Page 44 of The Sister's Curse

I looked at the fresh-faced, smiling young man. “They had been together awhile, sort of. Broke up Rick’s senior year before he went to college.”

“Was it amicable?”

“Oh sure. Neither one of them wanted to be tied down, especially with him going to college. Dana was a free spirit. She dated a lot, and she and Rick weren’t exactly exclusive.”

“Do you remember any of the other boyfriends?”

She put the opossums back in the box and closed the cage door. “Um. There was Jason Williams. A guy named Luke—I don’t remember his last name. And Wally—we used to call him ‘Wally the Wunderkind.’ I think he became an astronaut or something. Dana was catnip to guys. Everyone who saw her fell a little in love with her. But she was always fair. She made no promises.”

I nodded. That tracked with what I’d seen in her file. I knew young men might take things more seriously than she did, and I mentally added to my suspect list. Maybe one of them had fallen in love with her. I made a note to make background checks on these men to see if there were any red flags that might have come up in their adult lives.

Viv opened the second cage and began to feed Cheerios to the raccoon. He took the bits of cereal with dexterous fingers, scarfing them quickly.

“Rick came by a lot after Dana was gone, and after my mom got sent away. I think he felt guilty, somehow, though none of it was his fault.”

I looked closer at the picture of Dana. She was wearing the moon necklace with the pearl in it, settled in her creamy cleavage. “Can you tell me about that necklace?”

“It was her prized possession. She was learning to make jewelry. Dana had this uncanny knack for finding these freshwater pearls. She’d be down at Sandpiper Run and sometimes find three in an afternoon.” Viv smiled sadly. “I’ve never found one myself.”

I stifled a shudder. I felt as if I were walking through cobwebs.

I turned my attention to a picture of Viv, a candid of her in a short black skirt and waffle-soled platform boots.

“How old were you when your mom tried to kill herself?”

“I was eighteen. Just old enough to be able to get the deed to the house signed over to me. Not old enough to know what the hell to do with it, but I got it figured out. I got a job as a waitress, and ends somehow met.” She shook her head sheepishly. “I won about twenty thousand dollars on scratch-off tickets that year, so I was able to get by. The animals are taken care of mostly through donations.”

I didn’t comment on her luck. I picked up a picture of the mom and the girls as little ones, wearing matching purple dresses, likely at a Sears portrait studio. “What did your mom do?”

“She was a secretary. Worked for Jeff Sumner’s father, at Copperhead Valley Solvents.”

Small world. “She quit?”

“She stopped going in. When the company sent flowers to the house, she set them on fire and cursed them.”

“Cursed them?” I echoed.

She shrugged. “As one does. I cursed those little bastard Kings of Warsaw Creek, too.”

I blinked. Most people at least tried to disguise their hate in front of the cops.

She looked at me and laughed. “You know curses.”

“Um…when you say you cursed them, what does that mean, exactly?”

“I wished them all dead in the most awful, shittiest of ways. Mom was a witch, and I just followed in her footsteps. Don’t pretend you don’t know.” Viv turned away and sat on the couch.

My gaze roved around the room, and I saw things I hadn’t noticed before: a jar of dried chicken feet, a handmade willow broom in the corner, a deck of ornately patterned cards on the coffee table that looked too big to be playing cards. Little crystals were tucked on top of picture frames, scattered on the coffee table, and above the mirror that spread over the back of the couch.

“You mean, because I’m an investigator and I’m drawing conclusions based on your eclectic décor.”

“Nope.” Viv leaned forward. Her eyes glistened. “Because you reek of darkness, of some evil spirit that’s worked its way under your skin. You don’t talk about it, no. It’s your secret, how intimate you and the dark are.”

I went still, though my heart beat evenly, as I assessed how big a threat she was. She was playing head games, and I wouldn’t fall victim to them. “What makes you so sure of that?”

“There are dark things in Bayern County, things that crawl under rocks and slither through the river. Mom taught me aboutthem. Unseen spirits. Things that were never human, things that gather here.”

My throat was dry. “Why would that be?”