Chapter Eighteen

Sins of the Father

Grandmama's recipe box has eyes.

No matter where you are in the room, it always seems to be watching you. Or maybe it was because no matter where I was in the room, I was always watching it. It's sat in that tiny window in our kitchen for as long as I've lived.

I've only ever seen Grandmama's family recipes in brief glimpses. Something I snooped over her shoulder when she didn't realize I was near. A few words here. Drawn sketches or instructions there. Never a fully detailed "how to" list of what to do. They are ways for her to fix things that medicine or practical means can't. Things that require unnatural remedies. Like how she knows just the right measurement of Sin Eater Oil to bake in a pie that would make you sicker than a dog or one that would kill you from a single bite.

Or a recipe to help an old blind woman to see the sins people try to hide.

And whatever is in there can help me see what Adaire's trying to tell me. I'm sure of it.

As far as magic keys go, they aren't universal. When I tried the bone-tooth key Adaire found under the floorboard in her house, all I got was a zap of energy telling me Wrong lock. If I'm going to break into Grandmama's recipe box, I'm going to need her bone-tooth key.

"Why do I have to do this?" Raelean scowls from the other side of my bedroom window. Her voice whisper-quiet so she doesn't wake Grandmama.

The night air is musty from the day's rain. The crickets and the bullfrogs celebrate with chattering conversations.

"Because you love me." I blaze my biggest smile. She harrumphs, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

"Do you even know what you're looking for?"

See now, this is the sticky part. I don't have a clue what I'm after, just a recipe to see, whatever the hell that means.

"I'll know it when I see it." Or...I hope I will. She stands there, not budging. "Are you going to help me or what?"

She stares at me for another long cockeyed moment. "You do realize this is a me-always-helping-you, one-sided kind of friendship, right?"

Raelean's not wrong, but I'm not going to concede to it now.

"Okay, fine. If you want me to go to jail, then go on home." I make like I'm closing the window, sealing my fate.

She grumbles a few swear words and something about murdering me if she winds up in jail. "You owe me." She points a finger at my chest. "Twice now," she adds.

"You're the best." I blow her kisses, which she swats away like pesky flies. "Don't forget to be overly loud." I close my window and sneak over to my bedroom door and wait.

Anticipation revs up my blood. I wait a few seconds. Then a few seconds more. After a short piece longer, I strain my ears, wondering if maybe she's being too quiet. I'm about to go over to the window to ask her what's taking so long. Then I hear the bang-bang-bang clobbering of her fist on Bone Layer's smokehouse door.

Perfect.

I take a deep breath and ready myself.

I can't make out Raelean's exact words, but they're exasperated and panicky, enough that it will get Grandmama's attention. Seconds later, I hear the creaking squeak from the unoiled hinges of her bedroom door as she wanders out to investigate.

I'm relying on the fact that she has to know everything that happens around here.

"What's going on out there?" her scratchy voice demands from the porch as she makes her way to the smokehouse to see what all the thunder is about. That's when I make my move.

Quickly, I slip out of my bedroom and dash into hers. Leaving the lights off so I don't attract any unwanted attention, I blindly feel around in the dark on her nightstand for the bone-tooth key.

The magic from the key warms as my hand crosses over it. I snatch it up, fear and excitement fueling my blood. I skitter out of her room and into the kitchen.

In the backyard, Raelean apologizes for waking them up and gives the fake story that Violet is drunk and drove her car into a ditch again—which used to happen more often than not. She needs Bone Layer to pull her car out. I "borrowed" Aunt Violet's car, and Raelean helped me stage it in a shallow ditch to bring the lie home.

The recipe box growls at me from the window, reminding me I'm not allowed to touch it. I swallow back my hesitation and pull it down.

To my surprise, it doesn't bite.

One might expect a click or a snick as with a turn of a key in a locked box. But no such sound comes. The lid simply pops open and the world inside is mine for the taking.

I pause, reveling in the power at my fingertips.

"Please don't be angry, Mrs. Wilder," Raelean says rather loudly, stopping Grandmama from returning inside.

Shit.Hurriedly, I thumb through the recipes, no idea which one I need. There's promised warts to plague a straying lover. One about talking fire out of burns and blood-stopping with Bible verses. Remedies for a broken heart. Rashes for your enemy. Some cards have a classic title, then list out the ingredients and their proper proportions—tongue of a cat listed specifically for stopping gossip. Other cards have sketched images of rare medicinal herbs or diagrams of body parts and what you can inflict on them. Just when I'm about to give it up, I find a card with a perfectly sketched image of our perfume bottle with a stopper that matches.

A Way to See, the scrawled handwriting reads. Hope thrums in my chest. I pluck the card from the cache.

"You know Violet," Raelean says, extra loud. "She's always getting herself in a pickle."

The porch creaks.

I shove the card down my tank top and snap the lid shut and return the recipe box back to the windowsill where it lives. Before I duck underneath the dining room table, I grab the bottle with my Sin Eater Oil in it.

The recipe card burns with awareness. The bottle stopper rattles lightly in my pocket, and I clamp a hand around it, trying to calm my nerves. Outside, there's the rev of Bone Layer's engine as he wakes the truck to fetch the wrecked car out of the ditch. Grandmama shuffles back inside the house.

Then I feel a soft buzz in my hand, and I open my palm.

The magic of the bone-tooth key thrums. Waiting for me to return it back to where it sleeps, next to Grandmama's bed.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Grandmama stops mid-shuffle as if she's heard my thoughts. Her gauzy white gown sways slightly around her thin shriveled-up legs. My chest burns for taking such shallow breaths.

Please, God, I beg. Push her to go.

God doesn't give in to my pleas often, but tonight He's feeling generous. She moves on, shuffle-step, shuffle-step, back to her room.

The second her door closes, I make my escape. The bone-tooth key a damning piece of evidence in my possession. On the wall, Grandmama's baking apron hangs. I stow it in the pocket, hoping like hell she assumes she forgot where she left it.

I flee out my bedroom window.

Drink with the spirits.

Taste the death.

Walk the veil.

"That has to be the vaguest recipe of all time," I say to Raelean from her bathroom, putting on a fresh set of clothes she let me borrow after my shower: a WKRP radio T-shirt and red shorts. "I have no clue how I'm supposed to ‘see' anything with these instructions." I towel dry the ends of my hair and run a brush through it.

Raelean's trailer is a tiny place with a bedroom at each end and a kitchen and living room in the middle. Her vintage melamine table, aqua-blue-rimmed in chrome, something that stepped right out of the '60s. We sit at it, she's across from me, the amber glass shade of the hanging light casting a yellow light on us.

The lined card stock, once white, has aged to a dingy beige. In the top left corner, a printed rooster sits, similar to the one on the outside of the recipe box, a set that dates back to the '40s I'd guess.

Notes scrawled at the bottom, probably in my great-grandmother's hand, talk about seeing the sins of others, you'll need markers to reach them. Markers can be objects from the dead or something associated with them.

"What in the hell are you making there?" Raelean tips a chin toward the jar I'm filling.

"A witching jar."

"I don't like the sound of that."

"It's nothing too bad. It's just graveyard dirt and objects from the dead."

A piece of orange reflector from Adaire's bike I took from the cemetery. The blue bottle stopper. Adaire's last note. The picture of my mom and Gabby. Stone Rutledge's cuff link—something I should have gotten rid of already. Random pieces I've collected that might help me.

I'm about to screw the lid back on, but I stop. I tug the initial R pinky ring off my finger and drop it in there, too. I don't know why I do it, but something about it feels right. That's how witching works sometimes, fueled by thoughts that pop in your head out of nowhere. But I've learned over time that ignoring those little hints typically means things don't turn out very well.

I poise the lid over the jar, leaving a small gap where I can whisper the secret words that bind these objects together and ask them to help me discover what it is I need to know. Quickly, I screw the lid on tight.

"And what do you need that for?" Raelean points at the perfume bottle sitting in the middle of her kitchen table. The yellow light above shines through the blue glass and casts a small green halo onto the table.

I flip the card around so she can see it has the same bottle drawn on it, a watercolor image—except this shows the bottle full of the black ooze of death, where the one here barely has a half inch in the bottom. A black smear was wiped off the corner of the card at some point; in the light I see a faint iridescent oily shine of Sin Eater Oil. From my Papaw's mama, since she's the one who passed her gift on to him.

"I don't have a good feeling about this." Raelean crosses her arms over her chest and gives a sour disapproving expression. One that says she isn't the authority on stupid, but she recognizes it when she sees it.

"Well, I need your help figuring out what this recipe means." It isn't so much a recipe as vague instructions. "‘Drink with the spirits.' You think that means I need to have a beer in a graveyard or with a ghost?"

Raelean snorts at my suggestion.

I kick her under the table. "Okay, Miss Know-It-All. What do you think it means?"

She straightens up tall and takes the card out of my hand and stares at it. Thinking.

"‘Walk the veil.' That sounds like a place that's neither here nor there, right?" I nod. "So maybe that's where you'll ‘see' what you're trying to find? Like if you do these first two things, this will be the result."

Sounds solid enough to me.

"‘Taste the death.'" She looks up at me. "When you talk the death out of someone, does it have a taste?"

"No. Not a taste, but it has a sound." Which I know doesn't make sense to her and probably isn't helpful. "And it has a smell." I suddenly remember. "That's similar to taste."

She shakes her head, mouth pursed. "Not the same thing, though." She studies it a bit longer. "That stuff right there...what did you call it—Sin Eater Oil? That's what you cough up after you talk the death out of someone, right? So it's kind of like death in a liquid version, wouldn't you say? I feel like this card is telling you to taste it."

"Drink my own Sin Eater Oil? I'd rather not die, thank you very much." I snatch the card back. The idea of putting death back into my body is enough to make my skin crawl.

"But wait," she says. "What if this recipe is telling you how to do it without dying? Maybe you're right. You need to do shots with a ghost."

"Now you're just making fun of me." It was a dumb idea in the first place, and I don't need her bringing it up a second time to rub it in.

But something about what she said stops me.

"Oh!" I stand, excited, realizing what it's telling me. "Sin Eater Oil can never be in a cup that's had whiskey in it." I fan my arms open wide with a voilà motion.

Raelean isn't impressed with my revelation. "Oh-kay?" She waits for me to elaborate.

"So. No whiskey or vodka or any alcohol for that matter can ever have been in a cup where you're going to put Sin Eater Oil. Now why is that?" Raelean holds strong to her unimpressed look. "Because I bet you something happens when Sin Eater Oil and alcohol are mixed. Maybe that's what gives the oil it's ‘seeing' properties? ‘Drink with the spirits.' Not with a ghost. Spirits. As in alcohol. I have to drink my Sin Eater Oil with some kind of liquor." I'm sure Raelean must have something around here. I check her pantry.

Raelean nods, catching on to what I'm telling her. "And if you do, then you can ‘walk the veil.'" She air-quotes the last words.

"If this works, that pretty much makes me a genius." I waggle a bottle of Goldschl?ger I find. The gold flakes swirl in the bottom. Thankfully, there's a little more than a swig left.

"I'm fairly certain that's not how genius works." Raelean grabs a shot glass—which she has plenty of, too. She snatches the bottle from my hand and fills it up.

We both look at the perfume bottle of Sin Eater Oil.

"I ain't touching that," she says, eyeing it skeptically.

I pause. A knot twists in my gut. We could be mistaken. Am I really sure this is what the recipe is calling for? I mean, if I do this and I'm wrong, then it could kill me, right?

And if I don't, I might not learn what Adaire wants me to know.

"Okay. Let's do this." I pluck the mismatched stopper from the top and carefully tilt the bottle over the shallow glass of Goldschl?ger. A slow drop of ooze slips toward the lip of the spout—I half expect a puff of smoke when the two liquids converge. The dollop of oil drops into the alcohol with a plop.

Instead, something much more enchanting happens.

Crackling veins of iridescent blue light fracture the thick black drop, setting the shot glass aglow. The alcohol seeps into the cracks, causing the oil to roil and writhe as if it's a living thing, born into something new. The oil gives in to the alcohol and melts into a thinner substance, diluting the liquid to an inky blue.

Tiny crackling embers pop, the last remnants absorbed. A faint blue glow haunts the glass.

"It's cold," I say, surprised when I pick it up. My fingers frosty numb as if holding a chilled can of soda. I give it a smell. The glowing liquid ripples from the closeness of my touch, alive and thriving...waiting for a kiss.

"Are you going to drink it all?" Raelean stops me short of taking a sip.

"Should I?" I look at the liquid, wondering if a sip is enough.

"What if you die?" Raelean scrunches up her nose.

I was ready to dismiss that thought until she said it aloud. I set the glass down and sit back. Dying isn't on my agenda today.

I stare at the inky blue liquid as it begins to fade. A realization slipping into my thoughts.

"Fuck it." I snatch it up—

"Damn it, Weatherly." Raelean jumps out of her chair with a halting hand. Her urgency stops me cold. "If I have to call your grandmother and tell her you're dead, so help me God, I'll bring you back and kill you myself."

Something in my gut nudges, and a thought comes to me. "If I die, call Bone Layer."

"Are you freaking cracked?" Raelean huffs a laugh.

"You heard me." I look at her, stern. Not in a mean kind of way but with an unspoken understanding that says, Follow my wishes, even if they don't make sense.

The gravity of what we're doing forces Raelean to sit back down as she resigns herself to what's about to happen.

She nods. Once. Ever so slightly.

Here goes.I slug the foul-smelling liquid down. Frosty cold, it ices my throat, leaving an aftertaste of rotted fish and cinnamon. I cough and press a fist to my mouth, trying to hold it down.

I wait, not sure if I'm going to suddenly get slurring drunk or if visions will just reveal themselves in front of me. Or if I'll die.

Except nothing happens.

"I don't feel a thing," I say to Raelean, and set the glass on the table. When I do, my hand leaves behind a blurry trail, as though I'm moving in slow motion. "Whoa." I look around the kitchen expecting the whole room to melt into a dizzy haze. But it's the same sad kitchen as always.

"Are you seeing this?" I wave my hand back and forth to show Raelean. "It's kind of like a ghosting delay. Oh, wait, can you see—" I pause.

Raelean is sitting there, frozen-faced, her eyes affixed to the chair I'm in.

"Hey," I say a bit firmer and snap my fingers in her face. My hand an echo of itself. She doesn't even flinch. Then I notice the dust particles in the shallow kitchen light, how they no longer float, but are perfectly still. The second hand on the clock has stopped circling. And a drip from the faucet dangles in the air.

Everything in the room is frozen in time.

A melodic hum snakes into the silence, the sweet warm sound of a soul-song. Not inside my head, though. Nor my chest, like it does when another soul is preparing to leave this world. That beautiful hum, plucked from my childhood, is coming from outside. Adaire.

It snakes into the trailer through the cracks around the door.

The pull so alluring, I'm helpless to its call. I walk to the door and briefly pause, turning back to see the slow dragging of my body as it catches up with me. Raelean still sits at the table, staring at the spot where I just was.

I step out onto the porch—

The sight of Adaire standing there catches me off guard. Her back is turned to me, but I'd know that scratchy short hair anywhere. Her clothes the same we buried her in: black-plaid pants with her favorite red Journey T-shirt. The colors are muted, like the tones of a faded photograph.

When I call to her, no sound comes. Only a flatness of nothing refracts back to me. Black smudges the edges of my vision. A hazy frame around this in-between place I've stepped into.

Coolly, Adaire turns her head to look at me over her shoulder. I smile. Even though she sees me, her expression is emotionless. Then she turns around and walks off the porch.

I throw out a hand to catch her; my foot missteps off the porch—

And lands inside a house. Except there's daylight now, and instead of Raelean sitting at the kitchen table, it's Adaire. She hovers over a scrying skillet. Her thumb mindlessly rubs that bone-tooth key; her eyes lost to a vision. When I look into the black glassy surface of the water, I watch my mother cry as she reads a letter. I lean closer to see what the letter says, and tumble forward into the skillet—

Splash, through a ceiling, I land with a thud on the floor of an empty room. Not any room, a bedroom at the farmhouse. Adaire scoots a wobbly chair into the closet and disappears. When she steps out, the brown button tin of my mother's is in her hands. Eager to see what's inside, I cross the room toward her. A thickness in the air slows me. I strain to push through—

The tension releases and I flounder into a grand office. I flail my arms to balance myself. A gorgeous oriental rug lies under my feet. A stern bookshelf stacked with law books. Adaire sits in front of a massive mahogany desk. The tension in her nerves so visceral I can feel it, like static electricity in my mouth.

From over her shoulder, I see her gripping a handwritten letter. It's loopy swirls from the hand of a woman. Stone Rutledge, with his knitted brows and talking hands, attempts to reason with her. Her anger spikes a bitter metallic on my tongue, and she abruptly stands. The mixture of her and I in the same space, dizzying. I gasp as our souls collide. Determination pushes her out of the mansion. She turns back at the harsh call of her name—

My knees give way into a run. A spinning, churning motion that speeds the grass beneath my peddling feet—not my feet, but Adaire's. Decaying granite juts from the ground like rotted black teeth. Tombstones. Adaire's ramped heart, like the racked wings of a thousand humming birds caged in her chest. Her terror spikes as the metallic gold beast chasing her gains ground. She peddles faster. A deft nudge from behind sends her flying, head over feet into the ground. A crashing, crunching disjointed impact that blackens the world around us.

The smell of grass heavy in my nose as we lie broken on the ground, staring at the sky. The copper of a thousand pennies fills my mouth and dribbles red down my chin as we gasp in wet breaths. A greedy tugging at my waist causes me to look down. Gabby Newsome pillages our pocket—plucking free a blue droplet of rain. A recipe to see. Her grin an excited dance upon her face. The letter in our hand flutters away in the wind.

The pain.

Dear God, the pain. A blinding white-hot throughout my body. The blackness drinks me in. My eyes flutter in slow blinks. I give in to death as the sinking ground swallows me whole—

Wide-awake, I stand—or rather fall in reverse until I'm upright again. An endless field of grass surrounds me in all directions. I spin in a dizzy circle until a jarring stop lands me directly in front of Stone Rutledge. His gaze blank. His coloring a thinned version of what it should be. Flint eyes tip up to meet mine, and then he turns and walks away.

Just as with Adaire, I follow the dead—

Into a dim, smoky room. Red wool rug back underneath my feet. Fresh vanilla smoke and leather clouds around me as Stone Rutledge steps through me with an icy chill and into an office. Vibrant and alive and much younger than the man I ever met. A broken man. The heaviness of his sorrow like an anchor dragging at the bottom of an ocean.

At the head of the desk, the family lawyer, the same one that helped Stone get the charges in Adaire's case dismissed. Stone scribbles a signature on the documents pushed at him, then leaves. His bitterness the taste of an acrid pecan shell. I follow as he storms out and past Grandmama, waiting by the office door. My heart stops at the sight of her, causing me to trip backward—

Into a grand bedroom. Stone Rutledge stalks over to the window, intently watching down below. I look past his shoulder to catch a glimpse of Aunt Violet's rickety green Ford Pinto as it eases down Sugar Hill's driveway. The sweet face of eleven-year-old me in the rear window, peering back up at Stone. An ache—like none I've ever felt—stabs my heart. I clamp my hand over my chest at the longing—

In my hand is a glass of whiskey. Not my hand but a man's. Stone's. Looming over the mahogany desk before me, a raging Lorelei. Her anger a scorching bonfire against my face. Exhaustion. To my very bones, I am exhausted. The disappointment I feel for her tastes like soured milk. Abruptly, Stone stands and hurls the whiskey glass against the wall, yelling—

A panicked sound lures me down a darkened hallway until I face Ellis. Soft and muted, the eyes from which he gazes upon me are vacant. A gray version of the boy he was in life.

Just as the two before him, Ellis turns and I follow the dead—

Behind a dark doorway, we peer through a crack and watch Lorelei and their father argue. Whatever they are saying ignites my fear. Ellis leans too far into the door and falls—

My feet gain footing and I duck under a tree branch as he runs through the woods. I chase him—or whoever's body this is that I've fallen into does. Anger sets in my blood, threatening to rage. I can't let him get away. I can't let him tell. I clamp a desperate hand upon Ellis's arm. Disgusted by my touch, he wrenches free and swings around to face me. I see an opportunity to stop him, and I can't control myself. I shove him, angry and hard. He trips, a flailing, twisting motion. Horror slashes across his face as he grasps at the air. His hand catches at my neck—then snap! He falls backward and impales himself on the stick jutting from the ground. He lets out a scream that could wake the dead and I—

I wake up.

Me.

Wholly me.

What the hell—?

The real world a throbbing echo around me. Those blurred black edges of the Sin Eater Oil haze fade. The hushed sound of rain tamps around me. The tree canopy above an umbrella.

I lie there a minute. Those foggy moments in time that the dead showed me swim around in my head, bobbing up and down, telling me a story. Telling me the sins of others.

It was Lorelei. She chased Adaire down, ran her over with her car. She chased Ellis, after he found out. Pushed him right onto the branch that pierced his neck and killed him. It was all Lorelei. Because Adaire found out something that was worth killing for.

I sit up, trying to get my bearings. These woods look about the same as any other woods around here. It's morning now, the sun rising over the east—at least my sense of direction is still intact.

When I stand, a bitch of a headache pierces behind my eyes, about as bad as when I've had too much to drink. I hold still until the pounding subsides.

It doesn't take me more than a second or two glancing around to realize I'm where death and Ellis met. The sharp branch he pierced himself upon only a few feet in front of me.

Scattered on the rain-mucked ground lies Lorelei's bouquet of flowers, now rotting. A small glint of gold catches my eye. I bend down, riffling through the leafy debris to retrieve it. A dainty gold chain, something snapped in half. Instinctively I reach up to my neck, that yanking snap from the hazy dream still lingering. Lorelei's necklace.

The scales of Libra hung around her neck from a flimsy ribbon. That was why she came back out here. Not to leave memorial flowers at her brother's death site. But to find her necklace that Ellis snapped off her neck the day he died. She didn't shove dirt in her pocket; it was the gold pendant. The scales of justice.

It had to have been Lorelei who chased her brother in the woods that day. That urgent need to not let him get away still heavy in my chest.

She doesn't want me to tell.

Ellis knew. He knew Lorelei killed Adaire. He knew his father covered for her. A sin Ellis wasn't willing to keep quiet about, so Lorelei killed again. I think Stone must have figured it out. You could see it in his face that day at the Lathams'. A lost and broken man who realized he had raised a monster. A Bad Seed. Stone couldn't live with himself over it and the part he played.

The sky starts wringing out the clouds like a wet rag, so I get the hell out of there.

It takes me a solid hour of walking before I find a passing farmer to drive me back to Raelean's trailer. The cold rain—rude and relentless—spills from the sky as I step onto her front porch. My urgent fist pounds on her door.

It rips open. "Where in the hell did you go?" Raelean's face is pained, her hair a sloppy bun on top of her head, smudges of yesterday's mascara and eyeliner darken her eyes. Even early in the morning she's pretty. "You vanished—actually vanished—into thin air. One minute you're sitting across from me at the table, about to drink that awful liquid, and then next you're gone. Like I blinked and made you disappear." She snaps her fingers as she says this last bit, emphasizing the quickness of my exit.

"I'm sorry," I urge, but she knows it isn't my fault. I hope. The tension in her shoulders relaxes a little. Her tiny front porch doesn't have a roof, and I'm getting soaked. As soon as she realizes this, she steps aside, tugging her robe up around her neck.

"I need you to drive me home."

I take the towel she hands me and dry off as best I can. Then I tell her what I saw in the hazy Sin Eater Oil dream, where it took me—though I have no idea how—what I think it means, and why I need to go home.

Her face fills with dread, but she exhales a resigned sigh. "Let me get dressed." I'm grateful she doesn't feel the need to question me any further for now.

From my little witching jar, I fish out my ring and bone-tooth key necklace and put them on. The other stuff I return to the button tin for safekeeping.

I take a deep breath. Readying myself to face whatever is waiting for me at home.

Because I'd like to know exactly what business Grandmama had with Stone Rutledge.