“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.”
