From Herring to Eternity

by Delia Rosen

  “Act on what?” I wondered.

  Further reading revealed the expected: It was a good time to act to honor whatever you were celebrating. But it was also a good time to act against whatever bad may have occurred on that date.

  I looked back to the day Lippy was killed; no one had posted anything about any anniversary. So that was a dead end.

  And then it was Whoa Nellie! as Bozo the Clown used to shout on TV when I was a very little girl. What I saw was like a thunderclap, scary but illuminating. I looked up Come Blow Your Horny on the tongue-twisting site, AFCACDB. Damn—the answer was there. Right there. I looked up a celebrity home on Google Map, then checked the online archive of the Nashville National. I had an all-access password thanks to a debt owed me by the owner, Robert Reid. I went back ten years—and bingo! again. Both were a perfect fit. I looked up Bill “Spud” Carla’s online store, checked the list of vitamins and supplements he offered for sale. I clicked on several of them to see what they did. I found what I was looking for as I finished my soup.

  It all made sense. Sick, vengeful, nasty sense.

  I checked an address in the online white pages, then grabbed my bag and got in the car.

  I had no idea exactly where I was going, so I plugged the address into my cell phone GPS. When that was set I made a call. What was about to happen would not be pretty, however it went. If it was at all possible, I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t also be deadly.

  But this thing was also mine. I didn’t want Grant Daniels involved in this. He would probably think I was nuts. If I was, no one would know but me. Besides, if he showed up, there was no guarantee that things would go the way they needed to.

  There were no Native American reservations in Tennessee. The state did, however, have a Native American Indian Association, which oversaw small communities and apartment buildings that provided housing and assistance for persons of Native American descent. For the Cherokee in Davidson County, that was an older housing development in the Bordeaux-Whites Creek area west of the city. Bordered generally by the Cumberland River, I-24, and the county line, the region is mostly rural and hilly with occasional pockets of tract houses fifty and sixty years old and trailer homes which only looked that old. Frank James, the notorious brother of outlaw Jesse, lived here for many years.

  The perfect place for a criminal to hide, I thought as I left the highway and made my way along dark, untraveled Whites Creek Pike.

  I probably should have waited until the daytime, but I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. Not with this new idea bubbling in my brain.

  Better to be dead? I asked myself.

  Not if I did this right. And that was it, wasn’t it? I wanted this challenge. I created it, I invoked it. I had pushed myself and, so doing, I had cleared my property of squatters and found out who had attacked me. I did that, without Grant, without an attorney. I liked feeling something, even if it was dangerous—including fear over the possibility of being force-fed daphne or some other unhappy herb.

  I had the window open. I could literally smell the change of scenery from my tree-lined street with the clinging scent of gas fumes and neighborhood cooking to—how had A.J. once put it? “To where the Cumberland Plateau just wears out.” The Appalachians were to the east and they sloped down to where I was now, a world of old growth trees like eastern hemlocks—isn’t that what Socrates drank to depart Ancient Greece?—northern red oaks, and American chestnuts. It was like a salad bar in a health food store. I loved the sizzling grill at the deli, but that only went as far as the nose. There was no doubt that this air got into your cells and did a Snoopy dance.

  It was almost anesthetizing and I had to focus to stay alert—especially with a road where there was more likelihood of hitting a bear than another vehicle.

  The thirty-acre spread of lowlying homes—cottages, really—came up on the right. I got off the highway and followed the curving exit to the north. The Cherokee Nation Village was announced by a weather-worn wooden sign planted in the ground. An old post stood behind and above it with a red-and-white PRIVATE PROPERTY sign—peppered with rusted dents from what looked like target practice with a BB gun. The pulsing dot on my cell phone told me to follow Whites Creek Annex—a big C-shaped road—to near the end. Sally Biglake lived on a small, dead-end street named Coventree.

  Of course.

  I knew the witch would be in because the Facebook page said she was holding a meeting at her home. I was guessing their banishment was on the agenda. I had every right to be there, I supposed, though I had no idea whether I would be welcome. That I would be admitted, I did not doubt, not after I said what I had to say.

  Sally’s home was at the end of a cul-de-sac. Illuminated by a single yellow lantern above the front door, the cottage was an adorable log cabin. There was a rainbow spray of all kinds of plants in hanging pots and window boxes, in the garden along the entire front and in the windows. The driveway was to the left, a vegetable garden was fenced off to the right. The nearest neighbors were about two acres behind me on both sides of the street. Sally’s motorcycle was there, along with a van, a Volvo, and a vintage Volkswagen love bug.

  I killed the headlights as I neared and pulled to the curb well before the cottage. I exited quietly and took several long, deep swallows of rustic air. My heart was thudding so hard it actually scared me; I didn’t know hearts could do that without plotzing.

  I started toward the cottage, my shoes crunching on dirt that had washed down onto the old asphalt road. Apart from crickets, owls, and an occasional dog bark, it was the only sound. I looked up. The stars were brighter here than in Nashville. I smiled as I flashed back to being at the Hayden Planetarium as a sixth grader. It had been fan cooled, like the air felt now. My heart was thumping then because I had loitered and maneuvered going in so I would be next to Hershel Lewis. I’d had a crush on him. He was a tall, quiet kid who was also the president of the audio-visual club. I’d admired how sure he was of his equipment. His projectors and record players, I mean. He had a ring of school keys hooked to his belt and stuffed in his pocket and whenever he had to leave class there were no questions asked.

  Maybe I was spoiled at a young age to be drawn to men who had confidence and suction with the powers-that-be. My husband had been like that. And Grant. And the crush I had felt on that bum-lord Stephen R. Hatfield, who treated his tenants and his women like crap, but, boy, did he have confidence and local pull.

  Get over that shmontses, I told myself. It was understandable when you were twelve. It isn’t now.

  I was at the front door. Beating myself up had slowed my heart rate. The cat that had gone rat-catching at my house was circling my feet and mewing. I didn’t need to ring the doorbell—which, I noticed now, did not exist. Sally opened the door. She was dressed in a white robe with red floral patterns on the sleeves—roses and thorns. She looked at me with a rocky jaw, all solid lines and lumps. It softened quickly.

  “Sister Gwen,” she said. “It’s so good to see you! You were the one most hoped for yet the last anticipated.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “I mean, after all the hubbub about the temple.”

  “All in the past now.” She pivoted away like Ali Baba’s stone wall swinging wide. “Please. Join us.”

  Chapter 26

  I walked into Sally’s cottage, which was apparently one large room with a kitchen and bedroom, front and back, respectively. The smell of hickory was strong. It was coming from a smoking, woklike affair in the center of the room. The ladies were seated in a circle around it, on a red rug with a white pentagram stitched in the center. The smoke got into one’s nostrils but the open windows kept it from becoming suffocating.

  The “us” was everyone. Mad was there along with Ginnifer Boone, the palm reader from New Orleans; Dalila Odinga, the voodoo gal from Kenya; and the four others, to whom I hadn’t been introduced when they showed up at my home the night Reynold Sterne was there. Sally told me the names of the other women but I promptly forgot them. My heart
was tap dancing again and I needed to calm myself.

  I couldn’t read the other women. I felt as if I’d interrupted something and they were simply on pause. At a gesture from Sally, they tightened the circle to make room for me.

  “You saved us the bother of summoning you,” Sally said amiably. It didn’t sound as friendly as she made it seem.

  “You could have just phoned,” I said, taking my place between Mad and Ginnifer. Sally sat across from us.

  “A compulsion spell is different,” the coven leader said.

  “What is it, like an astral kidnapping?”

  “Oh, it’s hardly that. An abduction would be barbaric.” Her smile, which had been constant, faded a little at the edges. “You do understand that there’s a difference between barbarism and Druidism.”

  “If you say so,” I said. “But there’s something that interests me more than that.”

  “What would that be?” Sally asked.

  “First, this thing about the earth not being happy.” I looked at Mad. “My, uh—my sister said that several times at the deli. I assumed it meant that the digging up of the campsite on my property, disturbing any old bones, was what she was referring to. Why else tell me? Nothing else I was doing could have upset the earth, as far as I know.”

  “The earth is happy now,” Mad said distantly, like a chant, to no one in particular.

  “Right,” I said. “But not because the temple or the order from the bench stopped the university from digging there. That had nothing at all to do with me, did it?”

  “It did not,” Sally acknowledged.

  I hadn’t had to pry that from her. She didn’t try to change the subject. She just waited. I didn’t think that boded well for me.

  “It had to do with an anniversary,” I went on. “According to the calendar on Facebook, first, fifth, tenth, and twenty-fifth are the big ones.”

  “We describe those as the ‘perfect years,’” Sally explained. “Astrological alignments recur, allowing a direct connection to what is called the spawning day.”

  “The day something happened, either good or bad,” I said. “The day you can draw on or dispel the good or bad energies an event caused. Since the earth wasn’t happy, I have to assume the anniversary was something not-so-good.”

  “Again, you’re correct,” Sally said. She seemed almost proud that her newly minted sister was so quick on the uptake.

  “I thought back to something one of my workers told me last week,” I said. I looked at Mad. “About a Cherokee jeweler named Jim Pinegoose you were going to marry in 2003. Ten years ago. Making this one of the ‘perfect years.’”

  Mad was staring ahead in silence, her eyes on the rising smoke of the smoldering hickory.

  “Jim suffered heart failure during a tribal competition dance. Last week you tried to get in touch with him through some kind of tribal ceremony.”

  “Atskili,” Sally said.

  “Right. In the woods behind Barbara Mandrell’s home. That was where you held the tribal dance, wasn’t it?”

  Sally was positively beaming. “It was. So . . . you understand!”

  I smiled. “Completely. It was the dancing that killed him, but not really. His heart had been weakened by a natural drug that someone had been giving him. Potassium, I’m guessing, since enough of that can lead to a heart attack during unusual exertion. Since he was Cherokee, the medical examiner would have accepted the finding of the tribal doctor, who wouldn’t have bothered to look for a chemical imbalance in a man who died while dancing wildly.”

  Mad’s breathing had gone shallow. Her tattooed teeth were rolling as she ground her real teeth.

  I turned to the older woman. “Jim Pinegoose was having an affair, wasn’t he?”

  “No!” Mad snapped without looking at me.

  I smiled. “I looked up the newspaper coverage of your powwow. All kinds of wares were sold there, including his jewelry. Someone had bought his jewelry from a boutique in California. For a movie. She came to see the jeweler in person when she was here. He was smitten with her because, let’s face it, the gal oozed sex appeal. She and Jim worked out an arrangement. More jewelry for sex. It wasn’t really an affair, it was a business transaction.”

  “She was evil—”

  “She was a kid who was doing the best she could in the only way she knew how,” I said. “That ‘barter’ arrangement was consummated a few days before Jim’s death—sometime between September third, when the powwow began, and September tenth, when he died during the closing ceremony. Enough time for him to be toxified. How did you find out?”

  “He told me,” Mad said. “He felt possessed.”

  “He felt guilty,” I said.

  The room was silent for a long moment. The only sound was the faint pop and crackle of the flame-heated hickory. Sally seemed delighted, the other women remained respectfully on alert, but Mad was practically hyperventilating.

  I swiveled slightly toward Mad and inched closer. “You poisoned Lippy with mercury, at the deli, because it was the only way you knew to guarantee that his sister would come here the next day—September tenth,” I went on. “You weren’t even sure where she was, only that she had to be there on that day, the spawning day.” I looked at Sally. “What would killing Tippi Montgomery on that day have done, spiritually speaking?”

  “It would have cleansed Jim Pinegoose’s soul,” Sally said.

  “It was not his fault!” Mad hissed. “It was that succubus! She lured him to a sinful union, brought bad energy into our lives!”

  “And that cloud stayed with you until you killed her,” I said.

  “It hovered over the very earth on which we moved,” Sally said. “It poisoned all of the sisters of the coven.”

  I looked around the circle. “So you all knew?”

  “We all played parts,” Sally confessed openly. “One obtained the elements, two watched the individuals, another helped to transport Mad, our offended sister, to and from the unhallowed spirit.”

  “You mean Tippi Montgomery? Your victim?”

  “Call her by any name you like,” Sally said. “The deed remains the deed.”

  “As does yours,” I said. “Murder. That’s a helluva lot more serious than what she may have done.”

  I made a move as if to get up, only to have Dalila grab my right arm. I turned to her—and from the corner of my eye I saw Sally lunge forward. I thought she was going to attack me but all I saw was an explosion of yellow smoke. It smelled like burnt spinach pie and it coated my mouth and nostrils in the single breath I took before I could stop myself—something the Wiccans had been prepared for. My head didn’t swim, it flew, as though I’d taken a mega-hit of nitrous oxide. I was aware of a second burst, of green smoke—the counteragent, no doubt—as my body was maneuvered onto its back. Other than move my arms like weak turtle flippers, there was nothing I could do to fight back. I was on the rug looking up through tearing eyes at a purplish haze. I didn’t know whether they were going to poison me or cut my heart out or feed me to the cat. All I knew was that I was glad I’d anticipated something like this.

  K-Two charged through the front door as if she were entering a steel cage. I knew that because I heard her cry. I sucked in the rush of fresh air that came in with her. I felt myself pulled aside by the shoulders as legs and forearms and elbows and even a head protected the area above and around me. I heard grunts and cries. I heard the cat yowl as if it had been stepped on. I felt my lips move, though only my brain spoke: How ya feelin’ now, earth?

  I was yanked again, dropped, there were more shouts and smacks, and then I was hefted upwards. My hazy mind pictured it like that scene in Camelot, when Lancelot rescues Guinevere from the burning stake . . . only without the girlish longing in my loins for Franco Nero. My head bobbled up and down as we rushed from the cabin into the darkness.

  “Gwen, you okay?”

  I said something that was intended to be “yes” but sounded to me like “whuuu.”

  “I got
water in the truck,” she said. “You’ll be better in a sec.”

  I was bounced around a little more as she knocked down the tailgate of her pickup with an elbow and laid me down. The next thing I knew, bottled water was being dribbled into my mouth and rubbed on my face. It felt good, but mostly it was the fresh air that did it.

  “You’re lucky,” K-Two was saying. “I just got here seconds before that juju exploded.”

  I didn’t ask how she spelled that. I think I knew what she meant.

  “You could’ve given me more notice,” she went on. “I had to drive like crazy.”

  “Witches,” I said. “What—what—”

  “They ain’t coming after us, if that’s what you’re asking. I knocked ’em around pretty good.”

  “Cell picture, phone in my pocket,” I said. “Smoke.”

  It took a second before K-Two got what I meant. “Good idea. Evidence.”

  She left me, I heard her door slam, I saw her run toward the house, and then I lost her. When she came back, my head had cleared considerably.

  “Got it,” she said.

  “I also used my cell to record what they said while I was in there,” I said.

  “Those crazies are toast,” she said admiringly.

  I did hope so. I would hate it if my savior got into trouble for pulling my tuchas from the fire.

  By the time other residents of the block had noticed the fumes, I was well enough to get behind the wheel of my car and drive out with K-Two covering my retreat. No one stopped us and no one called the police. What happened on Cherokee land stayed on Cherokee land.

  Happily, one of those happenings was not my demise.

  It was eleven p.m. by the time I got home, loaded the recording and photographs onto my computer, and paid K-Two the two hundred bucks I had offered her to come out and play bodyguard.