Dead Stream Curse: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  Stephen shook his head.

  “George? I haven’t seen him in ages.”

  “Is that how you do it, Stephen? Block what you’ve done? Do you lock it in a trunk and throw away the key?”

  Stephen stiffened, and the nurse, Alice, touched his arm tenderly.

  Liv did not like the nurse. Her hands were cruel. She did not touch, but poked, and did so to cause pain.

  “Livvy,” he started.

  “Don’t call me that,” she snarled.

  “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

  She laughed.

  “And to think I wanted to protect you. I sacrificed everything for you, Stephen. Everything.”

  Stephen shook his head sadly.

  “I did hear about your mother, Liv. I was sorry to hear. Cancer, of all things. And she was hardly in a position to afford treatment.”

  Liv’s stomach dropped, and her lungs seemed to deflate within her body.

  “My mother?” she whispered.

  Stephen widened his eyes in mock surprise.

  “You didn’t know?” He slapped a palm against his forehead. “I’m sorry, Liv. That was callous of me.”

  The fight seemed to drain from her body. She let her arms relax against the restraints. When the nurse held up a syringe and lightly depressed it, sending a squirt of clear liquid into the air, Liv concentrated on the needle.

  “Sedate her, Doctor?”

  “Yes.” Stephen put a hand on her forehead. “Poor dear needs a rest.” He turned his attention to Liv. “We’re transporting you today, Liv. You’ll get much better treatment once we’ve committed you.”

  Chapter 31

  September 1965

  Jesse

  Jesse closed the closet door in Stephen Kaiser’s room, unwilling to look at the trunk as he searched the boy’s room.

  He opened drawers, sifting through pants and socks. He peeked between books and flipped open their covers, searching for some evidence that might reveal who lay inside the trunk.

  When he lifted the boy’s mattress, he spotted a faded leather folder.

  He opened it, and a single page drifted out and landed on the floor.

  At the top in bold cursive, he read: Curse of the Night Haunts.

  Beneath the title, someone had written a series of materials including bat guano, valerian, two feathers from the tail of a hawk, a piece of birch bark, and an item belonging to the accursed.

  Instructions followed:

  The stave must be written in blood from the left thumb of the caster of the curse, on a night when the moon is between three-quarters and full. To draw the stave, the caster must dip the hawk’s feather into the blood, and print the symbol on the birch bark. Both feathers must be used. Dip the bloodied thumb in a mixture of the guano and valerian, and place three thumb prints beneath the stave. Wrap the stave with a personal item, which belongs to the accursed and contains their scent. The stave must be handed to the recipient from the castor’s left hand, the blood hand, and the gift must be accepted freely.

  In the bottom corner of the paper, Jesse’s eyes flicked over a name, and he froze.

  Veronica, it said in small, dark cursive.

  He noted two different styles of handwriting. One was dark, deep cursive - the writing of an educated person. The writer seemed to press hard, leaving indents beneath his words.

  The second set of writing was hardly legible. Big awkward letters with arrows and symbols. This was the person who knew the spell. They were offering deeper insights into how to perform it.

  Jesse returned to the boy’s bureau and dug through his undergarments. He pulled out the picture he’d found days earlier.

  The boy, he assumed was Stephen Kaiser, stood next to a young woman with tangled blonde hair. She held a tall walking stick in her hand. They were at odds, these two, an unlikely friendship, and yet he could see they were friends. They leaned into each other as they stood, a warmth, even an intimacy jumping off the page.

  On the back of the photo written in black cursive he read: Stephen and Liv, August 1945.

  A leather bag hung over the girl’s shoulder with feathers sticking out. They were not hawk’s feathers, more like a crow’s. They were long and black.

  Still, he felt sure the spell contained the writing of these two young people.

  A noise from within the closet startled him, and he dropped the photograph. It drifted down, seemed to catch a breeze and slipped beneath the closet door.

  He had no reason to retrieve it. No further clues could be discovered in the young faces of Stephen and Liv, but he shuffled forward just the same.

  With a deep breath that he hoped might still the turmoil within him, he pulled open the closet door.

  The trunk sat unmoving, the lid ajar, revealing only a crevice of darkness. A dry rustling seemed to come from within the chest.

  Something pale reached from the dark opening.

  “Dear God, no…” he breathed as a slender hand slid from the truck and clutched the edge, as if the person inside intended to push herself up and step from the chest.

  Jesse blundered backwards. His legs hit the bed, and he leapt away as if the wood frame might burn him. He started for the door, made it as far as the hallway, and then stopped.

  “She’s dead,” he whispered, and the thickness - the stifling warmth that left him struggling for breath — loosened and scattered.

  He walked back into the room and stared at the chest exposed in the closet. The lid was closed, and no cadaverous hand reached out. A skeleton lay in the chest, not a flesh-and-blood woman with a solid hand adorned with glittering rings.

  He did not know what lay between the realms of God and man, but something existed, something that could conjure a solid hand from the emptiness. Something that wanted him, Jesse Kaminski, to take notice.

  * * *

  Jesse had not intended to take the money, but the woman in the trunk had invaded his brain like a cancer, and it seemed to be spreading fast.

  For the first time since his wife and son died, he had a purpose, and if he was going to follow it to its conclusion, he needed wheels. He’d also spent the better part of the night convincing himself that the woman wanted him to take the money. Could it have been sheer chance that it had been left behind? No, he decided, some series of events put the money in that drawer, so that someday justice could be delivered for the dead woman.

  He bought a used Chevy for two hundred dollars from a car lot decorated with bright red flags.

  Afterward, he pulled into Quarry’s Pub.

  Jesse slid onto a barstool and offered a half-wave to the bartender.

  “Back for more, eh?” the bartender asked, wiping spilled beer from the counter in front of Jesse.

  Jesse nodded.

  “Old-fashioned?” the bartender asked.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  The same drunk Jesse had encountered days earlier sat two stools away. He offered Jesse a bleary look and a grin.

  “Still fixin’ to buy that ol’ house in the woods?” the man asked.

  Jesse shrugged, shook the ice cubes in his glass and took a sip.

  “Maybe. Course, I’d have to track down the owners first, and that’s working out to be a mighty pain in the backside.”

  The bartender refilled Bart’s glass.

  “I was asking around about the Kaisers and heard a strange tale about another girl who went missing around the same time. Veronica Medawar?” Jesse asked.

  The bartender frowned and shook his head.

  “Terrible tragedy right there. She up and disappeared on Halloween night, her senior year of high school. I was a few years graduated by then, but the town was abuzz over that girl’s disappearance.”

  “No one knows what happened to her?”

  “The family insisted somebody took her, but the police speculated she ended up in the Dead Stream. It’s fast-moving and if you fall in, especially at night, you’re a goner.”

  “But they never found h
er body?”

  “She wouldn’t be the first to go into that river and disappear,” Punchie admitted.

  The drunk leaned over.

  “Lost two cousins to that river ma ’self. Brothers by the names of Charlie and Grady. Went fishin’ one day and never came back. They found Charlie’s body tangled in a tree about three miles from where the boys went in, but never a trace of Grady.”

  Jesse thought of the Dead Stream. He hadn’t swam in it, but he found it hard to believe the current could have taken so many lives.

  “Why would the girl be near the river on Halloween?” he asked.

  The bartender spoke with his back turned.

  “Kids followed the river all the time. It was faster than the road. Bonfires in the woods, that kind of thing. She was all dressed up like she was going to a fancy party. Some people suspect she was meeting a boy. That’s just talk, though. Nobody knows.”

  “Is it still an open case?” Jesse asked.

  Bart spurted beer and guffawed.

  “What do you think this is, New York City? We don’t have no detectives in Gaylord. And ain’t no big city hotshots comin’ in here to dig a river for a girl disappeared twenty years ago. No sir, it ain’t an open case.”

  The bartender rolled his eyes at the man.

  “I’d guess they’ll call it open until that girl’s body shows up. If it ever does.”

  “But the Kaiser boy and his friend disappeared then, too?”

  The bartender gave him a funny look and shook his head.

  “The Kaiser kid was already off to college by then. His little girlfriend probably run off with him. I’ve got to wonder at your interest in all this?”

  Jesse smiled and finished his drink.

  “I told ya before, I’m a curious guy.”

  “How curious is ya?” Bart asked, leaning heavily toward Jesse and giving him a wink. “That right there is the Medawar girl’s big brother.” He hooked a thumb toward a man sitting alone at a small table.

  Jesse recognized the cook from The Silver Spoon Diner.

  “What’s he drinking?” he asked the bartender.

  “Bud,” Punchie told him, “but I don’t advise goin’ over and diggin’ all this up ‘cause you’re curious. That’s a tormented man, right there. He’s liable to give ya a fist in the mouth for your troubles.”

  “I’ll take a Bud and another old-fashioned,” Jesse said, standing up.

  He took the drinks and ambled over to the man who sat half-watching a baseball game on a television perched in the corner.

  “Buy ya a drink?” Jesse asked, offering the beer.

  The man looked at it suspiciously, shooting a glance toward Punchie, who nodded at him.

  “Sure,” he grumbled and downed the rest of his own beer before accepting the one in Jesse’s hand.

  “Mind if I sit?” Jesse asked, pulling back a chair.

  The man sighed and shrugged.

  “I don’t own the place.”

  “I’m Jesse Kaminski,” Jesse told him, offering a hand which the man didn’t shake. “I’m in town on business.”

  “I seen you around,” the man told him, continuing to watch the game.

  “I noticed the missing poster for your sister, Veronica at your diner.”

  The man’s eyes swiveled back around to Jesse, and Jesse knew he was the kind of guy who might punch a man in the face. His eyes looked stormy and unforgiving.

  Jesse chose his next words carefully.

  “My dad was a private eye. He’s dead and gone now, but I caught the same bug, so to speak. It’s not my occupation. No, I’m a car man, but when I hear about certain cases, the need to look deeper starts gnawing away at me.”

  Jesse’s dad was not a private detective, but his dad’s best friend had been. The man used to regale Jesse and his dad with stories of spying on men’s wives or tracking drug dealers around town. And once, just once, the man helped solve a murder case. An old woman had been robbed and beaten in a Detroit alley. The woman’s son hired the private investigator when the police couldn’t turn up a suspect. The P.I. had spent a month getting close to the street kids, until one day they finally blurted out that one of the kid’s fathers had done the deed.

  The man at the table scowled at Jesse, holding his glass of beer in both hands. His jaw was set, and Jesse could see the throb of a vein pulsing in the man’s forehead.

  “Veronica’s been gone twenty years. You think you’re gonna blow into town, an outsider, and know somethin’ we don’t? See somethin’ we can’t? What are you after, chump? Money? Piss off.”

  The man turned back to the game.

  Jesse was not afraid of taking a pounding. His dad died when Jesse was twelve. He’d learned to be scrappy in the orphanages, and later on the street. He could hold his own. Not that he wanted to fight the man. He didn’t, but he wasn’t afraid to. Sometimes a knock to the head was the only way a man heard sense.

  Jesse drained his glass and slammed it on the table. He laughed and shook his head.

  “Typical small-town bullshit,” he chided. “If you’d rather go to your grave not knowing, that’s your choice.”

  Jesse stood and walked from the bar. He felt the man’s eyes on him as he pushed through the swinging door into the cool September night.

  He turned and started down the road, slowing when he heard the door to the bar shove open and the slap of footsteps on the concrete.

  He braced to get hit from behind, but the man didn’t shove him.

  “Wait a sec,” the man said. He put a hand on Jesse’s shoulder. Jesse didn’t flinch.

  “Like I said before,” Jesse told him, extending a hand. “I’m Jesse Kaminski.”

  The man nodded and took Jesse’s hand.

  “Tony Medawar. I shouldn’t have cold-shouldered you. I had a long day at the diner, and…” He tensed and looked at the starry sky. “This time of year is fucked for me. Twenty years, and I’m still…” He didn’t finish, couldn’t finish, Jesse thought as he heard the thickness enter Tony’s voice.

  “I get it, man,” Jesse told him. “It’s okay.”

  “Can I make ya a burger?” Tony gestured to the Silver Spoon Diner a few blocks in the other direction.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  * * *

  “So how do we do this?” Tony asked. “My parents talked to a private dick back in the ‘40s, but he never found a thing and they paid through the nose for him.”

  “For starters, I’m not interested in money. Like I said, I’m a car man. This is something I’m interested in because… well, it’s the right thing, is all. Your sister’s picture has stuck with me. But I need to know the facts. Everything you can tell me about the night Veronica disappeared.”

  Jesse took a bite of his burger as Tony sat on a barstool, squinting at the tiny red and gold flecks on the countertop.

  “It was Halloween 1945. I graduated the year before, and I was working for my old man. He owned a shoe store. I didn’t buy this place until ’55. I was still living at home, saving for a place and what-not. I remember getting home from work that afternoon, and I could hear the record player on in Veronica’s room. My ma told me she’d been in there for an hour doing God knows what. She had ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ playing on the record player, and now and then you’d hear her stomping like she was up there dancing.” Tony laughed and slapped the counter. “Damn, she could dance. She really could. Swing, jive, jitterbug, you name it and Veronica could do it.”

  Tony took a sip of the root beer float he’d made. “These take me back,” he said. “Root beer floats after high school dances. But Veronica is frozen there, you know? She’s trapped in 1945. She never got married, had kids. My Katie looks a lot like her.” Tony inclined his head toward the missing poster pinned to the corkboard.

  Jesse looked at the girl’s dark curls and thought again of the spirals of hair in the trunk.

  “I didn’t see her leave,” Tony admitted. “She was actin’ sneaky that night. Usually, she came
down and pranced around, showed off her outfit, had my ma fussing with her hair and makeup. My dad spotted her as she went down the walk. She was wearing a big purple dress. The formal kind. Not a Halloween costume, but he thought maybe the theme was princesses or some such thing.”

  “And no one knew where she was going? Not your parents?”

  “Not a soul,” Tony answered. “No one in our family and none of her friends, and that was the really strange thing. She told her friends everything. She had a tight little group of girls. Typical teen girls - bossy and gossipy, but Veronica was a good girl. She was real pretty and popular. She was the girl everyone wanted to be. But she didn’t use a bathroom without her girlfriends. When we started calling the next day, none of them knew where Veronica went on Halloween. It was a big secret. She told them they’d know soon enough. Her girlfriends all went to a costume party at this kid Brandon Maloney’s house. Half the senior class was there, but not Veronica. She had told them the day before Halloween that she had other plans, but she couldn’t tell them about it until after.”

  Jesse frowned, listening closely and thinking about the spell. Had something gone wrong that night? Had Stephen Kaiser and Liv lured Veronica to the house to curse her and somehow, she ended up dead?

  “Tony, was Veronica friends with a boy named Stephen Kaiser?”

  Tony scrunched his brow, and then shook his head.

  “Nah. I remember him vaguely. The rich kid whose father hung himself. His mom was a real Betty, but I only saw her around town a few times. He went to boarding school, so he didn’t exactly chum around with the local kids.”

  “Except I heard he was friends with a girl named Liv.”

  Tony scratched his chin.

  “Yeah, Liv Hart. I might have seen them around town a time or two. She was a ragamuffin, that one. I think Veronica and her friends gave her a hard time, but it was just kids' stuff.”

  “Gave her a hard time?”

  Tony shrugged.