Gilda Joyce: The Bones of the Holy (26 page)

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Authors: Jennifer Allison

BOOK: Gilda Joyce: The Bones of the Holy
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The tug-of-war between Captain Jack and Mrs. Furbo resumed in full force, this time with such energy that Mrs. Furbo kicked Captain Jack in the shin.
“Ow!” he yelled.
“Please! Everyone be seated!” The priest raised his hands, struggling to capture the attention of the bickering wedding guests. It was a lost cause; by now the entire group was out of control.
Amidst all the chaos, Eugene decided to make a run for it and escape while the getting was good.
But as he tiptoed away from the ridiculous fiasco that had started as his wedding, something very strange happened. Without warning, it began to rain. Next, and just as abruptly, Eugene found himself staring into the dead face of Charlotte, who wore the same wedding dress she had worn on the night of her death.
The guests jumped up to run for cover from the rain. They turned from their seats just in time to see a large man fainting at his own wedding.
“It was me,” Eugene muttered as his knees buckled. “I did it. I killed my Charlotte!”
47
Eugene's Story
It rained like a monsoon on the last night I saw Charlotte alive. Come to think of it, the storm was similar to the one we had just this week—tree branches down all over the place. . . . We know how rain comes almost every day and leaves as quickly as it showed up, but this rain was different. I remember how it continued through the whole night.
It was the eve of my wedding, so I wasn't expecting to see Charlotte until the next morning at the ceremony. I thought she was acting a little peculiar at the wedding rehearsal, but I guessed it was just nerves. I was worried, though, because I had heard a few rumors. In those days, people had a way of talking. And Charlotte—well, anything she did seemed to attract people's attention.
I did my best not to think about it. After all, Charlotte's father had just given me the best gift of my life—a beautifully carved antique rifle. I sat up at the dining-room table cleaning that rifle like Mr. Furbo had taught me, and I thought about how he and Mrs. Furbo had welcomed me into the family.
So who suddenly comes into the house looking like something a dog pulled out of a river but Charlotte. Well, I knew something was very wrong if she was barefoot and wearing her mama's silk wedding dress out in the rain on the night before her wedding.
“I have something to tell you, Eugene,” she says to me. And then she tells me that she can't marry me—that she loves someone else. She told me she was leaving for good.
Suddenly, it was like I was a little boy again, standing outside in the rain and just looking at them empty train tracks, wondering why my daddy left.
Not this time,
I told myself. This time, I wasn't going to stand for it.
“I'll kill him before I let him take you away,” I told Charlotte. “I'll follow him to Europe if I have to.”
Well, this upset Charlotte somethin' terrible, and she grabbed the gun by the barrel and tried to take it away from me. It went off, and she fell. I couldn't believe it; she had been shot right in the heart.
I lay next to Charlotte's body for the whole night, just listening to the rain. Well—I suppose I got up just one time, to forge some of her good-bye letters, including a letter to her boyfriend Chance—to tell him that she wanted him to leave without her.
I knew I should call the police, but how could I face Charlotte's parents after what I had done? How could I tell them that I had killed their only daughter, even if it was an accident? Besides, I knew they would make me give Charlotte up; I would have to bury her deep in the ground where I could never be close to her again.
I had decided I would never tell a soul. I would keep Charlotte near me always.
48
Still Single, Still a Doofus
D
ressed in jeans, a St. Augustine T-shirt, and a scraggly ponytail, Gilda's mother looked more like her old self than she had since Mr. Pook had started influencing her.
Gilda, on the other hand, was dressed in a lavender vintage dress and a matching hat that she had swiped from one of the closets in Eugene's house. After being locked in a musty old cistern and forced to sit next to a coffin containing a dead body for hours—not to mention several more hours of questioning at the police station after Eugene turned himself in—Gilda felt entitled to take at least one souvenir from the house.
Realizing she hadn't yet updated Wendy on her successful investigation, she took out her notebook and scribbled a letter to be mailed upon landing in Detroit:
Dear Wendy,
Let's just say that a few teensy things happened since our brief conversation a couple days ago.
Right now I'm on the plane returning home with Mom and Stephen.
Yes, Stephen is still single, and still a doofus. And no, he didn't kiss that girl I told you about, so you can stop asking. In fact, he literally had one of the worst Halloween nights of his entire life. We both did. To be honest, we're lucky we
survived
it, so next time you're jealous, just be careful what you wish on people!
I'll fill you in on exactly what happened later, but the result is that Mom did NOT get married. And no, it wasn't because I ruined the wedding either. Okay, technically I
did
interrupt the actual ceremony, but the reason the wedding got called off was that we all happened to discover something horribly tacky in Mr. Pook's background. (That's how we Southern belles talk about little social faux pas like murders and hidden bodies, by the way.)
After Mr. Pook confessed and turned himself in to the police for questioning, I gave the Furbos the diary I found in Eugene's cistern; it belonged to their daughter (she's the one Eugene killed in case you're not following me here, Wendy). They took the diary and just nodded at me blankly; they seemed to be in shock. It's strange how, even though the Furbos willingly broke off their relationship with Charlotte twenty years ago, now that they know she's actually dead and that she never even got to Europe, you'd think she had just disappeared yesterday. I guess deep down, they must have always assumed that they would see her again someday.
They were completely stunned at this horrible revelation, and just sat there holding the diary and glaring at Eugene. Mrs. Furbo didn't even notice when a gopher tortoise crawled out of her handbag! (Captain Jack told me later that she had tried to kidnap it.)
Speaking of Captain Jack, one benefit of this whole fiasco (and let's face it, as weddings go, it really was one of the biggest disasters in St. Augustine history) is that we now have an invitation to come back and visit him and go on his pirate ship again. He also helped take my mom's mind off the fact that her fiancé had been storing a corpse under his kitchen by taking us out on his boat and singing some of the sea chanteys he knows.
NOTE TO SELF: try to help Mom meet more zoologist-pirates.
Okay, Wendy, get your purple hair dye and lipstick ready, and put away your homework, because I'm coming back to town. And yes—I'm coming back TO STAY!
“I can't believe I didn't make it to the beach even once,” Stephen complained.
“Wait a minute.” Gilda stopped writing and turned to face Stephen more directly. “Is that all you can say after everything we've been through?”
“I'm just saying; I wish I had gone to the beach.”
“Okay, but let me ask you this: Has this experience finally opened your eyes to the reality of ghosts and psychic phenomena?”
“It definitely opened my eyes to the fact that Eugene Pook is one very messed up guy.”
Gilda rolled her eyes. “What about you, Mom? Didn't you notice anything strange about Mr. Pook's house?”
“Well, now that you mention it, I did have some odd little spells I couldn't explain.”
“What do you mean?” Gilda suddenly remembered how her mother had stood in the middle of the kitchen motionless, as if in a trance. She remembered how her mother's eyes had looked different—as if some other entity was looking through her.
“It was strange. I would walk into a room and immediately forget where I was and what I was doing. And now that I think about it, it often happened in the kitchen—right over that old cistern you and Stephen discovered. . . .” Mrs. Joyce's voice shook at the macabre memory, and she took a deep breath to compose herself. “Anyway, I suppose I did experience some strange events.”
“Next time, you should pay more attention to the messages you're getting, Mom,” Gilda suggested. “Maybe carry a little notebook in your purse like I do.”
“I'm not planning a repeat of this experience, Gilda.”
“That's exactly why you need to work on your psychic skills. You'll be able to spot warning signs and trust your intuition better so you don't end up getting engaged to someone who stores his ex-girlfriends under the house again.”
“Spotting warning signs would be a good thing,” Mrs. Joyce agreed, wryly.
“You're trying to get
Mom
involved in that psychic nonsense now?”
“Stephen, I'm not trying to get Mom involved in anything. I'm guessing Mom has some psychic sensitivity, right, Mom? I'm guessing you probably inherited it from Grandmother McDoogle, just like me.”
“I thought Grandmother McDoogle had dementia,” Stephen commented.
“Eventually she did,” said Mrs. Joyce, “but when she was younger, she had an uncanny knack for predicting all sorts of things that came true. And a lot of her friends believed that she really did speak with ghosts.”
“So now you and Gilda are going to sit around the house talking to ghosts?”
“What's wrong with that?” Gilda imagined sitting on the couch with her mother drinking sweet tea, eating chocolate chip cookies, and chatting about local ghost stories like Darla and her mother.
“I just want to find out how crazy things are going to get before I bring any new friends over,” Stephen commented.
“Don't worry; I don't have the stomach for this psychic stuff the way your sister does.”
“But wouldn't it be fun to learn at least a
little
bit about it, Mom?”
“Well.” Mrs. Joyce had always thought of herself as a down-to-earth person—someone who didn't have time for impractical pursuits. She had certainly never considered herself a particularly intuitive, creative, or psychic person.
But what if these things really do run in families?
she thought.
And what if I showed a little interest? Maybe Gilda and I might feel like we have something in common for a change
. “Okay, why not?” she said. “Maybe you can invite Wendy over and we'll have a little psychic party, since the two of you didn't get to go trick-or-treating this year.”
“Oh, great! I'll tell Wendy; she'll be so excited.”
Is it possible that I'm actually excited about doing something with my mother?
Gilda wondered as she added a note about the psychic party to her letter.
I guess the embarrassing answer is yes.
Gilda sat happily between her mother and brother for the rest of the flight and didn't even mind when Stephen bumped her elbow off the armrest for the fifth time in a row. If there was one thing she had come to realize during the past few days, it was that she was grateful for the family she had, despite the many flaws, quirks, and embarrassing scenes that came with it.
49
Psychic Sisters
Dear Gilda:
I hope you're doing well up in Michigan.
I just wanted to thank you again for letting me borrow your
Master Psychic's Handbook
; I read the whole thing and even took down notes, so I'm sending it back to you now. I think meeting you and reading this book really helped me feel less scared of the things I see. Now I create a “boundary” to protect myself, and also try to analyze the situation more so I can learn something from everything that happens to me. I also light my guardian angel candle every night and say a prayer for everyone I care about, and I haven't had as many nightmares since.
I thought you would be interested to know that I saw a light on inside Mr. Pook's house the other night, so of course I thought of Charlotte's ghost. I looked over the fence, and I realized it was Mr. Furbo sitting there all by himself. He looked really sad, so I went over to talk to him. He was sitting there reading that diary you found—the one Charlotte kept. And it kind of looked like he had been crying, but I wasn't sure.
Well, I ended up telling him that I live next door and that I used to see the ghost of his daughter around—and that I hadn't seen her ever since her body was found. He was really interested. He told me that he thought it was all his fault she died because if he hadn't told her to go away just because he didn't like her new boyfriend, she might still be alive.
I kind of had a feeling that there was a message Charlotte wanted to tell him—so I tried to tune into it the way the
Psychic's Handbook
instructs you to do.
“I think Charlotte wants to tell you something, Mr. Furbo,” I said. “I feel like she's at peace now,” I told him. “I really do. And she isn't even mad at you—or at anyone—anymore. But she says you're supposed to do something in her memory.”
“What kind of thing?” he asked me. He was really listening to me, as if I had all the answers in the world! And then I got this picture in my mind of Mr. Furbo and a family named Owens sharing their datil-pepper recipes at the next barbecue festival. “Mr. Furbo,” I said, “Charlotte thinks you might feel better if you went and got to know the family of that boyfriend she had so many years ago.”
So Mr. Furbo, he just stared at me, and then he nodded as if he was thinking about that idea really seriously. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe I'll just do that.”

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