Toll (9781466860629) by Priest Cherie

Author:Priest, Cherie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

15

DAISY AND CLAIRE’S

The rain had started up again, just loud enough to sound pleasant on the metal roof of the backyard shed. It beat a tinny time to the clicking of Claire’s knitting needles, and to the creaking rock of Daisy’s chair as her foot lifted and fell, pushing herself up and down. Cameron sat at their feet, the bottle of Jack open beside him. Each one of them had a glass filled up with two or three fingers’ worth of whiskey.

The ladies both said it was okay if he had some, too. He was probably going to need it.

Cameron wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about this. On the one hand, they were letting him into the booze stash—no subterfuge required. He was thrilled! On the other hand, they clearly knew he’d been helping himself all this time, but he’d been right when he’d assumed that they didn’t much care.

On a third hand, if they were willing to get him lit before they even started talking … this must be extra, super serious.

“Daisy, do you want to begin?” Claire asked, counting stitches with one eye and watching her godson with the other. “Maybe you could start with the floods.”

“All right.” She nodded. Her ankle worked the porch floor, nudging the rocker a little harder, a little faster than usual. Was she nervous? Cam had never seen her nervous before. Neither one of the ladies ever wasted any time being nervous. In his experience, they preferred to make other people nervous. “My dear boy,” she said, “I don’t know how much you know already, but Staywater used to be famous for its floods.”

“That’s a shitty thing to be famous for.”

“Shitty and deadly, too,” Claire interjected. “Dozens and dozens of people died, over the years. Probably hundreds.”

Daisy said, “Definitely hundreds. This area’s been flooding for centuries. The native folks knew better than to live here—and they were kind enough to warn the first dipshit white people who set up homesteads. Every thirteen years, they said. The waters come around.”

Claire chimed in again. “But they didn’t exactly mean ‘waters.’”

“No, they meant the creature that brings the waters. Or else he comes along with it, I don’t know.” Daisy paused to take a deep swallow from her glass, lowering the level by almost half. “Don’t ask me its name, because I don’t know that, either.”

“Nobody does.”

“If the Indians had a word for it, they never passed it along; or else, nobody who spoke English ever wrote it down. Over the years, we’ve read everything we could find about floods and the creatures what cause them. There are lots of cultures out there, with monsters that sounded almost right … but not quite.”

“There’s a thousand and one sea monsters, lake monsters, and swamp monsters, for example. Some are more famous than others, but none of them are exactly like the thing we’ve got here in Staywater.”

Daisy shook her head. “No, nothing like what we’ve got, God help us. Near as we can tell, we’ve got something unique on our hands.

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