Chapter 11 The Wicked Witch of Bayern County #2
Two large dog crates stood against the fireplace. I peered inside the first, at a knot of gray fur snuggled down in a box. “Baby opossums?”
“This is the time of year when some fall off their mom and need help.”
Her watch beeped. “Speaking of which…I need to do a feeding.”
“Don’t mind me,” I said.
I glanced at the second dog crate. A fluffy gray raccoon the size of a cantaloupe stared at me from a nest of towels. He yawned, showing sharp little teeth.
She slipped away to the kitchen, and I took in the rest of the room.
On an upright piano, photographs stood. I looked at them, one by one.
There were two dark-haired girls, the sisters, and their mother.
The mother looked barely old enough to be the girls’ parent, and might be mistaken for another sister.
Vivian returned with a bottle, opened the first cage, and picked up two baby opossums. She snuggled them in her shirt and began bottle-feeding the tiny blobs of fur.
The first one that took the bottle moved its black ears as it nursed.
When he was full, Viv turned her attention to the second, which was fussier about the bottle but eventually got the hang of it.
I looked at a picture of a girl in a dark red prom dress standing beside a young man in a suit. Her dress plunged low, and she had the sauciness of a silent-screen vamp. Her date looked thrilled to have her on his arm.
“This is your sister?”
“Yes. That’s her prom picture. Her date was Rick Smitz. Nice guy.”
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 about them. Unseen spirits. Things that were never human, things that gather here.”
My throat was dry. “Why would that be?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Some folks say Bayern County is at the center of a bunch of spirit roads, and many spirits come here and stay. Or maybe they can’t leave.
Maybe it’s because of all that underground water.
Mom said this place is like a big piece of fly tape, where we all get stuck and wriggle around until we die. ”
A fly zoomed past me in the room—or something I thought was a fly.
On my phone I pulled up pictures of the symbols on the beach and the skull in the mailbox. “Did you do these?”
She shook her head. “That wasn’t me.”
I didn’t think I believed her. “Do you know what they are?”
She leaned forward and squinted at the photos. “Looks like an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. It’s about the cycle of decay and rebirth. What goes around comes around.”
“Do you know why someone would put that here?”
She shrugged. “I don’t have any insight into another witch’s casting.”
“Another witch?” I echoed. There were witches…plural…in Bayern County? “Who might have done this?”
“Like I said, this is a place where powers converge. Lots of people tap into that. Could have been anyone. But if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.” A smile played on her lips.
My attention was snagged by the familiar sound of claws clicking on hardwood. I turned to the hallway to see a red fox trotting into the room. It looked at me and yawned with a squeak before going to sit beside Vivian. The fox glanced into the opossum cage, then slipped under Viv’s hand.
“This is Sinoe,” Viv said.
“She’s gorgeous.” I extended my hand to the fox. She sniffed my hand and stared at me with brown eyes.
“She’s been with me since she was a pup.”
“Another bottle baby?”
“Sort of. She never really domesticated herself. She comes and goes as she pleases.”
I turned my attention back to the investigation. “I’m working Dana’s case. I want to know what you know, if there’s anything you can tell me that might jog something loose.”
Viv leaned back and draped her arm across the spine of the couch. “Of course.”
“Did you have any contact with these…Kings of Warsaw Creek before or after Dana’s disappearance that made you think they were responsible?”
Viv sipped her tea. “The police said those fuckers weren’t allowed to talk to me and I wasn’t allowed to talk to them.
But we went to the same school, so of course that didn’t last long.
When I walked by them in the hallways, they’d bang their lockers to make me jump, and flick their lighters at me. ”
“Ugh.” It slipped out before I could stop it.
“Yeah. I wanted to fuck them up, destroy those sons of bitches who were going to get away with everything because they’re dudes and they’re rich.” Viv drummed her fingers on the back of the couch. “Mom told me to let her handle it, that justice would prevail. And if it didn’t, her curse would.
“But then my mom went insane, got locked away, and I was alone to make my own curses.”
“How did you curse them?” I ventured.
“Many ways. So many ways.” Her dark eyes glittered.
“I poured my blood into the ground and the creeks, asking for them to get their just deserts. I stuffed jars with sulfur and nails and piss and buried them all over the county. I carved their names into candles and burned them down at every black moon ever since. It’s taken such a long time…
Those motherfuckers must be seriously magically fortified. ”
“Viv, how…open are you about doing all this hexing?” There was nothing illegal about what she admitted to doing, but…
fuck. The honesty was a bit terrifying, no matter how deluded she was.
Maybe it was hereditary. Maybe she’d just lost her mind.
Maybe she could keep it together, refocus her trauma to help wild animals. But I wasn’t sure.
She laughed. “I make no secrets about how much I hate those assholes. I want them to suffer. But I’m not about to get arrested.”
“I’m confused about why you’re telling me this.”
“Because,” she answered matter-of-factly, “you’re a sister in these things. In things that creep around the dark.”
I shook my head sharply, swallowed, and shifted tactics. I asked her where she was yesterday and the night before that.
“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, touch anyone.”
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.