Chapter 30 Pawns and Kings #3
The coroner’s office determined that the bones found with Dana’s on the oxbow island belonged to a male subject, likely in his early twenties.
The body had been heavily predated, and the set of bones was incomplete.
Cause of death was unknown. Anthropologists at the local university had attempted to do a reconstruction based on the skull measurements.
I looked at the resulting clay face. It was thin lipped and angular, like the man I remembered.
I couldn’t look away.
Deep in my soul, I knew I was responsible for his death.
I’d been a killer since the beginning.
I told Nick. I told Nick about that killing and about the Rusalka. Maybe I told him because I wanted to drive him away, because I felt the need to be punished. He just listened, holding my hand.
“You had a head injury,” he said quietly, and I couldn’t refute that. It was certainly more plausible than believing I had become a supernatural creature.
“But I remember that man in the woods, the one I ordered my mom to kill.” My voice was low, fragile.
“You were a child,” he said. “You couldn’t have known your mom would do that.”
“But I’m responsible.”
“No. You’re not.”
I disagreed. But we tended to come at things from opposing angles. He did everything he could to preserve life. I was…not like that. I was something different. And I still wasn’t sure what I’d become.
—
The last green flash washed over my mind’s eye in the last week of summer, when the sun had turned south again and the days were beginning to shorten perceptibly. The water drizzling from our taps was cool and clean once more, smelling of nothing.
My dad returned without warning. Mom and I came in from hanging laundry, to find him sitting on the couch in the living room, unmoving.
“Dad!”
I flung myself at him, overjoyed. He smelled like wood smoke and flowers. I didn’t ask where he’d been. I was just glad he was back.
“How’s my favorite daughter?” He chuckled, ruffling my hair.
Mom slipped away from the room, as if she’d never been there. And I felt that absence, that hole. She retreated into herself once more, becoming cold and silent as a stone.
In the days that came, I told Dad about the poison. In my desire to impress him, I even told him what had become of the polluter, what I had done. Pride beamed on his face.
“You mustn’t tell anyone,” he told me, resting his hand on my shoulder.
“Why not?” My brow wrinkled.
He crouched before me in the kitchen. “Because you must not ever say anything that gets our family into trouble, all right? What happens in the family stays in the family.”
I agreed.
I glanced up at the kitchen witch figurine that hung over the sink. It had been there ever since I could remember. The witch’s beady black glass eyes followed me, always watching me, no matter where I stood in the room.
My mom had slipped away, though. She’d become distant with the return of my dad. It was as if Dad and she were part of a binary star system; only one could approach at a time.
I missed her. I felt that I was not only my father’s daughter, but also hers.
—
I drove down to my mother’s house and left a note in her mailbox.
I didn’t know if she’d meet me. I didn’t know what I expected.
I couldn’t confront my father. I had to be at peace with that.
I had to know that all my love for him could never have changed him, could never have brought him to the light.
I could never have stopped his killing. I could never know what he thought about all of those deaths.
He was dead, and there was no coming back from that.
But I could confront my mother.
She was dangerous, so I took my sidearm with me, hidden under my jacket. She had a lot to lose by talking to me. She could lose everything—the life and family she’d built.
And so could I.
I waited at the Hag Stone at dusk, staring at the spot in the river where there had once been an island, now drowned and swept away down the river. There were only a few snags of cedar stumps there now. The geese had fled, and the place was barren.
I heard footsteps approaching. My mother was not like my father; she couldn’t move soundlessly in the woods. I thought about ambushing her here, hunting her. But I didn’t. I just waited.
She picked her way through the leaf debris to stand beside me. She was much older than in my dreams, but her posture was still straight. She folded her arms in front of her and stared out at the river with me.
“What did you want?” she asked curtly.
I swallowed. “I remembered some things about my past.”
Her eye twitched. “What things?”
My heart hammered, but I forced myself to spit it out. “I remembered that summer when the water was poisoned. When you and I…when we were together. It was like we were mother and daughter.”
She nodded, her fingers tight as talons on her elbows. “I remember.”
“What changed?” I asked. “Why were we so far apart?”
Her shoulder hitched. “Your father and I…we were at war. I tried to keep it from you, at first. I saw how you were becoming his daughter, in all ways. He called you his heir, the heir to his forest.” She shook her head.
“But…the first time…when a man died, I was with you.”
She stared out, over the water, at the island that didn’t exist anymore. “Are you going to arrest me?”
I wasn’t sure. I just knew that guilt lay cold beneath my ribs. “His name was Darrell Castner. He was a maintenance man at Copperhead Valley Solvents.”
Her mouth hardened. “It doesn’t matter. He killed my child. Your sister.”
I exhaled. “Why take me along for that?”
“Because…I wanted you to be able to defend yourself. And I wanted you to know who you really were.”
“Who am I?”
“You’re your father’s daughter. And you’re also my daughter.” She looked at me for the first time then, and her eyes glittered like flint.
“But why take that away from me? Why have my memory taken away?” My voice quavered. This was the question I’d always wanted to ask her.
I realized I was looking down at her. At some point, she’d shrunk and become a couple inches smaller than me, and that startled me. “Because I wanted you to be who you wanted to be, independent of the both of us.”
She turned and began to walk away, calling over her shoulder, “Don’t waste that life, Elena.”
I let her go, standing there until it got dark and the fireflies rose. Arresting her would expose both of us, and I had no desire to do that. Justice mattered, maybe. But maybe I should just let the dead lie. Not be like Fred Jasper, who lived only a twilight life, in search of justice.
I wasn’t sure who I was: the hunter’s daughter or the witch’s daughter or someone else entirely.
But, freed from both their shadows, I had the freedom to find out.
—
The wound on my calf faded afterward, turning the normal color of a bruise before finally receding to a white, frost-shaped pattern that looked a bit like lightning.
I was glad the Rusalka’s touch had faded, but I was disturbed to have a permanent reminder of her on my body.
I guess it was a reminder that she’d worn my skin, and I shouldn’t forget.
I sat in the garden, feeling the ground solid below me as I harvested tomatoes and peppers and pulled weeds from the soil. The woods teemed around me. Fish had even begun to cluster prolifically in the creek, and I had hope that the river would recover from Sumner’s pollution.
Sometimes I felt eyes on me in the woods.
Sometimes I’d glimpse an antler, and my heart would clot in my throat.
Sometimes the eyes were those of a stag, moving serenely on deer trails.
Other times they were Sinoe’s, spying on me through the Virginia creeper.
She’d approach when I offered her food, and she’d take it delicately from my hand, but always refuse to come inside.
Still, she enjoyed sleeping on my porch.
I wondered at the influence of the forest on the Kings of Warsaw Creek.
They dabbled in the occult as teens…but had they managed to connect with my father’s Forest God?
Where did they get the idea that they could force him to do their bidding?
And was what Sumner said about the place being full of spirits true?
I didn’t know enough about magic to say. All I knew about the supernatural was what I felt, what I saw in dreams and in reflective surfaces, like Viv’s scrying mirror. None of it seemed real in daylight.
My parents had shown me the terrifying magic of this place.
I wondered about my connection to it. Was it because I was their daughter, and I shared their delusions?
Or did I have a spiritual connection to the supernatural?
I had so longed to separate myself from my father, to hide from his influence, to cast off everything that he’d given me as a gift of evil.
My mother taught me to kill. Maybe she was evil, too.
Where my father’s killings had been cold, distantly calculated, my mother had killed in rage, for her loss.
I listened to the water, as she showed me how to do, and felt that ages-old desire for revenge.
Maybe she was a witch in her own way, and I had inherited that sense from her.
But maybe some of what my parents showed me just was. Maybe we heard things nobody else could hear. But maybe there were others who could hear those things, too.
Maybe we all were under the thrall of Bayern County’s spell. Maybe we were trapped here, in our way, never able to leave, never able to escape our pasts or the sins of our fathers.
I exhaled and stared at the ring on my finger.
Maybe I could leave it behind.
Maybe I could be who I needed to be at the moment, and right now, I needed to be Anna, the person who loved and was loved in spite of darkness.