Page 8 of The Devil Knows Her Name

Just as I was standing up to return to the house, the death scream of a rabbit blasted my ears. Immediately my thoughts turned to hidden snares, trappers that had somehow evaded my defenses, dogs set loose in my woods, and I ran toward the sound without another thought. The rabbit screamed three more times, each one like a knife in my heart, and my feet flew over the hidden paths.

I stopped short when I came to the rose and berry thicket. There were wild roses and berry brambles all throughout the woods, but here they’d congregated, a furious tangle of white petals, midnight black fruit, and long spikes of thorns that climbed the trees and the surrounding shrubs. I planted it ages ago, back when I thought I could put a barrier between myself and the pond that lay beyond. There were paths through the thicket, if you had the time to look and the plants were feeling generous, but as I ran up to it with my heart racing and blood hot in my veins, it was an unbroken wall.

I whirled around, searching for the source of the sound—the snare, the trap, the trespasser. Instead, I saw a fox weaving her way out of the thicket, her head lifted high to keep her from tripping on the body of the rabbit in her jaws. She paused just long enough to make eye contact, and with the angle of the dead rabbit’s head, it seemed for a moment that they were both staring at me, delivering their own judgments.

This was the way of things here. There was a good chance this rabbit was one of dozens I raised this spring, a small life that I fed and cradled in my palm, but I was guardian of death as much as life. My calling was to be an intercessor between people and animals, not between the animals themselves.

Suddenly, I felt tired. The paranoia and what I realized now was a long sprint through the woods were taking their toll. I found a stump and sat down to catch my breath, which was when I heard a giant, gulping splash.

The sound was worse to me than the rabbit scream. I stood up again, sweat breaking out on the back of my neck, my hands suddenly clammy. It could’ve been anything—a frog jumping, a raptor diving for a duck, the overlarge snapper surfacing. It didn’t matter what it was; every time I came this close, the pond did something to make its presence known. I saw it in my mind’s eye, dark and still as a mirror.

I turned for home, forcing myself not to run.

Chapter

3

When my phone rang a few days later, I was hauling the cover off my well, preparing to cast the weather spell. There were four large pans of water placed around it to amplify my efforts. A bigger body of water would’ve made it easier, but the well, with its long throat of shadow, was the most I could tolerate. I straightened up, my back aching, and heaved the well cover into the grass to fish around in my pocket. My resident doe, whom I’d dubbed Mac for her preference for McIntosh apples, grazed nearby in companionable closeness.

I finally got my phone out, grimacing slightly as I smeared flakes of rust across the screen. “Hello?”

“Tess, Chief Broder.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear briefly to check the number: not the one I had on file for Burrsville’s police chief. He always seemed to call me from a different one, as if he wanted to take me by surprise.

“Chief, what can I do for you?”

“Got a call about someone keeping a fawn in their house. Caller was an older lady; guess she couldn’t be bothered to track down the right number. Said her neighbor found a baby deer in her backyard three days ago and is trying to make it a pet.”

I frowned. “Is she possibly confused? This year’s fawns will be sixty, seventy pounds by now; if someone brought one in the house it would destroy it, unless it was on death’s door or something.”

“I mentioned that, but she was insistent that someone come check it out.”

“Better to be safe than sorry, I guess,” I said. “I’ll head over right now.”

Broder gave me the address and, with a deep sigh, I dragged the well cover back into place. “Might have a job for you, Mac,” I told the doe as I left. I’d picked up Mac several years ago after she was hit by a car. She made me chase her for two miles before she went down, and when I got her back to the sanctuary, it was six months before her broken hip healed. She still walked with a hitch and she rarely left the meadow, but thanks to the protection here in the sanctuary and the hay I put out during the winter, it hadn’t stopped her from raising her own fawns or the ones she’d adopted. I rehabilitated a couple of fawns every spring, and as long as they weren’t injured, I could usually hand them off to Mac within a day or two. Of course, those were actual nursing fawns, not adolescents perfectly capable of feeding themselves.

Determined to get back to my weather spell as soon as I could, I left the water bowls and other elements in place and hopped in the truck. The sun was still climbing, and I cranked down my windows, allowing air sweet with the scent of third-cutting hay to drift in. As I descended into the valley, I passed the hayfields that were mid-cut, the cornfields nearing harvest, and then the view through my windshield became stunted forest and wetland. The grain silos and farmhouses became shabby prefabs, double-wides and trailers with peeling paint and plastic in the windows, or pioneer cemeteries overrun by brush. The village itself was little better, full of run-down Victorians and mid-century builds poorly converted to multifamily housing. The population of the whole town was less than three thousand, but every intersection with Main Street was anchored by a church. Almost all of them were closed and boarded up; the only one that showed signs of life was the Pentecostal, the sign out front reading Welcome Pastor Zeke in mismatched vinyl letters. Its rickety bell tower was the tallest structure in Burrsville now that the Catholic church was gone, although no one was allowed up in it. The members of the church had been fundraising to restore the tower for what felt like my entire life.

Almost everything else on Main Street was a secondhand store, an antique shop, or a diner. Burrsville had three secondhand stores; residents had been trading each other’s junk around for years. If the junk got sufficiently old, it landed in one of the two antiques shops, where it would either be passed to another Burrsville resident or snatched up by an out-of-towner hoping to strike it rich with a prewar hay baler or wool comb.

Down the road a mile or two, outside the village proper and not convenient for anyone to walk to, were the big box stores and fast-food joints. Most of Burrsville’s residents were employed there, and despite Evelyn’s yearly attempt to resurrect the farmer’s market, most of them shopped there too.

The address Broder gave me was on the northeast edge of the village, an overgrown little ranch dwarfed by boxy multi-family units on either side. Every place on the street had the vague, impersonal unkemptness of a rental—no names on the mailboxes, no flowers, no birdbaths, just ugly bushes and cracked sidewalks filled with weeds wilting in the heat. The only signs of life were a half-finished hopscotch court drawn in chalk and Broder’s police cruiser parked in front of the ranch.

I schooled my expression into a bland, pleasant mask and got out of the truck. Once I did, I heard raised voices from the back of the house.

Hurrying down the driveway, I found Broder with his thumbs tucked into his belt, occasionally holding up a hand and saying, “Ma’am, ma’am,” and nothing else. There was a woman standing on the porch huffing furiously on a vape pen between loud protests, her blue undercut tousled as if she’d been sleeping. The one doing most of the talking—shouting, really—was an old woman whose housedress was slipping off the hump on her back, her visible ankles veined with blue.

“Excuse me!” I shouted, and the conversation ceased abruptly. I pointed at the older woman. “Ma’am, do you live in this house?”

“No, I’m her neighbor.”

“So you made the call?”

“Yes, and—”

“Your call has been answered, you can go home.”