Sugarcane and Indigo

In the Sugarcane Fields

It'd been two weeks since Indigo and I had spoken. I tried calling him, knocking on his door, even putting letters in his mailbox - none of which had been answered. He was avoiding me.

Finally after a week and a half of trying to reach him, I'd given up. If he didn't want to talk to me then I didn't want to talk to him.

    And to think that I'd been ready to give up so much just to be with him. I'd been ready to turn my back on the town, on my family, on everything I'd ever known, just for him.

    That didn't mean though that I was stopping the investigation. Just cause he was acting like a little bitch didn't mean I had to.

    I had accepted that for some reason Anansi wanted me to solve this murder - maybe he was just as unsettled about it happening within the town's borders as I was. Maybe he wanted to eradicate The Whip. For whatever reason, I knew that he was helping me. Him pointing me in the direction of the Rylands were proof enough.

    So, for the last week and a half I'd been pouring over Grammie's yearbooks trying to figure out who the woman in the picture was - the one that the spiders had all together ignored. I had a feeling she was important.

    I could've asked Grammie but something deep inside me told me that Indigo wouldn't have been comfortable with that. And no matter how angry with him I was - or hurt, if I was being honest - I still owed him my loyalty.

    The investigation had hit a dead end until I ran into Lottie Mills.

Lottie was a girl in my grade that bore an uncanny resemblance to a mouse. She wore big glasses that covered half her face and turtle-neck sweaters, even in the heat of summer. We'd never really talked before besides saying hello, so it never connected in my mind that the person the woman reminded me so strongly of was her.

    I was walking out of the local diner when I bumped into her on the sidewalk. I had reached out without thinking to steady her, pulling her sweater down just a little bit and that's when I noticed the necklace.

    It was a plain little silver thing with a saturn pendant dangling at the end of it. I wouldn't have thought twice about it if I hadn't been seeing it wrapped around the neck of the woman I'd been obsessively researching for the past two weeks.

    "I'm so sorry!" Lottie had cried out.

    I had been too shocked to answer. I just stared at the necklace around her neck with awe.

    "Where did you get that?" I demanded, gesturing to the jewelry.

    Lottie glanced down. "Oh. My necklace? It was my Grandmother Tabatha's. She gave it to me before she went into the facility."

    "The facility?" I asked, finally looking up to meet Lottie's eyes.

    Lottie shifted uncomfortably. "The nursing home on Alder."

    "Oh," I murmured. "I'm sorry for prying. I really need to get going though."

    "Oh," Lottie exclaimed, "Okay."

    I turned and quickly started walking away. The nursing home! That's where she was!

    I kept walking, abandoning my other errands in favor of chasing this lead.

    I walked quickly around the twist and turns of Nowhere until I finally came upon Alder Street. I walked past the rows of houses until I came to the nursing home.

The nursing home was an old house transformed into an old people's home. The house itself was a two stories lilac color with a white picket fence. There were daisies growing in the front with a tall tree growing near the fence showering the sidewalk in shade.