Spells for Forgetting(7)

I punched the keys on the old register, my finger slipping from the number nine as the words left her mouth. The key snapped back, leaving a smear of black ink on the receipt paper.

“Well, welcome back,” I said, still holding the practiced smile.

“We came every year when I was a kid, back when the woman who owned this shop read tea leaves. My mother always got a reading.” She glanced at the pine hutch at the back of the shop, where the old cups and saucers were arranged neatly.

My eyes landed on the green, gold-rimmed teacup with a crack on its lip that sat on the top shelf. I hadn’t touched it in fourteen years, and I’d sworn I never would again.

“Yeah, well, we haven’t offered readings in a long time.” I started over with a steady hand, hitting the numbers again in a fixed rhythm.

It had been six years, to be exact. My mother was the last person to read the leaves in this shop. As far as I was concerned, it would stay that way.

“Oh.” She frowned. “You really should. Adds to the whole experience, you know?”

I stared at her, studying the perfect line of her lipstick, painted in almost the exact same shade as her coat. Her manicured fingernails tapped the counter between us.

“We stopped coming after the fire, of course. Couldn’t believe it when we heard. It was all over the news for months. Same night that poor girl died, wasn’t it? What was her name? Lily?”

I bit down on my bottom lip when I heard it—the clinking of the teacups on their saucers in the hutch. They softly rattled and the woman’s eyes drifted that way again, narrowing, as the sound faded into the soft patter of raindrops on the roof.

I dropped the tea into a bag, tying the handles closed with twine and tightening the bow with a firm tug. “That’s right.”

“So strange, the whole thing.” She dropped her head just a little to see my face. “What do people around here think happened to her?”

I let my eyes meet hers then, for just a moment. I knew that look. The morbid curiosity. The twisted entertainment of it all. But this wasn’t the first time someone had come into the shop asking the very same questions.

There was an unspoken understanding on Saoirse. We didn’t talk about that night. Or Lily Morgan. Especially not to outsiders.

When I didn’t answer, the woman smiled sheepishly. “Anyway, I thought it was time to bring my daughter. Carry on the tradition, you know.” She patted the girl on the shoulder absently. “You wouldn’t know by the look of the orchard now. Everything’s so beautiful.”

“Well, it’s been a long time,” I said. And it had been. Fourteen years. But it didn’t matter how green the branches of the apple trees were now, I could still feel that black stain on the earth that the fire left behind.

I came around the counter, pulling the door open before I held the bag between us. She seemed to hesitate before she took it.

The little girl watched me from behind her mother, shrinking under my gaze.

“Thank you for coming in.”

She pulled the girl down the steps and her umbrella popped open as they made their way up the walk, toward the tree line in the distance. The wind outside had turned brisk, the clouds gathering overhead like a gentle smoke.

I stepped back inside, letting the door close behind me. The shop felt empty in a way that it hadn’t that morning. As if the warmth that usually hovered beneath the roof had escaped.

I reached up, pressing the tip of my finger to the crack in the window and tracing the line of it. The faint impression of feathers was dusted onto the glass where the starling had crashed into it, and my breath fogged around the tip of a wing.

The floorboards creaked beneath my feet as I walked back to the counter, picking up the bundle of rosemary Leoda had left. I twirled it between my fingers before I went to the door and lifted up on my toes to hang it over the threshold, like she’d instructed.

Maybe it was the talk of the fire or the argument with Dutch. Maybe it was the feeling that always seemed to haunt me this time of year, or the sudden turn of the trees. A coincidence, Nixie had called it. But we both knew there were no coincidences on Saoirse.





Four


    AUGUST


Fourteen years and nothing had changed.

The ferry drifted to a stop, filling the clean air with the smell of burning fuel as I peered over the railing to the dock below. The gray wood planks were stained green with algae along the edges, stretching between old, rusted fishing boats and anchored catamarans.

The ferry crew was readying to leave almost as soon as the first passenger made it down the stairs, and I shouldered my pack, waiting. They’d turn the ship around and make at least four more trips before the sun went down, but the day on the island was only getting started.

A cloud of pigeons descended on the deck as the crowd thinned, scrambling underfoot for whatever crumbs had been left behind, I pulled my hood up over my hat and the metal staircase rocked as I took the steps down to the dock. The longer I went without anyone recognizing me, the less complicated this would be. But the moment my feet hit the ground, I could feel the weight of the island.

The wood planks narrowed as I followed them to the harbor and I inched away as I passed the ticket booth, where a figure sat behind the fogged glass. I kept one shoulder turned toward the boats, careful not to meet eyes with whomever it was. Maybe one of the Galloway boys or a farmhand from the orchard who’d grown too old to shovel hay. Regardless, they’d know the story, and news traveled fast in this town.