Page 36 of Harnessed in Gold

“Is that a hoodoo practice?” Leo asks.

Avery shrugs. “I think it’s a mix of traditions.”

Well then, if she’s heard of Haint Blue, maybe she’s familiar with some of the other folklore we learned about tonight. “Linda—or was it Barbara? Whatever, it doesn’t matter.” I wave off my own question. “One of them was talking about yarb doctors?—”

Sure enough, Avery gasps. “Oh my god, I completely forgot about that, too. What’s wrong with me?”

“You want a list?” Aaron teases, snickering until she threatens to throw her empty bottle at him.

“What’s a yarb doctor?” Topaz asks, surprising us all. Maybe tonight’s little trauma has spurred her into being more invested in this hunt, if only to get it over with and get the hell out of the Subworld.

“Yarb doctors were the main practitioners of Appalachian witchcraft,” Avery says. “Same with granny women, except they were midwives too. You’d go to a yarb or a granny if you were sick, or having bad luck, or needed a love spell or something.” She heaves a sigh. “Too bad they’re a thing of the past, because ifanyone could tell us where Browne’s Hill is, it would be one of them.”

“Well, uh, actually.” I get up and go over to my bag, pulling out my doodled-up brochure and waving it in front of me. “I think I have the name of a granny woman right here.”

“No shit?” Avery snatches the brochure out of my hand.

“I took notes,” I brag, smiling shyly.

She chuckles. “Cute smiley faces.”

While she admires my artwork, Rime and I share Linda’s story about the riverside fight between the Indigenous Americans and the settlers. Apparently, the talk at Topaz and Avery’s bingo table came around to the raid too, but the ghosts were of the Englishmen, not the Indigenous Americans.

Leo looks at me. “And that’s what you sensed, right?”

“It has to be. The emotions match the situation. And with the musket fire Aaron heard, it definitely adds up.”

He nods. “So it looks like we have some sort of proof that there was an early settlement here, but we still don’t know exactly where. Same thing with the natural oddities.”

I giggle. “Fuzzy snakes?” Maybe I shouldn’t have drunk that beer so fast.

Leo turns to me with a full-on smile, the first one since the morning I fled this living room in tears. “Yeah, the fuzzy snakes,” he says, a gentle playfulness in his eyes.

A chuisle mo chroí.

I look away and bring my beer to my lips, willing my heart rate to slow down. When I realize my bottle is empty, I carry on with the charade, hoping no one notices my shaky hands.

“…all sorts of weird stuff,” Aaron is saying. “But nobody seems to know when or where things happened. And no one said anything about Browne’s Hill.”

Avery leans forward in her chair, angling herself to see him better. “Okay, but you and Leo heard the same thing Topaz and I did, right? About the patch of land that was barren for decades?”

Aaron and Leo both nod.

“So then we’ve gotten the same story from two different sources,” she says. “That has to mean something.”

“Wait,” I cut in. “Linda and Barbara didn’t say anything about barren patches, but they talked about the crossroads. And they said they were where the college is now.”

Rime jumps in to tell the story of the Faustian preacher.

Aaron chuckles. “Good lord, you two got a lot of dirt out of those old ladies.”

“It was Betts,” Rime says. “They loved her.”

Actually, I think they wanted to mother me, probably because of the wounded puppy look I’ve been wearing for two weeks now. But hey, whatever works.

I laugh back at my eye-candy Irish boyfriend. “They loved you, too.”

He blows me a kiss. “A ghrá.”