of the house, glaring at each other with stony suspicion. The yard, weedy and badly mowed, was surrounded by an unkempt border of gnarled oleanders and hollies interspersed with straggly date palms.

  A rusty iron fence was wrapped around the house and yard, its sections leaning crazily, first one way, then another, some of its posts scattered like a litter of loose iron spears across the ground. From this enclosure, there were only two ways in and out: a double iron gate in front (centered with a large and ornate letter B) and a smaller gate in back, half-hidden in an overgrown clump of chaste trees. From the back gate, a graveled path edged with iris meandered haphazardly past a well-tended kitchen garden, then forked. One branch continued on to a small fenced plot at the edge of a wood, the other went to a barn, a double garage, and a small frame house—the caretaker’s cottage, probably. Behind that were a kitchen garden, a chicken coop and fenced yard, and several sheds.

  Ruby took a deep breath, then another. Nothing much had changed in the years since her first visit, except that the house, still out of place and uncompromising, had grown older and more worn and tired. Seen from this angle, it was even more maimed and misshapen than she had remembered, as though it had been copied from a construction plan but hurriedly and imprecisely, or perhaps not even from a plan but from memory—a faulty memory, flawed. Parts were joined at incongruous and inharmonious angles. Some parts were larger than they should be. Others were smaller, so that the whole thing seemed wretchedly out of alignment. It wasn’t evil or malicious or malevolent, like Hill House. It was just…just crooked. Crooked and sad and out of place and wrong, in exactly the same way it had been wrong all those years ago, when ten-year-old Ruby had seen it for the very first time.

  The first time? Ruby closed her eyes, then opened them again, feeling the same prickling sensation of déjà vu that she had felt during that childhood visit, only stronger now—much stronger and more unsettling. She wondered with something close to panic whether that first visit had really been the first, or whether she had known the house from some previous time, some other place, when it had imprinted itself on her imagination so powerfully that it could never be forgotten.

  But now, as then, what struck Ruby with the force almost of a blow was not just the wrongness of the physical structure and its outlandish unsuitability to the place where it had been built, or even the unsettling sense of déjà vu. It was its heart-wrenching sadness that brought quick tears to her eyes and made her instinctively turn away, as if to escape an embrace. For she felt exactly as she had felt that long-ago July afternoon when she and Claire had come here to visit: that the house, saturated in its own bitter sorrow, was waiting for her. It wanted to snatch her, clutch her, drown her in its devastating grief, as if—

  She pulled in a steadying breath and shoved the thought away, but her hand was trembling and her fingers were icy. She turned the key, but the ignition only clicked, and the engine didn’t turn over. She was about to try again when she glanced out of the window to see a slender woman emerge from the clump of chaste trees at the back of the house and open the low iron gate. She was wearing a gray shirtwaist blouse with a black ribbon and a darker gray ankle-length skirt, smoothly gored in the late Victorian style. Her dark hair was piled on her head, and over her arm she carried a woven basket filled with white roses. Her figure had the weight and dimension of reality, but there was a certain insubstantiality to it, a wavering quality, as though she were seen through a veil of falling water.

  And then, as Ruby watched, the woman turned, lifted her hand to shade her eyes, and looked up the hill toward the car. Then waved as if in greeting, as if she had recognized Ruby, as if she had been waiting for her and was glad she had come at last.

  Ruby swallowed. The perspiration broke out on her forehead and she shivered, squeezing her eyes shut. She had seen the woman before, during that first visit with Claire. The woman had turned and waved to her then, too. That was the moment that Ruby had realized that she had Gram’s gift, that she—

  “Hey!”

  Ruby gasped and jumped, startled half out of her skin. A man was leaning over to peer in the car window. He was tall, square jawed, with gingery hair and hard gray-green eyes and he smelled of tobacco. It was difficult to tell his age. From the lines on his face, he might have been anywhere between forty and sixty, and he had clearly spent most of those years working outdoors in the wind and sun. He wore an oil-spotted deni
m shirt, open at the throat to reveal a frayed and dirty T-shirt, and a sweat-stained Dallas Cowboys gimme cap. The phrase There was a crooked man elbowed itself into Ruby’s mind.

  “Who’re you?” the man demanded roughly. “This is private property, y’know. It’s not a public road. If you’re lookin’ to buy an oil lease, you can just turn right around. The owner doesn’t want drilling on this land.”

  “I’m not here about oil leases,” Ruby said. “My name is Ruby Wilcox. Claire Conway invited me to spend a few days with her. You are…?” She knew who he was, though. He was the caretaker the waitress had mentioned. Sam Rawlings.

  and he walked a crooked mile

  “Rawlings.” The man straightened. “Miz Conway shoulda told me you were comin’. You got a problem with the car?”

  “I…I just stalled it,” Ruby said, feeling that she had been reprimanded for bad driving. “I’m sure it’s okay.” She turned the ignition key and, to her relief, the motor sparked into life.

  He found a crooked sixpence

  “Well, at least you didn’t flood the damn thing.” Rawlings slapped the roof of the car with the flat of his hand and stepped back. “I’ll let Miz Conway know you’re here. Drive on around the back of the house and park beside the garage, then go on to the kitchen door. Leave your bags by the car and I’ll bring ’em in for you.” He paused, adding pointedly, “When I get around to it.”

  “I can manage,” Ruby said distinctly. “I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

  “Suit yourself.” The man turned abruptly and headed toward a faint path, like a narrow game trail, that led downhill in the direction of the house.

  As Ruby put the car in gear and started off, she looked back over her shoulder. To her relief, the woman in the gray dress was gone. But the windows of the crooked house, like sad and empty eyes, seemed to follow her as she drove cautiously down the hill and across the low concrete bridge over the gravel bed of the creek.