Wild Orchids Read online

  Neither Mrs. Cole nor Jackie seemed to want to talk about the devil or a woman who had been crushed by the townspeople. I knew that this woman had not participated in the crushing or she would be dead. And as a Cole by marriage, I guessed she’d been spared the can’t-leave-town hex.

  All Jackie and Mrs. Cole wanted to do was sit close to each other and talk about their mutual ancestors. Mrs. Cole had a two-foot-tall stack of photo albums, and Jackie wanted to see every picture and talk about every aspect of every one of her relatives.

  I looked at the dates on the spines of the albums, chose one, and flipped through it until I found a photo of the woman whose face had been re-created by the forensic lab in Charlotte. “Who is she?” I asked.

  Mrs. Cole gave me such a hard look that I turned red. She might be old but her mind was certainly intact. Obviously, she knew that I knew—

  Holding the photo, Jackie studied it. I was sure she also knew who the woman in the photo was and, unfortunately, I could see that she was struggling hard not to remember what she seemed to be seeing.

  I was eaten up with questions that I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t make myself voice them. Jackie seemed to think she had all the time in the world, but from the look of her grandmother and the machines by the bed, I didn’t think they had much time at all.

  Was it true? I wanted to ask. Did Amarisa see the devil? Had Jackie seen him? Why did the devil choose that woman? Who killed all the people who had been at the crushing?

  When I looked outside, I saw that it was full dark around the house and not just in the surrounding forest. My imagination went into overdrive. Had the devil put up a protective force field around this house? Was this house like Brigadoon and only existed at certain times for a certain length of time?

  To quieten my mind, I went into the living room and used my cell phone to call Noble. When they told me that he and Allie had found Rebecca in a bar before she set any fires, I offered up a prayer of thanks. And it seemed that Allie’d had to search for Rebecca before so she’d asked no questions.

  I went back into the bedroom and told Jackie the good news. She and her grandmother listened politely, but I could see that neither of them was interested. They were talking about the store that Jackie’s father had run after he married her mother.

  “How can we break the curse?” I blurted out, making both women pause to stare at me.

  “I would have thought Essie would have told you that,” Mrs. Cole said. Looking at her granddaughter, she smiled, and I could see a world of pain in her eyes. There was a wheelchair poking out of a closet in the old house and I remembered the newspaper saying that she’d been in the car when her daughter had crashed. And I remembered that her daughter had taken two days to die. This woman must have had to lie there, trapped, and watch her daughter die.

  “No one in town has told us anything,” I managed to say, the images in my head making my throat swell. It occurred to me that my books appealed to so many people because so many had experienced as much pain as I had. To love someone so much then lose them…What was worse on the earth?

  “It’s time that you know everything,” Mrs. Cole said, then waved her nurse away when she started to say that her patient was too tired. Mary Hattalene told us the story her daughter had told her during the days they’d both been trapped under the wrecked car. The rescuers arrived just minutes after Harriet died.

  We’d pieced together much of the story in our time in Cole Creek. Harriet Cole, who Jackie’s grandmother admitted had been spoiled and cosseted all her life, had snagged the handsome young man—Jackie’s father—who’d come to town to open a pottery business. But after the marriage, the pottery had closed and Reece Landreth—Jackie’s father’s real name—had wanted to leave town, but Harriet refused. Over the next few years the couple had come to despise each other, with only their love of their young daughter holding them together. Reece spent his days running a small grocery, while Harriet, her daughter in tow, spent her days with Edward Belcher—which explained why Jackie knew my house so well. She’d spent endless hours playing there as a child.

  When Jackie was about two and a half, her father’s older sister, Amarisa, had been widowed and Reece had invited her to live with them. Mary Hattalene said that while it was true Reece loved his sister, he also desperately needed her help financially as his salary at the store was minuscule.

  Amarisa gladly came to Cole Creek. She was a quiet person, as gentle and kind as Harriet was turbulent. The problem started because Jackie adored her aunt. It was understandable that Jackie would want to be with her aunt who took her for long walks, and let her use her camera to photograph the flowers, rather than with her mother who spent her days with pompous old Edward Belcher. It wasn’t long before Harriet began to hate Amarisa, blaming her for all her problems.

  Mary Hattalene said that as the months passed, Amarisa’s life became difficult to bear. Harriet’s anger and jealousy of the love that her husband and daughter, and even the town residents, bore for the sweet-tempered woman increased daily. It was when Jackie, just learning to talk, came home from a walk with her aunt full of words about the man they’d met, that Harriet went over the edge. When questioned, Amarisa, blushing shyly, told of having met a man who had a lovely summer cabin in the mountains. No, she said, the man wasn’t married.

  Harriet was terrified that if Amarisa got married and moved away that Reece would go with her and take Jackie. Harriet began a campaign to keep Amarisa from getting married, but when she extended an invitation to the man, she was puzzled as to why he wouldn’t accept.

  Curious, Harriet decided to secretly follow Amarisa and Jackie and see the man for herself.

  What Harriet saw was not the lovely cabin that Amarisa had described, but a pile of rubble from collapsed stone walls. Yet, as Harriet hid and watched, she saw her daughter and Amarisa laughing and talking as though there was another person there. She even saw them making the motions of eating and drinking.

  Later, Harriet told her mother that, had it just been Amarisa, she would have thought the woman was insane, but that her daughter also “saw” this person horrified her.

  Harriet ran down the trail to the minister’s house and told him what she’d seen. It was he who said that Amarisa had been talking with the devil. That night he called a meeting of the town council, which consisted of a member of each of the seven founding families, and two from the Cole family, Harriet and her father. They concocted a plan.

  The next day Harriet told Amarisa that Jackie wasn’t well so she couldn’t go with her aunt on her daily walk. Smiling graciously, Amarisa set off on the trail, while Harriet left Jackie with a neighbor. What Harriet didn’t know was that minutes after she started to follow Amarisa, Jackie slipped through a loose board in the neighbor’s fence and followed her mother and aunt.

  Eight adults and one child were hiding in the bushes in front of the fallen cabin that day. When Amarisa started laughing with a person they couldn’t see, the adults stepped forward, but little Jackie crouched down and stayed still.

  Mary Hattalene said that when the people confronted Amarisa and accused her of consorting with the devil, they angered him.

  “For a moment,” Mary Hattalene said, “he appeared. One second they were standing in that fallen-down house, then the next, the house was beautiful and there was a man there, a very handsome man. He was smiling at them in a way that my daughter said tempted her to smile back at him. It was a jealous Edward Belcher who picked up a stone and threw it at the man—and when he did, for a second, they saw the devil as people believed him to look: red, with horns and cloven feet. In the next second, he disappeared in smoke, and the house was again rubble and charred wood.

  “My daughter said that after that she wasn’t sure what order things happened in. When Amarisa backed away from the people, she fell, then someone dropped a stone on her, then another. Within seconds they were all in a frenzy and minutes later Amarisa was buried under hundreds of rocks. When she was covered, t