Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles 3)

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Amma gave Liv all the thighs, so I knew she was still feeling sorry for Liv after last summer. Luckily, the Sisters were asleep. I didn’t feel like answering questions about why there was a girl at my house who wasn’t Lena.

Liv stuffed her face faster than Link in his prime. By the time I was on my third piece, she was on her second plateful.

“This is the second-best piece of fried chicken I’ve ever tasted in my life.” Liv was actually licking her fingers.

“Second best?” I was the one who said it, but I saw Amma’s face when I did. Because by Gatlin standards, those two words alone were blasphemy. “What’s better?”

“The piece I’m about to have. And possibly the piece after that.” She slid her empty plate across the table.

I could see Amma smiling to herself as she added more Wesson oil to her five-gallon pot. “Wait till you taste a batch right outta the fryer. Can’t say you’ve tried that, have you, Olivia?”

“No, ma’am. But I also haven’t had any homemade food since the Seventeenth Moon.” There it was again. The familiar cloud settled back over the kitchen, and I pushed my plate away. The extra-crispy crust was choking me.

Amma dried the One-Eyed Menace with a dishrag. “Ethan Lawson Wate. You go get our friend some a my best preserves. Back a the panty. Top shelf.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Amma called after me before I made it to the hall. “And none a that pickled watermelon rind. I’m savin’ that for Wesley’s mamma. It turned out sour this year.”

The basement door was across from Amma’s room. The wooden stairs were scarred with black marks, like a burnt marshmallow, from the time me and Link put a hot pot on the stairs when we were trying to make Rice Krispies Treats on our own. We almost burned a hole in one step, and Amma gave me stinkeye for days. I made sure to step on the mark every time I went down those stairs.

Going down into a basement in Gatlin wasn’t all that different from going through a Caster Doorwell. Our basement wasn’t the Tunnels, but I’d always thought of it as some kind of mysterious underworld. Under beds and in basements—that’s where all the best secrets were kept in our town. The treasure might be stacks of old magazines in the furnace room, or a week’s worth of icebox cookies from Amma’s industrial freezer. Either way, you were going back up with an armload or a stomach full of something.

At the bottom of the stairs was a doorway framed in two-by-fours. No door, just a string hanging on the other side of the doorframe. I yanked the string as I had a thousand times before, and there was Amma’s prized collection. Every house around here had a pantry, and this was one of the finest pantries in three counties. Amma’s mason jars held everything from pickled watermelon rinds and the skinniest green beans to the roundest onions and the most perfectly green tomatoes. Not to mention the pie fillings and preserves—peach, plum, rhubarb, apple, cherry. The rows stretched back so far your teeth started to ache just from looking at them.

I ran my hand along the top shelf, where Amma kept all her prizewinners, the secret recipes and jars she saved for company. Everything in here was rationed, as if we were in the army and these jars were filled with penicillin or ammunition—or maybe land mines, because that’s how carefully you had to hold them.

“It’s quite a sight.” Liv was standing in the doorway behind me.

“I’m surprised Amma let you down here. This is her secret stash.”

She picked up a jar, holding it in front of her. “It’s so shiny.”

“You want your jelly to sparkle and your fruit not to float. You want your pickles cut to the same size, your carrots nice and round, your pack even.”

“My what?”

“How it goes in the jar, see?”

“Of course.” Liv smiled. “How would Amma feel if she knew you were sharing the secrets of her kitchen?”

If anyone knew them, it was me. I’d been by Amma’s side in the kitchen longer than I could remember, burning my hands on everything I wasn’t supposed to touch, sneaking rocks and twigs and all kinds of things into unsuspecting pans of preserves. “You want the liquid to cover the top of whatever’s inside.”

“Are bubbles good or bad?”

I laughed. “You’ll never see a bubble in one of Amma’s jars.”

She pointed to the bottom shelf. There was a jar so full of bubbles you’d think the bubbles themselves were what Amma was trying to bottle, instead of the cherries. I knelt down in front of the shelf and pulled it out. It was an old mason jar covered in cobwebs. I had never noticed it before.

“That can’t be Amma’s.” I rotated the jar in my hand. FROM THE KITCHEN OF PRUDENCE STATHAM. I shook my head. “It’s my Aunt Prue’s. She must have been crazier than I thought.” Nobody ever gave Amma anything that came out of another kitchen. Not if they knew what was good for them.

As I slid the jar back in place, I noticed a dirty loop of rope hanging back in the shadow of the bottom shelf.

“Hold on. What’s that?” I pulled on the rope, and the shelves made a groaning sound, like they were about to fall over. I felt around with my hand until I found the place where the rope met the wall. I pulled again, and the wood began to give way. “There’s something back here.”

“Ethan, be careful.”