The Devil’s Keepsake by Somme Sketcher

Poppy

FIFTEEN YEARS OLD

I saw the Devil when I was nine.

He claimed me when I was fifteen.

The six years that stretched between those two events were anything but peaceful.

The man with the amber eyes went from having a supporting role in the worst memory of my life, to taking a leading role in the soap opera that was my imagination. Like any character in a long-running show, he evolved with every season. He grew stronger, darker, scarier with every sleepless night I spent staring at my ceiling. His yellow eyes became more and more piercing with every sweat-drenched nightmare. His looming figure expanded, filling up more than the darkened corner of my father’s study. No. It filled the entire room, then poured out into every inch of my brain.

I was nine when I realized my dad, Marcus Murphy, was a bad man. But I’m fifteen when I realize he is a cowardly one.

His hurried footsteps grow louder and louder, that’s what wakes me up. His frantic voice accompanies them.

“Poppy.” My bedroom door bursts open so hard that for a moment, I think he’s ripped it off its rusting hinges. “You need to get up. Now.”

Most teenage girls woken up at the crack of dawn by their frantic father would expect the worst. That something had happened to a loved one. Except, I don’t have anyone to love outside of the four Barbie-pink walls of my box-sized bedroom. My mom was found swinging from the garage rafters when I was still in diapers, and both sides of the family severed ties with my father, and consequently me, after the funeral.

I tuck the bed sheet under my chin, recoiling at the sudden shock of light coming from the naked light bulb swinging above my head. “What have you done now, Dad?” I grumble, swallowing the annoyance that follows the initial shock.

Now. What have you done now.

It’s a valid question because my father has always done something. These somethings are the reason we have a baseball bat by the front door and the reason I have to tell the scary men who appear in our doorway unannounced that he isn’t home, even though he’s hiding in the linen closet.

At fifteen, I’m old enough to know my father is a criminal and old enough to know he isn’t a very good one. His employers wear expensive watches and smoke cigars and are chauffeured around in the back of luxury cars. They pay my father cash-in-hand, and if the cell phone in the trunk of his car rings, he knows better than to ignore it.

He works a constant graveyard shift, and when we cross paths in the mornings, me hurrying to catch the school bus, him on his way to bed, he often has a black eye and a bloodied lip.

Yes. At fifteen, I’m old enough not to believe his “I-work-nighttime-security-at-the-mall” bullshit.

Slitting throats is above a mall cop’s pay grade.

“I haven’t done nothin’, Pop. Okay? Nothin’.” The wobble in his voice says otherwise. “But you gotta get up, and you gotta get dressed.” He twists toward my closet, and like a mad man, pulls out every black garment I own. Dresses, shirts, pants, strewn across the carpet.

“Dad!” I shout as loudly as my dry throat allows. “What is going on?” My room is so small that I’m almost on top of him the second I leap out of bed. I wrap my fingers around his arm and squeeze.

Human contact seemed to work. He spins around, and his dark eyes are wild. I can’t remember my mother, but even without having the tatty photograph of her tucked into the frame of my vanity mirror, I know just by looking at my father, that I stole all of her physical features. My copper hair is a stark contrast to his jet-black tufts, and my ice-white skin isn’t even on the same Pantone color chart as his olive complexion. I must have taken my mom’s build too. My father is short and stout and even only halfway through puberty, I towered over him.

“Get dressed, Poppy,” he repeats, dragging a bruised knuckle over the scruff on his jaw. “We’re going to a funeral.”

The scowl on my forehead deepens. “Whose funeral?” My brain automatically flicks through the very small list of people I know. It’s less than half a page with just a fistful of names. Family… well, there are none unless you count my Auntie Esme, the faceless woman who sends the same Christmas card every year. Outside of my bloodline, there are a few girls in school I’m friendly with. And by friendly, I mean they let me sit at the end of their lunch table if I keep my head down. I rattle through the list in my head, thinking of all the nameless neighbors…

“The Quinns,” my father says, the name sticking in his throat. “Donal Quinn. And Eamon Quinn. And Fergus Quinn. They are…dead, Pop. The Quinns are fuckin’ dead.”

The names aren’t in my Rolodex, but they are somewhere, floating around the perimeters of my brain. The Quinn family.

My body reacts before my brain, sending a shiver down the length of my spine.

My father takes in the expression settling in on my face and nods, taking it as a sign I understood the gravity of the situation.

“So, get dressed,” he mutters, nudging the pool of black clothes towards me. “Gotta leave in an hour.”

* * *

An hour and two minutes later, I’m sitting in the back of my father’s beat-up Civic, in the only seat that had a working safety belt. I watch as he scurries out of the brown apartment building and down the broken path towards the car. A cocktail of guilt and embarrassment rattles in my chest. His only suit has seen better days, and the replacement button I’d hastily sewn onto his jacket a few moments earlier was a different color than the rest of them. His once white shirt is yellowed with age, and years of nervous sweat are entwined deep within the cheap fabric.

I look down at my own outfit. A simple black dress that makes an appearance anytime I have to look dressy. With its short sleeves and thigh-skimming length, it’s barely appropriate for a funeral, but even less fitting for a freezing January morning in Boston. We drive to the sound of my teeth chattering, making our way out of the slums of the Roxbury neighborhood. The Civic’s bald tires skate along the icy roads.

It’s the nervous tension brewing in my stomach that forces the question up my throat.

“Who are the Quinns?” I ask quietly.

My father glances at me in the cracked rearview mirror, surprise flashing across his face. “They are my…“ he grimaces, searching the road ahead for the end of his sentence. “The family I work for, Pop. The Quinn’s are—were—very important in Boston.”

I don’t know why there is a lump in my throat because that was the answer I was expecting.

So, the big, bad mafia family was dead. Some of them, at least.

I’d never been a curious child, not since the night I saw my father kill a man. Because curiosity didn’t just kill the cat, it killed my relationship with my father too. I learned hard and fast that being nosy and asking questions get you into trouble.

What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

I’ve never asked my father what job he has or who he works for. What qualifications he needs to slit throats for a living. I keep my mouth shut and remain stubbornly incurious.

But two other questions were burning in my throat desperate to get past my tongue. There is only one I allow myself to ask.

“Why do I have to go to the funeral? I didn’t know the Quinns.” In fact, I’m not sure if I’d ever seen them. My father’s employers were nothing but black, faceless shadows that put food scraps on our table and work him to the bone.

Even from the back seat, I see his knuckles whiten around the steering wheel. “You were invited.”

I turn my attention back to the scenery, watching the boarded-up windows and graffiti that littered my neighborhood morph into tree-lined, cobbled streets and four-story townhouses that screamed wealth.

I swallow the other question. The one I really don’t want to know the answer to.

Is the Devil with the wolf-like eyes going to be there?