Bayou, Whispers from the Past: A Novel

by Lauren Faulkenberry

“I can’t believe you don’t have a meat thermometer,” she said, tossing one into the basket.

  “Jack just eyeballs everything.”

  “That’s a genetic skill,” she said. “One that, sadly, you don’t have. We need to get you some essentials.”

  She led me through the store, filling the basket with various brushes, tongs and devices that looked more surgical than culinary. She grabbed an alligator-shaped oven mitt and put it on her hand like a puppet. “Obviously,” she said and kept it on as we walked down the next aisle.

  “Have I told you I’m really glad you’re here?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, pulling a lidded baking dish from the shelf. “Do you want red or blue?”

  “Blue.”

  “I take it Jack doesn’t mind houseguests.”

  “Not at all. And technically, I’m still the landlady.”

  She smirked. “Right.”

  Technically, I’d met Jack before I knew I would be his landlady. I saw him briefly at Vergie’s funeral, which I’d attended with Kate last May. But I didn’t know who he was at the time. He’d been a stranger in a well-cut suit, offering a soothing smile on a day full of sorrow and regret. I’d never expected to see him again.

  Then, last summer, while Kate spent several weeks attending a training session for work, I was in Bayou Sabine fixing up Vergie’s house. That meant Kate heard about everything long after it had happened. By the end of the summer, it felt like we’d been apart for a year. When she called me, I told her about flipping the house, working with Jack, all of the good parts.

  None of the bad.

  Not at first.

  I had to see her in person to tell her the part about the arsonist. The fires. And the part about almost dying.

  I knew it would scare her and make her feel bad for not knowing, not being able to help. She was like that—Kate was a fixer. If something was broken, she wanted to repair it. If friendships were hurt, she wanted to mend them. She didn’t like arguments, didn’t like to go to bed angry. If she’d known I’d been in danger, it would have wrecked her because she’d have felt like there should have been something she could have done. Should have done.

  But the truth was, she couldn’t have helped at all. The only person who could have, did.

  Still, it had bothered me that she hadn’t known about this part of my life. It was a series of events that changed me. I trusted people more now. I loved more easily. Even though the story had nothing to do with Kate, it felt like I was hiding something from her. It felt wrong, like a lie.

  A nagging voice in my head kept saying, If things were reversed, you’d want to know the truth about her.

  So I’d told her the rest in September when I’d flown to Raleigh to see her for a few days. I stayed with her while I closed on my house there, signing the papers that meant I had one less tie to North Carolina. We were sitting out on her deck in a couple of Adirondack chairs, sipping mojitos she made with mint from her yard, watching the sky turn lavender. She’d laughed when I told her how I met Jack and how we stumbled through the repairs to Vergie’s house. She’d been almost as surprised as my father when I told her I was selling my home in Raleigh to move into Vergie’s house, and she of course wanted to meet the mysterious Jack Mayronne as soon as possible.

  “If I ever get to take all that vacation time I’ve accrued, I’m coming to see you,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t you rather take a cruise? Lie on a beach somewhere and drink fruity drinks?”

  “Not unless you’re coming with me,” she said.

  It had been hard to relive some of the events from those few weeks I’d spent in Bayou Sabine, since I’d been certain I was going to die on that one particular summer night. She’d looked pale as a cloud when I told her the details.

  “I wish you’d called me,” she said.

  “That’s not something you tell a person over the phone, Kate.”

  She sighed, knocking back the rest of her mojito. “The thought that those things were happening to you, and I had no idea.”

  “It wasn’t like you could do anything to help.”

  Her eyes were steady on the horizon, as dark as the afternoon sky. “Still.”

  ~~~~

  “Are you listening?” Kate asked, holding a ceramic pie plate.

  I snapped back to Aisle 6. Crock-Pots, double-boilers, Dutch ovens.

  “Sorry.”

  “Stop fantasizing about your fella. We’re talking about pie, and that’s more important.”

  “I was not fantasizing.”

  “Please. Your walls are like cardboard. Don’t even try.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, and she tossed the oven mitt at me. “Do you have deep pie dishes? Chocolate-bourbon pecan pie is only good if it’s in a huge deep pie dish. Those little ones are for amateurs.”

  “No.”

  “How do you survive without me?” She grabbed a deep dish and stuck it under her arm as she led me down the next aisle.

  When she was satisfied we had the tools she needed, we stashed our kitchen gear in the car and strolled a couple of blocks over to the Faubourg-Marigny district, which seldom had as much foot traffic as the Quarter. Kate poked her head into a couple of boutiques as we meandered down the street I’d visited far too many times the summer before. I hadn’t frequented voodoo shops until then, but certain circumstances had driven me to this one, a small shop that looked more like a house, painted yellow with white trim. It had been months since I’d come to see Duchess, but this time it was not for protection.

  When I paused at the front door, Kate asked, “What’s this place?”

  “I need something for Buck.”

  She gave me a skeptical look. “Like magic?”

  “More like holistic.”

  When we entered Duchess’ shop, the bell above the door clanged. The big orange cat was still keeping guard, perched on the front counter by the cash register. We walked up one aisle before I heard the familiar voice. “Good afternoon. You ladies looking for anything in particular?”

  Duchess drifted into the center of the aisle, a bright purple dress billowing around her. Her dark skin seemed to glow against the fabric. She had piled her hair high on her head in tight braids, and she wore one pair of reading glasses tucked into her hair, while another pair dangled from the V of her dress.

  “We’re just browsing,” I said. “Looking for a gift.”

  She stared at me and then smiled. “How are you doing these days, chérie? Haven’t seen you in a while, so I figured you must have chased the bad away.”

  At that, Kate raised her eyebrows.

  “I’ve been doing fine,” I said. “This is my friend Kate. She’s visiting for the holidays.”

  Duchess shook her hand, her bangle bracelets clinking together like wind chimes.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kate said.

  “Everybody just calls me Duchess,” she said. “Y’all need anything in particular?”

  We’d paused by a basket full of mojo bags, not unlike the one Duchess had made up for me. She’d told me she didn’t cater to the tourists looking for souvenirs. These pouches, with little tags that explained what they were meant to attract, may have looked similar to what the typical tourist shops had, but I knew they were different.

  I picked up a blue one with a tag that read “good health.”

  “I just wanted a couple of things for a friend,” I said. “Nothing big today.”

  She slipped her glasses out of her hair and onto her nose. “Your aura’s looking better these days.”

  I smiled. “What you gave me last time worked.”

  She nodded, glancing at Kate, as if there was more she was tempted to say. Instead, she smiled and turned back toward her office. “Take your time. Call me when you need me.”

  She sauntered back up the aisle, past the beaded curtain that led to a work table in the back room. The last time I’d been here, the table had been covered with an array of herbs, handmade dolls and small animal sk
ulls.

  When Duchess was out of earshot, Kate said, “So how exactly do you know about all of this?”

  “Remember how I said the house was such a pain to fix? I started to think it might have a curse on it. I figured a little good mojo couldn’t hurt, so I came here.” I left out some of the other parts of the story. I wasn’t ready to tell her everything yet.

  Kate’s blue eyes widened. “You, who laughed at me for having my palm read.”

  “I know. Sometimes there’s wisdom in the old methods.”

  She continued down the aisle, smelling the scented candles and sliding her fingers along the fabric of the dolls. “Maybe I should get her to mix up something for me. Something to attract the right kind of man.”

  “That’s not really her specialty,” I said. “She’s not fond of love spells. Also, they always seem to go south.”

  “My methods don’t seem to be working any more,” Kate said. “I think I need a professional.”

  “I think you’re doing just fine. Andre’s a good guy. He’s obviously smitten with you.”

  “He may very well be, but that’s not going anywhere. He’s hours away from Raleigh, and he’s not my type. Not even close.”

  “Smart, kind, funny—not your type any more?”

  “You know what I mean. Can you see me with an outdoorsy sheriff who goes fishing and wears cowboy shirts?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  She snorted. “Also, it’s way too soon. I think my radar is severely broken. I need to take some time away from the dating pool. Like a sabbatical.”

  “Or maybe you should jump right back in, while your guard is up. Sometimes the counter-intuitive move is the best one.”

  She sighed. “I’m just so tired of this pattern. It’s like I’m doomed to pick the wrong one over and over. What if part of my brain is broken, and I’m just going to keep doing this again and again, ad nauseum?”

  “Your brain’s not broken. You just picked a guy that made a colossally bad decision.”

  She frowned, plucking a candle from the shelf. “I seem to do that a lot myself.”

  “Everybody makes bad decisions now and then. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out how compatible you are with someone. That’s not indicative of a problem. I think your people call that ‘trial and error.’”

  She laughed. “My people?”

  “Don’t put so much pressure on yourself, Kate. Experiments aren’t failures just because they don’t turn out the way you expect. One of the smartest women I know once told me that.”

  “Using my own words against me, now.”

  I shrugged. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  She nodded toward my armful of items. “What are you getting?”

  I dangled the blue pouch. “Good health and healing, for Buck.”

  Then I handed her a red pouch, whose tag indicated it kept fires in the heart burning. Duchess might not concoct her own love spells, but she seemed to have no problem stocking items that one might use to plant a seed of attraction in the person she desired.

  She turned it over in her hands and looked thoughtful. “Maybe I should get a bagful of these.”

  “You might be surprised by the results,” I said.

  Jack had given me a hard time at first about believing in voodoo, but he later came to understand it was more about believing that people who had absolute faith in something were not to be taken lightly. He teased me about mojo bags and chicken feet, but in some ways I thought little things like that had brought us together. I couldn’t say I really thought the things in this shop had any magical element, and I certainly didn’t think Duchess had any supernatural ability. I did, however, think of her as a kind of healer. Some folks need different kinds of healing than others, and it seemed that sometimes people found faith in themselves by placing it in other things—even if just for a little while.

  After picking up a few oils and some sage, I went back to the front counter. Kate wandered down the last aisle, browsing the candles as I picked up a bar of lavender soap and added it to my pile. Duchess came out of her work room, the beaded curtain tinkling as she headed to the register.

  When she reached the counter, she plucked another bar of soap from the display and handed it to me. Speckled pink and brown like granite, it smelled like cinnamon and cloves.

  “This one’s good for heartache,” she said. “On the house.”

  Thanking her, I wondered exactly what she could see when I met her gaze. I imagined she could read people the way some folks read tea leaves, ferreting out their secrets and their shame simply by studying the flecks of light and darkness in their eyes.

  When Kate was out of earshot, I whispered, “Do you know any ways to find out the truth about how a person died?”

  “When a police report just won’t do?” Her eyes settled on mine, and I had an eerie feeling she could see straight into my brain, see my questions forming even before I did.

  “When it’s questionable. Can you speak with the dead?”

  Duchess wrapped my items in tissue paper and placed them in a bag. “Sorry, child. Ain’t no medium. I only talk to the living.”

  I waited by the door as Kate checked out. She’d bought one of the candles and a couple of the small pouches—a blue one, for health, and the red one I’d handed her.

  Buck might laugh at the one I’d bought, but either way he’d know I was thinking of him.

  ~~~~

  When we got to Josie and Buck’s house, Josie was back from the hardware store, stirring a big pot of soup on the stove. She tried to set two more places at the table, but I told her we couldn’t stay long.

  I handed Buck the little blue mojo bag, and he examined it, his brow furrowed.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Good health,” I said. “A speedy recovery.”

  He looked at me like I’d just placed a bullfrog in his hand. “Haven’t you had enough of this yet?”

  “I think it’s good luck,” I said, kissing him on the cheek.

  He sighed and placed it on the table next to his chair. “Then maybe it is,” he said.

  As I left, I saw Lucille and Toph standing near a cluster of trees, partially obscured by the leaves. I heard her voice rise, saw him grab her by the wrist and yank her arm until her face twisted in pain. She turned to pull away from him and caught my eye, and then froze in his grip. He pulled her close, saying something I couldn’t hear, and then he noticed me.

  He released her and stalked toward his car. By the time I had closed the space between Lucille and me, he’d revved the engine and peeled out on the gravel drive.

  “Lucille, are you all right?”

  Her eyes were wide. “I’m fine. That wasn’t what it looked like.”

  “Of course it was!”

  She glanced away, then turned to me. “It’s not that bad. Please don’t say anything.”

  “This is unacceptable. You have to tell Jack, if no one else.”

  “No! Jack will lose it.”

  “Of course he will. He’s like your big brother.”

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t tell him.”

  “You can’t stay with him, Lucille. You have to get out of this.”

  She sat down in the grass and stared straight ahead. Tears fell down her cheeks. “I don’t know how to get out.”

  “You just leave.”

  “He’ll ruin me. I’ll lose the internship.”

  “Does that matter so much?”

  “Yes. It’s the only thing that’s going well right now. It’ll set me up for a good job. I can’t just throw it away.”

  “No job is worth what he’s doing to you. I think you know that.”

  She shook her head, avoiding my eyes. “You don’t understand.”

  “These situations always end badly. Always. But I think you know that too.”

  “Just a few more months,” she said. “I can handle him.”

  “Lucille,” I said. “Look at me.” When she finally
did, I continued, “You can’t keep this from Jack. If you don’t tell him what’s happening, I will.”

  She held her face in her hands, crying. I sat next to her and draped my arm over her shoulders.

  After a while, she said, “I’ll do it after Christmas. I can’t do it now.”

  “Lucille,” I started.

  “Please, Enza. I promise I’ll leave him after the holidays. But I don’t want to be the one who ruins Christmas.”

  “You wouldn’t be ruining anything.” I hoped she understood the emphasis, but she just shook her head, her eyes reddening.

  She grasped my hand and squeezed so hard I jumped. “Please,” she said. “Promise me you won’t say anything to Jack.”

  I sighed, shaking my head.

  “Please!”

  It hurt to see her so desperate, and while I couldn’t understand why she would put up with that jerk for ten seconds, I said, “OK. But the day after Christmas, you have to tell him.”

  She looked like she wanted to argue again.

  “The day after,” I said. “Or I tell Jack myself.”

  She nodded, combing the grass with her fingers. “OK.”

  ~~~~

  That night, Jack was still quieter than his usual self, and I knew it was at least partly because of Lucille and Toph. I hated keeping Lucille’s secret from him, but I’d made a promise. It was only a couple more days. Surely nothing else would happen in a couple of days. After all, they were staying at her parents’ house. If she had been anywhere else with him, she might not have convinced me. But I figured she’d be safe with Buck and Josie.

  For a couple of days.

  To get some time to myself, I’d slipped into the bathroom and run myself a hot bath in the old clawfoot tub. I lay in the water up to my neck, a paperback in one hand and a glass of bourbon in the other. Some days needed to end that way.

  When I’d read only a few pages, the door squeaked open, and Jack stepped inside.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  “Hi yourself,” he said, his eyes drifting down to my toes.

  “How are you doing?”

  He sat on the edge of the tub and slid his hand along my shin. “I miss you,” he said.