Cursed be the Wicked (14 page)

I sit down onto the couch in the living room and scratch at the back of my neck. I’m a schmuck for thinking I’d pulled one over on not one but both of these women.

Finn’s back with iced tea pretty quickly. She kicks her shoes off while she sets the drinks down on the coffee table. Then she sits down onto the couch and puts her feet up at my end. I pick them up and put them on my lap while I situate myself so that I’m facing her.

I’ve been fantasizing about a moment alone with Finn like this but I still want to know more about her. So instead of trying to get in her pants, I find myself trying to get inside her head.

I learn about her childhood and how she always felt like the odd man out. How she never really knew what it was she wanted to do and how she spent every summer here with Geneva while her parents traveled.

I wonder why it is I never ran into her but it’s not all that farfetched. Geneva may be social now, but back when I was a kid, she was a bit of a recluse, hence the witch theories.

Guilt sets in again about the pranks I took part in back then but Finn’s own questions distract me from letting it affect my mood.

She mostly asks about my job, where I’ve been, the places I’ve seen, my favorite trips.

We go on like that for a while. Finn gets up to stretch and take our glasses to the kitchen and when she comes back, she lowers the lights. She doesn’t take up her original spot on the couch, however. This time she snuggles up into my side and lays her head on my chest.

I rake my fingers through her hair as she tells me about the various jobs she’s taken up over the past couple of years. When she lets out a long yawn, I know she’s tired. It’s been a long day for the both of us and I should go but I can’t. It’s too comfortable here with her and as she slides her arm around my middle and hums, my arm tugs her closer into me.

“Coop?”

“Yeah?”

“Why did you leave Salem?”

I pause before telling her. It’s not that I hadn’t expected the question to come up sooner or later. What I hadn’t expected was how easy it would be to tell her.

“I just wanted it behind me. Ya know?”

She tilts her head up toward me, silently encouraging me to elaborate, so I do.

“It was difficult enough spending my entire childhood getting ridiculed about my crazy mother, Finn. Then I get arrested and am in the middle of being on trial when she finally decides to grow a conscience? Half the town still thinks I killed him and that she only confessed to protect me.”

“No they don’t,” she insists but I doubt she’s right on this topic.

“Anyway, I didn’t really want to spend my adulthood dealing with the repercussions of being the son of
Crazy Maggy Shaw
.”

She lowers her head again.

“You were just a kid, Coop, maybe there’s more to the story you didn’t know about back then.”

I yawn and think about that website I found on Mom.

“Maybe you’re right, Finn. It’s too late for any of it to matter now though.”

“Maybe,” she says quietly. “Maybe not.”

She stretches her hand upward and rolls it.

“What does the word on your tattoo mean?” I ask her and she turns her wrist around to look at it, letting me spy from behind her.

“
Spiro
,” she says, pronouncing it for me.

She stretches out some more, then she wraps her arm around my belly again.

“It’s Latin,” she says in a small voice. She’s not going to last much longer.

“Loosely translated, it means . . .” she yawns one more time and her eyes close. “...
to breathe
.”

“To breathe,” I whisper, and before I can think another complete thought, my eyelids are closing as well.

Chapter 9

Bakers Island

I’m standing in the middle of my front yard. I don’t expect the school bus though, and I haven’t just come home from a friend’s house, I simply stand there, debating whether or not I should go inside.

My father appears beside me.

“She’s not well,” he tells me.

I don’t believe him. I want her to come outside and tell me he’s wrong. She never shows.

“She’ll never be well,” Dad adds, and then he heads over to his old Chevy pickup truck.

“Get in.”

I don’t move. I stand there. I stare at the house. I wait.

“Cooper, get in,” he repeats, harsher this time, but I still won’t. He’s heading back for me, wild eyed, when his truck explodes. We’re thrown to the ground together. When I gather my wits and am able to stand again, I look to my bedroom window on the second floor.

My mother stands just behind the shadows, watching as my father gasps for air.

She’s smiling.

My eyelids fly open and it takes a few minutes to adjust into the conscious world. My heart is racing, my blood pumping, and I can still see my mother’s eyes from the dream as she watched my father struggling for air.

It was the same satisfied look she had the day he went missing.

“Where’s Dad?”

I was going to be late for school that day. My father drove me most of the time. My mother was at the kitchen sink, cutting strawberries as she stared out the back window. She was humming a tune. I recognized it from when she used to sing to me at bedtime.
“Mom, where’s Dad?”
I asked her again when she refused to answer, but she just shrugged.

I walked to school that day.

Later that night I found out someone at work reported him missing.

The mid-morning sun filters through the curtains and Finn shifts. I’m only now aware of her small, warm body against mine. She fits there, perfectly and entirely. I could get used to her being in my arms. I pull her gently into a hug.

When she stirs this time, she mumbles.

“I’ll take care of him.”

I wonder who she’s talking to. I wonder who she’s referring to. Then I know.

I know.

I need her
.

I’m warm all of a sudden, and my heart pounds inside my chest. Then I remember the last thing she said to me last night.

Loosely translated, it means to breathe.

I do it. I breathe, and it crosses my mind how nice it would be to stay here with her like this, but know that I can’t. Among other reasons, I need to stretch like crazy.

I slide out from underneath Finn, pull a blanket over her shoulders and stand. I check the time. It’s later than I thought. I crack my neck a little, then roll my shoulders out. Geneva’s couch might not be the best quality, but sleeping on it with Finn last night proved to be the best rest I’ve gotten since arriving in Salem.

I catch myself watching her sleep again and I don’t care. She’s too damn cute to look away from her.

I do have to get myself in gear, I remind myself. This article isn’t going to write itself, so I snoop around the living room to find my phone. When I do, I frown at it.

Seven missed calls. From the same local number in Salem as I received before. One from Bill.

I consider ignoring it, but the more I stare at the local number that keeps calling me, the more I want to know who it is. So I call back. There’s no answer and I shouldn’t be surprised but disappointment strikes me anyway. I’m about to turn the phone dark and slip it away when I notice, I have a message.

I listen to it and goosebumps race down my spine. It’s only my name I hear, barely. Whoever it is, is whispering. I could swear it’s my mother’s voice but that’s impossible. There’s no way it’s her.

Finn rolls over and murmurs again. “I promise, Maggie.”

My body stills with the phone to my ear. My blood burns suddenly and my heart rate speeds up. Between the voice I just heard and Finn talking to my mother in her sleep, I’m feeling claustrophobic.

I turn the phone off and think about waking Finn out of the dream she’s having. She looks exhausted, though, like she needs sleep as much as I do. So instead, I give her a soft kiss on the top of her head, and leave.

“Settle down, Coop,” I tell myself when I’m outside.

I try to ignore the voice inside my head that’s giving me too much to think about. I hear the voice on the other end of the message I just listened to and tell myself again, there’s no way it was Mom. She’s dead. The dead don’t call their sons and freak them the fuck out for no reason.

What am I saying? The dead don’t call anyone. Period.

Whoever it was just sounds like my mother. And the fact that Finn was saying her name while asleep could mean anything. We talked about her last night. She could simply be having leftover thoughts running through her subconscious.

I can’t let myself get sucked into the black hole that thinking about this might lead to, so I move on. I push it all out my head. Finn, the message, her dream, and I focus on something else.

Work.

I send Bill a quick text to let him know things are going fine, even though all I’ve got at the moment for my article is a jumbled mess of horse shit. Then I hop into the car and head back to the Camilla Rose.

In my room, I wing it mostly, which is fine. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s just a draft to get my creative juices going.

I write about the “authentic” witches shop over in Salem and the “real” Gallows Hill. I even tie the story Finn told me about the witch that fell in love into the piece. As I read over what I’ve got, a thought forms inside my mind about my mother and father. I think about what I read yesterday and wonder again if there’s truth to it. I wonder if any of it matters and how I’d go about finding anything else out at this point even if it did.

I force myself to finish my notes for the day before I consider options on learning more about my family’s drama. I’m not sure I really want to go down that road. I spent enough years living it, why would I want to put that story on repeat?

After about five hours of writing, one fourth of that spent trying not to let myself get distracted, I’m fairly happy with what I’ve got. After a good polish, it’ll set the perfect tone for not only the city, but the time of year people will most likely visit.

I save the file and send it off to Bill in an email to get his feedback. I apologize for missing his call the night before and tell him I’m off to check out more sights but really I just want to get out of this room for a while.

After my shower, I feel rejuvenated. I dress, grab some leftovers from lunch downstairs, then hop back into the car and head over toward downtown Salem. I figure if there’s ever a time I’m going to feel like I can conquer facing my mother’s old home, it’s now.

I pull up into the driveway and step out of the car. This already gives me hope. I’m further than I’ve made it before.

I stop though, when I take in the look of the place. The siding is faded and the roof needs work. The grass has apparently been cut, though not recently. The trees and shrubs have outgrown their shape and could use a trim and my mother’s flowerbed is nonexistent.

She loved those flowers. If nothing else, she loved
them
.

I should be glad she lost something of value to her but I’m not. The flowers being gone gives me a blistering feeling inside my chest. Like Mom’s death just became real for some reason and I’m not sure why it’s hitting me this hard.

I take a step back and look away to clear my head. It bothers me that Liz has done the bare minimum of work on this house but I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me. Her relationship with Mom was strained at best, in the end. Plus, the cost of upkeep is probably more than she can afford. I don’t know what I expected.

Just, not this.

I peek up again and see no vandalism at least. It simply looks nothing like the house I left behind. And looks exactly the same.

As I stare up at my old room, I imagine it the last day I saw it. My bed still wasn’t made, I’d left tons of clothes hanging in the closet and my book bag was sitting on the floor, next to my door. I know people have come and gone since then. Renters have probably trashed the place, or maybe not. The paint has been changed most likely and the marks on the wall where I tracked my height are probably smoothed over but I still want it to look the same.

I don’t know why.

“Think you’re ready?”

Finn is standing beside me and I look from the house over to her, wondering how long I’ve been standing there staring at the old place.

“When did you get here?”

“Just now,” she tells me, then throws a question right back at me. “Why’d you leave this morning?”

“You don’t beat around the bush.”

“Nope.”

I smile. “I like that.”

“Good thing.”

Our exchanges are like an old pair of shoes now. “I got a little spooked,” I tell her honestly then I kind of mutter the rest. “I’m getting these weird calls.”

“Calls?”

“Yeah,” I shake it off. “I think they’re wrong numbers but it’s annoying as hell, ya know?”

Finn nods her head but doesn’t ask me anything else about it. Instead, she looks up at the house, my room in particular, and smiles.

“That’s my old bedroom,” I tell her, pointing and she says, “Yeah,” but I’m not sure if she’s acknowledging that fact, or agreeing with me. When I take another look up at the window, I could swear I see the curtain move.

I blink.

“If you don’t want to go inside, I could show you Baker’s Island,” Finn says. Suddenly I think I’d like to go just about anywhere but inside this house.

“That sounds like a good idea, actually,” I tell her then I joke around to lighten the mood. “How much for today?”

Finn laughs it off and grabs my hand. She pulls me back toward the car and says, “Let’s go, money bags.”

I try and think of the significance Baker’s Island might hold as we pull away from my old neighborhood. I’ve heard of it but have never been. Although I’m not quite connecting the dots on why Finn thinks this is an important place to visit, I don’t start a round of twenty questions. I know she’ll tell me when she tells me.

Finn plays some music on the radio and cranks up the heat while I navigate us out of the city. I’m about to head for the bridge to get us over to Beverly Pier when she tells me, “Take Fort Avenue.”

She’s nuts. Fort Avenue isn’t going to get us anywhere
near
Baker’s Island, but I take the road anyway. I know better by now.

When she says, “Turn off on Winter Island,” I know she’s forgotten which lighthouse she said we’re headed for.

“Finn, that’s Fort Pickering, not Baker’s Island,” I tell her. She eyes me hard from over in the passenger’s seat and I shut up. I still question her navigation skills, though.

We pull into the parking lot, find a spot and when we meet in front of the car, I take her hand in mine.

“Okay, Finn, spill. What are we doing here?”

She tugs my arm and we walk around for a while, like tourists. It’s cold and I can’t believe Finn isn’t freezing her ass off with just a light sweater and jeans on today but hey, at least she’s opted for jeans.

She tells me some of the background of Fort Pickering and I listen like I’m sitting in my high school History class all over again. Interesting, yet dull.

When we’re at the lighthouse, she points across the water.

“See it?” she asks.

I do. It’s small from here, but I can see Baker’s Island.

“Yeah.”

“It’s the largest residential island around here.”

Okay.
“Do you want to move there or something?”

She stares off in its direction, opting to glaze over my sarcasm.

“She’s been through a lot,” she says whimsically. “The government tried for a long time to keep it from being deforested when they first took ownership.”

“Uh huh?”

She nods. “They had good intentions, but it happened anyway.”

“Then she was used for guano in the nineteenth century.”

She looks over at me. “You know what guano is, right?”

I laugh. “Yeah Finn, why are we talking about bird shit?”

She ignores me and goes back to admiring the island. “Then people tried to colonize of course. That was around nineteen-thirty-five.”

I sigh heavy to let her know she’s losing me but she doesn’t care.

“That failed.” She laughs at the obviousness of her statement. “And since then, there’s been airfields, hotels and of course, the lighthouses.”

“I remember that. There were two right? But one was destroyed or something?”

She smiles like she’s proud I know this. “Ma and Pa.”

The wind picks up and her pony tail whips around. I see the sunlight starting to die down. It’s getting colder now.

“If we stay out here too much longer you
will
freeze to death, Finn,” I tell her, then I take my jacket off and put it around her shoulders. She humors me and slips her arms through the sleeves. Then she pulls it tight around her and I smile, satisfied.

I wrap an arm around her and hug her into me to keep us both warm. I also just like having Finn next to me like this. She belongs here.