Though Liv’s family rarely had pretty things to provide. But when a little extra money was squirreled away, Liv’s stepfather often took it prematurely and arrived with a doll for Arlene, or a new dress. Liv’s mother would scold him, but she too delighted in her youngest’s joy at the gifts. And though Liv might have resented her baby sister’s special treatment, in truth, she too grew warm in the light of her sister’s smile.
“Liv, I need you to go to town for bread,” her mother said, not looking up from Arlene’s head.
“I want to go,” Arlene chirped, trying to pull away from her mother’s hands.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Polly whispered, catching her daughter’s shoulders and pulling her back. “You’re due for a bath tonight. The water’s already warming on the stove.”
Arlene growled and frowned, but leaned back into her mother.
Liv knew Arlene loved her baths. Sitting in the basin as their mother poured pitchers of warm water over her hair. Afterward, she’d rub Arlene with the oil and lavender Liv had made. Arlene would be shiny and sweet-smelling, and everyone would be happy.
Liv stepped into the bakery but didn’t make herself known. She heard the baker’s wife and her friend talking in the kitchen.
For a few moments, she pressed herself against the wall and inhaled the scents of yeasty bread and apples simmering in sugar and butter.
“That Adele Kaiser is a trollop,” the baker’s wife snapped.
“Candace!” the second woman reprimanded, though her voice was filled with malicious glee.
“What?” the woman asked. “I don’t care if you dress her in silks and paint her gold, it’s a cryin’ shame how she runs around with all those men. She thinks nobody knows because she lives in that big house in the woods. People know. I’d have half a mind to run her out‘a town if she didn’t have a boy to raise.”
Liv turned to the glass window and saw Stephen’s mother on the sidewalk outside the bread shop. She cast her head back and laughed at a man who’d stopped to talk with her. Liv studied the woman’s red lips against her pale face. Her silky dark hair was short, and the curled wisps blew in the afternoon breeze.
“I heard they just about expelled her son from that fancy private school last year. Something about killing the headmaster’s bird,” the second woman continued.
“I believe it. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And if ever there was a tree bound to produce rotten apples, it’s that one right there.”
Stephen’s mother gave the man a wave goodbye and climbed into her shiny black car.
Liv felt a little flare of anger at the woman’s comment about Stephen, but she swallowed it. Her family depended on the bread shop’s charity. She couldn’t afford to anger the owner’s wife.
Liv cleared her throat and stepped up to the little counter.
The second woman, small and thin with a pointed bird-like face, poked her head out.
A little shadow of distaste crossed her features before she slipped back, not bothering with a greeting.
“The Hart girl is here,” the woman said.
Candace let out a huff and lumbered into the kitchen. She was perpetually red-faced, with a thick chin that hung over her neck like a rounded melon. She narrowed her brown eyes at Liv and left her mouth set in a line of disapproval.
Apparently, the woman hated the rich and poor alike.
“My mom sent me for a loaf of bread,” Liv told her. “Please.”
The woman made a show of pulling a little card from her files beneath the counter. She laboriously flipped though. The mere flicking of her fingers seemed to wind her. After she found their name, she added a tick mark next to a long line of tick marks for all the loaves of bread she’d given to the family. The shop owners could tally up the cards at the end of the month and receive reimbursement from the town.
Liv left the bakery with her face burning.
Adele Kaiser’s black car was gone.
As Liv headed for home, she wondered about the women’s conversation. Stephen held no great love for his mother. Liv could plainly see that, but were her relationships with other men the cause, or something deeper?
As she hurried down the sidewalk, she didn’t see the group of girls on the corner. They drank from glass bottles of Coke. As Liv passed them, a familiar voice called out.
“Liv Hart!”
Liv looked up to find Veronica and her girlfriends watching her. They looked clean and pretty, hair curled and lips red. Veronica wore a red and white striped dress.
She extended her arm, and Liv gazed at the bottle of Coca-Cola she held out.
“Want one?” Veronica asked.
Liv clutched the warm bread to her chest, grossly aware of the pocket hanging loose from her worn shorts and her t-shirt stained from berries she’d picked that morning.
“It’s for you,” another girl beamed. Her name was Rosie, and she was short and slim with limp brown hair she tried to curl in the fashion of the day that ended up flat on the top and frizzy at the bottom. When she pulled her red lips back in a smile, she reminded Liv of a snarling raccoon.
“No thanks, I better not,” she murmured, taking a step away.
“Oh, come on,” Veronica begged. “We want to share.”
Liv paused and turned back. She didn’t want to take it, and yet she did want to. She wanted them to like her. She hated it, but the inclination sent her back a step and another, until she reached out and took the Coke.
They watched her, and she smiled.
“Thanks,” she told them, taking a sip.
Rosie spurted laughter, almost choking on a swallow of her own pop.
The other girls snickered, but Veronica’s smile had slipped away, replaced by a sneer.
“It’s a pity to waste the spit at the bottom of the bottle. We combined it for you. How does it taste?”
Liv hadn’t swallowed the sweet liquid. It sat in her mouth, and she wanted to spit it in Veronica’s face.
Instead, she turned and spat in the gutter.
She walked away from the girls, listening to their laughter at her back.
Chapter 23
Mack
Mack trudged through a torrential downpour. His boots stuck in the mud, and each step made an audible slurp as he pulled his foot free. A few times he had to jerk one so hard, he feared the boot would come clear off.
It wasn’t just rain either, but cold rain, icy rain that gnawed through your clothes in an instant and started working its way into your bones.
“Damn weather reporters, don’t know their ass from a hole in the wall,” he grumbled, pulling his ball cap further over his head. He’d checked the weather before he drove to the Stoneroot Forest that morning.
‘Nothing but sunny skies,’ the jovial weatherman had announced, donning a pair of sunglasses. ‘Can anyone say Indian summer?’
Mack had parked at his cabin, packed his bag with a compass, water, dried beef, and the hag stones.
He stopped every few feet, lifted the pouch, and fumbled the stones from their leather sac. His large fingers, numb with cold, struggled to grasp each stone without dropping it.
He placed the stone to his eye and turned three-hundred and sixty degrees, gazing through the tiny hole at the blurry forest. He repeated the process with all six stones, and then returned them to the satchel and the satchel to his bag. It was a painstaking process, and by his fifth stop, he could barely feel the stones in his stiff fingers.