Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 10
She hadn't had a boyfriend in a long time. The term “boyfriend” seemed silly and insignificant for their ages and what they were to each other. She hadn't been in a relationship for a while, was maybe the better way to put it, and for a short while—and she hadn’t been sure she still wanted one. But now that she realized she missed him—even just his texts and chats—she would need to carve out time for him, get away to see him, and more. She’d have to put in the effort. She was beginning to think that was absolutely worth it. Even now, just looking at typed out words on her phone and knowing they were from him eased some of the tightness in her chest. That is exactly what a relationship was supposed to do, she thought.
The ease of pressure didn't last long. She was still struggling with things in front of her face, including her missing time, her missing bone, and her missing memory. Grandmere walked in the door just then, her hands laden with cloth bags, presumably full of groceries. Eleri knew the woman had to get food from somewhere, though as much as possible came from the small garden. Still, there was meat and flour, and Grandmere didn't have animals to slaughter and butcher, nor did she have a flour mill. Eleri knew she must've obtained it from somewhere.
The heavy cloth bags she held were not the grocery store brands that Eleri owned. In fact, these bags looked hand-stitched from old, faded pieces that resembled flour sack fabric from the Second World War. Eleri wondered if these were the bigger pieces the scraps in her closet had come from. It would be just like Grandmere to make her own grocery bags and make voodoo dolls out of the leftovers.
Eleri popped up. "Let me help you with those."
Grandmere had three bags hanging from each hand—a very heavy load for anyone, let alone a woman who must be in her nineties. Still, she balanced the bags on both sides and walked slowly, seeming determined to get everything into the house in one trip. They didn't speak as they stood in the kitchen, opening the bags and putting the groceries away.
At last, Eleri could hold her tongue no more and turned, unable to avoid the topic. "Grandmere, when did I come home yesterday?"
Her great-grandmother frowned at her.
It was an odd question, she conceded, but her grandmother answered, "Around five."
"Did we have dinner?"
"No. I offered and you shook your head and refused. I don't think you said a word." Grandmere stood now with one hand on her hip and one on the counter as she leaned against it. "You were acting weird, child. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say you'd been spelled."
It was a word Grandmere had not used with her before. Eleri tried to let the moment pass without her surprise showing on her face. She guessed she'd always known what Grandmere was, but only recently had Grandmere been telling more of the truth behind it.
"What kind of spell could it have been?" Eleri asked. It was time to start talking more.
"I don't know. What happened?"
Eleri, unsure if she should tell everything, edited together what she could. She said she'd gone back into the shop. She didn't tell Grandmere the knife was made of human bone, though she didn't know why she held back on that. Maybe it was because she considered opening an FBI investigation, and Grandmere might have other ideas, given that the woman had her own human bones in her home. Eleri told about leaving the shop and wandering the streets in a daze. She had not yet told Grandmere about seeing Emmaline in her dreams for years, and still saw her in visions now.
"I went down the street, Grandmere. I saw a house I'd seen in my dreams before."
"What did it look like?"
"It was beautiful," Eleri said. “It was in a U-shape with the U facing toward the street. Two small porches graced either side. There were French doors opening onto the patios," she said, thinking of the grand home and how to describe it, "and onto the wrought iron balconies over them. It had a ten- or twelve-foot-high wrought-iron fence across the courtyard.
“I opened the gate and went inside. I remember thinking that it was locked, but that it opened for me." She paused for a moment, wondering if that had any relevance to the story at all.
"What was in the courtyard?" Grandmere asked. Was it significant that Grandmere had asked about a courtyard, or merely just that she understood it was a common design of New Orleans homes?
"A tree, a garden, some paver stone s…” She motioned the size with her hands, but found her memory less certain than she’d previously thought. “I dug in the courtyard, Grandmere. I went in, and I dug. I brought home a human bone."
Grandmere looked at her and shook her head. "No, honey, you didn't bring anything human home except yourself. I would have known if anything like that had crossed my threshold."
19
Eleri struggled with the idea that she was standing in her great grandmother's kitchen discussing the fact that she’d had some kind of spell cast on her. However, her logical brain couldn't dismiss the possibility. She'd seen and done far too much to believe there wasn't “something else” out there. And Grandmere? Grandmere knew all about it.
While she and her great-grandmother had never had the conversation about the family legacy, Eleri knew more about it now than she had a year ago. Donovan had found information easily enough, and Eleri had begun to speaking to other people about what it meant to be a Remy.
She now asked point blank, "What kind of spell could it have been?"
"Well, there's lot of options," Grandmere said without qualifications. "But apparently, it got you to stop what you were doing and got you home without any memory to hold onto."
Eleri nodded. That much was clear—that she had actually done at least some of the things she remembered from yesterday. It was plausibly some kind of mild psychogenic fugue, but the idea was ludicrous. That kind of amnesia would have involved her having a full psychological break, but still finding her way home—to a home that really wasn’t hers—and then forgetting exactly the portion of the day that seemed most useful. And all of this had to occur despite her never having had a psychological break before.
Even when she'd been working at the behavioral analysis unit, she'd stood psychologically strong. She didn’t break when her bosses accused her of knowing far too many details about the crimes she was supposed to be investigating. She'd been clear. She'd done the research. Sure, she'd gotten hunches, flashes of visions sometimes when she touched the photographs or held the pieces of evidence. Those things gave her little clues about where to look, and she would head off in a different direction. Sometimes, her new directions seemed to come out of the blue and were disconnected, but her work had always panned out. She'd caught a number of serial killers and a child kidnapper. She had returned three children safely home in exchange for being able to provide more information than just that the perpetrator was a white male, aged twenty-five to forty-five, whose mother had emotionally abused him.
But then her bosses had accused her of being involved in the crimes. Their attacks had stressed her out to the point where she had checked into a mental institution. Still, at no time had Eleri lost any chunks of her memory. This was fully new …
"So," she said to her great-grandmother, "the question is, did I just dream that I found the courtyard?"
"It's possible." Grandmere now leaned against the counter. Her hands on the edge, elbows crooked, feet crossed. It was the pose of a much younger woman, but it was also the position of a woman completely comfortable in her own home. "Here's what I'm thinking. Let's say someone just spelled you. You dream of the courtyard. That makes sense. You've dreamed of the courtyard before—right?"
She double-checked, and Eleri nodded.
"So," Eleri continued, "do you think it was the woman at the shop?"
"Could have been. I mean, it's a voodoo shop. Most of them are crap, but the Dauphine family owns a few, and they know what they're doing. Maybe other people do, too."
Eleri nodded, and said again to Grandmere, "Yes, I picked up a few of the pieces, and they seemed to have real ..." she hesitated to use the word magic. Though she fully understood it would make sense to Grandmere, it would not make sense to her. She didn't generally think in terms of “magic” and “spells.” She kept the conversation on a track where she could have a logical talk about it. But she was beaten to the punch.
"So, option one," Grandmere said, and Eleri could see where her logical brain had been passed down through the generations. Suddenly, she saw it in her mother, Nathalie, and all the decisions she had made to move herself out of this tiny house and into Patton Hall with Thomas Hale Eames.
Eleri smiled as Grandmere continued. "So, you go to the shop. You ask about a piece in the shop, correct?"
Eleri nodded again.
"The shop owner spells you. You leave in a daze. In a while, you believe you find a courtyard you've seen before. Then you come home and sleep it off."
Eleri nodded. It was as logical a chain of events as one could put together when operating from the premise that there had been a spell involved.
Grandmere looked at her through narrowed eyes now. "But why?"
That was a most excellent point. Although this story made the most sense, step by step, why would anyone do that to her?
Eleri had gone to the store and asked about a knife. That was all. She wasn’t threatening anyone. And if the knife hid some secret, why was it out on display? She spoke to Grandmere now. "The piece I looked at was very expensive. We discussed my buying it."
"Did you buy it?" Grandmere asked. "Did she spell you so that you would buy it?"
Eleri almost yanked her phone out of her pocket to check her bank account records. But in a moment’s flash, she put the phone back in her pocket and looked at Grandmere and said, "No. I didn't. When I went there this morning, she asked if I had come back to buy it."
"So you didn't buy it yesterday," Grandmere confirmed.
"Maybe she put a spell on me that was intended to make me buy a knife, but it didn't work."
Grandmere looked into the distance for a moment. "Well, I suppose it's possible the person owning their shop doesn't know what they're doing, and they screwed it up."
Eleri thought on that one for a minute. "But the things in that shop do not speak of someone who's an amateur."
"So, then, option two," Grandmere proposed. "You go into the shop, you talk to the woman, and you leave. You find the courtyard you've seen in your dream, you go inside, you dig up a human bone … and someone doesn't like it. They put a spell on you. They send you home in a daze."
Eleri thought the possibility through for a moment. "They take back the bone. They remove my evidence." She thought and thought, searching for holes she couldn’t find. Sadly, that option made much more sense.
She'd found something she wasn’t supposed to find. Someone in New Orleans had the power to either make her forget or make her believe it wasn't real. "There's no reason for the shop lady to spell me that I can think of," Eleri said, staring into space as she thought her possibilities through.
"Now the question is, can you find the house again, and can we figure out who owns it?” Grandmere then popped forward, basically interrupting herself as she hustled from the room. "Give me a minute, child."
Eleri stood at the kitchen counter, wondering what they would have for dinner tonight and what might have happened to her the day before. If someone had cast some sort of spell on her for going into the courtyard and finding a human bone, then that lent credence to her concern that there was not a plausible reason—or at least a legal or moral one—for the bone to be there. If there was, why would they worry?
Eleri also felt, deep in her own marrow, that it wasn't the only one. She'd found it so easily, it was unlikely there weren’t others.
Right then, Grandmere returned. She held a small bundle of herbs wrapped tightly in white cotton ribbon. A lighter in her other hand almost made Eleri laugh. It seemed somewhat ridiculous that she would have these old school herbs, clearly dried upside down. The ribbon, Eleri was certain, contained no polyester or synthetic fibers. But Grandmere had no issues lighting it with a ten-cent Bic. Fire was fire, Eleri guessed.
By the time she had finished that thought, the buds on the herbs were burning and releasing a fine gray smoke into the air. Not knowing what her Grandmere was doing, Eleri stood still while Grandmere waved the pieces around her.
"Hmm," she said. And Eleri stayed quiet, the gray smoke dissipating into the air around her.
"Hmm," Grandmere offered again. A third time she did it again, before holding up the herbs, telling Eleri to turn around. Behind her, Eleri heard the puff as Grandmere blew out the tiny flames. The herbs had smoked like cigarettes, a red front line burning down into the stems.
The smoke they gave tripled after the flame was put out. Grandmere held it close to Eleri. Interestingly, she noticed no smell at all.
"What's this, Grandmere?" she asked.
"Checking you for spells," the older woman said.
"And?"
"There are zero spells on you, child."
20
Donovan, Wade, and Christina sat on a picnic blanket on the grounds of the Little farmland. They sat on grass in an area they’d chosen, far out of sight from the family’s homes. Though the buildings no longer smelled of burnt wood and charred hopes and dreams, they did still look like the aftermath of disaster. Donovan had preferred not to be staring at them as they talked about what they'd found.
Wade had found a sandwich shop he particularly enjoyed, though it was about thirty minutes away. So Donovan and Christina had the task of locating a tarp and a blanket, which they’d managed to scrounge up at a box store they’d found in the other direction. Then they'd met up here.
It seemed silly to be having a picnic when they were in the middle of a case, but the town didn't have conference rooms. The sheriff's station wasn't anywhere nearby, and there was no police station, since the population couldn’t support one. There weren’t enough people here to be a city.
The agents were staying in a motel that boasted seven units. The place was almost at fifty percent capacity, and the entire capacity was the three of them. Even if another room had been available, having a conference on beds in rooms that had slightly smoky smells—because the area still hadn't quite come around to completely embracing the no-smoking laws—didn't seem any better than where they were.
So they ate their lunches as they sat on the blanket and discussed what they'd seen—and for Christina, what she'd felt. Wade and Donovan had rehashed the physical investigation of the farm area. Wade looked at it with an eye of someone who knew the place. Though he hadn't specifically been here, his own family compound was similar. His relatives had lived here. The old families had shared designs and layouts. He looked for very specific things.
Donovan, on the other hand, had been unfamiliar with the compound. He hadn’t even known they existed until the team had been in the Ozarks, just a few months ago. His was the untrained eye here, or at least the broad-view one.
Christina had spent her time in town talking to people. She got the stories of what had happened, or at least what the people in town knew. With a little bit of push from her mental abilities, she was able to persuade them to tell her all of it. She could easily get them to say if their information was rumor or fact. What evidence did they have? Where had they heard it? It made for an interesting story.
But then, as the three put the pieces together, the story got more and more disturbing. It had initially appeared that the hunting party raid in the Ozarks was a one-time attack on the compound. Though even then, those initial appearances were pretty easily swept aside, as it was clear no one could have done what was accomplished without being at least somewhat familiar with the place.
It was also believed that the group Dr. Murray Marks had run—or at least had been some high-ranking official in—had done the deed. And while that did still appear to be the case, it now looked like several more disturbing things were also true.
They’d found evidence of hunters on the land here—evidence of people outside the family hunting on this land. They had not been hunting for deer or big game other than the family members. Not only had the people who lived here been hunted on their own property, but a series of troubling incidents had occurred in town in at least the four years preceding the burning of the homestead.
“The locals told me about the time Jared Little was shot at the Seven-Eleven,” Christina offered. “Then Bess Little was hit and killed in a car accident on Potter Street. Before that, four family members caught a very severe strain of the flu, and three of them wound up in the hospital. Two survived, but one didn’t. Jefferson Little, who was once the family's patriarch, was murdered during a mugging. He was stabbed multiple times and his wallet was stolen.”
It didn’t sound too bizarre—just maybe a string of bad luck—until they added the numbers up. The family was big, but the area was small. The land was vast, but the population low. What Christina stitched together from each of the incidents was that they had been perpetrated by strangers. Small population or not, small town sentiment or not, there was still a criminal element. There always was. Someone would take advantage. Locals obviously knew who those people were. They had been in jail at times, or had CPS called on them, or more.
“Jefferson Little's murder still hasn’t been solved,” Christina added, “though people do recall the attack. One of the sheriff’s deputies told me—though he shouldn’t have—some detail about the case and the perpetrator. The witnesses also noted that the man who stabbed Jefferson fled the scene and was not anyone they recognized. The story in town is that some stranger had come through, gotten into trouble, and tried to steal a wallet. Jefferson Little fought back and got himself killed.”
Another “violent drifter” story, Donovan thought.
