Wild Orchids Read online

  “Thanks,” Jackie said brightly, grinning, her mouth full.

  I took the doughnut box away from her, and reached inside for one, but she’d eaten all of them.

  Incongruously, I thought, I’ll be damned if I’m going to live with a woman who I have to fight for the doughnuts!! If for no other reason, we have to get this thing solved.

  “Orchids,” Miss Essie Lee said. “Did you meet him at a place with wild orchids?”

  “Yes,” Jackie said, grinning and looking at me. “You saw the photo of the roses. There were orchids there, too.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I did see them.” I didn’t like Jackie’s perky attitude. I would have felt better if she were crying. Which reminded me. Why had Miss Essie Lee burst into tears when I’d told her Jackie’s name?

  “Can you walk?” Miss Essie Lee asked, looking me up and down.

  So maybe I wasn’t devilishly thin—every pun intended—but I wasn’t past walking.

  An hour later, I wished we’d had time to stop and buy a Jeep. Miss Essie Lee and Jackie, my father on their heels, were hotfooting it down an old trail that was all rocks and plants that I was sure were poisonous.

  Jackie, leading the pack, was chattering away at ninety miles an hour about the time she and I had gone hiking together and, according to her, I’d complained “incessantly” about the cobwebs across the trail. I would have defended my honor, but I was too busy defending my life against tree branches, loose rocks, and a couple of kamikaze insects that looked lethal.

  Every now and then, Miss Essie Lee asked Jackie a quiet question about her father and what she remembered about her mother. Jackie answered with a carefree air that made me want to give her pills to knock her out. Her attitude was proof that no one on earth should give up sugar. You needed to build up a tolerance so that when you did have it, you wouldn’t go into some insulin shock and start acting like a toy with a broken wind-up spring as Jackie was doing.

  After a long time we came to a clearing in the woods. It was a ghastly place. There was a rotting bench under a wall of dense trees, and a falling-down fence nearby. Few plants were growing, as though there was something wrong with the earth. Radiation, maybe. It was dark and gloomy inside the circle of tall, dark trees, but when I looked up, there wasn’t a cloud. Behind me, I could see sunlight, but this place, open as it was, had none.

  The worst thing was that it felt creepy. It was like the forest Hansel and Gretel had been lost in. It was like all the forests in all the scary movies. As I looked around, I expected big gray birds with long talons to swoop down out of the trees.

  Miss Essie Lee, my brave father, and Jackie walked to the middle of the desolate spot. I stayed on the trail. There was light there and air.

  “What do you see, dear?” Miss Essie Lee asked softly. Behind her back, she was holding my father’s hand.

  Jackie whirled around like Cinderella wearing a ball gown. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. The roses…” Closing her eyes, she inhaled. “Can you smell them?”

  “Why don’t you pick some?” Miss Essie Lee said, and it was the voice of a psychiatrist to a crazy, and probably violent, patient.

  “Oh, yes,” Jackie said as she sprinted over to the rotting old fence and began to break off bits of dying vine. When she had her arms full, she buried her face in the ugly mess. “Aren’t they divine?” she said. “I’ve never smelled roses like these before.”

  When we were kids we used to catch bugs in jars, screw the lids on tight, and leave them there for days to turn into black juice. This place smelled almost exactly like that bug juice.

  “What’s on the ground?” Miss Essie Lee asked, and I saw my father step closer to her. He was as creeped out by the place as I was.

  “Orchids,” Jackie said. “Wild orchids. Lady’s slippers. They’re everywhere. Oh! I wish I had my camera.”

  “And when do lady’s slippers bloom?”

  “June,” Jackie said, smiling, looking around the place, clutching her “roses” to her.

  “And what month is this?”

  “It’s August,” Jackie said, then she raised her head from the vines. “It’s August,” she repeated quietly.

  I wish I could say that this bit of logic made Jackie see the place as it truly was, but it didn’t. Slowly, she walked over to the old bench and put the vines down, treating them as though they were precious.

  Miss Essie Lee went to the bench, my father attached to her, and put her hand on Jackie’s arm. She nodded toward the trees behind the bench, which were as dense as a rock wall. “Your grandmother lives in the house up there. She’s been waiting for you for a long time.” She smiled at Jackie. “When you played in this garden when you were a child, it looked as you see it now.”

  I saw Miss Essie Lee’s hand tighten on Jackie’s arm. “I hope you can forgive us.”

  This last sentence seemed to catch in her throat, and she turned away to the comfort of my father’s arms.

  Jackie looked up the hill and, for a moment, seemed to consider whether or not she wanted to visit this newly-found grandmother.

  Personally, I wanted to get the hell out of there. If Jackie was seeing dying vines as fragrant roses, what was she going to see in her grandmother? Was the woman the witch from every fairy tale? Or was she the devil’s handmaiden? Was she even alive?

  I looked at Miss Essie Lee in question. “I can’t go,” she said softly. “Jacquelane must go alone.”

  Alone, I thought and looked at Jackie. She seemed to have made a decision because she took two steps toward the wall of trees.

  Alone, hell! I thought.

  By the third step, I was by her side. I slipped her arm into mine, and even though I wasn’t Catholic, I crossed myself, and we started walking up the hill together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Jackie

  I know they all thought I was on the verge of insanity. It had never occurred to me before, but a person is the way she’s treated. In the last twenty-four hours people had started seeing me as a person who was, maybe, losing her marbles, so I was beginning to see myself that way, too.

  Ford had spoiled me. From the first, he’d acted as though my visions were normal, no big deal. He’d listened to my first “dream” and when he’d seen it in reality, he’d acted on it. Afterward, he’d not quizzed me or even once looked at me as though I was a freak. And we’d even had fun with my second vision.

  While Ford was at Miss Essie Lee’s, Noble had grilled me until I felt like a cross between a witch and a spy. He made me feel as though burning-at-the-stake should be brought back as a legal punishment. He hinted that I’d moved to Cole Creek so I could find out everyone’s dirty little secrets and use them to—What devious purpose I was to use my knowledge for wasn’t clear.

  I don’t know how I came out to be the bad guy. If anyone was to be blamed, shouldn’t it be Ford? I’d started this whole thing with a fiancé who’d stolen my life’s savings, so I’d been pretty desperate for a job, preferably in another country. All I did was accept Ford’s job offer and move to Cole Creek. Okay, so maybe it was my story that had set Ford off, but if he weren’t so nosy, the story would have stayed buried inside me to my grave. So why was I being blamed? Because I’d had a vision or two? Me and half the world. Didn’t these people watch cable TV?

  As for Tessa, she was as bad as Noble. She didn’t say much out loud, but she’d whisper something to Noble, then he’d ask one of his worst questions. After a while, I stopped thinking of her as an innocent child and started asking her questions in return. It didn’t take long to figure out that she didn’t know much. All I could piece together was that a member of each of the founding families of Cole Creek had helped kill the woman, and as a result, the oldest descendant of each family couldn’t leave town.

  “So how do you break the spell and get out of here?” I asked.

  Tessa shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom won’t tell me. All she says is that I have to le