Cursed be the Wicked (23 page)

I take my first swig and think about Finn’s body against mine, how good and warm it felt. How being with her, any time, day or night, is like wiping the slate inside my head clean of anything and everything.

I take another long drink and I see her smile when I close my eyes. I hear her laugh and watch her eyes widen with awe when she talks about the history of Salem and its witches from centuries past.

I finish the beer off and open another one, wishing her lips were on mine right now, remembering how they felt, and how
she
felt, when she pressed herself against me the way she did.

It amazes me, that I can feel this close to something,
someone
, for the first time in I don’t know how long, maybe ever.

I take another long swig and beer number two is gone quickly.

I open another one, ready to finish this six-pack off when I hear the screen door slam from behind me.

“You better now?” a voice asks. I know who it is. It’s almost like I summoned her here.

I chug the third beer down and don’t answer. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as “better” when it comes to my family.

“You coming back in sometime tonight, Coop?”

I turn to see Finn leaning up against the entryway. She’s angry at me for leaving like I did and yet, “I see it in your eyes you know,” I tell her. “You want to fix what’s broken.”

Part of me wants to run. To get in the car and drive home and screw this fucking job. But the other part of me, the one that wants to carry her up to my bedroom again and never let her leave, that part
wants
her to fix me.

“You’re not broken, Coop.” Finn comes over and sits next to me.

“No?”

She shakes her head. “You’re just a little lost.”

I count the beers I have left. It would be easy to get lost in them. To be honest, I don’t want to be lost anymore. I put the empty bottles into the bag with the others and close the bag up.

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess I am.”

I pick up a beer and hold it out toward her.

“Want one?”

“No,” she says, quietly. Instead, Finn stands and helps me up. We go inside and I toss the bag into the trashcan as we pass it.

It’s difficult to climb the stairs this time. I’m exhausted. When we get to the room, I fall down into the bed.

Finn takes my shoes off, dropping them to the floor. She flicks the light off then she climbs up onto the bed next to me and nestles herself into my side.

I put an arm around her, close my eyes and think about what might have happened earlier. Whether we’d still be laying here in the dark like this, if I’d let my fingers graze her arm, basking in the after effects of it all. Or, following an awkward silence that fell between us, if she would have told me she had to go.

I think about it, things don’t ever seem awkward between us and I wouldn’t have let her go. I’ve let too many people go in my life.

“Finn?”

“Yeah?” she whispers, sliding an arm around me.

“Do you miss your parents?”

Her body tenses next to me but she answers.

“Yeah.”

“How’d they die?” I mumble into the room.

She doesn’t say anything, at first. Normally I’d let it go but I’m feeling a bit more pushy, thanks to the alcohol.

“Tell me.”

I feel her breathing beside me. I know she’s debating whether or not she wants to share. In the end, she decides I’m worthy. Or maybe she just thinks I won’t remember this conversation tomorrow.

“I saw them die,” she says in a low voice, one I can barely hear. I tighten my hold on her in hopes I’m returning some of the comfort she continually offers me.

“That sucks, Finn, nobody should have to watch their parents die.”

It’s the best I can come up with but little do I know, I’ve misunderstood.

“I didn’t
watch
them die, Coop. I
saw
it.” Her voice is tentative. She’s hoping I don’t react like I did earlier.

I won’t.

Before I can respond though, Finn wiggles and turns so she’s on her back. I look over at her. A small ray of moonlight shines through the window, reflecting off the wetness in her eyes. I reach over and wipe the tear away. She grabs my hand and holds it to her chest before I can pull it back.

“I was in my trigonometry class, seething over some stupid fight I’d had with my mother that morning. The teacher said we had ten minutes left and all of a sudden, I got light headed. My head started pounding and I felt like I was going to faint. I raised my hand to ask Mr. Whitts if I could go to the nurse. When I opened my eyes to get up and go, regardless of his answer, I could see them, clear as day, driving down the interstate. It was like I was in the back of the car with them. The window was down, I could feel the air blowing through the car and I could see them in front of me, but they couldn’t see me. There was a tractor trailer headed for us. It ran a stop light and it was happening so fast my dad couldn’t do anything to avoid it. My mother screamed, my father swerved but he over corrected. The truck rammed into the side of the car and I ducked, trying to brace myself for the impact. And then . . .”

She trails off but I have to know what comes next.

“Then?”

“Then I was back in my classroom. As quickly as it had come on, it disappeared. I just knew.”

She wipes at her eyes when she’s done.

I don’t know if it’s the alcohol in my system or the details from her story that makes me dizzy. Regardless, I close my eyes for a minute to try to get the feeling to go away.

“I didn’t ask permission to leave school that day. I ran home but of course, they weren’t there. I called Mom’s cell phone, she didn’t answer. So I just sat on the couch in our living room, and waited for the police to come.”

“Finn, people don’t see the future,” I tell her is some lame attempt to make her feel better.

She rolls over onto her side and tucks her hands underneath her cheek.

“I do.”

I’m not sure when I fell asleep but later, in the middle of night sometime, I wake up, and Finn’s no longer in bed with me. I get up and go look for her outside. As soon as I step foot outside the Camilla Rose, I’m in the woods. I recognize where I am. It’s Finn’s patch of forest that I followed her to a few days before.

She’s standing there, in the middle, like she’s been waiting for me. “Gran used to bring me here, to teach me things.”

She pauses. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say something or not so, I stand there, waiting as her eyes drop to the ground.

“I couldn’t bring them back.”

She looks over to me now; her eyes are dark with sadness. I want to go to her. To hold her. But I’m frozen in place, unable to move.

“My parents,” she says, answering a question I haven’t gotten out yet. My heart aches with hers. My hand goes to my chest to stop the pain. It doesn’t help.

“I didn’t believe Gran when she said witchcraft doesn’t work that way. So I came back, every day that summer, asking for a sign to prove that I had a purpose. That there was some reason I was still here and they weren’t.”

I go to say something but my vocal chords don’t work.

She shakes her head at me. “I had a dream the night I gave up. The night I asked for that sign. I was under water, drowning, and when I came up for air,” she laughs and it seems like she honest-to-god finds something funny, “I was at work. All by myself. It was storming. And the doors flew open, and I’m thinking, this is it, this is where the answers to my prayers are.”

She tilts her head. “Do you know what was behind the door Coop?”

My head moves, side to side, slowly.

“A customer.”

She’s crying, but now I can’t see her. She fades and I feel like I’m being drawn backwards somehow.

I can still hear her voice inside my head though.

“I never went back after that,” she tells me. “I couldn’t. It was such a disappointment to me.”

“What happened?” I finally ask. I’m safe in my bed at the B&B again. Finn doesn’t answer me and I ask her again, louder this time.

“I need to know what happened, Finn.”

The story can’t end there. She’s clearly not that wounded girl anymore. Not the Finn I know. I want to hear what made her change.

I feel her in the bed with me again. She scoots closer and her lips are next to my ear. She’s whispering to me.

“The customer from my dream?”

“Yeah . . .” I breathe.

She waits. Like she’s not sure she should say whatever it is she wants to say. Then finally, she tells me, “It was you.”

I sit up and blink a few times, looking around the room. Sunlight is peeking into the window and my head throbs slightly from drinking the night before.

I can’t make up my mind if I just dreamt everything tha happened or if I’m remembering the rest of an actual conversation with Finn from the night before.
Maybe it was a little of both.

I look down at her, sleeping next to me.

My fingers graze the side of her face, pushing some of the hair out of the way. I don’t know if Finn really saw her parents die in a vision, or if she saw me coming or not. I do think she’s something special.

Some
one
special, if I’m being honest.

I ponder over some of the other conversations we’ve had since I arrived in Salem. About history and truths, about how to listen and how to want to listen.

I think about the subconscious and how much it can mess with your perception of events. And how I’ve had a difficult time lately, all around, deciphering between what are real memories and what I might simply be wishing were real.

I think about how exhausted I am. How I don’t want to fight anymore. Or hate, or resent things I thought I knew to be true all these years.

I want to understand. And know, instead of guess, what in the hell happened with my parents. And with me.

So with the last bit of effort I have in me, I whisper out to the room, and I make a pact with my mother before waking Finn from her sleep. One I probably should have made a long time ago.

“Okay Maggie. Truce.”

Chapter 14

Masquerade

When morning comes, relief floods me when I do
not
see a ton of cars outside the B&B.

When I drive Finn back to Geneva’s, she opts to sit inside the car for a few minutes, enjoying the quiet. I let her. I imagine her day is about to get busy with work as soon as she leaves and I’ve got nowhere else I want to be right now. Besides, it’s nice sitting like this with Finn.

The song on the radio ends and both of us figure it’s as good a time as any to suck it up and get the day started so we get out of the car and as we make our way up the front walk. Then Finn takes my hand into hers.

“What are you up to today?” she asks.

What
am
I up to today? It doesn’t take too long to figure out what I
should
do, but before I get to work on my article there’s something else that needs to be done.

“I think I might head over and see Liz, ask her some questions, hopefully get some answers.” I laugh. “Then maybe go back to Maggie’s and do some more work on the house.”

She nods with a grin spreading across her face. I get the Finn stamp of approval on my plans.

I pull at her hand. “You wanna come with?”

I ask her if she wants to join me because it seems like she’s a staple that I need around these days, but since she has no idea how long she’ll be at the B&B, we decide to just meet up later on.

I don’t kiss her goodbye, even though I want to, but while I debate it, I hold her stare for a few seconds longer than I probably should.

Finn looks away first and waves me off. Then I promptly kick myself all the way back to the car for being a dumb ass.

On the drive over to my aunt’s house, I try to come up with a game plan. I don’t know the woman very well, I never really did. Even when I was living with her, we never talked much. We coexisted. And when I say coexisted, I mean she cooked for me but we never ate together, she made sure I went to school but never asked how I was doing, and she paid for my clothes but not once asked about my taste.

She was never interested in what was going on in my life, or what I was thinking,
if I was okay
.

I can’t say it bothers me. I was never all that interested in her either but she does have information that I want. I’ll fake it if it gets me what I want.

I sit outside her house for a few minutes, prepping myself before I go in. In other words, wasting time. I may or may not have a small amount of apprehension lingering about what I’ll find out from Liz.

I text Bill. I ask him what his thoughts are on the small bit of information I’ve sent him. When his reply isn’t as interactive as I’m hoping for, I find other things to text him about.

The weather here. The people. The events.

Finally, he calls and says I shouldn’t be so worried about keeping him in the loop.

“Despite my excitement for what you write, I’m not your babysitter, Coop,” he tells me and at the end of our discussion, he adds, “Don’t worry, we all know you’ll put together an excellent article.”

I laugh and when I end the call, I stare at Liz’s front door then I chastise myself for being afraid of a damn door. Finally, I get out and walk toward it. As I reach for the handle, unlike the last time I stopped by, the door opens before I have a chance to do it myself.

I don’t know why I expected her to be gone.

“Liz.”

“Figured you’d be by today,” she says, turning to leave me standing there alone. “I’m making breakfast, you’re welcome to eat.”

I follow her inside and toward the kitchen as I ask my first question.

“Where were you yesterday, Liz?”

“What’s that?”

I call after her. “I didn’t see you at the burial.”

“Don’t tell me you went,” she hollers out. I notice she hasn’t done a speck of cleaning since the last time I was here which confirms why Mom’s place is in dire need of a good once over.

I catch up with her and take a seat at the kitchen table. “She’s my mother, of course I went,” I tell her. I’m, of course, being a hypocrite since I’d originally had zero intent on going myself.

Liz waves a hand at me. “Well I have too much to do around here, and my sciatic nerve’s been acting up a lot. It’s not like it’s easy for me to get around, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Suddenly, she’s bending over just a tad more and holding her hip like it’s bothering her.

My brow is very judgmental of her horrible acting skills.

“I guess I just assumed you’d be there,” I say. “I mean, being that you’re her sister and all.”

Her eyes grow cold. “Blood does
not
make family, Cooper.”

She says it with venom wrapped around her words, and although a week or two earlier I would have agreed wholeheartedly with her, right now, I’m just curious as to what happened between the two of them to make her sound so hateful.

“So, Liz?” I clap my hands together and bit the bullet.
Better now than never
. “Anything you can tell me about Jack Diggs?”

She drops the pan she’s checking on back down onto its burner and turns to me.

“Why would you want to know about that old drunk?”

I shrug. “I don’t know, something he said the other day, about knowing Mom.”

“Well I don’t know anything about him, other than he’s a menace.”

“Do you know why he calls Mom
Mag Pie
?”

She slaps her spatula down onto the counter. She turns and points at me and her eyes become slits. “That man’s done
nothing
but cause trouble for this family, Cooper Shaw. You stay as far away from him as possible, you hear me?”

I’m confused.

“I thought you didn’t know anything about him?”

“I don’t.”

“But you just said-”

“Cooper, I am
trying
to cook here. Can’t you see that?”

“Well can you at least tell me where he lives?”

“He doesn’t live
anywhere
, Cooper. He’s a drunk, and he’s homeless, and I wish to God he’d leave Salem,” she growls, and then in a low mumble she adds, “Lord only knows why he stays.”

I give her a minute before I try to ask anything else.

“Can you at least tell me-?”

She cuts me off again. “I’m too busy for nonsense like talking about things that don’t matter anymore, Cooper. If you’re interested in staying for breakfast, like I said, you’re welcome to eat. Otherwise, I have more important things to do.”

There’s a quiet between us for a minute, it seems, and then Liz decides my invitation to breakfast has been revoked. She practically pushes me back through the house and out the front door. She mumbles something about needing to cook and errands to run. Once I’m outside, on her porch, she slams the door shut. I hear the lock click into place but as I wait there, what I don’t hear is movement from the other side.

She’s waiting for me to leave. Hoping I’ll let things go, maybe.

I’m sure
she
thinks somewhere inside that mind of hers that what she
has
told me will deter me from questioning things any further, but she has no idea how determined I can be.

She’s pretty much just confirmed that something was definitely up with my mother and Jack Diggs. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk about it, but I’m guessing Jack will, eventually. And when he does, I plan on being there to hear him out.

I slide back into the rental car and head through town to my old home. When I get there, I’m pleasantly surprised to see Finn waiting for me on the front porch.

“I thought you had to work,” I say, walking up to meet her.

“I took a vacation day,” she explains. “You don’t look as happy as when I saw you last.”

I grind my teeth together just thinking about it before telling her how my visit with the aunt from hell went. “Liz is hiding something from me. I’m sick of people hiding shit from me.”

I’m already inside and storming up the stairs when I hear Finn close the door behind her.

“Wasn’t too forthcoming about your mother, I take it.”

I bark out a laugh. “Understatement of the year, Finn.”

She hurries to catch up with me, and at the top of the stairs, I spin on her. “She literally contradicted herself within ten words. Ten words. Then she’s got the nerve to throw
me
out?”

Finn smiles up at me.

Smiles.

“What the hell are you smiling at?”

“You’re angry.”

“Damn straight I’m angry.”

“Why?”

“Because something’s not right, Finn. And I wanna know.”

“Know what?”

“The truth, dammit,” I tell her. And then it hits me. What she’s smiling at. And she nods before taking my hand in hers.

“All right then.”

The next couple of days are split between pouring over my mother’s journals and dealing with the fact that she’s gone now. I have no way of asking her about how she met Dad, why she wanted to marry him, when all their turmoil started, or better yet, why it started.

One more thing that nags at me throughout this process is Jack Diggs. I’m looking for something in these books—anything that will tell me who he was to Mom and why Liz seems to hate him so much.

I, of course, have no such luck, despite my open mind. It’s hard to tell what my mother was trying to say when all she ever wrote were short passages with more drawing than writing involved. Plus, spending two straight days looking over everything has done more harm than good. My eyes are bleeding. Late into day two, I lose track of time but I know I’m starved. I check the clock on my phone and it’s late.

“We should get a medal or something,” I yell out to Finn, who’s in my mother’s room cross checking something she read a while ago.

“What?”

“We managed to skip
two
meals today,” I joke.

I set the journal down that I’m reading through and stretch.

Finn appears at the opening of my mother’s secret room and I watch her as she reads something silently to herself. She’s like a sponge when it comes to my mother’s words. You would think she was reading ancient scripts that are going to change society as we know it.

It takes every ounce of energy I have to resist standing up and going over to kiss her. I’ve been dying to since the other night but I don’t dare make another move like that.

Neither does Finn.

She reads while she walks over to the bed. She sits next to me and plops the book down onto her lap. She grabs a piece of paper from the notepad I brought with me this time and scribbles notes down on it.

“I think your mom was one smart woman, Coop.”

“Why?”

She finishes with whatever she’s writing and shows it to me. She’s got a list of symbols started that Mom uses throughout her writings. It doesn’t look complete and there are letters next to some of them. Others have letters too but they’re scratched out.

“She doesn’t use it all the time. Mostly it all just looks like doodles, but then I noticed she doodles the same things repeatedly.” She points to where Mom’s drawn pictures down at the bottom of one page.

Finn has decoded a sentence. It isn’t a very long sentence, or meaningful for that matter, but she’d decoded it, nonetheless.

Hide my thoughts. Absconde.

I read it out loud.

“What thoughts?”

“Exactly,” Finn muses. “I think that word is Latin. It’s used in spells sometimes.”

Spells.

I sigh, tired. Both of us know, even with a secret decoder ring, we’re not going to be able to figure out what Mom was talking about.

“And what about these?” I point to the animal face we found two nights ago. There are two more symbols I’ve started to see. They’re not animals, but she used them repeatedly.

“Not sure yet. I think she might have special symbols that represent certain people. That’s what my gut’s saying anyway.”

I breathe out, inspecting the symbol. Something clicks and I remember something from the funeral.

“Jack was at Mom’s burial the other day.”

“He was?”

I nod and tap the bear face I see on the page. “There was a patch on the coat he was wearing. It was something like that, although I couldn’t make out what it was for. It sure looked like this.”

“Maybe that one’s Jack. It doesn’t make sense though.”

“Why not?”

She picks the book up again and flips through it. When she gets to a page she had marked, she shows me. There’s the bear, and there’s a huge “X” through it. Maggie traced it so many times there are holes in the page.

“Wow,” I snort. “Doesn’t seem like she liked him very much.”

Finn hums.

“I don’t get it,” she says. “There’s this other entry.” She goes back into the room and brings a different book out with her this time.

She opens it to the last page. There’s the bear sign again. This time, there’s a piece of rowan taped next to it.

For protection.

I rub my eyes. If there is something Mom wanted me to know by finding these journals, I’m at a complete loss as to what. “It’s one step forward, three back with this woman.”

I roll my neck, trying to get the kinks out.

“We’ll figure it out, Coop, don’t worry,” Finn says but right now, I need a break.

“I’m hungry Finn. Any chance we can stop for a while and go eat?”

She looks at her watch. “I guess so.
Oh,
I have an idea.”

She is too excited for my taste but I play along anyway because Finn has me curious now.

“Do tell.”

“You still have an article to write,” she starts, “and the Vampire Ball is tonight. You could use it in your story.”

She jumps up and starts to pull me up with her.

“Wait,
ball
?” I laugh. “I don’t think so, Finn.”

“Come on,” she sings. “They have
food
there and it’s fun, I promise,” she says. “Plus, you need to smile. You don’t smile enough, Coop.”

“I smile,” I tell her defensively. She puts a hand on my shoulder and squares off with me.

“But not like you mean it.”

Going to a
Vampire
Ball is the absolute last thing I want to do right now. I have no desire to be around people, but it’s virtually impossible to tell Finn no.