In the night, the bite and the knife wound had both healed. Her forearm was pristine. “What happen?” Howling asked, pointing. “Where boo-boo?” He had poked at the place where the cut should’ve been with a long twig.
To test this phenomenon further, Vern held the whole of both of her hands in the fire until she passed out from the pain. She’d put a boulder in the center of the pit, tied a thick belt to it and then to her wrists, so she could not withdraw them from the heat so easily. Her numb hands were swollen, red, and blistered for days, becoming infected, but she fought the rot off with surprising vitality, and weeks and weeks later, her hands were indistinguishable from how they were before the burn. “Special skin,” said Howling thoughtfully, for he still had a scar on his arm from the tiny burn he’d sustained months ago.
“Magic Mam.”
It wasn’t magic. It was the Blessed Acres. A side effect of the poison they’d been giving her from birth. Maybe, when the fiend had brought on the haunting of the wolves on that long-ago night, he hadn’t had to put anything in the river water Vern drank. He’d only had to trigger something already inside of her.
Vern shook her head, not knowing how something like that could work. As usual, her attempts to discover the truth butted up against the pervasive ignorance brought on by her upbringing.
When Lucy had come back, she’d said her mother had documented the things that happened at Cainland and showed them to a court. Others might know what was happening, then. Vern had been so lost in her suffering that she’d given up on figuring out the truth, but she could if she actually bothered to look for the answers.
* * *
OLLIE’S APARTMENT didn’t smell like much. Even the bathroom, scattered with bottles, did not bear the odor of the products inside those bottles.
This sterility comforted Vern, whose own world was pungent with signs of life.
“What?” asked Ollie one night.
“Thinking,” said Vern.
“About?”
“You, I guess, how I don’t know nothing about you.” Where did she live? Surely not here, not most of the time, anyway. There was never anything in the trash can. There were pans in the cupboard, but they’d never been used.
“I was under the impression that was how you liked it,” said Ollie, grabbing snacks from the kitchen. “But I can tell you more if you want.”
Vern shook her head. “I was just curious, is all. Aren’t you ever curious about me? Where I go when I’m not with you?”
“I figured you were purposefully leaving it out.”
“Maybe I was waiting for you to ask me,” said Vern, though she hadn’t been. She was only looking for a way to bring up the question she’d been meaning to ask for weeks now.
“Okay. So tell me,” said Ollie.
Vern smiled at Ollie’s willingness to cooperate. “Remember when I said I grew up on a commune?” Vern asked.
Ollie poured tortilla chips into a big glass bowl and undid the lid from a jar of salsa. “Yeah?”
“It’s pretty famous, is all,” Vern explained. “Maybe you even heard of it?”
Ollie shrugged, withdrawn. She was like this some nights, cold and uninterested, but Vern couldn’t call her on it because it wasn’t like she didn’t have moods, too. “It’s called the Blessed Acres of Cain.” Vern waited for a reaction from Ollie, but none came. Ollie collapsed onto the sofa and put chips and salsa onto a paper plate.
“Are you coming to a point?” asked Ollie.
“Do you know anything about it? The Blessed Acres?”
“Probably not as much as you if you grew up there, but yeah, I know of it. Kind of like a whole Black power thing, right?” Ollie put her fist in the air.
“Have you ever seen anything about us on the news? Anything about Reverend Sherman?”
“What kind of thing?”
“I don’t know. About him poisoning people or something?” said Vern desperately, perfectly aware it was a ridiculous question. If Sherman was doing things to folks there, it certainly wouldn’t be on the news. “Can you look something up for me on that?” Vern asked, pointing to Ollie’s laptop. It sat unopened on the bar top of the kitchenette.
“Look up what, V?” Ollie set her paper plate back on the table.
“Cainland. I just—I realize I only know about it from the inside. Maybe if I have some clue from the outside I can figure out…”
“Figure out what?”
Vern shifted in her seat. “Can you look it up for me or what?”