Daisy Lane (14 page)

When Grace got home, she was in such a great mood that it took her a few moments to sense the oppressive mood in the house. Her grandfather was waiting for her in the kitchen. He had the tin on the table with her money spread out by denomination. His face was dark red.

“Embezzlement,” he said. “That’s what they call it in the secular world. I call it thievery, plain and simple.”

Grace hid her backpack behind her back as she hung her head, but the movement wasn’t lost on her grandfather.

“Give it to me,” he said. “Let’s see what kind of devilry you’ve got hidden in there.”

Grace’s heart sank as she held out the backpack, thinking of the delicious food and her precious books. She couldn’t look as he unzipped it and unpacked the contents. His sharp intake of breath brought terrified tears to her eyes; they dripped down her face and she did nothing to catch them. She willed herself to be small, so small she disappeared.

“The devil has a foothold in your soul, granddaughter,” he said. “I see the evidence here. Stealing from me in order to purchase wicked books and rich foods. This was exactly how your mother and your aunt started. What do you think happens to children who let the devil take their souls in exchange for such sin?”

Grace knew better than to answer.

He threw a box of wooden kitchen matches at her. It bounced off her jaw and fell to the floor. She didn’t dare touch the place where it had hit her, which stung.

“I want you to go outside and build a fire in the burn barrel,” he said. “Go.”

Grace turned and walked quickly outside. She knew what was coming and there was nothing she could do to stop it; she could only silently obey. The tears continued to fall as she threw the smaller pieces of dried kindling in the burn barrel, lit them with a kitchen match, and slowly added larger pieces of brush until it blazed.

‘This is my life,’ she thought to herself. ‘This is how it always has been and this is how it will always be, as long as he is in charge of me.’

As the heat from the rising flames drove her back, she could feel a similar heat growing in her chest. She willed it to go away, to stay tamped down, but it would not be controlled. The fire inside her felt as wild and dangerous as the one blazing two feet in front of her.

‘I can’t do this anymore,’ she thought, and deep inside she felt something open that she knew could not be closed. ‘I am not going to do this anymore.’

Her grandfather came out of the house holding her book set. She raised her eyes to him as he took out each book and dropped it in the burn barrel, one at a time. The flames leaped up as they consumed the paper. She tried to look away, to look back down, and found that she couldn’t. He tossed in the case for the trilogy and then turned to her with hatred and contempt in his expression.

“That’s what I think of your devil books, witch,” he said.

Where she usually felt an overwhelming force that compelled her to stay silent and small, Grace now felt an even stronger force that compelled her to be big and say what was in her heart.

“I’m not a witch,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s you who’s crazy, just like Mom was.”

He struck her across the face with the back of his hand; something of which she knew he was capable but had been sure would never happen; if she were careful enough, obedient, a good little girl. Her cheek stung and her eyes watered. She remembered this pain from her childhood when it was her mother doing the slapping. At first she felt the same sadness as when her mother hurt her, but then anger rose up out of the place where the lid had come off and filled her up until she was boiling over. Hot white rage filled her chest; there was a roaring sound in her ears. She wanted to shove him, to hurt him.

“I should drown you in the river,” he said. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

“I hate you,” she said. “I wish you were dead.”

His face turned purple; he was sweating and blinking fast, just like he did before a dizzy spell. She resisted the urge to push him over, which she was confident she was angry enough to do.

“Witch,” he said. “Harlot.”

“I’m leaving,” she said. “And you can’t stop me.”

“Get your things and get out,” he said, his hoarse voice trembling. ”If I see you on my property again, I’ll shoot you.”

He was so angry he was gasping for breath. She thought then that he was perfectly capable of killing her, but she couldn’t help herself, she wanted the last word. Just this once.

“You killed my mother and my Grandmother,” Grace said. “But you won’t kill me.”

She ducked as he swung a second time. Then she ran.

Once inside the house she locked the back and front doors so he couldn’t get in to get his gun, but he didn’t follow her. She hurriedly shoved some clothes and books into her backpack and stuffed the cash from the rainy day fund into her pocket. From the pantry she took the boxed up swan and her grandmother’s apron off the hook. She was afraid to go out the back way to retrieve her bicycle for fear he would kill her with an ax.  Instead she went to the front door, but just as she was sliding back the deadbolt someone leaped onto the front porch and started pounding on the door.

Police Chief Scott Gordon had driven slowly down Daisy Lane until he reached the bottom of the hill, where a little over three years ago he had almost lost his life in a flash flood. Pulled along by a wild, swirling current of icy water in the dead of night, he had tried to cling to the high brick walls surrounding Eldridge College, only to be battered and scraped as he was tossed like debris down toward where the wall ended in the swollen, raging river, where he was sure to drown. At almost the last moment Cal Fischer had shown a searchlight upon him and thrown him a line. His rescue had seemed miraculous at the time, when facing death, all he could think of was how sad he was that he’d never see Maggie Fitzpatrick again.

That flood had destroyed several houses on Lotus Avenue, and damaged most of the others, which were condemned and torn down soon after. After the water receded, only the Glassworks, the depot, and the old Rodefeffer house had been left relatively unharmed, a testament to the strong stuff from which they were built.

Most of the Rodefeffer house was hidden behind a wall of shrubbery allowed to grow up past the second story level, with only a narrow walkway left between the alley and the iron gate that led to the front walkway. Scott had to duck to go through it. The iron gate’s hinges seemed to protest with a screeching groan.

The front yard was so overgrown it was impenetrable, and weeds grew up between each paving stone of the crumbling walkway. The porch bore the most evidence of the damage the flood left in its wake. There were pieces of plywood nailed down over the many missing floor boards. Scott was not sure it was safe to walk on. Most of the wooden porch railing was missing, but the iron railing along the concrete stairs was still intact. There was no sign of where Nino had lay dying, and Scott wondered again how a man so ill could have made it all the way from the bus stop on Rose Hill Avenue to this porch, and why.

No one had answered his knock so he backtracked to the lane and walked around the side of the house, where the grass had been replaced with a wide gravel path between two long greenhouses and the side of the house. A decrepit bike was resting against a thick rhododendron that grew high up the side of the house.

Out back, Scott could see smoke pouring from a roaring fire in the burn barrel. Scott found a sputtering water hose connected to a spigot on the outside of the house. The hose was stretched out through an open greenhouse door; Scott followed it. Inside the greenhouse, long sheets of plywood on top of sawhorses were covered with rack after rack of seedlings planted in trays. As he advanced toward the back of the humid room, the plants were taller, and at the very back a profusion of gloriously colored, fragrant flowers were in different stages of bloom.

Scott didn’t see Mr. Branduff until he was almost to the back of the greenhouse. The old man was on the other side of the center aisle of plywood racks, laying face down on the gravel floor. Scott scooted under the plywood and emerged in the aisle behind him, where he pulled away the hose that had created a large mud puddle all around the tall man. He knew before he felt for the pulse that it would not be there. No one but a dead man could lie that still.

Scott radioed for the EMT, even though he knew there was no chance of resuscitation. Scott’s next thought was of Grace; where was she? He wanted to get to her before she heard the siren, before she came out and was surprised by the body. He hurried around to the front of the house and bound up the steps to the porch. He pounded on the door, calling out, “Grace!”

“Grace,” he began as she opened the door, wild-eyed with fear.

“Your grandfather …” he said, and gestured toward the greenhouse.

He watched her eyes widen even further as she took in his facial expression.

She pushed passed him and ran down the steps just as the sirens started. Scott tried to catch her but she was amazingly quick on her feet. He finally caught up to her at her grandfather’s side, where she knelt in the puddle and struggled to roll him over. He didn’t have the heart to stop her, so he helped her. The man’s eyes were open. His expression was blank, and for that Scott was grateful; he’d seen much, much worse. Grace held her ear to his soaking wet flannel shirt. To Scott’s amazement she started prepping him for CPR, tilting his head back and searching his mouth with her fingers for obstructions.

“Grace,” Scott said, and reached out, but she batted his hand away.

She pinched his nostrils shut and covered his mouth with her own. When she sat back up, her face was covered with the mud and gravel that had been stuck to his face. She straddled him and started chest compressions.

“Grace, honey,” Scott said. “It’s too late.”

“Help me!” she gasped through the tears that were streaming down her face.

Scott crawled around her and did chest compressions until the first EMT that arrived told him to stop. Grace had to be bodily removed, and after a short struggle she collapsed into a sobbing heap, crying so desperately she gagged and choked. Scott had never seen someone so upset. She seemed wild with grief.

The second EMT calmly took the garden hose and doused Grace with it. Grace gasped. Scott grabbed the hose out of the woman’s hand and threw it down; he turned on her, saying, “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” 

She shook her head, pointed at Scott, and said, “You need to get out of the way and let me do my job. It was either that or a slap; which would you have preferred?”

Grace, who seemed to have lost her breath from the shock of the water, took a ragged gasping breath and began coughing.

Scott picked Grace up and carried her violently trembling body back to the house and up the stairs, in through the front door. It was colder in the house than outside. He made his way through a tangle of stiff clothes hung up to dry on a clothesline strung the length of the back hallway. There he found the bathroom and flipped on the light. He set Grace on the floor of the cold room, went to the tub, and turned the hot water tap, but nothing came out. Grace was huddled in a knot, trembling violently and crying, but no longer in a way that scared him.

“There’s no hot water,” Scott said to her.

“It’s Monday,” she said, without taking her hands from her face.

Scott went to the hot water tank in the corner of the room and felt it; it was hot. He followed the line to where it connected to the tub and found the connection was turned off. He turned the knob and this time when he opened the spigot hot water flowed into the deep tub. Steam filled the room as he rooted around a linen cabinet for a clean towel, appalled at how ragged and threadbare they all were. On the sink he found a cake of old-fashioned strong smelling soap like his grandmother had used when he was small.

Grace’s teeth were chattering, but she was calming down.

“You get in the tub and get warmed up,” Scott said. “I’m going to turn up the furnace.”

When Grace didn’t move, he said in a stern voice, “Grace, did you hear me?”

Grace nodded and stood up with his help. Once he was sure she was steady on her feet he left the bathroom, saying, “I’ll get you some dry clothes.”

In the hallway Scott found the furnace thermostat. It was taped with old, gummy black electrical tape so that it could not be turned up past 55 degrees.

“Son of a bitch,” Scott muttered as he ripped off the tape and turned up the heat. The furnace kicked on and immediately a blast of hot air filled the hallway from the floor vent, billowing out the clothing that hung above it.

Scott went from room to room until he found Grace’s small bedroom. The stack of threadbare quilts on top of the sagging, rusted iron bedstead broke his heart. Her clothes were neatly folded in an old chest of drawers. He hastily assembled the warmest-looking pieces he could find and lay them on the floor outside the bathroom.

“I put some clothes here for you,” he called through the door. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Scott went to the kitchen and began opening and closing cupboards, finding precious little food. The refrigerator was empty except for several small cartons of milk like those given out in school cafeterias.  There were also about a dozen small plastic creamers like those found in restaurants. In the pantry there was a can of coffee, an almost empty jar of peanut butter, some stale bread, some damaged packages of pasta and oatmeal, and several dented cans of soup.