AN HOUR LATER, I sat in the kitchen, soaking my feet in warm Betadine water and doing my best to ignore my cousins. Luke and Caleb were in the living room, but I could see them through the arched door. Mom and Aunt Calla were at the sink and couldn’t.
Luke took off his shorts and ran around the furniture in his underwear squealing, “Oh, my panties! Someone please save me from this beast!”
Caleb chased him, clutching one of Ernest’s old canes. His knees shook and he bleated like a dying goat. Every couple of rounds they’d collapse into a laughing heap on the floor until Luke yelled, “Oh my panties!” again.
“That’s enough, boys!” yelled Aunt Calla.
Luke hiked his underwear up and ran around in a circle, waving his arms in the air like a freaking loon. My sisters shrieked with laughter. They were irritating, but I never expected anything better from them. As far as I could tell, girls had no mercy. But the smiles on Mom’s and Aunt Calla’s faces just about did me in. Moms weren’t supposed to think that stuff was funny. They were supposed to profess their pride at my ingenuity and survival instincts, but no, not my family. Oh, no.
Luke and Caleb walked into the kitchen, both cuffing me on the side of the head.
“God, that was good,” said Luke. “I owe you, Pup. I haven’t laughed that good since…”
“Since we glued Miss Pritchett’s car to her spot,” said Caleb.
Aunt Calla wheeled around. “You did do that!”
“Duh, Mom. Who else?” they said.
“You swore you didn’t do it.”
“Kids lie, Mom,” said Luke. “It’s what we do. It’s like in the contract. You try to catch us at stuff and we outsmart you.”
“Well, just wait till I tell your father.”
“He already knows,” Caleb said.
“What?” Aunt Calla stared at them. Her eyes grew until they were perfectly round and looked about ready to pop out of their sockets.
“Well, we gotta go. Go…” said Luke.
“Mow the lawn,” said Caleb.
“I should hope so. We’ll talk about this later,” said Aunt Calla to their retreating backs.
Luke whispered, “No, we won’t.”
“Wait till we tell Shasta about Pup,” said Caleb. “She’ll die laughing.”
Great. My dad liked to say that it’s always darkest before the dawn. But for me, it was always darkest before it turned pitch black.
Ella and April came in the kitchen, seated themselves across from me, and smiled their perfect smiles. Compared to me, they looked like they squeaked when they walked. Their matching headbands were in place and their shorts ironed.
“Oh, you’re lucky. If you got off the land, you’d be in big trouble,” said Ella.
“Or dead,” said April, her mouth turned down into a fearful frown.
“Girls, that is not true. Give your brother a break. He had a rough morning,” said Mom.
“But he has to stay on Ernest’s land, right? We all do, so we’ll be safe,” said Ella.
“Well…yes, but the thing about Ernest’s land is just a superstition. We want you to stay on the land, so we’ll know where you are.”
“But Great-Uncle Vaughn ran away and he got hit by a truck. Daddy said he was only twenty feet past the property line.” Ella looked at April, who sucked in her lips and nodded.
“That was an accident. Anybody can have an accident. Vaughn wasn’t paying attention when he crossed the road.”
“And there was that girl, Sara. She left and fell down the old well on the Hereford farm.”
“She got lost.”
“Grandpa Lorne said three bootleggers got stung to death by bees when they tried to hide moonshine in Ernest’s cave. Bee sting allergies are really rare, aren’t they? How could all three men be allergic?” Ella flipped her hair over her shoulder and crossed her arms.
“Yeah, Mom. How could they? I mean, that’s so weird,” said April.
“Don’t worry about it, honey. It was a coincidence,” Mom said.
“What about that man that shot himself? He wasn’t invited, was he?” said Ella.
“Of course not. Do you think we’d invite a murderer in? Enough of Grandpa Ernest. Puppy, your feet have soaked long enough. Why don’t you start the bread? Girls, you put away all the groceries we left out.”
I dried my feet on a towel. When Mom looked at me, I gave her a knowing smile. She winked at me, careful to do it behind my sisters’ backs. She was good at changing the subject, but she couldn’t stop us talking about the so-called coincidences that occurred at Camp. I’d listened to different versions of the same conversation every summer of my life. The participants changed, but the content didn’t, and it always got around to the dead murderer lying on the living room floor.