Eternally Yours (23 page)

“I wonder if it’s a ghost,” said Solis. “Or if it’s someone trying to get at Nastasya by pretending to be a ghost. Or not even pretending—but the workers could only experience her as a ghost.”

“But you felt nothing?” Asher asked me.

“I felt a cool breeze on my face,” I said. “But that might have just been, you know, feeling creepy. I stayed awhile and walked through each room, and I didn’t see or feel anything else.”

“Hmm,” River said, looking thoughtful.

The next day, she, Asher, and Anne all came down to my shops and examined every inch of every building. They even scried a bit behind closed doors. But they too found nothing, felt nothing.

The rest of the week was quiet, ghostwise, and I went back to dealing with business at my card table in the bay window. One day, late, most of the workers had left, but I was catching up on writing checks, which seemed to be a full-time job. José came up and stood by me, holding his baseball cap in one hand.

“Uh-oh,” I said, examining his face for clues. It was dark outside, and most of the lights were off inside as well. The streetlamp shone in through my window, casting an amber glow on the floor. “More trouble?”

“No, senorita. I want to thank you for hiring my crew.”
His English was so heavily accented that I wished he would switch into Spanish. But I got that he had rehearsed this and wanted to show respect by speaking in what he didn’t know was not my first language. Or even my third or fourth.

“Well, Bill hired you,” I pointed out. At least I hoped Bill had hired them. Were people now just showing up and working? The thought made my head ache.

“But you pay us.”

I was apparently paying the larger part of the West Lowing population, but whatever.

“You guys do good work,” I said.

José stood there, shifting his cap from hand to hand. I was starting to get uncomfortable: Okay, he had thanked me, now move on.

“Is there… something else?”

“Your money made—I sent my pay home to my wife, and she came here,” José said in a rush. “She had my son here last week.”

Oh. It all became clear. The baby was an American, born on American soil.

Because I’d given José a job.

“Congratulations,” I said, trying to inject warmth into my voice. “But Bill is the one who hired you.”
Go thank Bill. I didn’t know about you, I didn’t hire you on purpose, it was a fluke, I didn’t mean to help you or your wife.

But no good deed goes unpunished, as they say, and José wasn’t letting go of this.

“You allow him to hire us,” José persisted. “Many people would tell him no, no foreigners. Bill is my neighbor. He told me to come work here. He say there is a girl who will pay you for hard work. She pay everybody.”

So I had a reputation as a sap, a soft touch. Excellent. Hundreds of years of hard-boiled toughness stripped away with one stupid project that River had made me do. Goddamnit.

“I pay everybody who
works
,” I said limply, my hands balling up at my sides. I felt like such a fraud. Didn’t he get it? I wanted to scream,
I’m not trying to help people here! I’m trying to help
myself!

“I work hard for you, miss,” José said proudly. “And I thank you.”

“You’re welcome, José,” I said with clenched teeth. I tried to stretch my lips into a smile, and finally, nodding, José gathered his tool belt and left.

I was near tears. I just wanted people to get on with their business and let me get on with mine. My chin trembled, and I gritted my teeth harder, furious. I wanted to torch the building, to run through and break everything, so I’d never have to endure someone’s thanks again.

I sank down at my card table and covered my face with my hands. A slight sound made my head jerk up—was it the ghost?

It was Reyn. He walked over, silent as a leaf in his work boots, and held out one hand.

“What?” I snapped.

He bowed, like an old-fashioned courtier.

“I’m not in the mood for this,” I spat out. “What do you want?”

With a look of exasperation, he grabbed one of my hands and pulled me to my feet. Then he half led, half pulled me to the middle of the shop. I dragged my feet, seething. He started humming something and then, holding me at his side, began to move. Being stiff and unresisting got me nowhere. After several moments I recognized archaic dance steps.

My eyebrows rose. “What the hell are you doing?”

“How about,” he said softly, “if I just think of you as a person who does good things?” He forced me to move with him, two small steps forward, two small steps backward, a step to the left, a turn. He hummed, matching his steps to music I’d heard recently only in BBC costume dramas.

His hand on my back was warm, his steps light, soundless, and of course, incredibly graceful. This marauder, this Butcher of Winter, was being kind. And thoughtful. And romantic.

My shoulders relaxed a bit as my feet struggled to remember the steps.

Back then—the late seventeenth century—couples didn’t dance alone. Everything was done in groups, all sorts of weaving in and out and tangling your skirts and forgetting who your partner was or where you were in the dance. Plus it was always muggy, even in winter, the ballrooms brightly
lit with a thousand candles, all of them putting off smoke and heat.

But here it was cool and dimly lit by the streetlight. There was no one else, and only we could hear the music.

“This is a lot easier with just one other person,” I said, revolving slowly in a circle around him, our hands raised, my left palm to his. “I could never keep it all straight.”

He smiled, and as I held pretend skirts out of the way, he revolved around me, first facing me, then with his back to me, as we rose on our toes, up and down.

I let out a deep breath. “You might as well know. I’m the worst dancer. They used to call me ‘the pretty one, who dances like a bear.’ ”

He laughed then, forgetting to hum. “That was you?”

My mouth opened. “Oh, come on! I wasn’t that famous. Infamous.”

This new Reyn teased, “You’ll never know.”

My feet felt lighter, along with my mood. We held hands and took rhythmic steps in a line, one two, one two.

A motion out of the corner of my eye revealed Joshua standing silently in the doorway, holding his leather tool belt, watching us.

Reyn’s muscles instantly tightened in a line from his fingertips up his arm, making his whole body rigid.

Though self-conscious, I wanted to keep moving; I was finally starting to enjoy something that had always been a trial for me.

Wordlessly Joshua walked toward us. Reyn’s tension was like a newly strung bow. To my shock and then delight, Joshua stopped on my other side and after a moment matched his steps with ours. He held out his fist, and I lightly draped my hand on it the way I used to, so long ago, and with men not one-hundredth as attractive or interesting as these two.

There—on the linoleum floor of the darkened, empty shop—the three of us moved in patterns we’d learned hundreds of years ago in different countries. We’d been different people with different names and different lives. Now we were, today, humming an old minuet and dancing, two steps forward, two steps back, a step to the left, and a turn.

It was really quite delightful.

A
s the days passed, River was still subdued, smiling less easily, looking pensive as she moved about the farm. I continued to study most mornings, but also escaped out to my shops every day. The mood there was brisk and purposeful, and it was gratifying to see rooms finished and freshly painted, seeming full of potential.

No one heard or saw any ghost. Reyn and Joshua both came to work, but the momentary truce of our shared dance faded rapidly. Once again it was like having two angry lions circling each other, leaving me wondering which one would rip out whose throat first.

In between the exhausting and cramp-inducing chore of signing away gobs of money, I had some downtime to read and brush up on all the spells that I had been ignoring for the past, oh, four hundred years or so.

One day I was nodding off over a thick tome with the alluring title of
Various Worts of the Americas
when I blinked and there stood a little group of raggedy people, right in front of my desk. Another couple blinks and my eyes focused enough to see that it was Dray; with her was a hard-looking woman with bleached-blond hair and a face that looked like she had started smoking too young and hadn’t quit yet: Luisa Grace, an oddly pretty name that didn’t seem to fit her. The guy was tall, pale, skinny, and unhealthy or unfortunate enough to have awful acne.

I’d talked to Luisa Grace before, something about crafts?—but what was her connection with these two? If these motley three wanted to rent an apartment together, I was going to be in an awkward position.

“Hey,” said Dray.

“Hey,” I said cautiously.

“You know Luisa,” said Dray, pointing at the woman. “And Skunk.” The guy.

“Um, hi,” I said. Skunk? Really? I realized that all of them were holding bags or boxes, and my heart sank. I mean, no way was I—

“Show ’er,” Dray directed, and Luisa Grace opened her white garbage bag… and pulled out a stuffed patchwork teddy bear.

“Like I tol’ you before, I make these bears,” said Luisa, sitting it on my card table. “Out of old bedspreads. Like this.” She pulled out three more; one made out of white cotton chenille, one out of blue seersucker, and another patchwork one, this one in pastels.

They were so cute. I picked one up, saw the neat, precise stitching; the pert, round ears.

“This is awesome,” I said.

“I sell ’em at craft fairs,” said Luisa. “And like at the farmers’ market. They go for anywhere between sixty-five dollars and like two-twenty or so, depending on what they’re made of.”

“Whoa,” I said, touching its button nose.

“I sold over a hundred and fifty of them in the last six months.”

“Wow,” I said.

“I make ’em, and my kids stuff ’em for me,” said Luisa.

“Cool.”

“Skunk,” said Dray, and nudged the guy. He set his beat-up cardboard box on my desk and started pulling out T-shirts.

“I make screens,” he muttered, dropping a pile of shirts on the table.

“He means he silk-screens T-shirts and stuff,” Dray said.

I picked up the T-shirts one by one. They were covered with skulls, bomber planes, angry slogans, pictures of brass knuckles, etc.

“I like this one,” I said, holding up one with red bomber planes dropping green bombs onto some dinosaurs.

Skunk nodded. “That one’s Christmassy.”

Dray was holding a small box that had once contained twenty-four cans of cat food. She opened it up and pulled out handmade jewelry: bracelets of telephone wire woven in complicated patterns, a necklace with links that were strips of an aluminum can rolled up like beads, another necklace with a pendant that was a hunk of frosted glass surrounded by copper wire.

“Did you make this stuff?” I asked her, and she nodded diffidently.

“It keeps me off the streets.” She sounded bored.

“Like I said, I want to rent the shop with the blue front,” Luisa confirmed. “To sell my bears in. And for other people who want to sell their stuff. Handmade crafts. These guys, and I got a friend who makes little jackets for wine bottles. So cute.”

We “negotiated” the lease for a while, which means Luisa tried to bleed me dry, but finally she and I agreed on rent and signed the papers, and I had my second shop tenant. I didn’t know how long Dray would continue to make jewelry, but I actually really liked her stuff and told her to save one of the bracelets for me to buy when they opened.

The consignment-shop lady had fallen through, but the third shop got rented the next day by a woman whose husband repaired guitars and violins—she wanted all his crap out of the house. But she also did simple tailoring, like cuffs and hems, and she was going to set up her sewing machine in one corner, and they would be there together.

Three new businesses on Main Street in this dinky town. Already more people were walking by, coming over to check it out after shopping at Pitson’s or Early’s. Ray and Tim were almost ready to open their coffee shop—You’re Grounded—and the city health inspector was due this week to certify them.

Brynne now came to the shops every day, in her oldest overalls, with a bright cloth around her bouncing corkscrew curls. She’d joined a painting crew. If she didn’t manage to actually be in the same room or apartment as Joshua, she was at least nearby.

One day she, Meriwether, and I were eating lunch together, laughing at something, and it hit me: We probably looked like three normal teenage girls, sharing lunch. Like regular friends. It was an interesting feeling. So weirdly everyday.

Of course, two of us were immortals who were trying to work through dark pasts. But other than that, we could just be three teenagers bonding.

And yet through all of it, I was eternally aware that Innocencio was still nowhere to be found.

But March went on without any more weird or upsetting things happening. Spring was definitely trying to get its act together; the woods were even more dotted with the bright yellow blooms of forsythia, fuzzy paws of pussy willows, and the deeper reddish yellow of witch hazel—bright pockets of color that made me ache for warmer days and long hours of sunlight.

Ottavio finally came back, unfortunately. Without him around, the tension in the house had been visibly lessened—or at least much of the tension: We still had Reyn and Joshua snarling at each other, and Daniel irritating all of us by offering savvy business tips and telling stories about the various fortunes he’d made. If I were River, I’d tell him to shut the hell up, but who knows? Maybe she still felt guilty for plotting to kill him a thousand years ago.

When I came downstairs one morning to find Ottavio setting the dining table, my stomach clenched. He looked up, his black shark eyes seeming to pierce right through me. I gave him a big, sunny smile and sat down on a bench.

“Ottavio!” Roberto kissed his older brother on both cheeks as Rachel set a tureen of oatmeal on the sideboard.