by Lisa Maxwell
“And what was you doing there, boy?” Mama Legba asked, her hands on her hips and her attention, finally, not on me.
“Mom sent me,” he said simply.
Mama Legba blinked, her expression tense. “Odeana saw it?”
Odane nodded, and Mama Legba sank into her chair.
“What?” I asked, not understanding why the mood had shifted so suddenly, so dangerously, in the room.
Mama Legba glanced up at Odane and then, after he gave a slight nod, she met my eyes. “My sister was born behind the veil. She got the second sight,” she said reverently, like that was supposed to mean something to me. “Some babies is born in the caul, and they has the sight—the ability to see what will be. Odeana been having her visions since we was girls, but she only sees certain things. Important things. Usually, when she gets the sight, somebody’s gonna die.”
“She saw one of us about to die?” I asked Odane.
“I’m not sure exactly what she saw, but she yanked me out of bed and told me I needed to get myself to the address where I found you. I learned a long time ago not to question my mom when she’s got a vision.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t question her this time either,” I told him, and I meant every word of it and a whole bunch more that I didn’t say.
“Me, too,” he said softly, and maybe for the first time, his voice didn’t hold even a hint of scorn. Then he turned back to Mama Legba. “I found Lucy in the basement. I almost didn’t find her, though—she’d crawled through a smaller door that went down into a second cellar. It was so dark in there I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. I almost turned back, but
I caught sight of the white toe of her shoe right before.”
We all looked over to Lucy, who was curled on the couch and still holding the box securely in her arms even though she hadn’t quite come to completely. Her eyes were open now, but she was sort of staring off.
Mama Legba went over and kneeled down next to her. Brushing some of the hair back from her pale face, she made some cooing noises to try and wake her. Lucy stirred a little, but only to adjust her hold on the box.
“Try to get her all the way awake while I make her something to help clear up her energy,” Mama Legba said as she pushed herself up. “She’s got mixed up in something dark and we need to be getting it off her.”
While the tea was brewing, Mama Legba lit a smudge stick and wafted the smoke around. Little by little, Lucy’s eyes began to look more focused. Little by little she stirred enough that we could get her to sip the tea. Finally, Mama Legba managed to get her to give up the box she was holding and set it aside.
When she was feeling well enough and her eyes had finally taken on their usual sharpness, Mama Legba settled herself down in the chair across from her. “You feeling better, Lucy-girl?”
She nodded and took another sip of tea.
“What happened, child?” Mama Legba asked.
I sat next to Lucy, to help keep her upright, but Odane took to lurking in the corner, a hip propped against one of the countertops, his arms across his chest. He had a look of utter concentration on his face as he listened.
“I went in the house,” Lucy told us, her eyes far off, like she was remembering. “I looked upstairs first, but there wasn’t anything that seemed important, so I decided to try the basement, like Chloe had suggested.”
Mama Legba glanced at me, one dark brow raised.
“I wasn’t allowed down there as a kid,” I said, sounding more defensive than I meant to.
“At first I didn’t see anything interesting in the basement either. Just a lot of old stuff, and I didn’t think that Thisbe would leave something important sitting out in the open.” Lucy paused long enough for another sip of tea. “But then I noticed the door. I almost missed it, since it was so dark down there and there were a couple boxes stacked in front of it. So I moved them and found this other part of the basement.”
“That’s where I found her,” Odane confirmed.
Lucy’s face went a little pink. “Thank you for that,” she said.
Odane nodded, but he didn’t add anything more.
“Anyway, I had my phone, so I used the light and went in.” She hesitated then, and her eyes were far away and serious.
“Take your time, child,” Mama Legba said, touching Lucy’s knee.
She blinked a few times, then closed her eyes for a long moment, like she was trying to visualize it. “There wasn’t any light in there at all,” she said. “But when I pointed my flashlight up on the walls, they were covered in symbols. Kind of like the symbols that were on that tomb.”
Mama Legba frowned. “You mean Thisbe’s tomb?”
Lucy nodded.
“Wait,” Odane said. “Back it up. Thisbe has a tomb?”
Mama Legba gave him an impatient look. “Last place they saw the old witch was in one of the cemeteries. She’d been hiding the boy’s body—”
“Alex,” Lucy interrupted, glancing up at Odane to explain. “She’d kept his body in one of those old above-ground tombs, only it wasn’t a normal tomb. It was all carved up with these strange markings, and they must have had some sort of magical properties, because they seemed to glow.”
Odane thought about this. “I didn’t see any markings in the cellar, but I didn’t have a light. I tried to use my phone, same as you, but it was dead.”
“Mine went dead, too,” I told them. But when I pulled my phone out of my back pocket, sure enough, it was fine. Plenty of battery. Plenty of reception.
Still no other messages from Piers.
“So whatever happened must have done something to interrupt the power,” Odane said, checking his own phone and finding it was also just fine.
“That’s about all I really remember,” Lucy told us. “I went down into the room—it had an even lower ceiling than the regular basement—it was all made of dirt, like someone had dug it out by hand or something. And the walls, like I said, were covered with these weird inscriptions. There was an altar or something there, but it wasn’t like yours,” she told Mama Legba. “It didn’t have anything but red candles that had been burned down to stubs and a tarnished silver bowl. Underneath the bowl, I found the box. I almost didn’t notice it, because it looked like a stand or something for the bowl, but the second I picked it up … ” She frowned. “I don’t know what happened.”
“Sounds to me like you tripped some kind of alarm,” Mama Legba said.
If Lucy had tripped an alarm, it meant that I probably hadn’t been the one to cause those evil bugs. That realization made me feel a little better. Not much, but a little.
Mama Legba looked at Odane, her patience at an end. “Now what about these bugs you was talking about?”
“It’s like I was telling you, when I pulled up, the whole place was dark as night, but it wasn’t night. You think the cicadas can get bad? They don’t have nothing on what I saw out there.” Even Odane looked uneasy remembering it. “The whole bed of my truck is still filled with them.”
Mama Legba perked up at this. “You best show me, then. You girls wait here. We’ll be back.”
By the time Mama Legba and Odane came back, Lucy had more color to her and almost seemed to be back to her own self.
“Please tell me you didn’t bring any of those things in here,” I said when I saw that Mama Legba had something cupped in her hands.
“Oh, hush,” she told me. She went into the hallway—the one that led out to the front shop—and after a minute returned with a heavy stone bowl. “Let’s see what we got here,” she said, using a wooden dowel to crush a couple of the black bugs in the bowl.
I shuddered at the sound of the exoskeletons crunching beneath her pestle.
“Scarab beetles,” she said, though I’m not sure if she was talking to us or to herself. “But not really.” When she was done, her brows went up as she examined the contents.
“Well?” Odane said. He didn’t seem half as bothered by what was happening as I was.
&n
bsp; “They might look like scarabs, but that’s not what they is. See?” She thrust the bowl toward him.
He examined the contents critically and then licked his finger and dabbed the tip of it into the bowl. Then he examined the fine powder coating the tip of his finger before touching it to the tip his tongue.
“Ugh.” I couldn’t hide my disgust.
“They’re not real bugs,” he said, as though that excused it.
“They looked real enough to me, and who goes around putting nasty stuff in their mouth like that? Just … ugh.”
Odane kind of chuckled at that, and I felt the sudden urge to throw something at him.
“They’re made of dirt,” he said, taking the bowl from Mama Legba and bringing it to me. “They looked like bugs and acted like bugs, but look—they crumble into nothing when you press on them at all.”
Sure enough, he was right. There wasn’t any sign of anything that remotely looked like a bug in the bowl. Certainly, there should have been some kind of wetness from their bodies—the insects hadn’t been dead that long. But the bowl only held some dry, dark dirt.
Not that I was going to taste it.
“So what does that mean?” I said, stepping back. Dust or not, I didn’t want to be anywhere close to it.
“It means that we was right about Lucy tripping some sort of alarm. These are just a bit of magic. Entering that cellar or touching that there box must have released a kind of energy, enough to animate this bit of earth into something fearsome.”
I shuddered. Fearsome wasn’t the half of it.
Mama Legba frowned as she walked over and settled herself on the couch to look at the box. “Sure don’t seem like much,” she said, letting her hands hover above it. “But it must be or she wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of protecting it like she did. I wonder what it’s hiding.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Odane said.
“We need to open it,” Lucy agreed.
Mama Legba’s mouth went tight, but she didn’t disagree. “We need a protection charm before we start,” she said, placing the box on the low table near the couch. “You want to try, Chloe-girl?”
It was the first time she’d offered to let me try any sort of charm since everything had happened, and I felt a little jolt of excitement as something shifted inside of me. Something that yearned to reach out and take the opportunity she offered.
“No,” I told her, slamming that yearning back into its own box. “You can do it.”
“I know well enough that I can do it,” Mama Legba said, “and I know you can do it, too. The question is if you know.”
I glanced away, unable to meet her eyes. “I’m not ready for anything like that,” I told her. In truth, though, I wanted to be ready. I wanted to feel that same spark of excitement that had flickered through me when the candles snuffed themselves out or when Odeana’s electricity flickered. But I was worried the part of me that wanted those things was way too much like my momma.
Mama Legba seemed to understand. Her hand rested on top of mine, and finally I looked up at her. “You afraid of the wrong thing, Chloe-girl. Not all magic means you linked to Thisbe, child. There ain’t no reason for you to keep running from what’s inside of you. I tried to tell that boy of yours that much, but now I’m telling you as well.”
It was too much of a temptation, and far too much of a risk, so I drew my hand away. “I’m not afraid,” I lied. “I just don’t want to.”
Mama Legba considered me a moment or two longer, and then seemed to decide it wasn’t worth arguing for now. She lit a stick of incense, and then holding her hands over the box, chanted the protection charm. Taking a deep breath, like she was trying to steady herself, she eased the latch on the box free and gently opened the lid.
We all seemed to be holding our breaths, waiting for something to happen when Mama Legba eased the lid up. When nothing did, the relief in the room was palpable.
“Let’s see what we got here,” Mama Legba said, gently lifting the topmost object.
Whatever I’d been expecting, the contents of the box were a disappointment. Inside I didn’t see anything at all worth protecting. The box didn’t hold nothing but a mishmash of useless junk: a faded silk ribbon gone brittle with age, a few buttons, something that might have once been a Gris-Gris. And some scraps of paper, most of which had long ago turned brown.
“What is all that?” I asked as Mama Legba picked through the pieces.
“Seems like a record of some sort. They’re all in a sort of order, too—most recent on top,” Mama Legba said, sorting through them.
She laid it all out on the table in front of us, piece-by-piece, as she went through them. “There are some more recent ticket stubs for flights, but the older they get, the more interesting they look. This here looks like a receipt for passage on a ship of some sort, right around the turn of the last century.” She read over one of the more fragile bits before looking up at me, her eyes dark with some unspoken emotion as they met mine. “I think this might be Thisbe’s free papers. Looks like it was dated 1810, when she wasn’t more than about eighteen years old.” She went to hand the paper to me, but I shook my head, refusing it.
It was hard enough knowing what my momma was without also having to think about what she’d been. I couldn’t think about her being no older than I was and owned by another person.
“I wonder what she did to get her freedom,” Odane said as he took the outstretched papers from Mama Legba.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked, not liking the note of amusement in his voice.
He glanced up at me with a lazy shrug. “Only that she must have had some sort of leverage to get her owner to let her go. Either that or she earned enough on the side—or someone else did—to purchase her freedom. Whatever the case, these didn’t come cheap,” he said, setting the papers back down on the table.
“This looks like a record of her life,” Lucy said, looking at another bit of paper—one that looked like a ticket. “She wouldn’t have been able to stay in one place without people catching on, so she traveled around.”
“Not just around,” Odane said, tapping the scraps. “Look here, this one is a transatlantic crossing to Liberia in the mid 1800s. Then she travels through Haiti and Jamaica before coming back to America.”
Mama Legba made a thoughtful noise. “There’s a pattern, sure enough. She could have gone most anywhere, but she didn’t. She wasn’t off in Paris or Rome, like she could’ve been. Look here, West Africa, the West Indies—all places on the Middle Passage. And they are places that have their own practices and beliefs when it comes to the spirits,” she said. “These are places where Voodoo was born and grew up in different ways.”
“So she was learning?” Odane asked. “Maybe collecting different parts of the tradition from different places.”
“Maybe so,” Mama Legba agreed. “From the looks of it, she certainly got around enough over the last hundred years that she could have learned all sorts of things.”
Lucy picked up the last of the pile of scraps. “What are these?”
Mama Legba held out her hand and Lucy gave her the fragile bits of paper. When she gently unfolded one, it nearly broke in two along the crease. “Looks like these are some newspaper clippings that date back … ” Her brows went up. “Some date way back.”
Odane leaned in for a better look. “What are they clippings off?”
“I don’t rightly know,” she said. “These here seem to be a couple of death notices.” She placed the clipped columns of newsprint on the table. “And these are just reports about that plantation out there Lucy’s daddy works on.”
Lucy leaned in and tapped a finger on one of the scraps before scooping it up. “I remember my dad talking about this. The state was going to reclaim the property because the last owner hadn’t kept up with back taxes before he died. The house was abandoned for decades before some private owner bought it for cheap, but he couldn’t afford to actually restore it, so he sold
it to the university.” She glanced up from reading. “That’s when they hired my dad.”
“A lot of these have to do with the plantation,” Odane said, pulling another of the clippings from the pile. “Says here this guy owned Le Ciel back in the 1920s, but he went missing sailing off the coast of Cuba.” He held the obituary out to me.
Without really thinking about it, I reached for it and—
It had been years since I’d seen the place, but the mansion looked the same as it always had. Like the years couldn’t touch the sanctity of those white walls.
I almost didn’t go around back, to the servant’s entrance, like I knew I was supposed to. I’d been so many places, learned so many things, and it was easy to forget that in this place, I wasn’t anything at all.
The woman who answered the door wiped her hands on her apron as she looked me up and down without so much as a word. Her lined face didn’t show any sign of recognition, but all the same I had to hold myself steady while she looked over me. When she decided I’d do, she ushered me into the stuffy warmth of the kitchen and then on past that to the coolness of the hall beyond.
“Mister La Rue will see you in his library,” she said.
“Mister?” I asked, surprised. Usually it was left to the woman of the house to interview new servants.
“Missus isn’t well today,” the woman said, giving me a look that let me know that the missus was often not well, and that “not well” was a nicer way of saying something that shouldn’t be spoken about in mixed company.
When I entered the library, La Rue was sitting behind his desk. His attention was focused on some big ledgers he was looking over, and he waved me to sit on the stiff-backed sofa without so much as looking up.
I did as he bade me to do, keeping my hands tucked in my lap and taking a moment to look around the place. I’d never been inside the big house, and now that I was, I hated Roman Dutilette that much more for building it.