A new skull was waiting on her workbench. A rat skull, small and unremarkable. She picked up her carving knife and began to write, in tiny, perfect script, the terms of a broken man’s redemption.
Barbara took the whistle. She held it to her ear. She heard a lullaby, a promise, a scream. She saw Leo’s future—a long road of foster homes and fist-shaped bruises. She saw her own forty-year retirement crumbling like a dry leaf.
It was infinite. It was unbearable.
Barbara leaned on her counter. The stuffed crow above her head cocked its wooden head.
“Does he?” she said softly.
Barbara, or “Barb” to the few who dared use the nickname, was a slight woman with iron-gray hair and the posture of a question mark. She ran the town’s only taxidermy shop, “Stuffed Memories,” and she was a master of her grotesque craft. A raccoon frozen mid-snarl in her front window greeted visitors. A bass the size of a kindergartner hung on the wall, its glass eye catching the light with unnerving accuracy.
Other incidents followed. A drunk who tried to burn down her shop was found wandering the highway three days later, convinced he was a field mouse. A real estate developer who tried to buy her land at a fraction of its value woke up with a perfect circle of feathers glued to his eyelids. He couldn’t remove them for a week.
She reached out and touched his forehead with one cold, dry finger.
Leo reached into his pocket and pulled out a bent, silver whistle. “My real dad gave me this. It’s all I have.”
“The bargain is already made,” Barbara said. “Not with me. With every living thing you’ve ever broken.”
To the outside world, Barbara Devlin was a curiosity. To the children of Mercy Falls, she was the Devil.
She put the whistle in her apron pocket.