Hell's Belles Page 21

  “It’s something about bones,” Gabriel said. “You guys don’t know comic books, but there’s a bad guy in one of the comic books I read. He can control metal, you know, like a magnet. I think you can do something like that, but with bones, Briar. With Marla’s bones and now with Gina’s finger.”

  “That’s not even possible,” I protested. “And even if it was, it would be super creepy and gross. Besides, I never touched Marla. I was locked in a shed.”

  “Bone Girl,” Gabriel whispered. “No, that’s no good. Let me think. Oh! I’ve got it. Marrow. Briar Givhans by day, Marrow, Mistress of Bone, by night. You’re some sort of super-hero!”

  “I’m no hero,” I said. “You read too many comic books.”

  Gina threw her arms around my shoulders and squeezed me. “Whatever. You’re my hero, Briar. I love you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, hugging her back. Gabriel continued to whisper “Marrow” in an awestruck way, like he was introducing a character in a movie, until Gina and I told him to knock it off.

  I stayed up late that night with my mind racing. I wasn’t special. I didn’t have “powers.” I was an orphan whose entire life could be stuffed into trash bags. But some of what Gabriel said rang true; there was still no logical explanation for what happened to Marla, not to mention Gina’s finger. I was the sole common denominator, present in both cases. But I hadn’t felt anything, no energy or release or anything at all.

  I couldn’t deny the overwhelming circumstantial evidence, but I knew deep down that I couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with any of it.

  I was Briar Givhans, ordinary orphan, not Marrow, super hero, no matter what Gabriel said.

  After Gina’s mysterious broken-then-not-broken finger incident, nothing inexplicable happened to me or anyone else at the house. The closest thing to a miracle was the fact that Marla came out of her ordeal with a new attitude and perspective. Covered in scars and plagued with body aches, she became withdrawn and quiet. Saying she was nice would be a reach, but her bullying days were behind her.

  Sadly, Daddy Muchow never showed up for Marla.

  A long-lost aunt showed up one day and whisked Marla’s friend, Taryn, away, but the rest of us served out our entire sentences with Mrs. Purifoy. At eighteen, with a brief transitional period, we were released out into the world.

  Gabriel earned an academic scholarship to an Ivy League school, becoming an inspiration to the rest of us with his hard work and perseverance. When his parents found out about his success, they attempted a reconciliation. He politely declined. If his academic success didn’t move some of us to spend more time studying, his class and heart motivated us all to be better people.

  Gina never found the love connection she dreamt of while she was living at the group home, but she never lost her smile, either.

  By the time it was my turn to go, the turnover had become so complete that very few people remembered what had befallen Marla in that backyard, and nobody knew the story behind Gina’s finger. Those things would forever represent question marks in my life.

  The mysteries that figured to plague and define my life were destined to revolve around only one thing— how I came to be the ‘Little Girl Lost’ on the front stoop of the Goose Creek fire station.

  Her Name is Briar Givhans. She just turned two years old.

  My name is Briar Givhans. I was about to turn eighteen years old.

  At least according to the birthdate I was assigned, based on when I was found and the information on the note.

  I’d graduated high school and was days away from eighteen and my release date when Mrs. Purifoy called all the girls in the house to come downstairs into the living room.

  We had a visitor.

  I’d been through this drill approximately twelve thousand times, and the novelty had worn off long ago. A couple, almost always a couple, although sometimes a single man or woman, would come in looking to adopt. They’d usually have a preference for boy or girl, and most often an age they were seeking; a baby or close to it.

  With my impending adulthood, the chances of me being picked were akin to me holding a winning lottery ticket. I certainly wouldn’t say no; having a soft place to land, a family to return to in case adulthood turned out to be tougher than I hoped it would be, sounded good.

  But I was jaded and knew not to get my hopes up. Not even a little bit.

  There were nine girls living in the house by then, ranging from Lucy, a six-year-old who was never seen without her beat-up stuffed penguin, up to me. The majority of the girls were between ten and fourteen.

  We stood around in the living room until we heard the familiar voice of Mrs. Purifoy coming down the hallway. “Yes, right this way, Ms. Embers. We have some very pretty and talented girls with us at the moment. Extremely bright. They just need a chance.”

  Mrs. Purifoy held open the door and it was with almost a gust of wind that her guest waltzed into the room. It was June, and hot, but when this “Ms. Embers” arrived, there was something oddly refreshing about her presence. I could tell we all felt it.

  She had an air of refinement about her, an understated elegance. And a natural beauty that made it hard to guess her age. It was difficult to imagine what she was doing visiting with us rather than attending the opera, shopping for jewelry, or doing whatever else it was that wealthy, cultured people did all day.

  “Girls, this is Ms. Embers. She wanted to meet you all,” Mrs. Purifoy explained.

  “Hello, ladies,” our visitor announced. “My name is Virginia Embers. I’ve taken an interest in the foster care system in our great state, with an aim to provide more opportunities for young women such as yourselves.” She walked back and forth in front of us as she spoke, smiling warmly. There was something genuine about her. She wasn’t what I imagined the typical wealthy person to be, which was stuffy and unapproachable.

  She knelt down in front of Lucy and stroked the faded wing of her penguin, which Lucy clutched to her side with both hands.

  “Who’s this, then?” Ms. Embers asked.

  “Her name is Penny,” Lucy replied.

  “Penny the penguin? How wonderful!”

  “That’s Lucy,” Mrs. Purifoy explained. “She’s six. She has the most vivid imagination. She writes her own stories already.”

  “Does she? An imagination is such a blessing. Never stop writing, Miss Lucy. And take care of Penny. I can tell she’s very special.”

  Ms. Embers stood back up and walked nearer to me, stopping in front of LaTashia, a tall Gullah girl with thick braids who I’d rarely heard speak since she arrived. LaTashia was thirteen.

  “What’s your name, dear?” our visitor asked.

  “LaTashia Shaw, ma’am,” she answered quietly.

  “You remind me so much of someone I know. I can see her strength in you. Have you ever been to Frogmore Island?”

  “No, ma’am, I lived in Summerville my whole life.” That was officially the longest sentence I’d ever heard from LaTashia in the two-and-a-half years she’d lived with us.

  “I’d just bet that you have kin on Frogmore,” Ms. Embers assured her. “I’ll look into it and be in touch with Mrs. Purifoy.” LaTashia nodded.

  Our visitor arrived, finally, at me.

  “You look ready to take on the world, young lady,” she said. “Are you?”

  She made eye contact with me and held it. Not in an intimidating manner, but her ever-present smile dimmed for just a heartbeat as she looked into my eyes. And her voice caught almost imperceptibly in her throat.

  “I…I hope so,” I answered.

  She hesitated, as if she had more to say, and her right hand moved like she wanted to touch me, maybe hug me, but then she thought better of it.

  “Excellent,” she said, nodding. She walked back over toward Mrs. Purifoy and thanked her, and us, for our time. “It was lovely meeting all of you.”

  With that, Virginia Embers was gone.

  ONE

  “’You are what you believe y
ou are,” my friend Mara said as I pushed past her to reach for a plate of sweet potato fries our cook had just set out for my table.

  “Okay, Gandhi,” I replied, and she smiled.

  “How did you know?” she asked. She was sitting on the counter across from me, her ankles crossed, a book in her hand.

  “Just a guess,” I lied. “You and your inspirational crap. Don’t you have tables to wait on?”

  Mara shook her head, her blonde curls bouncing with the motion. “Nope. Wendy just cut me. Says we’re dead today.”

  “Ugh,” I replied, as I scooted past her again, hot plate in hand. “I’m jealous. I’m so not in the mood to be here.”

  “You can take it if you want,” Mara replied. “I don’t mind working your shift.”

  I shook my head. “No, thanks. I need the hours. But I appreciate it.”

  I scooted back into the dining room and walked to the back inside corner of The Dixie Garden, the restaurant I worked at in downtown Charleston. A foursome of sorority girls sat bunched together in their Lily Pulitzer dresses. I gingerly placed the fries in the middle of their table. None of them reached for any.

  “Can I get y’all anything else?” I asked. They barely glanced at me.

  One of them said, “Just some Pellegrino.”

  “For everyone?” I asked. The same girl narrowed her eyes at me and just nodded.

  “Okay,” I said under my breath as I walked away. “Gotta love that southern charm and hospitality.”

  I’d only worked at The Dixie Garden for a month, but I already had a pretty good handle on the clientele. It was one of the many breakfast and lunch places scattered down King Street that catered to the “ladies who lunch” crowd. We were famous for organic everything and farm-to-table dining, whatever the hell that meant. I just needed a job, so I pretended to care about their “foodie philosophy” as my boss Wendy called it.

  I’d gotten my GED about a year ago, knowing that college wasn’t on the horizon for me anyway, and also knowing almost any job these days at least required some sort of proof you’d completed your education. High school had been a whole bunch of hell and being that my childhood was far from idyllic, I figured it was better to have that chapter close as soon as possible.

  I hadn’t regretted it yet. As soon as I’d been able to prove my income, I’d rented a tiny little studio apartment right off Elizabeth Street. It was actually a carriage house in the backyard of a mansion and my landlord was some elderly, old money, rich creep who’d stared down my V-neck while I was filling out my application.

  But for being downtown the rent was very cheap, and I was all about the cheap. I was also all about being away from Goose Creek. Charleston felt like a glamorous place to me after spending the bulk of my life twenty miles north of it with my trash bags and my head games.

  “Hey, Briar!” I heard Mara’s twang from the break room. “Did you see this?”

  “See what?” I asked. Mara had left the counter and was now sitting on a metal folding chair in front of the tiny tube television in what we referred to as our break room, although it was barely bigger than a closet. There was enough room for two folding chairs and a card table pushed up against the wall. The TV sat precariously on an old stool in the corner.

  “The news,” she said. “Someone jumped off the Ravenel Bridge.”

  My eyes widened. Who on earth would jump from the Ravenel in the middle of the day? Or ever?

  “We shouldn’t watch this,” I said. “It’s not right. We should show some respect.”

  “What do you mean? It’s crazy, is what it is,” Mara said, turning the volume up, as if to prove a point. “I mean, who does something like that?”

  I didn’t reply, but I had an answer.

  People jumped off bridges all the time— and it was always an attempt to escape. Ultimately, it was the only escape there was if the pain was deep enough.

  I didn’t like the jumper being entertainment. It just didn’t feel right to watch it.

  I walked over and switched off the television.

  “Hey!” Mara said. “I’m watching it. If you don’t want to, leave the room.”

  “I don’t even want to hear it,” I said. “Anyway, I changed my mind.”

  “About what?” Mara asked.

  “About taking your early out,” I said, untying the apron around my waist. “If you don’t mind, I feel like going home.”

  As I walked home from work, I could feel the energy of the news in the air. People were glued to their phones. Sirens howled in the distance. After hearing the news, I had immediately felt a loss. I didn’t even know the person who had jumped, but for some reason it hit me hard that someone would make that choice.

  As bad as life can be, I still held out hope that it would always get better. Despite what I’d witnessed in my own life, it was something I clung to— that all the bullshit meant something. And that life was about living long enough to solve the mystery.

  TWO

  It was a 15-minute walk to my place from work. I always enjoyed it (unless it was raining) and I usually took my time. I looked in store windows; I stared up at the columns of the Charleston single homes. From the street they looked so narrow, but they all had two, sometimes three, story porches that went way back under the shadows of palmettos. They almost always had a courtyard and beautiful gardens beyond their wrought iron gates. Some of them were walled off, with ivy stretching over the brick. I was desperately in love with every single one I passed, and my favorite thing to do was imagine the lives inside, and what it must be like to live inside of so much history— and money.

  Most of those homes are worth a couple of million dollars, at least.

  The carriage house I rented was part of one of the biggest homes on the peninsula. I’d never been inside it.

  When I signed the lease, I met with the owner (the pervy old dude) for brunch at a restaurant next to the law office where he’d been a partner before retiring. So he wouldn’t even allow me in the main house to sign a contract.

  I had my own entrance to my part of the property, thankfully, and he’d never invited me into the main house. I got the feeling you had to be a certain kind of person to get invited in, and I was as far away from that type of person as it gets.

  But that was fine with me, because like I said, he creeped me out.

  He could definitely charge way more for rent, but for some reason he didn’t. He also said he only rented to women, which came off as a little skeevy, but I’d dealt with way stranger folks than him, so it was a fine trade-off as far as I was concerned. He left me alone and that’s what was important.

  Usually I was in good spirits on my walk home. After all, what could be better than a walk home from work, especially when it was an early out? I still had a huge chunk of the day and night laid out before me. I’d gotten great tips that week. I could go to The Gin Joint on East Bay after dinner at Fleet Landing. I could digest my grits in Waterfront Park, on one of the big swings on the pier. I could watch the rich people take the water taxi across Charleston Harbor, back to Mount Pleasant where they lived in huge houses with their perfect families, right on the marsh. I could pretend I belonged to them, get on board the taxi. It only cost ten bucks.

  I could pretend for a little while.

  I did that all the time.

  But I was in a foul mood. Knowing someone was floating in the harbor after jumping off a damn bridge? It should depress us, not enthrall us. I guess that’s why I was in a bad mood. I hate living in a world where people being in pain is entertainment.

  Or maybe I was just PMSing. Both were possible.

  I walked up the crushed oyster shell driveway that led to my tiny little house. I was surrounded by beautiful gardens and a pre-Civil War fountain with a large angel statue. The angel looked right at my bedroom window. It greeted me every morning.

  I say pre-Civil War, but most people around Charleston (if they were truly Charlestonian anyway) called it the War Between the States. The ones wi
th the deepest Lowcountry roots called it the War of Northern Aggression. I’d been taught in school that it was all just some big misunderstanding about states’ rights.

  I kid you not. Oh, bless ‘em, I guess.

  I smiled to myself as I opened the door to my home. I was in my peaceful place now. No need to be in a sad mood.

  When you first entered my place, there was a small foyer that lead directly into a tiny living room and a very bare bones kitchenette with a micro fridge and a stove. It was a chef’s nightmare. But I rarely cooked anyway. I lived in Charleston, after all. Who would want to cook when there were about 1000 different places to eat within a mile of my doorstep? I also mooched a ton of meals off the The Dixie Garden. It was a great perk.

  There were a little narrow set of stairs that went to my bedroom and bathroom on the second floor. It was a small place, not even 1000 square feet at the end of the day, but it was just me. It felt like a mansion compared to anywhere else I’d ever lived.

  My landlord kept the furniture in there for me, which I did appreciate. It meant I didn’t have to scour Craigslist for a cheap mattress or couch. The furniture was very dated, though. I guessed that the stiff davenport in the living room had been around since at least the ‘50s. I bought some throw blankets for it at Target to make it less scratchy.

  No one had ever been in my place, not even Mara. I was a loner, through and through.

  But on that fateful day, I was in for a surprise.

  Because as I walked into the living room, I about jumped out of my skin. There was somebody there. And I knew her.

  On my couch, sat Virginia Embers.

  THREE

  “What the hell?” I dropped my keys on the floor as she stood up, her hand out as if she wanted to calm me down.

  “I’m so sorry,” she replied. She bent her knees into a squat and picked up my keys from the floor. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I really didn’t.”