The Gilly Salt Sisters Read online

  After the service, after the last wife in Prospect had finally greeted them with cool eyes and a cooler hand, after Father Flynn had blessed them and offered his own condolences, Jo replayed the encounter in her head as they traveled the last bit of the sandy lane toward the farmhouse, still unsettled by the fury in Ida Turner’s eyes. The wealthy Turners couldn’t abide the marsh-bound Gillys—everyone knew that—but Jo still felt as if she were missing something, some small detail that niggled at her like a vague cloud of gnats. She pictured Ida’s jewels, ferocious as armor, and the tiny smear of lipstick that had feathered over one corner of her mouth.

  It should have been you in that ditch. It was a terrible thing to say to a child, but odd, too, Jo thought, for if Ida had meant to threaten Mama, why had she done it staring straight at Jo? She scuffed her feet in the sandy dirt, comforted by the stagnant air and the familiar odors swarming around her. Maybe Ida had been a little right. Jo was alive, and her brother was not. It certainly could have been her caught in the weir, and maybe it should have been. Jo just couldn’t tell anymore. When it came down to her family and Salt Creek Farm, even she had trouble recognizing where things began and ended, and over the years, much to her frustration, that line wouldn’t grow any clearer.

  Chapter Two

  The first time Dee Pitman ever looked upon the mangled face of Joanna Gilly, she thought for sure the devil had sprung to life and come to snatch her soul. She’d been warned about Jo’s appearance, of course—how she was burned all up and down the right side of her body—but no one had cautioned Dee that Jo’s spirit was still smoldering hot under those wounds. She was the kind of person Dee wanted to trust but didn’t dare, in case Jo burst back into flames and took Dee up with her in smoke.

  It was Dee’s first week in the Cape village of Prospect, and her father had just bought himself a diner, even though he wasn’t a restaurateur. The pair of them weren’t really ocean people either, and Dee was still trying to get over the rush of nausea she got every time she looked out at all the water swirling on the horizon. She’d never seen the ocean in person before and wished it would just keep still, but wishing never made anything so, something Dee knew all the way down to the little pockets of marrow in her bones.

  Between the two of them, only her father, Cutt Pitman, had ever spent any time on the sea. Dee’s natural habitat was Vermont, but her father had been a cook in the navy during the Korean War, and then for a little while after before returning home and becoming a father unexpectedly late in life. To hear him tell it, a person would have thought Cutt was Sinbad the Sailor or something, but in reality he never saw much of the ocean. He’d spent most of his time in the stinking belly of a warship, getting mashed from side to side with boxes of powdered eggs, sacks of half-green potatoes, and tins of unidentifiable meats. When the navy finally let him go and Cutt found himself back on a mountain in Vermont, it was like he’d never left, he said, and that just didn’t sit right with him, but what was he going to do about it with a wife and a new baby to look after? He took a job in the local hospital cafeteria, got his land legs back, and that was all that.

  But then Dee’s mother got cancer and died when Dee was seventeen. Losing her seemed to make Dee’s father restless again. He’d go on drinking binges, and at the hard end of them he’d ramble on about freedom and the sea, weeping into his nicked hands. He didn’t exactly plan to move them to Prospect, Dee knew. He’d just unrolled a map one day, jabbed a pencil point down somewhere on the Cape, and then told her to read the name of the town out loud to him.

  “Prospect,” she said. It sounded strict and biblical to her ears, not a place she wanted to rush straight off to. Cutt put down his bottle, staring at it like he’d never seen it before, then looked around the living room with the same expression.

  “Well, then, I guess Prospect it is,” he said. “Eastward ho.” Like he thought he was being funny or something, when the truth of the matter, Dee knew, was that their hearts were about as heavy as two balls of tar. There wasn’t a single laugh to be had between them.

  As they drove up the Cape, it quickly became apparent that they were arriving in a summer region at the butt end of the season, which made Dee feel even lonelier. The closer they got to Prospect, the more crowded she watched the other side of the road grow with station wagons and little sports cars, all of them full of families and couples heading back to the mainland and their real lives. Dee stared out the car window and wished she were going with them, but instead she was trapped with her father in their sweatbox of a sedan, entering into a low landscape of scraggly bushes, ugly grasses, and, of course, the ocean. Right off she could just tell it wasn’t for her. The creepy way it swirled reminded her of a snake twisting. She couldn’t say if it was coming at her, fangs ready, or slithering away, having failed to bite.

  It was so muggy she fell asleep, her head pressed against the car window’s glass, and when she woke up, a string of drool was hanging from the corner of her mouth down to her chin. She sat up and realized they’d stopped and that she was alone, so she wiped her face and took a hard look around. As far as she could tell, they’d gotten not just to the end of the road but to the end of life as she knew it. They were parked in front of the diner her dad had bought, on a street so oyster gray that Dee automatically squinted. There were no green mountains to make her dry eyes feel better, no farms with dumb happy cows, no granite ponds. Just a one-street town stuck on the lip of a bay, a bunch of blank-eyed buildings with their shingles all cracked, and so much damn water she didn’t even have to dip a toe in it to feel like she was drowning.

  Her father materialized in the diner’s empty doorway. “Are you coming?” he shouted over at her, seeing she was awake. “Bring the suitcases. Work’s waiting.” She looked around for any sign of life but didn’t see any, so for once it seemed reasonable to listen to her father and do his bidding.

  They were to live over the diner, as it turned out. Cutt hadn’t told her that part of the plan, and as she climbed the rickety staircase in the back of the building, Dee wondered that she never thought to ask. But grief had turned her indifferent to life’s big decisions, even while it made the tiniest choices impossible. Dee never knew what to eat in the morning, how to fix her hair, or what to say to her father. As a result she ate everything, gained weight, left her hair in tangles, and went days without letting two sentences fly out of her throat.

  At the top of the stairs, she found a series of rooms so dingy she wondered what they’d been used for. Storage, maybe. They had the closed-up and dusty feel of an old person’s attic, but Dee thought she could make her room nice enough. It had a dormer window that looked out over the town’s main street, and the sloping ceiling made it feel cozy. She slid the window open, moved the sagging iron bed frame underneath it, and started putting her clothes away in the beat-up bureau leaning in the far corner. There wasn’t any closet, but that was okay. Dee barely had any clothes.

  After she put everything away, she went for a walk and discovered that Prospect had the bare essentials: a post office, a library, a bank, and a store. At the far end of Bank Street, there was a wide-open circle of patchy grass called Tappert’s Green. There were still a few families picnicking on it and some greedy gulls nosing around for leftovers, but in spite of the surface cheer the place still had a bad vibe to it. Dee couldn’t put it into words, but she noticed that a couple of town dogs crossed the street when they streaked past it. In the middle of the field, Dee made out a charred circular outline in the grass. She shivered. It seemed like the kind of place where witches would be burned if Prospect got the opportunity, and then she found out the town still had a living pair and that when it came to fire, they weren’t to be trusted at all.

  On their third day in town, Cutt hired a man named Timothy Weatherly to do some renovations in the diner. Dee found herself looking forward to having an eyeful of muscles around the place to ogle, but when Mr. Weatherly arrived, she saw he was a stringy old man in saggy overalls and a faded base
ball hat. He was about as appealing as a day-old serving of Cutt’s meat loaf. Cutt didn’t seem to mind him, though.

  “I want to theme the place,” he told Mr. Weatherly. “You know, make it nautical. Boat pictures on the walls. Brass lights. Nets, buoys, and ships’ wheels. The whole nine yards. Think you can handle that?”

  Mr. Weatherly just worked his mouth in a tight circle and Dee could tell he was thinking that those trimmings might thrill the tourists, but they wouldn’t do squat for the mood of the locals. “Aye,” he said. “Whatever you want.” And he went to fetch his tools from his truck.

  While they reupholstered booths and sanded down the counter together, Dee listened to her father grill Mr. Weatherly on everything from how cold it got in the winter to where to buy the freshest eggs.

  Mr. Weatherly answered his questions with patient monosyllables, and then, without warning, he suddenly stared straight at Cutt and asked, “You set yourself straight with Jo Gilly yet?”

  Dee observed as her father put down his sandpaper and wiped his forehead. “What?” he said, a little tremor of annoyance creeping into his voice.

  A funny look crossed Mr. Weatherly’s thin face. Not fear, exactly. More like a case of minor nerves, Dee thought. Like he was going to say something he hoped no one else would overhear, and since there was nothing she liked better than some juicy gossip, she leaned forward to catch his words.

  “There’s a marsh about a mile outside of town in that direction”—he jerked his thumb behind him—“out past the church of St. Agnes–by–the–Sea. Place belongs to the Gilly sisters, or it used to until the younger sister almost burned the older alive in the salt barn and left the place behind.”

  Dee inched closer to the conversation at the counter, forgetting her broom and pan in the far corner of the restaurant. Mr. Weatherly took off his cap and scratched the side of his head slow like, the way he did everything. “This was, oh, twelve years ago, I’d say, in ’68. Crazy time, right? Even out here in Prospect. Hippies rolling through in their pot-filled vans, the damn war in Vietnam making folks argue when they met one another on the streets. My brother lost his only boy over there, you know. Sad times.”

  Dee’s father, who was a veteran of those kinds of times, nodded, and she said a little prayer that they wouldn’t veer off into man talk about battles and presidents and all the things no-good politicians hadn’t done for the common citizen. She was in luck, it turned out, because Mr. Weatherly scratched his head one last time, jammed his cap on again, and got back on point. “Times were better then out there on Salt Creek Farm,” he said. “Tough, but better.”

  Unconsciously, Dee nodded and saw her father give her the snake eye. She hustled back to her broom but managed to sweep her way close to Mr. Weatherly again.

  “Joanna’s a solitary kind of soul,” he was saying. “Not like her sister, Claire. You’re not going to see Jo in town much, but when you do, make sure you treat her nice. She’s the one who lives in the marsh now, and our fortunes tend to flow with her salt. You’ll find that out soon enough.”

  “I thought your luck would depend on the sea,” Dee said, ignoring the glare from her father.

  Mr. Weatherly shook his head and bent to his sanding. “Nope. On the salt. And by the way, don’t let Jo’s appearance scare you none. Remember, she was in that terrible fire. Just treat her nice. And if she offers you any salt, you best say yes and accept it. Her sister won’t like it—she tells everyone it’s tainted—but I know better and keep some around on the sly anyhow. Mark my words. You won’t be sorry.”

  Cutt scowled. He was still a navy man and didn’t take his threats lying down, Dee knew, especially not ones from a wrinkled-up woman who didn’t have anything to scare him with but salt. “We’ll see about that,” he muttered, whacking a nail into the counter. “We’ll just see.”

  What about the other sister? Dee wanted to know. What happened to her? But Mr. Weatherly, sensing Cutt’s foul mood, pulled his cap down low and shut up for the rest of the afternoon, and all she had to entertain her was the never-ending rasp-rasp-rasp of sandpaper followed by the hot stink of fresh varnish on old wood.

  Joanna Gilly—craggy, weather-beaten, and boasting the surprise of a glass eye—arrived at the diner two days later, just as Mr. Weatherly had suggested she would. But Cutt didn’t spring for the salt, even though they were opening the next day.

  Morning rolled around, and Cutt and Dee unlocked the front door, but just as Joanna had predicted, not one person took up a seat on the barstools. Nobody sat in any of the booths either. The weather was still nice, and the streets were plenty full of late tourists, but it was like the diner had some weird force field pulsing around the door. At the end of the week, Cutt finally turned off the grill in disgust and closed the place early.

  “The old girl was right,” he muttered, crashing pots and pans, and Dee kept her distance. Her father hated it when other people were right.

  “Well,” she pointed out from the safety of the other side of the kitchen, “at least if we take her up on her offer, we know we’ll get some business.” Cutt’s only answer to that was another crash from the stack of cookware and a fat scoop of silence. He hated it even more when Dee was right.

  Whenever Dee’s father went and fouled things up for himself, he ended up turning to God. The time he drove over Mr. Dutton’s pasture fence after a bender, for instance, put him in church for a straight month, but that was an extreme example. Usually Cutt popped in to Mass on a Sunday and fortified himself with a midweek confession. Dee sometimes wondered if her father was so devout because he messed up so much or if maybe it was the other way around. Maybe weekly salvation made it that much easier for him to sin. Whatever the case, she wasn’t surprised when, on their first Sunday in town, Cutt decreed that they would attend church.

  “It’ll give us good faces around here,” he said, straightening his only tie and giving her the once-over to make sure her blouse wasn’t unbuttoned too low or her hair combed out too big. “We’ll let all the folks know we’re godly sorts. The kind that can be trusted.”

  Dee was surprised to find herself actually half looking forward to the outing. It wasn’t that she loved church—she just wanted to get away from the diner. It had been only a week, but the cramped rooms over the top of it were getting smaller by the day for her.

  If she was feeling shut in, she knew it was her own fault. She was only seventeen and should have been in school, but she’d forced her father to make a deal with her. If she came with him to Prospect, she made him promise, he would let her skip her senior year and work in the diner. If anything was more boring for Dee than church, it was high school, and she also didn’t relish the idea of starting a social life over with a whole new pack of kids. “Anyway, it’s not like I was ever Student of the Month,” she reminded Cutt.

  He poured an extra finger of drink when Dee pointed that out. “It’s not what your mother would have wanted if she were here,” he said.

  Dee spread her palms over her plump thighs and forced herself to take a deep breath, but she couldn’t resist sarcasm. “Well, then, I guess that’s one good reason we can be thankful she’s not.”

  She didn’t see her father’s hand coming, but the pain was nothing less than she deserved. Cutt got up and staggered out of the room, and they never spoke about the subject again, not even when they drove past the high school on their way out of town, where all the students were milling around out front before the bells rang, excited as a bunch of yapping puppies with new bones.

  Dee would be the first to admit that in Vermont she didn’t have the most sterling of reputations. In fact, her name hadn’t just been dragged through the mud of her old town; it had chemically bonded to it. And not just the scummy topsoil either. She meant all the way down deep to the bedrock where the worms hung out.

  Her father had no idea how she’d spent her weekends at home, and she knew that giving him that information wouldn’t have done squat for her current quality of life. For
all his bottle-tipping and foul-mouthed ways, Cutt wanted nothing more than to be a good servant of the Lord down in his guts where it counted, and he expected the same out of his daughter.

  The thing was, though, Dee wasn’t easy because she’d set out to be. It always just seemed to happen. Her first time was at a party when she was fifteen, with Dylan White, senior all-star quarterback. He’d taken her by the hand and led her upstairs to a spare room, where he fed her shots of rum, and before she knew it, the sweet liquid had entered her veins and turned her legs loose and her heart looser.

  “Come on, baby,” Dylan had whispered into her collarbone, his hips grinding slow ovals into her lap. “Let’s go.” He made it sound like he was inviting her on some kind of wonder cruise with an all-you-can-eat shrimp bar and a champagne fountain, and Dee was a girl who liked adventure, so she let him lay her back on the bed’s mildewed pillows and peel the layers of clothing from her one by one until she was as pink and bare as a boiled prawn.

  Four minutes later they’d docked, and seconds after that, they were back on separate islands. Dee was dabbing blood off her thighs in the dark, wondering if the stinging would ever subside, and Dylan was already halfway down the stairs, his shirttail askew in the front as if he’d just laid waste to a holiday meal.

  If Dee had been a different kind of girl—a milk-fed cheerleader or the head of the student body—she would have gone right down the stairs after him, found him guzzling beer in the kitchen, and glued herself to him like a barnacle, batting her eyelashes at his friends but also digging the points of her nails into his forearm until everyone in that room got the general idea that they were a couple. Then she would have proceeded to make his life a living hell until graduation.

  But later, when she thought about it, she realized she was still doing everything wrong, even in her imagination. For one thing, those kinds of girls never would have put out the way she had. They would have known better. And also, they had friends. If a boy like Dylan White had played loose with a cheerleader, the entire female population under the age of twenty would have known within three days that he’d not only fumbled the ball in the end zone but also completely missed the goalposts.