Free A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) by Dot Hutchison Page A

than most people, even if he can’t see the faeries he believes in so fervently.
    It takes more effort for him to kneel than it used to. He must be eighty if he’s a day, and he can barely move when the rain is gathering, but he refuses to retire. The most help he’ll accept is letting others clip the hedges and mow the lawns. He sinks his knees into the damp soil and leans over the violets to search the blooms beyond for invading weeds.
    He isn’t going to say anything else without a reason.
    I open the book in my lap, run my fingers across the shape of the letters without seeing them. Like Jack, I always know more than I say, but I think of the sorrow in Hamlet’s glowing eyes some nights, and other nights the rage, and I know it’s worth whatever momentary pain I have to pay.
    “He’s a ghost, you know.”
    He sits up so quickly that his back seizes, and the next few minutes are lost to a grimace of pain and slow, deep breaths to relax the muscles. Finally, he looks back at me over his shoulder, his thin white ponytail streaked with dirt and bits of plant matter. “You’ve seen him?”
    “Every night,” I whisper. “He’ll find his voice soon; I think he has something he needs very badly to say.”
    “Knowledge is a dangerous thing, Miss Ophelia. Knowledge cast us from the garden that was to the mercy of the demons and the fair folk. All the sins of the world, just from knowing for the first time what sin was.”
    “I thought you didn’t believe in sin.”
    “No, but I believe in Nature, and in the acts that go against it.”
    “Meaning?”
    He doesn’t answer right away, and once again, I wait. He’ll either say it or he won’t. I think he will, because the conversation has already come this far, but he just as clearly doesn’t want to say it. “I hear the funeral home did a good job of presenting him for the funeral,” he says eventually. “Made his face smooth and stern.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Wasn’t how it was when he died.”
    I remember death, peaceful and serene, but I know that’s not how death always is. “Is a heart attack painful?”
    “Fearful painful, until you can’t feel it anymore,” he answers absently, and he should know, having had several of them over the past two decades. “But his face was contorted past that level of pain. Whatever he was feeling had to be worse.”
    “So he didn’t die of a heart attack.”
    “I stripped his shirt to try CPR. Knew it was too late, still needed to try. He had a rash that spread across the skin, rough like oak bark. Never heard of a heart attack causing that.” With a deep sigh, he digs in the chest pocket of his stained overalls and withdraws a small syringe, like the kind doctors use to take blood samples. A large bead of potter’s clay covers the needle’s point. Only a trace of liquid remains, milky but mostly clear, too thick to be water. Dirty fingerprints cloud the surface of the glass, grains of soil caught in the ridges of the handle. He hands it across to me, the glass cool despite the sunlight that beats against us. “Found that half buried in the flowers. Fingerprints are mine, weren’t any on it when I pulled it from the ground.”
    “Poison?”
    “Most like.” He scratches at his bald pate, leaving smears of earth on his leathery skin. “Don’t know what kind, don’t want to. Even if he had a reason to, he couldn’t have taken it himself and buried it in the flowers; he didn’t have any gloves on him, no dirt either except his shoes.”
    I know I should be more shocked, more appalled, but ghosts always come back for a reason. Something had to work against the blessings of the priest and the sanctified ground. I roll the syringe across my palm, careful not to touch the needle or handle.
    “Miss Ophelia.”
    I look away from the syringe to see Jack watching me expectantly.
    “I was the one to find him, but do you remember the first here?”
    I was reading on a blanket by the tiny field of lavender