Starling House, page 9
She sighs. “But when I finish this degree … well.” She exhales as she turns away. “People aren’t trees, Opal.” Her shoes tap across the blacktop.
“Hey. Could you send me that transcript, if you get a chance?”
Charlotte hesitates. She nods once. “Don’t spread it around. I know where you live.”
By the time I make it back to the motel I still haven’t thought up a good story to explain how late I am, but I shouldn’t have worried: Jasper’s bed is empty. My heart seizes before I see the note on his pillow. Went over to Logan’s, will catch the bus with him tomorrow.
Logan’s dad is a roofer and his mom works in the county clerk’s office, which means the Caldwells have a pool table in the basement and name-brand coke in the fridge. They’re members of the PTA and the Rotary Club and they always bring tinfoil vats of mac ’n’ cheese to the church dinners and send out color-coordinated Christmas cards full of foster kids, even though they’re only a few years older than me.
I hate them.
The note ends with a cold P.S. We’re out of cereal instead of his usual x’s and o’s, so I’m pretty sure Jasper’s pissed at me. I should text him and find out why, but I’m tired and overcaffeinated and secretly relieved to have the room to myself tonight.
I don’t have to wait for my brother to fall asleep before I can sit cross-legged on the bed and prop the laptop on the radiator. I close the open tabs—job search engines, a special effects tutorial, the Gravely Power website, for some reason—and open “document 4.”
I wait. After a while, an email appears from the Muhlenberg Public Library staff account. The subject line reads: Interview 13A—Calliope Boone.
I open the attachment and read it again.
This is the truth about Starling House.
Once there were three brothers who made their fortune in coal, which is to say: flesh.
The Gravely brothers built themselves a nice big house on the hill, with two staircases and real glass windows, and then they built a row of rude cabins on the banks of the river. The first person they purchased was a man named Nathaniel Boone, from the Winifrede Mining Company. Nathaniel taught his fellows how to dig deep, how to shore up the shafts, how to wring coal from the earth like blood, and for a number of years the Gravelys did very well. But every mine runs dry, given time, and every sin comes home to roost.
By the middle of the century the easy coal was gone and profits had declined. The Gravelys might have scraped by another few years, making their living on the backs of better men, if it hadn’t been for the election of 1860. If it hadn’t been for Antietam and the proclamation that came after, and the way Nathaniel and the other miners paused sometimes at their work, as if they could feel the great gears of the world shifting beneath their feet.
The Gravely brothers determined to get as much coal out of the ground as they could before their time ran out. The oldest brother was the worst of them, a man with skin like sour cream and a heart like anthracite. Under his gaze Nathaniel and his men dug deeper and faster than they ever had before, driven down and down into the earth. When Nathaniel Boone spoke of those months, even decades later, his eyes would blacken as if he were still stuck in the lightless deeps of the mines.
They heard rumors, now and then, that the Constitution had been amended, but the Constitution didn’t seem to apply in Eden. Each dusk Nathaniel went to sleep in the same rude cabin, and each dawn he shuffled into the same dark earth, so that the sun itself became a stranger to him, harsh and foreign. One of the younger men evinced his hope that someone would take note of the chains around their ankles and object, and Nathaniel laughed at him; there had been chains on his ankles for ten years, and nobody in Eden had ever objected.
There was nowhere to go but down, so Nathaniel kept digging. He dug so deeply and so desperately that he reached the bottom of everything, and even then he didn’t stop. He kept digging until he fell through a crack in the underside of the world, straight down into Hell itself.
Nathaniel would never say what it was like down there, not even to his children or grandchildren. All he would say is that the Bible only got it half right: there were demons aplenty, but no fire at all.
The mist rose high that night, licking white up the bank, and the next morning the oldest Gravely was found bloated and blue in the Mud River. The men he owned, or thought he owned, were long gone.
Only Nathaniel Boone was still in Eden. He wasn’t sure why; there was a missing place in his memory, as if he’d fallen asleep and dreamed dark and lovely dreams for days. When he woke he was climbing back toward the light, his hands slick on limestone and pale roots. He emerged from a crack in the earth and found himself in the low, wet woodlands to the north of town. He could have run then, but he didn’t want to, or didn’t want to have to, or maybe he just didn’t want to leave Eden to thrive behind him, without any comeuppance at all.
So he took work on the riverboat that brought dry goods from Elizabethtown. And spent his days courting a freedwoman from Hardin County. She wanted to settle up north, and Nathaniel promised they would—but they lingered a long time after their wedding. They needed to save up a little more, he said. Or wait for the winter, or spring, or for her cousin’s second baby to be born. Every night when they climbed into bed his wife dreamed of brick row houses and electric streetcars, and Nathaniel dreamed of the Gravelys.
He dreamed them falling down stairs and choking on chicken bones, drowning, dissipating, taking ill and never rising. He dreamed of himself, sometimes, riding the steam train out of Eden with his wife beside him, leaving behind nothing but gravestones.
But the Gravelys kept on living, the way men of their station always seemed to. Nathaniel was considering taking matters into his own hands, despite certain promises to his wife, when he saw a different possibility standing at the very edge of the Mud River: a white girl in a gray dress, the hem black with water.
He recognized her, of course. Miss Eleanor had turned up at the Gravelys’ a little while back, big-eyed and thin, like a sickly songbird, and they’d taken her in. People said they did it out of the kindness of their hearts, but Nathaniel, who knew the Gravelys didn’t have hearts, was less sure.
Now here she stood, looking down at the river like it was her long-lost lover. She took a single step forward into the water, and Nathaniel said, softly, Wait.
She looked up at him with a distant, harassed expression, as if he’d interrupted her hanging laundry on the line. He asked her what she was doing, and she answered that it was her wedding day. She said it as if that were a perfectly sufficient explanation, and Nathaniel supposed that it was; hadn’t he himself dug a hole to Hell to escape the Gravelys?
He tied his flatboat to a leaning birch and waded ashore. He pulled Miss Eleanor back from the water and drew the stones gently from her pockets, not because he pitied her—in his calculation, every bite of food and stitch of clothing the Gravelys gave her had been bought with his blood—but because he thought the two of them might briefly share a common purpose.
He asked Miss Eleanor if he could tell her a story, and if she still wanted to walk into the river after he told it, he swore he would not stop her. She agreed, so Nathaniel told Miss Eleanor a story about the hole in the world, and the place beneath it, and the things that lived there. He’d told this story once before, to the freedwoman he would one day marry, and she said if he loved her he would never go back to that place. But Miss Eleanor didn’t love anybody, and nobody loved her.
She listened very carefully while Nathaniel spoke. When he was done, she did not walk back into the river.
Thus Nathaniel was not surprised to hear of John Gravely’s death or the footprints they found in the mines. He was not surprised when the widow was found laughing among the sycamores on the north end of town, and he was not surprised that she built her great, mad house there.
He was only surprised once, many years later, when he came home to find a note slipped under his door, which advised him to leave Eden as quick as he could “in memory of an old kindness.” It was signed with a small bird drawn in harsh black ink. A grackle, maybe. Or a starling.
Nathaniel left. When his wife asked him why, he told her there was no longer any reason to stay. Eden’s comeuppance had finally arrived.
TEN
The town seems different the next morning. All the details are the same— the crooked awning of the pawnshop, the sour smell of the river, the faces staring out at me from behind cracked windshields, lips pursed—but now it all strikes me as purposeful, perhaps deserved, like the punishment for some grand sin. I know that part of the story must be made up, because there’s no such thing as curses or cracks in the world, but maybe that’s all a good ghost story is: a way of handing out consequences to the people who never got them in real life.
I walk to work with the collar of Arthur’s coat turned up, thinking about Bev’s story and Miss Calliope’s truth, trying to decide if they’re the same thing. It’s like one of those optical illusions that’s either a cup of wine or two faces about to kiss, depending which way you turn it.
The Gravelys are either victims or villains; Eleanor Starling is either a wicked woman or a desperate girl. Eden is either cursed, or merely getting its comeuppance.
It’s none of my business, of course, but it’s better than thinking about Jasper eating a hearty home-cooked meal at Logan’s house, or Charlotte moving away. And it’s a hell of a lot better than wondering why a rich old man kept my mother’s cell number tucked in his Bible.
I’m more than halfway to Starling House when an engine hums somewhere behind me. I step well over the white line to let it pass.
Except it doesn’t. It slows down, purring along beside me. For a wild second I think the Department for Community Based Services has really upped its game and they’re coming to haul me in front of a judge for falsifying my birth certificate, among several other petty crimes, but nobody who works for the state of Kentucky has ever driven a car like this: sleek and low, with windows like polished black mirrors. My own face shines back at me, a pale oval caught in a scorched tangle of hair.
The back window scrolls down. My reflection is replaced by Elizabeth Baine’s smiling face.
“Good morning, Opal. Let me give you a lift.”
I have the sinking sense that this isn’t the kind of offer you can refuse, but I try anyway. “No thanks.”
Baine’s smile widens. “I insist.” She’s already opening the car door. “You and I have a lot more to talk about.”
“Do we?”
She slides across the black leather seat and gestures to the empty space beside her. I waver, caught between the satisfying choice (flip her off, keep walking) and the smart choice (play stupid, don’t piss off the rich lady with friends in high places).
I get in the car. There are two men up front, both of whom are wearing dark suit coats, neither of whom looks back at me. I have the absurd sense that I’ve fallen out of Eden and into a B-rated spy movie, that someone is about to shout “Get her!” and drop a black bag over my head.
Baine merely leans across me to pull the door closed. “We’re all set, Hal.” The driver nods once and pulls back onto the road. An apple-shaped air freshener swings jauntily from the rearview mirror.
“So.” Baine pivots in her seat. “Opal. I wasn’t completely candid with you yesterday. I told you that my consulting firm was working for Mr. Gravely, which we are, but we have other clients who are very invested in our work here. The mineral rights to the Starling property are just one of several interests we’re pursuing.”
Each individual word seems sensible and reasonable, but they refuse to add up into sentences in my head. “Okay,” I say.
“Our team identified some fascinating—maybe anomalous—data in this area, and we were hoping to interview some locals about it.”
It’s too hot in the car. I feel sweaty and stupid, bundled like a child in this ridiculous coat. The chemical taste of the air freshener fills my mouth. “Like what kind of … anomalous data?”
Baine twists her watch around her wrist. “Some of that is proprietary, of course, but some of it you could see on the census. The average life expectancy, the rates of heart disease, most kinds of cancer, addiction, asthma … fatal car accidents.” Her eyes flick mildly up to mine as she says the last one. I hold my face still and think, calmly: What the fuck. “All those statistics are two or three times the national average, in Eden.”
I lift one shoulder in the so-it-goes shrug everyone in this town learns before they start kindergarten. “Bad luck, I guess.”
Baine tilts her head back and forth. “Bad luck doesn’t usually have an epicenter. Here, let me show you.” She bends to rifle through a plastic case at her feet and I look out the window. Hal is a slow-ass driver; we’re still at least a mile from the front gates, and the fake-apple syrup of the air freshener is sliding down my throat, turning my stomach.
Baine slides a slick white tablet into my lap and scrolls to a satellite map in wrinkled greens and browns. I’ve never seen Eden from this angle, but I recognize the lush green of the Starling land, separated from Gravely land only by the muddy ribbon of the river. The power plant looks like a crop sign this way, a series of circles and scars. The ash pond is an ink stain on the blank page of Big Jack’s grave. Bev says they buried him with all his guts and fluids still inside, which is why nothing will grow right on that land no matter how much fertilizer and fescue they spray at it.
There are little red dots spattering the image, labeled with long strings of letters and numbers. The dots are clustered more densely toward the north end of town, gathered like ants around an empty square of land. The picture must have been taken in winter, because I can see the pale bark of the big sycamore that stands in front of Starling House.
Baine reaches over to swipe sideways on the screen. There’s a picture of a newspaper headline from the 2000s: FOUR DEAD IN PLANT EXPLOSION; INSPECTORS CITE MANUFACTURING DEFECT.
She swipes again. A screenshot from the Bowling Green Daily News describing a grisly incident at the strip mine, where the boom fell on four workers. She swipes again, and again, headlines blurring together into a litany of misfortune: CHURCH FIRE STILL UNDER INVESTIGATION; HISTORIC FLOOD LEAVES DEVASTATION; DEATH TOLL RISES AT GRAVELY SANATORIUM.14 Wrecks and suicides, overdoses and cancer clusters, missing children and collapsed sinkholes and freak accidents. Some of them look brand-new, grabbed from online papers, and some of them are so old the paper is the color of weak coffee.
The screen swells and distorts in my vision. I close my eyes, suddenly carsick, and when I look back at the tablet there’s a picture of the Mud River in winter. There are men in uniforms standing on the shore, their shoulders squared as if against a strong wind, although I know the air was perfectly still that morning. In the water behind them, just visible above the blur of the current, is the cherry-red bumper of a ’94 Corvette.
She told me once I was conceived in the backseat of that car. God knows where it came from, or what she traded for it.
The headline seems to rise toward me, hovering above the screen in all caps: CONSTABLE MAYHEW SAYS MOTHER OF TWO DROVE INTO RIVER. Baine taps the first line of the article with the smooth arch of her fingernail. “Jewell,” she says softly. “What a pretty name.”
And then I’m drowning.
I’m fifteen and cold water is pouring through the windshield. The glove box is open, spewing pill bottles and plastic utensils. Mom is beside me, her limbs drifting gently, her hair tangling with the tacky dream catcher she pinned to the car roof. I’m reaching for her hand and her fingers are slick and limp as minnows and I might be screaming—Mom, come on, Mom—but the words can’t make it past the river in my mouth. And then everything goes very quiet and very dark.
I don’t remember letting go of her hand, but I must have done it. I must have crossed her name off the list in my head and swum for the surface, abandoning her to the river bottom, because the next thing I remember is vomiting on the shore. Clay beneath my fingernails, grit in my teeth, ice in my chest. The shine of the power plant through the bare branches, a cold sun that refused to rise.
I drifted away from myself, dreaming, and in the dream I was not cold at all. I was not the bad-luck daughter of a bad-luck mother, an accident washed up on the shore of a poison river. In the dream I was held tight, safe and warm inside a pair of arms that didn’t exist.
Later, the ER nurse told me that’s how you feel right before you freeze to death.
They discharged me after forty-eight hours, but for weeks afterward I could feel this coldness in the middle of me, like something in my chest had never quite thawed. I even went back to the hospital and made them x-ray my lungs, but they said everything looked good. I guess that’s just how it feels to find out what kind of person you are; to know, when it comes right down to the mean wire between living and dying, what you’ll do.
“Opal?” Baine says my name gently, as if she’s concerned about me, as if she didn’t engineer this entire sick experience. I want to dig my fingernails into her cheeks. I want to open the car door and leap out rather than linger another second in the candy-apple stink of this car.
I keep my hands very still in my lap. I might be sick and dizzy and suffering from classic PTSD, but I still know better than to bleed in front of someone like Elizabeth Baine. “Yeah. Jewell.” My voice sounds ordinary, almost careless. “I’m named after her, sort of. She picked my name off a list of birthstones, so we’re both jewels. Get it?”
Baine sits back a little, studying my face. It’s hard to focus on her features, so I close my eyes.
