Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6) (40 page)

“They were kind because she had something they wanted.” Daria scoffed. “Let’s not go that route. I suggest we focus on what happened the last time she tried to take revenge on the family.”

Daria and I had texted the entire time Beau drove to pick her up, so she was up to speed as far as Charlotta and James’s fate. Her plan sounds like a good one, and I nod along in agreement.
 

“Yes. The last time she tried to kill your family, she killed her own son instead. According to the ghost of Charles Jr. she may or may not have accepted that fact, and your sister said Mama Lottie didn’t know about Charlotta being pregnant at the time.” I bite my lip, working out details in my mind. “Who’s to say it won’t be worse, this time around, that she’ll end up ruining the lives of her own descendants in the course of ruining yours…”

That sinks in, and it feels like the right answer. Mama Lottie must feel guilty about what happened to her son. It was never her intention, of course, to have him step in the way he had. She underestimated his love for his beloved Charlie and didn’t know about their child. Perhaps she figured that her tales of how the Draytons had wronged her, surely poured into his ears from a young age, would infest him with the sort of hatred and anger that ruled her life, and she never realized that he had a good heart.

Daria goes still, lifting her eyes in the direction of the river. I feel it, too—a change in the wind, with a biting, slithering cold underneath the previous chill.

“Is she here?” I whisper.

Daria nods, pressing her lips together. She tries and fails to hide her fear from me. “Let’s ground now, then walk back. Let me take the lead when it comes to helping her along, okay?”

I nod, then close my eyes. It’s easier since I practiced in the car, and after I give my invisible spirit guide an extra long talk about staying with me tonight, I open my eyes to find Beau looking at me. His hazel eyes are wide with concern, but there’s a tinge of pride in them that makes me want to puff out my chest.

The confidence probably won’t last long, so I’m glad when Daria finishes her prep a moment later and we start to walk toward the river. Her bag of Buffy tricks bangs against her hip, again sounding like wooden stakes, but I resist the urge to ask her what she’s brought along. I’m sure I’ll have to learn about it at some point, but for tonight, I’ll let her deal with whatever aspect she hopes to achieve with the supplies.

Part of my question is answered as we pull up between the two trees where I first saw Mama Lottie. The sight of a huge snake curled around a branch punches the wind out of me, but it’s good news—confirmation that our ghost is close, if not present visibly.

Daria digs in her bag and pulls out two wooden containers, which she promptly unlatches. One is full of what looks to be sea salt, and she shoves it at Beau. “Sprinkle this in a circle around where we’re standing. It’s for protection. She shouldn’t be able to come inside it to hurt us.”

I’m skeptical. She hadn’t touched me the other night when she’d flung me into the window. She’d been five feet away. I say nothing, though, because I’m no expert, and it helps a little to believe it will work. Sometimes I think belief is nine-tenths of the battle when it comes to spirits. Like maybe more people could see them if people didn’t start out with the assumption that ghosts didn’t exist.

The second box is flatter and longer, and there are sticks inside that have a pungent scent. She catches my curious gaze. “Sage. It’s used for lots of things, including scrubbing areas and helping spirits find their way to the next plane of existence.”

I’ve noticed before that Daria never says
next world
, or
death
, or
into the light
,
or anything cheesy like that. If we make it through this, that will go on my list of things to ask her as far as what she actually believes about these spirits of ours.

Beau finishes his task and hands the box back to Daria. She dumps it in her bag and gives me one of the sticks, and the three of us stand shoulder to shoulder as we wait.
 

“Are you going to, like, talk to her?” I whisper.

“You talk to her, Graciela. You’re the one who has something to say, remember?”

I take a deep breath, then another, organizing my thoughts. Where to start? For the first time in my life, I wish I had some kind of background in psychology instead of history. Had I known I would be forced into a career of undead counseling, perhaps I would have considered it as my major.

Focus, Gracie.
 

The stray thought about shrinks gives me an idea, though. Empathy. It had been simple for me to see Mama Lottie’s side when I thought of her as that scared, kidnapped child. I could start there. By agreeing with her.

“Mama Lottie, I want to talk to you,” I call out into the night. It’s not loud enough, so I clear my throat before continuing, even though I suspect she could have heard me if I’d whispered. “I’ve learned most of your story, the one you want people to hear, and I’m so sorry for the things that happened to you. No one deserves to be kidnapped, to be sold and owned and degraded.”

We all wait, and it feels as though Beau and Daria are holding their breath, too. I clutch the sage stick and peer into the moon-dappled darkness, but nothing happens.

“Sarah Martha Drayton treated you well, but you knew it wasn’t because the Draytons cared. It was because they needed you.”

“It was because they feared me.” Her voice rumbles, shaking the ground like a giant clap of thunder. She appears near the low-hanging branch and her snake.

All of the moisture leaves my mouth, and my heart pounds so hard she can probably see it from ten feet away. Beau, Daria, and I tighten up until our shoulders touch, as though we all decide at once to make sure we’re well inside the circle of salt.

“Yes.” I lick my lips. “They feared you. They couldn’t let you go so they didn’t bother to ask the questions they knew they should have about your origins.” I pause. “But Charles Henry, the first one, he was your friend. Like a brother to you. He was just a baby when he inherited the Hall. He couldn’t have known anything about how you came to live there.”

She glares at me, suspicion flickering in her obsidian gaze. “He could have asked me. If he were truly my friend.”

I don’t argue with her, because I suspect she knows as well as I do that a child would have had no way to guess one of his family’s slaves had been procured illegally.

“Why did you stay? After the war.” I figure the answer is simple revenge, but I want to hear her say it. “You could have left. Taken your son and gone back home, found your family.”

Anger swirls on her face like dark, ominous clouds.

Shit. Apparently that was the wrong thing to say.

“How could I go back home, disgraced as I was? I’d been used and enslaved, and I would have been an embarrassment to the women who came before me.”

“You stayed because you hadn’t found a way to make the Draytons pay yet, you mean?”

She folds her arms over her generous chest and peers at me as if she’s trying to figure me out. It’s an expression I’m intimately familiar with these days.

“Who says I was going to make them pay before…” she starts.

“Before they tried to take James?” I guess softly.

Her eyes burn, flames leaping high. “Yes. Before that girl thought she could run off with the only thing I ever had that was only mine.”

I pull the journals out of my bag and set the pouch on the ground, reaching inside for the one I left on the top. In it is the first entry that mentions how the two of them were in love, and how they planned to run away. “They were in love, Lottie. They were young, and it happened, and then she got pregnant. It’s not such a strange story, don’t you think?”

“I wanted more for my boy than having to support a girl who would likely have left them once she realized what a life outside of her daddy’s plantation looked like.” Her lips twist. “And he was going to up and leave me behind without a word.”

“He was scared of you,” I whisper. “Scared of your anger, I bet, and scared of the fact that your blood ran in his veins. Did you know he had your power?”

She shook her head, gazing out over the river. Mama Lottie is different tonight. She’s still angry, but instead of lashing out, she’s letting it simmer beneath the surface. “We never talked about it. Never had a male inherit it on my side of the family. That was the others.”

My breath caught in my chest. “My father’s side.”

Her head snaps back around, and she levels me with a harsh sneer. “Yes.
Your father’s side
. Took you long enough to put things together.”

“I’m a slow learner.”
 

“Get on with it,” Daria hisses. “The longer we engage her, the weaker my protections and the stronger she gets.”

“You didn’t know Charlotta was pregnant, the night you tried to kill her, did you?” I ask.

Mama Lottie doesn’t answer, looking at me like she’s trying to figure out what to do with my dead body instead.

“Would you still have done it?” I go on.

“How can you ask me that? I would take it all back if I had known that James would give his life to save hers.” She shakes her head and spits on the ground. “Why did he have to save them all? He would have lived if he had only saved the girl. He had to have known that.”

It doesn’t sound as though she’s talking to me, or to us, at all anymore. It sounds like she’s asking herself a question for the thousandth time since James gave his life for the Drayton family.

“He loved her, Lottie. He wouldn’t have been able to live with seeing her devastated after the loss of her family. Of his child’s family. Your boy was good.” I rush on before she can blow up at me for saying the wrong thing again, which the daggers in her eyes promise happened. She’s going to be even more pissed in a hot second. “It was
your
fault he died.
Your
poison, or curse, or whatever you put in that chicken ended up killing James. He died because of your need for revenge, because your hatred for the Draytons overtook everything in your life. If you do it again, if you go through with this curse, you’ll hurt James all over again because his blood and Charlotta’s are mixed together for eternity. You can’t change that, but you can decide to lay down your anger and hate and walk away now, the way you should have done then.”

The air around us goes still. Daria tenses at my side, fumbling in her pocket before pulling out a lighter. Fear grabs my heart in a tight grip, refusing to let it beat, and I hear Beau breathing heavily on my left. Mama Lottie comes toward us, her steps measured but her expression wild. Every instinct I have screams
danger
, hollers
run
, but I’m rooted to the spot, praying the salt does the trick.

“You dare to tell me what to do? You presume to know
anything
about what it takes to stay strong for as long as I have, to remain here to finish my life’s work?” She’s screaming, the sound like nails on a chalkboard, and I have to resist the urge to cover my ears. “I cannot stop now! If I stop now, James will have died for nothing.”

I swallow my terror, my own eyes so wide they feel like they’re going to fall off the side of my head. “He
didn’t
die for nothing. He brought a son into this world, but if you curse the family, you’re undoing that. You’re cursing
yourself
, Lottie. Haven’t you endured enough? Shouldn’t the one good thing you did—nurtured a son who was a good man, who had another son, and so on—be enough to let you go?”

“Go where? With whom? To do what?” For a half a second, fear flashes through her eyes like a bolt of lightning.

Daria stiffens, her fingers wrapping around my wrist. She slides the lighter into my palm. “There is another plane, Mama Lottie. You don’t belong here, and the longer you remain, the more your frustrations will grow.”

I light the stick of sage in my hand with shaking fingers, still convinced we’re all about to be eviscerated as a result of my poor therapy session with Mama Lottie. Daria lights her stick with a second lighter, not taking her eyes off our ghost.

For her part, Mama Lottie looks unconvinced as she sneers at Daria. “You know nothing. You don’t see, you only guess.”

“It’s true,” Daria agrees. She doesn’t sound like she’s about to pee herself anymore, but I feel her shaking. “I don’t know, but I do know I’ve never had anyone come back complaining.”

Mama Lottie does not appear amused by the joke. To be honest, neither am I.

We’re at an impasse. Tendrils of fragrant smoke waft past my nose, obscuring my vision as they float upward. I copy Daria’s pose and hold it lower, swinging the stick slowly back and forth in an arc. It’s easier to see this way, and my breath catches at the sight of a tall black man behind Mama Lottie. He’s standing over by the river, his feet in the water and a canoe at his shins. It’s not real—I can see through the boat and some of the guy. In the boat, a pretty, plump white girl with shining dark hair and eyes like Beau’s waits.
 

The boy is dressed poorly, wearing simple trousers, suspenders, and a shirt that shows part of his dark, muscular chest. The woman’s clothing is finer, and slightly newer in fashion, but I’d put them both around the turn of the twentieth century.

Tears fill my eyes. Charlotta and James. It must be them.

“Look.” Even though I whisper the word, as though afraid to spook the ghosts instead of the other way around, everyone hears me.
 

Mama Lottie is the last to see her son, and the expression on her face shatters my heart. Grief like I haven’t felt since Anne Bonny, since my particular brand of clairvoyance includes experiencing the emotions of the spirits who come to me, and my insides feel as though they’re being ripped out.

She’s not angry with anyone but herself, I realize. She wants his forgiveness but can’t imagine he would give it to her, because she can’t imagine a world where
she
would be able to, had someone wronged her in a similar fashion.
 

My knees buckle with the force of her emotions, and I grab onto Beau with my free hand, tears that aren’t really mine gushing down my cheeks.