Free The Devil's Stepdaughter: A Bell Elkins Story (Bell Elkins Novels) by Julia Keller Page A

so slightly, and Belfa saw the wide wet terrified eyes of a tiny frog.
    Before she had a chance to wonder what Steve intended to do with it—before, really, she was even able to register the fact that it was a living creature—he clamped his hand shut again. Strings of a greasy yellow snot-like substance shot out from between his fingers. The other four laughed, but Crystal’s laugh did not blend: It rose above their laughter, a thin grating shriek edged with hysteria. Belfa was shocked by what he had done, but the most disturbing part—she would realize this later, when sorting out the day and her introduction to these people—was Crystal’s reaction, the laugh that cut the air like a diamond scoring glass.
    _______
    The McCluskeys were very poor. Belfa’s family had been poor, too, but this was different. A different kind of poverty. It wasn’t about an absence, the way other ways of being poor constituted an absence—a nagging lack of food, of nice clothes, of the rent on a regular basis. It was, rather, about a presence: a soaked-in stain of conviction that things had always been like this and always would be.
    After the social worker left, Mrs. McCluskey told Belfa to sit down at the small wobbly dinette in the kitchen area of the trailer and—not unkindly, but in a matter-of-fact tone—explained the rules: One bowl of cereal in the morning. One. If you didn’t finish it, the bowl and its slack, tepid contents would be there waiting for you in the evening, and it would be your dinner. Then Mrs. McCluskey told her to go outside. She had a thin face, with a shelf-like ridge of bone across her forehead and, beneath it, sunken green eyes. “Other kids’re all down at the creek,” she said, gesturing with her bony chin, “so go.” Mr. McCluskey was sitting at the table, too. He had a stack of papers in front of him. Bills, Belfa saw. She recognized the red stamp, slantwise across the belly of the top sheet: PAST DUE. IMMEDIATE PAYMENT REQUIRED. Herb McCluskey never raised his face. His jaw moved back and forth, grinding away. He didn’t open his mouth. He was thin, but not as thin as his wife; over the top of his belt, his gut had just begun a growth spurt. He had not really looked at Belfa yet. Not even when the social worker was there.
    Belfa had found her way down to the creek. It was easy: the scraggly grasses were crushed and pummeled, and the small trees had been shoved over to make the path. The path was like a tunnel, twisting in rhythm with the uneven ground. The woods rose up on both sides like the solid slats of a high fence. The McCluskeys had to re-make this path every spring, Belfa surmised. It surely closed over in the winter, swallowing up the footprints and the memories of the summer before.
    Then came the moment when Steve squished the frog. Belfa felt sick to her stomach. But she knew better than to say anything out loud. She watched as Steve wiped his hand on his cutoffs, and then went right back to the hunt for additional victims under the foliage. The girls returned to their game.
    ____
    Things had happened very quickly. The world had become a machine, a toothed wheel that turned and engaged the next toothed wheel, with someone else running the controls, which was a relief. A week and a half ago, Belfa and her sister, Shirley, were living with their father in a trailer by another creek—Comer Creek—and then, on a night of smoke and jumping flames and crackling noises and abject confusion, the trailer burned down. Her father was dead and her sister was taken away. There was a deputy sheriff, a big man in a brown uniform with serious-looking black boots, who reached for Belfa’s hand that night and told her that everything was going to be okay. He said the sentence roughly, not softly, as if he needed to bully it into coming true. He told her his name was Fogelsong. “Funny name, right?” he said. Belfa nodded, because he seemed to want her to, so that he could keep talking, not