Savannah Scarlett

by Becky Lee Weyrich

  Later, Mary Scarlett would remember that Bolt kissed her goodbye and promised to be back as soon as possible. Exhausted and drugged with satisfaction from the night before, she never came fully awake before he left.

  When she finally woke up, it was past ten. By now, Bolt was somewhere over middle Georgia, winging his way to Atlanta. She missed him already. Grabbing his pillow from the other side of the bed, she buried her face in it and breathed in Bolt’s scent.

  Sighing softly, she cuddled the pillow close to her body, closed her eyes, and let her thoughts drift back.

  “So good” she murmured. “So right.”

  She had never felt this way before. It almost seemed as if she had just shed her Mary Scarlett-skin and stepped into someone else’s. If Granny Boo was right about all the women of the family for generations losing the men they loved—a pattern, a tradition—then Mary Scarlett figured she must have been left in a basket on the doorstep of the old house on Bull Street. Surely she couldn’t be related to a line of broken-hearted females that stretched back clear to the founding of Savannah. Or, she thought, frowning, Have I finally found Bolt only to lose him again? Is this just the beginning of the end?

  She tossed her head, refusing to allow any senseless gloom to linger. “Anybody who tries to come between me and my man will have to deal with me and Granny Boo’s gun!”

  Something was nagging at her, though—one of those “no-seeums,”—gnats so invisible you don’t know they’re there until they draw your blood.

  “What’s your problem?” she demanded. It came to her immediately. “Kathleen!”

  Yes, that was it! She still couldn’t be sure how far things had gone between Bolt and Kathleen. She didn’t think they had seen each other since the night of Allen’s party, but she really had no way of knowing.

  On sudden impulse, Mary Scarlett reached for the phone. The best way to find out what a woman had on her mind was to invite her to lunch. A couple of martinis, some cozy girl-talk, and secrets often slipped out. Now, while Bolt was gone, was the perfect time. She opened the phone book to look up Kathleen’s office number. To Mary Scarlett’s chagrin, she found it circled in the Yellow Pages with her home number written beside it in Bolt’s squared-off handwriting.

  Mary Scarlett jabbed angrily at the numbers on the phone. After the very first ring, a man with a mellow Southern drawl answered.

  “I’d like to speak to Kathleen O’Shea, please.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he answered. “Kathleen’s not in today. She had to take an early flight this morning. She’ll be out of town for the rest of the week on business. Would you like to speak to one of our other agents?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  Mary Scarlett felt the no-see-’em drawing still more blood. Forcibly, she shook off her suspicions. It was simply a coincidence that Bolt and Kathleen had both left town this morning and would be gone for the rest of the week. Still, there was only one airport in Savannah and that’s where the two of them had headed. Maybe they even ran into each other and had breakfast together. Or maybe, just maybe the two of them shared a common destination and common plans for the week.

  Determined not to let such a silly notion spoil her day, Mary Scarlett got out of bed, showered, dressed, and packed the rest of her things. Within the hour, she was in a cab on her way home to the Bull Street house. Now more than ever, she missed Bolt. It would be difficult to go back alone. She felt nervous, almost scared. Once again, she forced down her feelings. She was being foolish. Why, hadn’t she gone there alone in the middle of the night not so long ago? And, besides, this time she knew she had the lady in her aura watching over her. She smiled and brushed her hand over the top of her head as if she were smoothing her hair.

  “We here, ma’am,” the driver said. “I’ll he’p you with them heavy bags.”

  “Thank you,” she answered offhandedly, staring up at the house as if she were seeing it for the first time in years.

  “This place been empty a long time, ma’am. Shore needs a good yard man. And I reckon the inside gone need some tidyin’ up, too. You could use yo’self one of them domestic engineers. You got anybody to help you, ma’am?”

  “What?” Mary Scarlett’s thoughts had been elsewhere. She had heard the cabbie’s voice behind her, but she hadn’t really been concentrating on his words.

  “A maid, ma’am, and a yard man. Look like you gone need both and then some.”

  She nodded. “Yes, I suppose I’ll have to call an agency.”

  The driver set down her bags and whipped two business cards out of his shirt pocket. He grinned as he handed them to Mary Scarlett. “Best workers in town, my sister-in-law and her boy.”

  She looked at the smudged cards, nodded, and thanked him. “I’ll call them right now.”

  Heading for the flowerpot, she changed her mind abruptly. It wouldn’t be wise to let a stranger see her take the spare key from its hiding place. Instead she dug in her purse for the other one. She opened the unlocked door and he hauled her bags into the foyer.

  “Want I should take these upstairs for you, ma’am?”

  “No, thank you.” She handed him the fare and a generous tip. “I can manage from here.”

  He doffed his cap and gave her a wide grin. “You have a nice day now, ma’am.”

  The door closed. Suddenly, she was all alone with the house and her memories. The place looked different this morning. She had been here only twice before since her return to Savannah—the first time on a dark, stormy day and the second time at night. In the bright, unforgiving sunshine of late morning, the house looked shabbier than it had seemed before. She walked from room to room downstairs, taking a quick inventory.

  “A lot of work,” she murmured. “This is really going to take some time and effort.”

  She glanced down at the cards in her hand. Checking the wall phone in the kitchen, she was delighted to hear a dial tone. Bolt had told her he would have the phones reconnected. Quickly, she punched in the number on the card of “Domestic Engineer” Pearlene Jaudon. Minutes later, Mary Scarlett had the woman’s assurance that she and her son Egmont would be “up to Bull Street in no time a-tall.”

  Mary Scarlett hung up the phone feeling like a beleaguered Confederate general who had just been told that reinforcements were on their way. When she looked at the dusty, moth-eaten drapes, the grimy windows, and the tapestry of cobwebs in every room, the task seemed slightly less than humanly impossible.

  She had come dressed for battle in jeans and a tee-shirt. Leaving her bags in the hallway for the time being, she pitched right in with the clutter in the kitchen. Since the Lamar household had always had a maid, there was no dishwasher. A good starting point, she decided, was emptying all the cupboards, scrubbing them out, and washing every glass, dish, and piece of cutlery on the place. That would give her a chance to sort through things, too. She wanted to see if anything besides Granny Boo’s dessert silver was missing.

  Her search didn’t take long. When she went to the dining room to bring her mother’s best blue-and-gold-trimmed Limoges china into the kitchen for washing, she found only empty shelves inside the carved oak breakfront doors. She stood staring at the circles in dust where the dishes had sat until quite recently, by the looks of things. If Lucy Lamar had moved the china herself, dust would have gathered over the years, leaving no imprint. In addition to this piece of evidence, Mary Scarlett knew that her mother would never have parted with that china. It had belonged to some distant ancestor who brought it from France by way of Nova Scotia.

  Suddenly, Mary Scarlett remembered her vision of Marie, the young woman Jean Lafitte had loved. She had said her mother came to Savannah from Nova Scotia. Had Marie herself eaten from those delicate china plates?

  Next she checked the silver drawer and the heavy old English sterling that had graced Lamar dining tables for generations. Worth a king’s ransom at the price of sterling these days, she mused.

  The t
hief had realized that. The silver was gone, too. Only a few pieces of late Victorian silverplate remained in the felt-lined, camphor-scented drawers that had once dazzled the eyes with the rich gleam of sterling.

  Mary Scarlett was still pondering the thefts when the back doorbell rang. She hurried to the kitchen to see who it might be. She found an enormous black woman in a crisp blue uniform accompanied by a tall teenager wearing overalls and no shirt. Although the young man had not inherited his mother’s mountainous shape, the facial resemblance left no doubt that he was her son.

  “Well, if this ain’t a treat!” Pearlene’s chocolate-colored face split in a grin. “I don’t reckon I’ve been in this house since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.” Seeing the confusion on Mary Scarlett’s face, she said, “Why, you don’t remember me, do you, ma’am?”

  “No. I’m afraid not,” Mary Scarlett admitted.

  “I come from Delsey’s brood. I was the second youngest. And this here’s my baby boy, Egmont” She leaned closer and whispered, “His pa and me always call him ‘Eggie,’ but now he’s got a eye for the girls, he don’t like that no more. He want to be ‘Monty’ now. Don’t that beat all?” She laughed and slapped one ample hip.

  Mary Scarlett stared at the woman. “You’re Delsey’s daughter?”

  “Shore am! She used to bring me to work with her sometimes. I played many a hour on this here kitchen floor. Lord! Lord! Just look at it now! When Ma was in charge here, she kept it so clean you could eat offen it.”

  “I’ve been away,” Mary Scarlett explained, Pearlene’s words making her feel personally responsible for the decay and disarray all about them. “The house has been closed up since my mother’s death.”

  Pearlene pulled a solemn face. “I was sorry to hear about that. Such a sweet lady, Miss Lucy. She was mighty good to us all her life. Many’s the time she sent a box of your own lovely clothes home to us girls. Why, we was the best dressed at our school, thanks to you and your dear mama.”

  Egmont hung back, shifting from one foot to the other, awaiting his instructions on the yard, eager as any teenager to get started, get finished, get paid, and go spend it.

  “Eggie, meet Miss Mary Scarlett,” Pearlene said. “Why, she’s ‘most like family. You best do a good job for her, now. You hear me?”

  “Yeah, Ma,” he answered in a bored tone. Then he nodded, unsmiling at Mary Scarlett. “Ma’am,” was all he said.

  “Well, I reckon it’s time we all rolled up our sleeves. We got a heap of work to do. Eggie, you get that lawnmower outten the truck and get at it. I brought everything I’ll need in here, Miss Mary Scarlett, including elbow grease. I see you done started emptying shelves in the kitchen. Good! I’ll get right to that. Lordy, my ma would die all over again if she saw her kitchen in this mess!”

  Mary Scarlett had wondered what ever happened to Delsey. It saddened her to learn that the old woman had died. “Your mama’s passed on, too? I’m sorry, Pearlene. She and Granny Boo practically raised me.”

  Pearlene smiled her gratitude for the kind words as tears gathered in her eyes. “She always said you was a joy to have around, Miss Mary Scarlett. Loved you like one of her own, she did, to her dying day.” She cast her gaze down, shaking her head sadly. “What they did to her was a crying shame. I won’t never get over it. Not never!”

  “Are you talking about Delsey?”

  Pearlene nodded and dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her apron. “Yes’um.”

  “What happened to her, Pearlene?”

  She glanced over her shoulder to make sure Egmont was out of earshot. Stepping into the kitchen, she closed the door firmly. “They done her in with the mojo,” she whispered. “Killed her dead.”

  “Mojo?” Mary Scarlett repeated. It was a word she hadn’t heard in years, not since her childhood at old Delsey’s knee. “Pearlene, are you talking about voodoo? Do you mean to tell me someone put a conjure on your mama?”

  Her round face strained with remembered grief, Pearlene nodded until her double chin jiggled. “You right about that, Miss Mary Scarlett! Buried a conjure bag somewhere on the place, they did. And, worse than that—you remember them frizzle chickens Ma used to keep for protection?”

  Mary Scarlett almost smiled, remembering the funny looking chickens Delsey raised. All their feathers grew in backward, making them look like one of God’s mistakes or at the very least proving that He had a bizarre sense of humor. Supposedly, these frizzle chickens were the only sure safeguard against conjures. They could seek out and destroy any bag of grave dirt and bones, no matter how powerful its spell.

  “Yes, I remember Delsey’s chickens.”

  “Well, ma’am, before they put the mojo on my ma, they sneaked up and kilt every one of them frizzles. Wrung their poor, scrawny necks. They wasn’t taking no chances. Without the chickens for protection, Ma was as good as dead by morning, even though she lingered on, suffering the agonies of the conjure for weeks.”

  Mary Scarlett felt goosebumps crawl up her arm. “Who did this to her, Pearlene? When did it happen?”

  “They put the spell on her right after your own mama died. See, Ma was still working here then. In fact, she’s the one found poor Miss Lucy. Ma reckoned it was the man and woman that came to the house that night what put the conjure on her.”

  “Someone came here to visit the night of her fall?”

  “Yes’um, least that’s what my ma told me. That was her day off, but she come by the house that night late on her way home from church just to check was Miss Lucy doing all right She’d been a mite poorly, you see. Ma told me that when she was coming in the back way, she heard a woman scream and then a man yell at her.”

  “Probably Mama and Big Dick having a fight,” Mary Scarlett said, remembering the terrible row the night she had left home.

  “No’m, it couldn’t have been. Your daddy had been gone a good while by then. And Ma said it wasn’t Miss Lucy she heard screaming. Anyway, she hid out by the carriage house till she saw a man carry a woman out to a car in the alley. Then he went back inside and brought out a bunch of stuff from the house, put it in the car, and drove off with no headlights on. Ma rushed on in the house then. That’s when she found poor Miss Lucy, lying there in the foyer, all busted up from her fall.”

  “Did Delsey tell this to the police, Pearlene?”

  She looked mortified. “Oh, no, ma’am. Ma knew how touchy Miss Lucy was about gossip concerning the family. She’d have never let on that there was a man in the house, and Big Dick gone and all. Besides, the police wouldn’t have believed a crazy old black woman.”

  “Pearlene! I’m surprised at you. Delsey wasn’t crazy.”

  “Neither was Miss Boo, but everybody figured those two women had spent so many years together that they both had a few bats in the belfry.”

  “Who else knows about this?” Mary Scarlett demanded.

  “Not another soul but me and my man. See, me and my family was living with Ma then. All my brothers and sisters had moved off the place and Pa’d been gone since right after my baby sister was born. Ma told me about it when we found the yard full of dead chickens a couple of days later. She knew she’d be next after them frizzles. She had me go to every mojo doctor in the county. They all said the same thing—without her knowing who done it, they couldn’t fix it. So she just commenced withering away.”

  “That’s terrible!” Mary Scarlett exclaimed. “Poor old Delsey!” There wasn’t much else she could say. It would be a waste of breath to try to convince Pearlene that her mama had succumbed to anything other than a voodoo spell. Besides, from what Dr. Schlager had explained to her about his studies, mojo was very real, a case of mind over matter. If a person thought she was going to die from a spell, she died. Simple as that. Scared to death.

  “Don’t fret yourself, Miss Mary Scarlett. Ma went real peaceful at the end. That day she’d dragged herself up from her deathbed to bake a dozen lemon and pecan pies for the church homecoming.�
� Pearlene shook her head sadly. “But she didn’t never get to taste a one of them pies. Died that night in her sleep, real peaceful after all her suffering. I reckon the angels took pity on her at the last and just floated down from Heaven and carried her sweet soul home. It’s the way she woulda wanted it. But I know she woulda liked to stay long enough to have a piece of one of them pecan pies. At her burying service, the preacher made a point of saying how like Ma it was to bake pies for her own funeral dinner. We had the burying during the church homecoming and everybody who came said it was the best one ever.”

  Mary Scarlett didn’t ask “the best what?” Homecoming or funeral? Instead, her thoughts remained on the man and woman Delsey had seen the night of her mother’s death. Maybe it hadn’t been accidental after all.

  To keep her mind off so many nagging questions, Mary Scarlett ushered Pearlene over to Delsey’s deep sink and they both got busy, Mary Scarlett emptying cabinets and Pearlene washing dishes.

  When the phone rang, Mary Scarlett jumped so she almost fell off her step ladder. She was emptying the highest shelves, pulling out old crockery and copper pans that had not been used in her lifetime. Pearlene was up to her elbows in soapsuds, singing hymns as she washed.

  “I’ll get it, Miss Mary Scarlett.”

  “No, let me,” she answered. “I’m almost finished up here. I wonder who in the world it could be? Nobody knows I’m here and the phone was just reconnected.”

  Allen Overman knew. His grapevine never failed him. Pearlene’s brother-in-law, who had driven Mary Scarlett from Bolt’s place to Bull Street, had run into ’Gator White down on River Street performing for the tourists. ’Gator had wanted to know what was new, so the cabbie, for lack of any better gossip, had told him about his fare to the old Lamar house on Bull Street and that a right nice lady was moving in today. ’Gator had taken an emergency break from his banjo-picking to call Allen.

  And, as Mary Scarlett soon found out, that wasn’t all Allen Overman knew.