Investigator Reyes stepped inside, interested to see so little had changed in the wife’s absence. As his partner talked the man up, Reyes walked through to the back of the house, drawn by the large picture windows. Sunlight poured into the room, but not a speck of dust could be seen. It wasn’t the interior of the house that interested Reyes though. His eyes were busy searching the backyard until he found what he was looking for. He didn’t even need to step outside to spot the brightly-colored stalks growing along the fence line, dripping with elongated clusters of shiny, dark berries—pokeweed.
13Venery
I crash through the woods like a rabid bear, tearing at limbs and slapping at fronds as I try to keep up, shouting questions at her back. “What do you mean I’m a bane witch? Whatisa bane witch? Are you saying my mother just failed to mention this important detail during my entire upbringing? Are witches even real? Where did we come from? How does this have anything to do with me killing that man?”
Finally, she whirls on me. “Keep your voice down!” she hisses. She grabs my elbow and begins dragging me down the path. “Have you no survival instincts whatsoever?”
I trip along beside her, feeling for all the world like a seven-year-old child being scolded by her nanny. “You can’t just say something like that and then shimmy back up the ladder into the night like nothing’s changed!”
“I didn’t think you’d go screeching behind—” Her face suddenly falls. She stops so fast I bump into her.
“What the—”
She puts a finger to her lips, eyes wide as she stares into the blackness surrounding us. Then I hear it, the distinct rustle of leaves in the distance, steps that stop nearly as quickly as she did, as if we are being followed.
“Fool girl,” Myrtle whispers, pulling me toward the cabin with a burst of speed I didn’t know she had in her. She doesn’t stop until we are safely inside, the front door locked behind us.
I watch, bewildered, as she moves around the house, turningout all the lights and staring out the windows like she’s looking for something. Not thinking, I flip on a small lamp on the sofa table, and she spins around, flapping a hand.
“Put that out!” she demands.
I click it off, sheepish. “Sorry.” She creeps toward the glass, her eyes moving side to side. “What are you looking for?” I ask in a soft voice.
“Not sure yet,” she replies, still vigilant.
“How can you even see out there?” It’s so dark beyond the windows that I can barely make out the nearest tree, let alone anything deep in the forest.
When she glances at me, I notice the way her pupils constrict, abnormally large in the dark before shrinking. But it’s the way her left follows the right that unnerves me, leaving one eye black and the other green for a moment. “It’s hereditary,” she explains before turning back to the window.
I wrap my arms across my chest as we stand in silence, the night outside permeating the house around me until I feel like I might fall into it. The hush between us stretches paper-thin, the tension holding us each in place, taut and unmoving. Myrtle seems to be zeroing in on something. Her head inclines toward the glass before her. I feel like I might snap, the questions growing inside me with every passing second. I am on the verge of speaking—or screaming, I can’t be certain which—when a deer suddenly steps out of the nearby brush into a patch of starlight beside the cabin. Myrtle sighs. Her head drops. She turns from the window and sinks into a chair, heavy with relief.
By her behavior, she was expecting something else. A threat.
I make my way to the sofa and lower onto it, so flustered I can hardly draw breath. Myrtle clicks on the lamp beside her, the one she fussed at me for only minutes ago.
“You’ll have to ask your questions one at a time,” she says, pulling out her cell phone and laying it in her lap. “That’s the only way I can answer. And consider them well. I would like to getat least a wink of sleep tonight. I’m not staying up indefinitely to satisfy your curiosity.”
“Are we okay?” I inquire, nervous after the night we’ve had, after seeing her so panicked.
She sighs, a touch of exasperation in it. “Is that one of your questions?”
I shrug. “You seemed scared. What were you expecting to come out of those trees? Because it wasn’t a deer.”
“I don’t know,” she tells me, reaching for the photograph of the women I’d asked her about several nights ago. “Any number of things. The Strangler for one. The sheriff for another.”
“The Saranac Strangler?”
Her lips pull taut. “Is there another around here I should know about?”
I frown.
“He’s close,” she finally says. “Getting closer by the day.”
“How do you know?” I ask her.
Her eyes sharpen on me. “Tell me, when that man came in tonight, what did you see when you looked at him?”
I shrug. “An asshole.”
