“I don’t know. Evie won’t tell me. But whatever it is, it’s got her all freaked out.” I look down at my empty finger. Where Elora’s ring should be. “I wish she’d talk to me instead.”
He flicks the lighter closed, and his flame goes out.
“What if she said things you didn’t wanna hear?”
I don’t know how to answer him, so I change the subject.
“She’s in love with you, I think.” Hart stares me. “Evie.”
“Nah.” He shakes his head. “She thinks she is. Maybe. That’s all. ’Cause of what I did for ’er.”
“What you did?”
“To Vic.” Hart grimaces, then he runs one hand over his face and sighs. Deep. He sounds as exhausted as he looks. “That piece of shit was beatin’ her black and blue.”
“Oh, God.” My stomach turns. “Evie told you that?”
“She didn’t have to. I could feel it, Grey.” Hart puts the cigarette to his lips. Then remembers it isn’t lit. “I could fuckin’ feel it. That fear of hers. And the pain. Thinkin’ nobody in the world cared if that bastard killed ’er.”
“Jesus, Hart.”
One more wound that wasn’t his, but that cut him just the same.
“And this whole town knew it, too. Not just me. You didn’t need a psychic gift to see those bruises.” Hart tries to light the cigarette again, and this time he makes it work. He sucks in smoke like oxygen. “Only nobody said a word about it.”
Psychic Capital of the World or not, people down here still live by a certain kind of code. You don’t get mixed up in what goes on behind closed doors. That’s the way it’s always been.
Honey used to tell me, Worrying about other people’s business is just one-man gossip.
“You have no idea how messed up she was last winter,” he says. “Evie. She was comin’ apart at the seams. Poor kid. And there’s Bernadette, too damn scared of her own shadow to say a word to her own asshole brother. Probably thought Vic’d start in on her again if she did.” I just stare at him, openmouthed. “Fuck, Greycie. Everybody knows how he’s always treated her.”
I think about Bernadette. Her downcast eyes, and the shawls she wears, even in the summer heat. Hart’s gone dark, and I know he’s thinking about his own mama. How she suffered all those years at the hands of his daddy.
“If Vic had started in on Evie,” he goes on, “maybe Bernadette at least figured she’d get some peace. Or maybe she was just afraid.” He twists his neck, and I hear the bones crack. “Either way, she sure as shit wasn’t ever gonna put a stop to it. And I couldn’t really blame her for that.”
“So you did.”
For the first time in my life it occurs to me that, while I’m up in Little Rock most of the year, their lives all keep going on down here. In ways I’ll never really understand.
Hart shrugs. “I went over there one night back in January. Took the shotgun. Same one my mama used. Pinned Vic up against the wall. Right in his own livin’ room. Told him I had a killer’s blood flowin’ through my veins and that I’d blow his goddamn brains out if he ever so much as laid a finger on Evie again. Or Bernadette, either.” He takes a long drag off that cigarette. “I said they’d be pickin’ bits of his skull out of the wallpaper for the next ten years. Like we did my old man’s.”
“Oh, Hart,” is all I can think to say. No wonder he’s Evie’s hero.
He rakes his fingers through dark, tangled curls and breathes out smoke like a dragon.
“I don’t think he’s touched either one of ’em since.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you,” I tell him. Vic keeps a bunch of old guns lying around, and he almost always has a pistol on him.
Hart smirks. “He was drunk as a skunk. Never saw me comin’。”
Something horrible occurs to me. “Do you think Victor could have had something to do with whatever happened to Elora? Maybe as a way to get back at you?”
That would make so much sense. What if the secrets Elora is whispering in Evie’s ear are all about Victor? Evie’s own uncle. What if that’s what she can’t stand to hear?
Hart shakes his head. “I thought about that, believe me. And I sure as shit wouldn’t put it past him. But Vic was up at bingo in Kinter that night. Came back on the same boat as Mama and Leo. And that was after midnight.”