“Doing what?” Marcie pulled up a stool of her own. What now?
“Everyone in town is saying like father, like son about what Jason’s done. Bet you’ve even thought it.”
Marcie couldn’t argue that, so she stayed quiet.
“But it’s not like his father at all. Michael Maddox was a good man. A kind man.” She smiled wryly. “The kind of man William might have called weak. He certainly called him weak in the aftermath. When he wasn’t around to defend himself.”
“But Michael stole money from his client accounts,” Marcie said. “Jason told me all about it. He was going to prison,” she insisted. “And so he killed himself.”
“Michael didn’t steal anything.” Jacquie looked up. “Jason did.”
“But he couldn’t have—he didn’t—” Marcie couldn’t process it. It couldn’t be true. Could it? “Jason’s always so upset when he talks about his father’s death. The loss. How he had to build himself back up and get everyone’s respect again.”
Jacquie shook her head. “Jason was the only child. The golden child. Michael blamed himself for spoiling him, for the whole County Day lifestyle that can be great for those kids with drive, but for the few like Jason who are mainly arrogance and no substance, it can make them greedy. Jason was greedy, but it wasn’t Michael’s fault. It was just his nature.”
“So why . . . I mean, he killed himself. Surely he wouldn’t have done that if he wasn’t guilty?”
“He took the blame for Jason. His wife moved back to Jacksonville and wanted nothing to do with him. She died in a car crash shortly after. Drunk at the wheel. Her family said it was the shame of it all. Michael was alone and I think when he realized the enormity of what was going to happen to him, he couldn’t face the jail time and wasn’t sure he could maintain his story without buckling and telling the truth. Or getting caught out in lies and accidentally revealing his innocence. I think he came to believe that suicide was the only way to really protect Jason.”
“Oh God,” Marcie said.
“It gets worse,” Jacquie said. “Jason knew he was going to do it. He told me his father was talking about it. The day he hanged himself? He rang Jason, drunk, to say he loved him and would always protect him. It was a goodbye phone call. I knew it. Jason knew it. I told him to go around right away, to make sure his dad was okay, but he didn’t. He finished his coffee. Let another half an hour go by before he went. I think on some level he was happy his dad had taken his own life. He didn’t have to worry anymore.”
The creaking rope. Moments too late.
“And nobody suspected Jason at all?” Could this still be part of some twisted plan of Jacquie’s? Marcie wanted to cling to that idea, but somewhere inside everything she said felt true. The dead look on Jason’s face sometimes. The way he lied so smoothly. Sociopath sprang to mind. She felt a sudden, mildly hysterical urge to laugh.
“Eleanor maybe. She’d known Michael since they were young and she liked his gentleness. I don’t think she ever trusted Jason after Michael’s suicide. Eleanor was perceptive. Maybe Michael had even said something to her about it. They had been close. I think she saw Jason’s relief when his father died. It stank of guilt.” She looked up at Marcie, suddenly seeming a lot younger than her years. Vulnerable. “I told you we were going to need something stronger.”
“And you knew all this? And never told anyone?”
“I thought I could get past it. I couldn’t. Why do you think I was so bitter during the divorce? I’d carried this shit around with me for years. So much guilt. He didn’t feel it at all. He sailed through life while I couldn’t ever sleep, trying to run away from it all at night gyms. So yeah, when he decided to trade me in for you I was angry. I wasn’t jealous—I didn’t love him anymore—but I hated that he thought he could end it so easily, as if what I knew didn’t matter. And I guess it didn’t, because I never told anyone. I was too scared of implicating myself. But now”—she smiled, momentarily joyful—“he was arrogant enough to do it again and now he’s going to get his comeuppance. He’s finally going to pay in some way for what happened to Michael.”
“So you had nothing to do with what happened to William?” Marcie was still struggling to get her head around the wider picture.
“God no!” Jacquie said. “I mean, I didn’t like William very much and Eleanor deserved better, but then don’t most women? I had already been planning to talk to the police, or at least William, about my suspicions that Jason might be stealing, but then when William was poisoned I obviously suspected Jason of that too. That’s why I went to the hospital. To fish for information. That’s where I heard there’d been some tension and then I knew I had to say something.”
Marcie had to admit that after hearing all this, she’d suspect him too if she hadn’t spoken to him face-to-face. Sociopathic liar or not, she still thought he’d told her the truth. “I don’t think he poisoned William,” Marcie said.
“I don’t actually care,” Jacquie countered. “I’d still be happy for him to go to jail for it. Karma and comeuppance and all that shit. But I’ll settle for the embezzlement charges. Who knows, maybe they’ll look back at what happened with Michael and reinvestigate.”
The ghosts will always come for you. Marcie was learning that. “So you didn’t send the yearbook to Jason?”
“Your crazy past? No.” Jacquie smiled. “I never liked you much, but you also didn’t interest me enough to want to know about you. My hate was directed at Jason. Have you considered that maybe he sent that to himself? To keep you quiet? Or to keep you as a backup plan? If the police started suspecting him, he could throw your past at them, they’d see the coincidences in the deaths, and then no death penalty for Jason?”
“That would only work if he was guilty,” Marcie said. “And, as I said, I don’t think he is.”
“And my jury is still out on that one.”
They finished their champagne in silence.
“Why did you come back?” Marcie asked, as she finally led Jacquie back to the front door.
“I was alone again and I have good friends here. Good people. Coming up when Eleanor was sick reminded me of that. I’d gotten so caught up in hating Jason I’d forgotten that most people weren’t like that. Most people in this town were more like Michael and Eleanor. Kind. Sweet. Caring.” She stepped out into the humid gray afternoon. Overhead the heavy blanket of cloud was turning black but the air was oven roasting. “And of course I wanted to haunt Jason. To wait for him to slip up in some way. Watch him. Find some way to pass his guilt back to him and maybe get a good night’s sleep again.”
“I guess that worked,” Marcie said as Jacquie headed back to her car.
“Hey,” she called out after the woman she’d so long considered an enemy and now didn’t know quite how to feel about. “One more thing.”
Jacquie turned. “What?”
“Who do you know in Savannah who’s into voodoo maybe? Something like that?”
Jacquie laughed. “We’re in the South, Marcie. Most people have some belief in it. Why do you ask?”
“It’s probably nothing.” She wasn’t going to share all that stuff with Jacquie. She still didn’t like her. She raised a hand to wave her off. “And thank you. For telling me about Jason.”
Marcie felt hollow. Turned inside out. She’d married a monster and not even noticed. Worse than that, there was still someone out there coming after her, who she figured wanted Marcie in as much trouble as Jason was, and it wasn’t Jacquie. So who?
She had one more lead to follow. She threw the rest of her champagne away and made a strong coffee. Despite her fear, she wasn’t done yet.
60.
The doll was on the passenger seat beside her, now filled with ominous portent like a ventriloquist’s dummy in a horror film. Her thoughts kept coming back to church. That inner congregation she’d watched at William’s service. That passion. Wars were fought over religion all over the world so it wasn’t such a leap that a congregation would follo
w a minister’s wishes, or act for fellow worshippers. Puppets having their strings pulled. Was the voodoo church any different? She thought about the strange open-air celebration she and Keisha had gone to.
How they’d ended up there had been contrived too. The way that girl had knocked into their drinks and started chatting. If they hadn’t met those two girls, they’d never have gone, danced, made wishes, and gotten naked. She’d called Tiger Court at Savannah State University and asked to speak to Jade or Daria but the woman at the other end was adamant that there were no students with those names staying there. Had the girls been tasked with getting Keisha and Marcie to the rave and under the gaze of the old black woman with the orange hair? But why? To add to Keisha’s belief she was cursed? Or to actually curse them? But if someone was after Jason and Marcie, what did Keisha have to do with it? Keisha believed, that much was true. It was in her blood, that’s what she’d said. In her family.
Marcie glanced across at the doll again. Well, it wasn’t in Marcie’s and she refused to get freaked out about it. Outside, the sky rumbled, portentous, and Marcie pressed her foot to the pedal harder. She knew where she had to go.
“You think just because I’m black, I secretly practice voodoo?” Zelda burst into laughter, something Marcie, standing in the doorway getting wet, realized she’d never seen before. “I’m a Christian. A Baptist just like Mr. William.” Zelda looked down at the doll Marcie was still holding, which she’d thrust out at Zelda in a dramatic gesture but Zelda had refused to take. “I don’t know what that is, or what it’s for. I didn’t make it.”
“But Keisha saw you. St. John’s Eve. You were at the party we went to. Down by the Truman Parkway. Where the old black lady with the orange hair did some crazy song and dance. I need to know where to find her.” Dansé Calinda! We call on them to dance with us! The spirits! The ghosts! Li Grande Zombi! Marcie could still feel the earth pounding under her.
Zelda was still chuckling. “Oh my, oh my. I’m too old to go to parties. And that Keisha is crazy. She drinks too much to believe anything she says. Maybe she did see someone she knew, but it wasn’t me. I don’t like her much, she can be rude.” She paused and her face grew flinty. “But I like her better than I like you, Mrs. Maddox. And if you don’t mind, I want you to leave now. I have to go and open up the big house for Miss Iris shortly and I have some chores to finish first.”
“Iris?” Marcie asked. She didn’t even know the police had finished with the house.
“She’s coming to go through Mrs. Radford’s things. The first Mrs. Radford.”
Lightning shattered the gloom of the afternoon and for a moment Marcie got a glimpse into Zelda’s apartment beyond the small woman. It was perfectly ordinary. No signs of anything remotely weird. But then what had she expected?
“So who made this?” Marcie asked, exasperated.
“How the hell would I know?” Zelda’s laugh was filled with disgust. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Maybe go ask some white ladies.”
She slammed the door in Marcie’s face, leaving her alone with the rain, her unanswered questions, and the creepy doll.
The emptying clouds were so thick that although it was still afternoon the sky was almost black, lit up with crackles and flashes of lightning. Zelda had only opened the side gate for her and by the time Marcie ran back to her car, parked around the corner, she was soaked to the skin. Inside, she locked the doors, shivering against the seat and glancing around, paranoid that there were people watching her.
The sidewalks under the heavy canopies of trees were silent. Somehow that made her nervousness worse. It’s just bullshit, Savannah, she told herself, her old name clawing up from where she’d buried it. There are no such things as voodoo curses and magic. Whatever’s being done to you, there’s a flesh-and-blood person doing it, for flesh-and-blood reasons.
Still, she jumped when her cell phone rang.
It was Detective Anderson.
“So,” the officer started, in that laconic drawl that made Marcie want to carve her eyes out with a spoon. “Seems we’ve got some news on your mysterious yearbook. Guess who the email requesting it came from?”
“You’re the detective,” Marcie said, her jaw tight, in no mood for any more games. “You tell me.”
“Well, here’s the thing. It came from you.”
“What?” Marcie sat up straighter. That couldn’t be right. “It didn’t. I didn’t email them.”
“The request came from a Gmail account in the name of Savannah Cassidy.”
“I don’t care where it came from, I didn’t send it.”
“I’m sure. But we’ll soon know. We’re checking the computers taken from your house and Jason’s office to see if there’s a history of any of them accessing that account. You know a funny thing though?”
Marcie was sure it was going to be hysterical. “What?”
“The office secretary remembers a woman coming in to collect it. A couple of months back. A blond woman, not too tall. That’s what she remembers.”
Marcie thought of Jason’s father, and as her own lungs constricted in fear, she figured she knew how he’d felt, dangling on the rope, his life being taken from him.
“If it was me then why would I have even told you about the email to the school? That a woman had asked for the yearbook? Why would I draw attention to myself that way? Why would I report it?” With her free hand she tugged at the roots of her hair, something she hadn’t done in years. Her life was unraveling again. No—someone was unraveling it. For a long moment all she could hear was the rain on the car roof and Anderson breathing in her ear.
“You tell me, Marcie,” Anderson said eventually. “You tell me.” And then she hung up.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Marcie banged the phone hard against the steering wheel as she cursed loudly in the empty car as rain slashed against her windshield. The email would trace back to her somehow, she knew it. She beat the phone against the wheel again, three times more, and as she did, lightning blew up the sky, and a tall figure appeared from nowhere in front of her car.
It was her.
Marcie shrieked, shocked. The old black woman with hair the color of autumn fire. In the flash of light, she beat her cane against the metal hood three times, and even though the storm was starting to rage outside and the woman’s lips didn’t move, Marcie was sure she heard her call “Faith! Hope! Charity!”
Marcie flinched, and when she looked up again, the street ahead was empty. Breathless, she spun around in her seat. Where was she? Where? More lightning cut the sky and in the bright beam, the woman was standing behind the trunk, cane raised. She brought it down three times again. “Dansé Calinda!” she shouted to the skies, her voice filled with joy. She beat the trunk again, “You hear me in there! Make them dance! Li Grande Zombi!”
“Hey!” Marcie shouted, her frantic fingers struggling to lift the lock on her door. She was here, the woman was here, and now that Marcie’s heart had stopped racing in panic she just wanted some answers. “Hey wait!” Finally she got the door open and stumbled out into the storm. The old woman was walking away, immune to the elements as if out strolling on a summer’s day.
“Hey!” Marcie called out again. She picked up her pace, the fat woman ahead somehow moving fast, although she seemed to be only shuffling. “Wait!” Marcie repeated. In reply, the woman raised her cane to the sky and shook it, shouting words Marcie couldn’t hear, and then lightning cracked like a gunshot into a tree behind Marcie and she couldn’t help but duck and spin around, huddling behind her car, as a splinter of tree shot across the pavement. When she turned again, the rain suddenly easing as if even the storm was shocked by the lightning’s attack, the old woman was gone.
Marcie got to her feet and leaned against the car trunk, watching the smoke from the burned tree drifting into the rain. She was frustrated and angry and more than a little afraid. Where had the old woman come from? How did she know where Marcie was going to be? Was someone following her? What did she
mean with her sayings and her chants? Marcie looked down, the black-gray of the clouds above letting cracks of calm blue in as the storm marched relentlessly onward. The old woman had been shouting at something in the trunk. “You hear me in there? Make them dance!” Marcie’s fingers trembled as she reached for the catch and the sleek metal lifted silently. Flies, hundreds of them, buzzed loudly as they rushed past in a swarm, and she swatted around her head, disgusted, until the air was clear. She looked down, half-expecting to see a rotting corpse tied up against the carpet, a gift to Anderson and a final nail in Marcie’s coffin, but there was no such body, and at first the trunk seemed empty.
It was only as she peered more closely, to brush away a few lingering sickly flies, that she saw it, dark against dark. She picked it up. A ball. Black and lumpy as if made of mud dredged up from the bed of a stagnant river filled with rot. Not mud, she thought, rolling it around in her hands in horror. Earth and dirt and something else. What was that? She got back in the car and flicked on the light before recoiling in horror. Was that fur? Black fur? She rubbed the surface harder and looked at her fingers. A deep dark red. Blood and earth and fur bound together. There was something more, catching her eye. At first she thought it was strands of cotton bound around the revolting sphere, but as she picked one free she saw it was hair. Blond hair. Her hair.
Maybe Keisha was right. Maybe they were cursed.
61.
“Tell us about the boy.”
Keisha stared at the man across the table, her heart fluttering like a leaf caught in the storm outside.
“Auntie Ayo said I was cursed. She said there was no boy. She said I was seeing a ghost and I’d upset the spirits because I was a wicked little girl. She said I had to stop talking about him, otherwise the curse would never go. I had to forget about him.”
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