Summer Sons(83)

“The wife lives,” Mr. McCormick said, glancing between Andrew and Sam. “He blames the sister’s murder on another man. But the land’s alive, after that, because his sacrifice woke up whatever thing had been sleeping there.”

“And deals with the devil aren’t ever equal, which is where the curse comes in,” his wife continued, trading the telling to and fro between them.

Sam’s boot heel ground into his toes so hard Andrew jerked. Mrs. McCormick gave him a curious look and said, “Oh, are you all right?”

He said, “Sorry, cold chill.”

He forced himself to take a breath, then another, and another. His heart pounded fit to burst through his ribs. Eddie’s notebooks had been full of references to families and land and sacrifice. And the things that had happened in the cavern—

“The important part is that the deal doesn’t miracle-cure his wife. Instead, he gets some sort of terrible gift to manipulate death itself, and it drives him mad. His brothers end up locking him up in the big house along with his wife, who ain’t right either. They grow and die together. The brothers raise their children as their own. It was a scandal and a shame to the whole bunch of them,” the old woman wrapped up with panache, crossing her arms over her pink-flamingoed bosom in pride.

“Damn, that’s wild,” Sam said. He slathered his vowels out like welcoming honey, boot grinding constant and careful onto the top of Andrew’s foot. The minor, grounding pain sparking on those fine bones kept Andrew from rocketing out of the trailer in a blind panic. “That story hit all the notes I’d want and then some.”

“Thanks hon. Lot of Fultons follow after that, but—” Mrs. McCormick glanced at Andrew once in sympathy before continuing at a more sedate volume, “Their line’s cursed with death. Almost all of ’em died in the Civil War, and the handful that built the estate up after, kept it going, they had the worst luck. The story has it that even those who don’t try to wrangle the curse, like the second son who brought it on them, it wrangles them in the end regardless. The land’s hungry, and it gets its due, one way or another.”

“Thank you. He’s right, that’s a hell of a story.” Andrew fumbled for his phone under the pretense of checking the time. “Hey, don’t you have to get to work?”

“Yeah, probably got to get going,” Sam said as he pushed his chair out.

“Was that useful?” Mrs. McCormick said. She gathered up the glasses to bustle them over to the sink. Mr. McCormick stayed seated. “I hope it wasn’t too upsetting.”

“No, no, it’s real interesting,” Andrew said.

“I’m from around here, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard it before,” Sam added.

“I might reach out again,” Andrew said.

“Of course, please do,” she replied.

He blanked out for the walk to the car. He found himself struggling with the seat belt; lining up the buckle with the receiver might as well have been brain surgery. His mouth was full of spit, nostrils flaring with each taut, panicked breath. Sam smacked his knuckles, latched the buckle for him, then grabbed the base of his skull for a squeeze.

“Hush, dude, you’re good. It’s done,” he said. His palm and fingers were broad, thumb pressed under one ear and nails scratching near the crown of Andrew’s scalp.

“What the fuck,” he whispered.

“Why are you so freaked?”

“Get me out of here.”

The loss of the grounding pressure on his scalp when Sam switched his hand to the gearshift almost spun him off the face of the earth. He dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets while the car purred around him. The grand staircase flashed in his mind, unfamiliar but familiar. He remembered the gaping cave of the drawing room and the forbidding, locked door that stood between him and the dark inheritance his revenant so wished for him to embrace.

“His parents died in a wreck, you know that? Slid right off the road head-on into a tree. Happened on the property,” Andrew said into the silence.

“It’s just another story, Andrew,” Sam said.

In lieu of a response, he opened his phone’s notes app to painstakingly type the McCormicks’ version of the Fulton curse with his thumbs. The tale had all the hallmarks of Eddie’s favorite Southern gothics: a devil’s bargain, a damned lineage, an eldritch power resurrected. Except the tale belonged to him, the scion of a cursed house moldering in the woods, answering a question he’d been asking for almost a decade—the one Andrew had strenuously avoided for just as long.

But Eddie had never made it out to interview the McCormicks. He’d found some other record of the curse to hunt down in his final days. Troth said he’d mentioned some breakthrough at her dinner party, the last outing he’d attended. Without his notes, Andrew had no idea what he’d discovered or where, only that between his lucky find and the interview he’d intended to do with the McCormicks, trouble had found him and the land had taken its due.

As Andrew’s thumb hovered over the keyboard, partway through a sentence about the hubris of the second Fulton son, an incoming call took over the screen, phone vibrating angrily in his hand. He fumbled to answer with a brief, “Hey.”

“Found something kind of weird. Where you at?” Riley asked.

“With your cousin, running down an interview from that list of names.” Sam shot him a look, curious. He switched the phone to his left hand, angling his torso toward the window to escape observation in the close space. “What is it?”