Chapter Nine

Bone-Tooth Key

Black Fern's county jail is nothing like what you see in movies. They don't have the thick glass with telephones on either side. No interrogation room with a two-way mirror. Instead, it's a bunch of fold-up tables I'm pretty sure they got when the Aberdeen Baptist Church closed its doors.

Stapled to the faux wood paneling is a sign that reads Appropriate Attire with the visitor rules: No sleepwear, no tank tops, shorts can't show your buttocks, no sexually explicit T-shirts, and undergarments are required. How they know if you're wearing underwear is beyond me.

Deputy Rankin sits at the intake desk. His big greasy self is gnawing on a pickled pig's foot like it's a fried chicken leg. Disgusting. You'd think his exposed ass crack would conflict with the "can't show your buttocks," but apparently the rules don't apply to him.

A fat fly lands on a dried sticky stain on the table. A lone ceiling fan pushes hot air around the stifling room. The only other sound is the tick-tick-tick of the fan's pull-chain tapping the light globe as it wobbles in rotation.

Sweat trickles down the back of my legs. June in Georgia can burn you up if you don't watch it.

I'm about to ask what the hell is taking so long when the jailer door opens and out walks my ex-boyfriend Oscar Torres, along with the memories of us during my last summer of high school.

Being with Oscar made you dream of white picket fences and raising babies. He deserved something better than a soulless Death Talker. Besides, a nineteen-year-old joining the sheriff's department shouldn't be having sex with a kid still in high school. I did what he couldn't and broke us up.

Right behind him comes the sheriff. I stand like I'm readying for the national anthem.

Sheriff Thomas Johns is a burly man with an I'll-kick-you-in-the-teeth horseshoe mustache. He might be gray-haired, but his biceps are meaty as a steer. He's ex-military; army, I think.

And he's damn fast when he needs to tackle you. I should know.

"Have a seat, young lady." He nods.

I sit. He fires himself up a Camel, nonfilter cigarette.

"We have a few questions regarding yesterday." Sheriff takes a stiff drag.

I knew it. I knew that damn doctor told him I was doing something witchy. Maybe I could get Miss Caroline or Mr. Latham to attest to the contrary, since I saved Worth that one time.

"Of course, you know Darbee May Wilder," the sheriff states more than asks, throwing me for a loop.

I stare blankly at him. Obviously, this is a joke. I look to Oscar, trying to read what on earth this is about. Black Fern is small enough you know just about everybody even if you don't want to. I know I'm a bastard child, but what's she got to do with Ellis's death?

"Yes," I say through gritted teeth. "I know who my mother is." Her name, yes. Her personally, only a handful of times. A day or two here. A week there.

Haven't seen her since I was thirteen.

"We believe your mother was a squatter on this property." The sheriff slides something across the table for me to look at. "Can you tell me when the last time you visited this house was?"

It's a vintage-colored photo of my mother, a sultry young woman, wild as a fox, all slunk down in a regal chair fit for a queen—had it not been ragged and worn-out. Clad in a long gauzy bohemian dress with boots meant for a cowboy on her feet. One leg is cocked over the large wooden arm of the chair with her legs spread, but nothing is revealed, except her wickedness.

Chunky rings adorn every finger, even her thumbs. Her long blond hair dyed black, pitch as night and frightful with rage for how untamed and free it looks. It makes you fear her and want to be her all at the same time. Part of my mother's face hides behind her curled hand that shields a wry smile. Her smoke-rimmed eyes full of sin. I know because they're the same eyes I see in the mirror every morning.

Behind the chair, a bold ugly wallpaper with giant roses—a note of familiarity tickles my thoughts.

"I've never been there." But something inside me says, Yeah, you have.

A thin ribbon of smoke trails off the tip of Sheriff Johns's forgotten cigarette. The ash on the end grows long as the silence stretches. That tick-tick-tick of the fan's pull-chain racks at my nerves.

"I guess you also wouldn't know how this got buried on the property now, would you?" The sheriff's dark hand pushes a plastic evidence bag across the table.

The thumping in my chest ramps up.

It's a child's Bible. Pale blue with crinkles worn in its spine. Jesus reads a story to some children on the cover. Gold lettering in all caps spell out my name, WEATHERLY OPAL WILDER.

My childhood Bible.

The one buried with me...and those twin babies.

Fear flushes over my body. How'd they find the grave?

Zeke Latham's words flash back to me. Ellis's foot had sunk into some kind of hole.

My heartbeat is overwhelming now, and the only sound in my head is the muffled thud-thump, thud-thump, thud-thump.

"I said...when was the last time you were at this house? Do you recall ever being there with your mother?" Sheriff Johns knocks on the table next to the picture

I blink myself out of a trance and shake my head no.

"Are you sure? Take another look." The sheriff's voice firms up as he senses there's something I'm not telling him.

I study the photo once more, pretending to give it an earnest consideration. My mind riffles through my past, trying to force my brain to give up something it's hiding. The whisper of a feeling that maybe I do know this house starts to form.

Dirt. The dank smell of earth bubbles up like it's trying to remind me. A little red suitcase sits on a dirt floor. Lightly worn from use, but it's mine. I'm going on vacation to see the ocean with my mother. I can almost recall the excitement from the anticipation.

I've never seen the ocean, then or now.

The ocean, the ocean, the ocean.I squeeze my brain to unearth more nuggets from my past. Then I catch sight of what's dangling from my mother's hand. I pull the photo closer and lean in. I've seen a necklace similar to this one, pretty much every day of my life. It's a wooden bone-tooth key. Bigger than the one that Grandmama wears around her neck that opens her secret recipe box, but they're fashioned the same way.

My eyes dart back to the wooden chest propped underneath one of my mother's boots. Bigger than a shoebox, smaller than a cedar chest. A jagged keyhole, fit for such a key cut in the front.

I school my face and confidently slide the photo back to the sheriff. "Nope, never been there." I force my eyes to not flit to Oscar and give myself away. "What does this house or my mother have to do with anything?"

They haven't mentioned the babies' bodies, the ones Grandmama buried with me and that Bible all those years ago. Maybe wildlife carried them off?

"Deeper in the woods, a hundred or so yards past a grave we found this Bible in, a body was hung in a tree. I guess you wouldn't know about that, either?"

He places another photo in front of me. The image so gruesome I gasp.

A slack-jawed mouth hangs open with black veins of Sin Eater Oil streaking out and down the throat, staining the fine wool suit. The haunting, distant eyes of Stone Rutledge as he dangles from a tree branch. Dead.

I swallow hard. My gut sours. "God, no!" I shove the photo away. "What in the hell happened to him?"

"No?" Sheriff Johns quirks his head. "Nothing about Stone's death familiar to you? Those black lines of poison. Awfully similar to your grandfather's."

"Papaw died from sepsis, the medical examiner said," I say a bit sharply and remind him what he already knows. But it doesn't take away the suspicion.

A man who spent his entire life talking the death out of folks, it's bound to catch up with you. Only so much mucus you can expel after the fact. The toxic black ooze built up and ate through his body. Seeped inside his bones and rotted him from the inside.

Augustus Hamish Wilder was a sunny old man full of imaginative stories with a voracious appetite for poking fun at Grandmama's moodiness. He gave me his death-talking gift when I was only nine. Papaw told me what he could do, then he told me how to use the secret Bible verses to do it. The gift jumped out of him and into me.

There are only a few rules for death-talking. If you tell someone the secret scriptures, your gift is gone. You can only pass it to someone of the opposite sex. If you die with your gift, it disappears forever. And you can't talk the death out of someone twice.

What Papaw didn't tell me is how you shoulder a lifetime of guilt for all the souls you can't save. That I'll spend the rest of my life trying to make up for it.

Papaw must have known he was leaving this world, giving the death-talking to me so young. Had I realized he was dying, I would have turned around and used it right back on him.

Clear as day, I can still see his dead body stretched long down the length of our kitchen table, while Grandmama prepped him for the afterlife. I sat cross-legged on top of the thick pine box Bone Layer had made for him and watched her.

Grandmama's people came from Appalachia a long way back. Taking care of the dead was the way of things. She tied him down with twine on our family's heirloom laying board—heirloom, like a death board is something you hope your kinfolks pass down to you.

Tarnished Scottish burial coins kept Papaw's eyes shut, a wedding gift from a dear friend. Three things Grandmama stuffed inside his mouth: Tobacco blossoms with the seeds intact, so he'd have something for his pipe. Coffee grounds mixed with bacon fat, to keep him from ever going hungry. And a single chicken's foot, so he'd always know she was watching him, even when he was six feet under.

Traditionally, a handkerchief tied around the head kept the corpse's mouth closed. But Grandmama used four wild plum thorns and pinned Papaw's lips shut. Sealed tight with needling thread dipped in dove's blood and crisscrossed around the thorns like bootlaces.

That was to keep him from telling the dead—or the Devil—her secrets.

When she took out his innards, she made me go outside and play. It took two burlap sacksful of dried rosebuds and lavender she collected back in the summer to fill him. She said it wasn't no different than some of the animals we taxidermied. It was the only way to keep him fresh until the hard winter ground softened enough for a grave to be dug.

On the first night of sitting up with the dead, he laid in front of the fireplace inside his pine box. Red flames licked the wall behind it. The dim glow of embers backdropped Grandmama's silhouette as she sewed in her rocking chair next to him.

It was the cracking noise in the middle of the night that woke me.

Sounded like the crackle-pops of kindling wood being added to a blazing fire except with a hollowness only bones can carry. I woke up from my pallet on the floor and watched as Grandmama paused her work for a breath to listen, then went back to rocking and sewing like bone-cracking was an ordinary thing. I didn't understand until I was older that it was rigor mortis setting in, which would cause Papaw to sit upright as he stiffened. Hence why he was tied down.

Funny thing about that pine box they buried Papaw in, not ten minutes after I found him dead Bone Layer brought it in from the farm shed. Exactly my grandpa's size.

Grandmama said she knew Papaw was to leave this world. Claims the chickens told her evil was coming. Their eggs turned bloodred on the inside, another sign of death.

"Because what I see here is a possible murder," Sherriff Johns says, jarring me back from my memories.

"Or a man so ragged with grief after losing his son he hung himself," I say rather poignantly.

"There wasn't a suicide note," the sheriff says.

"So?"

"So we're investigating all our options."

Suffer as I have suffered.My own hexing words come back to haunt me. I cursed Stone that day at court. Do unto you as you have done unto me. I wanted him to hurt the same way I hurt after Adaire died. I got my wish, and his son, Ellis, died. He felt that pain, as equal as mine I'd imagine. Did I do this?

"Tell me about these ritual bones." Sheriff Johns slaps down more pictures—damn happy photographer. The rotting skeleton of a large crow lies on the ground below Stone, sitting on what looks like a small burn pile.

"Early this morning, when my men went to investigate this scene where the Rutledge boy incident occurred—"

"Incident. Don't you mean accident?" I ask him. He stares at me a long hard moment.

"No," he replied. "As I was saying, next to the location of the boy's incident, we found Stone's body," the sheriff finishes. "We need to know your whereabouts last night."

"My whereabouts? What the heck is going on?"

I snuck out my bedroom window and got drunk is where I was. Not before I followed a ghost into the woods—and found that little gold cuff link on my windowsill. Something only the rich would wear. Shit—I've got to get rid of that as soon as I get home.

"A group of kids were playing in the woods yesterday morning," Sheriff Johns says, snapping my thoughts. "Said they saw a woman, hiding behind the trees, chanting some weird prayer, then chased them down. They all seem to think it was you."

If there's anything I know, it's where I have and have not been. And I have not been skulking around the woods following some chicken-ass kids, chanting spells.

"Liars." I firm up in my seat, getting tired of being prodded with all these questions. "I was running up the hill from the quarry pond to save Ellis."

"Mmm, huh." His judgment thick in the air. "Surely I don't need to remind you of the public threat you made against Stone Rutledge at the courthouse." Sheriff Johns's tone as flat as his face and equally as accusing.

"Are y'all arresting me or something?" I look pointedly to the sheriff, then to Oscar, who knows I'm done with all this free questioning. "Because if not, I ain't gotta be here, right?"

They exchange a brief look, and the sheriff sits back to let Oscar speak. "His body was found on the same property as your Bible. These kids say they saw you. You threatened him in front of dozens of witnesses, officers of the law included. It doesn't look good, to be honest. There's a lot of questions we don't have the answers to. For now, we appreciate your cooperation."

"Last night I was at Aunt Violet's, you can ask her." Though I snuck in, so I'm not sure if she knows I was even there. "That Bible..." I nod to it. "We donated it to the church years ago, when Grandmama bought me a new one," I lie. "Could have been anyone who put it there. Besides, what does my mama and that house got to do with Stone?"

Oscar cracks open his mouth like he's about to speak when the sheriff cuts him off.

"I think we've got what we need for today." Sheriff Johns stands, ending our little chat. "If we have any more questions, we know where to find you."

"That you do." I nod and take my leave. My feet carry me out of there faster than I intend, guiltily fast.

It's dark out now, and a long ass walk to my house. I'll have to call Bone Layer to pick me up. I mutter a swear to myself.

"Weatherly," Oscar calls. I about jump out of my skin. He jogs out the door after me. "Let me give you a ride home, since it's so late."

I park my hand on my hip and square him with a look. "Sheriff send you out here on official duty? Or you offering as a friend?"

He thumbs his gun belt and returns the same hard glare. "You want a ride or what?"

Silently, I get in the passenger's seat of the sheriff's Bronco.

"You need to know they're going to be watching you," he says, as if I didn't already suspect this. The gravel pop-cracks under his tires as he backs out of the station parking lot.

"I figured." I smart my arms over my chest and turn my gaze out the window. The night, a gorgeous black-blue, reminds me of Rook's hair. My eyes instinctually scan the sky, looking for a speck of black. I'm scared he's already gone again.

The headlights split the dark as we turn down the long country road toward my house.

"You don't understand," Oscar says earnestly. "Sheriff knows you're hiding something."

I sharpen my eyes on him. "Hiding what?"

"Something about that Bible. Or your grandfather. The burned crow. The evidence of poison. Hell, everything, maybe."

I puff a disagreeing sound and roll down the window, suddenly feeling hot.

Oscar goes on. "I shouldn't be telling you this." He rakes a shaky hand over the spikes of his hair. "They are getting a toxicology report on Stone, but the medical examiner seems to think the poison is organic in nature—he was the same examiner when your grandfather died, he remembers. He's recommended they exhume your grandfather's body. He thinks whatever killed him killed Stone."

"Shit."

"Exactly." Oscar chews the inside of his lip. I'm sure his Boy Scout morals are already reprimanding him for telling me.

I told Oscar about my Sin Eater Oil and its confessional properties, and the few times it was used for mercy killings. In hindsight that seems pretty stupid, but his do-gooder heart had a way of making you fess up to stuff like confessional to a priest. And he's no dummy. The oil could be used in non-mercy situations as well. I can't count on him to keep this bit of information to himself forever. I think the only reason he's kept it quiet this long is because how do you explain to a practical man like Sheriff Johns my body makes a mucus that can kill people?

"They're looking for any reason to arrest you."

Awesome.

Oscar slows down to turn into my driveway, but stops short. From the nearby fray of woods, crickets fill the silence. I turn to him, not sure why he's not heading up to the house.

"Weatherly." He sets his hand on mine. I know where he's going with this conversation even before his words get there. "I know you're hurting. It can't be easy losing someone you were so close to."

I slip my hand out from underneath his. His great-grandparents are still alive. What does he know about death?

I turn my gaze out the window so I don't have to see the pity in those beautiful brown eyes of his. I shove down the emotion wanting to bubble up. "I don't want to have this conversation right now." I hop out of the truck, but he calls my name, and I stop.

His demeanor shifts as he switches from friend back to deputy. "What happened was a tragedy. But if you or anyone in your family has done something or knows something, you need to tell me. I've got your back in there, but if I find one piece of evidence that says otherwise, I'll arrest you myself. Stone's death will not bring Adaire back."

A knife of truth that stabs me in the heart.

"But damn if it don't feel good that motherfucker is dead, though," I say and shut the Bronco door in his face.