Charming Grace Read Online Free Page B

stood out like crimson paint splattered across pink balloons. I dropped to my heels and looked at the flowers. At least a dozen of them were speckled with the strange color. I reached out slowly and dabbed a fingertip into a dime-sized spot. My finger came away crimson. I studied it, bending close to the red dab on my own skin. Blood. Blood.
    I gave a soft shriek and shot to my feet, looking around wildly. “Harp! You’re alive!”
    No answer. The blood-freckled ladyslippers led me across the floor of the secluded cove. By the time I reached the other side I was nearly running. The glen’s west edge was bordered by a shallow gulley, just a crevice of exposed roots and muddy rain puddles.
    And there he was.
    Harp lay in the mud among the lost roots of trees, looking up at me like something from a horror movie. He was bony-thin and sallow, filthy, smelling like a dead thing on the road, his pecan-brown hair matted in long wads that clumped around his neck. He clutched a wrap of oily black animal fur around him from shoulders to knees; later I would find out it was a crudely skinned pelt from an old bear he’d found dead during the winter. He held a ragged ladyslipper in one fist. The bloom had wilted—no wonder, because he’d pulled the whole plant up by the roots. Even that ladyslipper was speckled with his blood. He’d wrapped his cheap tennis shoes in pieces of the same bear skin. Below the pelt, the left leg of his jeans was stained and torn, but serviceable. It was the other leg that held my attention. The denim was ripped open and bloody from the knee down. The jagged bone of the lower leg stuck up from a putrid gash.
    I gagged then wiped my mouth and climbed down in the gulley and sat beside him. “Harp Vance,” I moaned. “You smell like you’re dead, but you’re not.”
    He blinked slowly, struggling to focus. Finally he formed words through cracked, bleeding lips. “Is this like that day in the dime store? Are you an angel?”
    I fell in love with him at that moment. “I’m surely not any kind of angel.”
    “My leg’s busted. I fell chasin’ a deer.”
    “How bad does it hurt?”
    “Not at all, no more. I can’t feel it.” He paused. “It’s time for me to die.”
    “No it’s not! Don’t ever say that.”
    “Don’t tell nobody where I’m at. They’ll put me away. Somewhere I don’t want to go.”
    “No, they won’t. I promise. I swear.”
    “Where’s my sister? Is she all right?”
    “She…had to leave. My grandmother got a postcard. She went up north.”
    His eyes, large and dull and full of pain, glimmered with tears. But his mouth tightened. “Good. Then she got away. She’s free. So now I can die.”
    I took him by the shoulders. “She told my grandmother to find you and take care of you. And G. Helen has tried! All of us have tried! We want to help you! You have to believe me. You have to.”
    “What made you come here?”
    “ I dreamed about you. ”
    He stared up at me, blinking slowly, only half-conscious. “Nobody,” he said in a slurred voice, “Dreams about me .”
    I shook him. “I’ll run all the way to my house. And you better be alive when I get back with help. The ladyslippers helped me find you, and they’ll take care of you.” I touched the wilted one in his fist. “See? One’s been keeping you company.”
    “I . . . I pulled it up by accident. Just grabbin’ for a hold on anything. You’re the only ladyslipper I believe in.” He shut his eyes and his head rolled to one side. I squealed and put my hand under his nose, the way I’d seen TV doctors do it. The soft feather of his breath warmed my skin. I staggered to my feet. “Don’t die,” I whispered. “I need you.” Lost in a world below the level of the flowering earth, he didn’t hear me.
    I ran for his salvation, and mine.

    What I said about being born in the ladyslipper glen was true.
    My art-student mother, Wilhemina “Willy” Osterman Bagshaw, of Connecticut was always reckless