Chapter 1
Now
Alabama sunshine streamed through the streaked window, lending a cheeriness to the worn dining room. But it did nothing for the smell.
Huddle Hut stank of grease and desperation.
I wasn’t judging. How could I, when desperation gnawed at my gut like a hunger? Desperation for secrets to stay buried. To rot like bones, decaying until there was nothing left of them.
Too bad secrets didn’t work that way.
As for the smell of grease? Well. Huddle Hut was a diner, after all. A run-down diner in a run-down beach town, where bacon popped and sizzled and seafood—shipped frozen on trucks despite the Gulf being across the street—was battered and deep-fried.
The thing about Persimmon Key was that it collected misfits.
The small town wasn’t an actual key at all, but a shoddy line of Alabama coast that, thanks to a chain of barrier islands, has muddy brown waters and no industry or tourist season to speak of, dooming it to be a liminal layover space where people came to lay low or hide out.
But, like the diner, I couldn’t judge Persimmon Key too harshly.
I mean, I’d landed here nearly a decade ago, hadn’t I?
No, any judgment I held was reserved for bad tippers and men who hung metal testicles from the rear of their trucks.
And also, I realized, peering down at the couple in front of me, people who played grab-ass instead of giving me their order.
The man and woman in the booth were a tangle of sunburned arms and legs, chapped lips suctioned together, and crispy his-and-hers bleach jobs.
They devoured each other, and I can say with full certainty that absolutely nothing about the Huddle Hut inspired that level of horniness.
I breathed in, pushing my annoyance down deep—a talent, really—so it wouldn’t show on my face. Not that I was letting them off the hook: They were definitely getting the asshole tax (a 25 percent gratuity added to their check).
Assuming they separated long enough to order.
“What can I get for y’all?” I asked a second time, tapping my foot loudly and out of rhythm with the yacht rock that played over the speakers. It was only three in the afternoon, much too early in the day for this.
This was night-shift bullshit.
“Excuse me.” I tried a different approach, letting my East Tennessee drawl slip over my words. “Y’all ready to order?”
Neither answered, but the man slid his palm over the woman’s thin purple tank top and cupped her breast. Dirt was caked beneath his nails, and when he lifted his other arm to grab the back of the booth, pit hair bristled from beneath his own tank top, complete with pilled clumps of deodorant, which was more of an attempt at hygiene than I expected from someone whose shirt read AMATEUR GYNECOLOGIST.
“Mmm,” the woman moaned quietly.
My nose wrinkled at the display, and I was glad I’d worked through lunch and had nothing in my stomach to come back up.
I snapped my order pad closed. “Right.” I looked around the mostly empty restaurant. “I’ll check back in a minute, then.”
Larry would have my back if I kicked them out—rounding second base in a restaurant had to be breaking at least a few health codes—but there was only an hour left in my shift, and I didn’t feel up to the drama of dealing with them.
Never mind the twisting in my stomach warning me these weren’t good people.
It was the kind of feeling most would ignore, but for me, the intuition had always proven right.
Growing up, Aunt Ruth had sometimes called it my knowing, and whether it was somehow tied to our family’s gifts or not, well, neither she nor Aunt Hattie-May could say for certain.
Didn’t really matter, though. Whether the customers were assholes or saints, my job was to smile and take orders.
I sashayed across the restaurant, grabbing the coffeepot to top off my only other customer.
Billy was a regular, and as always, was parked at a table reading a newspaper as if he were the father from a classic TV show instead of a six-and-a-half-foot bachelor stuffed into a Black Sabbath T-shirt, leather vest, and snakeskin boots.
“Thanks, Milly girl.” He set the paper aside, nodding toward the couple across the diner. “They ain’t stopped since they got here.”
“Might as well let them finish,” I joked, because it sounded better than telling him I didn’t get paid enough to deal with this shit.
“Hm.” Billy pulled his steaming mug closer to him. “I wouldn’t want to wipe down that booth.” Billy sipped his coffee, then patted the newspaper. “Hey, you been keeping up with that story out of Mobile? About the missing college kids?”
“Not really,” I admitted.
Mobile, Alabama, was only an hour and some change north, and when two students from the University of South Alabama were reported missing a few weeks ago, it had been a big story.
“They found one of ’em.”
“I’m guessing he wasn’t off living his best life in a commune somewhere?”
“No.” Billy frowned. “And not he. She. They found the girl… Well, they found her body.”
“Shit. Where at?”
“Up in Moss Grove—”
“What?” Something stirred softly inside me like wind whistling beneath a closed door or the gentle rustle of wings. A whisper in my mind coaxing me to look, look, look.
I bit my bottom lip. How long had it been since the last time the echo of my gift wafted over me? Three months? Six? Always triggered by a reminder of her. Cruel, if you asked me, considering it hadn’t been trustworthy for at least a decade.
Still. Moss Grove?
I forced a smile and shook my head, as if clearing cobwebs. “Sorry, I mean, where did you say?”
“Moss Grove,” he repeated. “It’s a smaller town up in north Alabama, near Georgia.
Mostly big houses and cow pastures. They say the governor has some property up there.
” Billy tapped his fingers against the table.
“Pretty country, not the kind of place you’d ever expect to find a body.
But that’s where she was. Some kids playing in a creek stumbled across her arm sticking out of a shallow grave.
” He shook his head and kept talking as the heat drained from my face. “Makes you wonder how she got there.”
My hands were suddenly sweaty, and I clenched the coffeepot’s handle to keep from dropping it to the floor.
Billy’s dark eyes narrowed. “You okay? You look like you saw a ghost.”
“I’m fine. I…” I shook my head. “I’m, um. Yeah. I’m fine.”
I wondered what he’d say if I told him the truth, that I knew Moss Grove well. Very well, in fact.
How I’d never visited but was certain I could navigate its upscale homes and rolling green fields with my eyes closed. How years ago I’d spent countless hours searching Google Earth and scrolling through aerial views of each county road because I knew someone who lived there.
Someone who pretended I didn’t exist. But it didn’t matter, because regardless of how far apart we strayed, an invisible tether always snapped us back together. This was proof, wasn’t it?
Proof that when it came to Robbins women, where bloodlines begat secrets and intuition tangled like a vine through my family tree, it didn’t matter how far we scattered, we never escaped each other.
Not me and my sister.
And now, out of nowhere, her town, Moss Grove, announced itself. And further, the missing girl’s body had been found by a creek.
A memory elbowed its way into my mind’s eye…another creek. This one with a rocky bank with tall trees stretching overhead. Girls playing mermaids and making potions with water and sand and leaves…
No.
The two aren’t connected.
Yes, there’d been another creek. Another body. But in the South, creeks were common as fingerprints on a dirty window. It was a coincidence.
Everything means something, if you know how to look. I could hear Aunt Ruth’s voice in my head again. It was a truth I’d cut my teeth on. But the problem was, I didn’t know how to look anymore.
Or rather, the family gift refused to let me.
It teased and taunted and begged, but whenever I tried to open that place within me, once trained and practiced and welcoming, it no longer spoke like it should.
Except to whisper one thing. One cruel thing.
Again and again whenever I dared peek, channeling into it my tea leaves.
That is, if the internal door deigned to open for me at all.
So I ignored its teasing call, except when desperation hit hardest. On those nights, when I dared peer into my fortune, I always regretted it.
It had taken a lot, but I’d made peace with the fact that I wasn’t that girl anymore—the one who channeled the simmering Sight into a teacup, using tasseomancy to divine meaning. I wasn’t her, and I could never be her again.
Now, I was only a waitress living in a nothing town scraping by as best I could.
But Moss Grove?
It felt sharp and intentional—a slap across the face, which had once been fate’s preferred method of getting my attention.
Out of habit, I reached into my pocket and caressed the shard of bone tucked there, the one physical thing from my past I’d carried with me. My own morbid worry stone. As I ran my fingers along its smooth edge and sharp tip, it both soothed and shamed me.
Moss Grove, a creek, a body—It was only a coincidence. There was no deeper meaning. No reason to spiral and connect dots that weren’t there. The ugly truth was, people were killed all the time. Didn’t I know that better than anyone?
“They didn’t find the boy?” I asked, when I realized Billy was staring, waiting on me to say something. Prove I wasn’t about to pass out on the restaurant floor.
“Not yet.” Billy shrugged. “Some think he might be responsible.”
There. That was probably it. If true crime podcasts taught us anything, it was that it’s always the boyfriend.
Billy continued eyeing me as a squeal erupted from the booth across the dining room at the same moment the phone rang.
The shrill rrriiing! cut through the diner, and I had taken two steps toward the counter when the man in the make-out booth—who I’d mentally named Pit-Bush for obvious reasons—called out.