Supernatural: Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting (6 page)

That’s it for the Enochian. I’m sure there’s a whole lot more, but I’m new to angel lore. Learning as I go. Far as other angel weaknesses go:

What am I leaving out? My eyes feel like they’re gonna fall out if I don’t get sleep soon, but my mind won’t ease off the gas. So much I’ve gotta get written down. I could go on with angel stories forever, especially if you count all the ones about Gabriel, who for the longest time we thought was a trickster named Loki—wait. Trickster. Messy workmanship, godlike power, sketchy motivation . . .

I need to go back to the junkyard.

Anansesem

DIDN’T FIND WHAT I WAS
looking for in the junkyard. I was hoping—well, kind of hoping, anyway—that I’d find candy wrappers. See, Gabriel has a sweet tooth, and leaving candy wrappers behind was always his trademark. The guy ate more Reese’s Pieces than E.T. Not that this could actually
be
Gabriel, since he’s dead—Lucifer shanked him like a . . . thing you shank. Though it wouldn’t be the first time that a piece was put back on the chess board after it was knocked off—God (or whoever’s up there pulling strings) has been known to bring back people He’s taken a shine to. Like Cass, twice, or Sam and Dean, a bazillion times.

Either way, there’s no sign of Gabriel by the Chevelle, but that doesn’t mean one of his ilk isn’t involved here. By that, I mean
tricksters
, the wiliest bastards ever to walk the planet. Like I said, their power borders on godlike, and they’re petty, vindictive, sometimes arbitrary with their victims—they’re creatures whose sole motivation seems to be teaching people stupid lessons.

You know what? Speaking of stupid lessons, I think this’d be a good time for a little mental exercise. A “what would you do?” activity, to see if you’ve learned anything yet. Because Lord knows, I didn’t make the right calls when I was in this situation.

Years back, must have been the late eighties, I was on a solo hunt in the backwoods of Arkansas. It was hotter than Hades, and muggy, too—not my ideal vacation spot. I was looking into the deaths of five elderly women from a nursing home outside Calico Rock, all of whom died in fires. Separate, self-contained fires, all within the walls of the nursing home. Now, fires by themselves aren’t mysterious, but in each case, the fire marshal’s report stated that the fire’s source was on the women’s clothing. No accelerants were found at the scenes, but the fires burned rapidly and uncontrollably, until they suddenly stopped. As if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Always after the woman had been totally consumed by the flames. Starting to sound like my kind of work, right?

My investigation was by the book—interviewed witnesses, nobody saw anything. Interviewed family, learned that the women knew each other, mostly from their bridge games at the home. Calico Rock isn’t a big town, and they’d all lived nearby their entire lives, so they were bound to have run into each other over the years, but everyone remembered them as nice ladies who largely kept to themselves. Gossiped a bit, but who doesn’t?

My working theory: ever heard of spontaneous human combustion? Each woman had been immolated entirely without burning down the rest of the building. No heat sources were nearby. Nobody saw anything out of the ordinary—just a sudden fire that went out just as suddenly. Nothing else seemed to fit. The question became: why? Who (or what) was behind it?

The only person to say anything out of turn about the charbroiled women was an old widower who lived in their nursing home. He had skin the color of burned toast, and a smile that made him seem less than trustworthy, but any source was better than none. He told me that the old women argued over their bridge game constantly. That, at the end of the day, they couldn’t stand each other, but had no one else to talk to. Said they’d been friends so long they knew exactly what was most annoying and infuriating about each other. An interesting wrinkle, but not solid enough to base any conclusions on. I looked through their few possessions—they weren’t dabbling in black magic, they hadn’t made any demon deals, they weren’t suicidal arsonists.

I spent a week in town, poring over every scrap of intel, over and over again. Thinking I must have missed something. That’s when I found something—names.

Jeremy Prious

Alberta Prious

Maybelle Prious

The same names appeared in the wills of two of the deceased women. A connection that nobody had mentioned. When I asked after the names, the families of both women dismissed the connection. A woman named Georgiana Prious had been a housekeeper in Calico Rock, and those were her children (now grown). Georgiana had worked for both families, and it was out of gratitude for her hard work that money from each estate was set aside to make sure her children got an education—only those children were thirty-six, thirty-three, and twenty-eight, so the story didn’t hold up. “My mother hasn’t updated her will since my father passed,” one girl told me. “That must be why the Prious kids are still listed.” Bullshit. Something was up, and I was going to get right to the bottom of it.

I went through the newspaper microfiche at the public library, searching for any mention of Georgiana Prious. As a housekeeper in the fifties, she didn’t come up much. The part I haven’t mentioned yet—Calico Rock was something like 97 percent white, and the Prious family was African-American. I try to keep my head above any of that sort of racial nonsense, but it seemed like it could be a factor in whatever had happened.

After hours of fruitless, mind-numbing searching, I found the one and only mention of Georgiana Prious in the public record—her obituary. March 19, 1964.
Died in a fire
. There
was
a connection here, but not enough information in the article to let me piece it together.

Looked into the other three women’s wills—none of them had any reference to the Prious family, but I didn’t stop there. I went back to their next of kin and asked about Georgiana, and all of them knew who she was. She’d only worked for one of them, but another had heard about Georgiana’s tragic death, and the last one—a Mrs. Baldwin—well, it was her house that Georgiana died in. While, according to the police, Prious was
robbing
the Baldwins. The fire was electrical—an accident—and Georgiana was trapped inside the basement to burn while the fire department tried to put out the blaze.

It was time to talk to Jeremy, Alberta, and Maybelle Prious.

Getting the three of them into one room was a trickier proposition than I imagined it would be—they all hated each other, and hadn’t spoken in almost ten years. The only way I could convince them to meet was by dangling the carrot of a payout from the estates of the fried-to-a-crisp women. When they heard the amount they were entitled to, they reluctantly agreed to join me at the local watering hole for a drink and a quick chat.

What followed was the most uncomfortable first drink I’ve ever had, followed by a few so-so drinks, then a revelatory fifth through eighth drink. The Prious kids were beyond damaged by what had happened to their mother. She was the woman who took care of them, the only person they had in the world (their father had been killed in an automobile accident when the kids were young), and she died tragically, only to be afterwards accused of a crime they knew she didn’t commit. Their mother wasn’t a thief, she couldn’t have been one—she had three kids to support, she wouldn’t risk being arrested or losing her housekeeping jobs.

It was more than that, though. The kids believed that Georgiana was the victim of a cover-up—that the police knew that she wasn’t robbing the house, but was an invited guest. For what reason, none of them could even venture a guess. All they knew was that all of the women who had died—they had all been close friends at the time of Georgiana’s death, and they all had conspired to keep the circumstances of her passing secret.

What Jeremy, Alberta, and Maybelle did about their mother’s death in the years that followed, that’s what drove them apart. Jeremy ended up spending a year in juvenile detention for grand theft when he was fourteen years old. That got him separated from his sisters, put into a different foster home that was equipped to deal with “problem children.” Maybelle was furious. Jeremy stealing just made their mother look guiltier. Maybelle wanted to go through the proper channels to get justice—sue the town for malfeasance and for libel against her mother, but couldn’t get anyone to help her take the case to court. Hard for a broke teenager to get anything done, especially when she’s an orphan. She banged that drum until no one would have anything to do with any of the Prious kids, made things even more difficult for all of them. And Alberta . . . when she was sixteen, she dropped out of school and went to work as a housekeeper. For the Greysons—one of the families that Georgiana had worked for. One of the families that Maybelle and Jeremy were sure had been involved in covering up their mother’s death. Maybelle couldn’t stand it. She started rumors about her sister, saying that she was sleeping with the man of the Greyson house. Mister Greyson had no choice but to fire Alberta, and she wound up on the street. It all spiraled out of control, until here we were—drowning our sorrows in whiskey (gin for the ladies) and wondering what really happened all those years ago to Georgiana in that basement. It was the one thing the Prious children still had in common—they wanted the truth.

That’s when Alberta said it. “I suppose Mrs. Greyson must be terrified. All of her old friends dying like that.” I was so into my cups I hadn’t realized it—Greyson wasn’t one of the women who’d been killed. She was out there, alive, and quite possibly the next target.

So here’s the first quiz—you all know who the most likely suspect is, right? Don’t take a genius. Go ahead. Guess.

You said Maybelle, right? Figured that she was the most irked by the injustice done to her family, couldn’t get any results from the legal system, so she started looking into other options, like black magic—maybe hoodoo, maybe something more esoteric. Began to pick off the old ladies who did wrong by Georgiana, one by one.

Wrong.

Maybelle could not abide her brother tarnishing their family name by committing the very crime Georgiana was falsely accused of. No matter how much she wanted to, she would never kill someone—because that’d mean she was just as guilty as the people she wanted to punish. She preferred to suffer on, telling anyone who’d listen about the real facts of the matter. And Jeremy, well, he’d learned a harsh lesson in his youth about the consequences for disobedience. He’d lived his life on the straight and narrow since then. Started a family. Moved on.

Alberta, though . . . her life had been ruined by the tragedy. She knew all of the women involved, knew of their alleged involvement because of her older sister’s campaign. Had just as much reason to hate those women as Maybelle and Jeremy. The most important fact, though, is the most human—the one woman who
wasn’t
killed was Mrs. Greyson, a woman who had taken Alberta in when she was desperate and given her a home and a job. It wasn’t Mrs. Greyson (or even Mr. Greyson) who was responsible for Alberta losing all of that, it was Maybelle. Alberta was my suspect. Revenge the motive. Black magic the means.

Question number two: With all that in mind, what’s the next move?

Well?

It’s a harder choice than it looks like at first glance. It’s one of the most important lessons about hunting—emotions,
your
emotions, play a huge role in the decisions you make. Because, me? After talking to the Prious kids? No matter how little evidence they had, I believed ’em. Georgiana was innocent, and those old women were guilty. Didn’t matter that I wasn’t sure what they were guilty of, something about the look in Maybelle’s eyes as she talked about her mom . . . I wanted to walk away. Justice had been served.

You’ve got to
fight that feeling
. People were dying, and I couldn’t say for sure that it was going to stop. I had to keep digging.

Now, that don’t mean you should ignore those feelings entirely. My gut told me that Alberta was behind the spontaneous combustions, and that if I confronted her directly, I could end up combusted myself. Can’t have that. I also knew that, if I was right, the lynchpin to solving the whole case was with Mrs. Greyson. She was Alberta’s emotional tether—the one person who’d been kind to her through everything. If
Greyson
could confront Alberta, we’d be getting somewhere.

After I’d sobered, I went to the Greyson house. She lived alone in the old country home, having survived her husband by many years. Unlike her friends, she was still able to care for herself, but by the looks of the place, that facility was fading quickly. Mold covered one corner of the living room where water had leaked down from an upstairs bathroom—no one had done anything to stop the leak, so the mold glistened with wetness. Like a green tentacle, reaching down from the ceiling to grab at the many small rodents which scurried along the floorboards. It didn’t seem to bother Mrs. Greyson, who was sipping tea with honey and murmuring quietly to herself as I asked her questions. I told her I was from the newspaper, writing an article about the fires.

“What do you remember about Georgiana Prious?” I asked.

“Georgie . . . she was a flower. Wilted too soon.”

I didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean, so I pressed on. “Do you remember what happened to her? To Georgie?”

“Of course.”

“Will you . . . ya know . . . tell me?”

It was a lot of that. Back and forth, not getting much of anything from her. It wasn’t until I brought up the tragic deaths of her friends that Mrs. Greyson really started to talk.

“They all deserved it, one way or another,” she said. “Gossips and sneaks, all of them.”

“Thought you were friends,” I said.

“Were. Were friends. Years ago.”

“And now you’re not, because of what you did to Georgie?”

She scowled at me, in that way that old ladies are great at. Set down her tea cup. “I didn’t lay a hand on her. I took care of her youngest once she was gone. . . . I had no part in that business.”