The Librarian of Boone's Hollow - Kim Vogel Sawyer Page 0,124
the hills and never come back.
She pulled in a big breath of the morning air, smoothed her hands down her rumpled britches—she didn’t have no clothes to put on except the ones she’d worn yesterday and slept in last night, since nobody’d let her go to her cabin—and gave her head a little toss. Somehow the gesture didn’t perk her like it usually did. She puffed her cheeks and blew out the air, then zipped around the corner and pasted on a big smile. “Mornin’.”
Emmett and Nanny Fay both turned. Both smiled. Emmett patted the back of Nanny Fay’s hand and stood. He leaned down to the old lady. “I’ll be praying.” Then he headed for Bettina.
She instinctively shrank a little, but he stopped a couple or so feet away and slid his hands into his pockets.
“Addie took your route today, so you’ll be cutting flower pictures from the magazines for a scrapbook. Before you get started, though, you’ve got a visitor.” He nodded his head toward Nanny Fay. “I’ll let you two talk.” He went out the door.
Bettina gawked after him, her heart pounding like a woodpecker driving its beak into a tree. Why’d he go and leave her all alone with the old witch lady? Was he getting even by letting Nanny Fay cast a spell on her? She stayed frozen in place, afraid to move in case something bad happened.
Nanny Fay screeched the second chair from the table, and Bettina near jumped out of her britches. “Come sit down, Bettina. I ain’t gonna hurt you.”
She sure talked soft. Nice. The way she did on her porch when Bettina brought her books. The way Damaris Tharp talked. The way Maw had talked. The remembrances urged Bettina across the floor, but she gave a wide berth and slid into the chair’s seat from the opposite side. She pressed her palms together and jammed them between her knees, then hunched her shoulders, making herself as small as possible. She cleared her dry throat. “Whatcha want with me?”
Nanny Fay fixed her pale blue eyes on Bettina. They looked watery. Sad. “I wanna tell you I’m sorry.”
Bettina jerked. She scrunched her eyebrows. “Sorry…for what?”
“For havin’ your maw’s dress in my hands when you come in yesterday. I reckon that gave you a real start.”
It sure had. “Where’d you get it, anyway?”
“It got left at my cabin one night.”
Bettina eyeballed the woman through squinty eyes. “That don’t make sense. Why would my maw go to your cabin?”
Nanny Fay wiggled around in her chair and put her hands on the table. She laced her fingers together, and if she didn’t for all the world look like she was fixing to pray. “Bettina, you might not wanna believe this, but me an’ your maw was real good friends.”
Bettina shot her eyebrows high. “What? Nuh-uh.”
The old lady chuckled. “Oh, yes. She was just a little bitty thing, not even half your age now, when she come to my place the first time. She’d took a fall, skinned up her knees an’ the heels of her hands. She was bleedin’, an’ she was upset an’ scared.”
Probably scared ’cause she’d come face to face with a witch.
“I cleaned her wounds an’ put some soothin’ oil on ’em, then bandaged her up. When I did, I noticed…I noticed…”
The water in her eyes started dripping down her face. Tears. Was she crying? Bettina gulped and hunched a little lower, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Nanny Fay’s tears.
“I noticed she had marks. Bruises, Bettina. She had bruises.”
Cold shivers attacked. Bettina’s arms broke out with gooseflesh.
“Some old, some newer. Somebody’d hurt her again an’ again. Like to broke my heart.”
“Who done it?” Bettina didn’t even realize she’d spoke aloud until she heard her voice.
Nanny Fay tipped her head to the side, like she was all of a sudden too weary to hold it up. “Honey, her mama did it. But I didn’t find that out for a long time, ’cause Rosie—your maw—didn’t want me to know.” She sighed, looked down at her hands for a few seconds, then set her watery gaze on Bettina again. “But after that day, she kept a-turnin’ up at my place. Not every day. Sometimes not for weeks at a time. But I’d be doin’ my chores or sittin’ on my porch readin’ my Bible, an’ there she’d be. For years she come visitin’. Even after she married your pap. Even after you was born she came.”