Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

‘Stop it! That's disgusting!' Wyn yelled.

‘You said you wanted to see it!' I protested as I popped my eyelids back the right way around. ‘I had to look at your creepy double-jointed elbow, it's only fair.'

We'd been walking around Savannah for what felt like hours and so far, I'd seen nothing of the city. Wyn's sightseeing tour involved lots of interesting historical facts and figures but the only fact I had registered was just how much I was starting to like him.

‘It's gross enough to make me puke pasta through my nose,' he said, grinning as he took a slurp of his Starbucks.

I also had some minor regrets.

‘I knew I shouldn't have told you that,' I groaned. ‘OK, my turn to ask you a question. What's your favourite book?'

As we strolled up and down the Savannah streets, Wyn had suggested a game, quick-fire questions with immediate answers, no thinking. So far I had found out his favourite colour was blue, his birthday was in May, he loved old movies as much as I did, and his favourite pizza topping was pepperoni. None of it was groundbreaking but each crumb of information we shared felt like the key to understanding the universe.

Slowing to a stop, he grabbed hold of the iron railings behind him and swung from side to side. The sleeves of his T-shirt stretched over the tense muscles in his arms and I quickly looked away before he could catch me staring. Again.

‘I don't think I can choose just one,' he said. ‘Different days need different books.'

‘Agreed,' I said, honestly relieved he hadn't said he didn't read at all. There was nothing less attractive than someone who didn't read. ‘How about … city or country? Which is your favourite?'

‘You know I'm a mountain man.' He puffed out his chest and planted his fists on his hips. ‘Give me a wide-open space any day. Savannah is as close as I want to get to city living, couldn't stand the thought of all those skyscrapers boxing me in. What about you?'

‘I really like cities.' I answered according to the rules, without thinking. ‘I always figured I'd go to college somewhere like London or New York but I like the quiet of the countryside too and I love being by the ocean but Dad hated the beach so we hardly ever saw the sea.' I shook my head and laughed. ‘I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't know.'

‘You'd love it where I'm from. Asheville is a really cool town and the mountains are real peaceful. Unless my cousins are around anyways.'

Wyn was so grounded. He knew who he was and where he was from, he had so many relatives, he could barely remember all their names. He had a favourite pizza place and local sports teams and the same school friends he'd known all his life. He had all the things I'd always wanted.

‘OK, what's next? Cats or dogs, which do you prefer?' I asked, changing the subject before I started fantasizing about visiting the North Carolina mountains with a boy I'd only just met.

‘Dogs, I guess. I love cats but they never like me.'

He swirled the ice in his plastic cup and looked at me intently.

‘What?' I swiped at my mouth with the back of my hand. ‘Do I have something on my face?'

Instead of answering, he carefully hooked a long strand of my hair with his forefinger and held it out between us.

‘When the light hits your hair just right, it turns this real pretty shade of red.'

I tried to respond but none of my muscles felt much like moving, even the ones I needed to breathe. It was only when Wyn let my hair fall through his fingers that I was able to exhale again.

‘Must be the sun,' I mumbled before taking a noisy slurp through the straw of my giant iced latte. ‘Oh hey, what's this?'

Without waiting for a reply, I pushed past him and through an open gate to what looked like a park, but as soon as I stepped inside, I knew it was not a park at all.

‘It's a cemetery,' Wyn said, right beside me as I scanned the crumbling headstones and randomly placed monuments. ‘Colonial Park, one of the oldest in the country. If I'm remembering correctly, it dates all the way back to the 1700s and there's at least one guy in here who signed the Declaration of Independence, over that way, I think.'

He pointed off to the left but something pulled me to the right, a nagging feeling that gnawed away at me like I'd forgotten something but couldn't remember what. This place was so different to Bonaventure, much, much smaller and more open and bright.

‘That tree over there doesn't have any Spanish moss,' I said, wandering off the path towards the middle of the lawn. ‘Do you know what kind it is?'

‘It's a magnolia tree and as far as I know, it should. There's only one explanation I can think of.'

The shade provided by the thick, glossy leaves was cool and welcoming, and the fragrant white flowers that bloomed on the enormous tree filled the air with a light, sweet scent. Without even needing to ask each other first, we both sat down on prickly grass, appreciative of the magnolia's generous shadow.

‘In Florida, they call Spanish moss Old Man's Beard because of an old story of how it supposedly came to be.' Wyn stretched out his long legs and the white rubber toecaps of his shoes almost touched the trunk of the tree. ‘Legend has it Gorez Goz, a villain with a long grey beard, bought an Indian maiden for a yard of braid and a bar of soap, but she was so afraid of him, she climbed up into the trees to escape. He tried to follow her but his beard got all tangled up in the branches and the maiden dove into the river to escape.'

‘Was she OK?' I asked, pinching my toes through my shoes.

‘Sure was. She got away but Goz and his beard were trapped up there for all eternity.'

‘Good, the girl hardly ever gets away in those old stories. That doesn't explain why there's no moss on this tree though.'

‘That's the other part of the story,' he replied in a spooky voice, eyebrows arched over playful eyes. ‘They say Spanish moss cannot grow where innocent blood has been spilled.'

I looked around, checking all the trees in the cemetery. Every single one of them dripping with moss, all except for this one. ‘Well, that's super reassuring.'

‘I'm just the tour guide.' Wyn shrugged, a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. ‘There's no way of telling everything that happened right here on this very spot over the last three hundred years.'

‘Her outfit looks extremely vintage, maybe she knows.' I nodded at a tall woman with extremely pale blonde hair trailing down the back of a floor-length ivory dress. She looked so washed out compared to the green grass and red brick of the wall beyond her, as though she'd been run through a black and white filter when the rest of the world was in vivid Technicolor. She held my gaze with watery eyes as she moved slowly through the headstones.

Wyn frowned as he followed my gaze. ‘Maybe who knows?'

I turned to point her out but she was already gone.

‘There will be some boring reason,' he said, rolling onto his back and cradling his head in his hands. I leaned backwards, trying to see where she might have vanished to but there was no trace of her. ‘Pesticides or pH levels or something.'

‘Probably,' I agreed, ignoring the uncomfortable feeling in my gut that wasn't quite so sure. ‘Hey, I have another question.'

‘Shoot.'

‘What do you want to do?' I asked. ‘After you graduate, I mean.'

He made a long humming sound and tapped one foot against the other while he thought about his answer. ‘You got me,' he said after a good long while. ‘I don't know for sure.'

‘Something with your camera?' I suggested.

‘Maybe,' he replied. ‘I would love to travel the world, taking pictures of everything I see. What about you?'

‘I'm not sure either,' I admitted. ‘I only had plans set in stone as far as my seventeenth birthday. Dad's travel schedule was so unpredictable but we had a deal. I went with him wherever he needed to go until I turned seventeen, after that, I got to make my own choices.'

‘What kind of choices?'

‘College first, one school where I could stay and study for four whole years. After that, I'm not sure. Maybe teaching or something to do with books.'

‘Better stick to the books,' Wyn said with a grin. ‘If you were my teacher I would never graduate.'

His smile was infectious. I lay back on the ground beside him and beamed up at the sky.

We stayed in the cemetery for what felt like hours, laughing and joking and sharing stories about our lives. Wyn talked about growing up in the Blue Ridge mountains and I told him stories about my life in Wales. He was easy to talk to and listening to him was even easier. His voice was deep and warm with an inviting, lilting accent, and every time I made him laugh, I felt like I'd won a prize.

Under the shade of the magnolia tree, even though the grass was dry, the earth was almost cold to the touch, damp and soft as I pressed my fingertips flat against it. Then I heard it again.

Emma Catherine Bell …

My name, my real name, whispered like a rustling in the leaves.

Light hides the lies; truth lives in the dark.

‘Do you hear that?' I asked, standing up too quickly and spinning in a dizzy circle. There was no one else in the cemetery but us.

‘Hear what?' Wyn hopped up and held his hand above his eyes to scan the grounds. ‘Was it thunder? I heard it might storm today.'

I didn't answer. The voices faded away again and the ground rushed towards me.

‘Emily!'

He caught me as my legs buckled and I fell to my knees with stars in front of my eyes.

‘Are you OK?' he asked, holding my hand tightly.

‘Just tired, I think, or maybe it's jetlag,' I replied, echoing Catherine. My mind was a swirling mess of whispers and wolves and everything else that had happened in the last forty-eight hours. ‘I'm not usually this clumsy. I mean, I'm clumsy but not usually this bad, I swear.'

‘You did warn me falling over nothing was your special skill,' he replied with a wry smile. ‘Maybe we should look into getting you some kneepads and a helmet.'

‘No way, I do not look good in hats,' I said, managing to return his expression as the confusion faded. ‘I haven't been sleeping super well and I was out with my grandmother last night and we were attacked by a—'

I looked up into his startled eyes and Catherine's warning came back to me. Don't tell anyone. Don't be the girl who killed the wolf.

‘A dog,' I lied quickly. ‘A small dog. Small but like, super loud. It came right for us.'

‘Oh yeah, the small, loud dogs are the ones you have to watch out for,' he replied as I slowly rose back to my feet. ‘Em, you look really pale. I think I should take you home.'

As much as I didn't want our afternoon to end, I didn't protest when he led me out from under the magnolia tree and along the footpath. Things still weren't quite right in my head. A stone statue of an eagle sat above the main gates of the cemetery, its majestic wings outspread, and as we passed underneath it, I thought I saw its feathers flutter.

We walked slowly and quietly down the street. Wyn kept throwing concerned looks my way, as though he was waiting for me to faint away like some corset-wearing Jane Austen character. I felt so foolish. What must he be thinking? Wasting his day with a blundering weirdo who couldn't even stand up on her own two feet. I'd ruined everything.

‘This isn't really how I was hoping the day would end,' he said with a rueful glance. ‘Savannah has heaps of other cool things besides ice cream and cemeteries, I swear. You can say it, this was the worst tour ever.'

I looked past him at a row of beautiful old townhouses with their wooden shutters and Juliet balconies, manicured bushes loaded with vivid pink flowers out front, and the ever-present oak trees lined up along the footpath, their long, winding branches reaching out to create a canopy over the street. It was just about the prettiest street I'd ever seen. Jetlag and heat stroke aside, Savannah had already found a place in my heart. Besides, anywhere Wyn was, I wanted to be.

‘It was the best tour ever,' I insisted. ‘Even if we'd only gone to Leopold's, it would have been the greatest tour of all time. Everything else was icing on the cake. Ice cream on the cake, even.'

‘You're only being polite,' he smiled. ‘I do believe your southern manners are coming back, Miss Emily.'

When we reached the edge of Lafayette Square, Bell House just around the corner but thankfully still out of sight, I came to a reluctant stop.

‘I should probably walk myself the rest of the way,' I said. ‘Unless you want to answer a lot of awkward questions from my grandmother.'

Not that Catherine could be upset with me or Wyn. I wasn't doing anything wrong, no one had ever called this a date. He looked down, his unruly hair covering his perfect face.

‘OK,' he replied, shifting from foot to foot and staring at the ground. Why didn't he want to look at me? Unless … he was trying to work out how to let me down gently. My stomach dropped at the thought of never seeing him again, something that suddenly seemed all too possible.

‘This is the awkward part,' he said after what felt like forever.

I reached for the railings beside me and clung on tight as he raked his hair away from his face and looked up.

‘Where I ask if you want to hang out again sometime,' he finished his sentence with bright pink cheeks. ‘And hopefully you say yes then I say I'll call you and I go home happier than a guy with unlimited Leopold's for life.'

‘But you can't,' I replied, flustered when panic flashed across his features. ‘Call me, I mean. Because I don't have a phone. But I would really, really like to hang out again.'

He blew out a breath I didn't know he was holding in and the tension in his face turned into joy.

‘How about Sunday morning, nine thirty?' he suggested. ‘I've been thinking about it and I reckon I know a place you're going to love.'

‘Sunday morning is great.' I folded my arms across my chest to stop myself from throwing them up in the air to celebrate. ‘Where should I meet you?'

It was my incredibly unsubtle way of letting him know he still shouldn't come calling at the house.

‘Sunday, nine thirty a.m., Lafayette Square,' he said, chameleon eyes shining. ‘Until then, Emily James.'

We stayed right where we were, smiling at each other without saying another word until Wyn shoved his hands in his pockets and took a couple of backwards steps away from me as if struggling to break out of my orbit. But it didn't matter where he went, Wyn Evans was the sun, everything revolved around him now. I waved as he went, leaning against the railings and watching until he disappeared. It might have been the worst tour of Savannah anyone had ever given but it was, without a doubt, the greatest non-date in the history of the world.

Sunday couldn't come soon enough.