Thea Redgrave stood in her bedroom, in the half hour directly after sunset, and deftly folded the clothes she was bringing with her on this wild goose chase. Her flannel button-ups and worn jeans, though they were years old and desperately faded, were folded with an effortless, militaristic precision and placed just as neatly in her small pack.

“Thea? You home?”

Ray Goodman’s voice echoed through her rickety, drafty, utterly beloved farmhouse. She could hear him stomping the mud off his feet on the front porch before he came and stood in her living room.

She strode out of her bedroom on impossibly long legs inherited from her father’s side of the family. The effect was that she always moved fast while looking like she was moving slow. It was something she’d come to value in her life, and she particularly attributed that to her success with all the animals she kept on the farm. She cared for them, quickly and efficiently, but never spooked them in the process.

“Evening, Ray,” Thea said as she came through the kitchen to the living room, her hands tucked in the front pockets of her jeans and her hair, shower-damp, tied up in an economical knot to keep it out of her face. It was unusual for her to have a visitor at this hour, and seeing as how Ray was the person she’d charged with taking care of her farm while she was gone, Thea got an almighty sinking in her gut at the sight of him. Was he here to cancel on her? Tell her she was asking him too big of a favor?

“Sorry to drop in like this,” Ray said, holding his baseball hat in his gnarled, pre-arthritic fingers. “But I didn’t want you to leave without somebody saying goodbye.”

Thea Redgrave had a big secret. Somewhere deep in her chest was a pulsing, beating soft spot, filled with maple syrup. Sticky sweet. And right now, hearing Ray Goodman’s words, it warmed right up. “Ah, Ray.”

“Yeah, Loretta thought, since you don’t have nobody here to see you off…” he trailed off and twisted his hat.

The maple syrup hardened back into sap in her chest. She restrained her sigh. Ray was sweet enough to want to come here to give her company before she left town. His wife, on the other hand, would never miss an opportunity to point out that Thea didn’t have a man, or even a family, here on this homestead. Thea supposed that she should just continue to ignore all the passive aggressive quasi-kindnesses from Loretta Goodman. The recipes she sent over ‘in case Thea wanted to start trying her hand at cooking’. Loretta’s version of the work a woman was supposed to be doing in a hardened, unforgiving landscape like Flintrock, Montana. Or the special dirt-removing laundry detergent Loretta had dropped off ‘to try and get some of those mud stains off all your clothes’. On the surface, it was a neighborly thing to do, kind even. But Thea knew it was just Loretta’s way of reminding her that she had no business having muddy clothes on from working in the barn or the field out back all day long.

And this was just one more thing to add to that list. If Ray himself hadn’t been the kindest man west of the Mississippi, twisting his hat and looking for all the world like he was truly gonna miss her, Thea might have just booted him right out of there with the message for Loretta to go suck a lemon. But as it was, he took another tentative step toward her.

“You’ve had a good dinner, then? Something to set your stomach before you travel?”

His question was so thoughtful, and so like something her grandfather would have asked her, that Thea felt that sweet spot warm up again and she went ahead and pushed Loretta completely from her mind.

“I had a big old omelette and potatoes not half an hour ago.”
“Breakfast for dinner,” Ray shook his head, and looked at the ground, a little smile on his face. “Loretta says that’ll confuse your stomach and throw off your sleep, but it was always my favorite.”

“Well, you can have breakfast for dinner as much as you want while you’re staying here.”

Ray’s eyes lit up, and it occurred to Thea for the very first time that perhaps asking Ray to look after her land and her animals while she was gone was as much a favor to him as it was a burden. His and Loretta’s land didn’t need much tending this time of year and she’d even offered Ray her guest bedroom, seeing as how their homesteads were a few miles apart and it would be less of a pain for him to tend the animals come dawn if all he had to do was roll out of bed.

Ray cleared his throat and dropped his hands to his sides, his hat still clenched tightly in one fist. Thea immediately recognized the signs of a man about to say something he was scared to say, something he felt he truly had to.

“Are you sure you need to go do this, child?”

She wished she hadn’t been quite so forthcoming with Ray about the details of her trip, even though she hadn’t told him nearly all of it. As far as he knew, she was taking a solo camping trip in Northern Michigan, one last way for her to say goodbye to her grandfather.

“It was the last thing he asked me to do, Ray.” That much, at least, was true. “And it won’t be the first time a woman takes a camping trip on her own. I won’t go looking for trouble, and I can handle myself besides.”

“Well, I’ve seen proof of that.” He sure had. Ray smiled faintly to himself. He’d known Thea Redgrave since she was a two-year-old girl. She and her two older brothers had been unceremoniously dumped at Chet Redgrave’s homestead by their good-for-nothing parents and from that day on, they’d been Chet’s kids. He’d seen Thea grow up on this hard land, surrounded by hard people. Chet knew that she wasn’t a woman scared of much. And certainly not of hard work or hard conditions. She’d grown more and more beautiful as time went on, with her long, black hair, wildly pale skin covered head to toe in freckles. And those eyes. Witch’s eyes, Loretta always said. They were the palest aquamarine blue. Like sunlight through the Caribbean Sea. Not that Ray had ever seen the Caribbean Sea, but come on, he had an internet connection. He thought, privately, that her undeniable beauty had made her more closed off and a bit prickly over the years. As she had no intention of ever seeking a companion, and companions sure attempted to seek her.

The point was, Ray had witnessed Thea Redgrave handle herself in all sorts of situations, with all sorts of obstacles, and he’d yet to see her fail. He supposed that this ticking, nagging worry he felt at the thought of her leaving Montana was understandable and a bit extraneous. He shouldn’t burden her with it.

“Besides,” she told him, “I think it’s important that I do this. Leave for a bit. In a way, this place still feels like his. It might always. But maybe if I leave, when I come back, it’ll feel like mine.”

Ray nodded his head. Made sense to him. But then, Ray had always believed that women tended to make quite a bit of sense. Everything that Loretta said made sense in the moment. It wasn’t usually until much later, in the quiet of some bit of labor around his farm, that Ray would piece through her words again, try and figure out if they actually held water. He figured he’d have to do the same for Thea’s words. And whether they held water or not, by the time he’d figured it out, she’d be long gone on her trip.

Oh well. That was the way of the world. Time was a funny thing. There never seemed to be enough of it. But like all the people in their rural, hard-working community, Ray just did the best he could and called it a day when the bedside lamp turned out.

“I left instructions about Sarah’s medicine,” Thea said, moving toward a long, handwritten note in neat, precise handwriting. “She doesn’t like it much but the trick is—”
“I’ve administered udder cream to a cow before, Thea.”
“Right. Of course. And just so that you remember, I heard coyotes on the back acreage about ten days ago, so I’ve been double-checking the—”

“I heard them too, and I’m not gonna let coyotes find their way into your barn.”

“I know. One more—”

“Thea.” Now he just shoved that baseball cap onto his head and closed the distance between them. “I’ve been working this land around here for damn near forty years. I’m not gonna let it all go to hell because you’ve decided to go see the world.” He wrapped his arms around her in a good firm hug.

She laughed into the shoulder of his jean jacket and closed her eyes against the smell. Tobacco and dust. Just like her grandfather. “The world? I’d hardly call Northern Michigan ‘the world’.”

“It’s part of the world now, ain’t it?”

She squeezed him once and stepped back. “Guess you’re right about that.”

Ray stepped back and knocked one hand on the doorframe of her living room. “Guess I’ll see you in a few weeks, then.”

“That’s right. I’ll call and check in.”

“You be safe, darlin’.”

She nodded at him, unable to completely verbally commit to that, given the fact that she had absolutely no idea what the hell she was about to get herself into.

She saw Ray to the door and quickly turned back to her bedroom, getting the last of her things packed. Her few toiletries, no makeup. She was bringing a lightweight, single-man tent and a down sleeping bag that she strapped tightly to the outside of her pack—this was going to qualify as a carry-on if it was her last earthly accomplishment. The rest of her camping equipment she’d acquire when she got there. She couldn’t very well fly with a jackknife and a lighter.

The last thing she packed would have looked like a simple scrap of yellowed paper to the casual observer.  It was on thick paper that, strangely enough, never seemed to crease or wrinkle. On one side was a map with a small star in the Northwest quadrant of it. On the flip side, which Thea didn’t bother turning over to see, considering she’d already read it a hundred times and didn’t see the point in a hundred and first, were words in hand-scripted, flowing cursive:

 

 

On the seventh day

Of the seventh month

when the seventh moon

falls dark,

You, the seventh soul,

will find what you seek.

 

 

She carefully packed the parchment, clipped her pack closed, and tossed it on her back. She flipped off the lights to her house, knowing that Ray would be there later tonight for his first evening on duty. Thea grabbed her truck keys from the hook on the wall of the front entryway. She touched, for just a second, the peeling rosebud wallpaper that the grandmother she’d never met had so painstakingly put up. And then, pressing her fingers to her lips first, she pressed the pads of her fingertips to the glass of a photograph of the man who’d raised her. Chet Redgrave, in stark, shadowed black and white, stared back at her. A candid shot of a hardened man. He’d never have posed for a photo. But she was infinitely grateful that her brother, Will, had had the audacity to take this photo without warning their grandfather first. Because there he was, staring at Thea with those blue eyes that matched her own.

She knew what he would say to her, were he there to say it. “Go on, then. Do what you have to do.”

So, she did just that. Thea locked up the farmhouse and jogged, pack and all, to her old, red pickup truck. She took one last look at the faded white house in her rearview mirror as her truck kicked up whirlwinds of dust in the fading light of the evening. There it was, she thought, her whole life in that square of reflective glass.

 

***

 

Caroline Clifton flung the covers off of herself and sprang from the hotel bed where she’d barely slept a wink that entire night. She whipped back the track curtains and stared out at the cars parked in the gray parking lot. What a gorgeous morning! Well, almost morning.

The sun was still just a hint of periwinkle at the edge of the earth. The parking lot lights are still on, for God’s sake, Caroline.

Caroline could hear her husband’s voice in her head as clearly as if he were lying in the bed behind her. Which he definitely was not. He was always exasperated with her habit of rising bright and early. And by ‘rising’, she meant springing head-first into the day. Which was what she did on any normal day.

But this was not a normal day. She turned from the window and practically danced to the windowless bathroom of the hotel room to brush her teeth. Today was July fifth.

Which meant it was just two days from being the seventh day of the seventh month. Just two little teeny weeny days before the total lunar eclipse on July seventh. The first total lunar eclipse on July seventh in centuries.

Which meant that Caroline—the seventh soul!—was just two measly, puny days away from finding what she sought!

It occurred to her, as she spat out her toothpaste in the sink and turned on the shower, that if there were another person in possession of the map that was in her purse, they might be excited about finding the actual thing they sought. Caroline, on the other hand, was sublimely excited to find out what it was that she sought.

She couldn’t think of a more perfect gift than following her map to the marked star, witnessing a total lunar eclipse, and finding out what the hell she’d been searching for all these years.

Because if there was one thing that Caroline knew about herself, it was that she’d been searching for something. She just… had no idea what that was. She’d thought she’d found it eight years ago, at the ripe old age of twenty, when she’d first met Peter Clifton. But over the last few years, the feeling of looking for something she’d never find had slowly started creeping back into her life.

She’d find herself marching into a room, a specific purpose in mind, only to get there and realize that she had no idea why she’d walked in there in the first place. Now, she knew she was absent-minded in the extreme. She’d lose her car keys for days, only to have Peter find them in the fridge, next to the orange juice. Once, she even drove all the way across town to bring Peter’s cat to the vet, only to arrive realizing she’d brought an empty cat carrier. The cat was still lounging in a patch of sun on the chaise in their bedroom.

Peter, an orderly soul to his core, was driven to near madness in his frustration with her. And so, over the years, she’d taught herself systems and habits that seemed to quell the worst of her absentmindedness. To be honest, the advent of iPhones had been of huge advantage to her. There was, after all, an app for everything. And the only thing that Caroline had to remember to do these days was consult her phone for what she was supposed to do next. Ah! Pick up the dry cleaning! Don’t forget to set the timer on the rice maker! Call back the painters about that fresh coat for the living room!

She’d been doing so much better recently. Everything in its right place. Which kept Caroline busy while Peter was spending long hours at work. Which was nice, because it kept her from being too lonely.

Caroline scrubbed the hotel shampoo into her scalp and hair just a bit too hard and she winced. It wasn’t a particularly fancy hotel that she’d booked on the border of Ohio and Michigan. And the pedestrian smell of the off-brand shampoo they’d provided in the shower both delighted and depressed her. It delighted her because, quite honestly, all pretty things delighted her. And this shampoo was the loveliest shade of pearly white and smelled clean. But it depressed her because were Peter here, he would have criticized her for forgetting her own shampoo and then told her she smelled like a man. It was a rather mannish scent, but Caroline didn’t mind.

She swallowed the lump in her throat, and when it didn’t completely clear, she did what she always did to get herself breathing easily again. She sang a little tune. Nothing special, just a few familiar notes strung together. Though she sang quietly, her full, melodious voice echoed around the shower, rising up with the steam, taking her spirits with it. Singing, the most private thing she ever did, never ceased to buoy her.

Besides. She had just forty-eight little hours before she found this thing that she’d apparently been seeking all her life. She didn’t have time to be down on herself for all her mistakes and shortcomings.

She was the seventh soul, for goodness’ sake! And she’d driven all the way from New Jersey (she’d had no idea that Pennsylvania was such an unforgivingly wide state). And now there was the simple matter of a six-hour drive to Northern Michigan. Which would put her in the general area of the star on that map. And then all she had to do was find the clearing between the river and the swamp, which wouldn’t be too hard, considering the phone, the compass, the GPS device, and the five other maps of the area that Caroline had ordered off the internet.

And then she’d have what she desperately desired. Answers. Answers to the questions Caroline was barely brave enough to ask herself.

 

 

***

 

Jean Luc LaTour sat in a rather dingy motel room, clothes on, shoes on, over top of the bedspread. The blue of the television flickered across the room and so did the light from his phone, which was blowing up with phone calls practically every two minutes.

He knew who was calling and he didn’t want to talk.

Even sitting halfway up, his colossal feet threatened to hang off the bed. He would have been better off saving the money and sleeping in his car. Rich as he was, he was just as frugal and hadn’t wanted to spring the extra cost for a king-sized bed. So, here he was, all 6’6” of him, basically slipping off each edge of the bed. He shifted and could have sworn the damn thing creaked under his weight.

But he definitely wasn’t going back out there to ask for a better or bigger room. The clerk who’d checked him in had definitely recognized him. Jean Luc didn’t want to give the kid another chance to work up the courage to ask for an autograph or a selfie with the famous Jean Luc LaTour. He didn’t have enough energy to deal with a fanboy tonight.

All he wanted was to sleep and wake up tomorrow. Tomorrow. Finally. The day that Jean Luc used to dream about, and now he only dreaded. He’d spent so much of his life thinking about July seventh, the day of the total lunar eclipse. Jean Luc almost laughed, realizing that what he was really looking forward to was July eighth. When all this was finally over.

He almost laughed. But his body simply didn’t remember how to do that. He hadn’t laughed in two years. Actually, he could remember the exact moment of his last laugh. In the passenger seat of his brother’s broken-down boat of a Lincoln Continental. Hugo, his little brother, was singing dumb, fictitious lyrics to the country song that was on the radio, making Jean Luc shake with laughter, the way only Hugo could. Jean Luc had still been laughing when the semi-truck had plowed through the intersection and destroyed his life.

He’d woken up in the hospital two weeks later with not a molecule of family left in this world. And only one working leg. Too much money and nothing to do with it. No one to share it with.

It had taken two years to get his leg back in working order. And it was a real miracle that he was able to walk on it. The doctors said it was because he’d been such an impressive physical specimen before the accident that he’d been able to recover. His body was strong and his will was stronger. He had quite the hitch in his step, but he could walk. He even forced himself through jogs every few days.

The rest of him, though, had never healed. Hugo was gone. And all that was left of him was the map.

Funny, when they were kids, the two of them used to argue about which of them was the ‘you’ from the verse on the back of the map. Which of them was really the seventh soul. It couldn’t be both, they knew. Hugo had been convinced, utterly convinced, that it was him. Jean Luc used to argue, just for fun, but secretly he’d thought that it was Hugo, too.

Jean Luc had the obvious talent in the family, but Hugo had always had that little special something. A magic about him. He could make anyone laugh. He was a good listener. People used to tell Hugo secrets that they’d never tell anyone else. And Hugo kept them. He was confident and brave and everything that a hero in a story should be.

Jean Luc had known his whole life that his little brother was destined for great things. But that was before the accident. And now, Jean Luc was here, on this motel room bed by process of elimination.

He wasn’t the seventh soul.

But he knew that Hugo would have kicked his ass if he hadn’t at least checked it out. They’d dreamed their entire lives about the July seventh that would have a total lunar eclipse. They’d dreamed about what would wait in that clearing for them.

Jean Luc had made this promise to Hugo. He’d see it through. He’d go to the clearing tomorrow. And perhaps he’d finally be able to lay his brother to rest.