Free The Witch of Belladonna Bay by Suzanne Palmieri Page B

them.
    People say, that for just a moment, it felt like there weren’t no more air in the whole county. That’s how they knew, Towners and Old-timers alike, that Naomi was dead.
    Jackson said she’d simply had enough of all the roughness of life and went to live with the angels where she belonged. Jackson, unlike most folks who are right in the head, preferred believing her death was a choice. He kept on sayin’, “Mermaids don’t drown, mermaids don’t drown.”
    But Minerva? She tells it right. See, Naomi’d been off that opium for a while. Cleaned herself up for some strange reason or another. And then decided to dip her toe back in. Only … she forgot to lower the dose.
    Who knows why crazy people do the things they do? Hell, they don’t even know why. But Minerva’s made of rock and salt water. And because she has the same Green blood runnin’ through her veins, she knows a thing or two about accidents.
    Because accidents happen to everyone, no matter how charmin’, special, or loved. But they sure seem to love those of us with Green blood.
    But I do wonder why Naomi decided to wade into that mess all over again. What could have made her so sad?
    Maybe Aunt Bronwyn would know. If I felt brave, I’d ask her. But I had to find her first.
    Secret staircase it was. I love those, they’re so dramatic.

 
    7
    Bronwyn
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    A spider. A plain old Southern house spider from the look of it. Paddy used to collect them when we were small. How I let out that scream I’ll never know. High-strung, I guess. More Yankee than Southern girl. It fell right in front of me, landing on my shoulder. I screamed and jumped like I was walking on hot coals. When I saw it skitter away, I looked around, embarrassed. “Damn, girl,” I said out loud. “Get yourself together.”
    And then, there I was in the center of the foyer. Jackson was snoring away in his library. A hushed constant twilight fell over this part of the house. And the whir of the ceiling fans echoed throughout the halls with their white noise.
    â€œMinerva?” I leaned up the stairs and whispered her name. I didn’t want to wake Jackson and was relieved my scream hadn’t already.
    I headed up the long, ornate stairway. The pilgrimage I made almost every day of my childhood to “the world upstairs.” Naomi’s world.
    When we were all little, the four of us, me, Patrick, Lottie, and Grant, we spent hours upstairs in her rooms. Playing cards, making forts, and painting huge canvases that she’d have delivered from the artist colony up Route 98. Those were fun days. Laughter layered the walls and clung to the dust mites, making them sparkle like lightning bugs in the daytime.
    It didn’t stay like that. And even when it was like that, sometimes it wasn’t.
    My mother was addicted to opium in fits and starts for almost as long as I can remember, and her illness made her more childlike than a mother ought to be. Eccentric is one thing, incoherent is another. The worst part about her particular kind of sick was it kept her cooped up. Toward the end, she never left her rooms at all. The sweet-smelling smoke plumed under her doorway and crept downstairs like the mist over Belladonna Bay.
    It was my father, who loved her more than a healthy amount, who supplied her with that poison. The opium made her fun. The opium made her happy. The opium made her tired. The opium killed her.
    â€œShe needs it,” I’d hear him say as he argued with the doctor.
    â€œIt’ll kill her, Jack,” said Dr. Henry.
    â€œNothing can kill Naomi. She’s a mermaid. Mermaids don’t drown,” he’d say, and the doctor always did as he was told. He was an Old-timer, and Jackson is practically God with that clan. How he got it, I’ll never know. I don’t want to know, not really.
    The memories crept back with each creak of the stairs as I climbed.
    â€œOlly