“Someone like me?” I ask acidly. “And what do you mean by that?”
Laura sighs. She picks up her coffee cup and starts to pace the small kitchen. “Only one reason,” she echoes. “To throw you under the bus whenever she needs to save her ass. Cath does something stupid? There’s always Daddy with his sacks of cash to the rescue. Just blame the poor friend, she doesn’t have money for lawyers. I was surprised nothing bad ever went down. Considering what a crazy twat Cath is.”
For some reason, I think back to elementary school. Cath left a half-eaten popsicle on the floor in the corner of the classroom. Then, when the teacher found the molten sticky mess, it never occurred to anyone to blame Cath, the model student. Everyone thought it was me but had no proof.
“You watch out for that girl,” Laura says.
“I think I’m good,” I say. “We’re not exactly friends anymore.”
Laura gives me a shrewd look. “But she’s married to Luc now.”
Don’t I know it.
“I’ll be fine, Mom,” I say, and plunk the egg I just finished frying onto one of the plates.
Laura circles the room that’s at once kitchen, dining room, and den. I’d had time to tidy up and wash some of the dishes before I made breakfast. She whistles approvingly.
“Oh, Stephanie,” she says. I pause midmotion through flipping the egg over easy I’d been making for myself. Something in her voice alarms me. A mushy sort of sentimentality that I’d hardly ever heard from Laura. I’m stricken by a strange foreboding, like she’s about to say something else, something important, when out of nowhere, the sharp trill of the phone slices through the silence.
At once, the little smile lurking in the corners of Laura’s lips fades.
“Let me get that,” I say, and start toward the phone, which sits at the farthest end of the kitchen counter, on top of a stack of old Yellow Pages turned brown with age, just as I remember.
Laura stops me with a gesture. “Let it go to voice mail. We’re about to eat.”
I shrug. She picks up the plate even as the phone continues to ring. She pays it no heed whatsoever. She sits down, picks up her fork, and digs in like she hasn’t eaten in a decade.
Wary, I carry my own plate to the table, but I can’t help but steal glance after glance at the phone that continues to trill.
“Might be important,” I say.
“It’s the weekend. It’ll wait.”
“Okay.” Whatever.
At last, the phone stops ringing. Just as I sigh discreetly with relief, the answering machine picks up. It’s one of the old ones with the little tape recorder, the one that broadcasts loudly into the room.
“Hi,” says a female voice. I don’t recognize it—it sounds older and hesitant. “I know this is Laura O’Malley’s number, but I’m calling for Stephanie. Jeannette told me you were staying with your mother. I wanted to talk to you. I have something to tell you—” here, the voice seems to hesitate before drawing a breath and continuing with more certainty “—I have something to tell you about Michelle Fortier.”
I stand up so fast that the chair topples backward, but by the time I make it to the phone, she has hung up with a decisive click. She forgot to mention her name or, for that matter, her phone number.
FOURTEEN
1979
“A witch.” Laura feels a touch of skepticism. “La Grosse Sophie? I’ve heard that name somewhere before.”
“I’ll bet you have,” says her mother enigmatically. “We all knew her under a different name, but they say she was born Sophie Saint-Martyre.”
“Sounds like horseshit if you ask me.” Laura can’t help but guffaw. Then she looks up at her mother and is silenced by the serious look on her face.
“Supposedly, she left town years ago,” her mother said. “Or maybe she’d been chased out. Either way, no one admits to knowing anything. But one thing for sure, no matter what the circumstances, Sophie is still out there, and I’m guessing she’s pretty pissed off.”
“Why would they chase her out of town?” Laura asks.
Her mother chuckles. “All this stuff with the animals we’ve been seeing? Well, let me tell you, it was the least of what she was doing.”
Laura’s breath catches. She’d give up her prized collection of rock tapes to hear the rest. Her mother, though, takes her sweet time.
It’s rare enough for her to talk to Laura like this—like they’re actually mother and daughter. Most of the time, her mother is either drunk or yelling. Laura watches the other girls in her class with their mothers who come to pick them up after school. They wear nice, fitted dresses and sometimes even heels, and they get their hair done and look young and beautiful. Her own mother never looks like that, never has, as far as Laura can remember.
So Laura hangs on to this conversation, not just for the scandalous and thrilling story but for the sake of this interaction.
“Word is, she sacrificed these animals to the Devil,” her mother says at last. “In exchange for power, for curses, who knows. But at some point, I guess the animals weren’t enough. That’s how it always is, isn’t it? You feed the abyss, you better follow through because the abyss is never sated. It demands more and more, you hear?”
Laura nods.
“So she got started on people. And that’s when someone told her, persuasively enough, to hit the road. No one saw her after that. But that doesn’t mean she left, does it?”
Laura digests all this. “What sort of powers?” she asks after a while. Her voice sounds rough, and her mouth has gone dry. She has to lick her lips.
“Huh?”
“What sort of powers did she get from the Devil? What sort of curses?”
Her mother frowns. “Don’t you get ideas, young woman.”
“I was just asking—” Laura feels desperate. She’s already forgotten that she’d dismissed the story as fake not five minutes ago.
