by David Reed
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?
A. Go to Alberta’s apartment, ransack the place, looking for grimoires, magical implements, dead cats, all the usual black magic nonsense.
B. Skip that, assume Alberta’s guilt, and confront her.
C. Keep looking for more suspects. Talk to Mrs. Greyson.
D. Leave. Let the matter rest, since the damage seemed to already have been done.
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.”
“Bullshit.”
Not to say I didn’t feel for the woman, but there’s a certain art to prodding people into confessions. I could tell that Mrs. Greyson wanted to tell me more, but she was censoring herself. Thinking about her responses too much. I needed to get her agitated, make her talk faster, without the filter.
She went through the usual motions, “Who do you think you are?” and “You’re a guest in my house” and “In my day . . . ,” but none of them convinced me that she wasn’t involved in Georgiana’s death.
I asked more direct questions, like, “What was Prious doing in that house in the first place?” which she dodged for a while, until, finally—
“She shouldn’t have been there. She should’ve known that what she was doing was wrong without us telling her.”
Behind me, the front door creaked open. Balls. I’d convinced Alberta the night before to join me at Mrs. Greyson’s house, but not for another half hour—I wanted time to get to the bottom of things, get Greyson on my side and ready to talk sense into Alberta. I needed at least another five minutes, I was just getting to the good stuff. Except, it wasn’t Alberta. I heard the sound of a cane scuffing on the old hardwood floors. The uninvited house guest ambled in, didn’t notice me sitting in the dimly lit sitting room until he was right beside me.
It was the widower from the nursing home, with the burned-toast skin. A man who claimed to only know the deceased women because they lived
down the hall from him. Suspicious as hell that he’d show up out of the blue.
“Oh,” he said. “I’ll come back when you don’t have company, Mrs. Greyson.”
These were the options, as I saw them in that moment:
A. His visit was random, if incredibly coincidental. Let him go and get back to grilling Greyson.
B. He was another piece of the puzzle I didn’t yet understand, but Alberta was still the killer. Hold him there, wait for Alberta to arrive, let the sparks fly. Kill whoever seemed appropriate once they got their stories straight.
C. The widower was the real culprit, here to finish the job. Get him outside, out of Greyson’s view, and kill him.
D. Kill ’em all, let the boys up and downstairs sort ’em out.
Maybe you’re smarter than me. But me, facing those options . . . like hell I was gonna let him go. I beat him to the door, closed it. Bolted it. Made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere, which he wasn’t psyched about. Whether he or Alberta was the culprit . . . that I didn’t know. I had to ask more questions.
It became clear very quickly that Mrs. Greyson had no idea who the old widower was, or what he was doing there. One more strike against the guy. He claimed innocence, saying that Mrs. Greyson’s memory wasn’t what it used to be (happens to the best of us). That they were fast friends, and that he had no idea she had a connection to the burned women. Likely story, buddy.
He claimed his name was Omar Adams, that if we called any of Mrs. Greyson’s friends, they’d back up his story. I decided to call his bluff, went to the next room to get the phone—remember, this was the eighties—with the real intention of getting a knife from the drawer. I had a gun in my jacket, just in case, but the situation felt like it was getting away from me and I wanted to cover my bases. When I reached for the knife block, Omar’s hand was already on the butcher knife. He hadn’t even been in the room a second earlier.
“I thought you were going to make a phone call?” he asked. I noticed that he wasn’t holding his cane. He didn’t seem to need it.
The doorbell rang. Cut the tension like the knife I now couldn’t grab. This time, it was Alberta at the door. She’d shown up early after all.
I went to the door, unlatched the dead bolt, now realizing how pointless it had been to lock it in the first place. The widower had teleported himself into the kitchen, I was sure of it. My eyesight ain’t perfect, but I know when somebody goes from being not there to there in an instant. What’d that make him? At the time, I didn’t think angels existed, certainly didn’t know they could teleport. So what? A ghost? Sure didn’t look like one.
As Alberta walked into the sitting room, I reached into my jacket, found the cool metal of my pistol. If I was facing a creature that could both teleport and spontaneously combust people, the only advantage I had was that of surprise. I needed to act.
The widower wasn’t surprised. Not even a little.
Before I could level the gun on him, I felt my feet lift off the ground, and I was ratcheted backwards, over a chair, into the hall, banging past obstacles on the way. I fired off a shot, but the bullet dug ineffectually into the wooden banister leading up to the second floor. My body slammed into a wall with incredible force, my head swimming from the impact. I wobbled forward, tried to level the gun once more . . . and that’s when everything went dark.
. . . . .
When I woke up, I felt the warm trickle of blood down my back. I couldn’t see anything—figured I must have been in the basement. The old house had a storm cellar that had been sealed up for years, which I found when doing recon work on the place before I went inside. Seemed like a discreet place to dump a body, if need be. Didn’t think it was gonna be my body getting dumped.
Across from me, something stirred. Weight shifting in a chair.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” the darkness said.
“Like hell,” I said. “Don’t toss me through a wall next time.”
“I have a right to defend myself,” the voice said. The widower’s.
“What’s your real name?” I asked the darkness.
“Anansi,” the widower replied, hesitantly. “Maybe you’ve heard of me.”
I certainly had heard of Anansi. He was a trickster god from West Africa, had made the crossing to the Americas with a slave ship in the 1700s, if you believe the legends. Which, of course, I do. He was a keeper of knowledge in the old world, and was known for telling stories—they called ’em Spider Tales, or Anansesem. Was famous for playing tricks on people, teaching ’em lessons. Lore said he took the form of a massive spider when he wasn’t blending in with humans, which seemed about right—there was something about his face that seemed spiderly. I made a remark to that effect, asked why he wasn’t out spinning a web.
A match was struck in front of me, the light from it illuminating the crags and valleys of Anansi’s face. “Ah, yes. I recognized you as a hunter . . . from your smell. You smell like death, like killing. I thought you’d have recognized me sooner,” he said, pointing to his face. “My mask isn’t very subtle. I’m a black widower.” He smiled. The “Get it?” was implied.
Why do monsters always gotta make bad puns? I’ll never understand it. I moved on. “One of the Prious kids summoned you?”
Anansi laughed. “No, no. No one summons me, anymore. I go where I go, and right now, I’m here.”
“Blowing up old ladies.”
“Just deserts. The wheel just brought back to them what they put on it.” Anansi leaned forward. Squinted his eyes at me. “You don’t agree?”
“Can’t be sure,” I said. “I don’t even know what they did.”
“They burned a woman alive,” he said. “That’s bad for your energies. I can smell that, too. Good sense for these things.”
I asked him how we was so sure. He laid out the whole story, which he’d gathered from eavesdropping on their bridge games for the last five years—see, Anansi was retired. He’d given up his ways. Taken up life as a human in a nice little retirement home, only to be drawn back into service by the cadre of old women whose secret he overheard.
Georgiana Prious had been dating, in secret, the son of one of the women—a man by the name of Arden Baldwin. Arden had met Prious while at a social function at the home of one of his mother’s friends, where Georgiana was employed as a part-time housekeeper. They knew that their relationship wouldn’t get a good reaction from the Baldwin family, not because of her race, but because of her position—a servant, more or less. The Baldwin family was wealthy, as far as Arkansas went, and his familial duty as a firstborn son was to marry well and keep the family money in good (already rich) hands.
One day, a group of six women gathered to discuss an upcoming church event—because they were all good Christian women, of course—and came upon the secret relationship between Georgiana and Arden. Mrs. Baldwin was less than tickled by her son’s dalliance, and sat him and Georgiana down—forcibly. Neither of them was going anywhere until they agreed to call off their little fling. Problem was, love don’t work like that, and neither was receptive to the idea . . . until the family money came into play. Mrs. Baldwin, at the prodding of several of her friends, told Arden in no uncertain terms that he’d be thrown off the gravy train if he didn’t renounce his servant girlfriend there and then. But the whole while, Georgiana, who was terrified, of course, was figuring a way to escape. While Arden was weighing his options, Georgiana bolted, and Mrs. Baldwin chased her. I don’t have all the details of the next part, but what I do know is that things went from bad to worse. At the end of a scuffle, Mrs. Baldwin was standing over the unconscious body of Georgiana, and a tipped over lamp had sparked a small fire. They had a choice—I’m sure for a rich lady with everything to lose, it seemed like an obvious one. She and her gaggle left the girl inside to burn.
Part I don’t get? Why that idjit Arden didn’t speak out. I get it was his mother, but still . . . if he loved that girl, he shouldn’t have let things get so pear-shaped. She had kids, for G
od’s sake.
So there I was, sitting across from Anansi, head still foggy from the earlier violence. The whole story now told. From what I’d heard, it did sound like the women deserved it. I asked him what he was going to do with Mrs. Greyson upstairs.
He sniffed the air, asked me a question: “You can’t smell it?”
I could. Smoke. Mrs. Greyson was already dead.
This is where the no-win scenario kicks in. The trickster had already done all the damage he was gonna. He’d killed all six women responsible for Georgiana’s death and the cover-up. And in a way, he might have been right to—weren’t they the villains in the story?
So I got no idea why I did what I did next, and I honestly can’t say if I’d do the same thing if I was in the same position now. . . .
I leaned far forwards, put my head in my left hand, like I was overcome by emotion from his story (he was a storyteller, I knew he’d buy it)—and I used my right hand to reach down to my boot, out of Anansi’s sight. There, I kept a silver dagger, for occasions just like this. With one swift move, I pulled the dagger from its sheath, swung upwards, and stabbed it into Anansi’s lower jaw, so the blade went all the way from his chin to his forehead, the tip splitting out of his skull like one of those sandwich toothpicks.
Anansi spasmed, fell to the side, his eyes wide—that time, he was surprised.
I’d love to say I double-checked the lore, stayed behind to clean up the scene, or even checked in on Alberta, whose fate I still don’t know. I didn’t do any of those things. I ran. I got in my car and got home as soon as I could.
