Something in the Blood
Copyright© 2026 by Sparhawk99
Chapter 6: Names in the Margins
He didn’t sleep much that night, and when he did, he dreamed about the barn. Though it wasn’t really a dream so much as the same three seconds playing over and over—his small hand, the cord around his wrist, somebody’s voice telling him to go on inside. He woke up before six with the photograph still in his hand, creased now where he’d been gripping it too hard, and Nadia’s cartoons already going in the front room even though it wasn’t light out yet.
He found Samir in the kitchen eating cereal standing up, hair sticking out at an angle that would’ve been funny on a different morning.
“I want to go to the library,” Eli said.
Samir looked at him over the bowl. “The library.”
“They keep old newspapers there. Property records. I looked it up on my phone last night—the county archive’s at the public library downtown, not the courthouse.”
“Okay.” Samir set the bowl down like this was a completely normal thing to want to do at six in the morning. “Why.”
Eli held out the photograph. Samir wiped his hand on his jeans before taking it, careful the way you’d be careful with something that might still be sharp.
He looked at it a long time. Longer than Eli expected.
“That’s you,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s the farm.”
“Yeah.”
Samir turned it over, read the back, and his face did something complicated—not shock exactly, more like a door swinging shut somewhere behind his eyes while his mouth stayed easy. “Before he was old enough to understand,” he read out loud, quiet. “Understand what?”
“That’s what I want to find out.” Eli heard how thin his own voice sounded and didn’t try to fix it. “I want to prove it’s nothing. Some—some family thing, a naming ceremony, whatever. Church people do weird stuff with kids sometimes, I don’t know. I want there to be a boring explanation.”
Samir handed the photo back. “And if there isn’t one?”
“Then I still want to know.”
Samir nodded slow, the way he did when he was deciding something, and went to put on real clothes.
The library didn’t open till nine, so they killed three hours at a diner that smelled like burnt coffee and bacon grease. Eli picked at a plate of eggs he didn’t want, running the same five thoughts in a loop—the cord, the symbol, before he was old enough, who took that picture, who wrote on the back—until Samir finally reached over and took the fork out of his hand.
“You’re just moving them around the plate.”
“I know.”
“Eat something or don’t, but stop pretending.”
Eli ate two bites to make him quit looking at him like that.
The archive room, when they finally reached it, was tucked in the library’s basement—low ceilings, humming fluorescent tubes, the smell of old paper and dust mixed with something like a church basement, cool and faintly subterranean even though they weren’t far underground. A woman named Pat ran the desk, gray-haired, glasses on a chain, the kind of person who’d clearly been doing this job since before Eli was born and had made peace with the fact that almost nobody ever came down here.
“County records?” she said when Eli asked, like she was pleasantly surprised anybody his age knew the word records. “Land stuff’s on microfilm through the seventies, then it’s digitized after that, mostly. Newspapers we’ve got in bound volumes and film both. What are you after?”
“Family history,” Eli said. “Calder and Voss.”
Something crossed her face—not much, just a flicker, gone almost as soon as it appeared—but Eli caught it, the way you catch movement at the edge of your vision.
“Voss,” she said. “Out at the farm on County Road 9?”
“Yeah.”
“Big family. Old one.” She said it neutrally, professionally, the way you’d describe weather. “Let me get you set up on the film reader.”
The microfilm was slow going and made Eli’s eyes ache within twenty minutes. The machine’s little crank squeaked every time he wound it forward, decades of the county paper scrolling past in gray blur—county fair results, obituaries, church socials, a grain elevator fire in 1961, a flood in ‘72. Samir worked through the property records on paper in the next carrel over, going through deed books with the patient, methodical attention he brought to everything, like it was just another kind of homework.
“Okay,” Samir said after a while. “So the Voss farm’s been in that family since—looks like 1889. Same parcel, more or less, though it’s been split and put back together a couple times. And here’s something weird.” He turned the book around so Eli could see. “1934. Land gets transferred from a Voss to a Calder—well, it says Kelder here, but I think that’s the old spelling before somebody Americanized it—and then transferred right back to a Voss eleven years later. No sale price listed. No mortgage. Just—moved over and moved back.”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t know. Could be nothing. People did weird stuff with land for tax reasons.” Samir chewed his lip. “Could also mean somebody wanted it to look like two separate families instead of one.”
Something cold and slow moved through Eli’s chest—an old, familiar kind of dread. He didn’t say anything for a second, just cranked the microfilm forward another few inches.
“Keep looking,” he said.
It took him most of the morning to find the first one.
Local Family Marks Golden Anniversary at Farm Gathering, the headline read, from a 1958 edition. It was a small write-up with a photograph so gray and grainy it was mostly just shapes—a crowd of people standing in front of the Voss barn, dressed for a party. Eli almost scrolled past it. Then he stopped, wound it back, and leaned in close enough that his breath fogged the reader’s glass.
There, at the edge of the group, half-cut-off by the frame: a young woman held a toddler on her hip. Around the toddler’s wrist—small, easy to miss, the kind of detail you’d need to already be looking for—was something. A cord. A little dark shape hanging off it.
He sat back like he’d been shoved.
“Sam.”
Samir came over and looked where Eli pointed, squinting. “I can’t tell what that is.”
“It’s the same thing.” Eli’s voice had gone flat and strange in his own ears. “It’s the same bracelet.”
“You don’t know that for sure. Could be a locket. Could be nothing.”
“It’s the same thing,” Eli said again, quieter—because some part of him already knew arguing wouldn’t make it not true.
He printed the page—thirty-five cents fed into a machine that spat out a grainy black-and-white copy—and set it next to his own photograph on the little library table between the microfilm readers. He looked at them side by side, decades apart: the same shape hanging off two different small wrists.
“Okay,” Samir said after a while, in the voice of somebody trying to be useful instead of scared. “So it’s a family thing. Some kind of—I don’t know, christening thing, blessing thing. Old families do that. My grandmother’s got a whole ritual for babies’ first haircuts. It doesn’t mean anything sinister.”
“Then why don’t I remember it?”
“You were what, five? Nobody remembers being five.”
“I remember other stuff from when I was five.” Eli heard his own voice climbing and made himself bring it back down. “I remember my sixth birthday. I remember falling off my bike outside the Hendersons’ place. I don’t remember this at all, and it’s—Sam, it’s not like a first haircut, is it? Somebody wrote before he was old enough to understand on the back. You don’t write that about a haircut.”
Samir didn’t have an answer for that. He just looked at the two photographs a while longer, then went quiet and went back to the deed books. Eli understood that was Samir’s way of still being there without pretending he could fix it.
They found the genealogy room after lunch—a side room off the main archive with a wall of thick binders, hand-compiled family trees donated over the years by local historical society members. The kind of amateur genealogy work that gets done by somebody’s aunt with too much time and no editor. The Voss binder was thick. The Calder one was thinner, and stranger, because it seemed to just stop in three separate places. Gaps where a person’s name led nowhere: no spouse listed, no children, no date of death. Just a blank space and sometimes a small handwritten note in the margin, cramped and old: moved away. no further information. Once, just: left.
“That’s a lot of people just leaving,” Samir said, low, reading over Eli’s shoulder.
“Yeah.”
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