Sweet Unrest (15 page)

Twenty
-
Three

I didn’t sleep much that night, and once the sun was finally high enough to light the entire sky, I set out to find my ghost.

It was just my luck it had started to rain by then. I walked quickly past the pond and into the second copse of trees, thankful that their thick canopy gave me a short break from the downpour. When I reached the far edge of the trees, I didn’t give myself time to rethink my decision, just darted out into the pelting rain and hurried across the narrow field to the grove surrounding Thisbe’s cabin. In the gray haze, the worn façade of the decrepit house seemed even more faded. The coppery plink of raindrops hitting the metal roof beat out a strangely comforting rhythm.

Alex was waiting for me on the porch.

“I was afraid you would not come.” He looked unsure, nervous.

“I wasn’t sure I would.” I shrugged, hugging my wet jacket closer to me. “But I promised to help you. So here I am.”

He looked at me a moment, as though weighing my words. “I am glad.”

I wasn’t sure I felt the same. Seeing the past through his eyes had certainly made me feel closer to him, but I wasn’t sure I could trust those feelings any more than I could trust Armantine’s.

“We should go in and get you out of this weather,” he said when I didn’t respond.

I looked uneasily at the faded door in front of me. “Have you ever been in there?” I asked.

“Once. Long ago.” His jaw was set in a hard line, his brows drawn together in concentration. “Until recently, something had been keeping me out. I could go up to the steps, but no farther.”

Probably the red dust Piers had wiped away, I thought. “Well, I borrowed the key. We need to make this fast so I can get it back before my dad realizes it’s gone.” The door had been padlocked shut, in an attempt to keep locals from disturbing the work the restoration crew would be doing on the interior. I put the key into the heavy lock and popped it open.

It took Alex a little longer before he finally stepped over the threshold.

With the shutters closed and locked, the interior was too dim to see clearly, so I pulled out the flashlight I’d brought. Nothing looked any different, but the rain had intensified the overall musty smell of the place.

“Well?” I waited for his direction.

“This way,” Alex said, motioning toward the back room where my dad had found the crumbling coat and the box with the primitive doll.

We made our way carefully through the dark hallway, stepping over the debris that had not yet been cleaned up. The room looked the same, but someone had cleared the bricks from the collapsed fireplace. They were piled in a neat stack nearby.

When I looked over, Alex was staring at the low pallet in the corner. “Alex?” I had to call his name a few times before I got his attention. “Do you know where we should start looking?

“I remember this,” he said, but I didn’t think he was talking to me. Then he shook his head, like he was clearing his thoughts, and studied the room. “There, I think.” He gestured toward the fireplace.

I bent down to look, but the hearth was empty. “I don’t see anything.”

“No,” he said as I started to stand. “It is there. I feel it. Please, you will look again?”

His eyes had gone wide and kind of wild, so I bent down again to look. Carefully, I felt along the stones that made up the fireplace. “I don’t think—” And then I did feel something.

The stone was larger than the others, and round and smooth as an onyx. And if I pressed on it, it wobbled a bit. It took some work to pry it from its place in the pattern of the hearth, but eventually it came free.

When I lifted the stone away, it revealed a small depression that held a wad of cloth, which turned out to be a small, loosely tied sack.

I didn’t have time to open it before Alex called out, “Someone’s coming, Lucy.”

I heard the creak of the floorboards in the hallway. “Alex, we should—” But he was already gone.

Chloe appeared in the doorway. “Lucy?”

I jumped up. “Chloe. Wow. You scared me.”

“What are you doing here?” She watched me with a wariness that seemed totally alien to her usual open demeanor.

“I was, uh … I was just looking for something I lost the other day,” I said. I put the small sack behind my back and tucked it into my waistband, under my jacket. It was surprisingly warm against my cool, wet skin. “What are
you
doing here?” I countered.

She ignored the question. “Does your father know you’re out here?” She looked at me with suspicion, and I had the uncomfortable thought that I couldn’t trust her.

“Um, no. Actually, I planned to get back before he notices. I thought maybe I dropped a lens out here the other day. You remember, right? Those things cost a fortune, and I don’t want to hear Dad’s lecture about responsibility again.”

Her eyes remained narrowed. “Did you find it?”

“Find it?”

“The lens.”

“Oh. No, I didn’t.” I tried my best to look disappointed.

“So what are you doing there?” She pointed to the fireplace.

“I was just so impressed by the workmanship of it.” The lies were coming more smoothly now. “The stonework and all that—it’s really, uh, beautiful, don’t you think?”

“Your knees are black.” She wasn’t giving me an inch.

“My knees?” I looked down. Sure enough, dark spots ran from my knees down toward my shins, marking where I’d knelt on the filthy floor. “Oh, yeah. That. Well, I wanted to take a good look.”

“Seems you did more than look.” She pointed to the loose stone.

“Oh, I—” A voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like Alex screamed
Lie!
“I don’t know. It was like that.”

Chloe shot me a narrow look.

“Chloe, are you okay?” I asked, trying to change the subject and inwardly cursing Alex for abandoning me.

“What?” she snapped.

“Are you okay? You seem kind of keyed up about something.” She seemed more than keyed up. She seemed … wrong.

“I’m fine.”

“Okay. That’s good.” We stood in a tense silence for far longer than I would have liked.

“You shouldn’t be here, Lucy.”

“Right. I know. I was about to leave,” I said as I headed for the door. “I just need to lock back up.”

She followed me down the hall and back out onto the porch. She watched as I fumbled with the padlock, and then, when I thought she’d leave without another word, she spoke.

“Just because your daddy is the master here, it don’t mean you got any rights to mess with things that don’t concern you.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. The venom in her voice was so strange coming from Chloe, and I couldn’t figure out what had brought it on, or why Thisbe’s cottage concerned her in the first place.

“Right,” I finally said. “I’ll remember that. You want to come back to the house?” I asked more out of politeness than anything else. I fervently hoped she’d say no.

“No, I was on my way home.” She pointed to the trees beyond the cabin. “It’s faster to walk through here. That’s when I saw the door was open.”

“Right. Well, good luck getting back in this mess.” I gestured to the rain.

“Goodbye, Lucy. You remember what I told you.”

“Sure. Right. Definitely.” She started to walk off. “Chloe?” I called. “Maybe we could not mention this to my dad?”

She gave me a quick nod and pulled the hood of her burgundy raincoat over her hair before turning to leave. The rain had somehow gotten even harder while we were inside the house. The usual Louisiana heat was turning it into a fine mist that gave the entire grove an unearthly quality. I watched as Chloe walked away, a dark red smear against the even darker forest until she stepped through the tree line and disappeared into the trees beyond.

I sank down onto the porch, my legs no longer able to hold me, and leaned back against the door. Pulling out the sack, which had gown almost hot against my back, I stared at it. “Alexandre Jourdain, this better be worth it,” I said to no one but the rain.

Twenty
-
Four

The rhythmic swish of the wipers helped calm me as I navigated my dad’s Volvo through the sparse New Orleans traffic. After getting back to my room and changing into some dry clothes, I’d sat on my bed holding the sack before finally working up the courage to open it. Inside, I found a tiny carved figure with faded, rust-colored string circling its neck. It had some of the same strange carvings as the other doll we’d found in the cabin—the same symbols I thought might have been carved into Lila’s body—but where the other doll had looked like a starfish, this figure was recognizable as a man.

Still, it was an ugly, grotesque little thing, all gnarled and blackened. The string tied around its neck gave it the appearance of being strangled. When I took it out of the sack for the first time, I almost dropped it because of the way it seemed to pulse warmly in my hands.

When I picked it up again, I realized it wasn’t my imagination—the thing really was pulsating with heat. I turned it over in my hand and looked for an explanation, but it defied logic. There was nothing about the tiny effigy that should have made it warm.

When it grew so warm that I had to set it down, I thought about the guy who’d wanted me to find it. Alex had never reappeared after Chloe left—I’d called for him by the pond, but for whatever reason, he didn’t choose to show himself. Which made me start to wonder, how true was the vision he’d shown me? Why did he really need this thing from Thisbe’s cabin, and what was I supposed to do with it?

I needed to talk to Mama Legba.

It took me a few wrong turns before I found the street in the Quarter where her shop was, and then a few more wrong turns before I found a parking spot a few blocks over. I grabbed my bag from the backseat, locked the car, and started walking.

The rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, and it splashed off my bright umbrella and dampened the edge of my pants. I hesitated outside her door, but I knew I didn’t have anyone else to go to. I wanted to understand as much as I could about what I was dealing with, so I set my shoulders and walked into Mama Legba’s shop.

The same subtle sage perfumed the air. The door chimes tinkled as it closed behind me, and Mama Legba’s voice rang out from the back.

“I’m coming, I’m come—” Her face lit up in delight when she saw me. “Lucy-girl! You finally come to see me?”

“Apparently.” I chewed on my lip, suddenly doubting the wisdom of being there.

“I’m glad, Lucy-girl.” She didn’t seem to sense my indecisiveness. But then she noticed the bag hooked over my shoulder. “What’d you do, child? You bring something here for me?”

I swallowed hard. “I need your advice Mama Legba.”

She pursed her lips. “I see you do.” She studied me for a minute. “Come on back and show me what you got yourself into.”

I followed her down the hallway. The building was narrow, but it was deep, and the hall eventually opened into another room, this one even larger than the shop’s showroom. The room was as bright as the entryway, but the space was more comfortable. Against one wall, a low sofa was piled high with Caribbean-bright pillows. Two deep chairs in a muted plum flanked the couch.

“Sit,” she told me, gesturing to the couch.

I eased myself into the plush cushions while Mama Legba rattled around on the other side of the room and produced two mismatched, steaming mugs filled with a liquid that smelled like a spring bouquet. She handed me one and then perched on the edge of the chair like a queen holding court.

“Let’s see the trouble you brought with you,” she commanded.

I took the small sack out of my bag, carefully opened it, and showed her the tiny figure. As before, it pulsed in my hands as I set it on the low coffee table in front of the couch.

Mama Legba took one look at it and her eyes went wide. Slowly she reached out to pick up the little carved doll, holding it like it was a cobra about to strike. “Where’d you get this, Lucy-girl?”

I hesitated for a moment, not sure how much of the truth I should tell her. Alex didn’t trust this woman, Chloe had stopped trusting her, and Mina had never trusted her. “I found it,” I said, settling for vague.

“True enough, girl, but where?”

“I’d rather not say.”

Mama Legba studied me for a moment and then nodded once, a quick jerk of her chin. “And I’d rather you not tell me no lies, so I guess that’s gonna have to do.”

“What is it?” I asked.

She put the figure back down softly, like she was afraid to jostle it too much. “It ain’t nothin’ good, child, I tell you that much.” Her breathing was slow and steady as she looked at it, but her unease filled the air. It matched my own.

“I know that much.”

“You do?” She looked up at me finally.

“Well, it just—it doesn’t feel right,” I said, and I didn’t only mean because of its strange warmth.

“That’s because there ain’t nothin’ right about it.” She tapped the table close to it with her finger but didn’t touch it again. “No, no,
no
. Ain’t nothing good about that little bit of juju.” She looked up at me and her voice grew serious. “You in deep, girl, if you messin’ with magic like this.”

“I don’t want to mess with anything. I just want to make it go away.” I swallowed hard and tried to hide my
fear, but my voice trembled. “But first, I want to know what it is.”

She picked it up and examined it again. “Looks to me like it’s a binding charm, child.”

“A binding charm?” I gazed at the strange little figure and wondered what it could possibly bind. “What’s it supposed to do?”

“Well, binding charms can do lots of things. Some help people focus by binding their thoughts from driftin’ around. Other kinds keep things where they supposed to be. This one does that, but it’s made to be used for people.”

“You can bind a person?” I thought of Alex, stuck on the plantation.

“Of course you can. How you think those love charms people always be wanting work?” She pursed her lips again. “But this one’s different. This kind of charm don’t bind a body, like a love charm does. This one here—it’s meant for the soul.”

“How does it work?”

“I don’t rightly know the specifics, because that kind of magic ain’t nothing to do with no kind of Voodoo I know.” She studied the figure. “Reminds me a bit of that doll your daddy found in that old cabin,” she said, leveling a knowing stare at me. I felt myself flush.

“Anyway,” she went on, without saying more about the cabin. “From what I understand, you trap the soul when the body dies. Old folks used to think the soul hung around for a few days after the body breathed its last, you see. The conjure man, or woman more likely, would trap the soul after it departed the body by binding it to a charm like this one here. Then the person who owned the object controlled the fate of that soul.”

“What would someone want with a soul?” I asked.

Mama Legba shrugged and took a sip from her mug. “Sometimes a person might want revenge. If someone want to make you suffer even after you’s dead, keeping your soul for a bit might be a good way to do it.”

If she was right, binding a soul would stop it from moving on to heaven, or the next life, or wherever it is that souls need to go. “You mean, like a ghost?” I asked.

“A little bit, but ghosts are souls that have a choice. They be hanging around because they think they can finish something or another. The soul that’s bound with a charm like this, it don’t have no choice. Never did.”

“So it’s just trapped, forever?”

She let out a great sign. “Well, now, forever’s a mighty long time, Lucy-girl. Magic like this, powerful as it might be, don’t last much longer than the life of the person who cast it.”

“So when the person who did the binding dies, then the soul would be free?” I asked, thinking of Alex and wondering how the doll fit into his story.

“Maybe so, but it be more likely the soul would be too damaged by then to be truly free.” She set her mug on the table and ran her finger across the charm. “Remember what I told you, child? Souls ain’t made for being separate. They want they body, or they want to be with the spirits. Being in between the two—that’d take a mighty old and powerful soul to survive it whole without some sort of permanent damage, even for a short time. That’s the real darkness of a charm like this. It don’t just affect this life, but all the rest to come.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, not understanding how something could hurt you once you were already dead.

“People walk around this world every day with more damage to they souls than you can imagine. They take that pain and hurt with them on their journey. It affects who they gonna be next.”

I looked at the little figure. It was hard to believe anything so small could harness such power. But the way it had throbbed with heat when I held it told me it was dangerous, even if I didn’t completely understand how.

“Course, there is another possibility … ” she said slowly. But then she shook her head as if to dismiss it.

“What?”

“Just an old story I heard once.”

I’d already come to accept that I’d been having dreams about a past I shouldn’t know about and conversations with a ghost. No story, suddenly, seemed too improbable. “I’d like to hear it,” I told her.

“Well, child, every charm, every spell, takes energy,” Mama Legba began. “More energy they has, the stronger the bit of magic they can work. Now, a dead body, it don’t have all that much energy left, you know what I mean? But a
living
body … ” She glanced at me, studying me as though she wasn’t sure she wanted to go on. Then she said, “That’d be some mighty dark magic, Lucy-girl. It’s one thing to bind the soul of the newly dead. It’s another thing altogether to snatch the soul of the living, to leave the body as nothing more than a hollowed-out husk. Now, I’m not sure if those tales are anything but stories, but I’ll tell you this—that ain’t magic I’d want anything to do with.”

That wasn’t magic I wanted anything to do with either.

“I wonder why it gets so warm,” I said. “If I hold it for more than a few seconds, it feels like it’s going to burst into flames.”

“The magic’s still working.” Mama Legba’s tone made it clear I should have at least put that much together by myself.

“There’s no way whoever made this could still be around.” Not if my dreams could be believed.

“That’s not how it feels to me,” Mama Legba said with a frown. “That thing still be buzzing with energy, and none of it’s good.” She reached for my untouched mug and took both over to the counter.

If Mama Legba was right, whoever made the doll was still alive, which meant it had to have been made recently. If that was the case, I was even more confused about how it was tied to Alex. “There’s no way somebody could keep another person’s spell going?” I asked.

Mama Legba’s pursed her lips a bit, thoughtful. “Anything in this world’s a possibility, child.” She shook her head. “But it ain’t likely. Each person’s magic is they own.”

“It just doesn’t make sense,” I said, more to myself than to her. It didn’t seem possible for someone to have trapped Alex almost two hundred years ago if the charm was still working. Not if Alex was telling me the truth about it, unless Alex himself didn’t know the truth.

“You into something deep, girl,” Mama Legba warned again, interrupting my thoughts. “You best watch yourself. Someone wicked enough to perpetrate some soul stealing ain’t nobody to play with, and those souls trapped in the In-between can be as dangerous as the person who be trappin’ them. Something about a soul be wanting for a body. You best be careful he don’t try yours on for size.”

I didn’t miss the “he”—she knew. She’d seen Alex.

“How dangerous is this thing right now?” I asked, ignoring her comment.

“To you? Probably not very at all,” she said. “If you handle it too much, might be that the juju rub off on you. Bad energy like that ain’t nothing to mess with, but whoever this is tied up with, now that person be mighty dangerous. You best steer clear of the whole thing.”

“I don’t know if I can,” I told her. It’s not like I could stop the dreams. I would have already. “Can the binding be broken?”

“You can destroy the charm, sure enough,” she told me. “Destroy the charm, break the spell. But you do that, the person who made it might could find out. They maybe come looking for you.” She shook her head. “You ain’t ready for that.”

“How do I destroy it?”

“You ain’t listening, Lucy-girl. You not even
close
to being ready to deal with this. You best leave it here with me. I’ll take care of it.”

Her voice was calm, but I thought she seemed too eager, too excited to take the charm from me.

“No. I can’t,” I replied. “I can’t leave it. I mean, it doesn’t belong to me.” Technically, it belonged to Le Ciel and the university, so that much was true at least. “Can’t you just tell me how to get rid of it—if I need to?”

For a moment I didn’t think she would tell me, but then she sighed. “You sure enough on your way, Lucy-girl. Ain’t nothin’ for it.” She shook her head and motioned me to follow her.

I scooped up the figure and hurried back down the hall after her. In the shop, she began mixing some of her herbs and flowers in a small pouch, measuring carefully as she went. When she was finished, she tied it off with a white piece of ribbon and handed it to me.

“When you’re ready—and you make good and sure you know what you be doing before you start—you burn that little man with this.”

I took the pouch from her carefully and examined it.

“It won’t bite you, child.” She laughed. “You nervous about some little ol’ herbs and you got the devil’s own self there in your bag. That’s only a bit of fennel, bloodroot, and hyssop. Nothing at all to hurt you there. Those is meant for purity and protection.”

“Protection?”

“Just in case.”

“
Right.” I didn’t want to ask what else I might need protection from.

“You sure you don’t want me to take care of that for you, Lucy-girl?”

“No. Thanks, though. How much do I owe you for the Gris-Gris?”