Dead Girls Are Easy

by Terri Garey

  At least now I had a valid reason to go to Caprice’s funeral. Caprice wasn’t dead to me, although I’d already ceased to think that what was left was really, truly Caprice, either. Granny Julep could help me, I was sure. I just had to find a way to speak to her alone.

  “Nicki.”

  I couldn’t see Caprice, but I could hear her whisper. I scanned the room, back of my neck prickling.

  “I’m over here, Nicki.” The whisper came from a corner of the hall, the only pocket of shadow in the house. “Come closer.”

  I didn’t like her tone, and no way was I leaving that couch. Creeping around in the dark was not my thing.

  I gathered my nerve and yelled at her just the way I wanted to?no matter how stupid that idea might be. “How could you do that to Evan, Caprice? He was your friend, too.”

  “Evan was never my friend.” A low laugh came from the shadows. “He never had time for me. He was your candy-ass little friend. I just scared him some. I coulda done worse.”

  “That’s not the way to get my help.”

  “Then what is?” I heard the sharp hiss of frustration in her words. “Get Mo out of jail, or you won’t like what happens next.”

  There was something ugly there, hiding in the hall. It wasn’t Caprice?it was something evil. Fear tripped down my spine.

  I fought back panic. Running away would do no good?I had to get rid of it. “I’m working on Mojo’s release,” I lied. “I hired a lawyer for him.”

  Things got very quiet. What if it knew I was lying?

  I was terrified it might step from the corner.

  “You have to give me time.” I sat on my hands to keep them from shaking, but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about my voice. “You can’t keep freaking me out at night and expecting miracles the next day. And you can’t hurt or threaten Evan.” I let her hear how determined I was about that. “That’s it.”

  The sickly sweet smell of rotted fruit filled the air?bruised bananas and sour pineapples, melons left too long in the sun. I heard her whisper, “Don’t take too long.” A sigh. “I’m tired.”

  Good. With any luck she’d eventually fade away. Right now I’d just like a break from having the shit scared out of me.

  “I promised I’d help you, Caprice.”

  My laptop flew across the room, smashing against a framed print on the wall in an explosion of glass. I shrieked, watching as both print and computer fell to the floor in a jagged heap of broken shards and bent frames. The laptop screen gave a few frantic flickers before it died.

  “Damn right you will.”

  I let Caprice’s whispered pronouncement be the last word.

  I huddled on the couch and stayed there, wide awake, the rest of the night. When dawn came, I gratefully stumbled to bed and slept, blinds wide open, until noon.

  I needed the nap, because I still had a funeral to attend.

  In the end, I didn’t have to find a way to get Granny Julep alone. She came to me.

  Trinity Cemetery was one of Georgia’s oldest graveyards, a tangled garden of headstones on a sunny hillside. The sky overhead was a cloudless blue, and a clapboard church stood at the graveyard entrance, the triple crosses on the steeple like beacons to the wandering or lost.

  At least fifty people came to Caprice’s funeral. Most black, some crying, some not. Almost all of them were holding a single white flower. The graveside service was simple, just a long prayer led by an elderly black minister, and then the flowers were tossed on the coffin as it was lowered by men holding onto heavy straps. There was silence as the straps were removed and the men stepped back from the grave and picked up shovels. A bird trilled from one of the steepled crosses, an ordinary event made awe-inspiring by circumstance. One woman started a hymn and everyone joined in. Other songs followed, the woman leading each chorus, and no one stopped singing—not even the men who shoveled dirt on the grave?until the last shovelful of dirt fell and the grave was covered, nearly ten minutes later. It was very spiritual, and very solemn.

  I stood by a weathered headstone and listened, trying to reconcile this peaceful farewell for a good woman gone too soon against the evil thing I knew Caprice had become.

  As people turned away, the service complete, I stayed, watching an old woman in white who stood by the grave. She was ancient and stooped, by far the oldest woman there. Her gray hair was braided tight and wound into a rope crown atop her head. She saw me staring, and stared right back. When an elderly black man tried to take her by the elbow, she shrugged him off. Then she made her slow way around the headstones and came directly to me.

  “You a friend to Caprice?” Her face was seamed with wrinkles, made deeper as she squinted at me in the sunshine.

  “Yes, I’m Nicki.” I shook her knobby-fingered hand carefully, noticing a piece of brown string tied around her wrist. “I own the store across the street from Indigo.”

  “That’s nice. Now tell Granny Julep what you want.”

  So much for subtlety.

  “I need a mambo.”

  Granny Julep nodded knowingly. “The jumbies don’t leave you alone, do they?”

  I blinked. Jumbies was a Caribbean word for spirits. How could she know?

  “You one of the four-eyed, yeah,” she added decisively. “I see the flutters all around you.”

  “The four-eyed?” I hadn’t worn glasses since Lasik surgery. My vintage Carrera shades were nothing but a fashion statement.

  “They know you can hear them if they try hard enough.” The old woman looked not at me but to the air, eyes measuring. “They hovering ’round you like bees to honey.”

  “Great.” Just what I needed to hear.

  “Don’t worry, girl…you on hallowed ground. It makes them weak. No need to fear the ones that were put to rest good and proper.”

  On the bright side, it appeared I’d found my Obeah woman.

  Granny Julep smiled. “You got to learn to tune them out, girl. They’re drawn to your energy, but that don’t mean you got to give it to them.”

  The old lady was either as crazy as I was or she knew what she was talking about. Either way, it was strangely comforting.

  “What if they try to take it anyway?”

  Her smile faded. “Is that why you here?”

  I nodded. There was a stone bench in the grass a few steps away, and I brushed off a few twigs while I considered how to tell this frail old lady that her recently deceased granddaughter had become one of the walking dead. I offered Granny Julep a seat and she took it, settling her birdlike body with a grateful sigh.

  Most of the mourners were gone now, only a few cars still at the church. An elderly black man waited patiently in the parking lot, leaning on a fender and smoking a cigarette.

  “It’s Caprice, Granny Julep. Caprice won’t leave me alone. Her spirit’s not quiet.”

  Her wrinkled face turned to marbled stone.

  “Something bad’s happened to her.”

  “Of course something bad happened to her,” Granny Julep snapped. “She done been murdered by the man she loved?ain’t no wonder her spirit’s not quiet.” She blinked back angry tears while I waited, silent. Then she dabbed her eyes and nodded her gray head. “I knew she was still here. I felt it. But we’ll take care of Caprice during the nine-night.” The old woman reached out to pat my hand in absent comfort. “She’ll be home with Jesus by the time the last setup is over.”

  I’d read about the Jamaican custom of nine-night. Mourners hold get-togethers, called “setups,” to remember the deceased. The ninth night after the burial is the big blowout farewell, when the dearly departed are finally sent on their way with extravagant good wishes and excruciating hangovers. The Caribbean way of putting spirits to rest was apparently by partying them to death.

  I was thrilled to hear it, but I was afraid it wasn’t enough.

  “There’s more, Granny. She’s trying to make me do something…something I can’t do. She threatened to hurt my friend. She made him so sick he ended up in
the hospital.”

  Granny Julep’s look turned dark. I saw myself reflected in the muddy pools of her eyes, and suddenly wondered if Caprice had learned more than just jerk chicken recipes at her grandmother’s knee. This old woman was hardly the wild-eyed voodoo priestess I’d envisioned, but she had a disturbing edge nonetheless.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, girl.” I was tempted to get the hell out of Trinity Cemetery as quick as I could, but I’d gone too far to turn back now. “Why would Caprice do somethin’ like that?”

  “She wants me to get Mojo out of jail.”

  “Now I know you’re lyin’.” Granny Julep struggled to lift herself off the stone bench. I would have helped her, but she waved me off, gaining her feet on her own. “That man killed her. They’s at least three people who saw him do it. Why would Caprice want that cheatin’, low-down cochon gris to go free?”

  I didn’t need a translator to tell me Mojo would get no sympathy here. Three actual eyewitnesses?

  Lesson number one: Never agree to help a pissed-off ghost without checking the facts first.

  Why would Caprice want her murderer to go free?

  Granny Julep turned and started toward the parking lot, obviously dismissing me.

  “She doesn’t like the light,” I blurted.

  The old woman paused.

  “She hides in the shadows and creeps around in the dark. She won’t let me see her.” I swallowed, hesitating. “There’s a bad smell—like something rotten.”

  Granny Julep looked up at the sky, as if by admiring the cloudless blue she could ignore the ugliness of my words.

  “Caprice was my friend once.” I spoke to the old woman’s back, desperate to make her understand. “But now she’s something different?something evil.” A heartbeat or two later, I added, “Mojo says she’s a duppy.”

  I thought for a moment that Granny Julep would say nothing, that she’d make her careful way around the weathered headstones and down to the car. I’d already made up my mind to let her go. The woman deserved to grieve her granddaughter in peace.

  Instead, she turned around, movements slow and measured. Silent tears wet her cheeks.

  “I done told that girl not to mess with the Sect Rouge,” she murmured. There was both guilt and sorrow in her raisin-brown eyes. “That kind of power comes with a terrible price.” She gave a low moan, covering her face with gnarled hands that shook. I was at her elbow again in two seconds flat, easing her back toward the stone seat.

  All I needed was to have an old lady with a dark side die on me in the middle of the graveyard. Talk about bad juju.

  Now that she took me seriously, Granny Julep wanted to know all. She blew her nose into a scrap of yellowed lace while I told her everything that happened since I first saw Caprice on the street. It was a relief to talk about it with someone who didn’t question my sanity.

  “Caprice must have been powerful mad when she passed,” Granny said. “Baron Samedi don’t come when he’s called unless he’s promised a soul in return—she know that.”

  “Baron who?”

  She flicked me a look of irritation. “Never mind, girl. All you need to know is that Caprice done sold her soul to the devil.” She frowned into her lap, concentrating as she plucked at the string on her wrist. “She’s bound herself here.”

  “How do I get rid of her? And why isn’t she haunting Mojo instead of bothering me?”

  “Her spirit can’t go as far as the jail?it needs to stay close to where she died,” Granny murmured, still absorbed in her thoughts.

  I stood up, having had enough of doom and gloom in the afternoon. The cemetery was beginning to close in on me, and it would be dark again in a few hours.

  “I don’t have the power to get Mojo out of jail,” I said. “I’m not a lawyer. I’m not anybody. It isn’t fair what Caprice is doing to me.” I was getting angry, and desperate. “No offense, but this stuff scares me shitless. If you loved your granddaughter as much as she loved you, you’ll help me put her to rest.”

  “’Course I’ll help my Caprice,” Granny snapped, “but I’ll do it for her, and not for some snip of a girl that show me disrespect and use profanity here”—she made a quick gesture with one gnarled hand—“in the shadow of the name of the Lord.” She sat as righteously straight-backed as the headstones surrounding us. “This is hallowed ground, girl. Watch your mouth.”

  I bit my lip and looked away, searching for patience. My eye landed on the church steeple with its triple crosses. I couldn’t deny that there was a kind of Presence here on this quiet hillside, maybe even the same Presence that sent me back to do unto others.

  Angels and demons? Voodoo? What the hell did I know?

  “I’m sorry, Granny Julep.” I bit my lip and stared at my shoes, the black leather walking boots that were my favorite. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  She glared at me a moment more, then gave a regal nod of her braid-crowned head. Then she gave me her hand, obviously willing to forgive me enough to help her up.

  “Now, we got work to do.”

  She started down the hill, threading her way through the headstones slowly but surely. I followed in her wake. The old guy in the parking lot saw us coming, took a final puff on his cigarette and ground it underfoot. When Granny reached Caprice’s grave she stopped, waiting for me.

  “What you got in your purse?”

  An odd question, yet one I answered without thinking. “My wallet, my car keys, a comb—you know, typical stuff.”

  “Lipstick?”

  “Yes.”

  She motioned with her hand. “Let me see.”

  Hardly the time or place, if you asked me, but I dug in my Rosenfeld and dutifully held out the black tube. “Take the top off,” she said, “and scoop up some of this here dirt.”

  “I am so not doing that.” I looked down at the fresh pile of red Georgia clay and shuddered. Caprice’s body was under there?talk about creepy.

  “Yes, you is,” Granny replied calmly. “I can’t make you a gris-gris without grave dust.”

  I was either going to have to learn French or quit asking questions. Quitting was easier. I bent down and filled the top of my forty-five-dollar tube of Viva Las Vegas with ugly red dirt, trying my best to keep the gritty stuff off my fingers.

  “Now, let’s go.” Granny had already started toward the parking lot. She called to the old man who was still patiently waiting by the car.

  “Start it up, Albert. We’s going to Indigo.”

  “Indigo?” I wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to step foot in Caprice’s old haunt.

  “Got to,” she said simply. “Only place to get what I need.”

  “I’ll follow you in my own car.”

  She held out a hand for the grave dirt, and I gave it to her gladly.

  “You go straight there, girl, and don’t dally. This got to be done while the dirt is fresh.”

  I stared at her blankly as she turned and hobbled away, the moment surreal.

  Then I headed for my own car. I got the feeling that when Granny Julep said don’t dally, she meant don’t dally.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

  An entire glass cabinet full of rat skulls? I tore my gaze from that macabre display and scanned the shelves full of bottles?rows and rows of them?that lined the small room.

  Granny Julep ignored me, just as she’d ignored me since Albert unlocked the back door and ushered us into Indigo. It hadn’t seemed to bother her that he’d locked the door behind us from the outside, leaving us alone in the deserted store. Just as it didn’t seem to bother her when our footsteps rang loud on the old hardwood floors, sounding out of place in the quiet. Bins filled with produce, shelves filled with foodstuffs, dust motes dancing in the late afternoon sun coming through the front windows. She’d led me to this hidden room, tucked away behind the broom closet.

  “Ugh. What’s that?” An old doll with button eyes lay on a bottom shelf, cak
ed in dirt and smeared with something unidentifiable.

  “Don’t touch it.” Granny Julep spoke sharply, obviously paying more attention than I thought she was.

  I shook my head, grossed out. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  Granny turned away, reaching a gnarled hand toward the bottles, obviously searching for something. I kept quiet and kept looking around, morbidly fascinated by the sheer weirdness of the room.

  One corner held an altar of some sort. Photographs and bits of paper were stuck to the wall with pins, a colorful mosaic backdrop for a carved wooden snake about a foot high. Guttered-out candles and shot glasses full of liquor ringed the base of the statue. I looked closer, then drew back with a shudder, wrinkling my nose at the scent of stale rum. The wooden snake had an actual dead lizard dangling from its open mouth.

  Every inch of wall space in the room was covered with something; feathers, dried snakeskins, strangely carved sticks, and scary-looking masks. This was no made-up movie set for a bad B movie—this place was the real thing. I’d never imagined something like this could exist in the back room of a trendy Jamaican grocery store in Little Five Points, Georgia.

  “Caprice actually practiced voodoo.” I still couldn’t quite grasp it, even surrounded by the proof. Playing at goth in my early twenties was one thing, getting lost in the world of black magic was another. Death had lost its glamour for me after my parents died.

  I still clung to my heavy black eyeliner, but that didn’t make me a ghoul, just a girl.

  Granny was still gathering her ingredients.

  “People believe what they want to believe, child.” She took down another bottle, full of yellowed sticks that rattled against the glass. “If they ain’t got the patience or the gumption to wait on the Lord to solve their problems, they turn to the Evil Ones. The Ones who are always waiting.”

  The matter-of-fact way Granny made the comment was the creepiest thing about it.

  “I don’t understand how you can be a Christian and still believe in this stuff.” I was really baffled by the contradiction. The old woman whom I’d just watched pick up a dried chicken foot kept talking more like a Sunday school teacher than a voodoo priestess.