ancestors. Pages of them, going back centuries, branching in ways that boggled the mind. It took flipping to the very rear and the last few empty spots to find the lineage I was looking for. The Rousseaux family. I traced the names with my finger, recognizing those of my great-grandparents, who had two children. Their son died without heirs, leaving my grandma, who’d had two daughters. The oldest died young. My poor grandmother, outliving both her children. My mom had only me. I popped out two babies.
Geoff first, with the line for father oddly blank, and then my daughter with a name filled in under father that I didn’t recognize.
Even now, the recollection of what I’d seen in that book had me tightening my hands on the wheel. White-knuckling it. Stressed, too. A part of me wanted to forget what I’d seen. Obviously, the person who’d written it in was mistaken.
I didn’t know a Berith. And who had only one name?
A lie. At the same time, I couldn’t ignore it. After all, Grandma was a witch. She knew things, and many of those things were in the books I’d inherited. There were three of them in total, differing in appearance and content. One a book of kitchen remedies passed down, essentially a grimoire of spells that could be whipped up at home—although I was having trouble collecting tears of joy from a murderer.
The second book contained the Rousseaux family tree.
To round it out was a third creepy book, bound by some strap and unwilling to open. It made me wonder what was inside.
I mean look at what I’d discovered in the lineage book. So many stories of my ancestors, male and female alike. Some generations needing only a paragraph to summarize their accomplishments, others taking pages. The writing was tight, faded, and in a language I couldn’t read until the entries of about a century ago.
My great-great-grandmother had a short passage where I’d gleaned she considered herself the guardian of Cambden, and especially of the lake. What the summary didn’t explain was what she guarded and why, only that she took the task seriously. One of her daughters, great-aunt Mathilda, died young but managed a line that said, Died to fulfill the terms of the pact.
What pact?
My grandmother was the only person of her generation to stay in Cambden. All her siblings and cousins left. Their lines died out. My grandmother had an empty spot where her life summary would have gone. My mother’s section had a few shaky lines done in handwriting I recognized. My grandmother had left some words.
May she find peace in the next life.
Even my dad had something for his. He should have known fate would drag her back.
My gaze kept going back to Grandma’s blank summary. Who was supposed to write it? Her children were long gone, and I never realized my grandmother was a witch. I’d been so blind to everything until I came home.
But more disturbing than the blank spots for Grandmother and the cryptic messages for my parents was the fact I knew who wrote in the wrong name for Winnie’s father. I knew that handwriting. Very neat despite its cursive whorls. Impossible. My grandmother died before either of the children was born.
Obviously, the book worked off some kind of magic. It didn’t mean it was true. The claim was crazy. I’d never cheated on my husband. Never even thought of it
Yet this book had the name Berith inscribed. I wondered… Flipping back through the pages, the generations, I noticed no other incidents of the sort except for a great-great-great-something aunt, who had a different father for each of her kids. But those men all had proper names.
The book obviously got the wrong information. But who would have lied to it?
Thinking about that stupid book made me miss the entrance to my driveway. It meant turning around at the next house. As I pulled in so that I could turn around, I noticed my neighbor had the curtains on his place drawn tight. Usually Jace skulked around the woods, a master at spooking me. Him and his axe. For a short while, I’d thought him interested in me given how often he appeared when I was in trouble, a hero to save me. But of late, he was nowhere to be seen. It was like he’d disappeared and along with him the constant suggestions I leave and never come back.
I reversed and managed to find the right driveway. Look at me, I