Strange Folk, page 25
“Do you recognize this item?”
She answered on pure impulse. “No, sir.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You sure?”
Here was her chance to correct her lie. “No. I’ve never seen it in my life.”
He was quiet for a moment. “There was some hair in the locket along with a bit of dried plant debris and some toenail clippings.” He paused. “We tested the hair against the DNA sample you supplied when Joseph Hall’s body was found. It’s a match. This is your hair, Opaline.”
Lee looked over at Belva, who was watching them covertly from farther down the hall.
“Where did you find it?”
“The EMTs had to take it off Otis when they resuscitated him at the scene.”
“I don’t know how my hair got in there. I’ve never seen it before. I promise.”
He studied her face and worked something in his mouth with his tongue. “All right. That will be it for now. Don’t leave town.”
Belva and Luann silently joined Lee as she walked down the hallway, through the spectators in the waiting room, and out the front doors of the hospital. In the safe space of her car, Lee was succinct. “What the hell is going on? Why was my hair in that locket?”
Belva shot back. “I put it in for your protection. I didn’t know you were gonna give it away. It’s a family heirloom for God’s sake.”
“Fuck. I look so suspicious now.”
“Honey, don’t you see? That locket is what saved his life.”
Lee remembered the way it had protected her during the ritual, and her hand grasped at the empty space on her chest.
She told Belva and Luann what she’d seen inside of Otis. If they didn’t find out who was behind this, she worried Otis would eventually stop running and that thing would overtake him. “Do you have any ideas?”
Luann shook her head, and Belva looked frail and confused. “I don’t know. I’ve used all my methods. I never really had the sight, and I make do. But lately, it’s like someone’s thrown a sheet over the future. There’s nothing but blank space.”
* * *
That night, Lee couldn’t sleep. She wandered the house, studying the pictures of relatives. In a corner of the living room was Belva’s altar to Granny Pallie with its white lace and candy dish. In the framed picture, she sat in a rocking chair on a porch, and the folksiness seemed almost staged. Lee recognized her as the woman from her vision during the shadow ritual, the one who found her husband with his head blown off in the root cellar.
Lee spotted strawberry candies in the dish and promptly replaced them with butterscotch from Belva’s sweet stash. Then she lit the candle next to the frame and closed her eyes.
“Granny Pallie. Please help me see who attacked Otis and killed those men. Show me who or what is behind this.” She tried to open herself as she had for the shadow ritual, but nothing came.
She repeated the request a few times, but she heard no answer. She waited and hoped for a sign. But there was only the silence of a sleeping house.
She went out to the porch swing for some cool air. The rocking of the swing slowly lulled her into a calm, comfortable place, and she mercifully dropped away.
* * *
Lee came to on the porch and saw a woman sitting in the chair across from her in the dark. This version of Pallie was a bit older, but her hair was still black against her wrinkled face. Lee recognized the fury burning in her olive eyes.
“Opaline.” Pallie studied her. “Belva was right. You are special.”
Lee was skeptical. “In what way?”
“You are what we call an observer, my child. You will never have a gift for casting. But you can stare into the depths of others and observe.” Pallie studied her again with the same penetrating glance she knew from Belva. Lee shook it off.
“Who or what is behind it all? What am I missing?”
The old woman stood up and walked out into the grass, and Lee followed. The wind picked up and gusted through them, and Pallie opened her mouth to it. When it died down, she closed her mouth and lightly smacked her lips. “It tastes like your mother’s work. Powerful. Vengeful. No respect for the land and its spirits. Like a gun barrel forced into the mouth.”
“But Mama can’t pull from the land anymore, and she’s been reunited with her shadow. How could it be her?”
Pallie found a patch of dirt in the grass and squatted over it like a child. She pulled a pouch from somewhere in her skirt and poured a handful of dried corn kernels into her palm. She closed her eyes and shook the corn like dice, then she tossed them onto the ground. She bent over and peered at where they had fallen.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m reading the pattern.”
Lee bent over and tried to look for meaning in the shapes made by the scattered kernels. “What do you see?” she asked.
“I see… hm. I see what Belva means. There is something blocking us. Powerful work.”
“You can’t see anything? Maybe you need to try another method.”
“No, the corn don’t lie.”
“Can’t you just try, though?”
Pallie suddenly looked very tired, and the edges of her blurred. “Hush, child. I ain’t God. Just an old lady who needs a nap.” She smiled at Lee. “You don’t need me, honey. Use your gift. There are more secrets left to find.”
* * *
Lee woke with a start on the porch, but this time she was alone.
The house was still and quiet as she crept back in. Redbud was asleep on the couch. She usually looked like a corpse when she slept, but tonight she twitched back and forth, and little sounds dripped from her mouth.
Lee sat down at her hip and took her arm in her lap. She began to stroke it, and as she did, the boundary between this reality and the one inside of Redbud became permeable. Lee checked around the room before stepping in once more.
She was immediately dropped into her mother’s bedroom in the white house. The air was thick, and the images were distorted like in a dream. The sound of a hammer beamed slowly toward her from a figure crouched on the floor, like a submarine signal moving through water. It was her mother again, nailing those goddamn boots to the floor. After all of this, she was still fixated on this memory. Even in the fallout of accepting her shadow back inside of herself and presumably beginning to heal, she still dreamed of this stretch of hours.
Lee let the memory roll dreamily through, until it was once again the night after her father died. Redbud rolled carefully out of Lee’s bed and walked on the balls of her feet out of the room. She grabbed the red suitcase still sitting by the door from the night before and went out through the back, careful not to make a sound. She was wearing only a thin T-shirt and underwear with no shoes. The cold wind whipped through her, and the overgrown grass poked through the skin of her feet.
The coals were still glowing from the fire Billy had made for them to stare silently into that evening. She poked and blew on them and added kindling. The fire was reborn, rising from the ashes of itself, and she watched it grow higher. When she was satisfied, she released the clasps on the suitcase and took out her black book. She put her hand on it, and there was a long pause where she closed her eyes and tried to read the contents with her fingers through the leather. She hesitated. Then she set it down at the edge of the fire and pushed it into the hot center.
Redbud turned toward the house as if she’d heard a sound and walked briskly back in. Lee looked for her young self standing in the window as she’d seen during the shadow ritual, but this time, with the moon pulsing high above, Lee saw that it wasn’t her. The figure was in her mother’s bedroom, not Lee’s, and it was too tall to be her. For a moment, she wondered if it was her father’s ghost. But as she peered harder, she saw that it was a slightly older girl with a sullen face. Lee realized with a jolt that the girl had been erased from this entire sequence. A person who had been there that night and since forgotten.
It was Dreama.
THIRTY-ONE
Candles lit the way as Lee followed Dreama deeper into the house. She reached into her pocket and fingered the bundle of tinctures she’d taken from Belva’s workshop.
The first floor was one cavernous room with clusters of furniture delineating different spaces. Wide-planked wooden floors stretched out beneath her feet, and white shiplap covered the walls under floating shelves.
Lee had been in this house before. She’d lived in this house. Its copies existed everywhere in the country, miles of the same house stretching out into the parched horizon. For a moment, she half expected Cooper to come through the front door and ask what was for dinner.
They stopped in the kitchen, where Dreama opened a low door and pulled a bottle of chilled wine with the barest rinse of pink. She put out two glasses with enormous delicate glass bowls on thin stems and poured them three-fourths of the way full. Lee imagined crushing hers in her hand.
“This place…”
Dreama smirked. “I know, right? Brad flew Rebecca Tate from HGTV in to oversee the design. For an extra fee, you can pick from a few design options she put together, and we have a crew come in and place all the furniture and decorations before you move in.”
Lee pretended to take a sip of the wine, even as her mouth instinctively moved toward it like an infant reaching for a nipple.
Dreama took a sip of hers and angled her body toward Lee across the marble island. “I am so sorry about what happened to Otis. I really am. I can’t imagine how hard it’s been.”
Lee reached out and put her hands on Dreama’s. “Thank you for saying that. And thank you for being such a source of support these last few weeks. I don’t think I could have made it through without you.”
There was that soft, permeable, well-moisturized skin. Once more, Lee stepped into Dreama’s internal world and again, she was assaulted by images: the development’s McMansions, a large stucco church, a series of middle-aged male faces with their freshly shaved stubble and dented features. She strained to pass through this feed of surface concerns to whatever lay beyond it; she needed to travel deeper into Dreama’s mind.
On the other side, she found a long motel walkway with a door at the very end. It was outlined in a flaring yellow-pink, and smoke seeped from the bottom. As Lee walked toward it, she looked to her left over the railing. There was a cloudy sky and bare gray mountains in the distance. To her right, shouts and bangs came from behind scuffed doors. When she got to the smoking door at the end, she remembered her school fire training and tested the rusty metal doorknob. It was cold. She opened it and found a riot of flames in the middle of a room. It gave off an icy heat that felt like the last flaring tingles of frostbite spreading through her body. She winced, and the room disappeared.
Dreama’s face came into focus again. She had pulled her hand back and was leaning away from Lee. She looked at her curiously, then shrugged it off.
“What’s next for you guys? I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to leave and never come back.”
“We’re going back to California. Cooper and I are still done, but we can’t stay here. Not after everything that’s happened.”
Dreama smiled. “I’m so happy that you’re getting out again. I know you’re miserable here. You deserve to have a nice life.”
“Thank you for saying that.” Lee allowed herself to crumble a bit. She became a pitiful, wounded bird across the island. Dreama came around and put her arms around Lee. Through the press of her skin, Lee again entered Dreama’s internal world, this time running down the walkway for the door with more speed and intention. She flung open the door and steeled herself against the cold burn of the fire. She forced herself to focus on the room around it. It wasn’t your average cheap motel room. A counter spanned the room, with cabinets above and below, and it had the same clean, trendy style as Dreama’s house. Its blank cream pulsed with significance. Something important was inside this room.
Lee furiously opened cabinets and drawers, but they were all empty. She opened the final drawer at the very end of the counter and glimpsed a black book. But before she could investigate further, she was forced out, and Lee found herself back in Dreama’s kitchen.
Lee asked if she could have something to eat. Dreama, looking a little bewildered, went to the fridge and pulled out containers of food. When she wasn’t looking, Lee reached into her pocket for a mugwort tincture and poured a few drops into Dreama’s wine.
As Lee munched on fancy cheeses and farro with arugula, Dreama finished her rosé. Her speech became slurred and her ideas disjointed. She put her face down on the cold marble and wrapped her arms around her head. Lee called out Dreama’s name, then slammed her hand on the counter next to her ear and waited. Nothing. She was dead to the world.
Lee took quick, careful steps through the house and searched for the room she had seen in Dreama’s mind. Upstairs, she found only tasteful bedrooms with their own bathrooms and not a bud vase or throw pillow out of place.
She remembered the basement she’d been offered as a refuge and found the stairwell. There was a wooden bar, a pool table, a screening room with a large screen and leather chairs. Faceless guest bedrooms that were nothing like the room she’d seen.
The basement opened up to the backyard, and she saw a small structure sitting on the other side. As she ran across the lawn, she could feel the slick, artificial bulk of the grass.
Inside the guesthouse, the walls were covered in mirrors. A Pilates machine sat imposingly on one side, and a boxing bag and a beige dummy torso sat erect on the other. In the middle, two exercise bikes stood side by side in front of a projector screen. There was a shower room and a small kitchen filled with bottled water and protein milks. And that was the extent of it. She was met with a beige wall in the final closet: the end of the line.
Lee realized that the room could be anywhere; it seemed like they had enough money to own houses all over the country. Or maybe it wasn’t even real, just a construct of Dreama’s mind.
She took another look around the room and remembered the search for Belva’s black book and the false bottom. She wondered if Dreama had been given the same tutorial.
Lee studied the smooth expanse of wood floor. It reminded her of Belva’s trunk at home. That solid wood meant to trick those not curious enough to prod further and look for the unexpected in a flat gray world. It required the kind of shameless, clawing persistence for which Bucks were notorious.
She got to her knees and began to crawl slowly around the edge of the room, running her hand along the wooden boards of the floor. They’d been seamlessly placed, so that when she came across a small gap, it was easy to spot. She put her thumb through it and lifted it. The board came loose, and she pulled up the boards surrounding it until a small trapdoor was exposed with a flat handle that could be pulled out.
The door was heavy as she lifted it. The first rung of a ladder was visible in the hole with nothing but darkness below. She shined her phone light down and saw the rungs continued until they hit a cement floor.
Lee climbed down the ladder’s thin iron planks in the dark. It was cold as a root cellar, and all she could see was the deep-red glow from the illuminated cell phone in her jacket pocket. When she made it to the bottom, light suddenly flooded the space.
It was the room.
Lee began to open the cabinets, and this time they weren’t empty. They were filled with neatly labeled plastic jars of herbs, powders, dirt, and hair arranged on bamboo tiers, bottles of tinctures and waters in rotating storage, and tools in stackable containers. In a glass-doored fridge, she saw fresh black flowers cooling on a shelf. It was the West Elm version of Belva’s back-room apothecary.
She opened the far drawer, and a black leather book sat in its center on a paisley-patterned liner. The cover was charred and torn at the corners, but when Lee opened it, the pages were only singed at the edges, with all of its contents still intact. In her mother’s handwriting, she read the first entry dated May 13, 1980, which described in vivid detail what it first felt like to wield the power of the land. She flipped through and found page after page of spells. So many more than in Belva’s book, which was heavier on natural observations with drawings of birds and plants, like something out of Darwin’s notebook.
A noise suddenly came from above, and she saw Dreama’s face hovering over the entrance like a demented moon.
Lee put down the book, startled. She waited for her to speak, but Dreama only hovered there, silent. Her face was drained of all the cheer and goodwill Lee had noticed in this new Dreama. The angry, judgmental teenager Lee remembered was restored.
“Dreama. I’m sorry about snooping. Let’s just talk about this. I’ll come up there.” Lee moved toward the ladder.
Dreama’s face remained cold and impassive. “Stay where you are.”
Lee started up one rung.
“I told you not to move.”
Cold sweat beaded on the back of her neck. She wished she’d found something sharp.
“What’s going on?”
“Don’t play dumb. Let’s be honest with each other now.”
“Fine.” Lee paused, attempting to collect herself. “What is all of this down here? Why do you have my mama’s black book? I thought you hated this stuff.”
Dreama rolled it over in her mind. “I never said I hated it. I’ve found my own private uses for it.”
“Did you use it to kill those men? Did you try to kill Otis?”
Dreama narrowed her eyes at Lee. “I’ve had a hard time figuring you out since you got back. You’re arrogant, but you have no self-esteem. You detest this place, but you can’t seem to leave.”
The half logic of her words had a nightmare feel to it. “Please just tell me. Did you try to kill him? Was it you this whole time?”
Dreama sank back into quiet observation.
“Why did you do it? For what possible reason?”
Dreama smiled. “It was all for you, Lee. I did it for you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lee was done trying to get answers from her. “Dreama. Let me the fuck out of here.”
