Free The Curse of Crow Hollow by Billy Coffey

left out what he’d told Hays some weeks back, about how fickle a profession like tending to the dead can be. A man like Medric could pinch only so many pennies and stretch so many dollars before he’d get to pining for a few deaths to fill his pocketbook. Not many, a course, and not the young or those with mouths to feed, but maybe a few of the old and tired, eager for rest.
    Bucky’s attention turned to the wood double doors atop the church steps. Belle Ramsay had poked her head out, no doubt looking for Naomi. Behind her came the mayor, doing the same for his Scarlett. Both came down the steps, nodding and saying good morning to the worshipers flocking inside. The mayor asked Kayann if she’d heard anything of the party. There seemed no concern that nobody had. Belle said there wasn’t much trouble anybody could get into down at Harper’s Field.
    Had Angela overheard that statement, she would’ve disagreed. As it was, she’d been pulled aside by Landis and looked to have lost all connection to the world. He wanted to make sure she’d done the grocery’s ordering for the week. It’s hard to believe how such a petty thing as that could flush a grown woman’s cheeks, but it had. Yes, Angela told him, she’d done the ordering Wednesday, and she glanced at Bucky long enough to see him still talking to Medric and then said the truck should be there sometime in the next week. From then on, her eyes never left the man beside her. Landis ain’t a handsome man by any stretch—lanky to the point of gaunt, with thinning hair parted to the side and those round professor glasses always on his face—but the sight of him was enough to send a warm shiver down Angela’s leg that she’d long given up feeling guilty over.
    Don’t matter if they’s the ugliest soul who ever drew a breath, the first one you fall for always remains beautiful to you in some way, and the memories you have of the time you spent together get colored over in soft shades as the years wear on. It was like that with Angela. She’d dated Landis almost their whole senior year of high school and was to be engaged before Kayann stole him away. The hole Landis left in her heart back then had needed filling before she found herself sucked down into it forever. Next thing Angela knew, there’d been her and Bucky and a sky full of stars out in Harper’s Field one Friday night. It had been a fling, nothing more, some frantic way to get Landis jealous. Well, all that backfired when Angela come up great with child. She got a ring for graduation all right, just from a different boy and for a different reason. Landis’s daddy, Henderson Foster, had been kind enough to hire Angela on at the grocery once Cordelia was born, and Landis had been kind enough to keep her on all the years after. At least there was that.
    It was then that Raleigh Jennings carried his big frame outside the doors and pulled the rope on the tower bell. Bucky looked once more around the parking lot and then down the road for Scarlett’s little car, then made his way inside with Medric. Kayann, Belle, and the mayor followed. Landis kept talking on about a sale he wanted to do on the produce and if maybe the next truck should come Thursday instead of Friday, and Angela kept on letting him. She’d clung to the faith that says all things worked together the way they was intended, and she loved her family dearly. But it was mornings like that one, when the church bells had set to ringing and her and her husband had come to feel more like strangers than partners, that Angela must have entertained the idea things hadn’t worked out as intended at all. She paused at the top of the steps and looked down the long dirt road past the Exxon and the grocery. Watching for her daughter, who by then was in the front seat of that little Volkswagen bug, screaming that she couldn’t get the witch’s blood off