Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6) (16 page)

Aha.
He
is
unnerved by her resolved, malevolent presence.
 

“We’re not here to talk about you or me tonight, though. Miss Harper here has something to tell you.” He frowns, as though he realizes only now that his advice to me not to speak is impossible.

There’s no way around it now. Her head swivels toward me, just now deigning to acknowledge my existence. The fury in her gaze suggests that she saw me the other night, chose not to speak to me at the Hall, and is none too pleased to be forced into it now.

Nothing to do but say it. It’s my last chance to try to save the Drayton family
and
my own.
 

“I know you don’t want to talk to me…”

“Whatever would give you that idea?”

I resist the urge to roll my eyes at her sarcasm, a little surprised by my response. It must be coded into my DNA. “Yes, well, I have information I think you need before you go through with…what I’ve been helping you with.”

She purses her lips, then shoots a look toward Frank. He doesn’t bother to pretend disinterest in our conversation, and her countenance darkens. No doubt she’s less than thrilled about letting someone else in on her personal vendetta, and honestly, I’m not terribly excited about anyone knowing that I’ve helped this vicious spirit place a curse on a local family.

We’re out of options. She might not know it yet, but we are.

“Your son, James, had a child with Charlotta Drayton.” She stops pacing. Just freezes, like when the Internet connection goes out in the middle of a Netflix show. Then she swivels only her head, her dark, bottomless eyes akin to that of one of the demons I glimpsed once with Daria.
 

A shudder works down my spine.

“What did you just say?” she asked.

Frank again closes the gap between us, as though maybe he believes we’re stronger if our bodies are touching somehow. Maybe he’s right, but if Mama Lottie decides she wants to hurt one or both of us, I can’t imagine anything on this whole earth would be able to stop her.

“Your son…James.”

“How do you know about him?”

The question confirms that she had taken care to hide the fact that she had a son, never mind that he worked with her at the Draytons’, from everyone. The glint in her eye says she might not even believe I’m telling the truth, but I do know his name. How good of a guesser would I have to be to figure that out?

“Charlotta Drayton’s diaries. She talks about him quite a lot.”

“Liar. My James never went near the Drayton children.” The untruth glimmers in her face, inserts the slightest uncertainty in her voice. She knows good and well that Charlotta and James knew each other, if she doesn’t know about their baby.

“But you did.” My curiosity creeps up, trumping my fear at least enough for questions to slip through, ones I’m dying to know the answers to. “When I see the younger version of you, she appears with another ghost, a little boy…Charles.”

 
“They weren’t my
friends
.
” Her face twists with sour hatred.
 
“They pretended to care, the lot of them, but they didn’t. They let me suffer in captivity, like a bird banging itself against the bars of a cage until its body is as broken as its spirit. James knew better. He knew.”

In that moment, Mama Lottie shows me her vulnerability—or at least, the kind she must have had in life. If her claims are true, she must have been a terrified child, ripped from her family and sold to another. Considered chattel even as they claimed to care about her. She built her reputation and protected what little independence it earned her with fierce fire. It made sense that she would forbid her son from befriending the people who, in her mind, had betrayed her every moment they refused to see and speak the truth they must have known—that she didn’t belong.

But I’ve read Charlotta’s diaries. That means I know something Mama Lottie doesn’t, something that a young, innocent girl never could have invented on her own.

“He loved her, though,” I say. “He might have known better, but he couldn’t help it.”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“I have proof.” I don’t want to give her the journal but don’t see another way to convince her other than with Charlotta’s own words. I also have no idea if she can even hold it and read it, but given her abilities as a spirit, I’m guessing she can.

I also don’t want to turn my back to her, so I scoot backward, opening the door and backing into the kitchen. Amelia must have moved the journals off the table to make room for dinner, but they’re on the buffet that holds a framed photo of my grandparents on their fortieth anniversary and the American flag they handed me at Gramps’s funeral in return for his service during WWII.

It takes me a little bit to find the right book since they’ve been rearranged, but then I light on it. The last one, the one where Charlotta talks about finding out she’s pregnant and worrying over what to do. She never thinks, not for a second, that James will deny the baby or leave her. Her concerns center around what will become of them, and their baby, and how the news will hurt her family.
 

I head back outside, where Mama Lottie is pacing. I watch as Frank tries to calm her down with random bits of conversation, but she’s ignoring him. The murderous looks she’s shooting his way feel heavy and pointed enough to contain curses of their own.
 

She snatches the little book out of my hands, answering my question about if she’s able to hold solid objects without a word. I wait, trying not to start pacing myself, as she skims through the days and weeks leading up to the news. James is in the majority of the entries, because the two of them were spending almost all of their free time together and she was thinking about him whenever they were apart.

Thunderclouds gather on Mama Lottie’s ebony face, settling dark shadows into the grooves as she reads. I see the moment she reads about the baby. About Charlotta’s dreams for the future.

I wonder what happened between them and how Mama Lottie couldn’t know. She
must
know.

“You see. You can’t curse the family, Mama Lottie,” I reason. “They’re
your
family, too. You have grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Did you know that? I could tell you about them, if you want.”

“Those people will never be my family. They stole my James from me.”
 

A slice of hot disappointment slashes through me. What if James had turned out to be a cad and not the man Charlotta believed him to be? What if he had run from Drayton Hall without a look back and Mama Lottie had been left behind, too?

I hadn’t considered it. The way Charlotta talks about him, it seems impossible.

“What do you mean? They were kids, they fell in love. It happens.”
 

I duck, barely missing the journal she chucks at my head. I dive for it, my only thought to protect it so that Jenna doesn’t get into trouble.

“You don’t know anything!” Mama Lottie shrieks, the sound like the fingernails of a hundred people against a chalkboard.

She turns on me and my feet lift off the ground. My body flies backward, crashing into the door separating the deck from the house. Pain shoots through me and explodes in my head as the back of my skull cracks hard against the glass. I slump onto the cold planks, stars dancing in front of my eyes and the world spinning far too fast. There’s no way to get up, to even raise my hands to protect myself, as she towers over me, a blur of blackness and hate.

Frank’s voice comes from far away, chanting words that don’t sound like English at a pace so rapid they tumble into one another, tangling into a heap. My throat closes. I can’t breathe knowing she’s going to finish this thing between us once and for all.

Then she disappears as suddenly as she arrived.

F
rank’s at my side, checking my head and my pupils and dragging me to my feet.

“Are you okay? Jesus, that was terrifying.”

I shake my head and pull away from him, my whole body shuddering with cold that starts in my middle and flows outward, where it meets the night air. “I’m fine.”

Am I? No way to tell for sure, but I haven’t joined my ghosts yet, and that’s something. I give Frank a sidelong look, second-guessing myself. He’d probably still see me even if I were dead, and in that moment, I need a second opinion like I need to breathe.

“You need to go,” I tell him, prying open the door to the house—now webbed with cracks from the force of my body—and stumbling into the warm interior.
 

The work Leo did on the windows and furnace helped, thank goodness, but I feel as though I’ll never be warm again.

“Are you sure? I mean…” He glances at the clock above the sink and bites his lower lip. “It’s not like I can stick around all night, but you’re bleeding. Don’t you want me to drop you at the hospital?”

I snort, then immediately regret it. I hurt everywhere, but especially my head. I reach up to touch the spot that’s throbbing and my fingers come away bright red. My stomach turns, and my fingers snag a dishtowel but I try not to let Frank see my distress. “I’m okay. Head wounds bleed a lot, but if I decide I need to go, Amelia can take me.”

“Okay…” He follows me when I head out of the kitchen and into the living room. In the foyer, he stops with his hand on the door. “Graciela…that wasn’t good. She shouldn’t have been able to touch you like that. Carlotta isn’t a normal ghost, and I don’t want you interacting with her on your own again.”

Not a normal ghost.
Daria said some version of the same thing, and I have to assume both she and Frank have had far more experience dealing with spirits than I have. If neither of them have encountered anything like Mama Lottie before, then there’s no doubt in my mind that I should heed his advice.

That said, what right does he have to
give
me advice in the first place?

Anger, hot and fast, surges in my blood. “Thanks for your concern, Frank, but you missed my childhood, and with it, the chance to tell me what to do.”

He winces. The blow is low, if what he says about my mother keeping me a secret is the truth. I don’t think it is, especially not if he knows something about Felicia and baby Travis. I would have been a toddler—impossible to miss.

“Fair point. But that doesn’t stop me from worrying about you. And, for the record, I would care even if you weren’t my daughter. People who can do what we do are rare, Graciela. We look out for each other. I think you’ll come to realize that as you get more comfortable.” He twists, opening the door and sending a blast of chilly air prickling my overly sensitive skin.

My vision blurs, and it takes me a moment to realize it’s because of my tears and not my head injury. Maybe I
should
go to the hospital, but the people at Heron Creek Hospital already think I’m bats. They’re probably just looking for an excuse to lock me up for a few days.

Amelia. I just need her.

“I don’t know if I want to get more comfortable,” I blurt out, unsure why I said anything at all.

“Oh, sugar plum. You’re a Fournier. You don’t have a choice.” His lips twist into a grimace. “Don’t be mad at Henry for spying for me. You’ve seen yourself now—they don’t have another option. And he needs you.”

With that, he walks out into the night and closes the door softly behind him. I bend over and put my hands on my knees, breathing until the house stops spinning and I can straighten up without puking. The sharp, shooting pains that race from the base of my skull into my lower back make moving a challenge, but as much as I want to hash out everything that happened with Millie, her seeing me like this would scare her.

Instead of going to her room, I head up the stairs and into mine, shuffling straight into the bathroom to confront the damage head-on. I hate myself for looking for Henry but I can’t help it. The moment Frank said,
He needs you
, it was like a switch flicked in my soul. Like I can’t help it.

In the mirror, my face looks undamaged but pale. Blood has matted my hair at the crown of my skull, which is tender to the touch, but other than being ashen and skittish, the injuries will be easy enough to hide once I’ve had a shower. Under the spray, I watch reddish clots swirl around the drain and disappear.
 

Just as Mama Lottie had. And before I’d been able to gauge if anything I’d told her about James and Charlotta would change her mind. Not only that, but she’d gotten away a second time without me securing her promise of when and how the curse against the Harper boys would be lifted.
 

The memory of Frank muttering words that sounded foreign and fast slams into me. Had he sent her away the same way he’d brought her forth?

A frown finds my lips. He shouldn’t have done that.
 

That thought crashes with the mental image of her looming over me, fiery demon eyes daring me to say again that she’s vulnerable, that she’s anything but a faint, dark shadow of the terrified, sad girl who was taken illegally from her home all those years ago.

Maybe he had been right to send her away. He could have saved my life.