The Sister's Curse

1

Handfishing for Monsters

"You can't keep running!"

No one really could. Truth always slithered to the light. It could wait underground for years-decades, even-exulting in darkness. But truth inevitably lifted its head and flicked its tongue at the sun. It was sometimes beautiful, often terrifying, and usually poisonous.

And painful as hell when it bit.

"It's all over, Rod!" I shouted as I ran into the gloom. The sun had set, the last golden light fading from the tassels of summer grasses.

The man I chased was just ahead of me, a stringy dude in a camo T-shirt and jorts. He looked back over his shoulder, fearful. If he had any sense, he would've gone to ground and crawled through tall grass and purple ironweed. But Rod Matthews hadn't thought straight in many years. Decades of bad decisions had led him to today, to being chased by the Bayern County Sheriff's Office, on charges of meth production. A whole nest of meth heads had been disturbed, scattering to the four winds, and Rod was my chosen quarry for the evening.

"I ain't goin' back to prison!" he shouted.

Rod put his head down and pumped his scrawny fists, running for what was left of his life. I hadn't judged Rod to be in great shape, but adrenaline was a helluva drug. I'd eventually wear him down and he'd collapse. Eventually.

I toyed with the idea of taking my time, of hunting him. Sometimes . . . I wanted to enjoy circling my prey, feeling the space of air in my lungs, and the tightness of my muscles ready to spring.

But I didn't take that slow luxury. I increased my pace. I'd take him down quickly, haul him back to his meth lab. Clean. Like the good cop I once was, and was trying to be again.

In my peripheral vision something rippled the grass, as if an invisible shark swam beside me. It moved parallel to me, surged past me.

My heart lurched into my mouth, shattering my single-pointed concentration. No . . .

Rod screamed and collapsed, disappearing from sight.

"Fuck. Fuck. Stop it!"

I rushed to the place where Rod had fallen. He was lying on the ground, whimpering. A large, spotted pit bull was sitting on Rod's chest, chewing his T-shirt and growling like thunder.

"Gibby! Gibby, get off!" I reached for my dog's collar.

Gibby huffed at me. He drew his lips back into what I interpreted to be a smile, but Rod took as an expression of utter bloodthirstiness. I pulled Gibby back. Gibby liked hunting, too, but his methods were more direct. I couldn't really fault him for that.

I turned Rod over, shoved him face down in the grass, and cuffed him. To my relief, I noticed no blood on either Rod or the dog-just lots of slobber.

I glanced at Gibby, who smiled and thumped his tail on the ground. "You were supposed to wait in the car with Monica."

I swore he laughed at me. I had no idea how he'd gotten out of the SUV; I'd closed the doors and left the AC running. Gibby was a rescue dog with a very questionable reputation. A year ago he was on death row with animal control for mauling a cop; I'd pulled some strings to get him released into my custody.

"You're under arrest for the manufacture, possession, and distribution of a Schedule II substance," I told Rod, rolling him over to search him for drugs and weapons. His pockets were full of foil-wrapped pills-likely pseudoephedrine-and a pop bottle half-full of liquid. I squinted at it. It was the wrong color for cola or piss. Likely, it was one of the precursor chemicals for meth production-acetone or ether. I stuffed the evidence into my pockets and hauled Rod to his feet. I read him his rights as we crossed back through the field, toward a distant barn. He'd lost a flip-flop somewhere in his attempt to escape, so I took it slow for his benefit.

Above us, starlings flew west to their nests, chattering to themselves. They clotted together in a murmuration, twisting and turning in a cloud of seething, chirping shadow. It never failed to amaze me how they could become something so much more than the sum of their feathered parts, and I wondered what invisible current drove them.

Rod hung his head and plodded along, ignoring the show in the sky. "I'm going back to prison."

"Probably," I agreed, one eye still on the sky.

"Can I cut a deal? What if I roll over on my brother, Timmy?"

"Depends on what you've got to say about Timmy. Is he in town?" Rod's brother was a well-known drug runner. He was well-known because he wasn't very good, and got caught with some frequency.

"He's back from Florida, with a trunk full of ketamine."

"A whole trunk full?" I was skeptical.

"He picked it up at the airport, with some dudes from Germany . . ."

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 thing when 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.

"Let me up! Let me up!" I blubbered. "There's something down there. There's-"

Mom reached for my arm and hauled me out. I didn't think she was that strong, but she tugged me up to the grass with little effort. I curled up in a ball and wrapped my arms around my knees.

Mom gazed into the well, the way she did when staring into her teacup, still and contemplative.

"Was it a snake?" I gasped.

"No," she said.

I felt it then, that moment when the sun disappeared. I'd always been able to feel that exact moment, even when I was indoors or under cloudy skies. The light changed that much. I gazed out at the fading sunset and spied the green flash.

I pointed to it excitedly. "Did you see that?"

Mom nodded, but her face was lined with tension. "I saw."

"What is it?"

She exhaled. "The green flash means that something woke up. Something bad. Something we don't wanna mess with."

"But what is it?" I had read entirely too many fairy tales. "Is it fairies?"

She gripped my arm and pulled me to my feet. "No. It's time for bed."

I frowned. It was barely dark, but Mom usually made me go to bed early. But this time I was ready to go, to get away from that claustrophobic well and that look in my mom's eyes.


My mom told many lies.

She had to, I think. She was married to a serial killer, the legendary Forest Strangler, who left a trail of deceit and bodies throughout Bayern County. While he lied about his whereabouts, who he'd seen, what he'd been doing. Pretty much everything.

But she'd lied to herself about what kind of evil slept under our roof, and she'd lied to the police about wanting to take care of me. She'd given me up for adoption as soon as my father had been charged and had disappeared into the night.

I'd worshipped my father when I was a little girl. I always thought of myself as my father's daughter in so many ways, even after I learned who he was and what he'd done. The forest spoke to me the way it spoke to him, and I felt its pull, that beckoning darkness. He'd lied to me the whole time. And I hated that.

And I was slowly beginning to hate him, for both what he did and the lies he told me.

I didn't know if my mom lied to me about the green flash. There was nothing in it for her to lie to me about it . . . so why would she?

As an adult, I saw a television meteorologist talk about how the green flash was a rare phenomenon that occurred when a clear sky acted as a prism under just the right conditions. The meteorologist showed some grainy cell phone footage of such a flash. When I was a child, the flash had been magic. As an adult, I was relieved to know that it was just a freak meteorological event, perfectly scientific and perfectly safe.

I supposed my mom was a liar about that, too.

Swallowing the lump of a memory, I turned to Monica, now fifty yards distant, to see if she saw, but her back was turned.

I inhaled, a whispering breeze stirring the grass in a circular pattern. It felt like something was on the move, like on those full-moon fall nights when the deer traveled miles.

At my side, Gibby whined.

I lowered my hand to his head. "We should go back." Some things in the world were not to be fucked with. This was probably one of them.

A woman screamed in the distance.

Instinct overrode my hesitation, and I burst into a sprint toward the scream. Grasses made zip-zip slashes against my jeans, and Gibby panted beside me. We raced across the field toward the distant cry.

"Help!"

The land was darkening by the time we burst out onto freshly mown grass, a full yellow moon rising in the east. A grand two-story brick house with a slate roof stood in the center of the lawn. Old money, not new money. The slate was streaked from decades of acid rain, and wavy glass windows gazed down with black eyes.

A young woman, no more than sixteen, raced toward us. A brunette braid flopped over the shoulder of her T-shirt. She was wearing sandals and a long denim skirt.

"Are you the police?" Her fingers were knotted around her cell phone. "I just called 911."

I held up my badge. "I'm Anna. What's going on?"

"I'm Leah. The babysitter. I was watching Mason, and I . . . I can't find him. I . . ." Her face crumpled.

I took her by the shoulders. "It's okay. We'll find him. How old is he?"

"He's four. He's got blond hair, brown eyes. He's wearing a blue T-shirt with the Superman logo, and red shorts. Oh my God."

"Where did you last see him?"

"He was in the living room when . . . when I went to the bathroom. When I got out, he was just . . . gone."

"Show me." As we approached the house, I scanned the scene. I saw no cars whose drivers might have abducted him, heard no engines.

I spoke into the radio microphone pinned to my shoulder. "This is L4 at County Road 12. Report of a missing child."