Dead Girls Are Easy

by Terri Garey

  “True.” It wasn’t worth arguing over. “But even if Granny Julep isn’t necessarily looking out for my best interests, she has personal reasons for wanting Caprice to be put to rest. What she wants is what I want.” The more I tried to convince Joe, the more I convinced myself that I had to talk to her. “She knows things I don’t. Why shouldn’t I use her the way she’s used me?”

  “Because you’re not a user, Nicki.” Joe sounded resigned. “If anything, you’re too nice.”

  “I am not!” Indignant, I straightened. “I’m one tough cookie, and don’t you forget it.”

  Joe let go of my hand to take a corner. “Yeah, like a Fig Newton…one with a mushy center.”

  CHAPTER 19

  We were almost too late. One look at Granny Julep’s face, almost as gray as her hair, told me that. Her eyes were closed and a thin strip of tubing ran under her nose.

  “It’s way past visiting hours, so make it quick,” Joe murmured. “If you can get past him, that is.”

  “Him” would be Albert, already rising from his chair beside Granny’s bed, glaring at us both.

  “I need to see her, Albert.” I wasn’t going to waste time arguing with a man who never had anything to say. “Someone left a knife on my doorstep, and Caprice was in my house.”

  At her granddaughter’s name, Granny’s eyes fluttered open. Her fingers twitched. “You got to do it, child. You the only one who can do it,” she murmured.

  I came into the room, daring Albert with my eyes to try and stop me. It helped to know that Joe was right behind me, lending me courage. I knew I’d won when Albert shifted so I could get closer to the bed.

  “Granny Julep.” I wanted to be sure she recognized me and understood what I was saying. “It’s Nicki.” The little nod she gave me was enough—she was weak, but still there.

  “Caprice attacked Joe tonight.” I knew she understood when her eyes flicked to Joe, then back to me. “She’s stronger now,” I shuddered, “very strong. Evil, angry. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Knife?” Granny’s voice was feeble, but I could understand her.

  “A big one. With a red cord tied around the handle. Someone left it on my doormat.”

  She closed her eyes again, and for a moment I thought she’d gone to sleep. “G’day,” she murmured. “Bokor.”

  Huh? I was so frustrated I could cry. Gibberish wasn’t going to help me.

  “The knife is the Mark of Guede.” Albert’s voice made me jump. He’d moved to the opposite side of the bed and stood facing us over Granny’s blanketed form. Grizzled and scowling, disapproving as ever, his face softened as he gazed down at the woman on the bed. “Someone wants to steal your soul.”

  The room seemed to tilt a little, righting itself at the touch of Joe’s hand on my shoulder. Steal my soul?

  “Sir…” Joe’s voice was mild, but I could hear his impatience. “What exactly are you saying?”

  Albert lifted his eyes to mine, and in their raisin-black depths I saw something I didn’t like.

  Pity.

  “Felicia,” Granny murmured, drawing our attention back to her. “The chains.” Her eyes fluttered open, finding and focusing on the old man who hovered over the bed. She moved her hand toward Albert, and he took it. “Tell them, hon.”

  Confused and scared as I was, I blinked back tears, touched by the obvious devotion between the old couple. They wouldn’t be a couple much longer, and they knew it.

  “Do you know a woman named Felicia?” Albert’s words were abrupt, but his face was resigned. He didn’t let go of Granny’s hand.

  I shook my head, drawing a total blank. “I don’t think so.”

  “A black woman, who sells organic soaps and lotions.”

  I caught him with that skinny piece of trash who supplies us with that damn organic soap! Caprice’s voice rang in my head, making me shudder. Go see that skinny ’ho, Felicia. Tell her you’ll go to DFCS about them kids of hers.

  Felicia—the woman Mojo had been having an affair with.

  Joe tightened his arm around my shoulder as Albert kept talking.

  “We didn’t know she was bokor.” Whatever bokor meant, it must have been pretty bad—Albert was frowning even more than usual. “Or she…” He glanced down at Granny. “…Julep would have done things differently. Now it’s nearly too late.”

  I seized on that one word. “Nearly?” Joe squeezed my shoulder, silently urging me to let Albert finish.

  “It isn’t good to speak of these things.”

  I was still surprised Albert was speaking at all, so I bit my lip and just listened.

  “The knife you found on your doorstep is proof this woman seeks to ‘create serviteur’ with our Caprice. She torments her spirit, keeping it separated from her body, until her soul becomes corrupted”—he lowered his voice, face strained—“a different thing entirely.”

  I glanced at Joe, knowing he remembered only the evil spirit who’d attacked him in the kitchen, not the smiling, upbeat Caprice whose laugh used to carry all the way into the street.

  “The knife has marked you as the cheval, the horse. If this woman can force Caprice’s spirit to enter into you, she wins.”

  “Whoa there, Nelly.” If I were going to be compared to a horse, I’d respond in kind. “‘Force Caprice’s spirit to enter into me’? That’s impossible.”

  Albert just looked at me.

  “Isn’t it?” Getting no response, I turned to Joe. “Am I the only one who finds this conversation completely bizarre?”

  “Call it what you like,” Albert said. “But a death has occurred, and a bargain has been struck. The Baron must have his soul. He is not particular whose he takes.”

  Either all that time on the Internet had paid off or I must’ve been learning “cryptic” through osmosis, because what Albert said suddenly made some kind of weird sense.

  Felicia had made a deal with the devil to get Caprice out of the way, but now that her rival was dead, she wanted the ultimate voodoo revenge—total control of Caprice’s soul. In order to do that, she had to give the Baron another, and for some reason she’d picked mine.

  “Why me?” I asked, gripping Joe’s hand with fingers gone suddenly icy. “I don’t even know this woman!”

  Albert blinked, looked away. “You put yourself in front of her when you tried to help Caprice.” His voice was so low I could barely hear it. “Just like my Julep.”

  I’d no sooner wished for a chair before Joe was guiding me to the one at Granny’s bedside. Thankfully, I made it before my knees gave out. I stared at Granny’s gray head on the pillow, knowing in my heart it was old age that claimed her, but wondering nonetheless.

  Did this Felicia person really have the power to do what Albert said?

  “You’ll have to forgive me, Mister…” Joe waited for Albert to supply his last name, but Albert was back to being close-mouthed. “…um, sir. This Felicia is the one who left a knife on Nicki’s doormat? What’s her last name? Maybe the police should have a little talk with her.”

  Albert demonstrated his remarkable ability to drip contempt without saying a word. The silence in the room was broken only by the hum of the fluorescent light above the bed.

  “What do I have to do, Albert?” I was so tired of fighting shadows. I wanted it over.

  “She done told you, girl.” He was talking about Granny, whose hand he still held. “You got to bind Caprice with chains. And you got to do it tonight, before the sun rises.”

  Caprice was in her coffin.

  CHAPTER 20

  Home improvement stores have everything.

  By the time the moon was rising over the triple steeple of Trinity Baptist Church, Joe and I were well prepared to dig up a grave and chain down a corpse.

  “This is insane,” Joe said. We were sitting in the parking lot of the church, looking out at the darkened cemetery where I’d first met Granny Julep.

  It looked very different tonight.

  “Tell me again why we’re do
ing this.” Joe wasn’t happy, and neither was I. The car was still idling. There were no lights on inside the church. The place was empty except for the permanent residents under the lawn.

  “Because if we don’t, Caprice will never rest. She’ll be doomed to walk the world at night as an evil spirit, doing whatever Felicia wants her to do.” I looked away from the spooky graveyard and into Joe’s eyes. “Scare people, hurt people—like what happened in the kitchen.” My real fear was that she’d kill someone—like me—and that person would end up just like her.

  To comfort myself, I repeated what little I knew from a brief stop at a cyber café on the way over. The coffee had cleared my head as I’d surfed the Net, leaving room for the sketchy details to engrave themselves on my brain.

  “Caprice’s body and soul are still connected, but not for much longer. We have to bind them forever, symbolically, with the chains.” It sounded like something from a bad episode of The Twilight Zone. “The weight of the chains ties the spirit to the body.” I looked out over the shadowed headstones and shuddered.

  “It’s a last resort, and our last chance to get rid of her.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  Joe had gone from skeptic to believer. It was a relief to know he didn’t think I was crazy.

  Yet here I was, about to test that theory to the limit.

  “Let’s get this over with.” Joe turned off the engine and the lights. We got out and gathered our gear from the trunk: two shovels, two heavy-duty flashlights, and a length of chain, the sturdiest we could find. Joe draped it over his shoulder, then took both shovels and turned on his flashlight.

  I lit up a beam with a trembling finger and led the way into the sea of headstones, glad the place was nowhere near a main road. This was a pretty rural area. We’d still have to keep an eye out for the occasional passing car.

  It was quiet. Dead quiet. I found myself wishing for crickets, even an owl. Anything besides the sound of my boots swishing through the grass, anything to cover the scared rasp of my breathing.

  “I think it was over here,” I murmured. We were in a shadowed maze of crosses and stone slabs. I tried hard not to let my flashlight rest on the names inscribed on them. It was easier not to think about who or what they sheltered.

  “Kill the flashlight,” Joe hissed, “a car’s coming.”

  We snapped off the lights and ducked, Joe crouching behind a headstone as I slipped behind a stone angel. He was a shadow in the darkness, and I hoped I looked the same.

  The headlights of a car swept over the stones to our left, casting a moving silhouette of squares and crosses over the graves. A crunch of gravel reached us.

  Someone had pulled into the church parking lot.

  I ducked as low as I could go, daring to take a peek around the angel’s robed feet.

  A sheriff’s cruiser. Dammit, dammit, damn it all.

  Joe scuttled toward me, dragging me down with an arm around the shoulders. He pointed silently at a large double-stoned grave site about twelve feet away, a little deeper inside the cemetery.

  A mist was beginning to rise from the grass, and the moon was shrouded. If we could stay out of sight, maybe the cop would go away. What was he gonna do, search an entire cemetery in the dark?

  I nodded to let Joe know I got it. He slipped off the chains with hardly a rattle, and we left them there with the shovels. I followed him as he crept toward the big headstone.

  The blare of the cop’s radio startled me. He’d opened the cruiser’s door and was getting out. Joe and I froze for a split second, then moved even faster. We stayed with the shadows, keeping low.

  Then we were safe behind the stone, pressed against each other shoulder-to-shoulder, and breathing fast.

  Just in time, too. Another sweep of headlights, another crunch of gravel.

  “Oh, shit,” I whispered. Not another one.

  “Whatcha got, Dan?” The second car rolled to a stop, still idling. The man’s voice carried clearly up the hillside.

  “BMW 325i, looks like. Nice car.”

  Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

  “Stolen?”

  “I dunno. Haven’t run the plates yet. Hood’s still warm and it’s locked, I checked. No sign of any damage.”

  One of the cops hawked and spit. Tobacco, probably. What else was there for a lawman to do in rural Georgia besides hang out in church parking lots and chew tobacco?

  “Reverend Cobb’s brother is in town. Some fancy lawyer from Boston. Could be his.”

  The other cop answered, “Yeah. Could be. Looks like a lawyer’s car.”

  Even in the dark I could see Joe’s insulted expression. I controlled a sudden urge to giggle.

  “I gotta take a whiz,” said the first cop.

  This time I had to clap my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. Joe’s teeth gleamed in the darkness as he smiled. He slid an arm around my shoulders and held me, our backs to the tombstone.

  “Well, hurry up, then. Coffee’s getting cold.”

  “You got my bear claw?”

  Doughnuts. It was too much. Joe and I rocked with silent laughter despite the tricky situation. After all, what else was there for a lawman to do in rural Georgia besides hang out in church parking lots, chew tobacco, and eat doughnuts?

  “Yeah, I got your bear claw. Now hurry up…it’ll be closing time at the Dew Drop Inn soon, and Earl asked us to swing by and patrol the parking lot. Government checks came in the mail today.”

  Mentally adding “breaking up fights between drunken rednecks” to my roster of sheriff’s duties, I buried my face against Joe’s chest to stifle any giggles.

  He smelled great; male sweat and Tide. There was something to be said for a guy who knew how to do his own laundry.

  “Shh,” Joe whispered. His breath in my ear made my nipples tingle. “We may be here awhile.”

  I lifted my head and he lowered his. My lips were next to his ear now. “Ever make out in a graveyard?” I kissed the rim of his ear, letting my tongue just touch it.

  Joe’s breath caught.

  Behind us, the two cops slurped their coffee and ate their bear claws. They’d begun to argue good-naturedly about the best bait to use in bass fishing.

  “You’re a very bad girl, aren’t you?” Joe murmured.

  “You have no idea.” I had, in fact, made out in a graveyard once. Junior year of high school; Daryl Metcalf. Daryl had been bony and brooding, perfect teenage goth material.

  Joe’s lips were inches from my own. It was dark, his eyes unreadable. But when I slid my hand down his pants, the surge of maleness I felt there told me all I needed to know.

  “Shh.” I kissed him, slipping my tongue inside his mouth, and he surged again beneath my hand.

  I felt a bolt of heat inside that surprised me, given the circumstances. Making out was one thing, but…

  What the hell.

  So while the cops finished up their coffee break and the moon reduced the world to shades of gray, I brought Joe over the edge to the dark side. We barely even noticed when the first cop slammed his car door shut and the two cruisers drove away.

  And when it was over, and Joe lay gasping for breath, me nestled beneath his arm, I looked up at the night sky and smiled. The line between life and death was a fine one. Throw in some sex and everything got blurred.

  “Oh, my God.” Joe sounded dazed but happy. “What just happened?”

  “If I have to explain it to you then I must not’ve done it very well.” I kissed him on the chin, feeling the rasp of stubble in the darkness. “But don’t get too comfy…we’ve got work to do.”

  I sat up, raking the hair out of my face with my fingers. Joe straightened his clothes, only pausing once to lean over and kiss me, softly, on the lips.

  “Never a dull moment. One of the things I love about you.”

  He stood up, leaving me sitting there with a stunned look on my face. Thank God it was too dark for him to see it.

  I heard the quick
rasp of a zipper, then Joe reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet.

  “Let’s get the shovels,” he said.

  Caprice’s grave was easy to find, even in the dark. It was buried under a mass of white flowers, all of which we’d use to cover the signs of our digging when we left this place.

  As I stood there staring at the pile of flowers, I heard a whisper, like a sigh on the breeze, swirling through the darkness. “Nicki, please.”

  “Did you hear that?”

  Joe froze, gauging my reaction. He shook his head, but with a quick shrug let the chains fall to the ground, clinking and clanking. Then he moved closer, gripping the shovel in one hand, scanning the shadows.

  I shone the flashlight beam over the nearby headstones, hoping against hope I’d see nothing, yet knowing something was there.

  “She’s here, Joe. I heard her.”

  “Nicki.” How could a whisper be so frightening? “Help me.”

  Help me? I’d help her all right—I’d help her get the hell away from me. Even though the flashlight was shaking, along with my voice, I said to Joe, “Let’s dig.”

  “I don’t hear her this time.” Joe’s voice was somber. “What if she tries to stop us?”

  The memory of Joe choking, gasping for air, made me touch the black beads beneath my shirt, and when I did, another memory came back to me.

  “Granny says spirits are weaker on hallowed ground.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Joe muttered.

  And so we started digging, me doing my best to ignore the whispers that continued to swirl in my ears.

  “She keeps asking me to help her.” I wanted Joe to know what was going on. “She doesn’t seem angry. Do you think it’s some kind of trick?” I kept my voice low, continually looking over my shoulder. “Every other time Caprice asked me for help, it was a demand, not a request.”

  Joe shrugged, digging for all he was worth. “I’m just following your lead, Nicki. You’re the voodoo expert.”

  “Don’t say that!” I glanced around uneasily. “I only know enough to be dangerous.”

  “Please, Nicki, please.” As scary as the whispering was, there was a note of pathos in it I couldn’t ignore. “Help me.”