Read Online The Dogs of Winter by Kem Nunn - Free Book Online Page B

things, he had been less forthcoming. He would only say that it must have gotten put there somehow when they were moving, and she had begun to have a bad feeling about it. She had also, for reasons that were still not altogether clear to her, begun to wear the dead girl’s clothes, and Drew had begun to spend a great deal of his time in the shack by the river, with his template drawings and his weather charts and his old wood.
    Pam placed her cigarette on the table. “Let me tell you something about Travis McCade. The guy’s got two kids by two wives. I’ve known him since high school. The man thinks with his dick. You start hanging around him, he’ll get you into trouble.”
    “Like I’m not in trouble already,” Kendra said. She took a sip of wine, aware of her pulse in her temples.
    Pam studied her in the dim light of the bar. “Have you been doing those exercises?” Pam asked. “The ones I showed you.”
    “You mean the spells?”
    “I mean the meditative exercises.”
    Pam had given her a number of books. Drawing Down the Moon. The Spiral Dance. Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense.
    “I tried the one with saltwater.”
    “The saltwater purification ritual. That’s good. Water washes. Salt preserves. You should do that on a regular basis. How did it make you feel?”
    “Sick. You wind up drinking the water.”
    Pam rolled her eyes. At the bar the men were calling for another round. On the tape deck Iris Dement had been replaced by Charlie Daniels.
    “You don’t drink it. You sip it. One sip . . .” Pam rose to serve the men.
    In fact, the ritual had not made Kendra sick, because she had not gotten so far as the drinking part. She had, however, filled her ritual chalice with water. With her athame she had added the three mounds of salt and stirred it, counterclockwise, holding the chalice in her lap. She had set about letting her fears, worries, doubts, hatreds, and disappointments surface in her mind—a feat that, in her case, required some commitment of time. She had done her best to see them as a muddy stream flowing from her body as her breath rose and fell, tried to see them dissolved in the ritual chalice—which, in this case, was a mug from the Chart House restaurant in Haleiwa. She had held the cup before her, trying to feel her body drawing power from the earth, letting the power flow into the salt . . . which, according to the book, was to be done until the water began to glow with light. Which was where she got stuck. Her chalice refused to glow and the water was only cloudy like dishwater, and rather than feeling deeply cleansed, she had only felt deeply foolish. She had ended by pouring the water down the sink and drinking one of Drew’s beers instead.
    “You got to get off this kick,” Pam told her. She had returned from the bar. “They found the man with blood on his boots, for Christ’s sake . . .”
    “And then he hanged himself.”
    “You think he was innocent, he would hang himself?”
    “The guy was no doubt some loser. You’re a loser long enough, you start thinking like a loser. He probably figured he was an Indian . . .”
    She broke off as Pam was only shaking her head. “Don’t give me that,” Pam told her.
    A moment passed between them. Pam picked up her cigarette. She placed it between her lips and lit it.
    “What if he didn’t do it?” Kendra said. “The papers said he and Amanda knew each other. So what if he came by afterward? What if he found her, but he was afraid? Because he was an Indian. Because he knew what people would say. What if the guy that did it is still out there . . .”
    “What if you’re living with him?”
    Kendra could feel the baseline of the music in her blood. “Yes,” she said. She believed it was the first time she had said it aloud and her inclination was to stop here, to consider what doing so had done.
    “Look. If you think that . . . if you think anything like that, then that trailer is the last place you should