Page 70 of The Sister's Curse

Leah looked down at her cereal. Her lips peeled back from her teeth. “Good.”

She took a bite of Froot Loops.

Kara led me away, to the porch. “That isn’t an uncommonreaction,” she said. “She’s likely in shock, and it will hit her in a few days.”

I understood that reaction, though. I understood it all too well. “I’m afraid that the abuse was worse than I thought.”

“Me, too, but I won’t know for some time. Her world has been turned upside down, and we have to work slowly.”

“What’s going to happen to her?”

“She’ll stay here for now. We’ll go through the usual process, see if there are kin who might be permanent-placement candidates.”

I shook my head. “I hope none of those candidates belong to that church.”

Kara exhaled. “She’s safe for now. That’s the best we can do.”

I looked over her shoulder, at the house. Maybe that was all I could do.

But there was so much more I wanted to.

—

I wasn’t getting anywhere with Quentin Sims’s death.

But I could look into the past.

I tracked Dana and Viv’s mother to a state-run mental health facility a couple of counties away. It was difficult to have someone committed to a mental health facility long term, so Cassandra Carson had been in and out of institutions since the disappearance of her daughter. Mostly in. I was able to contact the facility’s director, who permitted me to visit…under certain conditions.

“I ask that you don’t upset her too much,” the director said. “Cassandra is a very fragile patient, and we don’t want to see her agitated. She can become very…difficult to handle.”

I understood. I promised to be gentle.

I drove two hours down a freeway studded with orange barrels. Traffic should’ve been light, but the narrowing of the road to one lane in each direction slowed it, and there was nothing to be done about it. I stared out the window at green hills, cow pastures, and knee-high corn. It was bucolic here, in its way. Maybe therapeutic.

I was stuck in traffic when my phone rang. I took the call immediately: it was Nick. Nick never called; he only texted.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Hey.” His voice sounded taut. “I wanted to tell you the hospital lab tested that water you collected.”

“Yeah?”

“They found some stuff you’d expect—typical bacteria and algae. But they also found a weird viscous benzene compound that’s a liquid at room temperature.”

“Benzene?” I echoed.

“Yeah. It’s a component of crude oil, and is used in manufacturing industrial solvents.”

“Like what Copperhead Valley Solvents might be using.”

“That’s my guess. And it’s also my guess that this is what caused the death of that patient I mentioned losing two years ago.”

“Does this help at all with treating Mason or Ross? The water sample wasn’t from the pond where Mason nearly drowned, but…”

“I brought it up to the pulmonologist. She’s calling Ross back to the hospital to do a CT. She thinks Mason might be suffering the effects of having oil in his lungs—it’s called lipoid pneumonia. She can increase his steroids and do a lung lavage.”

“That sounds unpleasant.”