said.”
“Dodge,” Rennick admonished him.
I tried not to blush, however impossible that was. Dodge’s eyes held mine, and I saw a bit of Rennick in his grizzled gray face. The same dark blue eyes. I smiled. How could I possibly be standing in this man’s house? A man whose wife I had just saved from imminent death? A man who accepted that fact with no question?
I didn’t know which seemed more impossible.
“You want a sandwich?” Rennick asked, gesturing toward the stove.
“No sirree,” Dodge said, pulling out my chair for me at the table. Rennick would not meet my gaze, and I saw the little boy inside him again. He didn’t blush, but he laughed to himself, head down.
Dodge crouched down to nuzzle Bouncer. “Got myself some pickled herring.”
“Fabulous,” Rennick said, wrinkling his nose.
“Son, just go on out to the lake, sit on the swing if you can’t handle the smell of it. Take the rest of your lunches. You can have some privacy.”
“You mind, Dodge?”
Dodge shook his head.
Rennick grabbed his plate and motioned to me. He avoided my eyes, held the back door open for me. “This okay, Corrine?”
I nodded. “Nice to meet you,” I told Dodge, grabbing my food.
“My pleasure,” Dodge said, giving me a wink. Bouncer stayed with Rennick’s grandfather, and we went out the back door toward the lake. It was gorgeous back there. I hadn’t fully appreciated the wildflowers when I had been there yesterday. The scents. The scenery.
I took in the big vegetable garden too. I spied ripe purple eggplant. The frilly edges of coriander. No wonder Mr. Twopenny and my mother knew each other. Mom would love these gardens.
Rennick and I sat down on the big old swing that hung from the magnolia-covered arbor. It faced the lake, which was murky and swampy, yet serene and beautiful in its own way. The muddy green tones of the water reflected in the way the sun played on the waves, the grasses and bulrushes swaying in the breeze on the water’s edge, the throaty, buzzing croaks of the locusts and frogs echoing in the distance.
“So how long have you lived here with your grandfather?”
I picked the crust off my sandwich, pushed my feet on the ground to move the swing a bit. Rennick smelled like his clothes had been dried on a line outside on the first day of spring. And the shape of his jaw just kept drawing my eyes. Chiseled, that was a good word for it.
“I moved here last summer.” He looked at me from the corner of his eye and added, “I didn’t get kicked out of Penton.” He wolfed down the last half of his sandwich. I did the same and became very interested in my iced tea, trying not to ask but hoping he would elaborate.
He didn’t. I held my tongue for a quarter rest, tried to wait out a whole note. I wanted to hear more. A crow swooped down and cawed near the water’s edge, picked up something in its mouth. I had to fill the silence.
“Do you think the newspapers, the reporters, will give up after today?” I asked.
“No.”
I hadn’t expected this answer. Rennick turned to me. “Things have been going on in New Orleans.”
“What do you mean?”
“More people like us.” I gave him a look. “People with extrasensory powers. Sixth sense of some kind. Clusters of us.”
Bouncer came storming out of the back door, Dodge following. He walked hurriedly, a hitch in his step, and spoke in a low whisper. “Some reporters at the door a minute ago. Told ’em you weren’t here.”
“Should we take a walk?” Rennick looked at me seriously.
“Maybe if I just answer a few questions,” I offered.
“No,” Rennick said. “Bad idea.”
“Take a walk,” Dodge whispered, grabbing Rennick by the shoulder for a moment in such a serious way that it unnerved me. I wondered again how Ruth had died. And how she had lived too, with this secret, with people’s judgments. With all her own doubts?
I followed Rennick, and I got that feeling again that I could see myself from the outside, going off into the woods with someone I hardly knew.
But Rennick motioned for me to follow him, and I felt that tenuous string between us. Some kind of real connection. I wasn’t ready to break it. I wasn’t sure I totally trusted him and everything he said, but he hadn’t steered me wrong yet.
I went with my gut instinct. My heart knew this guy in some weird and cosmic sense.
I went with Rennick, not deep into the woods, just along the edge, and I was a little bit scared about everything. A little bit chilly in the shadowy canopy of the trees. A little bit excited about how every few steps Rennick would turn around and check on me with an easy smile.
My senses came alive as we hiked through the little patch of forest that backed up to Rennick’s grandfather’s property, the sprawling live oaks, the pungent pine trees, the swampy masses of kudzu. It felt good to hike, to walk and feel my body move and not to hold it in, not to cross my arms and hold my limbs close. I found a sliver of freedom out there in the shade of the forest, and I felt the blood pumping through my veins, my heart working. And I liked it.
We quickly came to a little shack, really only three ramshackle walls with a slanted aluminum roof. Rennick said it was a hunting blind, his grandfather’s, although I had never even heard of one before.
“Dodge and I camp out here and hunt for deer and turkey.”
I tried to picture Rennick as a hunter. It didn’t seem to work. But I reminded myself that I didn’t really know this guy. At all. He sat down on the floor of the hunting blind, rested his back on the inside wall, and patted the ground next to him. “We only shoot what we can eat. Nothing more,” he said, as if he had been reading my mind.
“Before, you said that you knew someone like me, long ago. Were you speaking of your mother? Or—”
“Someone else too. Dell was his name.”
“Dell.” I sat down next to him, my shoulder grazing his. “Could he just heal anyone? Anything? Did he ever
“We were kids, Corrine. I think Dell didn’t quite know what he had. It’s only looking back that I sort of put the pieces together.”
“Could I talk to him?”
Rennick shook his head, his eyes dark. “You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked, looking up at me through his lashes. He looked almost apologetic.
“Should I remember you?”
“We met once a long time ago.” He didn’t look at me now but instead drew in the dirt with a stick—his initials, a compass rose, squiggles.
I thought hard. Rennick Lane? Wouldn’t I have remembered meeting this guy? This part nerd/part dreamboat/part meddlesome
“Summer. We were probably nine or ten. Lake Pontchartrain.”
It hit me then. “You were the boy with the sparklers?” I looked at him wide-eyed, my jaw dropped. He nodded, didn’t quite meet my eye. I couldn’t believe it. I remembered that night. Of course I remembered that night.
I tried to reconcile this cool, easy young man with the awkward kid I had met on that Fourth of July.
He had worn thick black-rimmed glasses and had the kind of hair that lots of ten-year-old boys have: unwashed, untamed, too long in parts, too short in others. His ears stuck out from his head, and he was all hands and feet and teeth. Gangly. He had been an absolute nerd, no question.
So, I had been right about that. And for some reason, I liked that.
My family and I—Sophie had been just three or four years old then—were having a campfire on the shore with a big gang of my parents’ friends and their kids. It was a Fourth of July tradition. Rennick—or the kid I knew now as Rennick—sort of hung around the outside of our little group, on the fringe, for a long time that night. He was digging a lot near the waves, near the rocks, I remembered that.
