Rebel Belle

Chapter 17

I SPENT the next few days avoiding David. Or maybe he spent them avoiding me. Either way, I hardly saw him, and when our paths crossed, both of us were quick to look the other way. Once, as I watched him cross campus, his shoulders up around his ears, I felt a twinge of . . . something. At first, I thought it was maybe the beginnings of that gut-wrenching pain that meant he was in trouble. But it wasn’t that. I think it was sympathy. Or pity. As hard a time as I was having wrapping my brain around Saylor Stark being some kind of witch, David must have been having it a million times worse.

But I’d done the right thing in walking away from them. From all of it. No matter how awesome I thought superpowers would be, they weren’t worth giving up my life for.

Still, as I perched on a stool in my Aunt Jewel’s kitchen that Friday afternoon, I couldn’t stop thinking about how worried David looked every day, how just that morning, someone had slammed a locker in the hallway, and he had nearly jumped out of his skin.

It was true, what I’d told Saylor; I didn’t want David to get killed by bad guys, obviously. But I still couldn’t see how it was even feasible for me to watch over him forever.

So why did I feel so bad?

“Harper, a bird is going to land on that lip if you keep pokin’ it out,” Aunt Jewel said. She sat at the table with her two sisters, my Aunts May and Martha. The three of them were doing what they did every Friday afternoon—playing cards and smoking. Since I wasn’t married, I didn’t get to play with them, and smoking was out until I was widowed.

Not, I thought as I fanned the smoke away from my face, that that was ever going to be an issue. Smoking was so seriously gross.

“I’m not poking out my lip,” I replied, even though I was pretty sure I had been.

Aunts May and Martha were twins, but seeing them with Aunt Jewel, the three could have easily been triplets. All of them had the same iron-gray hair, permed within an inch of its life, and all three wore the same type of brightly colored elastic-waisted pants, usually paired with floral sweaters, or, like today, holiday-appropriate sweatshirts. Aunt May’s had a turkey on it, while Aunt Martha was wearing pumpkins. Aunt Jewel had what appeared to be a giant pie stitched on the front of hers.

Sipping sweet tea, I watched them play rummy and insult each other. “Martha, I know you’re not going to take that ace,” Aunt May said as my Aunt Martha did just that. May scowled as she flicked ash into an ugly clay dish I’d made for that purpose at summer camp seven years ago.

“You are evil, Martha,” she said, drawling her twin sister’s name out so that it sounded more like “Maawwtha.”

Aunt Martha gave a smug smile and arranged her cards. “Harper, baby, do you hear your Aunt May being ugly to me?”

“Don’t drag Harper into this,” Aunt Jewel said as she laid down another card. She was the eldest of The Aunts, and the other two tended to listen to her. “We never get to see her, and now the two of you are going to spoil her visit by fussin’.”

I hid a smile behind my glass. Actually, sitting in Aunt Jewel’s cozy, yellow kitchen, watching the three of them argue with each other, was one of my favorite things. They could get downright nasty over cards, but there was never any doubt that they were sisters who loved one another.

I wondered if I could ever think of the word “sisters” and not feel a steady ache in my chest.

I sat my tea on the counter behind me. “I’m fine,” I told them. “Also, Aunt May, if you pick up that four Aunt Martha discarded, you can get a run.”

Jewel and Martha groaned as, hooting, Aunt May scooped up the card. “You should come by more often, Miss Harper,” she said.

Aunt Jewel began gathering the cards back up, and Aunt Martha looked over at me. “Speaking of, what brought you by today, sweetie? Not that we’re not thrilled to see you, of course, or that we aren’t pleased as punch to have a hummingbird cake”— she nodded toward the heavy glass platter on the counter—“but you’re usually so busy.”

“Too busy,” Aunt May chimed in. “Girls today have so much going on. School, and sports, and dances, and committees . . . it’s too much!”

“Don’t say that,” Aunt Martha told her, lighting another cigarette. “Our Harper is responsible and has a good sense of community. What’s wrong with that? And least she’s not one of those Teen Moms.”

The other aunts clucked in sympathy. A few months back, Aunts Martha and May—they lived together—had gotten a satellite dish and discovered the joy/horror of reality TV.

“Or one of those crackheads, like on that show where they make people feel bad about taking drugs,” Aunt Jewel offered. “Did you see the episode with the girl who did something called huffing? With the cans of cleaning—”

I hated to interrupt, but once they got going on car crash TV, they might never stop. “I have been busy,” I broke in. “And that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to y’all about.”

All three of my aunts put their cards down and swiveled in their chairs to face me. There were few things they loved more than people coming to them for advice. It helped that they were really good at it. “It’s about Cotillion,” I said, and Aunts Martha and May exchanged a look, while Aunt Jewel exhaled a cloud of smoke.

“That Cotillion,” Aunt Martha spat out. “I suwannee.” That was her way of saying “I swear.” Aunt Martha belonged to that generation of ladies who thought any type of swearing—not just saying the bad words—was not the thing to do.

“You don’t like Cotillion?” I asked, surprised. All of them had done it, and so had my grandmother, my mom, my sister . . .

Besides, The Aunts lived for tradition and propriety. Cotillion should be one of their favorite things ever.

“We did,” Aunt Jewel said, stubbing out her cigarette as she stood. Ladies never smoked unless they were sitting, after all. “Until that woman took it over.”

More grumbling. I scooted forward on the edge of my stool. “Saylor Stark?”

Aunt Jewel rolled her eyes. “Such a silly name.”

“Before she came, Cotillion was held in the spring. Which is when it’s meant to be held,” Aunt Martha said, laying her hands in her lap. “Girls are supposed to come out in the spring; everyone knows that. That’s why it used to be called the Chrysalis Ball.”

“And now it’s what? The Mistletoe Ball?” Aunt May asked. She gave a derisive sniff. “That doesn’t even make sense. Unless she has y’all running around kissing people.”

“She would,” Aunt Jewel muttered, plucking a piece of lint from the pie emblazoned across her chest.

“Who ran it before?” I asked.

“Cathy Foster,” Aunt Jewel answered promptly. “And she did a lovely job of it, too. I never understood why she handed it over to a stranger.”

“I never understood why Saylor Stark was so bound and determined to be in charge of Cotillion, anyway,” Aunt Martha said. “Apparently, she’d run one back in her hometown in Virginia.”

Another round of frowns and clucking. “The whole thing was odd,” Aunt May mused, leaning back in her chair. “Cathy loved running Cotillion, and as far as I knew, she planned on passing it on to her daughter. Then Saylor Stark showed up, had one lunch with her, and suddenly, she was in charge.”

“Same with the Pine Grove Betterment Society,” Aunt Martha reminded her. “I thought Suzanne Perry was going to run that until the end of time. But it was the same thing. Saylor Stark marches her behind over to Suzanne’s house with a rum cake, and suddenly she’s in charge of the PGBS, too.”

I fidgeted on my stool, thinking about my conversation with Saylor. She’d called herself a Mage, but it seemed like “witch” was just as good a term. And she’d obviously used some kind of power on Cathy Foster and Suzanne Perry. And now that I knew why she’d taken over all of those things, my beloved Cotillion included . . .

“Do y’all know anything else about the Starks? Anything . . . I don’t know, kind of odd? Out of the ordinary?”

Aunts May and Martha exchanged another glance as Aunt Jewel got another glass of sweet tea. “Whole family is strange if you ask me,” she said, frowning. “Saylor appearing in town like she did, with that brand-new baby. And buying up Yellowhammer.”

Right, that had been the name of the Starks’ house. I knew it was kind of dumb.

“When we were growing up, people used to tell ghost stories about that house,” Aunt May mused. “They said a witch lived there a long time ago. Or something like that.” She waved her hand, raining ashes down on Aunt Jewel’s yellow gingham tablecloth. “Of course, you can’t swing a possum without hitting a haunted house in these parts, so I’m sure it was nothing.”

Aunt Martha shook her head. “I always thought it was odd that she didn’t have a husband. I’m telling you, I don’t think that boy is just her nephew.”

“Hush, Martha,” Aunt Jewel admonished. She went back to the table and began dealing cards again. “I’m not Saylor Stark’s biggest fan by any means, but no matter who she is to that boy, she’s done the best she could by him. And he’s turned out nearly as smart as our Harper!” Leaning forward, Aunt Jewel gave me a shrewd smile. “You’re still going to whup him for valedictorian though, right, baby?”

I smiled back. “Absolutely.”

They started to play again, and while I was already about to go into a diabetic coma, I poured myself some more tea anyway. “Are there any other weird things that’ve happened here in town? Not only related to the Starks, but . . . I don’t know. People seeing things. Stuff disappearing, like . . . magic kind of stuff?”

All three of them exchanged a look this time, and then Aunt Martha very gingerly put her cards down. “Harper, have you been doing the huffing?”

“No,” I said, setting down my glass so fast that tea sloshed out onto the counter. I reached behind me for a paper towel and continued. “I was just wondering. For a research project. I’m doing a—a paper on local superstitions.”

Mollified, The Aunts resumed their card game. “Oh, well, in that case, of course there have been odd things,” Aunt May said. “There’s that window in the courthouse that supposedly shows a man’s face if the sun hits it the right way.”

“And they say the choir loft at First Baptist is haunted,” Aunt Martha added, pulling out another cigarette from her pack. “Although I think it’s just pigeons up there, and the janitorial staff isn’t doing their job.”

“You know, sweetie, now that you mention things disappearing, there was that man years back,” Aunt Jewel said, not looking up from her cards. “Real particular. Several people saw him lurking around town, dressed all in black, very suspicious. He was renting a room over at Janice Duff’s boardinghouse. One night, Janice hears this awful ruckus up there, and when she goes in, she swears up and down that she saw him dead on his bed with a big sword in him.”

My neck prickled as Aunt May nodded. “That’s right. I talked to her about it the next week at church. She said it wasn’t a regular sword either, it was one of those big curvy ones. Like in the old movies about sheikhs. What do they call those things?”

“Scimitars,” I croaked, my mouth dry.

“That’s right, a scimitar. Anyway, she calls 911, havin’ an absolute fit, but when the police get there, the man was gone.”

“And more than that,” Aunt May said, discarding a five of clubs. “There was no trace he’d ever been there. No blood, no clothes, no suitcase. Bed made up all pretty and everything.”

“Most everybody thought Janice was having a nervous breakdown. Happens when some women go through”— Aunt Martha dropped her voice to a whisper—“The Change.”

My hand was shaking as I poured myself another glass of tea. This time, I was pretty sure it wasn’t from the sugar. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and hoped The Aunts wouldn’t notice.

Not my problem, I tried to tell myself.

Aunt Jewel picked up a discarded card, and then turned a bright smile on me. “Anyway, does that answer your question, baby?”

I swallowed. “Sure does.”