Page 46 of The Sister's Curse

“I was at work, at the Grey Door bar. My boss will have my time cards.” She didn’t seem offended at all that I was asking. “Why?”

I didn’t see a television here, but I figured she would hear about it eventually. “There were near drownings…involving children of those men.”

She was still, very still, and I couldn’t read her. “I see.”

“Viv, did you do something to those kids? Did you visit the sins of the fathers on the children?”

She shook her head. “I spat in jars and poked holes in poppets with pins. I did not, in any way, shape, or form, touchanyone.”

The hair on the back of my neck lifted. I thought she was telling the truth. But damn. She had motive. Such powerful motive.

When I left, I glanced up at the lintel. There was a railroad spike on it.

I asked Viv, “What’s the railroad spike for?”

She patted the cold metal. “That’s to keep evil out. It works most of the time.”

I walked back to the car, remembering when I’d seen a railroad spike above a door…at Jeff Sumner’s house. And again, at Sims’s parsonage.

Maybe the Kings of Warsaw Creek believed in the occult, too. Small world.

12

Trust

“Get a grip, Anna. Get a grip.”

I repeated this over and over to myself like a mantra, clutching the El Camino’s sticky steering wheel as I drove back to familiar ground. Viv was playing me, and she was likely unhinged from the trauma in her family, existing in a fantasy world she’d created. She just happened to be really good at reading people, like so-called psychics who fleeced folks at festivals.

Right?

I didn’t like how she’d decided I was some kind of dark entity creeping around the margins of Bayern County. I was a Girl Scout den mother. I always turned my library books in on time. I had commendation medals from work. There was no fucking way this woman could peer into my soul and decide I was tooling around the county’s occult underbelly. There was no way she could tell I was my father’s daughter.

Right.

I headed by the Grey Door bar, tucked away on a side street near the Copperhead River. It was the kind of place I had no interest in, having broken up more than my share of fights there during my Patrol days. It was a one-story building with no windows and with a scuffed door painted gunmetal gray.

As I opened the door, a bell jingled. My eyes adjusted to the dim light, my gaze sweeping over the bar, the sticky floor, the booths, and the cracked jukebox playing vintage hair band music. There were only three patrons, including a couple of guys in a booth who seemed to be deep in conversation. When I walked by, they glanced up at me and shut up. Probably for the best.

A familiar figure sat at the end of the bar. Rod Matthews looked at me like a deer caught in headlights.

I nodded at him. “I’m surprised you made bail this early, Rod.”

He looked down at his drink and mumbled something.

“I’m sorry?”

He cleared his throat. “My mom bailed me out.”

“Ah. You gonna show up for your hearing?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He hiked up his pant leg to show a GPS tracker fastened around his ankle.

Well, at least I’d know where to go looking for him next.

“Is your brother, Timmy, back in town? I thought I saw his car.”

He shook his head. “I haven’t heard from Timmy.”