James wraps his arms around me from behind and I let him. It feels right, honest, and most of all, like he belongs there.
“Who do you think the girl is?” he whispers warm into my ear and my body tingles. “You still think she’s Heather’s?”
“I don’t know.” My head hurts just thinking about it. “I honestly don’t know if Heather was well enough to pull that off. Maybe she’s from the shelter? He could have paid off some crackhead to borrow her kid. Nothing would shock me anymore. Where is your dad, anyway? He usually doesn’t sleep in this long.” I glance past his shoulder, but his body tenses behind me so I drop it. In truth, I don’t feel like going there either.
My phone buzzes. “It’s McCafferty.”
Hear the news?
I show the phone to James. “You think she knows?”
“Doubt it.” We turn on the television and Concordia lights up the screen, a forest quartered off with caution tape, and I turn up the volume.
“They must have found a body.” James leans in, studying the screen intently. “That’s on the border of town about fifteen minutes away.”
A woman takes over the screen, Gretchen MacAfee, and both James and I share a dissatisfied growl. A redhead stands next to her bundled in a navy wool coat. Frost lies over the ground, washing the earth in a patina of innocence.
“Three murders, three days, all of them involving the very same type of weapon.” She holds up a hatchet and I catch my breath. “Heather Evans was a recently widowed mother of two who had turned her kids into foster care over a year ago because of the crushing weight of her loss.” The woman standing next to her nods.
“Oh my God.” Heather was a widow. Her children abandoned to some crappy state run system.
The redhead nods in agreement. “Authorities claim she had given them up to pursue a relationship with a woman. She was off to pursue love. It’s just so twisted. As a mother, I really can’t wrap my head around that one.”
A woman. Was I that woman? Oh my God, I was that woman.
Gretchen smirks. “And the librarian. Nora Stewart. How is that connected? Nora was a Black Stone Indian. Only a very small remnant is left from that tribe.”
My blood runs cold. Nora, the librarian. “She wanted to speak with me.” The words come from me numb.
“Who did?” James rattles my hand as if trying to pull me from my trance. “Heather or the librarian?”
“Both.”
The redhead tsks into her mic. “Such a senseless tragedy unfolding here. They are such a small remnant. Of course, rumors have persisted for years regarding the curse of the tribe.”
A single tear rolls down my face without my permission. “That’s Reagan’s tribe,” I whisper.
“What?” James looks straight ahead at the screen in disbelief.
The camera pans back to the woods, to the caution tape glowing like the surface of the sun, citrine in an ashen world, and it’s jarring.
Gretchen steps into the scene. “And young Hailey Oden.”
James grips my hand. The room grows icy.
“My God.” Can’t breathe.
Gretchen shakes her head at the scene. “To have the child ripped from your womb and left to die in the woods, naked and alone. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s obvious we have a very disturbed psychopath on the loose.” She looks directly into the camera. “I’m telling you right now, citizens of Concordia, of Saginaw County, of all of Idaho, be vigilant. Watch yourselves. Walk in pairs. Lock your doors and windows because there is a brutal serial killer out there, roaming freely, unafraid, undeterred to take human life whenever they deem.” She raises the hatchet in her hand and the ax head gleams like a nuclear flash. “And this is their weapon of choice.” The camera pans down to a bloodied hatchet on the ground, but it’s not the blood still covering the blade that takes the breath right out of me. It’s the picture of an eye carved into the handle.
“You see that?” James rumbles over my shoulder.
“Yes.” But I wish I didn’t.
My fingers fumble with my phone as I head to the Internet to do hasty research on the Black Stone Indians. I have looked only a handful of times to my detriment. Too afraid James would catch me, and here I am doing it with his supervision.
“Right there.” He points to an article, fifth one down in the search engine.
“The Curse of the Black Stone People.” My body thumps with fear.
We click over and start reading at a breakneck pace.
I scroll to the bottom until I hit pay dirt. “Legend has it the Chachnoaw Indians, a weak and paltry band nearly destroyed by yellow fever, looked to the Black Stone for mercy and tribe integration to sustain their people and stave off starvation. But legend insists that the chief of the Black Stones turned them away. Before the small weak tribe could leave Black Stone land, the chief took the only surviving daughter of Chachnoaw royalty, a little girl of six, and slit her throat for all to see. The Chachnoaw were greatly distressed as they had promised her late parents, their chief and priestess, they would raise their daughter and plant a son in her one day to carry on the royal lineage.” I swallow hard, trying to understand how anyone can be so cruel.
“The curse.” James runs his finger lower over the screen. “The self-appointed leaders of the Chachnoaw decided to fight to the death for the honor that was lost of their warrior princess. Every single Chachnoaw died that afternoon. Before the last one perished, while he struggled with the breath in his lungs, he swore that the Chachnoaw spirit warriors would forever avenge the blood of their people. Anyone with Black Stone lineage would die a horrible death—the curse initiating on their sixth birthday.” He looks up at me. Reagan is six. “They would allow the tribe to thrive in order to bring sorrow to each and every generation forever more. In an attempt to seal their honor, each death is to come purely from their vengeance, unadulterated by worldly disorder. They believe in a fair fight. A good one.” His finger floats down farther. “The spirit warriors would come back in the form of the little girl who was brutally slaughtered.” James and I go rigid as I land my finger on the final sentence.
“And that is what became known as the curse of Otaktay—the killer of many.”
A scream comes from upstairs followed by a heavy thud as James and I fly up swift as ghosts.
The door to Reagan’s room is off the hinges and we find Reagan shivering in the middle of the room.
“Where is she?” I twist in a panic.
James gives me a hard shove and sends me flying as a metal blade slices the air next to me, embedding itself into the floor.
Ota appears, larger, her hair expanded and matted as if she just underwent an electrocution. A horrid scream expels from her throat, shrill and horrifically loud, as she plucks the blade right out of its newfound resting place.
I snatch Reagan into my arms and dive into the corner, shielding her body with my own.
James dives over Ota—the creature, the beast—his hands wrap themselves around her neck and it’s as if all of time stands still, the story of our lives rewriting itself in this one homicidal moment. I try to memorize it, the way her fragile neck grows ever so thinner, the convincing way her eyes bulge, her tongue splayed out, pink and fat. James grunts as he puts some muscle behind the effort.
We were good people, my husband and I. We had everything you could ask for—successful careers, a stunning home with the requisite, yet clichéd, white picket fence, a precious daughter to call our own. We had secrets, my husband and I. Not many, so few, all of them lethal.
I watch as James clasps his hands tighter around the girl’s bird-like neck, squeezing hard until her flesh goes white—so hard you can see his bones bulge severely, stretching thin the skin at his knuckles.
We were good people, James and I.
It was true until it wasn’t.
In an instant, his body bucks off her as he crashes against the table.
“James!” I extend my hand in an effort to reach him.
“
Get out!” he roars so loud, I can’t tell if he’s talking to me or the demon swirling between us.
Ota stands in the center of the room, her features morphing to something far more masculine. Her mouth grows unnaturally wide and Reagan screams, burying her face in my thigh.
“You cannot stop us.” A thundering voice escapes her, deep, unmistakably inhuman. The voice of a thousand men, haunting, interwoven like rushing waters. “You cannot. Reagan must go home to her ancestors.” Ota—that thing staggers toward my baby girl. “Her true father awaits.” A horrible maniacal laugh escapes from that misshapen gaping mouth.
Something in me snaps when I hear it—see it taunting my child’s life that way. James has loved this child from the moment we found out I was expecting. Like a flood, all of the memories, our first sonogram, our careful wedding night, the birth of our precious child. James and I went through it all. And then the resentment grew so great because I knew that I should tell him, and then not knowing how. I became cold toward him, a festering wound. Yes, we had problems, and we both handled them poorly. Him worse than I ever did. But nobody threatens my family.
I lunge for Ota and capture her in my arms, the laughter of thousands of hyenas echoes through me like a tuning fork. I wrap my fingers around her neck and squeeze as her body writhes and chokes beneath me. My thumbs inch their way up until they land over those dark soulless eyes and I press into them with all of my strength, her body kicking and bucking beneath me until I gouge those demonic orbs out, the blood on my hands so real, so very convincing.
James plucks the gyrating girl from my arms, and in one herculean move he hurls her across the room, crashing her through the window, and we hurry to see her hit the frozen ground beneath with a slap before detonating into dozens of small black sparrows. One by one they float to the sky, dissipating to nothing, disappearing to some other worldly plane that I hope to never visit.
Reagan latches around my leg and I scoop her up. James wraps an arm around the two of us.
There’s a stillness filling the room. A beautiful silence that feels full of peace and dare I say, joy.
“It’s over?” I shake my head in disbelief. I think deep down we both realize it’s far from that.
James pulls me up by the chin, and I see his tear-slicked face. “How about we start all over again?”
“I think that’s the perfect place to begin.”
He holds us tight as the iced air breezes in and washes us clean, breathes its blessing of renewal over our lives.
We are starting anew.
The doorbell rings downstairs and the three of us walk down together.
16
James
Rich and McCafferty are not impressed with our efforts to explain away Reagan’s reappearance with the truth—most of the truth anyhow. McCafferty isn’t buying the old Indian curse. She needs hard evidence with logical explanations behind it, a drifter, your run-of-the-mill psychotic serial killer, a demented grandfather whose legalistic ways ultimately did him in. No, I didn’t give her my father. There was no point. I let Rich discover the body as he circled the premises. My father’s heart stopped at some point in the night. He was found sprawled out, face up to the sky, eyes wide open, mouth agape, arms strung out. My father had hung himself on the cross of his own disabling judgment. His impossible rules had already taken the life of so many, and now they had finally taken his.
After the first twenty-four hours of having Reagan home, the media circus died down, snuffed out like a flame that we never wanted burning in the first place. The public’s opinion of us remains the same, at least for now. Allison and I were money-grubbing schemers who made up a second girl—profited off the false kidnapping of our own daughter. My father’s storage facility was exposed, but the public doesn’t believe for a second that Allison and I didn’t have a hand in it. They say Reagan is too well-adjusted for a child who was left alone in a locker for the better part of two months. But she wasn’t alone. My father visited daily. There was a stash of sedatives found that he used to knock her out when he wasn’t around. It must have been hell. He could have killed her. I’m shocked he didn’t for the sport of it. After all, he had a record to maintain. I’m not sure about Monica’s role. But the rest of the time without my father—it must have been so very hard for Reagan.
Allison, Reagan, and I drive down to the Concordia cemetery, to the inadvertent family plot where my father has a prepaid hole in the ground waiting for him. We’ve gone through the motions of planning a funeral, the wheels of which my father had started turning over thirty years ago. A part of me doesn’t know what to make out of the fact that my dad had paid for and planned his demise for over three decades. My father always was a planner. The only regret here being, he should have gone first.
We pull along the curb in the middle of the cemetery, with all of its winding roads, its birch and aspens already bald as we head into winter. The mound of dirt waiting to cover my father’s casket sits right there next to him in his new two-by-six cell—one he will never escape from. A small crowd has gathered, mostly reporters, old colleagues, talking amongst themselves.
I reach over and give Allison’s hand a squeeze. “You okay?”
“I’m okay if you are.” Her milk white teeth graze over her lips. So beautiful. It’s the only thought I have of my wife lately. So perfectly beautiful and she’s all mine.
“Let’s do this.” We deliberated briefly on how to go about it, but at the end of the day it wasn’t about me or our anger toward that demented fool who brought so much tragedy to so many. It was about Reagan. She loved him. At the moment, she doesn’t know any better. She wants to say one final goodnight to Papa. And I’m sure one day, when we spell out exactly what kind of a monster he really was, she’ll appreciate knowing the location of his grave so she can swing by once in a while and spit on it.
We get out and I take Reagan up in my arms. My daughter. I may not be able to say she is flesh from my flesh, but I feel it even in that way. No one will ever take Reagan away from me again. She is mine, through and through. Allison heads over to say hello to her parents. Her mother, another psychotic in a long line of psychotics fate has surrounded us with—and she accepts her with open arms.
“Auntie Mony!” Reagan’s miniature feet swim near my legs as she points to a familiar brunette.
I glare over at Monica with her thick black coat, matching dark hat with its widow veil, dark sunglasses that eat up half her face. My father mentioned she helped out—at least in the beginning. She’s just as culpable in my eyes.
Reagan bucks as if spurring me in that direction. “Auntie Mony let me stay at her house until Papa took me to our great adventure. She has a puppy. I want a puppy, Daddy.” Her fragile arms wrap tight around my shoulders. “I love you.” Her tiny features morph into a mask of worry. “I don’t want any more big adventures. Next time you and Mommy need to leave—please take me with you.” Her voice breaks with a whimper and I pull her in close, my hot breath in her hair.
“I will never leave you. You will never spend the night alone again.”
“I was never alone, Daddy.” Her frail hand slaps against the side of my face as she grips me. Her eyes sparkle into mine, and I don’t have the heart to delve too deep into the trauma we just pulled her out of, but my blood runs cold at who it could have been. “Auntie Mony taught me to play Old Maid. She said she loved that game when she was a little girl my age. And jacks. We played lots and lots of jacks.”
My rage shifts toward Monica and the dark ludicrous path she followed my father down.
I set Reagan down on the damp grass. “Why don’t you head over to your mom and say hi to your grandparents?” She takes off without any further prompting, but I head over to the merry widow, a grin on those bright red-stained lips of hers. “Don’t bother smiling at me. You will never get one out of me again.”
“That’s harsh.” She shudders as she looks to my father’s baby blue casket. Blue. Of all the colors of the rainbow, my fat
her chose something youthful, far too innocent to encapsulate himself in forever.
“They’re going to be harsher to you where you’re going.” I keep my gaze straight ahead, soaking in the white sky, not a trace of the hue my father has robed himself in.
Monica sucks in an auditory breath. “Look, you can’t prove anything. I didn’t do anything wrong. Your father—he needed me. Your mother shut him out and he needed the feel of a woman in his life.”
I glance over at the thickly embedded worry lines tunneled into her forehead. Monica has aged thirty years in these last few days.
“He loved me.” A silent tear runs down her cheek. “When you abandoned me and the baby, he stepped in. He was doing the right thing by me.”
“You never had my baby, Monica. It wasn’t possible. The math is wrong. And”—I glance to Allison as an icy lone tear makes its way down my own face—“I’m not able to have a baby.” There. It’s as if a boulder has lifted from my shoulders. When Allison and I were trying and it didn’t happen, I wondered if it was her. But before I asked Allison to get herself checked out, I thought I’d take myself off the infertility shelf. Sure enough, my sperm had low motility. It would be a miracle for me to have another baby again. Or at least that’s what I believed when I thought I had already miraculously conceived Reagan. That’s how I was certain that Hailey’s baby wasn’t mine. Rich ran the DNA, and I was right. Faulk Oden’s wife, had yet another man to heat the sheets with. Of course, I still bear the guilt. I’ve turned into another Price monster who takes down families. It’s a painful truth that I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.