#ch: sadie smythe

[moonslaura]

SARAH ROSE SADIE SMYTHE | 31 | PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR | LOSER’S CLUB

She buried something in Fox Pass -- and it should have been picked over and scattered in the detritus by now. The old farmhouse is sealed up, the orchard overgrown, the black weasel that lived underneath the kitchen now taken roost in the attic. No, not him -- she reminds herself -- he’s long dead. Or should be. There is the littering of a past life  -- a sun-bleached barrette, broken and lost in a tangle of the rosebushes that twine with poison oak and climb to the edge of her window. A beer can rusts in the driveway, the twelve bear skulls once kept in the living room are heaped in the backyard like brittle kindling. She’s not a little girl. She will not be afraid.

It is a house -- a shell, occupant long vacated, buried in those woods of his. Worm-eaten, cold.

But she half expects to hear his voice curl clamor like brimstone from the den: “Don’t be a little bitch, starling -- come in and take your shot.”