He was following me.
“Guilty,” he said, but when he looked at me, the hint of a smile was playing around his lips. I felt myself redden, and my arms and legs began to tingle, little bursts of energy zinging up and down the muscles. The side effect every time I felt the slightest bit tired or self-conscious. Vulnerable. The neuropathy would never let me forget just how far from normal I really was. I stood and rubbed my arms.
“Want a ride back?” Koa said.
I brushed off my shorts, suddenly conscious that they’d become a mess of horse blood, saliva, and mucus. “I’ll walk,” I said. “You should stay with her.”
He didn’t argue.
“I’m just not looking forward to the Old Testament swarms of mosquitoes that are going to attack me.”
“Can I make a suggestion?” he said.
He motioned to me, and I followed him down the steps, to a faucet on the side of the cabin. The ground beneath it was muddy, and he scooped out a dollop.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
He took my wrist and rotated my arm, exposing the tender skin. Then, in one deft stroke, he smeared the mud from my wrist to elbow, all the way up to my shoulder. He talked as he worked.
“So the Caddo lived in what became Oklahoma, east Texas, and Louisiana. They were farmers, generally. They also constructed mounds and made bows to sell to other tribes. They were peaceable, with only one real enemy.”
His fingers traveled around the curve of my arms, slowing ever so slightly, covering the entire surface of my arm with mud. I watched, entranced.
“This enemy was a formidable foe. A tireless one who attacked with unmatched stealth and persistence.”
My shellacked arm now resembled a tree branch more than a human limb. I looked up at him. His eyes were liquid in the porch light.
“Mosquito,” he whispered. The word felt positively sensual coming out of his mouth. I concentrated on keeping my knees from buckling.
He dropped my arm. “I would’ve tried to show off and say it in Caddo, but I grew up in the suburbs of Baton Rouge, never lived on the rez. And I was a dumb-ass kid who thought he was too cool to pay attention at summer culture camp.” He smiled. “Anyway, there you go. Native American bug repellent.”
“Where is the Caddo reservation?”
“Western Oklahoma.”
“Do you think you’ll ever live there?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s where my life is, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I feel like I’m still looking for that.”
I nodded. I knew what he meant.
He went to work on my face then. A quick swipe across my forehead, temples, and cheeks. My chin and nose and around my lips. He caught my fingers and scraped a lump of mud onto them.
“I’ll let you handle the rest,” he said.
He nodded in the general direction of my exposed chest, and I hastily smeared the area. When I was thoroughly coated, I presented myself for inspection.
“How do I look?”
“Like Swamp Thing. But you won’t get bit.”
“Please tell me this is a real thing people do and not just some elaborate practical joke,” I said. I could already feel the crackle of drying mud on my face. And imagine Laila, Esther, and Doro’s laughter when they saw me.
“Don’t trust me?” He smiled, and my belly flipped.
“I do,” I said. “I think that’s the problem.”
His eyes flashed in the light from the cabin window, but he didn’t answer. I couldn’t read this guy. Couldn’t tell whether he was interested or just being nice. I couldn’t seem to read anyone on Bonny Island. This place had knocked me off balance in some way.
So I smiled back at him, said, “Thanks,” and trotted off in the direction of Ambletern.
“Watch out for snakes,” he called behind me. I thought I heard him laughing.
KITTEN
—FROM CHAPTER 7
Fay woke from a dream of Kitten and Cappie arguing over something, she couldn’t remember what. Even after she’d showered, had her breakfast, and taken Kitten down to the beach, the dream stayed with her.
It expanded inside her mind, filling her with dread. It was like that horror movie she’d seen when she was a child, the one she’d accidentally come across on late-night TV. She had no memory now what the film was about, but she’d never been able to shake one particular image—a dismembered arm crawling on its own across the floor.
When Herb returned with the guests from the marsh tour, and Fay heard the news that Cappie had been found there, drowned, she suddenly remembered the dream. And one detail specifically: Kitten, repeatedly screaming a strange word, over and over.
Mico.
Ashley, Frances. Kitten. New York: Drake, Richards and Weems, 1976. Print.
Chapter Sixteen
No one was around when I got back to the hotel. Thank God.
Upstairs in my room, I climbed into the shower and scrubbed myself raw with a washcloth. As I toweled off in the steam-filled bathroom, something caught my eye—an aloe plant in a tiny pink ceramic pot and a vial of tea-tree oil, sitting on the edge of the tub. There was a note tented beside them. Dab me, it said. I smiled—Doro—then dashed a couple of drops of the oil onto the welts on my arms and legs and neck. It was pitch black outside now, so I climbed into bed and opened Kitten.
Ambletern’s guests had started coming down with a mysterious stomach ailment—except Kitten, Fay, the Murphys. A local doctor appeared on Bonny to investigate. He seemed to suspect young Kitten, which made me wonder if he would be the next to go.
The storyline was spooky, if a bit on the predictable side. But it was easy to see why people loved it. Grotesque characters doing weird stuff in a creepy Southern setting—who wouldn’t love that? It was a mash-up of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, if you dumbed down the prose and multiplied the splatter factor. And my mother had come up with that shit. Pretty impressive.
Meanwhile, Susan Doucette—superfan, micro–Kitty Cultist, and über-annotator of books—seemed determined to prove that there was a real-life mystery to be solved. The same mystery all the Kitty Cultists wanted to crack—if the real Kitten, Dorothy Kitchens, had actually murdered the real Cappie Strongbow, Kim Baker.
Susan’s notes were plentiful. Every time the word Guale appeared, it was circled in red pen, and in the section where guests were vomiting and passing out, she’d repeatedly scrawled the word. On other pages, more words, like penciled vines of ivy, twined along the margins: father, land grant, cassina, GTO, AIM, rock.
I had no idea what any of them meant.
I grabbed my computer, climbed back in bed, and searched the word cassina first.
The little blue line shot halfway across my address bar, then stopped. The Wi-Fi must have been down.