Page 21 of Devil

“I remember you,” I said. “Is everything okay? There aren’t any issues with the rain or anything?”

“No, it’s not the rain,” she said. She sounded awkward and apologetic, and a heavy dread began rolling toward me. “It’s your sister.”

9

BIRDIE

On any other day,the drive to Sunrise Beach and the trailer a few miles south of that would take about three hours, but the rain was an awful thing, solid almost, pounding on the top of my tired, dented car like it wanted to crumple the metal like it was a can of pop. Several times I had to pull to the side of the road to wait for the smallest abatement in the rain just so I could see farther than three feet in front of my hood.

Night came—just a deepening of the rainy dark—but at least it meant I could count on the other cars having their headlights on. It was the only way I could see them.

I heard screams, Mel Charboneau had said,but when I went down there to check, she was alone. She screamed at me to leave when I knocked. I have your number from when your sister first started trying to sell the place. She said you might be closer to the property if something came up and she was traveling, and well…I thought I should call you before the police. Give you a chance to see what’s going on.

I’d thanked Mel and gotten in the car. I should have asked Paxico to borrow his truck again. My car was barely up to the task of driving to Evelyn, much less three hours to the lake, and even less up to navigating the steep hills around it, but I also didn’t think I could afford to gas up the truck. As it was, driving down to the lake would take about all I had left in my checking account after paying for the forklift tomorrow.

I finally made it to the narrow road and whispered a prayer through clenched teeth as I navigated my car onto the half-mud, half-gravel lane that led to a thicket of houses and trailers where our family trailer was.The cabin, we’d called it growing up, orthe lake house. It took me a long time to hear the gentle self-deprecation in my father’s tone when he said it, because to my child’s eyes, it was just as perfect a place as any new mansion in Shawnee Bend, so I couldn’t have understood that it was a joke.

On one side of the road, the hill scrabbled up into darkness broken only by the blur of two or three sodium vapor lamps on utility poles. On the other side was a sheer drop into a hole.A holewas the only way it could be described—a deep hollow filled with dead trees, brackish water, and a plague of frogs every summer. The gravel lane was not maintained by any government entity, and it wasn’t shored up on the hollow side, and I could feel it ooze and sigh under my tires as the car slid and went crooked for a terrifying moment. I tried not to think about the crumbling edge on that side…or how I was going to get the car back up the hill.

Every light was on in the trailer when I got there and trudged up to the front door, but I didn’t hear anything like screaming. I’d tried calling and texting Busy, but I’d gotten no response, and I didn’t even know if she was still using the same number she’d been using a month ago. I let myself in with the key stashed under a plastic rock and then stepped inside, shivering wetly on the ancient brown carpet.

“Busy?”

The trailer was small, with a sliding glass door leading out to a homemade sunroom my grandfather had added to the side. The living room, kitchen, and sunroom were empty, which left only the trailer’s single bedroom. I called Busy’s name again as I walked down the short hallway, and my stomach twisted into a knot as I opened the door. I didn’t know what I’d find, and all the fears I’d tried to drown out with prayer now whispered loudly. Overdose or suicide or some other kind of violence I couldn’t conceive of?—

The hollow-core door swung open to reveal the bed with its vintage floral bedspread, a broken lamp on the carpet, and then my sister sitting on the floor with her back against the faux-wood paneling and her legs straight out in front of her. She was barefoot, wearing nothing but a T-shirt, a big one of Dad’s that must have still been in the closet somehow. Smudges of mascara blended into sleepless bruises of purple under her eyes. A few actual bruises were splotched on her legs. There was another on the top of her forearm.

She stared at me like I was a stranger.

I rushed over and dropped to my knees in front of her feet. It was too narrow between the bed and the closet to be next to her, to take her into my arms and hold her.

“Busy, what’s going on? I thought you were still in Odessa!”

She flinched, then rolled her head against the wall so she was looking away from me. At the tall dressing mirror tacked to the paneling instead. “I got here yesterday.”

“Your legs look?—”

“I’m clumsy.”

“And your arm?”

She closed her eyes. “Reallyclumsy.” And then she laughed and laughed, a peculiar laugh that was loud but low, like someone else was laughing with her voice. It raised the hair on my arms.

“Mel Charboneau called,” I said. I paused before adding, “She said she heard screaming.”

“Interfering bitch,” muttered Busy without opening her eyes. “It’s none of her goddamn business what I do. It’s my own goddamn property.”

“She was just worried, I think. I’m worried. Maybe you should come home.”

Her eyes opened at that, and they flashed me a scathing look. “I’d rather go back to Odessa than stay a single night under Kaitlyn Masterson’s roof.”

“I’m not… She told me—” The wave of the last twenty-four hours suddenly reared up to suck me under, and I had no idea how I managed to suck in a breath and try again. “She kicked me out yesterday. I’m back at the hill house.”

Busy stared at me. “She kicked you out.”

“I’m getting fired from Evelyn.” The words came out steadier than I could have hoped, but they were so brittle they were practically flaking off at the edges. “They found me with a student yesterday, and it looked like—it?—”

Both of her eyebrows lifted.