The Curse Keepers (Curse Keepers series) Page 2

  “What’s gotten into you and more importantly, why are you still here?” Marlena asked. “You tryin’ to get out of your date with Dweeb tonight?”

  Her question shook me out of my thoughts. I’d forgotten all about my date. I forced a scowl. “Dwight.” I rolled my eyes. “And no, I’m not. If anything, I’m late for my shift at the inn. But I can’t leave because I’m covering for Lila. She had to run up to Norfolk.”

  Marlena tsked. “That’s twice in two weeks that girl’s sloughed off her shift.” She snagged my shirt and pulled me backward, untying my apron. “Barb’s here. We can handle things until Lila gets in. You have to get ready to see Dagwood.”

  She didn’t have to tell me to leave twice. “Dwight… and I thought you didn’t like him.”

  Marlena shrugged with a grin that told me she was up to no good. “You said this was date five. Your men don’t make it much longer than that. The sooner Dwane is gone, the sooner you’ll hook up with someone like Mr. Hottie.”

  With a sigh, I stripped my apron over my head and tossed it into a hamper. “His name is Dwight and things are different with him. He’s got a job with State Farm. He’s stable.” I grabbed my purse out of a drawer in the back room and stared at her, raising my eyebrows and daring her to contradict me.

  Marlena placed her hand on the doorjamb to the back door, barring my exit. “Oh, he’s stable all right, but he’s so full of stability that he’ll suck the life out of ya.”

  My heart thudded against my chest at her statement. Going out with Dwight was nothing like having the life sucked out of me. I’d had the life sucked out of me on two occasions. The first was figurative and had happened when my mother was killed. I didn’t care to dwell on that memory. The second had happened that afternoon and was quite literal. Give me stability, thank you very much.

  I stood in front of Marlena’s beefy arm and waited for her to move, giving her a look of impatience.

  Marlena’s voice lowered. “I care about you, Ellie. You’re a sweet girl. You deserve better than the boring guys you date. You’re young. You need a little excitement. Live a little.”

  “I live plenty, and I happen to like dependable guys.”

  “If you like them so much, than how come you go through them like Kleenex?” She dropped her arm and brushed past me before I could respond.

  Scowling, I pushed the back door open and stormed out into the humid North Carolina heat. I was late for my second job, helping my stepmother Myra at the bed and breakfast she and my father owned. I considered stopping by my apartment and changing first but realized I didn’t have time if I wanted to finish at the Dare Inn and get home in time to shower before my date. Dwight was supposed to pick me up just before seven.

  The great thing about living in downtown Manteo was that everything was within walking distance. My parents’ B&B was only four blocks from the restaurant where I worked, and my apartment was in the alley behind the restaurant. If a grocery store would open downtown, I’d hardly have to drive at all, especially since I rarely left Roanoke Island. Good thing too since I drove a rust-bucket piece of crap.

  Although it was a short walk to the inn, it was long enough to work myself up into a nervous ball of anxiety. The encounter with the guy at the New Moon shook me up more than I’d been in years. I chalked it up to my overactive imagination, desperate for the bizarre occurrence to be anything but the curse. I was halfway to believing it was all in my head—but for the fact that he’d had a hard time breathing too. Never mind the electrical current and the scorch mark on my palm. I stared down at the darkening shapes on my hand. I must have set my hand on wet paper or a soggy cardboard box. The ink bled onto my palm, that’s all. And the hallucination I’d had could be marked off as stress.

  Even so, I would have felt better if Marlena or the older couple had had problems breathing…

  But I wasn’t ready to slap a curse label on it. My only hope was that my dad was having a lucid day and/or my stepmother Myra could help me find a reasonable explanation for it all.

  I’d worked up a sweat by the time I walked in the back door of the inn. Myra was on the phone in the small office and gave me a soft smile. My job in the late afternoon was fairly simple: I set out the snacks for the guests and hung around to answer questions and play concierge. That, and I folded towels. I was late enough that Myra had already set out the fruit, cheese and crackers, and bottle of wine.

  An older couple sat on a leather sofa in the living area, huddled over an open map.

  “Hi.” I walked into the common room, suddenly worried I might have some telltale stains from the restaurant on my clothes or face. Too late to worry about that now. “Need any help with directions?”

  They looked up, and I recognized them from earlier that afternoon. They were the couple in the restaurant who left me alone with the guy. My stomach flipped with nerves.

  The man smiled and patted his knee. “Weren’t you our waitress this afternoon?”

  I leaned my hip into the chair across from them. “Sure enough. My parents own Dare Inn so I help in the mornings and afternoons.”

  “I love your little town. Have you lived in Manteo long?” the woman asked.

  “My whole life.” And not a day had gone by since I was eight that I wished I didn’t.

  “There’s so much history here,” she continued. “It’s so fascinating what happened to that town. Imagine. An entire colony completely disappeared. Everything.”

  I forced my smile to stay plastered on my face. You can’t live in Manteo and not answer these questions half a dozen times a day during the summer months. And working in a service job made it an even more frequent conversation. Normally I didn’t mind, but the afternoon’s events had shaken me up. The fate of the Lost Colony of Roanoke had been pounded into my head since before I could string words into a coherent sentence. And not the version they told at the visitor center or reenacted at the play every summer. My family had its own version of crazy to hand down. If I were to believe my father—and I didn’t—my ancestor had a firsthand account.

  But I kept all of that to myself and shook my head in mock sympathy. “Tragic.”

  “To think that all those poor people were wiped out by Indians,” she tsked.

  “Actually, historians now think that the colonists split up and went to live with other Native American tribes. Which explains why the entire town disappeared. They took their belongings with them.”

  Her eyes narrowed and bore into mine. “Do you think that’s what happened?”

  If she had asked me earlier that morning, I would have wholeheartedly said yes. Now I wasn’t so sure. And that worried me more than the afternoon’s events. I shrugged and raised my eyebrows, giving her a mischievous look. “I guess we’ll never know. That’s what makes it so fascinating.” And that’s what kept Manteo thriving for four months out of the year.

  “Has your family lived here long?”

  “As long as we can remember.” I sat down on the arm of the leather club chair and leaned forward, needing answers, but worried I wouldn’t like them. “Say, today at the restaurant, before you left, did you have any trouble… breathing?”

  The man sat up straighter, his eyes widening. “What do you mean by trouble? Was there some type of chemical leak?”

  I jerked upright, suppressing a groan. “What? No!” Holding up my hands, I shook my head. “Nothing like that happened. I just wondered if perhaps you felt a little short of breath.”

  The older woman placed her hand over her heart, her chest rising and falling in short pants. “I didn’t this afternoon, but now I am. What were we exposed to?”

  I shook my head again. “No! You weren’t exposed to anything! It was nothing. I had an asthma attack is all. It must have been the pollen.” My smile was now cemented onto my face.

  The woman’s shoulders slumped in relief. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  Myra approached from behind and placed her hand on my shoulder. “How are you doing this ev
ening, Mr. and Mrs. Crabtree? I see you’ve met my daughter, Ellie.”

  They gaped in surprise. Myra was second-generation Chinese, and you couldn’t find anyone more Caucasian looking than me—fair complected, freckles on my nose, and long dark red hair. Some days Myra was ornery enough to let the guests puzzle it out. This must have been one of those days. “So where are you two planning to go for dinner?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Crabtree were still trying to figure out our genetics.

  “If you’re looking for seafood, I highly recommend the Carter House on Highway 10, headed toward Nags Head. Their own employees often catch some of the seafood they serve.”

  “Is that so?” the man asked, squinting from me to Myra. It was obvious they wanted to ask about us, but politely refrained. “Sounds good.”

  Myra took a step backward toward the office. “If you’ll excuse us, Ellie and I have something we need to attend to.”

  They waved us aside, and I cringed. Was I in trouble? Myra usually understood when I was late.

  She led me to the small office and lowered her voice. “You and I both know you’ve never had an asthma attack in your life. What’s going on?”

  Leaning into the door frame, I screwed up my face and gave a half shrug. “It was nothing.” I paused. “How’s Daddy today?”

  Her eyes narrowed in suspicion as she studied me. Then she shook her head and smiled. “He’s better today, actually. He was asking about you.”

  I forced another smile. I’d done quite a bit of that in the last few hours. “It looks like things are under control here. How about I go fold towels and talk to Daddy?”

  Myra knew I was up to something, but Daddy’s good days were fewer and far between so it was hard for her to call me on it. “I left him in the screen-in porch. He was watching the neighbor’s dogs.”

  “Thanks, Myra.” I kissed her on the cheek and spun around.

  “Ellie…”

  I turned around, surprised at the worry in her voice.

  “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

  I smiled again, and this time it was genuine. “Of course, Myra. And I love you for that.” I gave her another quick kiss and bolted out the back door before she could ask any more questions. Myra knew about the curse, but Daddy had the answers I needed.

  I walked across the yard to the main house and grabbed two baskets of bath towels from the laundry room, carrying them through the living area to the porch off the front of the house. Daddy sat in a rocking chair, staring out toward the sound. You couldn’t see it from here, but we were close enough that you could smell the salty air and feel the breeze.

  “Hey, Daddy.” I sat in the chair next to his, dropping the baskets in front of me with a loud thud.

  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. Fla
shbacks 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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  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?