When Devils Sing(12)
CHAPTER 4ISAIAH
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Missing Teenager In Carrion, Georgia
>If you’re receiving this email, it means something bad happened to me. Whatever the local news says in the coming days, I’m not dead.
>It’s all connected to the Lake Clearwater community. Find out their secrets before more people go missing.
Not even the roosters could wake Isaiah Johnson that early morning. Only the rough shake of his grandmother’s hands as she pulled him from deep, dreamless sleep. He jolted upright, finding himself seated at his desk with his laptop as a pillow.
Grandma Bee frowned down at him. “Baby, you were sleeping like the dead. Nearly gave me a heart attack.”
Isaiah winced and rubbed his stiff neck, struggling to clear away the haze of exhaustion that hung over him. “What time is it?”
“Almost sunrise. You would’ve slept through the harvest if I didn’t wake you.” Grandma Bee cast an evaluating look at him. Her eyes narrowed, and Isaiah’s cheeks warmed. “What were you doing up all night?”
Isaiah’s dark brown eyes slid to his laptop. “I was transcribing a hearing,” he lied. “Took longer than I thought. I must’ve passed out.”
“Those boys at the law firm are already working you silly, aren’t they?” Grandma Bee didn’t look satisfied but, thankfully, didn’t push further. “Well, almost everybody is here. Hurry and get ready so you can eat before harvest.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Isaiah said as his grandmother left his room, leaving the door ajar. Bright light spilled in from the hallway, illuminating his untouched, perfectly made bed.
Isaiah bemoaned another night spent at his desk. He hadn’t slept properly in days. Not since he’d received that email. Once he was certain his grandmother was downstairs, he opened his laptop, navigating to the encrypted messaging service he used. For what felt like the hundredth time, he reread the ominous tip that had appeared in his inbox a week ago. The email that could change the entire trajectory of his summer, if not his life, if he let it.
“Shit.” Isaiah buried his face in his hands, massaging his temples.
It wasn’t that Isaiah had never received tips for his podcast before. Secrets of the South was in the “Top 10” list of all true crime podcasts across all streaming platforms. He had hundreds of thousands of listeners, which meant a large audience of amateur sleuths, often pitching him the next big thing through email.
But this one was different. The email was about a kid from Carrion, his Carrion, and that didn’t sit right with Isaiah. He hosted the podcast anonymously. Admittedly, a large part of its success was due to the mystery of the person behind the mic. No one knew a Black teenager from Georgia ran it, and he intended to keep it that way. But what were the odds someone would pitch him a story about his hometown?
Carrion was a small, insignificant town in rural Southwest Georgia. A place no one had heard of unless they were from the area. What made Carrion remotely significant wasn’t even the town at all, but the neighboring, unincorporated community of Lake Clearwater. It was too coincidental, and Isaiah wasn’t one for coincidences. The same question repeated again and again and again in his head.
Why now?
“Boy, you best get up quick!” Papa Charles called playfully from down the hall. “Or else I’ll eat all the eggs!”
“Be down in a minute!” Isaiah called back, returning to the world in front of him. He logged out of the email and shut down the laptop, placing it in the drawer of his desk. His eyes lingered on the open curtains of his bedroom window. The sky was slowly changing from blackened night to the purple-and-orange gradient of early morning.
Isaiah stumbled through his morning routine—including eye drops and the eight-step skin care regimen his mom had taught him—anything to make himself look less tired, even if he was just going to be kneeling in the dirt for the next few hours.
Once downstairs, he walked into the kitchen just as Grandma Bee pulled a fresh tray of golden biscuits from the oven. Bacon sizzled on the stove, and Papa Charles handed him a cup of freshly brewed coffee.
“You look like you need it,” he said with a laugh and a wink before heading out the front door.
But Grandma Bee wasn’t smiling as Isaiah sipped the coffee. He sidled up beside his grandmother, offering her a one-armed hug to placate her.
“Most everybody’s already outside and fed,” Grandma Bee said with a nod toward the door. She handed him a warm plate topped with all the makings of Southern comfort food. “They were tired of waiting on Mister Harvard,” she said in a teasing, singsong voice. “Hurry up and eat, then head outside.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Isaiah smirked at the light jab, carefully cradling the plate to his seat at the kitchen counter. That morning was the first day of the summer harvest for his family’s farm, but it was also the first time everyone was together since he received his Harvard acceptance a few months prior. It was meant to be a celebration of not just the farm, but of him.
Isaiah was the second on his father’s side of the family to attend an Ivy League school, the first being his father, Laurence. Isaiah had worked tirelessly to get accepted. But with high school graduation newly behind him, doubt brewed in his stomach. He still wasn’t sure whether Harvard was what he wanted, or if he was simply fulfilling the path his father forged for him.