The Curse Keepers Collection (4 page)

He turned to face me, his gaze wavering before it cleared. A smile lifted his mouth. “Hey, Elliphant.”

Tears burned my eyes. He hadn’t called me that in weeks. He hadn’t recognized me at all in days. “I miss you.”

His eyebrows arched in surprise. “Did you go somewhere?”

I suppressed a groan, annoyed with my stupidity. Making comments like that only confused him. “No, Daddy. I’ve just been so busy I haven’t had time to stop by and see you in a few days.” Which was a lie. I’d seen him every day for the last six weeks.

He sat back in his chair and rocked. “Oh.”

The soft rhythmic creak of his chair filled the space around us, and I leaned my head against the wood slats of the rocker, closing my eyes. Nostalgia washed over me, hot and sweet. Funny, the more you want things to stay the same, the more they change.

“How’s the New Moon?”

My eyes flew open, and I sat up. Daddy was having a really lucid day. “Oh, you know. It’s a job.”

“I told you that you should have gone into archaeology like your mother.” He winked. “Then you could play in the dirt for a living.”

I nearly burst into tears. I used to spend hours playing in the dirt when I was a little girl, before my mother died, digging for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. I was sure that Momma and the rangers at the visitor center had it wrong. The colony was probably in my own backyard, even though Daddy used to tell me that I could dig to China and never find it. Daddy hadn’t mentioned the memory in years.

“Daddy, I need to ask you about the curse.”

His chair stopped, and his hands tightened on the edges of the curved arms.

“I’ve forgotten how the curse is broken. Can you remind me about that part?”

His rocking resumed, and he focused on the dogs playing in the yard. “I thought you gave up on that
nonsense
years ago.”

His words pierced my heart. I
had
given up on the nonsense years ago, but the curse was his entire life, his legacy passed down to me. If I had only known how little time I’d have left with him, the real him and not the shell of him I saw every day, I wouldn’t have been so callous about dismissing his stories as nonsense. I would have at least pretended.

“You felt it too,” he whispered.

My heart jolted as my breath caught. “Felt what?” I whispered back, terrified of his answer.

“It opened. I thought I’d dreamed it.” His face turned to me, fear in his eyes. “It happened.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. While Daddy never doubted the curse’s existence, he’d never once claimed that it had broken. I pushed aside my terror and patted his hand. “Don’t be silly, Daddy. That curse has held for well over four hundred years. Why would it break now?”

Confusion flickered in his eyes again. “The two Keepers would have had to have met.”

Oh, shit on a brick.
I had trouble catching my breath, but this time not from possible supernatural causes.

His eyes bore into mine, more lucid than I’d seen him in months. “Did you meet the other Keeper today?”

I snatched a towel out of the basket and started folding. “How in the world would I know? We don’t even know that there still is another Keeper, let alone what he looks like.” My mind backtracked to the few memories I had. “Besides, even if I had, how would that break the curse?” I fisted my hand to hide the mark.

“You would have to touch the other Keeper.”

The towel in my hand shook.

“Did you touch the other Keeper?”

“How would I know?” But my defensive tone gave me away.

Excitement filled his eyes. “Who was it? A man or woman?”

“Daddy . . . we don’t even know . . . ”

“Ellie.”

I took a deep breath and bit my tongue before I blurted out
this is crazy
. “Man.” I turned my attention to the next towel.

“Old, young . . . Did he look Native American?”

I folded my hands on the towel on my lap, avoiding eye contact with Daddy. “Man, young. About my age. It’s hard to say if he was Native American. He had dark hair and eyes, but you know the Lumbee Indians are so integrated with Caucasians and African-Americans that you can’t always tell.”

“Do you think he was Lumbee?”

I closed my eyes, nausea churning in my stomach. “I don’t know. I
do
know that I’d never seen him before until he walked into the restaurant.”

“What happened?”

I set the towel in the spare basket and began folding another. “Not much. He ordered a beer, I felt like I’d been slightly electrocuted, I nearly suffocated, then he left.”

“So it’s true.”

This was all happening too fast, the consequences too high. I’d spent the last fifteen years convinced none of this was real. There was no way I could simply accept it as truth now. “No, it’s not. There’s got to be a logical explanation why I couldn’t breathe.” I sat up and held out my palm, then quickly closed it when I saw the red scorch mark and faint lines of the circle and square still there. “Maybe I developed a sudden allergy. Like maybe to peanuts or cashews. Claire only has to walk on a plane with peanuts and her throat gets tight.”

Daddy’s confidence wavered. Flashbacks of middle school hit me full force, when I told him I never wanted to talk about the curse again. Seeing his current disappointment made me feel like I was disappointing him all over again. But nothing good ever came from believing in the curse. The only thing the curse produced was four hundred years of endless waiting. The children of Egypt searched for forty years for the Promised Land. At least they got manna from heaven for their trouble. The ancestors of Ananias Dare got disappointment and heartache. I fully intended to stay as far away from the curse as possible.

Daddy sat back in his chair and rocked for several moments, both of us sinking into our own thoughts. It was like old times, when we wallowed in the murky limbo between Momma’s death and Myra’s entrance in our lives. When it was just Daddy and me, suffocating in our grief and our guilt.

“A storm’s a brewing, Ellie.”

Daddy was right. Clouds had begun to churn and darken in the short time since I’d walked over from the restaurant. “I’ll make sure the trash cans are put away before I leave.”

His hand covered mine and squeezed. “No, a
storm’s
coming. I feel it in my bones.”

A chill ran up my spine. “That’s called arthritis, Daddy.”

“Be ready, Elliphant. You’re the Keeper now. You’ll have until the beginning of the seventh day and not a moment longer.”

That’s what worried me.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Sometime between leaving Daddy and slathering my hair with conditioner, I’d convinced myself that I’d gotten myself worked up over nothing. From what little I remembered of the curse, nasty things were supposed to happen as soon as it was broken. Here it was over four hours since my encounter with
that man
, as I’d begun to refer to him, and the worst thing to happen was I couldn’t find my new sandals to wear with my thrift store–find sundress. Honestly, that in itself was a tragedy.

But the misplacement of my sandals had everything to do with the fact my closet was a mess and nothing to do with evil spirits. What were evil spirits going to do with strappy sandals?

When Dwight knocked on my door promptly at 6:45, I answered barefoot and breathless. “Hi.” I’d crawled out from underneath my bed and my just dried, long hair was a mess, negating my five minutes of styling.

Dwight stood on my porch wearing his work clothes—gray dress pants with a pale blue shirt and yellow tie. I loved me a man in a tie. “Ready?”

I opened the door wider to let him in. “I was just looking for my shoes. Give me a second.”

“We don’t want to be late.” I heard a slight tone of worry in his voice. “All the good seats will be taken.”

Good seats
in relation to the Manteo Pioneer movie theater was a relative term. “I’ll just take a second.”

As I disappeared into my bedroom, I noticed Dwight glancing around my apartment. He’d only been inside once, and this time I made sure that it was picked up. Especially since I hoped to come back here later.

I grabbed another pair of sandals and stepped into them as I walked back into the living room. “See? All ready.”

Dwight stood next to the door and eyed me up and down, taking in my pink, sleeveless dress. “The air conditioning tends to run cool at the theater here. Aren’t you worried you’ll get cold?”

I gave him a coy smile. “That’s what I have you for.”

Confusion flickered in his eyes. “I don’t have a jacket to share with you.”

I fought a groan as I picked up my purse. This man was dense. “That’s okay. I’ll take my chances.” I followed him out and locked my door. As we descended the steps from my third-floor apartment, a weird tingling tickled my palm. I felt as though someone or
something
was watching me. I shook it off. All this curse nonsense was getting to me.

We walked to the theater, and I snagged Dwight’s hand. The streets of Manteo were filled with tourists going to dinner and walking around the town and by the pier. The shops that lined Queen Elizabeth Boulevard, the main street downtown, stayed open late in the summer, snagging more sales of beach trinkets and Roanoke souvenirs. We passed Poor Richard’s Sandwich Shop, a small restaurant and bar.

“Do you want to grab something at Poor Richard’s? I didn’t have a chance to eat.”

He scrunched up his nose. “But we’ll be late for the movie.” In the few times I’d been out with Dwight, I’d learned he was a creature of habit who didn’t like the rules changed midstream. He’d asked me out to the movie, not dinner. To throw in dinner was like derailing a train.

“We’ll only miss the previews.” I gave him a sweet smile. “Or we could skip the movie and just talk.”

His eyes bugged as though I’d suggested we set his pants on fire. “But I really want to see this movie.”

I forced a smile as we passed the restaurant and turned the corner at the old courthouse.

“Do you ever get tired of all the chaos?” Dwight asked as we stepped around a family who’d stopped to pick up their kid’s fallen ice cream cone.

I shook my head. “No. It’s so quiet the rest of the year that I like the reminder that there’s a whole world out there outside of this little town.”

“Why not go out there and see it yourself?”

Now didn’t seem like a good time to bring up the fact that I found it physically difficult to get too far from Roanoke Island. “So what’s playing tonight?” I knew it was an action movie, one that had been out several weeks. There was one small movie theater in town, and it only had one screen.

Dwight didn’t notice that I’d avoided his question and told me that the special effects were supposed to be spectacular. He was excited that the theater had recently added digital so he wouldn’t lose all the great CGI. I nodded and smiled, hoping this evening would end up with an entirely different kind of action.

The movie was loud and packed with explosions. The theater was freezing, and Dwight was too dense to catch any hints about putting an arm around my shoulders to keep me warm. To top it off, a kid sat behind me, kicking my seat the last half of the film. When we left the theater, I was cold, hungry, and cranky. I was cursed all right.

We walked through downtown on the way back to my apartment. The sky was still overcast and the clouds churned overhead as if they were angry. The wind had picked up, and I grabbed the bottom of my dress to keep it from blowing up. Not that Dwight would have noticed.

The crowds were thinning, but I loved the excitement of the people who wandered the streets during the summer months. Wondering where they’d come from. The places they’d seen. Since I could never get more than a couple hundred miles away from Roanoke Island without a crushing pressure on my chest—which Daddy always declared was a byproduct of the curse—I had to fulfill my desire to see the outside world with the Internet and cable TV. That and the stories of home the tourists shared with me from time to time.

When we reached the bottom of the wooden steps to my apartment, Dwight leaned over and gave me a peck on the lips. “Thank you for a wonderful evening, Ellie.”