Summer Sons(84)

“Okay so, near the last pages of the journal he writes about finding a mention of the Fultons in a genealogical history—and that mention referenced another book, get this, a monograph from the late forties about supernatural lore and folk magic in rural Tennessee,” he said in a rush.

“Maybe that’s the breakthrough he told people about. Did he find the monograph?”

“Here’s where that gets a little weird. I went looking for the monograph, because it’s obvious he found it given the timeline of his notes, but the damn thing has disappeared into thin air. It’s not with his materials or in the carrel, and the library system says it’s checked out. I’ve spent the whole fucking afternoon combing shelves to see if it got misplaced or something, but nada. I know it’s minor, but given everything else, it strikes me as off.”

“Yeah, more of his shit going missing fits in with the rest.” Andrew struggled to connect the dots as his thoughts chased themselves in circles. The McCormicks’ tale was trope-filled and appropriately spooky, but didn’t seem too special on the outside—unless someone knew, like Eddie did, that it held a kernel more truth than most.

“It’s either correlated with the phone and the notes or the worst coincidence in hell. The question I’ve got now is: was it the research someone got after, or something he found in the research?”

Andrew grunted his neutral agreement with Riley’s train of thought. “See if you can find another copy of that monograph, and I guess we’ll find out.”

“On it, boss man,” he said with a tinge of snark and hung up.

Window glass propped up his forehead, cool and soothing. After the initial burst of adrenaline faded, he felt emptied out. The sedation of rhythmic movement and enclosed silence dragged Andrew’s eyelids down in swooping blinks as he drifted between sleep and consciousness. Sam turned on his stereo system and spun the volume knob to a faint murmur.

The ratchet of the parking brake startled Andrew alert. He straightened out his kinked back, disoriented and cotton-mouthed, fighting to process the sight of a garage wall plastered with band posters. He croaked, “Your place?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Leave Riley out of this, going forward. He doesn’t need to be fucking with it.”

Addled from his impromptu nap, he said, “What?”

“I don’t see this curse business turning up rainbows, Andrew, so leave him out of it,” he repeated. “Find that shit yourself, don’t send him looking for it. I don’t want him involved any further.”

“He’s a grown man,” Andrew said.

A muscle in Sam’s jaw twitched. He let a breath out through his nose and opened his car door, stuck one leg out, then said, “I’m not asking your opinion.”

“What is your problem—” he started.

Sam slammed his door midsentence. Andrew sat in the car as Sam mounted the steps into the house, leaving the interior door hanging open behind him as an obvious demand. Andrew swallowed his pride and got out to follow. At the kitchen table he took the unoccupied seat in front of a neat glass of bourbon and faced Sam, already sprawled in his chair, indolent, radiating displeasure. His glass dangled from his fingers. Andrew sipped while looking right at him, waiting as the silence stretched.

“Why can’t you be the one to tell him?” Andrew asked when it became clear Sam wasn’t going to start the fight. “You have the problem, so you can tell him to back off.”

“The last thing he’s interested in is me parenting him,” Sam said.

“Then don’t parent him,” Andrew replied, unprepared for how adult he felt.

“He still needs it, and he deserves to make something of himself without getting pulled into this wreck of a situation,” Sam said with a broad gesture in his general direction. “In case you missed it, the last person doing the research you just asked him to do is dead. Have you thought enough about that?”

“Riley was Eddie’s friend,” he said.

“Yeah, and so was I. Look where that got us. This is our problem to solve, you and me. I’m not going to ask you again,” he said.

The weight of the preceding weeks crashed onto Andrew in a tumult, filling him up to bursting and straining all his existing fissures. Andrew leaned forward with both elbows braced on the table to snap, “I’m not your bitch, so tell him yourself.”

Violence crackled between them despite the calmness of the kitchen, the shared drink, the loose posture. Riley’s involvement was tangential to Andrew’s anger; he wasn’t sure what about the situation made him so fucking furious, but his temper was not about to slow down. The last time a man had the gall to tell him I’m not going to ask you again, it had been Eddie. He’d been telling Andrew to shut up about coming to Nashville in the spring, earlier than planned. Andrew didn’t take those kinds of orders from Sam.

Sam got up and rounded the table, saying, “I know your spoiled ass doesn’t understand what it’s like to claw your way out of awful shit, and neither did Ed. So I’m going to tell you this once”—midsentence, he shoved Andrew’s chair out cockeyed with a foot on one wooden leg; Andrew caught himself with a heel on the ground before he tipped over—“and you’re damn well going to listen. That kid has had it hard enough already, and I will not fucking tolerate any threat to him or his success. Not from you, not from Ed, not from myself. You got me?”