Page 5 of The Devil Knows Her Name

He motioned toward the rushes where the kits had disappeared, but his eyes were locked on me. “They let you touch them? Are they pets?”

“No, just orphans. Maybe too young to know better.”

“They knew enough to run when they saw me.”

You’re a man, I almost said. Instead, I only smiled and shrugged.

“Miss Wynne, is it?”

“Tess.”

“Tess,” he repeated, although his accent made it sound different, the vowel rounder and longer. “That’s pretty.”

We made small talk for a while, shyly and with too many long pauses. He told me he came from Kansas, where rain was as precious as diamonds and the wind blew the dust into great black walls of cloud. He told me he only had enough money to take the train to Indiana, and he had to ride as a stowaway with the hobos until they reached New York. He told me he went three days without eating before he fell in with the logging crew, and the first time he went out on a job, he was so weak he missed the tree entirely and the axe went flying off into the undergrowth.

I told him nothing.

“You don’t go to church?” he asked eventually.

“Sometimes,” I said evasively. Even my mother, whose first priority was always to appear as harmless as possible, couldn’t stomach the falseness required to go to church every week. We made our appearances on holidays, which was enough to quell the rumors. But it was a dangerous question, dangerous for other people to notice, and I gave the answer she always did.

“We worship at home most days.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” he said, and a grin curled the corner of his mouth. “I wouldn’t have minded a reason to see you every week.”

I laughed, absurdly pleased with his casual impiety.

As it turned out, we ended up seeing each other nearly every week anyway. Sometimes I found him waiting for me by the pond, cooling his feet in the shallows. Sometimes I lingered at the edges, waiting for him to materialize from the darkness of the woods.

But I was not a girl with a lot of time to socialize with the other young people in town, and the occasional meeting by the pond was not a courtship, so I could hardly be surprised when the Macouns announced that Norman was engaged to their daughter, Laura. Nor could I be surprised when he continued to meet me at the water’s edge, when he looked at me with the same intensity.

Finally, when the days had begun to shorten and the evenings were kissed by the cool breath of autumn, I went out to the pond and found a checkered blanket spread over the damp grass, a jar of apple cider and some rough sandwiches in a basket. I was still seething from an argument with my mother hours before—“You’re going to attract the wrong kind of attention!” she’d hissed, shattering the bottle of homemade perfume I’d attempted—and the anger made me reckless.

Maybe, as a young woman who didn’t often attend church, I had something of a reputation, and maybe I knew it. Maybe I knew that Norman was looking for something his proper churchgoing fiancée couldn’t give him, and maybe I, not so terrified of an eternity in sulfur and brimstone, was a little too eager to give it.

He seemed nervous, pouring the cider messily and spending fifteen minutes picking at a corner of his sandwich, then wolfing the remainder in two bites. I tried out the slow blink, allowing my lashes to dip and flutter like a butterfly’s wings, and in a heady rush of euphoria I saw his pupils blow wide like a cat in the dark. I’d kissed a few boys before, never going any further than that, but perhaps my lack of fear solidified my reputation. By the time he worked up the nerve to kiss me, the sky had turned a sultry violet, and when he laid me down on the blanket, I felt the tremor running through his whole body.

It was an embarrassingly short affair. I had only a vague idea of what should happen, and although he reassured me, the murmured words seemed mostly for himself. He had barely entered before he was pulling back out again to spend himself on the ground. He was breathing heavily while I had the barest flush in my cheeks, and the warmth of the sun was all but gone, leaving a damp chill behind. The intense pressure created by the secrecy and urgency of our tryst dissipated, and the mood shifted abruptly. For a moment we sat there, staring at each other coldly.

“You made me do this,” he said, and the tremor was in his voice now, fear instead of passion. Looking back, it was the fear that disgusted me, not the blame.

“Do what?” I snapped. I thought perhaps he was trying to salvage the moment with a backhanded compliment, and I was in no mood for it.

But it wasn’t that. His face was screwed up in fury, and the fading light caught tears shining in his narrowed eyes.

“Bed you. I’m engaged to be married.”

I was still brazenly naked, and I laughed, too stupid and spiteful to sense the danger. “I didn’t make you do anything. You wanted to wet your whistle.”

“No.” His voice began to shake. “You made me do it. You were jealous of Laura. You seduced me somehow.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said scornfully. I scrambled to my feet and snatched my blouse from the ground, trying to find the sleeves in the gathering dark. “I didn’t do anything except join you for a picnic.”

He stormed forward suddenly, grabbing the blouse from me and hurling it away; I heard the seams pop. “Don’t lie. What did you do to me? Some kind of drug? Or spell?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and neither do you. This was your idea as much as mine, and you came to it on your own. What, you think I slipped you some love potion, like a lonely old crone?”

He seized my arm in an iron grip, and suddenly I was aware of the size of him, the untapped reserves of strength at his disposal. His fingers touched around my upper arm, and he loomed over me, bent like a furious sapling. It began to dawn on me why my mother always sought to make men calm, to make them feel secure and strong; fear did not make them weak, but vicious.