If Griff was in on this with Bobby, even if I managed to get away, he might be out there waiting for me. Was there anyone else out there along with him? Althea? Could she have hitched her wagon to Bobby and Griff’s star? Maybe I was the fool in this scenario.
But how far did they plan to take this?
What would they do to get what they wanted?
Bobby banged on the piano keys, jolting me from my thoughts. He strode across the room and yanked Ember up by the arm.
“Now give me a word, girl,” he hissed. “Speak the word of the Lord and for once do something in your useless life.” In the dim light of the room, I could see his eyes glitter. They made him look unhinged.
“Let go of her!” I yelled at him. “It doesn’t work that way! You don’t sing a song and think happy thoughts and get a secret message from God.”
I pulled Ember away from him, but she turned to me, a pleading look on her face. “Eve, you’re wrong. You’re wrong! I know there are miracles. I know it. It’s that believing that keeps me going. In spite of everything they say.”
“Fine! Believe what you want, Ember. But don’t let him use it for his own personal gain. You own your belief.”
A bolt of pain stabbed through my arm. I clutched at it and without even realizing what I was doing, let out a whimper.
“What?” Bobby barked. He let go of Ember and raced to me. “What happened?”
I angled away from him. “It’s nothing.”
“Bullshit. You’re sensing something. Just say what’s in your head, Eve. Whatever it is, just say it!”
Our eyes met.
There was so much in my head, I doubted I could put it into words. Images of Dove and Bruna holding hands onstage. A letter to Charles . . . singing and ministering here and there, managed by Mr. Arthur Holt . . . The sound of a misstruck penny, clinking down into the lock of the door.
Dove’s house, too, the small one across the highway from Pritchard Hospital.
I’m not the one who can give you your miracle, she’d said to me there, running her fingers so lightly down my right arm.
All I can do is tell you the truth . . .
But was what she told me that day really the truth? Or was there something more that lay beyond her words . . . something bigger and brighter and so confounding that Dove herself didn’t know whether to call it the truth or a lie?
I tore my gaze from Bobby to face Ember. “Has God spoken to you, Ember?” My voice came out harsh, unyielding. “Has He told you where to find the coin?”
She stared at me, then looked away. “No.”
“He hasn’t told me either.” I addressed Bobby. “So that’s it, okay? Yes? We did what you wanted. We sang and nothing happened. Let her go.”
“Your arm was showing you,” Bobby spat. “You just didn’t listen. Maybe you need some encouragement. Maybe this’ll help.”
He strode past me, pulled Ember by her shirt and swung her toward the chaise. She gasped and stumbled over her feet, but he didn’t stop. He pushed her down and closed a hand around her throat.
I sprang toward him. “No!” I screamed. “Stop!”
She barely struggled, barely even moved beneath his weight. Then, with his free hand, he drew back and punched her, a sharp, well-aimed jab to the nose. I screamed as I heard the air whoosh out of her lungs.
I clawed at his back, but he swung around, deflecting me easily, and I fell back against an ottoman.
In a flash, his hand around Ember’s neck. Then I heard the sickening sound of flesh striking flesh. I jumped up and pulled at his shirt, trying to capture his free arm, trying to stop him from hitting her again. But he was so strong. I couldn’t seem to contain him.
Time slowed and I felt immobile. Then Ember grunted and Bobby leapt awkwardly away from the chaise, nearly stumbling over me as we both toppled to the floor. I scrambled up, and so did Bobby, breathing hard and thumbing at his nose.
“You scrawny little cunts always go for the jewels, don’t you?” he snarled.
She sat up. Blood poured from her nose, and her mouth looked swollen and bloody. But she was conscious. And looking at me. I nodded, once, just the slightest movement so Bobby wouldn’t see, then as if we shared an internal signal, we simultaneously launched ourselves at him.
She got there first, pushing him backward into a polished marble cocktail table. He flipped over it, and she grabbed him by the shirt and pinned him with an elbow to the neck.
“You know, I could see your future the minute I laid eyes on you,” she said, her voice low and fearsome. “Your family’s going to leave you and you’re going to die alone. You’re going to die, weeping for all the good days your family’s going to have when you’re gone at last.”
She twisted back to me, her blood-smeared face making her look like some terrible, battle-frenzied goddess. “Go.”
Chapter Fifty
Muscle Shoals, Alabama
1934
Ruth screamed and screamed until the veins stood out along her temples and her neck was corded. Until saliva dripped from the corners of her mouth, her hands bent to claws, and she felt like a woman who had lived a hundred lives.
As she screamed, she imagined her body lifting up and away from the grandstand, flying back to her old room in the east wing of Pritchard Hospital. That putrid yellow room had stunk of all the bodies who had lived and died there. It was where her mother had laughed and sang to her and then, at the end, swung from the doorjamb, the restraining strap from the cot looped around her neck. Ruth had cried for days, tears falling and nose running onto the dirty, broken-glass floor, a rope connecting her leg to the cot, until her head throbbed and she thought the world had ended.
She screamed for all that had followed those horrible days. For the steam from the washers in the laundry that singed off the first tender layer of skin on her face. For when Jimmy Singley breathed his hot, damp words into her ears and left the imprint of his fingers on her arm.
She screamed for when the Major sang his song and when Dell shot his marbles and when Eunice and Ethel laid their cards on the scarred wooden table. She screamed through the broiling heat and unbearable cold and the stink of shit and piss and vomit, mildew and rot and despair. She screamed until her throat was raw and all that came out was a croaking, gasping sound. And then she quit.
The people below stared in stunned silence. Ruth dully registered a man in the audience step into the aisle and lift his hat. It was a magnificent black homburg with a pink satin ribbon tied around it.
“I know her,” he announced in a formal voice, nodding genially, deferentially, at Arthur. “She ran off from the insane hospital down in Tuscaloosa.”
Arthur squinted into the light. “Who are you?”
“I’m the Reverend Robert Singley, chaplain of the hospital and emissary of the superintendent, sent to fetch her back on home.” He ambled down the aisle toward the stage. “She’s a loon. And not a harmless one. She’s a danger to herself and all who dare to enter her circle.”
“You have documentation, I assume?” Charles Jarrod edged his way down the row of bodies into the aisle behind Singley. Ruth didn’t look at him.
Singley turned back. “May I ask who’s inquiring?”
“Charles Jarrod, a friend of Miss Davidson’s.” The crowd let out a ripple of admiration, which Charles acknowledged with a wave of his hand.
Singley ducked his head in deference. “Hello, Mr. Jarrod, and a hearty welcome to the state of Alabama. I acknowledge that you are a man of God. A man of rectitude and charity. But all the same, the law’s the law. The girl’s a runaway. She should be locked up before she does any further damage.”
Ruth searched the faces she could see, looking for Dell, but it was Charles Jarrod’s eyes she found. They were kind and trusting, and instantly she saw that he was waiting for her. Waiting on her next move before he did anything else.
But she didn’t know her next move. She’d come tonight planning to tell the crowd that Steadfast had gotte
n lost in Key Cave like Arthur wanted. But Bruna’s news had changed everything. Her best friend was going to have a baby. She would stay in Florence and make a family with Arthur; Ruth couldn’t tell this terrible lie about her grandfather, then leave. She just couldn’t.
She looked into Charles’s eyes, bolstered by the calm way he looked back. Just a moment before she’d been terrified and alone and trapped like the lion in his cage. Out of options. Out of friends. But now . . .
Now she knew what she must do.
She ran to the end of the stage, and, stopping just short of flying off the edge, seemed to hover above the crowd. The audience gasped, and for a moment, there was crystalline silence. Then she caught herself and curled into a ball. She let out another ear-shattering scream and the people stared. She clawed at the air then, contorted her face into a fearsome expression, and shrieked so shrilly some covered their ears.
Bruna seemed frozen in horror and confusion. Arthur too. Only Charles appeared unperturbed.
“See?” Singley hurried toward the stage. “Just look at how she suffers! She must be locked up!”
“No!” Charles Jarrod shouted, thrusting his hand to the stage. “You’ll do no such thing. The girl isn’t insane.”
The people quieted, then turned their faces toward him.
“Anyone can see, she’s tormented with a demon. She needs deliverance, not a hospital.”
Low exclamations rippled through the crowd. Ruth whimpered and sobbed.
“The Lord’s spoken to her,” Arthur interjected quickly. “She knows where Mr. Steadfast Coe has gone, and she’s got to prophesy.”
“She can do that after she’s been prayed over,” Charles said curtly.
“I’ll handle that.” Singley leapt onto the stage with lightning speed. He grabbed Ruth’s right arm, twisted it behind her, and forced her to the stage floor. She went down easily, no match for his strength and fervor. Charles sprang toward the stage, but Arthur caught him, and Singley, emboldened, twisted her arm. Ruth’s vision went spotty, and she cried out, this time in real agony.
“Come out! Come out, foul spirit!” Singley bellowed.
Ruth struggled in his grip to find some purchase on the worn floorboards, but there was not a chink to be found. Her face pressed against the smooth wood, and she squeezed her eyes to shut out the blinding pain.
She thought she heard someone calling her name—Bruna, maybe—but it felt like it was coming from underwater. A voice in a dream.
Where was Charles?
Singley yanked her arm farther back—“In the name of Jesus, I command you to leave her!”—and she heard something crack. An electric jolt shot through her and she swayed, body arching in an effort to escape the pain.
Oh God, dear God. Had he broken her arm? Had he . . . had he?
“Get her!” someone shouted. A smattering of applause rippled through the crowd.
Singley wrenched her up by the shattered bone. “Speak, foul spirit!”
She screamed, this time an unearthly sound, even to her own ears.
“Listen to that!!” Singley bellowed. “The demonic spirit speaks to us from the fiery pit of Hell itself!”
He twisted the arm again, but she was beyond sensation at that point, only hazily aware that Charles Jarrod and maybe a few others had finally reached the stage. She heard an outraged voice yell out a string of colorful curses—Dell?—then she felt a pleasant blanket of fog descend. She was slipping away, her consciousness telescoping until all she could see was a small pinpoint of light. Then she heard Charles’s voice ringing out above the rest. It drowned out everything—the heat, the pain, the fear—and she willed that voice to fill her physically, if that was such a thing. And she welcomed it.
“I said get your hands off her,” Charles said. “Before I relieve you of them both.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Florence, Alabama
Present
I ran to the front door but pulled up short a few feet away.
Shit. I’d forgotten. Bobby had locked it and still had the key.
I changed course, tearing down the hall toward the back of the house. When I got to the kitchen, I looked wildly around. I could leave. Run out the back door and see if I could find someone with a phone, or run to the police department. But that would mean abandoning Ember, and I couldn’t leave her alone with Bobby.
The gun . . .
The one Griff found the other day.
I pushed open the mangled door, now stripped of its hardware, and crept to the center of the maid’s room. Surely Jason had put that old Colt 1911 back into the lining of the ice chest. Ember had said it wasn’t loaded.
Hadn’t she?
I pulled the chest down from the top of the old wooden fridge and plunged my hand inside.
“Eve.”
I jumped. Bobby was standing in the doorway, still slightly hunched in pain. His face was a repulsive combination of fanatic zeal and unmitigated hatred.
“Where’s Ember? What did you do to her?”
“You know where it is, don’t you?” he barked. “The coin. You saw it just a minute ago when you were singing. I know you did.”
My fingers closed over the cold metal, I drew out the pistol, and with my right arm, aimed it at his chest. I felt a tremor roll through my arm, and, for a split second, I worried it wouldn’t be strong enough to hold it steady.
Don’t you fucking move, I ordered my arm. Not one inch.
“You monster,” I said. “You lying, murdering piece of shit. You actually think I’d tell you if I did? You think I’d let you touch what doesn’t belong to you? Where is Ember?”
“Out like a light.” Bobby put his hands up, but he was smiling. “That thing’s a hundred years old. Hasn’t been oiled in forever.”
“Whatever you say.” I was trembling with fear and adrenaline and I knew he could see it.
Hold still. Hold still.
“It’s not loaded.” But he wasn’t sure and I saw it in his eyes. But the problem was, I wasn’t sure either. Ember had said it wasn’t loaded. But she hadn’t checked the chamber, had she? I was no gun expert, but wasn’t it possible that a bullet could be loaded there?
“Is Griff helping you?” I asked.
Bobby shifted his position in the doorway, hands still up, obviously still feeling the effects of Ember’s knee.
“Answer me!” I yelled.
He grinned through his pain, enjoying mine.
“Does he know you attacked me? Did he help you plan it?” I couldn’t help it. My voice cracked and Bobby offered a sympathetic smile.
“Don’t you worry about Griff, darlin’. It’s just me and you here right now. Just us two”—he waved his arms like an old-time preacher—“and the Flowing Hair. I can feel it’s in this house, like the Spirit coursing through my body. Can’t you feel it?”
I held the gun steady. Did I need to pull back the slide if there was a bullet in the chamber? I had no idea. I’d never shot a gun. I’d never even held one.
God help me. What am I doing?
“I know you felt it a minute ago, Eve. Don’t be afraid to admit it,” he said.
“I didn’t feel anything. Except disgust and pity for you.”
His hand went to his chest. “Oh, darlin’, you wound me. I thought we might be family one day. Keep that circle unbroken.”
“I don’t want any part of your fucking circle.”
He cackled, his face shining with deranged fire. “Look, I’ll split it with you, the money from the coin. Eighty-twenty. I think that’s pretty generous. Don’t you? And I’ll give you the old man’s bones, too. Then I can pay off my debts and get Helena back. And you . . . you can marry that pussy son of mine and the two of y’all can move out to Hollyweird. Make all the movies you want. I’ll keep your secret. Dove’s secret.”
“Your son is a great man.”
“No. He’s soft. Weak.” Bobby shrugged. “It was easy to get him to take this job. He’s always been so desperate for my approva
l.”
“Which you couldn’t be bothered to give.”
“Who needs approval,” Bobby said, “when they can have money? Right? I think even Dove would see what a good deal I’m offering you. She was a hustler. She’d tell you to take my deal and run.”
My arm shook. I fought to hold the gun steady.
“I have no doubt,” I said, evenly, “if my grandmother was here right now, exactly what she would tell me to do.”
He straightened, turned as if ready to leave me and this conversation behind. “Okay, then. Have it your way. I’ve got the psychic. What do I need you for?”
With an ease and control that surprised me, I pulled back the slide on the pistol and lowered the weapon approximately two feet south, aimed right at the center of the zipper on his jeans. He smirked in response. He didn’t think I would do it.
But he didn’t understand how coming to Alabama had changed me. How I’d found a side of my grandmother I never knew existed. And that because of it, I now understood that I had to fight—really fight, not just worry and fret and prepare—for my family. They were what was most important. I was going to defend them. I was going to do whatever it took to keep them safe. And now, that family included Ember.
“Now you’re nothing but a goddamn complication,” Bobby said, then coiled and lunged at me.
I pulled the trigger.
Chapter Fifty-Two
East Alabama
1934
Ruth bolted upright, woozy and disoriented, screaming Bruna’s name.
A voice shushed her. “It’s okay. You’re safe now. You’ve been sleeping.”
The car smelled new to her, all polished leather seats and shiny burled-wood panels. And the seat was soft. Very soft. And Charles, still in his starched white shirt and tie, one arm over the seat, was driving down a dark road.
The hot July air blew in the windows, and Ruth lay back and closed her eyes. Her arm was wrapped in some kind of contraption, secured tight to her chest. It still hurt, but it was better than before.
Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters Page 26
