The Girl in the Maze

by R. K. Jackson

  “The Geechees?” Martha pulled out her notebook and pen.

  “They’re direct descendants of slaves who were freed after the Civil War. Let me show you….” She opened a cabinet on the wall and pulled out a black-and-white photograph. It showed a group of people standing under the bough of a gnarled oak. A man with a bushy beard and cane sat in a ladder-back chair. A heavyset woman stood next to him—flowing dress, a scarf around her head. An older gentleman cradled a drum. Two young women gazed at the camera, wide-eyed, enigmatic.

  “They’re the direct descendants of slaves. Like the Gullah, in South Carolina, only…now where did we put those—” She opened a shoe box, glanced inside, replaced the top. “They’ve lived in isolation, maintaining a truly distinct culture and system of beliefs.”

  “What kind of beliefs?”

  “They still believe in magic, ghosts, those kinds of things.”

  Martha felt a chill run down her back. She wrote the word in her notebook. Ghosts?

  “Don’t worry; they’re beautiful, gracious people. The elders hand down traditions to their children, traditions they brought from places like Sierra Leone and Liberia. It’s a wonderful culture, but it’s dying, you see.”

  Martha nodded, jotting down the information.

  “Only seventy-five are left on Shell Heap. Most of their other communities along the coast have been bought out. It’s happened on St. Simons, Daufuskie, and Hilton Head. They’ve been forced to sell, in some cases.” She moved away from the cabinet and began opening and closing file drawers. “Many of the island residents are quite elderly now. Most of the younger ones have fled. The whole culture has been preserved orally. It exists only in the words and memories of the elders. That’s where the society comes in. Last May, we received a grant from the Georgia Trust to capture that history—that’s what the book is about. I suppose we’ve recorded about five miles’ worth of tape already. That’s why we need…ah, here we are.”

  Lydia slid open the cover of a rolltop desk, pulled out a shoe box, and handed it to Martha. The box bulged with cassette tapes, separated by labeled index cards.

  “Sixteen tapes here already. We still have another thirty-three interviews to record. We want to get every surviving member of the community on tape if we can.”

  “You want me to help transcribe these? All of them?” Martha felt a twinge of apprehension, mingled with excitement.

  “More than that. Make sense of them. You know, clean them up. Make them sing. Your professors said you were good at that. And help with the rest of the interviews. For that, you’ll need some ‘people’ skills. A lot of these residents are shy. Some of the older ones are afraid of having their voices recorded.”

  “Afraid? Why?”

  “They think it gives you a mystical power over them. Any other questions?”

  Martha looked at the photo of the Geechees. She tried to think of a question, but drew a blank. She couldn’t take her eyes off the image of the two girls, the ones staring at the camera. Braided hair, like woven ropes. The gnarled and mossy oak…and then the room started to spin and the image was fading, going dark, as if someone were turning down the lights, twisting the dimmer switch. In the darkness, a vision flashed into Martha’s head. A cloth sack, hanging from a metal hook. Something alive inside, something squirming….

  “Martha?”

  Lydia’s voice broke through the cloak of darkness and Martha was back in the room. She clutched the edge of the table to steady herself.

  “Miss Covington? Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I’m fine.” She fought to control her breathing. “I’m just a little tired. It must have been that ride on the bus, all day yesterday. I guess it sapped my energy.”

  Lydia blew on her ring, rubbed the pearl against her dress. “Well, I hope you get your strength back by Wednesday. There’s going to be a special night meeting of the County Commission to discuss the Tidewater Project. Are you familiar with it?”

  “Yes.” Martha clicked her pen. Focus. “Before I came here, I read some news articles about it online. I understand it’s going to bring new business to the county.”

  Lydia slapped the map with the palm of her hand. The ring made a sharp bang. “Business? At what cost? The Tidewater Project is just the latest bid to grab Shell Heap Island and turn it into a cash cow. It’s got our town torn into pieces. They’ve already taken so much of our coastline and turned it into hotels and subdivisions and golf resorts—Disneylands for the plaid-pants crowd. But not Shell Heap. No, they won’t get it. Not as long as I’ve still got blood stirring in my veins.”

  Lydia took a deep breath and exhaled. “I apologize. To think about those vultures, pecking over the remnants of our beautiful coast…” She began to roll up the map. “Questions?”

  Martha shook her head.

  “All right then. Stacey will help you with your paperwork, and she’ll also tell you where to go for Wednesday night’s meeting.”

  Stacey brought over a note card with handwritten instructions. “Here you go, Martha. Be sure to get to the meeting early, if you want to find a seat.” She grinned ruefully. “And you might want to bring a football helmet.”

  Chapter 2

  Vince handed Martha a tissue-wrapped package.

  “Thank you,” Martha said. She held her elbows pinned against her sides to keep herself from unraveling.

  “Don’t worry, Martha. It’s actually kind of goofy. Go ahead and open it. Please.”

  Martha sat back in her chair, grateful to extend their time together for a few extra moments. She broke the cellophane tape and pulled the tissue apart, revealing an exquisite silken box. She turned it slowly in the palm of her hand. The cover was red, an Oriental design. Flowers and dragons.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  Vince smiled, scratched the side of his beard. “It’s called a good fortune box. A little something to help you face your dragons. Open the lid.”

  Martha lifted the flat loop of ribbon attached to the lid. Inside, a plastic tray with eight individual compartments, each labeled with a different day of the week, and one extra. The tray fit inside the silken box perfectly. It burned her deep inside to think how long Vince must have searched to find one that would fit.

  “It’s a pill-minder,” Vince said. “I thought it would make your daily regime a little more pleasant.”

  “Thank you.” Martha felt her eyes stinging.

  Then Martha stood. She looked at the box, not at Vince. He came around the desk to embrace her.

  —

  The walk back to the Pritchett House took Martha along Tobias Avenue, a residential street lined with massive live oaks. Their limbs laced together like fingers over the center of the street, creating the effect of a sun-dappled tunnel. The air smelled of marsh.

  She had made it through the first day. Everything had gone fine, except for that brief dizzy spell—that nightmarish vision, the thing in the squirming sack. Other than that…

  She had even started transcribing the first tape. It was an elderly woman speaking in a thick patois. The woman spoke of the use of certain charms to ward off evil spirits.

  “What are the charms made of?” the interviewer asked.

  “Haiah,” the woman said, voice crackling like an old limb breaking in two. “Haiah, from duh cloze.”

  Hair from the clothes, Martha typed, after rewinding and listening several times. The woman’s ancient, musical voice mesmerized her. She tinkered with the transcript, took out the unnecessary pauses, picked away the verbal flotsam, decided where to insert the paragraph breaks, until the whole interview began to flow. She looked forward to returning to the project the next morning. Working with words was a sublime pleasure she could still claim, something the illness had been unable to touch.

  She turned onto the gravel driveway of the Pritchett House and walked along a row of moss-draped trees. There was a buzz of cicadas in the grass. Beyond the two-story clapboard she could see a glint of river in the waning sunlight. />
  As she entered the front door she could smell Rice-A-Roni. She heard a clatter from the kitchen.

  “Hello?”

  “Who is it?” Eileen Pritchett’s voice sounded muffled in the kitchen, and vaguely annoyed.

  “It’s Martha. Just saying hi.” She heard Eileen mutter something indecipherable.

  Martha stopped in the hallway, took out her cellphone, flipped it open. No service.

  “Okay if I use the phone?” she asked through the swinging door.

  The door opened a crack and her landlady peered out, eyes magnified by thick glasses. “How’s that?”

  “I need to make a phone call.”

  “Long distance?”

  “Yes. I have a calling card.”

  Eileen pursed her lips. “Go ahead, but remember the rules. No more than ten minutes.”

  “I’ll make it short.”

  When Vince answered, he sounded distracted.

  “Martha! How are you? How are you doing?” Martha heard other voices in the background, a clink of dishes.

  “I’m at the rooming house. I just got back from my first day on the job.”

  “How did it go?”

  “It went well, I think. The people who work there seem nice.”

  “Terrific. I want to hear more, but I’m actually at a restaurant right now. It’s a dinner for the university trustees. Can you call me in the morning? We’ll talk longer. Let me know how things are going, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Martha spindled the phone cord around her fingers, wondered if she should mention the vision—the squirming thing. “Vince?”

  “Yes, Martha?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can do this, Martha.”

  “I know.”

  “I have faith in you. Don’t forget to take your meds. I want you to call me tomorrow, okay?”

  —

  After dinner and a warm bath in the claw-foot tub at the end of the hall, Martha slipped into her red dragonfly kimono and headed back to her room. She moved quickly to avoid being seen by the Pritchetts or by Mike, the tenant in Room A. The kimono was getting too small now and a little frayed at the edges. She had sealed the frays with superglue twice. The robe was a gift from her father on her fifteenth birthday, the last one they spent together, and she planned to keep wearing it as long as she could.

  Martha closed and locked the door to her room and paused to survey her handiwork. The paper Chinese lantern, thumbtacked to the ceiling in the corner, looked out of place, but at least it added a festive touch. Hanging on the wall by the bed was a framed picture of Martha and her father holding a fish they’d caught at Lake Hartwell.

  She unpacked the remaining items in her suitcase—a pair of sneakers, a few office items, and a ceramic pig wrapped in newspaper. A relic of high school ceramics, “Piggy Marley” sported a painted-on psychedelic tie-dyed shirt and John Lennon glasses made from pipe cleaners. The animal’s stoned expression and dreamy, half-lidded eyes always made her smile.

  She put the pig on the windowsill, kicked off her slippers, and felt an impulse to celebrate. First day, on your own. You made it. In the old days, her choice might have been to sit by the river and watch the sunset while slowly sipping a glass of white zinfandel. Or maybe call up a couple of her college friends for an impromptu meeting at Jagger’s, where they could hang out, trade gossip and rumors, and discuss the physical merits of various professors, or lack thereof.

  It’s so awful. All she’s been through. Poor thing…

  God, how that kind of talk annoyed her. Those visits in the hospital, talking about her as if she weren’t there, or too sedated, or just made stupid by the drugs. Most galling of all was the presumption that previous events in her life had anything to do with it. She survived all that, dammit. This was something else. This was biological.

  Martha went over to the sink, took out her silken pill-minder. She popped the plastic lid marked “Monday” and tapped a trio of pastel tablets into her palm. Zyprexa, 5 mg. Clonazepam, 2 mg. Niacin, 200 mg.

  This nightly ritual was her lifeline, her insurance against ever having to go back to that terrible place. She could still smell the stench of antiseptic, could picture the whiteness of every wall, every uniform…having her fingernails cut to the nubs, being forced to drink paper cups of viscous liquid that turned her into a zombie, getting stripped to her underwear and wrapped in ice-cold sheets until she began to shake. The needles, and tests…so many tests. Her body ached at the memories. Never again.

  She turned the iron handle marked “C.” The faucet spat and coughed, ran brown, then clear. She looked into the oval mirror above the vanity at a face she barely recognized. Her light brown hair hung limp and stringy from the humidity, like damp moss. Her gray eyes, her most striking feature, seemed dull. In pictures, her eyes had sparkled with curiosity and mischief. She had been pretty.

  You still are. You are a woman with a future. You will not be defined by this.

  She took a deep breath and looked out the open window over the sink. The tide was high. Glass-smooth pathways meandered between shadowy fields of marsh. A pulsing chorus of frogs and crickets filled the night air, rising and falling like the breath of a sleeping animal.

  The scene lulled her for a moment, the tapestry of shadow and sound blending into a seamless whole. It almost didn’t register at first, the hint of movement among the stand of reeds, where the river curved away into darkness.

  She blinked and squinted. Seconds later it was there again—an orange flickering light, like the end of a cigarette, bobbing and swaying. Martha leaned forward, her nose almost touching the window screen. The shape multiplied, split into several firefly orbs, each moving and darting, the water rippling now, swirling the scattered reflections. An icicle of dread formed in her gut as the orange shapes steadied and gathered into an irregular line. Grouped together they began to glide. They drifted slowly down the river with the hint of a larger, shadowy mass following below.

  Martha remembered a technique Vince had taught her: Look away for a moment. Then look back.

  She turned from the counter, faced her room, and named each furnishing. Wallpaper. Brass bed. Quilt. Armoire. Lantern. Holding her breath, she slowly turned back toward the window. Nothing there now. Not even a ripple. The same nothing she’d seen moments ago. Just a dark stretch of moonlit water. She allowed herself to breathe again. Nothing is good.

  Martha tossed the evening’s pills into her mouth and washed them down with the tepid water. She hung the kimono on a hook inside the armoire and climbed into the creaky bed, sliding between the cool sheets.

  She looked at the jumble of shadows in her room, the water stains on the ceiling, the faded frieze of the wallpaper. She closed her eyes and could hear no voices. Just the sound of the marsh, its shimmering night melody. Nothing is good.

  Chapter 3

  Jarrell Humphries put down his oar and swapped it for a sawed-off broomstick. He knelt in the bow of his wooden skiff and probed the water, searching for the center of the narrow channel. He planted the broomstick and pulled the boat forward. The hull brushed against the muddy bottom of Pullman’s Creek, making whispery sounds.

  The moon floated on the surface of the water like a lily. Jarrell worked quietly, sweating, accompanied by an orchestra of night sounds—frogs chirping, the buzzing of crickets, and somewhere nearby, the nervous call of a whip-poor-will.

  A few hundred yards away, near the center of the Oracoochee Sound, the big white cabin cruiser tipped slightly. The stern was toward him, and in the glow of the running lights he could see the name, MOON MIST, stenciled in tall letters.

  Three men stood inside the cabin, bathed in fluorescent light. One of them Jarrell could identify from here, just from the way he moved and the lunky shape of the head. Jarrell had been following that fish-belly for months; had watched him go out on his fishing trips and come home with an empty hold; had trailed h
im on his night runs to the island to plant his “evidence.”

  Jarrell pulled off his knit cap, letting his dreadlocks spill out, and massaged his scalp in the cool night air. What he was about to do was stupid, not to mention illegal, and it would take a hell of a lot of nerve. He pressed the knob to light the dial on his watch. Ten forty-five. Half hour, tops, before low tide would eliminate his escape route. Don’t chicken out. If you’re ever going to bust this sucker, now’s your chance.

  He was animated by anger, the same devil that had possessed his father. For years his old man had attempted to conquer the beast with legal documents and injunctions, amassing legal fees that drove their family to the edge of bankruptcy. Later, the fight had turned inward, and he tried to drown the thing in a sea of Jack Daniel’s, sought to hide from it in pool halls and juke joints, until finally it reached up and closed its fist around his heart.

  This time, things were going to be different.

  Jarrell tapped the outside of his jeans pocket to make sure the Sony digital recorder was still there. He clipped another tool—his folding trench knife—onto a carabiner that hung from a belt loop. Finally, he pulled a camouflage net over his head and stretched out flat on his belly, chin propped on his backpack, eyes just above the prow. He dipped an oar into the water and began to row silently toward the cruiser.

  When he reached the hull he stashed the oar and put his hands out to make sure the two boats didn’t bump. He maneuvered his skiff so that he was concealed below the prow of the larger boat. He could hear the men’s voices now, and they weren’t discussing NASCAR, or exchanging fish stories, or telling racist jokes. They were talking business.

  Jarrell caught a glint in the corner of his eye and crouched low. A beam of light painted the tips of the cordgrass along the bank, then glided slowly across the water.

  “What are you worried about, Aubrey?” one of the men said. “Something out there? Are the frogs going to hear us?”

  “Who else would be out here this time of night?”

  “Water’s as flat as a bedsheet.”