Denise Swank: The Curse Keepers

The curse was make-believe and nonsense.

Still, something stirred deep inside, setting me on edge and making me clumsy the rest of the afternoon. What the hell had I experienced when he touched my hand? And how did I explain the scorch mark on my hand and the thing that looked like a tattoo?

“What’s gotten into you and more importantly, why are you still here?” Marlena asked. “You tryin’ to get out of your date with Dweeb tonight?”

Her question shook me out of my thoughts. I’d forgotten all about my date. I forced a scowl. “ Dwight .” I rolled my eyes. “And no, I’m not. If anything, I’m late for my shift at the inn. But I can’t leave because I’m covering for Lila. She had to run up to Norfolk.”

Marlena tsked. “That’s twice in two weeks that girl’s sloughed off her shift.” She snagged my shirt and pulled me backward, untying my apron. “Barb’s here. We can handle things until Lila gets in. You have to get ready to see Dagwood.”

She didn’t have to tell me to leave twice. “Dwight… and I thought you didn’t like him.”

Marlena shrugged with a grin that told me she was up to no good. “You said this was date five. Your men don’t make it much longer than that. The sooner Dwane is gone, the sooner you’ll hook up with someone like Mr. Hottie.”

With a sigh, I stripped my apron over my head and tossed it into a hamper. “His name is Dwight and things are different with him. He’s got a job with State Farm. He’s stable.” I grabbed my purse out of a drawer in the back room and stared at her, raising my eyebrows and daring her to contradict me.

Marlena placed her hand on the doorjamb to the back door, barring my exit. “Oh, he’s stable all right, but he’s so full of stability that he’ll suck the life out of ya.”

My heart thudded against my chest at her statement. Going out with Dwight was nothing like having the life sucked out of me. I’d had the life sucked out of me on two occasions. The first was figurative and had happened when my mother was killed. I didn’t care to dwell on that memory. The second had happened that afternoon and was quite literal. Give me stability, thank you very much.

I stood in front of Marlena’s beefy arm and waited for her to move, giving her a look of impatience.

Marlena’s voice lowered. “I care about you, Ellie. You’re a sweet girl. You deserve better than the boring guys you date. You’re young. You need a little excitement. Live a little.”

“I live plenty, and I happen to like dependable guys.”

“If you like them so much, than how come you go through them like Kleenex?” She dropped her arm and brushed past me before I could respond.

Scowling, I pushed the back door open and stormed out into the humid North Carolina heat. I was late for my second job, helping my stepmother Myra at the bed and breakfast she and my father owned. I considered stopping by my apartment and changing first but realized I didn’t have time if I wanted to finish at the Dare Inn and get home in time to shower before my date. Dwight was supposed to pick me up just before seven.

The great thing about living in downtown Manteo was that everything was within walking distance. My parents’ B&B was only four blocks from the restaurant where I worked, and my apartment was in the alley behind the restaurant. If a grocery store would open downtown, I’d hardly have to drive at all, especially since I rarely left Roanoke Island. Good thing too since I drove a rust-bucket piece of crap.

Although it was a short walk to the inn, it was long enough to work myself up into a nervous ball of anxiety. The encounter with the guy at the New Moon shook me up more than I’d been in years. I chalked it up to my overactive imagination, desperate for the bizarre occurrence to be anything but the curse. I was halfway to believing it was all in my head—but for the fact that he’d had a hard time breathing too. Never mind the electrical current and the scorch mark on my palm. I stared down at the darkening shapes on my hand. I must have set my hand on wet paper or a soggy cardboard box. The ink bled onto my palm, that’s all. And the hallucination I’d had could be marked off as stress.

Even so, I would have felt better if Marlena or the older couple had had problems breathing…

But I wasn’t ready to slap a curse label on it. My only hope was that my dad was having a lucid day and/or my stepmother Myra could help me find a reasonable explanation for it all.

I’d worked up a sweat by the time I walked in the back door of the inn. Myra was on the phone in the small office and gave me a soft smile. My job in the late afternoon was fairly simple: I set out the snacks for the guests and hung around to answer questions and play concierge. That, and I folded towels. I was late enough that Myra had already set out the fruit, cheese and crackers, and bottle of wine.

An older couple sat on a leather sofa in the living area, huddled over an open map.

“Hi.” I walked into the common room, suddenly worried I might have some telltale stains from the restaurant on my clothes or face. Too late to worry about that now. “Need any help with directions?”

They looked up, and I recognized them from earlier that afternoon. They were the couple in the restaurant who left me alone with the guy. My stomach flipped with nerves.

The man smiled and patted his knee. “Weren’t you our waitress this afternoon?”

I leaned my hip into the chair across from them. “Sure enough. My parents own Dare Inn so I help in the mornings and afternoons.”

“I love your little town. Have you lived in Manteo long?” the woman asked.

“My whole life.” And not a day had gone by since I was eight that I wished I didn’t.

“There’s so much history here,” she continued. “It’s so fascinating what happened to that town. Imagine. An entire colony completely disappeared. Everything.”

I forced my smile to stay plastered on my face. You can’t live in Manteo and not answer these questions half a dozen times a day during the summer months. And working in a service job made it an even more frequent conversation. Normally I didn’t mind, but the afternoon’s events had shaken me up. The fate of the Lost Colony of Roanoke had been pounded into my head since before I could string words into a coherent sentence. And not the version they told at the visitor center or reenacted at the play every summer. My family had its own version of crazy to hand down. If I were to believe my father—and I didn’t—my ancestor had a firsthand account.

But I kept all of that to myself and shook my head in mock sympathy. “Tragic.”

“To think that all those poor people were wiped out by Indians,” she tsked.

“Actually, historians now think that the colonists split up and went to live with other Native American tribes. Which explains why the entire town disappeared. They took their belongings with them.”

Her eyes narrowed and bore into mine. “Do you think that’s what happened?”

If she had asked me earlier that morning, I would have wholeheartedly said yes. Now I wasn’t so sure. And that worried me more than the afternoon’s events. I shrugged and raised my eyebrows, giving her a mischievous look. “I guess we’ll never know. That’s what makes it so fascinating.” And that’s what kept Manteo thriving for four months out of the year.

“Has your family lived here long?”

“As long as we can remember.” I sat down on the arm of the leather club chair and leaned forward, needing answers, but worried I wouldn’t like them. “Say, today at the restaurant, before you left, did you have any trouble… breathing?”

The man sat up straighter, his eyes widening. “What do you mean by trouble? Was there some type of chemical leak?”