Page 2 of The Sister's Curse
We reached the barn, and uniformed officers took Rod from me. A row of Rod’s buddies were sitting on the ground, their hands zip-tied behind their backs.
Captain Monica Wozniak grinned at me. “I see you found him.”
“Rod or the dog?”
She winced in regret. “Sorry. I opened the door to grab my gear, and he was gone like a flash before I could get his harness on. He doesn’t like being apart from you.”
I stared down at Gibby, who was gazing upon me with enough adoration to cause even the stoniest heart to explode.
“What am I going to do with you and your separation anxiety?” I murmured.
I grabbed an evidence bag for the manufacturing paraphernalia from Rod’s pockets. “Rod made off with some precursor ingredients.”
“Great,” Monica said. “Forensics will love to try to figure out what they’re using to cook up smoky quartz.”
A new permutation of meth had crept into Bayern County. Tweakers called it “smoky quartz,” because it looked like little gray crystals. They would’ve been pretty in a rock collection but were a hazard out on the streets.
In the distance, I heard music, a woman singing. Probably a radio. Patrol cars were clustered around the old barn that Rod and his pals had been squatting in. But the music was coming from another direction, off to the east.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Monica.
“Hear what?” She frowned.
“Never mind.” Maybe there were campers with a radio out there. “I’ll be back…Gonna check to make sure Rod didn’t drop any more evidence.”
I waded back through the grass, toward the music trickling into my pulse and tightening my throat. I felt it then, the exact moment when the sun vanished and the light changed. Sunset. I turned west, to where the sun had dipped below the trees, gold melting into leaves and fading out. A brief flash of lurid green lit up the horizon. I held my breath as it flared and vanished, leaving the land in soft twilight.
The fabled green flash, a rare meteorological phenomenon. I hadn’t seen it since I was a child.
—
“Don’t make me go down there,” I whispered.
I was maybe eleven years old, judging by the Wonder Woman Underoos I wore as swimwear. I sat on the edge of the three-foot-wide well, next to the still pump, feet dangling into the darkness. I could see something moving below me—could be water, could be snakes. My toes curled in fear.
“Quit whining and go down there,” Mom snapped. She was standing in the grass in the fading light, one hand on her hip and the other holding the ember of a cigarette. “You’re the only one small enough to get down there and see what’s clogging the pump.”
I flinched. This was my dad’s domain, fixing things. But he and my mom had had an argument yesterday, and he’d taken off. “Can’t we just wait for Dad?”
“No,” she said quietly, a vicious smile on her lips. “We can’t wait for him anymore. What if he never comes back?”
Fear trilled through me. I couldn’t imagine my dad leaving forever. For a few days or weeks, sure…he did that sort of thingwhen he and Mom got into it. But I couldn’t imagine him leaving me with…with her…forever.
She shoved at my shoulder with her espadrille-clad foot. I teetered, then fell in with a shriek.
I landed, sputtering, in black water up to my chin. My fingers brushed the muddy walls of the well. Evening light streamed in, in a circle above me, a diffuse light that did little to show me the PVC pipe reaching into the water beside me. My mom glowered at me.
I turned to the pipe, reaching down. I couldn’t feel the end of it.
“It’s too deep!” I called.
“You’re not coming up until you find it.”
I took a breath, closed my eyes, and went underwater. My hands followed the pipe down, down to where the debris trap had to be, somewhere…My fingers closed around mud and sticks clotting the end of the pipe. I flung the crud away…
Something brushed against my leg in the dark.
I screamed, my cry muffled in bubbles, and I clawed my way back up to the surface.
