Free On Folly Beach by Karen White

though it, almost running into Martha’s broad back, her dark skin gleaming in the winter sun like an omen. The laundry had been taken down from the lines, making the bottle tree a beacon in the backyard like the Morris Island lighthouse.
    Lulu tucked her chin into her neck and clutched her hands behind her to make her look sorry. “Yes, ma’am?”
    “I don’t need to be asking who put that thing up there in the yard. Miss Maggie works too hard and Miss Cat’s too lazy to make time for something like that.”
    Lulu felt a finger on her chin raising her head so she could meet Martha’s troubled eyes. “We don’t mess with things we don’t understand, you hear? You don’t know what things you’re letting into your soul when you fool around with this bad stuff. It ain’t Christian, and it don’t belong here.”
    Lulu made her lower lip tremble. “But it’s only bad if you think of it that way. I just see something pretty. And . . .” She hesitated long enough to make Martha start worrying.
    “And what, sugar?”
    “And mostly it reminds me of Jim. He told me how they had the bottle trees in Louisiana where he was from. It makes me think that he’s nearby, and it makes me happy again.”
    “Oh, child,” said Martha with a voice that didn’t sound so angry anymore. She wrapped her arms around Lulu and squeezed. “Jim was a good man, and I know you miss him. But you shouldn’t use something evil to remember him by.”
    Lulu rested her chin on the mound of Martha’s stomach and looked up at the dark face of the woman who’d known her since she was born. “This is the one thing I have left of him, Martha. Please don’t take it away. I don’t think I could stand to lose one more thing.”
    Martha’s eyes softened and Lulu knew she’d won. “And I promise to make two of the branches into a cross as a more fitting memorial to Jim, if that would make you feel any better.”
    Lulu felt Martha’s hands loosening around her. “Well, I figure if you do that, it should be all right. You just do it right away, you hear? Before anybody else sees it.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Lulu said solemnly before walking out into the backyard, being careful to keep her head down. A small smile appeared on her lips as she thought how easy that had been. She turned her head back to Martha, unable to hide her grin, but her smile dimmed on her lips as she saw that Martha wasn’t smiling, too. The older woman was looking at her with narrowed eyes and tight lips, shaking her head.
    Lulu reached the tree and knelt in front of it, wishing very hard that it did have magical powers despite what she’d just told Martha. They all needed a little magic in their lives right now. Everything seemed so off-balance, like being on the Ferris wheel and getting stuck at the top, the sickly-scary feeling you got in the bottom of your stomach when you knew what was going to happen but you couldn’t stop it.
    She felt that way now, and all the praying in church hadn’t made it go away. But her bottle tree, with its colored glass and breathless sound, comforted her as no one could, making her believe in things you couldn’t see. She’d change it if that was what Martha wanted her to do, but she wouldn’t stop believing. Sitting back on her heels, she closed her eyes and listened to the winter wind sing inside the mouths of the bottles and tried to remember what Jim looked like when he smiled.

CHAPTER 4

    FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA
    July 2009
     
    The interstates between Indiana and South Carolina had been laid out in the 1950s at the direction of President Eisenhower as part of a national defense system for the entire country. Emmy knew this from the hours of meticulously poring over the atlases she’d found in her mother’s store, her fingers pressed to the spidery veins of roads and byways, through places that sounded familiar and others, like Enka Village and South Congaree, that seemed as if they belonged in an entirely different part