Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 9
Her first stop was confirmation. If the entire day was missing—if she really had slept it all away—this should tell her. And honestly, sleeping the day away made a level of sense. She was emotionally exhausted, deeply disappointed that the bones had not belonged to Emmaline, and traveling too much lately. When she added in that there was no dirt on her pants from the day before, sleeping more than twenty-four hours in one stretch began looking plausible.
She’d checked the gas gauge while she'd driven across the bridge, but she couldn't remember quite clearly how much gas she'd had the day before. Regardless, the drive from the Lower Ninth Ward into the French Quarter wasn't very far. If she'd only come in and parked and then driven back home, she wouldn’t have disturbed the needle enough for her to know that she'd been anywhere.
She needed to find something else to confirm her story of the day before, so she headed toward Mystic Vudu with a purpose in her stride. She threw the door open, still not quite sure what she would say, and again found the shop owner standing there. Realizing her attitude was absolutely inappropriate—throwing open the door as she had, and then striding into a shop and barking questions—Eleri softened her stance and set a smile on her lips. Even though it felt forced, she tried to make it look natural.
"Hello," said the woman, the same wonderful lilt of mixed accents in her voice. "Can I help you?”
Ah. Eleri felt a vague sense of relief. She had not been here yesterday. The woman had not shown a flicker of recognition. But then, as the woman turned away and stepped behind the desk, she asked, "Did you come back for the knife?"
Eleri paused for a moment. At first pass, the phrase seemed damning. In her memory, she and the woman had looked at the knife together yesterday. The woman had described the symbols carved onto it. But then again, if the shop keeper had been watching on the first day, she might have seen Eleri pick up the knife and examine it, before she dropped it and ran from the store.
Eleri felt tongue-tied and only managed to shake her head. "I just had a few more questions."
The woman nodded and waited for them to come. Unfortunately, Eleri's statement was not a brilliant opener, designed to tease out information from the woman. She was underprepared. She’d thought this would be easier—that she would walk in and immediately understand what had happened, from the reaction she got. Now she needed to ask, "Was I here yesterday? And did you speak to me about the knife?" but without saying those words. Without coming across like an escaped mental patient.
She had a brief thought that maybe, for this past year or so, that was exactly what she had been—a parolee from the looney bin. She'd never finished her stay in the psychiatric institute and she’d practically loved it there. Despite the fact that people had been absolutely bonkers around her, she had stayed and worked her program, trying to find some semblance of mental balance, trying to reconcile what her bosses had accused her of and had never been able to prove.
Agent Westerfield had snatched her out of the hospital, demanding that she return to work—new work as a field agent, with a new partner—before her therapeutic stay was up. She was under the impression that Westerfield was still quite confident that her time in the institution had been unnecessary. Maybe he was right. She had not ever believed she was psychic, though they'd put her in for treatment of that delusion. On the other hand, she had solved a disturbingly high number of cases through the behavioral analysis unit.
Initially, she’d been a field agent, but then she wound up at a desk as an analyst because they'd needed her there, and because she'd been good at it. The very quality of her performance had ultimately done her in with her bosses. They wound up accusing her of knowing far too much about the crimes she investigated. The mental institution had been a welcome relief from the stress of accusation.
However, here she stood, in the open doorway of Mystic Vudu, wondering where her day before had gone. Maybe my stay in the loony bin was appropriate and too short. Closing the door behind her in an attempt to mimic a sane person, she walked inside, leading the way to the back room.
"You said a few things about the knife." She opened with that vague statement, realizing that if she hadn't been here the day before, any more details would sound absolutely bonkers. The woman merely tilted her head. Maybe she was used to customers coming in and thinking they’d been here before when they hadn’t. Maybe they’d visited other, similar shops and confused them with this one.
Eleri understood. She had been in a few of these common voodoo shops in the tourist sections of the Quarter. Shops of all sorts lined the streets in this section of town. At least every tenth one had a voodoo theme—it was a museum, or a spell shop, or a bookstore specializing in craft and magic. Many looked remarkably similar, and Eleri could not say there was anything particular about Mystic Vudu that made it stand out from the others.
She asked a few boring questions, different from the one she had asked yesterday, things she wouldn’t know even if their conversation had been real. And the conversation slowly went around in a circle. It seemed there was nothing Eleri could say to prompt the woman to give her a true clue as to whether she'd actually set foot in the shop the day before.
It was only as she was leaving that the woman said, "Come back anytime, Miss Eleri. I'm happy to answer your questions."
Eleri smiled and nodded in response, thanked her, and turned away. She headed out toward the left, down the block, aiming the direction she had aimed the day before—although she was still uncertain if she'd even been here.
Two blocks later, she stopped so suddenly that the man walking behind her had crashed into her. This being New Orleans, he managed to look at her as though she was insane even while apologizing profusely.
Only nodding at him and motioning him to go by, she stayed where she was in the middle of the narrow sidewalk. The woman in the shop had said goodbye Eleri. She'd known her name. That meant Eleri had been there the day before. It meant the woman's name was Darcelle, and that yesterday had happened—or at least the first part of it had.
Heading down the street with renewed purpose and trying to retrace her steps, Eleri remembered running her fingers along the black wrought-iron fence. She went back toward the graveyards and looked at them again. As best she could tell, she was looking at what she'd seen the day before: the weeping angels, the carved white marble headstones, the mausoleums blocking her view of the houses on the other side of the wide lot.
She walked on and became upset when, three blocks later, Emmaline still had not appeared, and Eleri was once again lost. She couldn't see or remember the turns she had taken. She saw wrought-iron fences that seemed familiar, but she was more than fuzzy on whether they were the same ones she had passed the previous day.
She took turn after turn. Because New Orleans has a certain culture and clear design style of its own, she saw things that she was confident were blazingly familiar. However, these home businesses sat next to buildings she was certain she’d never come across before. Her heart ached and she tried to stare into the middle space, hoping she could conjure an image of Emmaline, but she couldn't. Her sister did not come. Though she wandered the city for several hours—until she was hungry and tired, and her feet were sore—she never found the garden that held the human bone.
17
Darcelle flipped the door sign to Mystic Vudu, the golden script she’d hand-lettered to announce the store was now closed. Then she walked straight through the shop and headed out the back door, bolting it behind her. By habit, she added a little spell for safety and aimed straight for home.
She would have liked to walk the other way, into the city, but she wasn't able to. She would have liked to have stepped off her set trail and grabbed a meal at one of the places on Bourbon Street, or even one of the little hole-in-the-wall shops that no one really knew about—no one except the city dwellers. She could have driven the path, but she had long since given up on that.
The walk home was her only chance to look around and see the city, to have a little bit of the freedom that was mostly denied to her. Her world was only the shop and home—and home wasn't even truly her own home. It was her parents’ house—or her mother's, to be sure. Her father had never had much hand in it, or truly, much hand in anything. He'd been cowed by one of the most powerful women Darcelle had ever met. So she and her sisters had been raised by their mother and her father had merely been an entity that existed in their lives.
It took a good thirty minutes to walk through the streets that led out to her house at the slow pace she kept. She did it for several reasons, mostly because the space between shop and home was the only freedom she had. She intended to make it last.
Also, she did not like breaking a sweat, and anything higher than a snail's pace would certainly do that in this weather. She wore a long-sleeved, button down white shirt, in lightweight cotton to reflect the heat. It was harsh, trapping her body heat close. Still, it seemed cooler and less humid than the outside air. Her long, flowy skirt swished at her ankles, and she wore sandals with little bells on them, as though it was important that everyone knew she was coming. That was laughable.
All she did was come and go. She had a mild amount of freedom on her days off. One night per week, once the shop was closed, she could go out. Alesse, who had never been nice to her about anything else—at least not that Darcelle could remember—had made momma concede to at least that.
"Momma, that'll kill her," her older sister had once protested on her behalf. Once.
Momma had snorted, "She'll kill herself."
Momma hadn't seemed to care that she’d just commented on her daughter's suicide due to a restrictive system she was setting up. Darcelle had watched in horror as Momma set out her rules. She’d attempted to scream and run, but she was held in place by forces she couldn't see or fight. Now, some nights, she tried to veer off the path, to test if this was her one night of freedom. On those nights, she was limited, but still freer than normal. She still couldn’t leave the city limits at all. But it seemed tonight was not the night.
When she reached the front door of her home, it pleased her greatly to see that she had changed it. In fact, she had changed everything she possibly could. Momma had thought she’d be stuck living in her mother’s plans and designs. Momma had not counted on the internet and fact that Darcelle could have just about anything shipped to her.
So now, the front door had been replaced. Instead of the old wooden version, she'd ordered something from the hardware store and had it delivered. Bright light came through the pane glass front. It was not a good, safe version, as the glass could be shattered and the lock inside reached. But Darcelle did not worry about safety the way most people did. She'd painted it a welcoming shade of bold blue. The house itself was now orangey-peach. In most parts of the United States, it might have been too bright, but not here. Not in New Orleans, where color reigned supreme.
The blues she chose were not colors that normal people would put together, but Darcelle made them work, mostly because she had to. She had to scrub every inch of her mother from the house. She’d traded out the throw pillows immediately and then gone after the bigger pieces of furniture, spending down to her very last penny. For her own mental health, it was important that everything was different. She'd painted the walls, refinished the floor, and when she finished—when she’d changed every last piece of the house—she panicked.
What was there left to do? Soon, she'd taken on other projects. She had dolls to make, of course. But those could be done in the empty hours at the shop. She preferred not to bring the work home. A part of her hated it. A part of her knew it was in her blood, and the logical part knew it was all that there was. But she’d also taken up cross-stitch and embroidery, making beautiful things to relieve the stress of her imprisonment. Some kept for herself. Some she sold.
This evening, as she pushed the front door open—reveling in the cool air from air conditioning units she'd installed in windows around the house—she noticed something was amiss. The beautiful, bright throw pillows in pops of pinks and oranges had been taken from the couch and tossed about the room. One had a huge tear down the middle and oozed stuffing, as though a pet had clawed at it. But Darcelle had no pets.
The couch cushions, though not broken or permanently damaged in any way, were flipped up as though someone had been looking for loose change underneath and didn’t have the sense to put them back. In the kitchen, cabinets stood open. One broken plate was scattered in pieces across the floor, though at first glance, the rest seemed to be intact. Darcelle strode boldly through the mess, not worried about her feet. She had shoes on, but more than that, she knew her magic would protect her.
Her bedroom was the only room that was untouched. She breathed a sigh of relief that her spells there had held. She had not thought of protecting the rest of the house she hated. In the bathroom, medicine bottles lay in the sink, directly below the cabinet where they'd likely been scooped out and let fall. Mostly, they were Momma's. She'd turned to pharmacy to treat herself at the end, but had not finished any of her prescriptions.
Darcelle didn't bother with them now. She headed instead to her older sister's room. Though her sisters were free to come and go as they wished, this did not look like freedom. Alesse's room had taken the brunt of the damage. The mattress was flipped and lay partially off the bed. The closet stood open, clothing still on hangers tossed frantically about the room. Someone had obviously been searching for something. For all Darcelle knew, it might have been Alesse.
She looked around the room, and spotted a few key, empty spots. She could come only to one conclusion: Alesse was missing.
18
Eleri had come home to Grandmere’s that afternoon after deciding she was completely unable to find the house with the fence and the garden in the center. She was certain now that she had visited Mystic Vudu the day before.
The woman knew her name, and Eleri had only said it the day before when she’d asked about the knife. So today had to have been at least her third time in the store. Eleri, as an investigator, knew not to discount the possibility that she had returned to the shop yet again in the stretch of time that she didn't remember.
Grandmere was still out when she got home. Again, she had the worrisome thought that perhaps Grandmere was missing. It probably wasn’t true. Grandmere lived here on her own for months and months on end when Eleri didn't visit. Surely, Frederick came by. Eleri had a few other cousins that she didn’t know well, but Grandmere was close with them. It wasn't as though no one was checking on her. Still, the house seemed unusually empty.
Heading into her own closet once more, she examined her pants from the day before again, searching for telltale signs she might have missed on the first pass. Had they possibly been washed? Had she simply not gotten them that dirty? Maybe the dirt was drier than she remembered and it was now gone, brushed off cleanly? There were no answers here.
She now knew she had been to the shop, but she might not have been in the garden. She had driven home somehow. She'd made it back to her car—or someone had—and her car had made it to Grandmere's driveway. There was a comfort in being able to say at least those few things were facts after the screwed-up day before.
She sat on the couch, staring into space, wondering if she should make her own meal or simply continue thinking about the evening and the strange evidence before her. When her phone pinged, her heart leapt into her throat. Avery. Did she want to see what he had to say? She didn't know. It had been a while since she’d texted him—longer since they’d spoken. So much time had elapsed since she’d sent her apology that she wasn’t certain he would return her message.
Then again, she'd also been doing too many other strange things to think too much about it, and maybe Avery deserved better than that from her. She should have been more worried about them than she’d had time to be. As she watched the message pop up on her small screen, she realized there was only one word in the message. Good.
Eleri frowned. Quickly, another bubble popped up. "I mean, good that you're still speaking to me. I'm sorry about your sister's case. I had hoped it was something distracting and not something I had done."
Eleri almost smiled. It was absolutely something he had done, and something she had done. They’d had a bit of a tiff over how her life went. Clearly, her life wasn't going any better now, and she didn’t see it changing in the future. So they’d just faded away. But she found she missed him, despite the fact that neither had much room to give more. He was starting his pre-season practice. Then again, she'd nearly laughed at that idea that he was “starting.” He’d barely finished the last one.
She'd known nothing about hockey before she met Avery. Most of what she’d learned had come from him telling her about his team and their games, about making it to the playoffs and so on. In addition, she’d looked up what she could. To call hockey time a “season” was a little on the ridiculous side. They played nearly eleven months a year, if you added in all their practices and playoff games.
She was smiling as she typed a message back. "It's not that. I miss you. I want us to be us." As vague as that was, she contemplated adding more to it, but couldn't think of any other way to explain her feelings in the text message.
Another return message popped up quickly. "I have to go practice, but we'll talk more later."
"Yes," she texted back, uncertain if he’d bolted immediately after hitting send and maybe never even seeing her reply. At least this was one thing going well, or better. This was a problem she was grateful to have the opportunity to fix.
She enjoyed solving things. She enjoyed closing cases and knowing that she and Avery were in the right place. Their relationship had a problem, and she wanted to fix it. It was that simple. Lord knew, despite how busy she had been since she had last spoken with Avery, she'd had plenty of chance to think about whether it was something she really wanted.
