If I was going to find my way back to Gatlin, I wasn’t going to walk there. Not on any kind of Route 9. That was pretty clear.
What had my mom said? You imagine where you want to go, and then you just go. Was that really all that was standing between Lena and me? My imagination?
I closed my eyes.
L—
“Whatcha doin’ there, boy?” Miss Winifred looked up from sweeping her porch a few houses away. She was in the pink-flowered housecoat she wore most days back when she was alive. When we were alive.
I stared. “Nothing. Ma’am.”
Her headstone was behind her, a magnolia tree etched above her name and underneath the word Sacred. There were a lot of those around here, magnolias. I guess the magnolia carvings were the red doors of the Otherworld. You were nobody without one.
Miss Winifred noticed me staring and stopped sweeping for a second. She sniffed. “Well, get on with it, then.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I could feel my face turning red. I knew I wouldn’t be able to imagine myself anywhere else with those sharp old eyes on me.
Turns out, even in the streets of the Otherworld, Gatlin was no place for the imagination.
“And stay off my lawn, Ethan. You’ll trample my begonias,” she added. That was all. As if I had wandered onto her property back home.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Miss Winifred nodded and went back to sweeping her porch like it was just another sunny day on Old Oak Road, where her house was sitting right now back in town.
But I couldn’t let Miss Winifred stop me.
I tried the old concrete bench at the end of our row of plots. I tried the shadowy place behind the hedges along the
edge of Perpetual Peace. I even tried sitting with my back up against the railing of our own plot for a while.
I was no closer to imagining my way to Gatlin than I was to imagining myself back into the grave.
Every time I closed my eyes, I got this spirit-killing, bone-crushing fear that I was dead in the ground. That I was gone and that I would never be anywhere again, except at the bottom of a water tower.
Not back home.
Not with Lena.
Finally, I gave up. There had to be another way.
If I wanted to get back to Gatlin, there was someone who just might know how.
Someone who made it her business to know everything about everyone and, for about the last hundred years, always had.
I knew where I needed to go.
I followed the path down to the oldest section of the graveyard. Some part of me was afraid I was going to see the blackened edges where the fire had burned through the roof and Aunt Prue’s bedroom. But I didn’t need to worry. When I saw it, the house was exactly the way it looked when I was a kid. The porch swing was rattling and swaying gently in the breeze, a glass of lemonade sitting on the table beside it. Just how I remembered it.
The door was carved out of good Southern blue granite; Amma had spent hours choosing it herself. “A woman as right as your aunt deserves the right marker,” Amma had said. “And anyhow, if she isn’t happy, I’ll never hear the end a it.” Both were probably true. At the top of the gravestone, a delicate angel with outstretched hands was holding a compass. I was willing to bet there wasn’t another angel in all of Perpetual Peace, or maybe any cemetery in the South, that was holding a compass. Carved angels in the Gatlin graveyard held on to every kind of flower, and some even held on to the gravestones like they were life vests. None held a compass—never a compass. But for a woman who had spent her life secretly mapping the Caster Tunnels, it was right.
Under the angel was an inscription:
PRUDENCE JANE STATHAM THE BELLE OF THE BALL
Aunt Prue had picked out the inscription herself. Her note said she wanted another “e” on Ball—making it Balle, which wasn’t even a word. According to Aunt Prue, it sounded more French that way. But my dad made the point that Aunt Prue, being a patriot, shouldn’t have minded having her last words written out in plain old Southern American English. I wasn’t so sure, but I also wasn’t about to enter into that particular conversation. It was just one part of the extensive instructions she’d left for her own funeral, along with a guest list that required a bouncer at the church.
Still, it made me smile just looking at it.