Between the Spark and the Burn (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea) - Hardcover

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April Genevieve Tucholke digs classic movies, redheaded villains, big kitchens, and discussing murder at the dinner table. She and her husband--a librarian, former rare-book dealer, and journalist--live in Oregon. Between the Spark and the Burn is her second novel.

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Chapter 1

MY DEAD GRANDMOTHER Freddie once told me that the Devil created all the fear in the world.

But then, the Devil once told me that it’s easier to forgive someone for scaring you than for making you cry.

The problem with River West Redding was that he’d done both to me.

Since then I’d spent months just waiting. Waiting on my rotting mansion’s wide front porch, on its secret little beach at the bottom of the cliffs, in its nefarious guesthouse. And I was getting antsy. I’d tasted love and terror last summer, and it left a sweetness in my mouth. I wanted to go somewhere. Anywhere. I wanted to make something happen. I wanted to get bone-shaking scared and face my fear. I wanted to get scratched. Bruised. Bloody.

River and his brother Brodie were gone. Long gone. Doing God knows what. Alone. Or together. Who knew.

Was River the Devil?

Was Brodie?

Mostly I tried not to think of them. Either of them. Of what they were up to or the trouble they were causing or the lies they were lying.

And mostly that didn’t work. At all.

Where are you, River?

Silence and not a word. Not for months. Neely had gone looking, but nothing. Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe it meant River was keeping his promise. But then why hadn’t he come back? He’d glowed up my damn heart last summer and then left without a trace. He’d been gone so long now that I could barely remember the smell of his skin. Or the way his eyes lit up when he lied. And lied. And lied.

River, what would you say if you could see me now, lonely little book-reading Violet, talking about getting in trouble and making something happen? Would you crooked-smile at me with that glint in your eyes and say, “I like you, Vi”? Or would you look worried and run your hands through your hair, and wonder what the hell had changed inside me since last summer?

A gust of cold wind blew in off the sea and smacked me in the face. Instead of wincing, I smiled. I had a blanket around my shoulders, coffee in a nearby thermos, and a pair of binoculars in my hand. The sea stretched on forever before me, and my thoughts went with it.

I’d read stories of widows who never recovered from the Death at Sea of their captain husbands. Widows who spent their days wandering the seashore, waiting.

But that wasn’t what I was doing down here, under the moody sky by the capering waves in the hidden little cove by my cliff-hugging tumbledown mansion that my grandmother Freddie had named Citizen Kane.

My Freddie-blue eyes squinted under the cold, glaring sun. I’d starting watching the ships again, out there on the Big Blue. I’d started wishing I was on them.

I sighed as a freezing winter breeze blew across my neck. A wave crashed into the sand and stretched its long fingers toward me. It drenched my feet and the hem of Freddie’s red dress—which I had stupidly worn down to the beach when I knew better. The seawater made the dress look redder, like it was blushing.

My hands pressed into cold ground. I leaned back. Closed my eyes. The sand rubbed against the Brodie-scars on my wrists, and they started hurting. But it was a good hurt, like cold snow melting on warm skin. Or like kissing River’s lips after he lied.

Maybe it was River’s magic that made me think of him still. Made me talk to him like I used to talk to Freddie. Maybe it was that bit of glow still lingering in me like the last tingle of opium in an addict’s blood.

River, I found something.

Heard something.

Freddie once caught me climbing a tree in the Citizen’s backyard. I was twenty feet off the ground and still going up when I heard her voice. GET DOWN RIGHT NOW, VIOLET WHITE. The second my feet hit earth she wrapped her arms around me and hugged me for five whole minutes, maybe more.

“Your life is not your own, Vi,” she said. “Don’t you know that? It belongs to the people who love you. So you need to take better care of it.”

Freddie was right, I supposed.

I wasn’t taking very good care of my life. Not since River came into it.

And yet . . .

I walked back up the steep trail toward home, my wet dress hitting my boots with a smack, each step. And I sang a little song to myself, something that I made up as I went along, something that was melancholic and nursery rhyme, something that sounded a little bit like A-hunting I will go, a-hunting I will go.

Chapter 2

I FOUND MY parents painting out in the shed—it got great afternoon sun, even in winter, which it was. It sat there, squat and chipping paint, in its little shaft of sunshine, wedged in between the skeletal winter woods and the overgrown maze and the now empty guesthouse and the beautiful, buffeted, browbeaten, salt-stained Citizen Kane.

I loved the ocean. Its sounds were like lullabies and mothers’ voices—I’d grown up on them, a soundtrack of lapping waves and seagulls and storms.

Yet the rollicking sea sea sea was a bully. I reached up to the low roof of the shed and knocked off a couple of icicles. A rotted piece of wood fell with them. I left it on the ground and went inside.

My brother was in there too, painting away, and the redheaded orphan boy, Jack. My next-door neighbor Sunshine was sitting on the floor, watching. I sat down next to her and enjoyed the cluttering bodies and the burnt smell of the space heater in the corner.

It was Christmas Eve and pretty much everyone I knew was packed into a painting shed. There wouldn’t be any baking, or decorating, or caroling. Not with the Whites, not at the Citizen. But that was all right with me.

“So I’ve decided to go after River.”

I said it quick, just like that, before I had a chance to think better of it.

“Who is River?” my mother asked, head snapping up, looking straight at me. Really looking, for once. Most of the time her eyes were distracted and dreamy when she talked to me, as if her mind were clicking through colors, figuring out the exact peachy shade of my skin, the perfect wheat-yellow combination of my blond hair. My parents painted and the rest of us moved around them in a blur.

“Neely’s older brother,” Luke said when I didn’t answer. They searched my face, Luke and Jack and Sunshine, trying to puzzle out why I’d brought up River after all this time, why I’d dipped my toes into that mess of lying, glowing, out of control, brown-eyed, brown-haired rich boy.

The hell if I knew why I did it. The words just fell out of my head, out of my mouth, like leaves off trees. Like snow out of the sky.

Maybe there was something in the air.

I sighed.

I wondered if Neely would be back for Christmas.

I missed him.

I missed the way he reminded me of River—the way he drank espresso with narrowed eyes and ran his hands through his hair.

Though Neely’s hair was blond, like mine, not brown, like River’s.

And Brodie, the other brother, the half brother, his was red. Red, red, red.

I missed the way Neely laughed at everything. Redheaded cowboys with knives. River’s lying. Everything.

I missed the way he loved his older brother so damn much and at the same time really liked putting his fists in River’s face.

Neely had run off three times already, trying to find his older brother, trying not to think about his younger one.

But nothing.

I wanted Neely to come back. But not because he looked like River. And not because I was restless and cabin-fevered and dying for something to happen.

I wanted him to come...