“The thing is,” I began, “my mother’s quite ill.”
“Oh, hell, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks. She’s staying here at my house with my family and me. And her being here, well, it’s got me going down memory lane. And my older daughter—she’s sixteen—is doing this video diary, asking my mother allabout her life. And Mother’s talked a lot about Bobbi. They were so close growing up.”
I didn’t know what I was hoping to find out, but my heart beat fast with excitement. Carter might know something, be able to give me some clue about the stone and where it had come from—something that might help.
“Yeah, they were,” he said. He was quiet for a beat, and I wondered, in that silence, if he’d ever suspected that his mother and mine had been more than friends.
“My mother, she’s got that stone of Bobbi’s. You know, the one from the painting?”
There was a long pause. “Yeah, I know the stone you mean.”
Behind him, I heard the faint wailing of a siren.
“She’s got it beside her right now. She keeps it close.”
I could hear him clear his throat. “Good,” he said. “Better her than me.”
My skin prickled.
“Oh?”
The siren was getting closer to Carter, louder.
“I always hated that stupid rock.”
“How come?” I asked, trying to sound completely naïve. And trying to keep the excited rush I felt under wraps. I was right about the stone. I knew it.
“I just…” He paused. “I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I always believed it was evil. I was totally scared of it when I was a kid. I blamed it for all the bad things in my life.”
There it was. So obvious even a kid picked up on it.
“Bad things? Like what?” In my mind, he’d had a picture-perfect life, with a TV star mom living in the Hollywood Hills.
The siren went by along with a blaring horn, loud enough to startle me.
“My mother wasn’t exactly the good witch she played on TV.”
“Oh?”
“She struggled. My dad always said she had an ‘artist’s temperament.’ That was what drove him away. He left us when I was just four. Can’t blamehim. She was moody as hell. She’d be loving and doting one minute and cruel and abusive the next.”
My skin crawled. This story was a little too familiar. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“She was probably bipolar or something, I don’t know. I don’t think she was ever diagnosed or anything. She drank a lot—that much I know. And she used to talk to herself. And she talked to that damn stone. Begged it for stuff. Argued with it. It was like this living, breathing thing to her. After my dad left, there were three of us in that house: her, me, and the stone.”
I swallowed hard. I knew the feeling too well.
“One time she got all mad and crazy and threw it away. Then she got up in the middle of the night, went out to the street and tipped over the trash cans, ripped open the bags, talking to herself, calling herself all kinds of terrible names. The neighbors came out to see what the hell was going on. But once she found the stone, she calmed right down, went back inside, left me out there to clean up the mess.” He was quiet for a few seconds. “I swear, sometimes I thought that stone was alive. You know how you have those crazy ideas when you’re a kid?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I had a lot of crazy ideas myself back then.”
I sucked in a long breath of air, thought that my ideas back then were nothing compared to the crazy ideas I had now: demons living in stones and possessing people, turning them into cruel, abusive mothers.
“Anyway, after she died, when your mom asked if she could take it, of course my aunts and I said hell, yes. I never wanted to see that damn thing again.”
“Do you know the story of where it came from? My mom mentioned that Bobbi found it in Mexico. You know, when they were traveling around after college?”
