Wild Orchids Read online

  I ate a cracker she’d spread with cheese and put half an olive on top of, and waited for her to finish.

  “He did take the silver.”

  We laughed together. So much for old age and no heirs. I ate four more of the cracker things. “You almost seem to know the man personally.”

  “True,” she said, spatula paused in midair. “I feel like I almost know what he looks like. And I seem to know a lot about this house. I’m beginning to think my father told me a few little white lies.” She paused a moment. “And maybe one or two whoppers.”

  I thought about what she was saying. Her father had said they’d lived in Cole Creek for only a short time when Jackie was “very young,” but she seemed to remember too much for that to be true. And what “whoppers” was she referring to? Yeow! Her mother? “You think your mother could be alive?” I asked, trying to sound causal.

  She took a moment before answering, but I could tell that she was working hard to get her emotions under control. “I don’t know. I do remember that they fought a lot. I think maybe he kidnapped me, and that maybe the reason we spent our lives moving from one town to another was so she and the law wouldn’t find us. He didn’t have a copy of my birth certificate and whenever I asked for facts, he became vague.”

  “Interesting,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted. I had an idea she’d just told me more than she’d ever told anyone else. “Maybe my next book will be about a young woman who finds her origins.”

  “That’s my book,” she said quickly. “You’re here to find the devil so you can talk to him about your wife.”

  Damn! but she could cut! I had a cracker at my lips when she said that, and it was as though my heart stopped beating. Not even in my own mind had I let myself think of the truth of what she’d just said.

  She was standing absolutely still at the stove, her back to me, spatula paused. I couldn’t see her face, but the back of her neck had become three shades darker than normal.

  I knew that what I replied would set the tone for our future relationship. About two-thirds of me wanted to tell her she was fired and to get the hell out of my life. But I looked at that candlelit table and the last thing I wanted was yet another evening alone.

  “Only God would know anything about Pat,” I said at last. “The devil would say, ‘Never heard of her.’”

  Slowly, she turned to look at me, and there was such gratitude on her face that I had to look away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes I say things that—”

  “Are the truth as you see it?” I asked, not wanting to hear her apology. Truthfully, I think that my first idea about the project had been about Pat. Maybe I’d thought that if I could find out how one became a ghost, I could figure out how to bring Pat back in spirit form. Or maybe a witch could cast a spell to bring her back.

  But as I started reading, the project itself had begun to interest me. For one thing, several states claimed the same stories. Did that make them folklore rather than truth?

  We were quiet for a while as Jackie served some kind of chicken casserole that was quite good. She seemed to be a vegetable fanatic because she put three kinds of vegetables on the table, plus potatoes, plus more vegetables in the casserole.

  At first we ate in silence, then I started telling her how close she’d been in her assessment of why I’d started on the ghosts and witches, but that I’d changed.

  “Maybe I’m being romantic, but I’d like to find out if there’s any truth in those old stories. Or maybe I’d just like to give the readers a bloody good read.”

  “Better to want a good story than to ask the devil for anything,” she said as she began to clear the table.

  Since there was no dishwasher, I washed and she dried. After the kitchen was cleaned up (except for the mold growing over most surfaces) we went upstairs and started on the bedrooms. She laughed when I complained about the hideous wallpaper in my bedroom. It was dark green, magenta, and black. The bed was dark walnut, as were the other thirty or so pieces of furniture in the room. Between the wallpaper and the furniture, the room was as light as a tunnel at midnight.

  “How about if tomorrow I call an auction house and get rid of the excess furniture?” she asked. “Actually, you could get rid of all of it, then buy new.”

  When I looked at that ugly old bed, the thought of buying something new made me smile. White maybe.

  But then I caught myself. I was not going to be living in this tiny throwback of a town. I was going to do some research here then move on to—Well, I had no idea where I was going, but it would be far away from this horror-movie house.

  Jackie and I put new, but unwashed sheets (an ancient washer and dryer were in the pantry, harvest gold, sixties vintage) on my bed, then we went to her room to do the same.

  “You know,” she said slowly, “I saw a Lowe’s just down the hill from the grocery.” She stopped tucking in her side of the sheet and looked at me as though I was supposed to read her mind. When I said nothing, she told me that if you buy new appliances at Lowe’s, they take your old ones away. When I realized what she was saying, we looked at each other and laughed. Some poor, unsuspecting appliance movers would take away that refrigerator whose smell could pollute outer space.

  “What time do they open?” I asked, and we laughed some more.

  An hour later, as I snuggled down in bed (and vowed to get a new mattress) I felt better than I had in a long time, and I finally allowed myself to think about the devil story that Jackie had told me in the car. I don’t think she had any idea how unusual her story was. For the last couple of years I’d been reading regional ghost stories, and for the most part, they were quite mild—so mild that I couldn’t remember any of them an hour after I’d finished the book. There was so little meat in the stories that the writers had had to embellish them with long phrases about the beauty of the people, or add some sinister aspect that had nothing to do with the real story. You could feel that the writer was just trying to fill up pages.

  But Jackie’s story was different. The first version, the so-called “factual” story, the one she said her mother had told her, was interesting, but it sounded like several small town legends I’d read.

  I didn’t want Jackie to know it, but it was her second story that interested me. I’d already seen that she was a good storyteller, but her dramatic telling of the devil story had given me the creeps.

  Jackie started by describing the woman who’d been murdered. She told of a woman who was kind to everyone, who loved children, and who always wore a smile.

  Jackie said that the woman used to take long walks in the woods, and, one day, she came to a beautiful house made of stone and a man was there. Jackie described him as “nice looking, like Santa Claus, without the beard.” I wanted to ask her how she knew this, but there was something so odd about the way she was telling the story that I didn’t interrupt her.

  She said the woman had gone often to the house, and Jackie told about food the nice man and nice woman had shared, how they’d laughed and talked together. She told about the pretty flowers that grew all around the house and how the inside smelled like gingerbread.

  After a few moments, I realized what was odd about her storytelling. There were two things. One was that Jackie related it as though she’d been an eyewitness, and the second was that she told it in the manner of a very young child. When she came to the part where the townspeople saw the couple, she said, “You could see all the people through the bushes…” “How many people?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t, and as she spoke, it occurred to me that the child who saw this may have been too young to know how to count. If I’d asked Jackie how many people were there, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d said, “Eleventy-seven.”

  She said some “grown-ups” had seen the woman but they couldn’t see the man because he was invisible. Jackie said the townspeople had shouted at the woman but Jackie didn’t seem to know what they’d said, just that they were “shouting.” When the woman had backed up, she