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'Daddy', Audrey said, 'what you doing here? You know Miz Taylor don't like to find you here

Audrey's father, Johnny Washington, was a good man, but he had been involved in a fight two years back in which another man had been killed - the victim was Johnny's brother-in-law. Johnny stood trial and was acquitted, but Mrs Taylor still didn't like to have the man around her house, even though it had been her husband Graham who had defended him.

'Audrey', her father said, 'they was a accident out at the farm, Mr Crane's place

'What happened?' cried Audrey, 'was you hurt?' Then she glanced at her father sternly. 'D 'you hurt anybody?' Her father, even though let off, had been guilty of the crime two years before. Audrey continued to rock the baby slowly in her arms.

Johnny Washington shook his head meaningfully. 'No, sir, I sure didn't. But you should have seen it, Audrey! Mr Emmons what owns the store where we buys drinks at dinnertime, Mr Emmons done went right out of his head, start chasing round this bird dog right through the peanuts waving a gun all 'round him, and then jumped right in the baler! Come right in the barn and jumped in the baler, and is got parts of his head and his shirt spread out over all creation out there! You never saw nothing like it in your life! I was up top in the barn, scared for the life of me he was gone take me for that bird dog and shoot my legs off!'

Ohhhh!' cried Audrey, 'but he didn't get you, did he? He didn't aim at you or nothing, did he?'

'Nope!' her father exclaimed. 'Didn't see me, didn't
let
him see me! Nearly got hit with flying teeth and things though -nearly got hit...' he repeated.

Audrey sighed dramatically, in relief for her father's safety, but then she quickly cautioned him, 'Daddy, Miz Taylor's right now on her way back here, and you know she don't want to find you here.'

Johnny's wife had died two years before and Audrey had been their only child. Audrey, though young, had stood valiantly by her father during the time cf his incarceration and trial, and he knew that Graham Taylor would never have defended him at all - much less for a fee of only fifty dollars - if Audrey hadn't begged the man (her employer then too) to help her father. In that difficult time Audrey had cared for her father, and gained some ascendancy over him. They both had come to believe that it was only because of Audrey's constant watchfulness that Johnny was kept out of trouble. Johnny was veiy thankful for what Audrey did for him, seeing that he got employment in the fields, seeing that he didn't spend all of his paycheque on whiskey, seeing that income tax and welfare forms got filled out and filed properly, seeing that the house was kept in good order. Every night Johnny asked his daughter if she was planning on leaving home, because maybe she found him just too much trouble to bother with, and every night Audrey replied, 'When you get to be too much trouble for me, Daddy, you'll know it, 'cause I won't be here no more.' And that satisfied the man until the next evening.

'I brought you this', Johnny Washington said, and fished the amulet out of his pants pocket. He dangled it before her a moment; Audrey stared at it, and then reached out and took it from him.

'What is it?' she demanded.

'You s'posed to put it on your neck, I s'pose', he replied.

Audrey swung it before little Ralph's face. The baby reached for the piece. Thoughtfully the black girl said, 'That's real sweet, Daddy, but where'd you get hold of this? I was in Woolworth's yesterday, and I didn't see nothing like it. And I
know
that jewellery counter!'

Her father did not answer her.

'All right if people see me wearing it, Daddy?' she inquired suspiciously. 'I don't want to get in no trouble .'cause of a little necklace, and I got no kind of sales slip for it...'

'It's all right, Audrey, it's all right, I think.'

Audrey pulled the amulet cut of the reach of little Ralph.

'Put it under your dress for the next couple of weeks or so, that's all', her father cautioned, as an afterthought.

Audrey smiled knowingly. "Thanks a lot, Daddy', she said. 'Now, you better go on home, and I '11 be there 'fore long. Miz Taylor don't want to find you here, and I want her to be back here any minute now.'

Audrey's father nodded, and turned to go. Audrey let the door slam shut behind him, and latched it. Then she moved down to the end of the latticed porch to the washing machine. She opened the top and made sure that the clothes were being agitated properly and that the water level was correct. Miz Taylor had had trouble with the appliance in the last month and had asked Audrey to keep a sharp eye on it. Audrey sang a little formless tune with incomprehensible words to the infant in her arms, and stared at sheets and pillowcases being sloshed around at a furious rate.

Audrey set the baby carefully down in a pile of folded laundry in a great wicker basket set beside the washing machine, and then examined the amulet for a moment. In the dim light of the back porch she could not see the catch, but she figured she must have pressed it, for the chain came apart in her hands. She held it around her neck and pressed the ends of the chain together and they caught - though she still could feel nothing but the two unbroken links at either end. She stared down at the amulet, wishing she had a mirror handy; well, she could go look in the mirror that was in the dining room.

She reached down to pick up the baby, and found to her acute dismay that little Ralph had wet not only himself but also the freshly washed blouse of Miz Taylor's directly beneath him. This infuriated Audrey, for she knew that Miz Taylor would jump down her throat for it. That stupid baby couldn't hold himself for twenty seconds, that stupid baby wasn't any better than his fool brother had been. She'd like to take that baby home for a month, and then she'd whack it into some kind of shape. White people didn't know what to do with a baby. They thought you ought to stop it from crying, no matter what you had to do for it, but Audrey figured that the best thing was to make it remember for a long, long time when it had done something bad. Well, this baby had just done something terrible. Audrey reached down and snatched the blouse out from underneath the baby, who tumbled over in the basket, gasping in surprise. She plunged the article into the washing machine, even though it was the wrong cycle for such clothing - and told herself she didn't care if the thing was torn to shreds. Little Ralph had banged his head against the side of the basket, and set up a dismal howl. That noise drove through Audrey's skull, and she cried, 'Damn you, baby! Damn you to hell for that!' She picked the infant up and shook it, so that its head rattled on top of its pudgy shoulders.

Arid when she returned to the kitchen a few moments later, Audrey no longer bore the slight burden of the year-old Ralph Taylor.

Mrs Taylor pulled up into the driveway of her home, a little flurried; she had promised Audrey that she could leave by five-forty-five, and it was well past that time now. Audrey was a good girl, and Mrs Taylor trusted her with the children, so she liked to treat Audrey as well as possible. It wasn't the girl's fault, after all, that her father was a killer (even though Graham had got him off for lack of evidence), and so long as the man didn't come around along with his daughter, everything was all right.

There were four great bags of groceries in the back seat of the car; she ought not to have gone to the store right at five-thirty, for that was when all the women from the munitions plant went as well, and there were great lines at the check-out counters. Mrs Taylor got out of the car, and called towards the kitchen window, 'Audrey! You come on out here! 1 need some help!'

Mrs Taylor opened the back door of the car, and lifted one of the heavier bags into her arms, and turned towards the house. Audrey had not come out, so Mrs Taylor called again. 'Audrey!' she cried, and walked to the back door. She supposed that the girl was in the far part of the house, perhaps with the baby in his room. She tried to pull open the latticed door, but found to her surprise that it was latched on the inside.

'Audrey!' she called again. 'Come unhook the door! This bag is heavy, girl!' She shifted the weight in her arms and waited a moment; it was then that she heard clearly, for the first time, the terrible racket that the washing machine was making, rocking from side to side as if with a greatly unbalanced load of heavy clothing, or rugs, even.

Mrs Taylor stamped her foot with impatience. What had become of that girl? She had hooked the back door, she was letting the washing machine get away from her - and Mrs Taylor had specifically warned her about the machine - and for all she knew, Audrey might even have left the dishes from dinner! She feared for a moment that Audrey might have gone off just at five-forty-five, locking the two children inside, but reassured herself thai Audrey, young though she was, was much more responsible than that, and would never leave the two children alone for a minute.

Again Mrs Taylor shifted her weight, and listened with some little alarm to the violent rumblings from the washing machine on the porch inside. She glanced down towards the kitchen window, to see if she could catch sight of Audrey inside; but what she saw frightened her severely. She screamed loudly, and threw down the bag of groceries, so that cartons of milk and eggs broke open, and spilled out on to the back steps. The washing machine had overflowed and water was pouring underneath the latticework and on to the plants that bordered the house; but the suds from the machine were red - red like blood.

Mrs Taylor flew down the steps, slipping in the spilled liquid and kicking cans out of her way, and ran over to the side of the house. She cupped her hands beneath the liquid. It
was
blood, blood mixed with soap. Again she screamed, and frantically attempted to wipe it away on her dress.

Inside the house, Audrey was humming soft and low in the kitchen. Mrs Taylor's calls were plainly to be heard, and the child Graham looked up at Audrey inquisitively, wondering why she did not respond.

Audrey took up a large butcher knife from the rack of drying dishes by die sink, and walked with it out on to the back porch. There the washing machine was rocking violently from side to side, almost shaking off its concrete block foundation; the crimson suds flowed in lugubrious pulses from underneath the lid. There was a great slippery pool of dyed water in the middle of the porch, through which Audrey had to go to get to the back door.

But the thin film of soap on top of the pool caused the young black girl to slip as she was reaching for the latch on the back does-, and she fell backward against a shelf on the wall. The radio droppeu to the floor and smashed open.

Audrey lay full-length in the pool of blood and soapy water. Her slick shoe heels would not catch against the painted floor, and she could not immediately get up. She rolled over on her stomach and was raising herself on all fours, when she inadvertently placed her hand swiftly down on the blade of the butcher knife. Her wrist was sliced open, and the bloodbegan to flow prodigiously from the wound. Audrey scurried to raise herself, and unthinkingly grabbed hold of the electrical cord of the radio to pull herself up with, but this had been pulled from the appliance, and was live with electricity. She was stunned into unconsciousness, and in only a couple of minutes had bled herself beyond the hope of recovery.

Mrs Taylor went again to the "back steps and began to pound on the door. Now more blood - thicker, darker, less diluted with water - began to flow out over the edges of the porch. Again Mrs Taylor set up a round of screams, and ran around the other side of the house. She was on
heT
way to the front door, but stopped at the kitchen window and peered inside. There, she could see her three-year-old son little Graham playing with a great bloody butcher knife, trying to carve up one of his wooden blocks. *

Hysterically, his mother screamed at him, 'Graham, you put that thing
down
'fore you cut yourself! You hear me! You put it down!!'

Sarah did fix Jo her dinner that night, but the two women, sitting across from one another at the tiny breakfast table in the kitchen, spoke hardly a word. And those few words that did pass between them had nothing to do with the amulet or the air conditioner. Sarah cleared the table, and said, 'I'm going over to Becca's now. We're gone look through some old catalogues, I think.'

Jo sat very still and said nothing, but she glowered a monstrous frown, and her eyes disappeared into their sockets.

Sarah shrugged and walked out the door without another word. Why mollify a woman who had, in effect, murdered a dozen people?

Sarah and Becca went through seven years' of Montgomery Ward's and Sears' catalogues, but found no item that resembled the amulet. Becca was not on the mailing list of the wholesale jewellery houses in Mobile, and had none of those books.

Sarah sighed when she closed the cover of the last and oldest catalogue, 'I didn't think we'd find it anyway. The first time Jo talked about it, she said her cousin gave it to her just years and years ago, and I think she made it ali up about the Montgomery Ward catalogue, trying to confuse me.'

'Well', said Sarah, 'what do we do now?'

Becca shrugged and looked away. Sarah could tell that her friend was thinking of something, but she did not prod.

'I tell you what', said Becca after a few moments, in a low, cautious voice, 'I think we're gone try the wee-gee board.' Sarah started to protest; she knew how much Becca feared the thing. But Becca held up her hand, and shook her head. it's not gone be as bad as all that. Besides, this whole town has had bad luck, and we ought to do what we can to stop it. We're just gone be real careful, that's all.. .'