First Frost Read Online Free Page A

instead of making them.
    And no one noticed .
    As the labels on the backs of the jars attested, the lemon verbena candies still quieted children and eased sore throats. The lavender candies still gave people a sense of happiness. And everyone still swore the rose candies made them think of their first loves.
    But the candies now contained nothing from the Waverley garden, that mystical source of everything Claire held true.
    In weaker moments, she found herself thinking, What if it wasn’t real? What if Tyler was right and Waverleys were odd just because everyone had been told that for generations, because they just happened to live next to an apple tree that bloomed in the wrong time of year? What if the little girl Claire used to be, the one left here as a child, clinging to her grandmother Mary’s apron, had latched on to the myth of this family simply because she’d so desperately wanted roots? What if the flowers weren’t special? What if she wasn’t? Instead of keeping the Waverley name local and mysterious like her grandmother, she’d opened it up to wider speculation. She’d wanted the attention, she’d wanted more people to know her gift, as if the more people who knew, the more real it would be. But she’d begun to wonder if she had betrayed a secret her grandmother had entrusted her with.
    It didn’t help that, at this time of year, Claire felt the loss of her grandmother Mary the strongest. Claire had been twenty-four when she’d lost her. That had been twenty years ago, but Claire could still smell Mary’s fig and pepper bread sometimes, and there were times she was sure Mary was still here, in the way a carton of soured milk would tip over into the sink, or the mixing bowls on the shelf would seem to coordinate themselves by color overnight. She missed how natural everything felt with her grandmother around, how substantial.
    She stepped away from Mariah’s window to go to the kitchen. She paused, then turned back. Across the street, on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Kranowski’s house, she thought she saw a shadow. She squinted, her nose almost pressed to the glass, and the shadow began to take form.
    There was someone standing in the darkness between the streetlights. He was tall and wearing something light, like a gray suit. His hair was silver. Everything else was obscured, as if his skin were invisible.
    But he was definitely staring in this direction.
    She made sure Mariah’s window was locked, then she quickly went downstairs and pulled a flashlight out of the drawer of the table by the door.
    She unlocked the door and opened it, stepping onto the porch. The chilled floorboards made her toes curl.
    There was no one across the street now.
    â€œHello?” she called.
    She flicked on the flashlight and aimed the light on the front yard. A breeze flew through, picking up some leaves and swirling them around, the sound like fluttering pages in a quiet library. Mrs. Kranowski’s dog barked a few times. Then everything was quiet.
    There was a scent of something familiar in the air, though, something she couldn’t quite place, a combination of cigarettes and stout beer and sweat and, strangely enough, cheap cherry lip gloss.
    Everything meant something, in Claire’s experience. And this vision of a man made the hair on her arms stand on end.
    First frost was always an unpredictable time, but this year it felt more … desperate than others.
    Something was about to happen.

 
    2
    Earlier that day, when the old man had stepped off the bus and onto the green in downtown Bascom, he had looked around with dismay, wondering how his life had gotten to this point.
    He was usually one step ahead of the colder weather as he traveled, doing jobs as he made his way from the north to Florida every year. Hoards of carnival people wintered there. Mostly old-schoolers like him, who never referred to the past as the good old days.
    But he needed a