The chanting pressed into her back.
“They’re afraid now,” she said. “They don’t want to lose their jobs. But if the news crews come in, they’re gonna find out what everyone’s too scared to say.”
The plant should have installed an overfill pipe. Cluck knew it. This man must have known it. And he must have known of a dozen other little mistakes. A disregarded pressure gauge. A broken thermometer. Pipes that hadn’t been cleaned. Slip blind procedures skipped. A shift worker so bleary from overtime he could barely read the numbers.
These things would come out. The question was how fast, and if Lace would help.
The man turned around. “Nobody knows who you are.”
“You’re right,” she said. “And this isn’t a story. It’s two lines in anything but the local paper. But it could be bigger. It will get bigger. All that noise is coming. You know that. So my question is, do you want me to be part of it?” She turned her face again to show her cheek.
“I don’t have time for this.” The man turned his back, shaking her off through that chain-link fence.
All Lace had left was a thing that was not hers to tell. What Lora Paloma had figured out with Alain Corbeau’s help. Not because Tía Lora wanted justice for her dead husband, but because she did not want the sinking of a grove of trees to destroy the family she now called hers.
Alain Corbeau was the one man who could have told Tía Lora if she was right, and who might have wanted to see the fighting end as much as she did. He was the one Corbeau who, years ago, did not travel with his family’s show.
The mineral extraction work being done under the lake. Alain Corbeau had found the records that proved the lake swallowing the trees was an act neither of God nor of either family, but the fallout from the crumbling of a salt dome beneath the lake.
The plant’s owners had sunken a well into that salt dome. Shoddy work, and orders for more salt faster, made the wall of the well cave. Rock slipped down into the empty space, trapped air bubbled toward the surface, and the lake opened up. A sinkhole took out all those trees before the water settled. The river’s sudden roughness, the thing Lace’s family blamed on the Corbeaus’ magia negra, had been from the force and debris off the collapsed lake bed.
All of this an act of no one but the chemical plant’s owners, who’d covered it all up so well that the whole town thought it was a natural disaster, a tragedy no different than a lightning-strike fire.
But before Alain Corbeau could steal or copy the records that would prove what he and Lora knew, the plant managers had found out and fired him. Then he had nothing to show he was more than a madman with his theories.
Tía Lora didn’t have those records. Neither did Lace.
All she had was lying.
“Maybe you wanna talk about the sinkhole,” Lace said through the fence.
The shift in the man’s walk gave him away. He stopped in the middle of his stride, and turned around. His eyes got tight.
“You don’t know anything,” he said.
“And you don’t know how much of a pain in your ass I can be,” she said. “You really want to find out?”
The man’s face relaxed, but there was no more of that smirk, that ridicule. The man may not have believed her threat had any more weight than a string of paper dolls. But he knew the way to make it not matter. It was a small thing to let Luc Corbeau go.
He could make her go away, and he knew it.
Lace pushed herself off the fence. “Get him out.”
De lo perdido, lo que aparezca.
From what is lost, what comes back.
Her toothbrush cleared out the bitter taste of starflower leaves. But her stomach didn’t settle.
She thought of the Corbeaus in that rented Craftsman house. They carried with them so many years of lying Lace waited for the clapboards to split.
She put on the white wings Cluck had made her, tied the ribbons under her breasts, and waited in the blue and white trailer.
When Cluck opened the door, he didn’t look surprised to see her. He didn’t look happy either.
“What the hell did you do?” he asked.
She got up from the built-in bed.
He threw the trailer door shut. “You went to the plant?”
She set her hands on his upper arms, checking that he was all there. The red shirt and brown corduroys she’d never seen him in before that morning. His hair that looked neat at the funeral but uncombed now. The three fingers Dax had broken.
“These aren’t the kind of people you want to deal with.” He put his hands on the side of her face, the heat of his palm stinging her burn.
She didn’t stop him.
He gripped the back of her neck. “You know that, right?” He didn’t raise his voice. Today had hollowed him out too much. He didn’t have the sound left to yell.
“I don’t care.” She dug her hands into his back. “I wanted you out.”
He kissed her, hard. She kissed him back, almost biting his lip.
His hands found the feathers on her back. “What are you doing in these?”
She made him stand in front of the mirror, eyes closed, like he’d done to her. She tied to his body the things she’d made. Those hundreds of black and red feathers threaded to the empty wing frame, filling in the wire shapes until they were thick as crow’s plumage.
She fastened the red ties to his shoulders and across his chest.
The feeling of the ribbon against his shirt made him open his eyes.
She watched his face in the mirror, his eyes half-closing again, his mouth a little open. He took in the spread of black feathers. Red streaks wove through, like the petals of French marigolds on dark water.
She stood behind him, her fingers tracing the wingspan. “I borrowed the frame,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
He met her eyes in the mirror.
“I just tried to copy what you did on mine.” She moved between him and the mirror. “It’s nowhere near as good as your work, and they’ll probably fall apart in about two days. But I had the feathers.”
He held her against the mirror, the hollow shafts of the white peacock feathers pressing into her back. His breath fell hot on her mouth. “Why?”
The night she stole the thread and ribbon and the wire frame, it was to get him back. But now she’d tied them to him so Tía Lora would know him, so she would not have to ask if this was the boy.
Lace hadn’t told Tía Lora she would do this, but her great-aunt would know. The boy in the black wings, brushed red, was the one Lora Paloma needed to tell the things she’d told Lace. Lace was afraid if her great-aunt had to ask, if she heard herself say the question—Is this him? Is this the boy?—she’d shrivel back into herself and never speak.
Lace held her hand to Cluck’s chest, so neither of them would close the space between their lips again. “There’s someone you need to see.”
She led him across the woods, both of them still wearing their wings, a shared sign to anyone who wanted to look that they would not let this go on. All these lies would not bleed into two more decades.
The motel hallway was empty. Tía Lora waited behind an unlocked door, fidgeting with a handful of thread and glass beads.
A flicker of recognition passed between her and Cluck.
Lace shut the door. Cluck and Tía Lora stood in the middle of the room, him looking a little down, her a little up.
Tía Lora lifted a hand to his cheek, as though she could know him by the grain of his skin.
His wings made him so much bigger than Lace’s great-aunt. He loomed over her like an archangel. He must have felt it too. He untied the wings from his body, took them off, and laid them on the bed.
Lace knew she should leave them alone. But if she did not stay, did not needle her great-aunt into repeating the things she’d told her this morning, the truth would sink under the river silt, and never be found.