Page 87 of The Sister's Curse

I stood and nodded. “Please call me if you think of anything. I’m so sorry for your losses.”

He stared into the distance, looking haunted. “So am I.”

—

I needed answers from Viv, answers to questions that I couldn’t ask anyone else.

Was there something lurking in the depths of the water, this Rusalka? Was she real? Though it defied rationality, I couldn’t deny what I felt.

I had been willing to accept that my father’s Forest God was real, after a fashion. Was this another face of the same entity? Or was this something different, an adversary? The Forest God demanded women as sacrifices. The Rusalka took men. What other hungry spirits might exist in the shadows?

I rolled up her driveway, and the hair on the back of my sweaty neck stood on end.

Viv’s front door was wide-open.

After radioing my location for backup, I crept up the porch quietly, then knocked on the doorframe. My right hand rested on the butt of my service pistol.

“Viv, it’s Lt. Koray. Are you home?”

I sucked in my breath as a snake crawled out of the darkness of the house.

I held my breath as the four-foot-long rat snake crawled over my shoe. Its spine made nervous ripples as it moved over me and across the porch, to disappear in the lattice underneath. For that time, the only sounds were the rasp of its scales against shoe leather and wood, and the thundering of my heart.

I stepped inside, mindful not to touch anything else. “Viv?”

I stood in her dark parlor. The place had been tossed. Photographs on the walls had been dashed to the floor, and my shoes crunched on the broken glass of their frames. I frowned—no burglar would do that. This was personal.

The cages that had contained the opossum and raccoon babies were empty, and my heart leapt into my throat…the animals.There was no sign of the opossum joeys and raccoon kit, or of the fox.

The couch had been shoved over and the credenza rifled through. All the drawers in the kitchen were dumped out and cabinet doors open. A broken jar of spaghetti sauce was splashed on the floor. The place smelled like mint; there was some drying on a rack in a dark corner, untouched.

I wound up the wooden staircase. The master bedroom smelled of dust, dried flowers, and evaporated perfume. All the clothes had been torn from the closet and strewn on the floor. Another bedroom must have been Dana’s once upon a time; posters covered the walls, and a dried-out paint set was on the dresser. The bedspread was a celestial print, with moons and stars on a navybackground. Dana’s art stood on her dresser and easels, paintings of haunted woods, and serpents coiling around crystals. Someone had torn the canvases, slashed them open.

This was so, so very personal.

I flipped through the canvases, pausing when I saw a familiar image: a black snake biting its own tail. It was painted in acrylic on a canvas with a wine-red background. The title was scrawled in the corner:Forever.

I inhaled. Dana knew this symbol. And Viv did, too. Despite her alibis, it looked more and more like Viv was to blame for what was happening to the Kings of Warsaw Creek. And now it seemed like they were getting their own revenge.

I peered briefly into the bathroom, at the clawfoot tub where Viv’s mother had tried to kill herself. To my relief, it was empty. The bathtub faucet dripped musically over a spreading rust stain on the cast iron around the drain.

Viv’s bedroom smelled like incense. The curtains were drawn, and orange afternoon light burned through. I stared at the unmade bed, not seeing blood there, but there were signs of a struggle: there was a hole in the plaster to the right of the bed, at the right height for the head of a woman of Viv’s stature to land. I examined the hole for hair or blood, but nothing was visible to the naked eye.

I turned to an armoire, its doors open. Within, I saw what might have been the remains of an altar: candles and years upon years’ worth of wax in layers dribbling from a shelf, curling around crystals that had become embedded in it. The candles were burned down, and the wax was long cold. In the background were framed pictures nailed to the back of the armoire: Dana and their mother. A mirror was turned down on the shelf, and a shattered mason jar, once full of garlic cloves and nails, lay on the bottom shelf of the armoire.

I poked at the jar with a pencil. There was a piece of paper inside it. I donned gloves and pulled it out and unfolded it. On the paper were the names of the Kings of Warsaw Creek circumscribed by that symbol that kept turning up—the snake eating its own tail.

It should’ve been warm in this room, on the second floor of a house with no central air. But this place was cool, cool as evening shade.

I returned downstairs. I heard something then, a scraping in the kitchen. The sound was coming from the sink’s drain. I stared at the drain, wondering if a snake was going to crawl up from it.

Instead, I heard a giggle.

I leaned forward, holding my breath, daring the voice to say something.

It didn’t. I must have imagined it.

Right?