Page 24 of The Sister's Curse

The sheets were strung up, streaked with rusty stains that looked like dried blood.

She growled and ripped the laundry off the line.

“Get your shoes on,” she snapped.

“Where are we going?”

“To find out what’s going on with this water.”

Mom stuffed the laundry into the kitchen, collected her shoes, and led me from the house. At first, I thought she meant to climb into the car to go to the grocery store for bleach, but she grabbed a shovel and stalked off toward the well. I followed her to the low land behind it, where water sometimes accumulated during hard rains. This summer was brittle with drought, and the clay earth was cracked.

She stalked away into the woods, following the lowest part of the land.

I scrambled in her wake. My mom hated the forest. She never ever went there. I had never seen her camp, hunt, or fish. I rarely saw her go barefoot. She preferred the olive-colored shag carpet of our living room to any grass.

But she cut sticks from a willow tree, stripped off the leaves, and broke them down into Y shapes. She showed me how to hold the ends of a Y with the stick’s main stem pointing ahead of me.

“Like that. If you relax and focus, you can find water.”

She said it like it was simple, like turning on a sink faucet. I bit my lip and closed my eyes, straining to comply.

In my mind’s eye, I saw the water behind me, this cool, shining vein like a river in Hades’s underworld. It shimmered in the dark, far below my feet, then split away. I chased it, imagining it writhing beneath me like a snake. I traced the undulations in its spine as it moved in its sidewinder way through the cold clay, and deeper, past glittering sandstone and pale limestone.

The water snake in my mind came up, up, close to the surface. I knelt there, pressing my hand to the ground. I imagined that the snake licked my palm.

I opened my eyes. My mom was just behind me, leaning on her shovel. For once, she wasn’t scowling at me.

“There?” she said.

“I think so.” I sweated as Mom set her shovel to the ground.

She dug a hole, the sharp shovel chewing into thick yellow clay. As she did so, pieces of it sloughed away like snake scales lifting. I examined one of those pieces. It was a murkier brown on the inside, moist.

She dug until the ground shattered and pieces of clay fell down, down into the ground, rattling into the dark.

My mom and I crouched over the hole. About two feet below us, water blistered up.

My mom smiled at me…actually smiled at me. “You’re a natural.”

I beamed. I hadn’t imagined it.

“You’re like me. You can sense the water’s pull.” She looked at me as if she had never actually seen me before.

My heart lurched into my mouth.

“I’m proud of you.”

I blinked back tears. “What…what is this? A well?”

“It’s an underground aquifer.”

I stared down into that hole. It smelled green, though there wasno way the sun could reach it to grow algae. The water was almost at the lip of the hole now, radiating cold.

Dead fish, white and as long as my hand, dozens of them, floated up on their sides.

Tears stung my eyes. “How are there fish here?”

“There are underground aquifers all around here. Every body of water here is interconnected underground—the river, the ponds, the creeks. They’re all interconnected in the limestone underneath, giant vaults and galleries.”