Devil's Oven Read Online Free PDF Page B

makeup—including several sets of false eyelashes—and a card that added minutes to the pay-as-you-go cell phone she had tossed in the parking lot. She had twelve dollars left in the zippered change purse in her back pocket.
    Walking, she kept her head bowed, and stuck as close as she could to the parts of the road covered with more gravel than mud. There were homelier places than Windswept Holiday Park on and around Devil’s Oven, but few of them gave off such strong waves of despair. She remembered it as new, the dozens of trailers painted vivid apricot or robin’s-egg blue, and the cheerful, twelve-foot neon sign posted at the entrance. Now the faded paint couldn’t hide the auras of gray and maroon and brown and green that bathed the people who lived here. Almost no one was happy.
    Most of the trailer park’s residents didn’t show themselves until noon. But sleep was something different to Jolene, something none of them would understand. She had lain within the rocky flesh of Devil’s Oven for three decades, neither waking nor sleeping. Conscious but not breathing, unaware of time passing. It had been just two weeks since she had come—naked and cold—off the mountain, close to the electric co-op facility where Charity’s boyfriend, Eli, worked as a night watchman. But already she was feeling penned-in, anxious to get on with what she had come back to do. Whatever it was. Why can’t I be certain?
    Again, she was a different person. Again, nineteen. The face she discovered in the soft light of Charity’s bathroom mirror was much thinner than she remembered. Her blue eyes and hair, once as white as a snow fox’s fur, had gone dark as chestnuts, as though being buried all those years had caused them to take on the same color as the mountain’s scant topsoil.
    But how she looked didn’t matter to Jolene. She was done with that foolishness. The first time she had been released, confused and terrified, from the mountain’s heart, she had called herself Mary, unable to think of any other name. It was the name given to her by her mother, from whom she had fled over a century earlier. It was the only thing she had escaped with. This time, she had chosen Jolene, because of the song.
    She did have a mother once, and a father who called himself a preacher when it was convenient. She knew good from evil, and a hundred or thirty years didn’t change their definitions. Which one applied to her, she wasn’t sure. The choices she made, the things she did, the people she touched weren’t really choices. There was a hand guiding her. A strong hand. She was its revelation in the world.
    •  •  •
    The Git ’n’ Go Mini-Mart was out on the highway, a six- or seven-minute walk from Charity’s trailer. But already Jolene’s clothes felt heavy with rain. The sullen teenager behind the counter didn’t bother to look up from her magazine when she entered the store.
    Jolene took a blue energy drink from the cooler at the back, and lingered in the aisle packed with chips and packaged cakes and donuts. She picked up a bag of corn chips and a pair of orange-iced cupcakes and took everything to the register.
    “Five eighty-eight,” the girl said after ringing it up. “You want a bag?”
    Jolene shook her head. “No, thanks,” she said.
    The girl went back to flipping through her magazine before Jolene was out the door.
    If the girl had acknowledged her or been the slightest bit friendly, Jolene might have said something kind to her, or suggested she get to a doctor. The girl’s aura was a sickly gray-green, and there were fist-sized spots of black hovering over her liver and lungs. But Jolene didn’t consider herself perfect, or even necessarily good. She couldn’t save everyone. The only thing she was certain of was that she was here to help Ivy, the girl-now-woman who had been her daughter for five short years.
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    Jolene stood in the gravel driveway, adjusting to the timbre of the land that