by Catie Rhodes
Mysti screamed and ranted about neighborhood busybodies calling themselves homeowners’ associations. We took down the whole shebang and left the house’s exterior undecorated, Mysti muttering to herself the whole time. It had been a sight to behold.
Outside the endless subdivisions lay acres after acres of shopping centers full of stuff I couldn’t imagine paying for even though I had a little money. And the restaurants. The variety boggled my mind. I had delighted in trying Italian ice and gelato for the first time and could eat Indian and Thai food anytime I wanted.
But the longer I lived in The Woodlands, the less I went out. The maze of streets, businesses hidden by scrub brush—which the locals considered woods—turned me into a nervous wreck. It was nothing to spend thirty minutes driving somewhere four miles away. And everybody ran around in such a hurry, powered by some manic urge I neither understood nor had the desire to imitate. People even talked fast. I had to ask them to repeat themselves. Most gladly did so because people here were friendly. At least there was that.
Mysti’s tight voice pulled me out of my musings. “No, no, no. Please don’t run the red light.”
“Just keep going.” Brad reached for Mysti’s knee again, but she slapped his hand away and took her foot off the gas pedal. A Cadillac Escalade hurtled toward the intersection.
“They’re not slowing down.” My throat strained with the volume of my voice.
“Hold on,” Mysti yelled and jammed on the brakes. Mysti and I both screamed as her Toyota sedan—the same model as mine—slid toward the luxury SUV. Tires squealed, horns blared, but the Escalade kept right on trucking, through the red light and beyond, probably to cause more havoc somewhere else. Just before they got out of sight, the driver’s window lowered, and a closed fist popped out. Slowly, the person raised their middle finger. The Escalade disappeared around a bend.
“Go after him,” Brad shouted.
Mysti ignored him and blew out a relieved breath. We finished crossing the intersection, took a right, and drove a few blocks on a smaller road with a perfectly landscaped median. The posted speed limit was thirty-five, but Mysti did fifty miles per hour.
Other cars whizzed past us. A dude wearing a golf visor pulled alongside, slowed, and yelled something. I made a face at him. He slammed his fist down on his horn and screamed at me until his face turned red.
“Peri Jean, stop the trailer trash routine.” Mysti glanced into the rearview mirror.
“But he started it,” I whined, bored with all the minutes spent in the car. Brad laughed.
Mysti sighed. “Be that as it may, we can’t stop to whup the world right now.” She turned onto yet another road.
“Here, Sis.” Brad shook his finger at a driveway. “Park in there.”
We climbed out of the car and followed Brad across the parking lot. At the end of the lot was a small, asphalt-paved opening obviously not intended for cars. We walked through.
The asphalt path ended facing a canal, which sparkled despite the gloomy sky. Native plants and young trees banked the stretch of water for as far as I could see. Of all the things I expected to find back here, this never hit the list. I stopped in my tracks.
A woman jogger approached, panting, her feet slapping the pavement. A guy on a bicycle rode over a concrete and iron bridge that led across the canal and ended near a shack advertising kayak rentals. He turned and continued his ride down the wide sidewalk.
“This way.” Brad led us down another branch of sidewalk past a wide, grassy field where people sat on blankets watching their kids play.
“Mysti!” A girl with shoe-polish black hair and a silver studded face jogged toward us, waving. She grabbed Mysti in a hug, which my friend returned. They broke apart, and the girl turned to Brad and gave him a shy smile. He had the humility, or good sense, to keep his big mouth shut. Then she stared at me, bright-eyed and expectant.
“Tyler, I want you to meet Peri Jean Mace, my business associate.” Mysti put her arm around me.
“Wow, that’s a country name.” Tyler laughed and held out her hand. She had crosses tattooed on the backs of each finger. On her thumb was a pentagram. Hadn’t Mysti said this girl worked in a library? In Gaslight City, the only job she’d be able to get would be cashier at a convenience store or bartending work. Maybe. The differences in the two places danced around in my head until I felt dizzy. I shook her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“I know you only have an hour, so I’ll get right down to business,” Mysti began.
“I’m ready for action.” Tyler showed us a manila folder.
We sat on graduating steps overlooking the canal. Another jogger, this one a well-built man, sweat damp shirt clinging to his muscular back and his leg muscles bunching, ran past.
My head turned as I watched his progress. I hadn’t bothered with a man since Wade Hill turned me down flat a few months earlier. Did I want to get back into the dating game? Not really. But looking never hurt.
“I can’t thank you enough for your hard work. Your next tarot reading is on the house.” Mysti nudged me with her elbow. Brad chuckled and snapped his fingers in front of my face. I dragged my gaze off the pretty boy and nodded my thanks.
“Not a problem. I already had a lot of this stuff in my personal file. I’m thinking about doing my thesis on the Coachman.”
Male scenery forgotten, I turned my full attention on Tyler. Some of the piercings on her face made me want to flinch.
“That caught your interest, didn’t it?” She smiled wider. “I’m guessing you know the story then?”
I nodded and told her the two versions I’d heard so far.
“Those sound about right. I’ll tell you what I know. Then we can play Q and A. The cotton plantation referred to in the legend was Camilla Plantation. It was built in the late 1840s and operated as a full plantation up through the early 1870s.” Tyler took out a photocopied picture and handed it to Mysti.
She held it where I could see too. The place wasn’t as impressive as my ex-boyfriend’s family home, but it was right on up there with its Georgian columns and circular drive. I passed the picture to Brad who barely gave it a glance. Why had he come again? Oh, to flirt with Tyler. Good gravy.
“Camilla was built and owned by a man named Rodney James. They farmed cotton and a few other things.” Tyler passed us another photocopy of a picture. This one was of the same plantation gone to ruin, one wall fallen into rubble on the lawn and half the house open to the elements. One of the huge columns had started to crumble around its base, and the roof sagged.
“What about the actual Coachman? What do you know about him?” I handed the photo back to Tyler.
“There’s several different tales about the Coachman floatin’ around, Peri Jean.” She tried to imitate my accent, grin widening. One glance at my face, and she dropped the grin. “Sorry. I really do find your accent and your name adorable.” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Tyler squirmed at the silence. When she spoke again, her voice was tight and her cheeks red. “I’ve been studying this bit of folklore, urban legend, whatever you want to call it for six months now. Urban legends like this are a reflection of our fears as a society. One this old, it’s hard to find the truth. I’ve heard versions where the mysterious stranger mentioned in the story is a sort of vampire, other versions where he’s a werewolf, and a really interesting version where he is a Bloody Mary-like character.”
“Bloody Mary?” I almost hated to ask because I had the feeling she could go on and on about any topic that might come up and never really talk about the Coachman.
“You stand in a darkened room in front of a mirror and say the name “Bloody Mary” a set number of times. She appears in the mirror next to you. Whether or not she’s malevolent depends on the version of the story you’re told.”
What did this have to do with the Coachman? I hoped this didn’t turn out to be a waste of time.
Tyler broke off staring at my raven tattoo and laughed. “Listen to me. You asked what I know
about the Coachman, and we’re talking about vampires and Bloody Mary. Very little is actually known about the Coachman.” She thumbed through her file and took out a photocopied article. “The first information I found documented comes from the nineteen-fifties.” She handed me the page. I scanned over it, but she began talking again. “Camilla Plantation sat empty after the murder scene in your version of the story. It fell into ruin. In the years just before the Great Depression, a young man showed up claiming to be the last remaining heir of the original plantation owner. He went by the name of Elijah James.”
“But I thought the whole family went missing and all anybody found was a bunch of blood.” Mysti’s face creased as she tried to understand.
“That’s true, and I actually found a newspaper article about the missing family. The plantation owner originally came to Texas from Ohio. During that period of history, there were a lot of incentives to attract settlers. Including free land.” Tyler withdrew a sheet with formal handwriting on it. “Elijah James claimed to be Rodney James’s last living relative from Ohio. Apparently, he was pretty convincing because local authorities cleared him to live in the old place and start farming it again.”
This was all very interesting, but Tyler hadn’t told me anything helpful so far. A cold wind found its way under my leather jacket. I hunched my shoulders against the discomfort and hoped she’d get to the good stuff soon.
“An African-American community named Blessed Union had built up around the old plantation grounds, and the residents weren’t too happy to see this stranger move in on them.” Tyler tapped the photocopied page she’d handed me. “The author of this article talked to a man who was born and grew up in Blessed Union.”
That caught my attention. Cecil had mentioned the name Blessed Union. And the community’s old school house was where I found the spent spell.
Tyler smiled at my interest and continued. “The man interviewed for the article was just a boy when Elijah James took over Camilla. But he remembered a man named Israel Beard, one of the elders of the settlement, said Elijah James was evil.”
Mysti stiffened. “What kind of evil?”
Tyler raised her eyebrows. “Israel Beard swore the man claiming to be Elijah James looked exactly like the mysterious stranger who murdered the original James family.” She leaned forward. “But here’s the kicker. Nobody believed it because if this Elijah James, fake name or not, was the murderer, he hadn’t aged a day since the original incident some forty years earlier.”
Mysti and I both sat up straight and exchanged meaningful glances. The Coachman’s deal with the goat man probably kept him from aging.
“The freaky part?” Tyler grinned ear to ear, barely able to sit still. “This mysterious stranger drove a carriage. Israel Beard claimed it was the same one driven by the man thought to have murdered Rodney James and his family.” She leafed through her file some more. “The man interviewed for the article said he awoke one night to find Elijah James standing outside his window, beckoning him to come outside. The interviewee said Elijah’s eyes were glowing black, even though it was a moonless night.”
Cold seeped into me and found places to hide. It had been the Coachman. I knew it in my bones.
“People, mainly kids, started going missing from Blessed Union. The residents made as much of a stink as they could, but things were different then. Because of their race, they were largely ignored.” Tyler removed a photocopied picture of a bunch of burned-out shacks. “Then, one day, Blessed Union burned to the ground. Israel Beard, the man who’d made all the claims of this stranger being some sort of ghost or demon, was found tied in a barn. He’d died a pretty gruesome death.”
Someone had wanted to shut him up, to shut the whole community up.
“Once Blessed Union was gone, the disappearances spread to the white community. People claimed to see Elijah James’s carriage coming through town late at night, driving really slowly.” Tyler took another photocopied article out of her folder and showed it to me. “Rumors started about Camilla Plantation, about Elijah James. A group of men went out to confront him, but none were ever seen again.”
“What happened? How did it stop?” Mysti’s voice was barely above a whisper.
“Nobody knows. People reported hearing an explosion. A group went out there, only to find the house laying in pieces all over the ground.” Tyler showed us another photocopied picture of the wreckage. The lower part of brick chimney jutted out of the ground, the upper part scattered all over the ground. Pieces of the Georgian Columns lay among the bricks. Broken bits of wood littered the mess.
“The last odd thing I’ll share is that no bodies or remains were ever found.” Tyler packed her papers away and checked her watch, a gaudy, tarnished silver affair. “Any other questions?”
“I’m guessing the Elijah James name was a fake, right?” All that, and we didn’t even get the Coachman’s name.
“I’ve never found records of an Elijah James who was related to Rodney James. Was that the Coachman’s real name?” She shrugged. “Could be. Maybe the surnames being the same was a coincidence. I can see someone using that as an opening to introduce himself to Rodney James in order to court his daughter.” She held both hands up. “There’s just no way to know for sure. The identity of Vivian James’s suitor—probably the man who murdered the original James family—seems to be lost to history.”
I slumped. Finding out the Coachman’s name was against the odds. We’d have to refocus. An idea hit me. All this information about the plantation might give us an idea where Zora was taken. The way she disappeared had me baffled. She had to have been hidden. “What about a map of the area where Camilla Plantation was?”
She opened her file again and rifled through the papers but stopped. “That’s right. I never replaced those.” She raised her head. “You three aren’t the first to approach me about this. A guy about Brad’s age, but not as cute”—she winked at Brad—“contacted me about the Coachman. He wanted copies of my maps, but the copy machine won’t do sheets that big. I had to send off special for those. Then he said he wanted copies of my documentation. While I was making them, he walked off with the maps of Camilla’s grounds. And they were good maps too. They showed where a storm cellar had been, the location of a grain silo, all sorts of things.”
The remnants of the spell in the Blessed Union Schoolhouse appeared in my mind. The humans helping the Coachman. The map thief may have been one of them. “What’d he look like?”
Tyler, head down scrolling through her phone, only muttered, “One step ahead of ya, cowgirl.” She held up the cellphone. A picture of an unfamiliar male filled the screen. “There was just something off about him. He was intense, sort of scary. I took this picture without him knowing and sent it to my mother in case I went missing.”
“Mind emailing it to me?” Brad rattled off his email, probably more to get a contact on Tyler than to help. She sent the picture, and his phone dinged. He opened the file and held the phone close to his face. “Hey, what’s this thing in his hand?”
“Oh, that! I almost forgot.” Tyler stuffed her cellphone back in her pocket. “He had this tile, like mahjongg tiles…” She trailed off and snapped her fingers. “No. Now that I think about it, the tile was more like Elder Futhark runes. The symbol on it looked similar to those.” She grinned at the expression on my face. “Elder Futhark is the oldest known runic alphabet.”
I grabbed a stick and drew the symbol I saw in Jadine’s vision in the dirt. “Like this?”
Her mouth fell open, and she rubbed her arms. “Exactly.” Tyler checked her watch again. “I hate to run, but my lunch hour is past over.” She turned to me and held out one hand. We shook. “Guys, seriously, anything else you need, give me a call.” She gave Brad a meaningful smile and walked away.
9
BRAD WATCHED HER GO, also meaningfully. He caught Mysti and me staring at him and tried to play it off. “What’s this symbol?”
“I saw it in Jadine’s vision of ho
w the Coachman became immortal.” Just looking at the thing made me shiver.
“If I were religious, I’d call it blasphemous.” Brad swiped his foot over my stick drawing until nothing was left. Then he shook his hands, a gesture I recognized from the spells we did together. He used it to let go of negative energy.
“That was the symbol the goat man left behind, wasn’t it?” Mysti leaned forward, taking shallow breaths. I nodded.
The pieces clicked together in my mind. The goat man commanded the Coachman to keep a souvenir of his murder victims, to put that symbol on the part he kept. Those objects were to be the Coachman’s link to the living plane. I’d kiss a wild hog if the rune Tyler’s map thief held hadn’t once belonged to the Coachman. Where’d the stupid idiot find it? And how did he know to call the Coachman? No matter now.
Mysti tapped me. “Don’t shut us out.”
I gestured at Brad’s cellphone. “That map thief must have used the rune to get the Coachman out of the place where he hid his soul.”
“The Coachman killed his mortal body.” Mysti’s face paled. “And now he’s looking for a new vessel.”
If the Coachman needed my body for a new vessel, why did he need Zora to raise the dead? I was missing an important link. Worse, it hovered just out of reach, jumping out of my grasp every time I closed in.
Brad pulled out his cellphone. “We need to find this guy and now.” He used his thumb and forefinger to enlarge the picture Tyler sent him. All three of us stared at the image of a nondescript nerd with a wispy mustache. He wore some kind of uniform and had an eyebrow ring. Brad tapped the screen. “Dude has a name tag. The light’s got his name blurred, but I can almost see the place where he works.”
We spent several minutes squinting at the tiny square on the guy’s shirt. Finally, Brad snapped his fingers. “I know. I recognize the shape. It’s from a little pub right near here. Maybe he’s at work.”
