Chapter 28
Now
Fifteen silent minutes later, we were parked at a table at the twenty-four-hour truck stop we’d passed off the main highway.
It wasn’t the smartest thing—leaving a record of our night on a security camera—but in the moment, I didn’t care. Casey’s helmet should’ve been next to him in his grave, or perhaps rotting next to his dirt bike, under the cover of kudzu.
Not in Burt’s desk drawer.
We each cradled a Styrofoam cup of sludge that probably would’ve passed for bad coffee hours ago. I sipped it, ignoring the bitter burn, because caffeine was necessary. My night was only beginning.
Over the gas station’s speakers, Johnny Cash sang about hurting himself, while across from me, Frances tangled and untangled her hair around her manicured fingers.
“Tell me now, or I’m going home. How do you have Casey’s helmet? How did you know he died?”
Frances lowered her voice. “Look. I know I should’ve been honest before I let you bring me back here.”
“You think?” I snapped.
“I didn’t… I didn’t think it mattered, and I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“You didn’t want to hurt me?” I snorted. “Save it.”
“It’s true.” She looked up, her eyes scraping over me. “The night I told Burt about Shane, we’d had a few drinks. The whole story—the whole night poured out of me. I thought…I thought he loved me. I—”
“Wait.” I held up a hand. What she was saying made no sense.
I’d been alone. I’d woken up to Casey alone. I’d handled it alone. “What are you telling me right now?”
“I…I know what you did with Casey.” Her dark eyes pierced me, and I squirmed as if I were the one who’d been caught. She continued. “I saw you. That morning.”
“What?” The word was almost a gasp, because saying it was painful. Talking about Casey at all was like ripping a dried scab off a festering wound. My fingernails bit into my palms. “How?”
“That night I followed you and I overheard Hattie-May tell you her plan, how I’d go to the boarding school and you’d finish the year at home.
She said something like worst-case scenario, you’d need to leave town.
The aunts always babied me. We’re only three years apart, but they acted like I was ten years younger. ”
She tore a piece of Styrofoam from the rim of her half-filled coffee cup.
“That night, I’d fallen asleep holding your hand, like when we were kids, but when I woke up, you were gone.
I was furious. You’d promised you’d never leave me, but I thought the plan had changed and you’d been sent away without even saying goodbye.
” Frances pulled a brown paper napkin from the table dispenser and started ripping it up.
“Until I realized the aunts weren’t awake yet. ”
She shook her head. “Your truck was still in the yard, so I went looking for you—I called out as I ran down the path to the greenhouse, but you didn’t answer.
When I got there, I saw you pulling Casey into the woods, to the little path we used to follow to the creek.
You had his ankles and you were crying. You kept making this awful choking sound.
I wanted to help, but you always got angry if anyone saw you cry, and I was worried. I thought…” She grew quiet.
“You thought what?”
“I was young, Milly. And maybe I still don’t know what happened—but back then I thought, if you killed him you must’ve had a good reason.
I remembered how the shovel came down on Shane’s head.
How you’d hit him so we could escape. I figured if you killed Casey, it must’ve been something similar. I couldn’t blame you for it.”
“I didn’t kill him.” The words were sharp enough to draw blood.
I took a breath, then repeated, calmer, “I didn’t kill Casey.
” But it still tasted like a lie. “I mean, it’s my fault he died.
I didn’t murder him, though.” I covered my crumpling face with my palms. “He fell asleep next to me and never woke up.”
Imagining what Casey’s life would look like if he’d had a crush on anyone besides me was one of my go-to punishments.
Would he have stayed in Puddle Creek or gotten out?
What would his job look like? His kids? No matter what I dreamed for him, I always came back to the body I’d awoken to that morning.
“What do you mean?” Frances asked. “If you didn’t kill him, how’s it your fault?”
“I think…” I’d never said this out loud before. “I think it was the curse. I broke a rule, Frances, I accidentally broke a rule—the big one, the curse—and—”
“What?” Her head cocked slightly.
I pushed on before my nerve abandoned me. “I can’t explain it unless you’ve experienced it, but I should’ve realized what it was. I should’ve done a better job controlling the Sight.”
“But Ruth always preached that the curse is brought by reading the fate of your true love, dooming them to become your cursed thing. You read Casey? You think he was your one true love? A boy you knew in high school?”
“No, I didn’t read him on purpose, exactly, but he kissed me once, and I felt it. There was this flash of seeing. And don’t downplay what we had—he loved me. I know that now.” Again my face contorted “Casey loved me, and because I couldn’t control my power, I doomed him.”
Frances’s eyes widened, as her hand snaked across the table, her fingers weaving through mine. “No. That’s not… The curse isn’t real.”
I shook my head “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course it’s real.”
“There’s no way,” she said. “And even if it was… Casey was a boy you liked—that’s all. Y’all were kids.”
“How can you know that? You’re saying you don’t believe me. You still think I…I hurt him.”
“No. That’s not what I’m saying at all.”
“Then how can you say it’s not real?” I sniffed. “I mean hell, look at our family’s legacy—all the death… Shit, look at Mama and Daddy.”
Frances sighed. “Good people die, and bad men do bad things all the time. Hell, if that’s a curse then every woman in the world is cursed. ”
“Stop minimizing what I did, Frances.”
“Let me say this,” she continued. “We know what happened to Daddy—may he rot in hell. Are you really saying that he died and that Mama’s in jail because she read his fortune and fate made her pay?
” She scoffed. “Doesn’t that seem a little, I don’t know, fucked up to you?
Because I know what I think. Daddy wasn’t Mama’s ‘cursed thing,’ he was just a curse on his own.
And as for the women and the death in our family?
” Frances leaned forward slightly, her brows arched.
“You know what happened to Hattie-May’s brother-in-law, our grandpa, who married off Aunt Ruth when she was just a girl? ”
“He had a heart attack,” I said.
“Yeah. He had a heart attack, but you and I both know what all Hattie-May grew in that greenhouse of hers and we know how some of the women who visited her were often later listed in obituaries as the widows of men who had heart attacks.”
“You’re saying—”
“Let me finish.” Her voice was sharp. “And the old man that teenage Aunt Ruth was forced to marry? He died in a hunting accident.” She rolled her eyes.
“Did you ever hear that entire story? Because I did. The ‘hunting accident’?” Frances curled her fingers in air quotes.
“He didn’t fall out of a deer stand—that perv was shot. ”
“What?”
“Yep. Grew up hunting, but somehow accidentally shot himself with a rifle.” She leveled her gaze at me.
“I heard someone say that Ruth was the one who found him.” She shrugged.
“So. There’s no curse activated by reading the fortune of our so-called beloved.
These men were nobody’s ‘cursed things.’ We just happen to be women who, when wronged, fight back.
” She paused. “Do you really think fate would be so misogynistic? To trap us, then punish us for it?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” I shook my head. “What about Hattie-May’s husband? She always talked about he was a good man—they were in real love. He wasn’t like the others you listed—he was her person. Then, he was sent to war and—”
“A lot of boys from Puddle Creek died in Vietnam. You know that. It wasn’t because of anything Hattie-May did. Besides. Do you really think she’d break one of their beloved rules?”
I didn’t love the scoff in her tone, but I ignored it.
I drummed my fingers against the table. “It doesn’t prove the curse isn’t real.”
The door buzzed and we both froze, watching as a middle-aged couple staggered in. Neither of us spoke again until they paid for their energy drinks and left.
“Maybe not,” Frances said. “But you can’t prove it’s real either.”
“Except Casey didn’t do anything wrong. How could he die like that if it wasn’t the curse?”
“I don’t know,” Frances said, gently. “You slept outside near the woods, in overgrown grass. Could’ve been a snakebite.
Or a spider—though I’m not sure that would kill someone so quickly.
He could’ve had an allergic reaction to an insect or something.
And God knows what plants of Hattie-May’s were seeded nearby.
It could’ve been literally anything. But whatever it was, unless you actively killed him, it wasn’t your fault. He was not your cursed thing.”
I closed my eyes and saw Casey, pale and lifeless.
I shook away the image. “He was buried without a funeral, without a gravestone, without anyone celebrating his life, because of me. I should’ve told someone.
Instead I…” I yanked napkins from the dispenser in a giant wad and pressed it against my eyes. “Maybe I was the curse.”
“No.” She gently touched my hands. “You were a traumatized kid who’d just gone through something horrible. You were scared. And maybe I sound like a bitch, but no one could bring Casey back to life, and I’m not sure that trashy family of his would’ve spent money on a funeral anyway.”
The steam had stopped rising from my coffee, and it tasted even worse cold.
“Maybe.” I wasn’t going to shake a decade of guilt in one conversation. “I can’t believe you’ve known all this time. What did you do after you watched me move him?”