The Deepest Roots Page 10

  But right now, Lux is so giddy that she’ll be of no help with the Jett interrogation. She might giggle at Jett if she sees him, and then he’ll be following her around for the rest of the day like a lost puppy. And I have to admit that I wouldn’t like that. At all.

  Lux’s gift doesn’t work on girls, so it certainly isn’t the reason Morgan follows her around all dreamy, smiling when Lux leans over to whisper something into her dark hair. I should mention that to Lux the next time she says she’s cursed. At least she’ll always know if what she has is real.

  “Hi,” Jett says when he enters the classroom. I’m looking right at him the moment he’s framed in the doorway, as if I was waiting expectantly for his arrival, and he clearly takes this as a sign of encouragement. He talks over the twelve or so other people in the room, and completely bypasses his buddy in the front row. A few people glance at Jett, wondering why he’s heading to the back of the classroom where Lux and I had long ago set up dominion.

  “Hey,” I reply with a shrug. I don’t know why I shrug. It’s not like he’s asked me a question, and yet an Evanston boy calling a Cottonwood Hollow girl out in front of the entire class is a question.

  “Plan on taking any more naps outside today?” Jett weaves his way between the desks and takes a seat on my left. Lux is on my right, and she barely manages to purse her full lips in time to look annoyed with his familiarity and keep her talent at bay. Morgan’s just darkened the doorway with her designer backpack, so Lux can’t manage much more than that now, and turns her attention completely away from me and Jett. I guess I’m on my own.

  “Not today,” I reply to Jett, pulling out one of my Dollar Tree yellow pencils to take notes. “Too much to do. No time for naps.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll still share your lunch with me,” Jett teases, his grin broad enough to pop that dimple in his cheek. He’s like sunshine, I realize. There’s nothing dark or hungry in him, only light and happiness and laughter. How strange that must be.

  “No peanut butter today,” I say, forging ahead to more serious matters. I’m doing this for the Mach, I tell myself. And for Lux. I can’t be weak now, even if Jett is incredibly attractive. And funny. Steeling myself, I plow on, “Hey, I wanted to ask you if you’d seen a diary from my bag yesterday. If maybe you picked it up.”

  “A diary?” Jett asks, one dark brow rising theatrically.

  “Yes. It’s missing from my backpack. And since you’re the only person I talked to yesterday other than Mercy at school, I thought you might know where it is.”

  “Know where it is like I took it?” Jett asks, leaning toward me a little so that I’m caught in that cloud of heat he radiates wherever he goes. His hands are huge, I realize, as he pulls a spiral notebook out of his backpack.

  “Yeah, like maybe you picked it up,” I agree, though some tiny voice in the back of my head is screaming that I’m going about this all wrong.

  “So you want to ask me if I took your diary without telling you.”

  “Well, if you stole it, I assume you wouldn’t tell me. That would make you a pretty crappy thief.”

  “Oh,” Jett says, and his warm, amiable face arranges itself into something resembling granite, the dimple disappearing. “I see. So I’m a crappy thief now.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I backtrack, hating myself. “Just asking if you saw the diary. If you might know where it is.”

  “I don’t know anything about your diary,” Jett says. “And I don’t think you know me very well if you think I would take something of yours without asking.”

  “I’m just saying it’s missing. And I thought maybe you might have seen it. Yesterday. At the baseball diamond.” I’m speaking in fragments now because apparently my brain has turned to mush.

  Jett takes a breath before he answers, his broad shoulders lifting and settling in his Evanston blazer. “I haven’t seen your diary, Rome.” He stacks his books and pencils together and moves like he’s going to get up.

  “It’s not my diary,” I begin lamely. “I just had it . . .”

  But it’s too late. Jett picks up his things and moves to the front of the classroom to sit next to his teammate before Miss Strong enters. He glances back once, and it’s the look of someone who is disappointed. I look over at Lux, but she’s got her fingers intertwined with Morgan’s under Morgan’s desk, and in that moment neither one of them knows I exist.

  During my free period, Mercy and I searched the mezzanine in the library, and the diary wasn’t there, either. So the three of us spend our lunch break scouring the baseball stadium where I’d fallen asleep. I cringe when we don’t leave early enough to avoid Jett’s gym class filing out onto the field. I’m still ashamed of the way I treated him, and pretty sure that offer to take me to dinner has been rescinded now.

  I watch him as the three of us clamber down the metal steps of the stadium, and he studiously avoids my gaze the entire time, even when one of his buddies points me out and says something about “that peanut butter girl from yesterday.” I’d been waiting for him to reveal his true colors, and he did. He’s a nice guy. I’m the jerk. Sure, there are some stuck-up, snobby guys at Evanston, but he isn’t one of them.

  Near the entry to the stadium, while Mercy and Lux argue about what to do next, I watch Jett on the baseball field, wishing that I’d done things differently.

  “Let’s just give up on the whole diary thing,” Lux says. “We don’t need it to find the stupid dowry chest. We know it has to be on Remington land somewhere. Unless it’s literally buried in a hole in the ground somewhere, it’s probably in the house.”

  Mercy sighs but nods. “I guess we can go out there . . . if you really want to.” She looks at me, and I know she’s thinking of the last time we were there.

  “I’ve got a late shift at Red’s,” I tell them. “If we head out there right away, I’ll still have enough time to get to work.” I’m not looking forward to having Mom take me to and from the shop tonight. It’s just another interaction between her and Red that I would prefer to avoid.

  When we get off the bus after school, the three of us walk to Lux’s house first so that she can drop off her backpack.

  While she runs back to her room, Aaron sits in front of the television, still wearing his coveralls from his early shift at the meat-packing plant and sucking down a bottle of Budweiser while he watches baseball. So what Lux’s mom had said was true. If Aaron’s got the morning shift now, that’s nearly fifteen less hours a week. Tina’s not here, and I wonder if she’s picking up extra hours at the nursing home to help make up the difference.

  When he sees Mercy and me waiting, he snarls, as if he’s been waiting for someone to walk in the door so that he can lash out and expend some of his anger, “You’re the Fixer girl. Did Lux tell you somebody fucked up my pickup? Guess I should’ve had you look at it. When I hear from the mechanic about what exactly they did to it, there’s going to be hell to pay. You don’t fuck with a man’s truck like that.” Aaron’s never been exactly friendly, but there’s a raw edge to him now that makes me uneasy.

  Mercy edges closer to me.

  Aaron takes another swig of his beer. “You heard anything about it?”

  “No,” I lie without missing a beat. “Sure haven’t.”

  “How about you, chica?” he asks Mercy, his features locked in a grimace.

  Mercy tenses next to me, and it’s all I can do not to step in front of her. But I’m afraid he’ll think that makes her look guilty, and that won’t help any of us. The mechanic is going to confirm that someone put bleach in Aaron’s gas tank, and Aaron’s going to start wondering who had a motive. Like maybe the best friend of the stepdaughter he smacked around who knows exactly what to do to his truck to mess it up.

  Mercy answers with a grace that I’ll never have. That she shouldn’t have to have. “No, Mr. Willard,” she says. “Of course not.”

  “Well, when I find out who did it,” he spits, “I’m going to make them pay. Bet your pretty little
ass on it.” He takes another hard swig from the bottle.

  “Come on,” Lux says, returning from her bedroom. “Let’s go.”

  Mercy is overly bright when we leave the house, chatting away about whether or not she should volunteer to read to the elderly this summer, like she wants desperately to hide Aaron’s nastiness from Lux. So I guess we’re all keeping secrets now.

  We stop at Mercy’s house next, and Mrs. Montoya is in the kitchen when we get there. It’s a whole different world from Lux’s house. Mrs. Montoya is pulling a baking sheet of chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies from the oven, her face flushed. Her dark hair is pulled back with a clip, and she looks so genuinely pleased to see us I can’t even make a joke about her being like some 1950s housewife. Because Mrs. Montoya is happy. The kind of happy I felt when I was driving the Mach with the windows down, soaring over every hill and around every corner. I envy her.

  “Hello, Mrs. Montoya,” Lux and I greet her in unison. Mrs. Montoya has a bar counter at the edge of the kitchen, and Lux and I each slip onto a stool while Mercy and her mom move around each other like well-fitted cogs, each complementing the other and moving their task along. Mercy slides a few of the cookies off the cooling racks and onto a plate to make room for the fresh batch her mom has just pulled out.

  “I wanted to thank you,” I tell Mrs. Montoya while she loads up a few more cookies onto the plate Mercy is making for us. “For the dinner you sent over last night.” I’m able to tuck my tail between my legs and say thank you for the handout because it’s the right thing to do, and because I’m still irritated at myself for handling the conversation with Jett so poorly this morning.

  “Oh.” Mrs. Montoya waves her potholder at me. The potholder matches the kitchen. Actually, everything in this house matches. “That was nothing. Just some leftovers we had around. I hope Mercy helped you heat everything up?” She looks over at Mercy, knowing I’m inept in the kitchen.

  “She did,” I confirm. “It was delicious.”

  “Good,” Mrs. Montoya says, and she smiles at me in that way that somehow manages to be kind but not condescending. Very few people can do that, but the Montoyas are one of those families that can.

  “Is there anything around that maybe needs to be Fixed?” I ask.

  Mrs. Montoya’s face softens, and suddenly she resembles Mercy so much that it almost hurts to look at her. “Oh, sweetheart, not right now. But I’ll let you know if I need anything, okay?” Mercy’s little brother, Malakai, bursts in the front door after the bus drops him off from the elementary school, and Mrs. Montoya gets him a snack and leaves to help him start his homework.

  “Where’s Neveah?” I ask before shoving a cookie in my mouth.

  “She’s at a church group function. They’re doing charity work after school this week.”

  “In Evanston?” Lux asks.

  “Yeah,” Mercy replies, selecting her own cookie. “It was Mrs. Johnson’s turn to drive the girls, so she took Neveah and Adele after school. How did the chat with Jett go this morning?”

  “Not good,” I reply, pretending to be incredibly interested in the cookies. “He responded with a basic ‘screw you.’”

  “Classy guy,” Lux hisses. She’d been too enthralled with Morgan to notice our exchange, and now she’s offended on my behalf.

  “He didn’t actually say that. But it was clear I’d pissed him off and he moved back up to sit with his baseball bro.”

  “He even came to sit with you? You should definitely apologize,” Mercy says, wiping her lips with a napkin.

  “You guys were the ones who told me to ask him if he took it!” I exclaim, irritated. I shove another cookie into my mouth.

  “Well, you should have found a nice way to do it,” Mercy says. “My guess is you were too blunt, like you always are.”

  I glare at her while I chew and swallow the cookie. I don’t want Mrs. Montoya to catch me speaking with food in my mouth.

  “You are rude ninety percent of the time,” Lux agrees while I’m chewing. She borrows Mercy’s napkin to wipe the chocolate off her face.

  “You two,” I grumble after I swallow the cookie, “are really something. Next time, why don’t you ask someone if they stole something and see how they take it?”

  Mrs. Montoya returns, and Mercy gives her a line about needing to help Lux collect weeds for a natural science lab.

  “Are you staying in Cottonwood Hollow?” Mrs. Montoya asks.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lux answers, smiling sweetly. If Mrs. Montoya had been a man, she would have begun melting into a pliable, adoring slave.

  Mrs. Montoya offers me another cookie from the almost-empty plate. “Well, be careful. I ran into Mrs. Pelter today and she said her son fell and broke his ankle exploring the ruins because he was trying to find a snakeskin for his collection. So the town council has decided just to burn them on Sunday. They say those old trailers are too rusted up and rotting to salvage anything, and after the Pelter boy got hurt, well, they’re just too dangerous to have near town. Which reminds me,” she adds, holding up a finger, “I offered to make sandwiches for the volunteer firefighters. Let me know if you girls want to help. I could always use an extra hand.” She looks more at Lux than me, which makes sense. I’m not much help in the kitchen.

  “We won’t go near the ruins, Mom,” Mercy says. “It’s gross over there.” She flicks a glance over at me. “And I’m sure Rome and Lux would love to help out.”

  Mrs. Montoya beams at Mercy while Lux and I try to rein in our dismay. “Smart girls. I never have to worry about you.” She tugs on Lux’s long braid. “Good luck. Let me know if you need anything. I think there are some garden shears and gloves in the garage if you want them.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Montoya,” Lux says. “You’re the best.”

  “Armando is going to grill burgers. You two are welcome to join us for dinner.” Mrs. Montoya gives me a pointed look, as if she knows that I’m likely to skip dinner if she doesn’t offer.

  “I’ve got a shift at the shop tonight, Mrs. Montoya, otherwise I would,” I tell her. My heart is somewhere in my throat over Mrs. Montoya and her cookies and dinner invitations. It’s one thing to say that you wish someone had a softer life. It’s another to do something about it.

  Outside, Lux breathes in the afternoon air like she’s been starved for oxygen. “Your mom is so . . .” She searches for the right word.

  “Perfect,” I finish for Lux. It’s not hard to be jealous of Mercy’s life. Everything seems so smooth, so perfect. I know Mercy feels the weight of their expectations, the strength of their rules, but all I feel in that house is love.

  Lux’s eyes lock on mine, and I know she is thinking what I am. “Yeah,” she says. “She’s great.”

  Mercy’s dark hair falls to cover her face when she looks down at her little black ballet flats. “You’ve known her forever. I don’t know why you two act so weird sometimes.”

  “It’s Lux,” I reply, needing to feel some lightness in my bones. “She’s been sniffing glue again.”

  Lux rolls her eyes. “I’m going to glue your mouth shut,” she replies. “Now let’s go out to the homestead. We know Emmeline died there, right? It’s not like she hiked across Cottonwood Hollow with this chest to bury it somewhere while she was dying.”

  “Unless she had her neighbor hide it somewhere,” Mercy murmurs. “Maisie. She was the woman who lived there afterward until she was, like, a hundred years old. She was the one who convinced the Cottonwood Historical Society to try to turn it into a museum. Preserve everything just like it was. I need to find the book the society put together. It might have more in it about who she was.”

  “Which means that it’s probably not there,” I counter. “Wouldn’t someone have found it already?”

  “There’s all kinds of junk upstairs,” Lux says. “I doubt they went through everything.”

  I nod. “If nothing else, maybe we’ll pick up other clues,” I say. “It can’t hurt to look, right?”

 
“I just don’t like that place,” Mercy says with a shiver.

  “It won’t be so bad this time,” I say, looking over at Lux. “This time we’re all going together.”

  Lux’s face shutters, like she’s trying not to think about the last time we were there.

  Ten

  KANSAS TEMPERATURES HAVE WARMED JUST enough to draw a trickle of sweat between my shoulder blades. It soaks into the white button-down shirt I’m wearing as we stomp through the pasture toward Emmeline Remington’s homestead. “We should’ve changed,” Lux grumbles as she pulls a foxtail out of a pleat in her skirt.

  “I would have,” Mercy mutters as she picks a burr off one of her knee socks, “but you acted like your ass was on fire.”

  “Stop whining and get moving,” I tell them. “I’ve only got another hour before I have to go to work.” I wonder if anyone’s made an offer on the Mach yet, or if Garrett’s just hot-rodding it around town, enjoying the way people do a double take when they realize it’s him driving it and not me.

  We’re almost to the stand of cottonwoods by the creek, and the Remington homestead is just on the other side. “Has anybody been out here this far since the tornado?” Mercy asks. “Can we still get across the creek?”

  “Yeah, like I check it out on a daily basis,” Lux retorts. “We’ll find out when we get there.”

  We hear the creek before we see it as we pick our way between the massive cottonwoods. The trees have gorged themselves on water from the creek, their roots digging deep for over a hundred years. A wind stirs the leaves and lifts the ruddy curls off the back of my neck.

  “It’s still here,” Lux says, pointing. The massive cottonwood fell sometime when we were little kids, in a storm a lot like the one we had on Sunday. Bone-white roots stick up into the sky and fan out where they were ripped from the ground. The trunk spans the ravine about fifteen feet above the swollen creek, making it a bridge for the brave only. It’s a fall I wouldn’t want to take. I look over the edge of the ravine down to the rushing water, which is running high from the storm. Bits of debris float on islands of frothy white stuck around roots growing out of the ravine walls.