Four and Twenty Blackbirds (22 page)

"And, those cousins of yours I mentioned?"

"Yes?"
I gripped the porcelain sink behind me and sat against it. I did not like where this seemed to be going.

"They're . . . they . . . their line was much like yours—it was not a large branch of the family. But all of them, beginning with the oldest and working down to the youngest—the farthest from Avery, that is . . . all the blood relations. They're all dead."

"You're lying." My head was growing light. "There's some mistake. You don't know I was related to those people. You can't possibly know that."

"Eden, we've been tracing your genealogy since before you were born." Harry could see from my expression that it would take more than words to convince me, so he muttered, "Hang on," and shuffled out of the room.

My mind was racing so hard I barely noticed Harry leave. When he returned, he silently handed me a scrapbook. I took it grudgingly and began flipping through it, only to find pages and pages of obituaries. By the time I reached the last two entries—a little girl, Cora, whose forlorn pose in her grade school picture could have doubled for one of mine; and my own grandmother—my eyes were teary enough that I could barely read. But still I protested. "These people all died of random diseases. There's nothing here to prove there's any connection between them."

"The cut-out cloth men came in the mail. There is no mistake."

"There
is
a mistake. Nothing is wrong with Lulu, and nothing's wrong with
me
."

Harry held out his hands, palms out and fingers up, trying to calm me or keep me back. "Listen to me, Eden. Someone has tapped into Avery's energy line and is drawing his power. He was the only one who was ever strong enough to attempt the magic needed to resurrect John Gray, and whoever this is will certainly need every ounce of it he can get. You and your aunt Louise and her younger sister are the last remaining descendents. Only a few days remain before the gateway closes and they lose Gray forever.
That's
why we have to find that book. Without the book, they have nothing—not the power to harm us nor the power to resurrect him. They can't raise Gray, and they can't hurt any of you."

I pivoted and slammed the cabinet closed, then planted my hands on either side of the sink. The mirror splintered, leaving the image a fragmented, bug's-eye view, but I could still see Harry's tragic, haggard reflection in the mirror. His gray eyes were bloodshot and tired, but his jaw was set. He ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair.

"Don't you understand, Eden? Before I came to Eliza, I was Father Harold Frazier. If they bring Gray back, we're all done for. You, your aunt, and me too. I'm a member of the order they've targeted. They're coming for us all."

I looked down and turned the faucet handle. The pipes squealed and hissed, then finally provided a tepid stream that grew hot as I held my hands under it. "You're off your rocker. You ought to be out there with Malachi. The two of you could talk about God all the livelong day. I'm sure you'd have a fabulous time."

"Eden, you can't ignore this. It's too close now."

Steam was rising from the sink, and the water was hot enough to scald my hands, but I held them under the nozzle anyway. The broken mirror went damp and muted with white fog just the way I wanted it, and after a minute or two I couldn't see Harry's pleading eyes boring into the back of my head. "It isn't true," I said, reaching for the soap in order to validate my use of the sink. "It just isn't true."

"I understand that your aunt has been in ill health of late."

I wheeled around and hurled the bar of soap at his face. It landed against his forehead with a wet smack before bouncing out into the bedroom and sliding to a halt against the wall. "You shut your mouth."

"Call her, then," he insisted, wiping bubbles out of his eyebrow.

"Maybe I will!" I stomped past him towards the hallway in search of a telephone, but I'd barely left the room when Harry called out.

"Eliza doesn't have long distance. Use my cell phone." He withdrew a small black phone from his trouser pocket and held it out to me. "Take it. Call."

I snatched it away and began to dial, my fingers slipping on the rubberized buttons. I should've rinsed better.

No one was answering at home.

My fingers started shaking. Small slivers of white were stuck beneath my nails, rendering anything I touched a bit soapy. I messed up Dave's cell phone number twice, then managed to dial it correctly. I wrapped both hands around the receiver and pressed it against my aching head.

"Dave?"

"Eden, where have you been? I've been trying to call you for hours!"

"I'm—I'm sorry. Something came up and I left the hotel, but I'm all right," I couldn't help but notice Dave's voice was half an octave higher than it ought to have been. "What's the matter?" I asked, even though I surely wouldn't like the answer. My chest, throat, and ears began to congeal into one solid lump.

"Lu dropped tonight when we were out to eat. She's in the hospital. They don't know what's wrong with her. We were just eating at that Italian place, and she ordered a glass of wine, and I went to the restroom, and when I came back the waiter was trying to bring her around. She just fell over in the booth, and I don't know what's wrong with her. No one will tell me anything—"

Dave rambled some repetitive combination of the same phrases while I sank against the wall, clutching the slippery phone. Slowly I dropped to my haunches and put my head on my knees while I listened. I concentrated on a worn spot on the carpet. I focused on it
hard
.

"Dave, what was it? They must have told you something." I was talking into my own lap, refusing to look at Harry, who had come to lean against the doorframe beside me.

"They don't know. They're saying it was just fatigue, or exhaustion, or whatever, and they're running some tests and keeping her overnight. That's just their expensive way of saying they don't know."

"Did she come around at all?"

"For a few minutes. Long enough to argue with the doctors that she was fine, then say something completely nonsensical and pass out again."

I stared down at my feet on either side of the worn spot, rubbing and shuffling on the carpet, playing idly with the edge of the rug. "What'd she say?" I whispered.

"Oh, it started out okay—she wanted me to call you. But it was what she wanted me to say that was all-out confusing. She said to tell you to find the man and save yourself. But that doesn't make any sense at all, does it? Does it?" In the background, all the static noise of a hospital came through. I heard a muffled name gargle across an intercom, and the rolling wheels of gurneys. It made my uncle sound all the more alone.

Bitter, hot tears welled up in my eyes. My nose filled up and made my voice all soggy. "I've got to go."

"Eden?"

"Dave, I've got to go. I'm going to take care of it."

"What are you talking about? Do you know something? Dammit, what was she talking about? What do you mean, you're going to take care of it? What are you going to do down there? And why don't you come home, like she asked you to in the first place?"

"I've got to go. But I'm going to take care of it. You tell her to hang on, and I'm going to go get him. You tell her when she comes home from the hospital, I'm going to be waiting for her at the door."

I pressed the "end" button. It disconnected us with an electronic blip, and the lights behind the numbers went dim. Harry reached out as if he meant to touch me in comfort, but I drew away, holding his phone out to him and lifting my head.

"Okay. You win. How do we find this goddamned book?"

IV

I spent the next hours sick at heart, tearing through Eliza's house in a frantic search. Together, Harry and I turned every room inside out—we emptied cabinets, we broke plates, we dumped silverware onto the floor. We dragged out all the liquor bottles and tapped around in the wet bar, seeking any small hollow place. We went inch by inch along every wall, feeling each crack with the tips of our fingers, hoping to stumble upon some hidden spring or button. We lifted aside all the rugs and pressed the toes of our shoes into the floorboards, seeking some loose part that might come away.

We found nothing.

In the end, we returned to Eliza's bedroom and scoured it once more before dropping ourselves to rest on the floor against her bed. By then it was nearing dawn. Both of us were exhausted and despairing, knowing that for once in her century-long life, Eliza had been telling the truth. She didn't have the book.

"Then where could it possibly be?" I asked, fully aware that Harry didn't have any better idea than I did.

"Anywhere. Nowhere." He was fidgeting with the papers he'd removed from between her mattresses. I could now see that they were letters, in envelopes. They made me think of the bundle I'd pulled from the files at Pine Breeze.

"What are those? Besides the obvious, I mean."

"These?" He held them up. "Nothing. They're all empty. Just empty, old stationery. Some of them are postmarked as far back as fifty years ago. Look at this one—July twelve, 1956."

I took one from him and examined it for myself. Yes, it was empty, but I had a feeling it wasn't "nothing." The one I held was made from the same cheap paper as the one I'd found in Leslie's file. The handwriting on the outside was even the same. And so was the postmark: Highlands Hammock, Fla.

"Harry, what's in Highlands Hammock?"

"Where?" He looked at the postmark. "In Florida? I don't know."

"Is it anywhere near St. Augustine?"

"No, not really. If it's where I think it is, it's considerably farther south, towards the Everglades. Now that you mention it, I think it might be a state preserve of some kind. Why do you ask?"

I told him about Pine Breeze, and about what I'd found during my excursions. "Come to think of it, the letters are out in my car," I added. "You wanna see them?"

"I'll take your word for it."

Something about the handwriting intrigued me. I held the envelope up to the light and watched the paper glow. Something about it. Something . . . I'd seen it somewhere else. I climbed to my feet and started towards the bathroom.

"Where are you . . . ? Oh," Harry said, seeing my destination.

"No, I'm not going to use it, I want to check something." I opened the medicine cabinet again and reached for the bottle that'd caught my attention earlier. The brown glass containers were where I'd left them, so I retrieved them again and held the labels up next to the envelopes.

A perfect match.

"Hey, Harry, check this out." I returned to the bedroom with the bottle in one hand and the envelope in the other. "It's the same on both of these."

"So?"

"So whoever prescribed the dosage on
this
stuff also addressed
this
envelope."

It took a few seconds for the truth to dawn on him. "But that envelope was sealed and mailed in 1956, and I know for a fact that that bottle arrived in the mail last week." Then he shook his head. "No, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Eliza's over a hundred years old—it's reasonable to think she has friends of a comparable age. Especially if they're in Florida."

"Possibly," I conceded. "I guess there are a lot of old people in Florida." But I couldn't help but think my deduction was more significant than coincidence.

"There's no return name on the envelope—is there any signature on the bottle?" Harry asked.

"Uh-uh." I unstopped the cork and took a whiff of the greenish liquid that sloshed inside.

Damp grass. Slimy bark and moss. A memory receptor fired in the back of my brain, but not hard enough for me to tell what the scent reminded me of. I could only recognize that it was familiar; I couldn't have said what it was or where it came from—except that it had apparently come from Florida, maybe someplace near the Everglades. It certainly smelled like a swamp in a bottle, that much was sure.

"What is this stuff? You said you know she got it last week; does she get it often?"

"About twice a month she gets a package, addressed just like these letters. When I asked her about it, she said it was an herbal remedy for her rheumatism that she orders from a doctor down there."

"This is no doctor's script." The letters were heavy and precise, though not refined. Whoever had printed them was working slowly, and laboriously. Perhaps he or she couldn't read very well. I was willing to bet it was a man, for the letters had a masculine quality to their square-edged straightness.

"No, it isn't. But it's never done any good to argue with the woman, as you can well imagine." Harry sat on the edge of the bed and shuffled through the letters again, furrowing his brow into deep creases. "Do you really think this is important?"

"It might be. We could ask her."

"She won't tell us anything, not now that she's been tied up in a chair all night. You thought she was uncooperative
before
. . . I'll bet we ain't seen nothing yet."

I stared down at the bottle, swishing its contents around into a whirlpool. "You're probably right. But she's all we've got. This time, how about you let
me
do the asking?"

He shrugged and rose, reaching his hands behind his shoulders and cracking his back. "Be my guest. You can't possibly get any less out of her than I did."

Downstairs in the dining room, Eliza had fallen asleep. Her curly white head was tipped forward, her chin resting on her breastbone. Her chest expanded and contracted just enough to lift and lower her face, still blocked by the gag. I was merely inches away from feeling sorry for her until Harry removed her gag and she shot awake and started yelling.

"You scalawags—both of you dirty goddamned carpetbaggers—I'll see you both dead! I'll see you both gutted and stretched and dead on a rack before I'm gone, do you hear me? I'll kill you myself, with my own two hands! I'll—"

Harry popped the saliva-soaked rag back into her mouth and let her gnaw on it in muffled rage. "I told you," he said to me. "She's not going to be of any use. We may as well turn her loose and make a run for it."

"I'm not going to run away from a little old lady," I said, jaw set firm. "I'll smack some manners into one if I have to, but I'm not going to flee from one. It's undignified."

"What do you plan to do, then?" He said it with a hint of warning that implied, all threats aside, he would prefer that no actual manners-smacking took place.

I positioned myself so that Eliza could stare me down all she liked. I wanted her to look at me. I wanted her to remember how much she hated me, and my mother before me. There was a chance I could use that fury to my advantage.

"Eliza, who's your friend in Florida?"

She stopped squirming and gnashing her teeth against the rag. Her eyes shrank to tiny, mean slits, and she slowly shook her head back and forth.

"Okay," I said, "that'll work. I'll just ask yes-or-no questions and you can shake your head. That'll work fine."

At that, she threw her nose into the air and stared at the ceiling. I might have expected as much, but her refusal did not daunt me. I could get a knee-jerk reaction out of her, and that was something. It was more than "nothing."

I decided it was safe to act on my assumption that her correspondent was male. "Tell me, Tatie. Your friend in Florida. You've known him for a very long time, haven't you? We found some stuff in your room that tells us you've known him for fifty years, if you've known him a day."

Her eyes didn't release their death grip on the ceiling, but she didn't huff as though I'd said something stupid and wrong. Her hands had instantly gone into hard-knotted fists where they were strapped to the armrests, and it was not because she was tied inhumanely.

"Is he a family member?"

Nothing. Not even a twitch at the corner of an eye.

"This swamp water he's sending you, it's some kind of medicine?" She continued her steadfast policy of nonreaction, so I wiggled the cork loose and smelled at it again, squinting down the neck of the bottle. "I have a hard time believing that. And you take this regularly?"

"It's for her rheumatism," Harry reiterated without enthusiasm. Eliza pivoted her head just enough to glare over at him instead of the ceiling, then permitted herself a half nod.

"I don't buy that. Not for a second."

"This conversation can
not
go anywhere, Eden. She's not going to tell us anything." My coconspirator was growing tired of the games, or possibly just tired. Lord knew I was beat like an old rug. I would have given anything to lie down in the big bed upstairs they'd assigned me earlier, and go to sleep as I ought to have.

But there were bigger things at stake than circles under our eyes. "Eliza, what would you do if I threw this out? Flushed it down the toilet? Would you care?"

Her head jiggled ever so slightly, signifying the negative.

"Not at all?"

She did it again, more firmly. Harry was wrong. Whatever the vial contained, it was important enough to Eliza that she wanted me to think it was useless. If it had really been something ordinary, she would have left her eyes on the ceiling and kept her head stationary.

"All right, then, maybe I'll just dump it down the sink in the kitchen." I left her immediate vision and walked towards the door.

Eliza shrugged, and by all appearances was unconcerned. She didn't even try to see what I was doing. Either she knew I wasn't going to do it, or she knew she could easily get more. Or I supposed she might be bluffing. Perhaps it ran in the family. I hesitated. Or maybe Harry was right and the foul-smelling stuff was inconsequential. Hmmm. So many possibilities. There might be a way to tell.

I returned to Eliza and stood before her again. Her eyes were tilted skyward once more, and they did not come down to meet me. "Herbal stuff. Folk medicine, huh? Then I bet it doesn't have anything more interesting in it than saw palmetto and mud. Maybe I'll just take a drink of it myself."

That
got her attention, but she didn't seem sure how to react. She was reluctant to give too much away; she refused to struggle against the bonds or try to call out, but she clearly had something on her mind. She brought her eyes off the ceiling and looked at me again.

"Well?" I held my breath and put the bottle to my lips.

"Urngh—"
she grunted.
"Urngh urgh."

I stopped, and pulled the gag out of her mouth with two careful fingers. The rag was soaked with drool and I didn't want to touch it. "Yes?"

She didn't start screaming again, which was a relief; in fact, she didn't say anything at all.

"Well?" I waggled the bottle before her. She blinked, but kept quiet. I'm not sure what I wanted her to say, but whatever my expectations, she disappointed them. "All right then, bottoms up."

She gasped as I poured a mouthful of the stuff past my teeth.

I would have gasped too if it wouldn't have meant spewing the brew all over the place. Eliza's herbal medicine tasted as vile as it smelled. I swallowed with force so quick that it made my throat hurt—but the pain was more tolerable than the taste so I couldn't complain. The stuff burned going down, boiling all the way to my stomach where it simmered and stewed.

"What on earth is
in
this shit?" I asked, more as a rhetorical statement than a genuine question.

Despite the limited progress I'd made in Eliza's interrogation, Harry was not happy. "You shouldn't have done that. She probably doesn't know what's in it any more than I do, and it might be . . . bad for you."

"Oh, please," I wiped my tongue around my molars, trying to scrape away the fetid flavor. "Anything a woman her age regularly drinks can't possibly be that harmful. See? No ill effects. It's disgusting, but I'm sure it's harmless." For emphasis, I threw my head back and took another deep, hearty swallow—this time taking care to plug my nose to dull the assault on my taste buds. To my surprise, this second swill left the bottle close to empty. Hard to believe I'd ingested so much of it. Hard to believe anybody could.

Eliza finally broke her silence. Her voice was strange, soft, and unhappy. "You shouldn't drink that."

"Why? Is Harry right? Will it hurt me? I know you don't care, so be sure to try a different approach when you answer."

"No. I don't care if you
choke
on it. Look at yourself, guzzling down a sick old woman's medicine that you stole from her cabinet. I need that to live, and you don't need it at all. You're young and strong, and you are killing me with every drop you drink."

"That's not much of a deterrent. If anything that makes me want to hunt down every bit of it you've got in the house and run it down the sink." I wiped at my mouth with one of the napkins that had not been used to plug Eliza's mouth. I couldn't have downed another sip if they'd held a gun to my head. How she'd been drinking it in such quantities for years astounded me. "You've got a lot of faith in this stuff."

"It's strong medicine. I need it."

"But you can get more. Harry said you get a new shipment about twice a month."

"I don't know if I'll last until the next one comes." She was afraid. I saw it in her eyes, in her floppy jowls, and her quivering mouth. I looked down and saw there was enough "medicine" left for maybe another smallish dose. I looked up at Eliza.