“I used to.”
“What happened?”
“It’s just hard to hold onto when everyone you love keeps leaving.”
“That why you left? Why you moved way across the country? You decided to do the leaving for a change?”
I laughed. “I can do without the psychoanalysis this morning, thank you very much.”
He kissed my nose and squeezed my waist. Then that peaceful feeling I had was suddenly broken by the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. “Damn! She’s back! Hurry up!” I told him as I hopped out of bed and started throwing on some clothes. He took his time. “Hurry!” I hissed at him.
“We’re adults. And we didn’t even do anything.”
I shot him an evil glare. “This is Clothilde we’re talking about.” He understood what I was getting at and hurried to finish getting dressed. We raced downstairs to beat her to the door. We quickly arranged ourselves in the living room, I in Paw-paw’s old chair, and he on the sofa. We waited for the door to open, but there was a knock instead. I looked at him, puzzled. I got up to answer it. Cee Cee was on the other side, a covered basket around one arm, her Elvis purse draped over one shoulder.
“Well, good mornin’, Leigh!”
“Morning.” It took me a second, and then I remembered the message she left last night, saying that she’d be coming over today. “Oh! Um, Clo- Maw-maw isn’t here. She’s at Miss Ya’s.”
“That’s okay. Mind if I wait?” Before I could answer, she stepped inside. “I tell you, I don’t know how much longer I can take that drive on the Basin. It’s—” She noticed Lucas. “Well, hey! Who’s this?” she grinned.
“Um, Miss Cee Cee? This is my friend, Lucas Castille.”
Lucas, always the gentleman, rose to greet her. “Hi, how you doin’?”
“I’m good, my baby. Thank you.” She turned to me. “You know when your maw-maw’s coming back?”
I shrugged.
“Sorry, ladies. I have to get to work. It was nice meeting you, Miss Cee Cee. You take care.”
“You, too, darlin’!”
I gave Lucas a helpless look. He shrugged and said, “I’ll call you later, okay?” He left, blushing heavily.
“I hate to ask,” she said, sweetly. “But do y’all have anything to eat here?”
“Oh! Of course. Sorry, I should have offered.”
“No, no! Not at all! Don’t worry about it. I was just feeling a little weak, and I think something solid would help.”
I made us a breakfast of eggs, toast and sausage. I had to admit that it was delightful talking to Cee Cee. She wasn’t as old as Clothilde, but she was somewhat of a Louisiana historian, nonetheless. She told me stories of New Orleans and old Louisiana politics, stopping every few seconds to laugh. Eventually, the topic moved to her Voodoo store.
“Maw-maw said you have the gift of magic,” I said, cautiously.
“Yes, indeed,” she said, proudly holding her head high.
“And you do this through Voodoo?”
She nodded and then laughed at the worried look on my face.
“Voodoo has received a bad reputation throughout the years, I’m afraid. It’s really a lovely religion that borrows a lot from Catholicism. But I’ve learned spells and incantations in the Voodoo faith that enhance my ability. The ancient Franks had their way of doing their magic and, as the bloodline made its way down to me, my ancestors adapted their magic through Voodoo. And even I do things a little different from how my daddy did it.”
“What can you do? With magic, that is. I mean, do you just say a magic spell and something happens?”
“No. I need to have certain ingredients that are important for the rituals. The magic is in the ritual. It’s a lot of repetition, you see. Kind of like telling the spirits over and over what you want done. Sometimes they a little hard-headed, so you have to keep reminding them.” She laughed at this.
“Spirits?”
“That where you get all your help, from the spirit world. You pray to God, of course, but when you want something to happen sooner rather than later, you can speed things up by asking for help. And, when you need help with something not from this world, the spirits can show you the door.”
“So, do you, like, put curses on people?”
She laughed. “That depend on how you look at it.” She took in the puzzled look on my face. “Yes. I can put a hoodoo on someone. But I don’t.”
“Not even for your enemies?”
She shook her head. “When you judge someone, you playing God. That’s not good for your soul. It make you darker. I seen the sweetest people in the world have dark souls because they choose to use their abilities the way they do. See, when you put a hoodoo, or curse, on someone, the negative energy of what you doing imprints on you and winds up hurting you just as much as it hurts them. I’m sure you heard that old phrase, ‘what goes around comes around?’“ I nodded. “That’s a universal law. It keep everything in balance. No one person is supposed to have control over another.”
“But you could put a hoodoo if you wanted to?”
“Yes.”
“On just people?”
She saw what I was getting at and sighed. “No one can curse something that doesn’t have a soul. The Dark Man gave up his soul a long time ago to follow Les Foncés.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t lose heart, my baby. There are other things I can do.”
“Like what?”
“Like this house. I’m sure you’ve seen that man’s bird flying around here. It can’t get in because I put salt and earth under the door mats and on the window sills and said a few words. And, I can heal people, but not nearly as good as you and your maw-maw. Y’all are like surgeons, and I’m more like a candy striper.” She laughed heartily at this.
“I can’t heal anyone.”
“Yet,” she corrected. “You will soon enough. That ability will come when it need to.”
“But I need it now. No telling when he’s coming for Lyla. It’s like he’s playing this sick waiting game, and I need to be prepared.”
“It’s your destiny, so it’ll happen.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m a little sick of everyone saying ‘destiny’ all the time. All this business about fate and things meant to be, but still having to make a choice—”
“Let me put it to you this way. Let’s say your destiny is to travel from New Orleans to Paris—which I’ve done by the way and, baby, if you ever do that, don’t fly coach!—but like I was saying, you going all that way. It’s your destiny. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. You’re going to do it. But how you going to do it? You could fly. Or swim. You could walk or crawl, but chère, you gonna do it and that’s all there is to it.”
She saw the disheartened look on my face and changed the subject, but I wished she hadn’t. “So, how are you and your gentleman friend getting along?” she asked with a knowing smile.
I could feel myself blushing heavily. “Um, we’re okay. He’s a good friend.”
She laughed. “Look like y’all are a little more than that!”
“What do you mean?”
“I know I’m getting to be an old lady, but I remember what young love feel like. And there was so much afterglow when I came in that it could power a rocket!”
I could feel my face hot and flushed, and, embarrassed, I turned away. “We didn’t do anything! But please don’t tell Maw-maw, anyway. She’ll just get mad and call me a gep again.”
“Hush, baby. I’m not telling her nothin’. She can be a bit ornery at times.”
“At times?”
She laughed again. “C’mon. I’ll help you clear the dishes.”
I got up, and as I bent down to gather the plates, my mom’s locket slipped out so that it was resting on the outside of my shirt. “In’t that pretty,” she said, touching it. “Look old. That belong to your maw-maw?”
“My mom,” I said, and she noticed my tone change immediately.
“What the matter,
my baby?”
“I …” I started to choke up, tears pricking my eyes. Cee Cee put her hand on mine, and I set the dishes back down on the table. She motioned for me to sit, and I did.
“It’s okay, my baby. I know this is all overwhelming. I know it’s hard, and you worried about Lyla so much and having to deal with your brother and his wife dying not that long ago.”
I wiped away a tear that escaped from my eye. “It’s not just that. I recently found out about how my mother died. This was her locket. I found it yesterday at the Dark Man’s house.”
She looked at me, gravely. “How’d you find his house?”
“He left a clue with all the people he killed. Father Ben sent us to a friend of his at U. L., and she helped us identify this symbol thing.”
“Oh, he did, huh?” She sounded resentful.
I looked at her, my eyebrow raised. “What?”
“That man!”
“Who? Father Ben?”
She just shook her head.
“Please. What is it?”
She huffed. “I just wish he would’ve waited, is all.”
“Waited for what?”
She looked at me apologetically. “We—Ben and your maw-maw and I—had agreed that we didn’t want you to know the details of your momma’s death. We thought it would hurt you more than help you.”
“Too late. I had already seen the picture the other day.”
“What picture, chère?
“Lucas got a package with pictures of a bunch of people murdered. Mom’s picture was one of them, along with David’s and Michelle’s. Lyla’s picture was the last one.” I tried to stop a couple more tears from trickling down, but it was no use. “And Maw-maw already told me about the night Mom died. About how all of you went to that cabin in the bayou.”
“She did?” She huffed again.
“What? I wanted to know. I had a right to know.”
“I guess you did, but I’d rather you remember your momma alive and happy than seeing her like that.”
“Why would he send all those pictures to Lucas?”
Cee Cee shrugged.
As I twirled my mother’s locket between my fingers, all I could see was her lying in her own blood. Every emotion I felt after she died came flooding back, but I let the tears turn to anger. Suddenly, it felt like every cell in my body was on fire and the rage and frustration that I had last night before Lucas kissed me struck back with a vengeance. I looked at Cee Cee, and she seemed taken aback at the coldness of my voice. “How do we stop him?”
“We need to find him first. That’s the hard part when dealing with Les Foncés when they in spirit form.”
“How do we find him?”
“It’s not easy, but we will have to bring him to us.”
“How?”
She spoke cautiously. “We need to go to his home and burn his bones. That’ll bring him to us. The dead don’t like it when you mess with their bodies. Once he come, we pray for the white light to absolve him.”
“Where are his bones?”
She hesitated. “Southeast corner of the Bancker cemetery.”
Of course, I thought, sarcastically. Where else? “I’ll call Lucas and see if he can meet me there.” I got up from my chair, but Cee Cee grabbed my hand.
“What you think you doin’?”
“Going to go get Savoy’s body and bring it to his house in Sulphur.”
She shook her head. “It’s too dangerous, chère.”
I jerked my hand back. “Someone has to do something! You should have done this fourteen years ago. Now I have to finish it!”
Calmly, she said, “Let’s wait for Father Ben and your maw-maw.”
“Fine. You wait!” With that, I stormed off toward the living room and out the house. As soon as I opened the front door, I saw Clothilde and Lyla walking up the steps. The look on Clothilde’s face stopped me in my tracks. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Miss Ya died,” she said, sadly, as she made it to the top step, out of breath.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I hugged her, and she took a seat in her rocking chair, rubbing her knees with her hands. Lyla looked up at me silently. I motioned for her to go inside so I could talk to Clothilde alone. She went in, and I sat in the chair next to the rocker. I reached out for her hand and remembered how, when I was a child, I use to marvel at all the lines and creases on her soft skin. Now, the creases were deeper, every line a story to be told from years gone by.
“She was my best friend,” she said with a choked voice.
I was very careful with what I asked her next. “I thought that you could heal her. Isn’t that what the gift is all about—what being a traiteur is all about?”
She took her time, and I felt as though I may have caused her more pain by saying what I did. “You’re not supposed to keep someone from God when God is calling them.”
“But, if you have the power to save them, isn’t that part of God’s plan?”
She sighed. “We’re not supposed to live forever. We all have a time when we’re supposed to go. It’s just the cards we’re dealt in life. Sometimes you have to know when to fight and when to let go.”
I stared out at the big pond, partially shaded by the oaks lining the sides. The grass on the lawn was still glistening from last night’s rain, and I smelled the honeysuckle from around the corner. A few honey bees lazily buzzed around the flowers in front of the porch. It was a summer morning like the ones I remembered from when I was a child, back when the world was safe, and I was protected from all the bad things in life.
Sometimes you have to know when to fight and when to let go, my mind echoed. For a brief second, I thought about letting go of it all, of retreating and closing up inside a shell for the rest of my existence. But, feeling my mother’s locket around my neck and taking in the scene before me, I wanted Lyla to have as many summer mornings like this as she could. I fiercely wanted her to feel safe and grow to make her own choices and mistakes and to fall in love and go out on her own, a strong woman one day, stronger than I could ever be. She deserved that. It was my time to fight. If nothing else, but for her to experience life and all the good and bad that came with it.
“Maw-maw? Cee Cee told me how we can save Lyla. How we can save all of us.”
She regarded me with old, tired eyes, and I considered that she possibly didn’t have more than a year or so left to her life. Fresh tears formed in my eyes. “Lache pas la patate,” she said and winked at me. It made me smile, but it was a sad one.
“We have to go to his old house and burn his bones.”
“You know where he lives?”
“Yes. In Sulphur. I’ve seen the place before. When I was driving back to Louisiana.” I shuddered a little then, remembering what was written on the wall in the barn. “And you were right. It looks like he’s trying to cut off our end of the bloodline. And Cee Cee and Father Ben, too.”
She was quiet for a moment, lost in thought. “Do you know where he’s buried?”
Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 01 - Dark Bayou Page 18
