Page 14 of The Devil Knows Her Name

“This enough, or should I put an order in?”

“Might as well—I know I’ll use it eventually.”

She cashed me out, and I pretended I didn’t notice how empty the cash drawer was. “You hear about the Pentecostal church?” she asked. “They got a new pastor. He came in here just twenty minutes ago looking for squirrel traps, says the parsonage attic is full of them. I told him not to bother with any of that and just give you a call.”

“Oh, yeah, I saw the sign. How long do you think that’ll last?”

She sucked her teeth. “You know, I wish ’em the best. Not sure if it’s a cause or effect, but I know this town was doing a lot better when we had five church services going every Sunday. Plus, I think we should be grateful for every drop of new blood we can get. He’s got a wife and a son, a teenager.”

“Wow, kind of a rough move for the kid.”

“I know it—I heard the graduating class this year was only twenty. But Ev’s determined to help make it stick, so we’re all going to do the welcome wagon thing this Saturday. You want to come?”

“Sure, I can make something and bring it by. What time?”

“I’ll tell Ev to text you; I think she said noon but that wasn’t definite. You know, I can’t even remember the last time we had a new pastor in town. Must’ve been—maybe ’82? I remember because that was the year the 4-H building burned down, and they asked the new Wesleyan pastor to say a prayer even though he didn’t know a single person here. It was embarrassing. Do you remember—”

She paused. Confusion clouded her eyes, and I knew she was trying to work out how she remembered me being part of the bucket brigade in ’82 when I didn’t look old enough to have even been alive at the time. I plucked at the strings of my magic as gently as a harp, channeling just enough influence to make her lose her train of thought.

Georgie cleared her throat uncertainly. She glanced at the cash register, at her own hands poised over the counter. “Did I give you your change?”

“You’re keeping it,” I said. “I’ll text Evelyn and see what’s up for Saturday. Thanks!”

I turned and hurried back out to the truck before she could say anything else. I hoped she would go back to her magazine and not think any more about the fire in ’82, or who might or might not have been there.

Chapter

5

I set the young raccoon up in his enclosure in the barn the next day. He explored the hammocks and climbing poles in the stall enthusiastically, chittering away to himself, but only ventured outside as far as the shade of the canvas cover went. I watched him for a few minutes to ensure he found the water and food dishes; my own stomach rumbled as I did, and I reached into my back pocket for my phone to check the time.

My phone was nowhere to be found, but judging by the position of the sun, both the fawn and the squirrels were due for another feeding, so I hurried inside and started to heat water for the milk replacer.

The squirrels had already started to complain, squeaking loudly from the rehab room. The fawn was on her feet, staring intently toward the source of the sound with her nose pressed against the wire of her pen.

“Noisy little buggers, aren’t they?” I said to her. I’d been doing that since she arrived—little offhand comments or greetings, things I didn’t have cause to say since my house was usually empty. I didn’t often talk to the animals in my care; until now, Mac had been the only exception. For some reason, I wanted the fawn to acknowledge me.

She did now, but only briefly, glancing in my direction before she returned her attention to the rehab room. The squeaking was beginning to grate on my nerves, so I hurried through the prep of their milk and then into their room.

They’re certainly getting more mobile, I thought as I opened their bin. Not a single one was in their artificial nest, all of them fled to the corners of the bin, and I wondered if they were complaining so vigorously because they were hot. I turned down the heating pad and scooped them back into the nest, supplying each one with a few drops of milk in the hopes they’d quiet down.

They didn’t. As I picked up each one to give them their full meal, the others kept up a frantic cacophony of mewling. They’d always been good eaters, but this time they didn’t settle, and I had to downright fight with two of them to accept the dropper. They squirmed out of the nest and crawled away until their noses hit the wall of the bin, and even then they tried to keep going, scratching at the plastic with their tiny nails. As the feeding progressed and they flung their bodies against the walls of the bin with their meager strength, I began to worry they’d exhaust themselves.

When they’d all eaten, I gathered them back into the nest and cupped my hands around them, plying my magic to calm their little hearts. I had to be careful—with such small things, it would’ve been easy to slow their blood to stillness, and for a few minutes they continued to squeal and writhe against my palms. I’d never particularly enjoyed handling infant bodies—the limpness of their necks, the way their bones and sinew rolled under the slightest weight—but it was an unavoidable part of the job, and I’d become accustomed to it. This time, though, the slide and furl of downy skin and fibrous muscle turned my stomach.

I turned aside and breathed deep through my nose, forcing myself to be calm, to simply be a channel for my craft. After a few minutes, the squirrels quieted. I released them slowly, bracing myself for the noise to start again, but they remained asleep in the nest. I gathered up the dropper and remains of the milk and went out, shutting the door softly behind me.

The fawn was exactly where I left her, still as a statue except for the flaring of her nostrils. The force of her attention unnerved me, trained beyond me and through the door, and I moved instinctively as if to break her line of sight. Still, it wasn’t until I’d made her bottle and brought it over that she paid me any heed, crossing the pen with a faint limp and a hungry shine in her eyes. She nearly yanked the bottle from my hands on the first pull, and drained it in record time.

There was something about the way she ate that both delighted and disturbed me. Any bottle-fed ungulate I’d ever seen—calves, goats, fawns, foals—would suck a bottle dry with a kind of mindless frenzy, a product of the instinct that said starvation was around every corner. But this fawn took every bottle like she was owed it, not with desperation or gratitude but greed. I saw myself in that avarice, the drowned thing that had crawled out of the pond and sworn not to be less sinful or more cautious, but to take what she wanted without apology. People did not expect such a thing, from a woman or a fawn; we were both meant to be prey, both meant to be grateful simply for being allowed to survive.

“Maybe all fawns should have teeth,” I mused to her. “What a different world that would be.”

When the bottles and droppers had been washed and put away, I finally had time to grab a bite for myself. I threw together a sandwich using the last of the bread I baked last week and the remains of the cheese Paul brought to dinner, and I spotted my phone half-buried beneath a pile of seed packets. I took a bite of my sandwich and pulled it out, swearing through a mouthful of bread when I saw I had a missed call and a voicemail from Evelyn.

The voicemail was garbled, and I had a feeling she’d made the call through the shitty Bluetooth headphones she loved to walk with. I gathered that Burrsville students didn’t have school because of parent–teacher conferences, so the welcome wagon would be calling on the new pastor and his family today rather than Saturday.

It was already half past eleven, which meant there was no time to bake a pie or a loaf of bread. I was briefly seized with the temptation to say I couldn’t make it; I was busy enough, after all.