“I don’t know.”
“All right, I’ll give it another go.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I think you were quite taken with the tale of your ancestor and Lady Barnsley, and then you fell in love with the portrait you saw in Atlanta. I watched it happen on your face while you were looking at it. That image is wandering around in your brain, not your yard.”
“Maybe.”
For some reason, I had a fleeting thought of the coin hidden upstairs in my mother’s room, a silver ghost of the moon, just waiting there. I wondered when someone would ask me about it and want to know where it was. Maybe, I thought, I could use it to buy the portrait of Lady Barnsley; hang it in my living room. Maybe that was all she wanted: for her portrait to be back among family.
Andrews mistook my musing.
“Okay, then.” He sighed, exasperated beyond measure. “What do you think it is? You’re obviously dying to tell me.”
I rallied, sipped a quick breath.
“Something much more frightening than a ghost story.”
“Oh for God’s sake.”
“What if a curse actually has its own kind of energy field? And what if we take quantum physics seriously?”
“What if we do?” He was irritated because he couldn’t see where I was going.
“Suppose a curse is like all other energy: It can’t be created or destroyed; it can only change form. Suppose the curse that Dan and I lifted last night isn’t really gone—or what if the rage Lady Barnsley let loose is still floating somewhere in the air? They’ve only changed form and are wandering now, looking for somewhere else to land.”
I thought of where I’d been when the events of the previous few days had begun: engaged in useless pursuit, moving rocks up a hill and sweating in September heat.
“You mean you think that the form of some curse has found its way to your house,” Andrews asked, “and is wandering in those woods? God, but you’re a hopeless wretch. I give up. You can believe all that—if it makes you happy.”
He shook his head. It was the face of Dr. Andrews but the voice of Dan Battle.
And the voice may have caused me to have a small epiphany. I was forced to consider that although it was clearly possible to see the events of this world as a series of chaotic, unrelated moments, maybe there was another possibility.
What if I did take new physics seriously? In Einstein’s universe, the reality of an event depends entirely on the person who sees it happen. The observer makes the observation.
And if that were true, I thought, then it might be possible for me to see the events of this world the way Dan might, as a completely interdependent web of relationships, where everything relied on a kind of miracle of perfect connection.
“Maybe,” I began slowly, as if conceding some long-battled game, “if I’m the observer of my own life, I have a choice. I can see my existence as a meaningless mess, or I can see it as a constant miracle.”
“Right,” Andrews responded hesitantly, staring into my eyes, still not certain where I was going.
“So I suppose I have to ask myself this: If it is up to me how I see everything, then what kind of world do I want to live in—a rocky place that’s empty of significance, or a green place filled with wonder?”
But before I could finish the thought, my eyes widened and I blinked back what I was seeing in the woods outside my kitchen window.
Thank God Andrews turned around just in time to see it, too: a huge white swan bursting from the shadows and rowing upward toward the autumn sky.
By Phillip DePoy
The Fever Devilin Mysteries
The Devil’s Hearth
The Witch’s Grave
A Minister’s Ghost
A Widow’s Curse
The Flap Tucker Mysteries
Easy
Too Easy
Easy as One-Two-Three
Dancing Made Easy
Dead Easy
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A WIDOW’S CURSE. Copyright © 2007 by Phillip DePoy. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DePoy, Phillip.
A widow’s curse / Phillip DePoy.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-2103-3
1. Devilin, Fever (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Folklorists—Fiction. 3. Mountain life—Fiction. 4. Appalachian Region, Southern—Fiction. 5. Georgia—Fiction. 6. Family secrets—Fiction. 7. Talismans—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.E624W53 2007
813'.54—dc22
2007010866
A Widow's Curse Page 27