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beers there if ya don’t mind,” he asked, “and help yerself to one too.”
    “No, thanks. I quit two years ago.” She pulled a can from the styrofoam cooler in the footwell, opened it and passed it to him.
    His knee kept the steering wheel in place when he took the can. “Bet‘choo ain’t even drinkin’ age and you’re already on the wagon. More power to ya, I say. You’ll find out soon enough, though. Ain’t nothin’ to do in this town ’cept drink and sweat.”
    Cassie was already figuring that out. She grimaced over each bump in the road; the pickup’s suspension was shot, and by the sound of it, so was the muffler. Riding in style, came the sarcastic thought. Gee, this puts Dad’s Caddy to shame. He took a long narrow road up behind the row of shops. Soon they were in dense woods.
    “All’a Blackwell Hill, see, is cursed so they say. Let me ask you something? When you and your daddy moved in, most of the furniture was still there, weren’t it?”
    “Well, yes,” she admitted, and she also had to admit that it was a strange fact.
    “After all this time, a lot of it probably looks like junk, but let me tell ya, there are some quite pricy antiques in that house.”
    “I know. We kept most of it. My father had it cleaned up by some refinishers from Pulaski.”
    “And don’t that strike ya as odd?” Roy cut a side-glance at her, sipping more beer.
    “A little. It is a lot of furniture.”
    “Ain’t no one lived in that house for about seventy years. All that expensive stuff sittin’ in it, but in all them years nobody pinched a single piece. Any other place—shee-it. The rednecks in this burg’d clean the place out in one night.”
    Cassie thought about that. “Yeah, I guess it is pretty strange. I wonder why nobody ever ripped the place off.”
    “It’s ‘cos you can hear the babies cryin’ at night. You heard ’em yet?”
    “Babies? No. I haven’t heard anything funny. And what’s with the babies?”
    Roy’s head tilted. He seemed to be pausing for the right words. “It was Blackwell. Everything south of town’s called Blackwell something. Blackwell Hall, Blackwell Swamp, Blackwell Hill, like that. ’Cos there was a guy—Fenton Blackwell; he’s the one who bought the original plantation house back before World War One, then built all them crazy-lookin’ additions.”
    Great, Cassie thought. The wing that I live in.
    “Blackwell was a satanist,” Roy said next. “Bigtime.”
    “Come on.”
    “It’s true enough. You can go to the Russell County Library’n read all about it. They still got the old papers on some micro something-or-other. See, right after he had that funky part of the house built, some local gals disappeared a might quick. ‘Bout ten of ’em all told, but nobody paid it much mind on account they was just hill girls. Creekers, we call ’em.”
    Cassie loved ghost stories, and this was sounding like it had all the makings of a doozy. “What about the babies?” she urged him.
    “I’m gettin’ to it. You seen the basements?”
    She remembered them well: long, narrow brick channels beneath the newer part of the house, not like typical basements at all. “Yeah. Big deal,” she said.
    “Well, it was Blackwell who snatched them hill girls, and it was in those basements he’d keep ‘em chained up. He’d—you know—he’d make ’em pregnant.”
    “And ? ”
    “And then he’d sacrifice the babies lickety split. Soon as the gals gave birth, Blackwell’d take that newborn all the way upstairs, to that room with the funky window—”
    The top garret, Cassie thought. With the oculus window.
    “—and then sacrifice ’em to the devil.”
    Cassie slumped as if let down. She didn’t believe a word of it, but she at least had hoped for a ghostly folktale that was more original that this.
    “Then he’d bury the dead babies on the back hill. They found a few, dug ’em up, but it’s for sure that there were lots more all told.”
    “What makes you