by Paisley Ray
The gentleman with the newspaper snapped the pages again.
Francine leaned forward and rested her elbows on her shiny golden miniskirt. “What did the man have to say for himself? Leaving us in harm’s way.”
“He’s as surprised as we are about Hodge. Said he’d never seen it coming. Had a hard time believing the police story and wanted my take.”
“I hope you told him your take is that he ain’t paying you enough money to live on Crazy Island and manage his deadbeat trinket shop.”
“That’s harsh.”
“You know what I’m saying. The arrangement all sounded real good on the telephone. Free housing on a quaint island that backs up to water. Managing an art gallery in the historic district. “Tsssst,” she seethed. “Smokin’ mirrors, that’s what he led you and the likes of me into. Did you give it to him real good?”
“I accidently held a sealed bank statement of Larkin’s over a steaming kettle. His business isn’t eking out a profit, and his house needs some work.”
“You singing to the choir. That place is one loose floorboard away from collapsing.”
“I told him about the knife and the painting I rescued. He was grateful about the silverware since it was an heirloom, but he didn’t seem too bothered by the disappearance of the Surrender painting. I asked if he knew that it was an original.”
Francine pursed her lips, ready to spew something, but harbored her thought inside her head.
“Larkin didn’t know. When I told him it was a Julian Scott worth into the six figures, I thought I lost the connection. He started crying. Said that he’d run off for the summer to stay at a friend’s cottage to wrap his head around the mounting debt. Was going to have to sell the property and liquidate the gallery when he returned.”
Francine patted my knee. “So without you, he’d be broke?”
Grinning wide, I did a terrible job of covering up my gloating face. “It wasn’t my only find this summer. You know the farm animal canvas that you think is crap?”
She squinted her eyes tight.
“Dad sent a local insurance appraiser he knows who specializes in art to the Larkin Gallery to see it. It’s an authentic Edward Hicks.”
“I see the smug on your mug.”
“He had a buyer. I sold it.”
“How much?”
“I don’t have the check yet. But it’ll be enough to pay off Trudy with some cha-ching left over for senior year spring break.”
“O’Brien, you smiling wider than a possum eating a sweet potato.”
“I have a stop to make, and I need you to give me directions.”
“What stop?”
“I need to ask about a wheelbarrow. Will you show me the way to the prayer house on Lady’s Island where you and Campbell dropped Rilda off after the lock-down?”
“YOU HAVE TO BE THE craziest girl roaming Beaufort. Circuits in your head, they ain’t connecting.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“White folk don’t go to prayer houses. It’s insulting.”
I slammed the Volkswagen door. “I don’t mean disrespect. I have a loose end that needs tying up.”
Sliding over the gearshift, Francine settled into the driver’s seat. “I’ll keep the engine running. When I see your white ass hightailing it, I’m stepping on the gas. You best do a road runner if ya wanna catch this ride outta here.”
There was a small roadside clearing with a rustic sign that read “Lady’s Island Prayer House.” No structure could be seen from the road. A trampled footpath wound among the moss-draped trees. Under the canopy of branches the air temperature dropped, and I rapped the acorn-handled silver knife I held against my palm. My heart beat in a rumpity-pumpity, faster-than-normal two-step rhythm, and my palms emitted a sheath of tackiness. Fumbling in my back pocket, my fingertips grasped the slim Benson & Hedges and the Bic lighter I’d stashed. Besides a few crimps, the tobacco was still encased and smokeable. Inhaling the sweet smoke, I willed myself to relax before I pressed forward.
I knew Francine wouldn’t leave me. That’s the thing about her—she might say one thing, but we both knew she meant something else. It was a secret language between us. She was worried about my safety, and the lawyer simmering inside of her was irritated at the swift justice of Hodge being booked for a murder that neither of us thought he’d committed. We couldn’t sit back and watch his life get jacked for someone else’s crime.
The ground covering beneath my tennis shoes crunched with every step I took, and above my head a flash of yellow landed on a branch, sounding a throaty set of cheeps and skrawws while a gray squirrel scampered up a nearby tree trunk. Ahead of me, I could make out the image of a whitewashed wood structure that could have been a playhouse. There was one step leading inside, and I didn’t see any windows. A voice rang out, “tell um” and others shouted, “Amen to the good Lord,” followed by a raucous stream of “hallelujahs.”
A silence fell upon the building and paralyzed my feet. I hadn’t come here to make a scene. I came to speak to Rilda. Before I had decided what I’d say when I found her, clapping erupted, and bodies of local Gullah residents spilled out the door. Stubbing my cigarette out, I put the unused portion back in the soft pack and waited.
The men and women who passed me stared with an unsettling curiosity. A few motioned and mumbled pleasantries. Well aware that I was on Gullah land and in a sacred place, I questioned my motives and sanity. Maybe I should’ve waited it out at her cottage, but I’d stopped by a handful of times and she hadn’t shown up. Before Hodge was arrested, he’d routinely left work early on Wednesdays for services, and I suspected that Rilda wouldn’t avoid the prayer house weekly gathering.
Once everyone seemed to have left, I stepped away from the tree I leaned on and walked the few paces to the entrance. The door was partially open, and when I pressed my palm on it, it creaked like a town crier announcing my intrusion.
Inside, raw floorboards and a few rows of bare benches greeted me. A single bulb hanging from a cord near the front of the room threw light on the profile of Rilda sitting in the far corner, her head resting back against the wall. “You been looking for me? That shoulder actin’ up?”
My hand rubbed my collarbone. “Never better since you gave me the salve.”
She smiled wide. “Rilda, she knows.”
I held the acorn-pattern knife in my open hand. She contemplated me with curiosity. “What you flauntin’?”
“A little something I found. This went missing from the Larkin house.”
She watched me.
I waited.
“The spirit was hanging in those items. I told you I had to remove some things. You come all the way out here ta show me dat?”
“I know what happened.”
She slapped her knee and chortled. “Lots of people think they know lots of things, but that not always the case.”
“Buell Blake. Hodge didn’t kill him.”
“Da man escaped the big house. If he still there, he’d be alive.”
“He was Gullah?”
Her posture stiffened. “You be asking around, eh? Yes he Gullah. Born down the road. He brought nothing to da community. Take, take, take. That’s all he did. Didn’t know how to give back. Drank too much, too lazy to provide for da family. Took to da company of some bad men. Thought it be da easy way. But da easy way rarely the right way.”
“What did he do?”
Her eyes appeared hollow and her voice stayed in monotone drone as she told me, “He shot my little sister. He claim it be an accident. What he did was no accident. She’d told him to stay away.”
“When he escaped, he came back?”
Rilda spat. “Damn fool. Wanting a hex for revenge all da folks he blames for his mistakes.”
I sat down next to her. “What folk?”
“Been keepin’ names on scraps of paper in pill bottles. Pull a handful outta his trouser pocket. Police officers, judge, jail guards, and some of his old friends. But I
ain’t doin’ his dirty deeds.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“Grabbed me and shook me good. Told me it better work or I be visiting the other side. I’s smarter than he,” she said as she waved her finger. “I called on my Lwa guide. He tell me to mix an elixir for protection real quick.” Bending toward my ear, she coughed a laugh. “It was a sleeping draft for his nerves, I told him. The sun be setting soon, and dat boy, he needed to hide, so I tell him that Mr. Larkin gone. He took off to hole up in the shed. He was gonna come back for the hex spell in the mornin’.”
I knew what she’d done, I just didn’t know why.
“So you took care of him.”
“The spirits, dem can have ’im now. He weren’t nothin’ but trouble round here. Dat boy had a taste for murder, and he was goin’ to commit some more.”
“And Hodge. Did he help you?”
She shook her head. “I’s work alone.”
“How’d you get Buell from the shed to the water?”
“Rolled him down to my skiff in your wheelbarrow. It’s stuck in the mud. That how you here, right?”
Instead of fear, I felt an admiration stir for Rilda. If she hadn’t been so quick on her feet, Buell Blake could’ve killed her, maybe even Francine and me.
“You and me. We had an agreement. I help you rid Larkin house of Gullah Jack, and in return, you help me.”
“But there was no Gullah Jack.”
“Says who?”
“Rilda, I don’t know how I can help you. The police have found the body and they’ve arrested Hodge. The death penalty is legal in South Carolina. No matter how noble your intentions, I can’t let an innocent man die from lethal injection or rot in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”
She reached into the folds of her pocket and removed a baby food jar wrapped in fabric. Unraveling the string tie, she said, “Tomorrow, you give them officers this, and they know Hodge had no parts of no killing Buell Blake.”
In a black goopy liquid floated a gray glob. “Eww. Rilda. Please tell me that’s not a finger?”
“That not any finger. It’s a trigger finger. Powerful magic, that.”
“I’m not taking that. What if they think I did it?”
She nudged the jar toward me. “How you do it when you with Francine the whole time?”
“They’ll ask where I got it. I can’t lie.”
“You tell ’em you got it from Rilda.”
“You’re turning yourself in?”
After tying the jar up, she placed it in my palm.
“I didn’t say that.”
I closed my eyes. What was I supposed to do now?
From inside her pocket, she removed a stone of sorts that she’d been fiddling with. I thought it must be a good luck trinket, but after closer inspection, I noticed it was a three-dimensional glazed ceramic amulet, no bigger than an inch, with symbols etched upon it that I recognized, since I owned the same talisman. Mine was a gift from a mystical woman of notoriety in New Orleans. The symbol was Egyptian and supposedly provided protection. “The eye of Horus. I have one too.”
She winked. “Da world be smaller than ya think.”
NOTE TO SELF
Maybe two wrongs do make a right.
An invitation from Paisley Ray
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For The Record
The Vesey plot of 1822 was real, but did not involve any hangings on Lady’s Island in Beaufort, South Carolina.
Gullah is a creole language spoken today by an African American population living on the sea islands in the coastal region of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and northeast Florida. It is based on English with strong influences from West and Central Africa. Words and this dialect can be difficult to understand. I used my writer’s license to give Rilda a slight Gullah flair while making her speech understandable to the reader.
COMING SOON
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
An invitation from Paisley Ray
For The Record
COMING SOON
