Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6)

by Lyla Payne

  “Then why help?” Mel asks.

  “According to him, because their religion hinges on dark and light staying in balance, and this curse is so old and so evil that it could throw the whole world out of whack. Or something.”

  “I’m not sure you should talk so flippantly about what they believe,” Beau murmurs, looking around the diner as if he suspects Dr. Rue might be eavesdropping to make sure we don’t talk any shit about him.

  It would be funny if Beau’s nerves didn’t bounce right over to me. I press my lips together, wishing I could take it back, even though I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. The sad truth is, after all of these months talking about curses and voodoo, my vocabulary hasn’t expanded enough to be able to articulate better.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, but that’s essentially what he said,” I amend. “He wants to help, and other practitioners want to help, because what’s happening is bigger than our family.”

  Mel and Will seem appeased by the explanation, but the way they both sit forward, their shoulders hunched and their hands flat on the table, suggests they want more details.

  “What do you have to do?” Mel’s eyes are wide. “You don’t have to sacrifice an animal or anything, right?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know that.” Beau nudges me, his eyebrows raised. “He didn’t exactly spell out this whole ceremony thing he’s planning.”

  “Okay, fine, I don’t know if any animals will be sacrificed in the breaking of the curse.” My stomach lurches at the thought. God, don’t let it be something cute. “All he said is that we’ll need to gather at the site of the original curse, which, thanks to Anne, we can find. Or at least, I can.”

  I’m hoping I can find it again without her. I was pretty banged up and out of it when I left there last time, but my memory is younger than the rest of me, thank goodness.

  Mel and Will are watching me expectantly, waiting on the rest of what Dr. Rue said, because that obviously can’t be all. The words stick in my throat. I glance helplessly at Beau, and his eyes soften. One big, warm hand covers mine and squeezes.

  “He said all of Anne’s living descendants need to be there in order for the ritual to work,” Beau fills in, saving me from breaking down in the middle of town. Laurel and Dorothy are already pretending not to listen to us from the bar, where they’re bent over a single piece of pie and two steaming mugs of decaf coffee.

  At least, I assume it’s decaf. They’re too old to realize caffeine can and should be consumed any time of day.

  “So you can’t do it until we find Amelia,” Mel states, her jaw set in a determined line.

  I know she doesn’t want to admit the same thought tearing away chunks of my heart every time it sloshes through my chest—that we might not find Amelia. Or if we do, we might be too late.

  Back at home, there’s no way to tempt sleep, no matter how little I’ve had lately. I settle in the living room with Charlotta’s journals, my mind fixed on getting answers.

  Now that I know what has to be done about my own curse, the only thing left to do is figure out how to get around the problem of Mama Lottie. If she’s holding Amelia, or has stashed her somewhere to get back at me, the problem of the Drayton curse and my own are now entwined too tightly to be separated. It should make me glad, to realize that if I can pull off a miracle, both Beau’s and my family will come out free on the other side of this.

  That’s one big if, though. I have no idea if I can convince Mama Lottie to stop throwing me around, never mind decide to dismiss the desire for revenge that’s gotten her through a hundred years of being dead and leave us all alone.

  Deep breath, Gracie. First things first.

  A smile tips one side of my lips, because even though I’m talking to myself, it sounds like something Amelia would say if she were here.

  I can’t shake the feeling that she must be nearby, that we must have missed something. I keep coming back to the fact that she had to have walked and wouldn’t have been able to get that far before we started searching.

  Unless someone picked her up, but that would mean another living human was doing Mama Lottie’s bidding. Is that even possible?

  The journals, Gracie. Focus on the problem at hand.

  None of the rest of it matters if I can’t find everything there is to know about Mama Lottie and her son. I hope that Charlotta wrote down what happened, that she wasn’t too traumatized by losing her first love to work it out on paper. Or that she wasn’t too scared of what Mama Lottie would do if she caught Charlotta….

  21 March 1900

  We’re planning to leave in less than a week. James has been saving money for a while, everything he can without his mother getting suspicious, and has gotten us tickets on the train to Philadelphia. I’ve decided we might want to go farther north, perhaps to New York, because Philadelphia is an old city full of people with old ideas, and I fear we’ll face the same sort of troubles we might if we stayed in Charleston.

  James worries that we won’t have the money to go farther, so we’ll see. I know that we both want the baby to be safe—the baby I cannot continue to hide if we don’t leave as planned. Even Mama has noticed I’m getting fat and has cut my portions at supper. I get no breakfast so James brings me his, but we can’t go on like this. Father and Charles haven’t noticed, of course, but they’re men. My sister has started to look at me with a suspicious gleam in her beady, bossy eyes. It won’t be long until Bessie guesses.

  Then there’s no telling what will happen. I’m too far along to try any of the remedies that might have flushed the baby from my womb months ago. He would be tiny, still, but might survive. He’s a fighter.

  James often asks me in an excited voice how I’m sure it’s a boy, and there’s no real answer. I just know, and that’s the truth—the same way I’m positive he’s strong, that he’ll have James’s eyes but my lighter coloring, and that he’s special.

  Perhaps all mothers think that about their children, have the same hopes and dreams, but I’m not sure. My parents wish nothing for me but to marry well, and I think that’s partly so that they’ll be relieved of the burden of caring for me throughout my life.

  Either way, James Jr. is healthy. That will be his name. We’ve both agreed.

  I’ve been packing all day, little bits here and there. It’s difficult to accomplish with Bessie lurking around, and this time, not even Charles can assist. He’s been wonderful about helping us sneak around and meet, and about keeping our relationship from Mama and Father, but he loves us both—especially James—so much that I know he would do anything to keep us from leaving.

  I’ve got some things packed in a potato sack and I hear Bessie downstairs haranguing the cook about something, so I’m going to run and hide it in the old cabin where James and I have kept up meeting even though the weather has started to turn nice. No one goes in there except us, so it’s perfect. The rest of the workers think the old slave quarters are haunted. My parents say that’s nonsense, but I notice they don’t go in there, either.

  To tell the truth, I think they are haunted, but maybe they don’t bother us because we’re sort of trapped here, too.

  There’s a break in the page, as though she’d left off to meet James and then came back, and when it picks up again, there’s no new date and the penmanship is shaky. It gets my attention, and I sit up straight, setting down my cup of coffee.

  James’s mother knows everything. She followed him to the cabin, and even though we didn’t see her, she says she saw us together, that she heard us talking about our plans to run away. Come to think of it, she didn’t mention the baby, and of course, neither did we.

  So perhaps she doesn’t know absolutely everything.

  I’ve never been so frightened in my life. She says she won’t let us go, that she’ll tell Father and he’ll stop us, that she’ll stop us herself even if she has to kill me.

  “You’re my son. My blood. These people stole everything from me, and now you think I
’m going to let them steal you, too?” Her eyes were glowing like a demon’s, I swear it before God. It’s like she’d forgotten I was there, too, shrinking against the wall and about to bawl like a child. “I will not. You will not leave me, and you will discard this harlot like the trash she is.”

  Now that made me angry, even if maybe in some people’s eyes at least the first part is true. But I’m not trash! I stood up to tell her as much, and even swallowed most of my fear.

  “Mama Lottie,” I said. “I don’t know why you hate my family so much.”

  That part was the God’s honest truth. I’d always been told that we took her in as a child, that she’d been a few years older than my father when she’d come to the Hall, and since my aunt Sarah had taken a liking to her, Mama Lottie had always gotten to work in the kitchen and the house, even before the war came and everyone was set free. She’s the one who chose to leave the house for the fields, for no reason. And all of that happened before I was born, so why should she hate me with such ferocity?

  “Don’t worry your empty head about it. No other Drayton ever did,” she growled in response to my cheeky statement.

  “Well I don’t care about that, and neither does James. We’re in love, and we want to go somewhere we can be together without judgment.”

  Her eyes widened, then narrowed, as though she was fighting off her own desire to be surprised by my strong statements. “Love? Do you think that I, or anyone else, gives a whit about love? You may think you can escape persecution by fleeing north, and although that may be true in some sense, it will not be for all. And there is nowhere you can run where I will not find you.”

  The way she said the words, like a wish or a hex or a curse, thundered straight into my heart. Fear blossomed like a thick, dark cloud that overtook my body, and I reached for James. He came to me, but then immediately went as stiff as a board at the look on his mother’s face. She was going to kill us where we stood, that’s what I thought.

  But she didn’t.

  Her eyes kept on glowing as she leaned in, until her nose was a breath from her son’s and her voice a low whisper that felt like the tongue of a snake in my ears. “You will rid yourself of this disease of a girl. You will do it now, or I will make you regret it.”

  With that, she was gone. I don’t know if I blinked or passed out for a second, but it was like she was there one minute and gone the next.

  I sat right down on my bottom in one of my better dresses, not caring about the dusty floor. My stomach tried to insist on being emptied, but there wasn’t much in it to start with, and as James rubbed my back I started to feel better.

  At least until I looked into his face and saw he was as scared as I was. I’ve always known he feared his mother and now I know why. Even though Mama Lottie hasn’t been around the house since the war, not my whole life, my mother and father have fond memories and stories to tell of her. I can’t believe the girl Father talks about, the one who saved lives of whites and blacks alike, is the woman who just threatened my happiness with such passion.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked, my lip trembling and damned tears gathered in my eyes. I wanted to be strong for James and our son, but I was scared. Maybe I was right to be.

  “We’re going ahead as planned,” he told me, his own voice shaking but his eyes sure as they settled on mine. His hand was soft as he smoothed hair from my sweaty forehead. “We’re a family now, Charlie. She’s… She’ll have to understand that once she knows everything.”

  “We can’t tell her,” I nearly shouted, panic choking my good sense. Every last piece of me knew that Mama Lottie knowing about the baby would only make things worse. “And what about her telling my father? What if she does that before we leave?”

  “She’s not going to tell your daddy anything.” He clenched his jaw, pain in his face.

  It didn’t take me long to realize he was right. If Mama Lottie told my father what we’re up to, there was a chance he’d kill James with his own two hands. My daddy isn’t a violent man. He’s kinder than most, even, and it wouldn’t even be just because he thinks James is unsuitable for me in more than one way. But a man can’t have his daughter spoiled before marriage, and if she is, he can’t let the boy get away with it. That’s the way it is.

  “Maybe we should leave sooner,” I begged.

  “No. We’ve got the tickets, and we need the next few days to get everything ready.” He pressed a kiss to my forehead, but his words and actions did nothing to make either of us feel better. I could feel it in the way the air between us was strained in a way it never had been before. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  My hands haven’t stopped shaking. Bessie’s worried. She thinks I’m having some kind of fit, but I can’t make them stop. I don’t know why, but I have a premonition that a few days is going to make all the difference, and that staying here that extra time is going to be the end of everything.

  I can feel her worry, almost see Charlotta’s fear forming the words on the page. My own stomach is tied in knots, reading about her confrontation with Mama Lottie. My heart hurts that James didn’t tell his love what he suspected about his own blood, tainted with magic or juju or whatever Mama Lottie’s people up north called their connection to their African religious roots before she was stolen and sold.

  Part of me grieves for that little girl, the young Mama Lottie ripped from her family and everything she knew. At some point she’d had a son and made him her world, so it isn’t hard to understand why she would have fought so hard to keep him. Why she had no problem frightening and insulting Charlotta Drayton, even if she hadn’t been born when her family transgressed against Mama Lottie—if they had even been aware of her origins, as she believed.

  All of that, I can empathize with, even if it does seem excessive to my twenty-first-century brain. It makes sense given all she had been through and what little she had left.

  I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that whatever came next would not be easily understood, no matter the time and place. My hands are wet with concern for Charlotta and her child, and even for James, so clearly caught in the middle between his roots and his future. I don’t see a way out for him, maybe because I know he and Charlotta never left the plantation together.

  Even though Charles Henry, the patriarch of the story, told me himself that Mama Lottie had caused the death of her own son.

  I refill my coffee mug, turn on the oven with plans to heat up a frozen pizza since I never did eat any dinner and abandoned that pie, and go back to the journals. I’m almost to the end of the last one, and there’s no way Charlotta would have wasted time on frivolities now. With my heart in my throat, I take a deep breath and steel myself for the end of their story.

  24 March 1900

  Nothing has happened since the night Mama Lottie caught us. I’ve been holding my breath, ready to run for my baby’s life if she pops out, determined to stop us like she said, but all that’s changed is my nerves are strung tighter. It’s not good for our son, for me to be so on edge, but it’s almost over. We’re leaving in the morning.

  I will not believe it’s happened until we’re on the train and away. Mama Lottie says she can find us wherever we go, but that’s nonsense, like believing there are spirits in the slave cabins. We can hide from her.

  I know that James believes she has the power to do what she says, but I have hope that time and distance will let him see her for the angry, sad human being she is—nothing more and nothing less.

  Bessie gave me a brief scare before dinner, cornering me in our room and asking questions about why I’ve been so quiet, how I’m still gaining weight with Mother’s forced diet and exercise regime, and telling me she knows I’ve been sneaking off to see someone in private. It’s all bluster, of course, and she stopped short of accusing me of meeting a boy and being pregnant. Bessie probably can’t believe I’d really do such a thing, even though she’s seen all the clues and put them together.

  Those are things t
hat happen to other girls, stupid girls who aren’t Draytons. Even if she suspects all of that, she would never guess the identity of the boy I love, and that’s all that matters.

  I’m not feeling well tonight, and neither is Bessie or Charles. The roasted chicken we had at dinner, prepared differently than we’re used to, must not be sitting well with any of us. I even heard Father grumbling and coughing over the chamber pot, so we’re all coming down with the sickness.

  Even though I’m bathed in sweat, ill in my stomach, and feeling weak as a kitten, there’s no way I’m not leaving with James before first light. Nothing will stop me, not if I have to hang my head out the train window all the way to Philadelphia.

  I frown at the next entry, dated more than three months after the previous. There are no pages missing, no other journals we haven’t been through, and I hate missing so much of their lives—probably even the birth of their son, which I can’t believe she didn’t document. Dammit.

  30 June 1900

  Three months have passed since all of my plans for the future were crushed beneath the heel of one angry woman.

  No. Not only a woman. Mama Lottie is something else, though I can’t speak to what. My James was something else, too, though no matter what he believed, they were not the same.

  This is the first time I’ve felt like writing since he died, but I’ve also been busy caring for our son, who was born early that same night. He’s strong, like I predicted, and a fighter. He’s as big as he should be by now and as healthy as a horse, even if Mama won’t let me take him to the regular doctor. The medicine man in the Gullah camp is just as good, I figure, and my baby is happy.

  Too happy for a child who lost his father before he drew his first breath.

  I don’t want to talk about what happened, but I think now that I must. If I do not, then who will ever say that my James was a hero? How will people ever know he was a great man?