Shine - Lauren Myracle [71]
Christian was at my side in a flash. He squatted and pushed down my shoulders. “Sit down. Good Lord.”
“Give it to me,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Aunt Tildy said, her voice high. “Whatever it is, it’s no good, and just . . . give it to me. I’ll burn it.”
“Give me the note, goddammit,” I said to Christian.
Aunt Tildy gasped. “Cat! Language!”
I dug at Christian’s closed fist, and at last he relented, because that was the code of siblings, even when the relationship was fractured. We might keep secrets from our daddy or our aunt, but not from each other.
Stop flapping your tongue, or I’ll cut yours out, too, the note said. The block letters were as dark as congealed blood.
Christian grabbed it back and shook it. “Was it Tommy? When he was here, he said he wanted to talk to you, but then he claimed it was nothing important. Was he the one who fucking wrote this?”
I blinked.
Christian was furious. “I didn’t see him go into your room, but I guess the piece of shit could have slipped in when I wasn’t watching. So did he, or did some other piece of shit climb through your window and leave this trash on your pillow?”
I flinched and cried, “How am I supposed to know?”
Aunt Tildy shifted into efficiency mode. She disappeared into the hall, came back with one of the rags she uses for cleaning, and scooped the tongue up. Then she fast-walked to the front door and stepped out into the yard. I guess she flung that piece of meat as far as she could, because I heard it land, a faint plump in the woods.
“Thanks,” I said weakly when she came back to my room.
“It has to do with Patrick, doesn’t it?” Christian said. “I told you to leave it alone. But did you? No.”
“It’s late,” Aunt Tildy said. “You children ought to be in bed.”
“Should we call the police?” I said. “Get Deputy Doyle out here?”
“Why on earth would we do that?” Aunt Tildy said.
“To tell him what happened. About the note. About . . .” I swallowed, unnaturally aware of my own mouth’s inner workings. A wet thick muscle, that’s what it was. “About the tongue.”
“What tongue?” Aunt Tildy said. “It’s gone, et up by a fox.”
“But, Aunt Tildy, we all saw it.”
“Et up by a fox,” Aunt Tildy repeated stubbornly.
“There ain’t no point in calling anyone,” Christian said angrily. “Deputy Doyle’s either passed out at the hospital doing guard duty, or else he’s at the snack machine, stuffing his gut with those damn cheese crackers he loves. He ain’t gonna drive out here, not for a high school prank.”
“You think it was a prank?” I said.
“Hell no,” Christian said. “But that’s how he’d see it, or that’s how he’ll say he saw it. Deputy Doyle ain’t gonna do nothing.” He slowed the pace of his words. “So if you know who did it, if you even think you know, then fucking tell me so I can take care of it.”
My eyes went to Aunt Tildy. She wouldn’t meet my gaze, but instead fixed her stare on floating, invisible dust motes.
Christian, on the other hand, did look at me. His eyes burned so fiercely into mine that I felt a physical jolt, and the sheer force of it seared me and threw backward into the past. Time shifted invisibly and deeply, dropping me three years back to when Tommy got me alone on our living room sofa. The dead tongue spoke to me from the woods, insisting in the horror of the moment that ugly things couldn’t be thrown away so easily. They had to be dragged into the light, or they’d keep growing.
The ugly thing—the bad thing—happened when I was thirteen. It was a week before my eighth grade graduation, and Christian was outside burning the old smokehouse that had been next to our house since before I was born. Nobody’d smoked meat in it since my granddaddy was young, and we no longer had hogs to slaughter even if we’d wanted to. We once used the smokehouse as a shed, but that was when Daddy still kept the place up and needed somewhere to store the lawn mower and other tools.
By my thirteenth summer, the smokehouse was beyond repair, listing to the side like a carnival fun house. A feather drifting