Wild Orchids Read online

  It was such a perfect pantomime of Jackie that I was laughing hard. The only word my father said was “busy,” which described Jackie perfectly.

  In my hilarity, I glanced at Noble, but he was sitting on the couch stone-faced, not even looking at Toodles.

  Eventually, my father quit cleaning and photographing, and looked toward a door. “Oh! There he is,” he said in a good imitation of Jackie’s voice.

  He opened the imaginary door, then introduced Russell Dunne to Toodles and Noble. Taking turns, Toodles portrayed himself and Noble as they looked for, but didn’t see, Jackie’s guest.

  It took me a few moments to stop laughing, but when I did, I wasn’t sure I could believe that my father was doing such an excellent job of imitating.

  Jackie had introduced Noble and Toodles to a man who wasn’t there. She’d had a conversation with all of them, but when Toodles and Noble didn’t reply to the invisible man’s questions and comments, Jackie began to get angry. Toodles showed Jackie’s anger, then stepped aside and mimed his own consternation. He showed how Noble had banged on the side of his head and said water had got in his ears in the shower that morning and he couldn’t hear a thing. And Noble had put his arm around Toodles’s shoulders, saying he was shy with strangers so that’s why he wasn’t speaking.

  Toodles acted out Jackie’s relaxing and smiling, then shouting to a deaf Noble that Russell said he liked Toodles’s vest and did he have any rhinoceros beetles on there? Toodles showed himself displaying the horned beetle, his eyes wide.

  Toodles showed Jackie listening to the man, then shouting that Russell had to go, so could Noble please move so Russell could get out the door? Toodles demonstrated Noble stepping in front of the door, blocking the exit, and pleading with Jackie to let Ford meet Russell.

  “Would you?” Jackie asked, looking at empty space and waiting for an answer. “Sorry,” she said, turning back to Noble. “Russell doesn’t have time to meet Ford right now. So, Noble…” She motioned for him to move aside.

  Toodles showed how he and Noble had held their breaths, watching the door to see if it would open by itself. But when the door didn’t open, Jackie said, “It sticks sometimes,” and she opened it, then went outside—after stepping aside for Russell.

  Toodles and Noble got wedged into the door as they both tried to crowd through it. Toodles pinched Noble and when Noble yelped, Toodles went through first.

  Once they were outside, to my disbelief—and no little repugnance—my father pantomimed Jackie in an imaginary embrace and kissing—complete with tongue—her invisible friend.

  After the kiss, my father and Noble looked at me as though I was supposed to know what was going on and to explain it to them. As a kid, I’d seen that look often. From about the time I was nine, whenever anything filtered in from the outside world, I was supposed to explain it. Legal papers and anything from a doctor were handed to me, and I was to read and translate it into English.

  Of course I knew that this imaginary friend of Jackie’s had nothing to do with her being crazy. If it did and she was, that would be an easy matter to deal with. A few hundred milligrams of some drug and she’d be fine. No more meeting men in the garden and we could all get back to what we were doing.

  I should be so lucky. I looked at Toodles and Noble, once again sitting on the couch close together. They looked like old first graders waiting for their teacher to explain why the sky was falling.

  “Well, you see…” I began. You’re a wordsmith, I told myself, so start smithing those words. “Jackie is…Well, actually, I think maybe…I mean, we think maybe Jackie is, uh—”

  Praise the Lord, but the door to my office flew open, distracting the three of us. Tessa stood there, her eyes wide. “Jackie’s having an epileptic fit,” she said.

  I jumped up, Noble and Dad behind me.

  “Get a spoon,” Noble said.

  “Join the twenty-first century,” I shot back at him as I ran down the stairs behind Tessa, Toodles and Noble close behind me.

  Jackie was sitting on the chair in the entrance hall, her face buried in her hands and she was crying. I knew she’d had another vision and I wondered how much time we had.

  Kneeling before her, I took her wrists and pulled her hands away from her face. She looked awful so I knew that what she’d seen this time was really bad.

  I picked up all of what felt like twenty pounds of her, carried her into the living room, and put her on the couch. Noble, Toodles, and Tessa followed me so closely they were stepping on my heels, and after I put Jackie down, I sat on an ottoman in front of her, the Three Stooges sitting behind me.

  “Where and what?” I asked.

  If Jackie even saw the faces behind me, she didn’t let on. She just put her hands back over her face and started crying again. “It’s happened,” she said. “Just what Russell said would happen, has.” When she looked up at me, her eyes were full of fear. “I saw something bad inside someone’s head.”

  I took her hands in mine. “Calm down and tell me about it.”

  She took a couple of deep breaths, calmed herself, then looked behind me. By this time Toodles’s head was on my left shoulder, Tessa on his shoulder, and Noble had his head on my right shoulder. I must have looked like a four-headed monster.

  I gave a couple of shrugs and for a second they pulled away, but they were back as fast as flies on watermelon. All I could do was try to convey to Jackie that it was okay to talk in front of them.

  “Rebecca Cutshaw is planning to burn the town down,” Jackie said, tears running down her cheeks. “I was inside her head and what I saw is horrible. She’s full of anger. Rage like I’ve never seen before. She wants to leave here, leave Cole Creek, but she can’t. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “None at all,” I said. “But a lot of things in this town don’t make sense to me.”

  Tessa pulled her head off Toodles’s shoulder and sighed noisily. It was the sound of kid-boredom. I guess that when she saw Jackie wasn’t really having an exciting seizure, she wasn’t interested. “The devil won’t let us leave,” Tessa said.

  We all turned to look at the child. “What do you mean?” I asked as casually as I could manage.

  Tessa shrugged. More boredom. “My dad has to come here to visit us because my mom is one of the people who can’t go more than fifty miles outside Cole Creek. When she dies, I’ll be the one, so I have to leave before she dies and I can never come back.”

  All four of us adults sat there blinking, opening our mouths like the proverbial fish. I think all of us wanted to ask a billion questions, but nothing would come out. After several seconds of silence it dawned on me that the urgency now was Jackie’s vision. I looked back at her. Her tears were gone and she was gaping at Tessa.

  “How much time do we have?” I asked.

  It took Jackie a moment to remember what we were talking about. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was night.”

  “Time for what?” Noble asked, turning away from Tessa, his head no longer on my shoulder. If I knew my cousin, he was thinking about changing the oil in his truck. Newcombes didn’t like anything “ghosty” as they called it. They were superstitious to a medieval degree.

  “Before some woman sets fire to the town,” I said impatiently. Better to think of a fire than the devil.

  Again Jackie put her hands over her face. “What I saw was catastrophic. People died because they couldn’t get away, couldn’t leave town. And, Ford”—she grabbed my hand in hers—“the fire trucks couldn’t get here. They couldn’t get into Cole Creek. Something wouldn’t let them enter the town.”

  Tessa had wandered over to the little glass cabinet beside the door and was looking at some porcelain birds. “That’s because the devil hates this town and wants it to die,” she said.

  My first thought was to find my Patsy Cline CD and listen to her sing “Crazy.” My second thought was to raid the refrigerator and take six days’ worth of food upstairs to my office and bolt the door. What h