The Witch of Tin Mountain
Paulette Kennedy
Wherever a witch’s blood is spilled, a curse remains on the land . . .
PROLOGUE
ANNELIESE
1831
It is too late for her. She knows this, and so she finishes her writing, scrawling the last few lines of hurried script across the parchment. A shout comes from outside, followed by the steady rumble of male voices. Her son ceases spinning his top across the floor and looks up at her, his brown eyes wide with fear.
The woman closes the book and takes the little boy by the hand. “Come, Liebling.”
She leads him to the trunk at the foot of her bed—hewn of strong cedar carved by her father’s hands and protected by her wards for such a time as this. She lifts the boy into it, then gives him the book. He hugs it to his chest. “You must keep this and go on, Jakob. For her sake.”
A rock sails through the cabin window, smashing the warped glass to shards. The wind filters through the ragged opening, bringing the sweet fragrance of rose verbena and the fiercer scent of burning tallow. Flickering light glances off the cabin walls. The little boy whimpers and reaches for his mother. She smiles at him, presses her lips to his forehead, and buries her face in the soft darkness of his hair one last time.
She closes the lid and stands, then walks to the door and opens it, a defiant smile on her face. The man in black does not smile in return. He grasps her by the wrist and hauls her out into the night, where her death awaits.
Hidden inside his grandfather’s trunk, the boy remains. And the book remembers.
ONE
GRACELYNN
1931
Thursdays are town days, and it’s town days I dread most. People’s eyes swarm all over me like flies on a wet dog, their mean words humming like hornets around my head. They hardly wait until I’ve passed by before they spit in my path. Granny tells me to ignore it—that folks here have their superstitions and it’s nothing for me to worry over. But I’ve learned enough to know you can’t put much trust in people who want what you have on Thursdays but won’t talk to you come Sunday morning.
If it weren’t for Granny, I’d be long gone from Tin Mountain and the people here who’d break me if they ever got the chance.
I pick my way down the slump-drunk shoulder of the hillside, mud seeping through the holes in my Salvation Army boots. My yarb bag swings low and heavy at my hip. Inside, there’s a whole pound of fresh-picked morels and a screw-top jar full of green sludge that’ll get old Bill Bledsoe’s bowels to moving and buy us enough food for a week—if he’s feeling generous, that is. We never charge for our cures. We take whatever sort of payment folks can give. Sometimes that’s money. Sometimes it’s no more than a can of beans or evaporated milk.
At the edge of town, the sweet, half-burnt smell of sawdust curls up my nose. Northrup’s Mill sits at the end of Main Street, as it has for the last fifty years. Timber and sharecropping are about the only work folks can find in these parts. And if you don’t do one of them things? I reckon you ain’t worth too much around here.
“Well, lookie here. If it ain’t the high and mighty Miss Doherty.” The low drawl is followed by a puff of blue tobacco smoke, and a lanky form unfolds from the shadows next to the sawmill. A slow smile spreads across a pockmarked, narrow face that wears its twenty years hard. Harlan Northrup. All sorts of trouble, and none of it the good kind.
I ignore him and keep on walking. He follows me, his big feet punishing the dirt. “Where you goin’， Gracie? Too full of yourself to stop and talk to me?”
I spin to face him. “Get on your way, Harlan. I got deliveries to make.”
“Is that right?”
“I mean it. I’m in no mood for triflin’ with you.” I draw myself up tall and cross my arms, glaring over the edge of my scarf.
“Easy now. I don’t mean no wrong.” He tosses his cigarette butt into the gutter and widens his stance, trying to block me. The old men jawing on the mercantile porch fall silent. Their eyes skim past us like dragonflies skating across a pond. “I jus’ want to bend your ear for a spell. Maybe see that pretty hair of yours.” He edges closer and reaches for the scarf tied over my braids. I jerk away and he grins, showing his yellow, crooked teeth.
A raw, fierce burning starts low in my spine. The same burning that haunts my dreams. I don’t quite know where it comes from, but every time it happens, I feel like a baby copperhead, newly hatched and lethal. The air shimmers in front of me and my eyes start stinging. I clench my fists. “Get out of my way.”
Harlan’s squinty eyes go big, and he takes a step back. I step forward. That’s when he laughs. But it ain’t like he’s laughing at a joke. He’s nervous. I can almost taste his fear, sour as gooseberries on my tongue.
“All right, Gracie,” he says, putting his hands up. “Another day.”
I shake my head and stand firm in my spot. “No, Harlan. Not another day. Not ever.”
“Witch.” He hacks and spits at the dust, then turns on his heel to go back inside the mill. When he’s gone, I let my breath out in a shaky rush. I’ve won. For now. But Harlan Northrup ain’t the only person in Tin Mountain I need to watch my back around. Ever since I came here, as a girl of fourteen, folks have treated me different. It started the first day I showed up at the schoolhouse, freshly scrubbed with lye soap, pale braids pulled tight by Granny’s fingers, my eyes watering from the cold. I’d climbed down from Tom Kellogg’s school wagon, slipped on a glaze of ice, and fell flat on my back with my skirt up around my bloomers. Only one girl came to help me up, while the others laughed. Abigail Cash. No matter how hard I tried to make friends, to fit in, Abby was the only one who ever treated me like I belonged. But it was the day Clyde Millsap said I’d killed my own mama that hurt the most . . . because he wasn’t half-wrong, his words sharp as rocks in a shoe. I hauled off and hit him so hard his nose is still crooked to this day. After that, there was no more school for me.
The kind of learnin’ I got from Granny was a far sight better, anyways.
I keep my head down and hurry up the road, not stopping again until I come to the big house on the corner. It’s three stories of painted timber decked out with peeling gingerbread and stained glass—proof that old Bill Bledsoe was once the richest man in town until the Northrups stripped him of that honor. I hoist my bag with its sloshing liquid and climb the steps trimmed with splintered millwork.
Calvina, Bledsoe’s maid, flings open the door before I have a chance to knock. “Come on in, Miss Gracelynn. Mr. Bledsoe’s been ’specting you.”
I step over the threshold, blinking from the sudden change in light. Calvina’s dark eyes flit nervously from mine to the stairs. “He’s in mighty bad pain. Been tryin’ the castor oil like you said. Ain’t nothing moved.”
“Locked up tight again, ain’t he?”
A loud groan filters from the floor above. “Goddammit, Calvina! Bring that girl up here!”
Lands. Old Bledsoe is in mighty rare form.
I follow Calvina up the stairs to a room draped in scarlet silk. Faded pink wallpaper curls at the corners. Mr. Bledsoe’s propped up in a bed as wide as a railway car, sweat sliding down his wrinkled face in rivulets. He squeezes his eyes shut and rolls onto his side as another cramp seizes him. “I’m dyin’， Lord Jesus,” he groans.