Chapter 7: The Saint Christopher

Everyone in Maple Heights recognized Joe Barnes’s Saint Christopher pendant.

It was huge, crudely made, its rough grooves packed with years of grime, looking like something a kid might dig up in a muddy backyard—ugly, heavy, impossible to forget.

He’d picked it up for $12 at a roadside flea market on a trip to see family in Boise.

Of course, it wasn’t real silver—it was plastic.

You couldn’t buy silver for twelve bucks.

But the vendor swore it was, and Joe cherished it like it was the real thing.

The vendor had said, “Men wear Saint Christopher, women wear Saint Mary. Wear this, your luck’ll change, and you’ll meet a good woman and marry yourself a beauty.”

The words ‘beautiful wife’ made Joe’s heart skip. He emptied his pockets, found twelve dollars; the vendor, seeing no more was coming, let the ‘$40’ pendant go at a loss.

It was so cheap, the vendor didn’t even bother to toss in a chain.

Back home, Joe’s blind mother dug through her sewing basket and made him a necklace from a piece of red knitting yarn.

That red string turned black inside a month.

Now, that blackened red string had been yanked off, and the pendant lay stuck in the blood beside Lila’s bed, fused to the congealed mess.

“That’s Joe Barnes’s,” everyone agreed.

To this day, some in Maple Heights remember the pendant glinting in the sun as Joe walked down Main Street, hands deep in his jacket pockets, always alone.