Free The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel by Holly Messinger Page A

attention. It was as if the misadventure in Sikeston had burnt out a pocket of bad air in his brain, and left him feeling clear and relatively unburdened.
    Boz was quiet for a moment. “You reckon that Fairweather woman knows anything about this business?”
    Trace turned his head so abruptly that Blackjack snorted and sidestepped in the road. “You ain’t sayin she did for them—?”
    “Naw, I didn’t mean that, but you said she knows about spirits and such. She’s still sendin you notes, right?”
    Trace grunted. She had sent him three notes in the past two weeks. The first two had been brief and high-handed: she had another job for him and looked forward to discussing it at his earliest convenience, et cetera. Trace had burnt them both, railing to Boz about the sheer gall of the woman.
    But yesterday there had been a third message, a single line in elegant copperplate script:
    Have the spirits been less troublesome, since last we spoke?
    He wondered how she could know that. And what else she knew. And what it would cost him to find out.
    “You think I should go see her?” Trace asked, half-hoping Boz would advise against it.
    “I dunno,” his partner said, after a moment’s contemplation. “I was thinkin maybe if she could tell you somethin—if there was some way you could prove Miss Anna didn’t do it … but I don’t know what. And I don’t reckon you want to be beholden to her at all.”
    “No,” Trace agreed.
    *   *   *
    “ T HERE YOU ARE! ” Jameson bellowed, as Trace walked in from the back of the store. “Lawd a’mighty, boys, I was starting to think you’d been copped.”
    “Whyn’t you announce that a little louder?” Trace said, glancing around to see the place was empty but for Miss Fairweather’s pet Chinese, keeping company with the wooden Indian in the corner. “What the hell is he— ?”
    “Been here an hour or so,” Jameson said, lowering his voice. “I told him you were out working all day and he insisted you’d be back soon. Then I saw this and I started to wonder if you were coming back at all.”
    Jameson reached for the stack of newspapers on the end of the counter, snagged a Carondelet Citizen, and thrust it at Trace. For a second Trace wondered why he was being handed a page of want ads. Then the print in the third column brightened from black to crimson and began to ooze down the page.
    Trace smothered a grunt of revulsion and dropped the paper on the counter. The text instantly reverted to orderly black rows. THREE MURDERED AT LOCAL HOMESTEAD, proclaimed the headline.
    “Is that true?” Jameson asked.
    “Yeah, it’s true.” Trace rubbed his hand on his shirt. “We just came from there.”
    “Jeezly Crow,” Jameson swore. “I mean I hardly knew Miss Anna, but Herschel’s a good sort, and he doted on those two girls…”
    “What’s it say?” Boz asked.
    “‘A trio of grisly murders occurred in the late hours of Monday evening,’” Trace read, “‘at the small but prosperous farm of landowner Judd Herschel, who with his wife and eldest daughter were hacked to pieces and their bodies thrown into the family well by an unknown assailant.’”
    The piece went on to describe, in lurid detail, the scene at the house and yard, lingering over the image of Herschel’s mangled face gazing up from the waters of the well. It also gave a lengthy recounting of Anna Herschel’s story to the police:
     … Miss Herschel claims an argument between her father and sister, Leah, escalated to bludgeoning each other with a stick of wood and a fireplace poker. Anna and Mrs. Herschel attempted to intervene, and the mother was struck down in defense of her child. Mr. Herschel then vented his rage upon Leah, and battered his elder daughter about the head until she fell senseless.
    Then, seeing what he had done, Mr. Herschel sought to dispose of the bodies by tipping them into the family well. Anna, believing her father to be “possessed or mad,” tried to