Chapter Twenty

Somethin' Terrible

Getting arrested takes a heck of a lot longer than what the movies make you believe—Hollywood can't get nothing right.

It's a lot of waiting around for the law to do their job. Sign this. Authorize that. Make calls to a judge who is not happy about his Sunday afternoon golf game being interrupted. Most of the day we were waiting for Bone's arraignment and a bail to be set. Now it's starting to get dark. If another deputy tells me, "We're almost done," one more time, I think I'll crack.

At least we get to go home. They rushed the search of our house on account of the big storm rolling in. Didn't take them long to search everything. When you're as poor as we are, you don't own much.

All we are waiting for now is for Aunt Violet to show up with the ten percent of the assigned bail, and we can take Bone Layer home.

At the corner desk, Deputy Rankin hen-pecks on a typewriter as Grandmama stiffly waits there for him to finish. We didn't speak the whole car ride over. She knows something, but now so do I. And it'll take more than wanting to please her to part with my new knowledge.

Across the room, Bone Layer sits with his church coat folded nicely over his lap, his left arm cuffed to a metal pipe. A pipe he could rip straight off that wall if he wanted to. His eyes lost in a gaze to the nothing on the floor.

There's a lot of secrets locked up in that man. I really need him to part with one or two.

The torrential downpour outside has me worried as hell. Where's Rook right now? Does he have somewhere safe to go? All the years and all the storms, he's managed okay. It's flimsy reassurance, but I'll take what I can get.

My attention, on the other hand, is constantly being pulled back to the rain-drizzled glass door up front. Not at the door, but at what I can see just beyond, Bone Layer's truck and that small red suitcase that's waiting for me.

My fingers are itching to get at what's inside, but I can't chance opening it here, can't risk it getting confiscated by the sheriff.

I promised your mother I'd do anything to protect you. I keep replaying Bone's last words in my head. He wouldn't tell me that if he planned on turning me in, though, right? The practical side of my brain thinks maybe it's just the recipe box; he hid it inside there for safekeeping.

"It's a pitiful shame, if you want to know the truth about it," the heavy, burly drawl of Deputy Rankin says as he pours himself a cup of coffee and grabs a slice of Callie's marbled Bundt cake. My stomach growls at the sight of it; I haven't eaten all day.

He's not talking to me but to Billy Parnell. I must be invisible because neither one of them seem to notice I'm sitting just two chairs down.

"Somethin' terrible if you ask me." Billy's accent has that exaggerated Southern drawl that feels like he's talking in check marks, every syllable starts low and ends up high. "Sad how that pretty girl lost a brother and her daddy in a matter of days. Then all that crazy business with her aunt, too." He shakes his head with a frightful shiver. "They hauled her off real quick-like. A rag doll the way they tossed her in that hospital van." He takes a large bite. "Though maybe she's better off somewhere else," he says with a mouthful of cake.

I can't say I don't disagree with him. Gabby definitely needs professional help. Poor woman, her family locked her away like a shameful secret. That's no way to live.

Billy leans into Deputy Rankin, dropping his voice. "You think he killed them all?" He pans his eyes over to Bone Layer as if there's some other person in the room arrested for murder.

The scowl I send Billy's way is lethal. He catches it from his periphery, realizing I'm watching and listening. He decides to shove another bite of cake into his mouth, then he makes himself busy pestering Callie at the intake desk.

Rankin bears down on me with one of those looks that says he thinks he's better than me because he has a badge. I brandish my fakest smile and hope it reads like a middle finger.

Deputy Rankin isn't wrong about Lorelei, though. Losing two loved ones like that...unimaginable. If she wasn't an evil bitch for murdering my cousin, I might have felt sorry for her.

Her and Ellis may have been twins, but it's clear they were nothing alike. Ellis didn't seem like he had a bad bone in his body. I'm basing that off the handful of times I ran into him in town, during those brief summers and on holidays when they were home from boarding school. But that stark fear on his face as he ran from me—well, not me, Lorelei.

Biz-bong!

The station's doorbell startles me back to the present. Oscar rushes into the building, shaking off the rain. He hands Callie a plastic bag protecting some evidence he found at the house. After he knocks clear the droplets clinging to his Stetson hat, his eyes land on me. He nods for me to join him in his office.

"It's been a crazy few weeks around here." Oscar's bronze hand glides over his wet hair. He fans an open palm for me to sit across from him. Same seat I took two nights ago.

"It's getting dark soon, and this storm isn't getting any younger," he says, grabbing up some paperwork and a pen. "We've got calls coming in that Davenport Road has waters rising. And we've already closed off the levee because of flooding. You should probably get Agnes on home before it gets too bad to drive."

"Well, I wanted to wait on Bone," I say, thumbing over my shoulder.

"Look." Oscar stops signing his paperwork. "I can't have you getting stuck on a flooded road and putting my boys in danger trying to fish you out of a ditch. They already had a tornado touch down up in Tennessee." He takes one stack of paperwork and files them on top of another equally tall stack. "Don't worry about Bone. Once his bail is paid and the paperwork is processed, I'll bring him home myself. Of course, he'll have to show up for court on Monday, but I'll get him home tonight."

Court on Monday. To press official charges for murdering those babies. And Papaw. And maybe even Stone. I'm wondering how, between now and then, I can make things right. "You don't have to do that. I can take Grandmama home and come back for Bone."

Oscar gives me an exhausted look; he's tired of arguing. "Have you eaten today?" He raises a brow, knowing the answer. It's the soft way he regards me that reminds me why I dated him in the first place. "Go home. Get something to eat. You could use the rest, Weatherly. I'll bring Bone home shortly."

I nod, standing. Food and sleep do sound good. "Hey." I stop, realizing something. With Bone Layer getting arrested, and that Sin Eater Oil dreamy haze last night, I had forgotten about what Davis and I discovered with Lorelei's car. It's too exhausting to explain everything, so I just tell him the basics. "I know now is not the time, but Davis and I found a place that towed a gold brand-new Firebird Trans Am to their shop."

Oscar's shoulders drop.

I throw up my hands in surrender. "I'm just relaying the information. The receptionist said a girl brought her car in after hitting a deer—"

"It's not illegal to kill a deer."

I grit my teeth. I'm about to pull all my hair out if I have to keep convincing people Adaire's death wasn't an accident. I let out an exhausted sigh.

"The sheriff's office has connections with the motor vehicles department, right?"

"Are you asking me to illegally get you information?"

"No," I say. "I'm asking you to do your job and investigate. All it takes is one phone call." I hold up a single finger. "Get the VIN number for Lorelei's car and find out where it is."

"I'll have one of my boys look into it." The dryness in his tone tells me he's not jumping on it anytime soon.

"Thanks," I say back to him, just as dryly. "I'll tell Bone you're taking him home. See you out at the house in a bit." I turn my back on him before he can say anything more.

Out in the main room, it feels a lot colder than sitting here a minute ago. I walk over to Bone Layer. He scoots his knees out of the way, allowing me to sit in the folding chair next to him.

The sleeve on his church coat has a button loose. I make a note to mend it. His dark eyes search my face. The complexity of who he is kept at bay by his stoic silence. Like all his knowledge is stitched up tight, filling him to bursting. If he doesn't let it out soon, I imagine his seams will split wide-open.

I don't even know where Bone Layer is from besides Appalachia somewhere. Or if he has kinfolk he still speaks to. And yet here he is, knowing my entire world.

"Why?" A loaded question that's asking him ten things at once, but mostly why he's letting them arrest him for something he didn't do.

Bone observes me for a time. I sit up taller in my seat. I want to tell him I'm grown enough to hear it all. Let it free. When he doesn't say anything, I think about cracking his head open just to get a look at his thoughts.

A small smile tugs at the corners of his mouth, so soft I almost miss it. "I remember when you were born." His words a warm vibration, tucking itself around my heart. "So tiny I could hold you in one hand." Bone splays his palm open—the size of a dinner plate. I don't speak, for fear this rare moment might evaporate.

The sparkle from Bone's eyes dwindles, his brow dips. "Your mother wasn't always who she is now." Bone Layer says this so earnestly I believe him. I think about the picture of my mother and Gabby at the big Baptist convention. My mama looked wholesome back then. Pure, even. "She was very different before..."

Before she got pregnant with me, and I ruined her life, I finish in my head.

"You were her greatest joy." Bone says this as if he heard my thoughts. "She wanted to do right by you. Sometimes that means making sacrifices. Someday you'll understand."

"Well," I say, "I won't hold my breath waiting for someday." Then I inform him about the worsening storm and how the roads are flooding and how Oscar will bring him home after they process everything.

The rain washes down on me in buckets as I dash out to the truck. The windshield wipers swat the rain, pathetic-like. I pull around to the side entrance underneath the flimsy metal carport and wait for them to bring Grandmama out.

Rain wraps the awning in sheets, trapping me in its watery curtain veil.

I glance into the darkness of the truck's floorboard. I can't see my little red suitcase, but I can feel it. Calling for me to open it up already. I slip another glance at the door. My hand reaches down into the dark at the same time Callie rounds the corner to the short hallway with Grandmama on her elbow.

The suitcase is going to have to wait a little bit longer.

I stretch across the bench seat to open the passenger door.

"Drive safe now," Callie says, after she helps Grandmama into the truck.

Grandmama pats Callie's hand softly with a polite expression on her face as she tells her thank-you. Not two seconds after Callie shuts the door, she grimaces in disgust.

"Her belly smells of rot." Grandmama's cragged voice cuts through the silence. She only says things like that when she thinks someone has been an adulterer. I've seen Callie and her husband uptown with their family occasionally. They seem as normal as any other couple raising four kids. But they haven't gone to church in some time, and that's sin enough for Grandmama.

"Only thing rotten around here is you," I say, and I throw the truck into Drive.

"Don't you go smarting off at me, just because you've been lying and stealing and hiding secrets away."

The cab of the truck is icy cold despite the heat of the summer. Grandmama has a way of sucking the warmth out of everything. I kick up the wipers as fast as they will go, and it's still a sloppy blur on the windshield.

"What did you tell them about those babies?"

"Nothing they didn't already know." Her calm is infuriating.

"What's that supposed to mean? You and I both know Bone didn't kill them."

"No, he certainly didn't. Neither did I," she says with a poignant look in my direction. "Maybe I should have shared more with them?" The threat clear in her narrowed stare.

"Well," I say, shoring up my confidence, "maybe you should have. I guess you better get busy praying Bone doesn't decide to tell them how you ordered him to bury me alive with those dead babies. Wouldn't that be a hard pickle for you to explain your way out of?" I get the satisfaction of seeing her stiffen a touch.

A flash of lightning races across the sky and lights up the watery road ahead. I grip the steering wheel with two hands and slow down. A spray of water fans out from the tires, and we drive through it.

It doesn't matter what Grandmama told the sheriff. I've already made up my mind that come Monday morning I'm going to tell Oscar everything that happened the night Gabby Newsome's babies died, despite how crazy it's going to sound.

I've also decided I'm never going to give Grandmama another drop of my Sin Eater Oil.

If I think about it, Sin Eater Oil isn't the reason we are all in this situation right now. It's not why Bone Layer was arrested. Sure, Sin Eater Oil killed those Newsome babies. And it will keep killing folks or making them sick. But it's the death-talking that's the real problem. You can't have one without the other. That's when it hits me.

"You don't want me locked up, do you?"

"Am I supposed to want my only granddaughter to be hauled off to prison? Is that what you'd prefer?"

"No, that's not it, you need me—you need my Sin Eater Oil. Else you can't go on fixing up potions and shit, poisoning people around town, inflicting your own version of justice on everyone else."

"Shut your mouth. Don't you dare sass me. After all I've done for you, you ungrateful little beggar. Took you in after your mama left you, didn't I? Wouldn't have had a roof over your head nor food in your belly if it wasn't for me. Taught you how to use your gift, how to do something worthwhile in this godforsaken world."

Gift? It ought to be called a curse.

No, death-talking is not a gift once you take in the sum of it all. It's a burden. One I'm exhausted from carrying. It anchors me here to this small town. To this life. To her.

"You've barely taught me anything, none of the real magic, anyway. All those recipes you keep locked up for yourself, hoarding that so-called power. You try to control everyone and everything around you. Manipulating us all to do your bidding, acting like you're some holy saint sent here by God himself. Look at Papaw, you used him for years, and where did it get him? Six feet in the ground. Dead! From all the death-talking you made him do."

"How dare you—"

Something smashes against the windshield of the truck. I swerve in response. A smear of blood covers the fractured glass. Darkness eats up the road ahead where the truck's headlights shine until a flock of crows flies straight at us.

Bodies pound against the windshield. Caws of pain echo all around as bone crushes against steel. Until... BOOM! A single solid body punches the roof of the truck. Something large flies over the top, rolling as it hits the ground and flops to a halt.

A visceral image of Adaire being run over shoves itself into my brain. The agonizing, white-hot pain she felt. The iron taste that pooled in her mouth and choked out her last breath.

I stomp on the brake as we slide toward the ditch. The rain-slicked tires fishtail left, then right until the back of the truck whacks a tree.

My head strikes the door window.

Stars spark my vision.

The truck tilts to one side with a sloshing thump.

A long dark pause fogs my thoughts as my head struggles to comprehend what's happening. Ears ring. Only the dull short huffs of my breath anchor me to the present.

The headlights now shine in the direction we came from. Relentless rain punishes the pavement. A dark object lies in the road just out of the light's reach.

Not a single dead bird anywhere in sight.

Then I switch the truck beams on high. Rook's body lies lifeless on the ground.

"Oh, God, no." I shoulder open my door and out into the pouring rain. It bounces off the inky surface of the road. Scattered taps against the ground as the night sky weeps. Rook's black jeans are suctioned to his soaked legs. Long black eyelashes thick from the wet. His moonlit skin flawless as always.

"Wake up." I shake him, but he doesn't move. "Wake up!" I try again, but he only flops limp.

I lean in closer to him, trying to hear that soft whisper of his soul-song. The song I've tasted on my lips, drank into my body, and the life I've breathed back into him once before.

Once is all you get.

A little voice inside my head reminds me.

"No! No! No!" I try to make Rook sit up, but his arms are like slippery noodles in my grasp. "Wake up!" I scream. That's when I notice.

There's no blood.

No bruising.

There's not so much as a scratch upon Rook. He's perfect and beautiful and everything my heart desires.

And he's not real.

Everything I held to be true floats away. Rain drizzles down my face. I close my eyes, and I'm back in the comfort of Adaire's room, nose to nose with her. Her ghostly words whisper in my head. You have to let me go.

From my pocket, I pull out a raggedy feather, one I keep for just such occasions. I make a wish to set Rook free.

And I let it go.

"Wake up! Ma'am, wake up!"

My eyes flutter open to find a strange man hovering over me. Confused, how is it I'm lying on the side of the road in the mud? Driver's-side door wide-open. A single foot still lodged in the doorway.

"Ma'am, are you alright?" the man asks again.

From my right, I hear a murmuring. Or, more precisely, it's the slow disjointed musical sound of a soul-song, calling to me. Through the truck cab, I see Grandmama slumped against her door. A silty mud from the embankment oozes through the cracks in her window. A trickling of blood dribbles down her face.

A blinding bright light pierces the night from the middle of the road, causing even the man who woke me to turn toward it.

We both watch as the glowing blue light glimmers, remnants of Rook's soul letting go of this world. Freeing him.

A figure steps through the brightness and calls my name.

Crackling, garbled voices swallow me into the dark.