Page 78 of Divine Oaths

“Great observation,” I teased, rolling my eyes. “So, what? Did your great-great-however-great-grandfather Melvin win his petition to inherit Westfield at eighteen?”

Kasem turned the page back to the image of Melvin, his mother, and his siblings. He was silent for a long moment, clearly taking in the reality of his family from decades ago staring back at him from the confines of an old local pamphlet.

“He’s not technically my great-grandfather. More like great-great-uncle or something.”

I tilted my head, not quite understanding.

“Melvin couldn’t afford to keep fighting Duncan’s side of the Saint James line and the board trustees over the conservatorship they’d placed his inheritance in. He agreed to wait until he turned twenty-one to officially claim his inheritance, at which point he’d disband the board of trustees. Something he’d made openly known to them.”

I waited for Kasem to continue, apprehension tugging at my gut.

“He died,” Kasem said. “On his twenty-first birthday. Some strange, sudden illness, apparently.”

And there it was. The other shoe. Firmly on the ground.

“But he never got to claim the inheritance.”

“No,” Kasem said. “He didn’t.”

“Oh. Of course. I’m sorry.”

Kasem shrugged. “Same thing happened to his younger brother, until the youngest, at twenty, agreed to have the inheritance passed to his children and keep the conservatorship and board of trustees established. That was my grandfather. He lived pretty long. Did pretty well with the conservatorship managing the funds of the Westfield estate on his behalf. They agreed to allocate some funds for his family here and there. But his oldest son, who was supposed to inherit Westfield, also tragically died on his twenty-first birthday. So he had his younger son make the same deal. Keep the conservatorship and the board of trustees, and let them manage the estate on our behalf. And every time someone from my family has tried to inherit the estate, they don’t live long enough to take ownership of it. Rinse and repeat.”

What Kasem was describing, I realized, was the curse, manifested through each generations in his family where every son determined enough to inherit the estate would end up dead.

“So the curse started in 1960.”

Either that, or someone had been picking off heirs of the estate for decades without getting caught.

“Sounds like your family’s the target of a serial killer,” I observed. Which, somehow, felt much more tangible than a curse.

A curse had to be rooted to its source. It had to be broken with magic, or spells, or what have you. A killer, though? That kind of meticulousness could surely be tracked down by a good private investigator.

“We’ve done that,” Kasem explained when I suggested as much. “One of my grandfathers spent hundreds of thousands of his allowance trying to work with one to see why this kept happening in our family. But do you really think if this was just some killer, or a series of them, hunting us down because of our family’s wealth that the police or the justice system wouldn’t be onto them?”

I considered the possibility. If decades had passed without legal recourse or justice for the victims in Kasem’s family line, then it was just as likely that those very institutional forces that could solve the cold cases might have instead played a part in them.

“Were there any deaths on Alaster’s side of the family?” I asked instead.

“Yeah, maybe five. One was an accident, another a car crash, I think, and a few robberies and such. There was even a kidnapping. The police solved those pretty quick. One guy’s in prison.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s hope it’s just a curse, then.”

Kasem laughed. “Yeah, or that a true crime podcast picks up my family’s story.”

“You keep playing,” I said, “but this is all pretty macabre. I get it, though.” After I’d lost my family in the fire, I’d became the Queen of Dissociating. It wasn’t so much that I found humor in everything—it was that everything became meaningless. So what did it matter if I laughed or cried or screamed about it? No one would care. Nothing would change. But after a while, and even now, that numbness became suffocating.

“The 1960s are about the earliest we can trace the curse back to,” Kasem continued. “Melvin’s death, and maybe even Joseph’s, after he won his case. And Alaster’s side of the family has always been given the role of president to help with the transition process. But they’re just figureheads for the Board. They know it. We all know it.”

“What about Kent Saint James? Did he die before he inherited Westfield?”

Kasem shook his head. “No, he died around 1877. But he was forty-five by then, and Duncan was serving as the president of Westfield under the board of trustees. Reconstruction happened and when it ended, Kent died of natural causes. Duncan’s son took over as president when his dad passed, and the board of trustees managed the Westfield estate and leadership ever since.”

“You said Jojo was able to do a ritual to give up his inheritance and survive the curse,” I said. “Do you think there’s another kind of ritual that could help you too?”