The truth was, Billy and Bobby hadn’t addressed a single bouquet to me in a year. And as much as I’d like to say that it was because they’d somehow focused their attentions, the truth was that in most cases, none of the town boys came after me anymore. I’d become the prickly, unapproachable sister when it came to suitors, now directing my attention at warning everyone off who wasn’t worthy. Which was all of them.
But somehow, it’d only isolated me from my sisters a little bit more.
“How’d it go at Crowe’s?” Daisy asked.
A smile flickered on my lips. “Oh, man—you should have seen it. The colony had set up inside the rusty carcass of an old ’74 Super Beetle. It was huge. I filled two full brood boxes. I thought Old Man Crowe was gonna have a coronary right there on the spot.”
Daisy laughed. “Well, the sight of you scooping up handfuls of bees without gear on can be alarming to the unpracticed eye.”
I shrugged, taking a sip of my coffee. “Well, we are the Blum bee witches, aren’t we?”
“How we didn’t burn in the pioneer days is beyond me,” Poppy said. “Although we did end up cursed, so I guess we didn’t escape unscathed.”
The joke was an old one, and we laughed automatically, though I wasn’t sure we even thought it was funny anymore. Our men suffered one of two fates—desertion or death. But despite being the town Black Widows, Poppy and Daisy were still pursued by the same boys who tried to date us in high school. We seemed to be the only ones who took it seriously.
I didn’t mean to say we believed in actual magic, more like some deep and unbreakable bad luck that followed us around like a thunderhead waiting to strike. If we didn’t fall in love, everyone was safe. Our hearts were safe.
Loneliness was preferable to heartache any day of the week.
Of course, there was the pact we’d made a million years ago to stay single as long as Mama did. If she didn’t date, neither would we, and there was approximately zero danger of her dating, not with the same old town fare as she’d ever had. She’d devoted her whole life to raising us, and the thought of leaving her here alone disturbed us.
But one day, Poppy and Daisy would find someone, and off they’d go. But not me. I’d be here with Mama indefinitely.
Daddy wouldn’t have left her alone, and neither would I.
I’d heard it said that every child is different, physically and personality-wise, and though my sisters and I were very clearly sisters, we lived up to the adage. We all possessed a healthy sense of sarcasm, but Daisy was softer, sweeter than Poppy and me. I was on the opposite end of the spectrum, too salty to be sweet. And Poppy fell somewhere in the middle, which was how she ended up the glue of our trio.
But where Daisy was just like Mama, I was the spit of my father.
As long as I could remember, it was all anyone ever said. I had the strong jaw and determined chin. I had the skeptical eyebrows and tilted smile that reminded everyone of him. I didn’t know if my expressions were genetic or learned—I spent all of my time at his elbow. He taught me everything about bees and farming flowers, showed me what hard work meant and the difference between sarcasm and being an asshole. He even let me sit in his lap to drive a few times under the promise I’d never tell Mama.
I was nine when he died. My family came unraveled, left frayed and threadbare. There was a moment at the house, on the day of his wake, that a realization dawned on me, giving me purpose.
I was just like my daddy. So I was uniquely equipped to take care of them. Just like he did.
Mama used to joke that I was the man of the house, but I wore the title with pride. I was a champion spider slayer and the mistress of fixing squeaky hinges and stuck windows. I’d lobbed off the heads of many a snake, and once, when I was twelve, I shot a coyote that’d cornered Mama outside the chicken coop.
I cried for a week over that coyote, but never where anybody could see.
I’d made every big decision in my life on what Daddy would have done. And I knew one thing for certain—he wouldn’t sell to Flexion’s well-suited goon. He wouldn’t sacrifice anything for the sake of money. And he wouldn’t leave Mama here to fend for herself alone, either.
So neither would I.
“Think Stone will be back?” Daisy asked, and I realized I’d missed part of their conversation.
“I think he was sent here to get our rights, and he won’t leave until he’s done it or we run him out of town,” Poppy answered.
And I smiled. “Then we’d better sharpen our pitchforks.”
4
Hellflowers
GRANT
I sat on the small back porch of the short-term rental, sipping terrible coffee from a mug that read Rosé All Day, wondering if my father had sent me here to set me up for failure.
This town was too far off the highway to have a hotel, and the one motel in town wasn’t fit to take my shoes off in, so here I was in a tiny studio rental off the back of Salma Hayak’s old Victorian near Main Street. No, not that Salma Hayak—this one was so old that her age was indeterminate. She was nothing but cotton fluff hair and clacking bones, but she was kind, and the sheets were clean.
Doilies saddled ancient furniture, including a television that looked to be from the 70s, complete with bunny ears connected by foil. The kitchen, which was in the same room as all the other rooms, hadn’t been updated since the fifties, nor had the bathroom—the showerhead hit me in the kisser. The bed was an iron contraption made before mattresses had standard sizes, so someone had rigged up the frame to accommodate a double mattress, which worked fine, so long as you didn’t move too quick. It’d already fallen through to the floor twice.
After a few nights in Salma’s house, driving an hour from San Antonio was looking shinier than it had at first glance.
The back porch was secluded enough, facing back to trees. We were on the edge of town—a solid two blocks off the main drag—but you’d think no one was around for miles, as quiet as it was. Besides the warbling bird in a nearby tree that thought we should all be up with him well before the sun was out.
I’d been to towns like Lindenbach plenty of times but was always surprised by the alien culture in places like this. Jo wasn’t wrong about my upbringing—I’d grown up in the DC area where my father worked for the Flexion’s East Coast offices. I attended private boys’ school in Connecticut, and though I could tie a number of sailing knots, I’d never actually sailed on my own, preferring yachts with crews and a bar to any sort of manual labor.
Most times, the key to cracking the code on small towns was making sure the check I offered was big enough to get them to throw their principles away. Everybody waved around their morals until you shook a bag of money at them. But when that failed, my job was to convince them I wasn’t the enemy. To earn their trust, I had to relate to them and make them feel like I was on their side. They didn’t need to know the only side I was on was my own.
If that didn’t work, subterfuge would. All I had to do was find the chink in the armor and exploit it. Like turning brothers on each other. Or a couple’s divorce, which was one of the instances here in Lindenbach. Seduction was always an easy one, and sometimes there were ways to squeeze a farm into a situation they couldn’t get themselves out of.