Kiss of the Sun (2 page)

Martha sat slouched on the wicker sofa, her notebooks and reference books spread in drifts on the side table and floor.
The Hoodoo and Conjure Handbook,
a musty volume she had ordered from a dealer in antique curios, lay open in her lap. Mojo, her seal-point Himalayan, was curled up next to her feet.

She was supposed to be working, but the languor of the morning had cast a spell on her. “All right, we're going to finish one more chapter, Mojo,” she promised the cat, and gave him a small rub with the side of her foot.

Her legs were lightly tanned, as they always were since she'd lived on Shell Heap, even in winter, and well toned from daily bike rides—her sole means of transportation on the island. Her jaunts took her along the shady road that ran through the center of the village, where she would often pause for extended conversations with her Geechee neighbors, the direct descendants of slaves who had settled the island and formed an isolated community after the Civil War.

After making her social rounds, she would ride out to the ferry dock, pick up her mail, and head out of the village, following the dirt road north across the center of the island. A mile later, she would turn right on a sandy path that led into the forest and down to a hollow that contained the prehistoric shell midden, the archeological feature that gave the island its name. It was there that she would rest and have lunch, breathing the clean oxygen of the forest and tasting the brine of the nearby ocean.

Later.
You have a deadline.
She was pulling the book forward, pen in hand, ready to take notes, when she noticed that Mojo had turned his head and pricked his ears. He was looking toward the front door. Martha followed his gaze.

Martha felt her skin temperature drop when she saw them standing there, an elderly African American couple, motionless behind the screen door. They looked like characters from a 1940s vintage photograph, posing in their Sunday finest. On the left, a wiry gentleman with a chocolate-brown brimmed hat and matching tie; beside him, a stocky woman who shimmered in a paisley rayon dress.

A hallucination?
It had been a long time, more than a year, since Martha had experienced visual symptoms.
Look away, then look back.
She looked down at her teacup on the glass-topped wicker coffee table, with its vestige of ruddy chamomile, and counted slowly to three in her mind. Then she looked back toward the door. The two shapes were still there. The taller one reached up and pulled off his hat. He rapped his knuckles against the wooden frame of the screen door. Mojo slid off the sofa and padded toward the kitchen.

It's okay, they're real.
Martha pushed aside her papers, slipped on her sandals, and went to the door.

“Good morning. Sorry to disturb you. Are you Miss Covington?” the man asked. He held a shoebox. The woman wore horn-rimmed glasses and clutched a silver lamé handbag with a gold clasp. Deep in the crevasse of her large bosom, a tiny gold cross glinted.

The couple was not from the island. She knew every name and face in the small Geechee community.

“Martha Covington?” the woman asked.

“Yes, that's me. Can I help you?”

The couple glanced at each other.

“We've driven all the way from Palmetto,” the man started, holding his felt hat over his stomach. “We spent the night in Amberleen and took the ferry out this morning. We'd very much like to speak with you. We've heard about your practice.” The man smiled, causing his face to crinkle. He projected a courtly grace, a gentility, while the woman looked tense, determined.

Palmetto.
Martha had heard of the town, vaguely. A small burg somewhere south of Atlanta. Hours from the coast. And Martha had no landline, no Internet, and her cellphone worked only on the mainland. She certainly didn't advertise her “practice.” How had they found her?

“I apologize for us coming unannounced like this,” the man continued. “Folks said you don't have a phone, so we just came out to see if we could find you. I'm sure glad we were able to.” He pulled a white handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed sweat from his forehead. The walk from the ferry landing was a solid mile, and the pair looked hot.

“Would you like something to drink? Maybe some water or tea?”

The couple looked at each other. “Do you have any iced tea?” the woman said. “I would love a small glass.”

“Yes, just a small glass would be wonderful,” the man said.

Martha paused, holding on to the screen door, considering the two apparitions before her—antique and materialized wholly out of nothing on a Sunday afternoon. They looked harmless enough. “Come on in,” she said.

They stepped inside and surveyed her small living room. They saw her shells on the windowsills; her desk covered with papers and stacks of books about root work; the clay bowls and Mason jars containing roots, herbs, and miniature bones; the twine-wrapped packets of feathers and dried botanical matter. She could feel them watching her curiously as she took a pair of thrift-store tumblers from the cabinet and filled them with ice. She poured in the remaining chamomile tea from the pot she had made that morning, then set the two drinks on the coffee table along with a bowl of sugar and a spoon. “I'm afraid you'll have to add your own sugar. I drink mine unsweetened.”

“It doesn't matter, as long as it's cold and wet,” the man said, taking a polite sip.

“How can I help you?” Martha asked nervously. “Did you want some kind of consultation?” She always felt like a fraud, doing her so-called practice for the island residents: prescribing herbs, making up gris-gris bags, occasionally interpreting dreams. It was all based on her research into archaic folklore, combined with a dollop of intuition. Any positive results, her psychologist felt compelled to remind her frequently, were simply due to the placebo effect. To extend the charade to outsiders seemed unthinkable. Had her “reputation” spread so far? It's not as if she advertised, or even hung out a shingle. This was too much.

“Yes, ma'am, we'd be much obliged if you could assist us,” the man said. “We understand you have the gift.”

Martha smiled. “I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding. I only do this as a hobby, and a research project.” She waved toward the stacks of books and papers on the desk. “I got a grant from the Georgia Humanities Council to write a book about the folk traditions of the Geechees. I'm not a real root worker.”

The couple looked around her living room, scanned the bottles and herbs, the snakeskin hanging from the corner of a bookshelf. Martha knew she had begun to look the part, too, with her windblown, sun-bleached hair, her necklace of shells.

“None of this is real,” Martha said emphatically. “It's just research.”

“We learned about you from Charlie Gibbons. He's Clarence's brother-in-law, and his wife's cousin lives out on the island. We came because Charlie told us you were the real thing. One of the very last who's got it.”

Gladys looked at Clarence, her face drawn, like she might burst into tears. Clarence put a hand on her knee and spoke, squeezing the folded peak of his hat. “We've driven a very long way, Miss Covington. As I said, we would have called ahead, but we decided just to drive out and see if we could find you.”

Gladys pulled a crumpled tissue from her handbag, mashed it against her eyes. “It's been so long since…”

“And now that we have,” Clarence continued, “we would be much obliged, much obliged, if you would just take a few minutes to hear our story.”

Gladys spoke again. “We don't want to trouble you in any way, but we've tried everything else.”

“Everything we could think of.”

“The police, the FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. We've talked to most everybody we know of. We've been carrying this around for years, and everyone else has just give up, but we can't ever give up, not until we have the answer as to what really happened.”

“Gladys,” the man said, “we need to take this slowly.” He turned back to Martha. “Just let us tell you our story, and you can decide if you think you can help us in any way.”

He leaned forward and put the shoebox on the coffee table.

“This is about our grandson, Peavy,” Clarence said, lifting the lid from the shoebox.

Martha felt a clammy sensation in her gut.
No, not this.

“He's been missing for a number of years,” Gladys continued. “It's what the police call a cold case.”

“We used to live out here,” Clarence said. “St. Helena Island. We used to have a root doctor we went to, a seer, out there. All the villages had at least one. But not anymore. Leastwise, not since Dr. Buzzard passed.”

“What Clarence is saying is, you don't look like what we expect, but Charlie said you're one of the last that can really do it. The last one the elders still go to for this kind of help.”

Martha took a breath. She looked into her cup with its puddle of cold tea, gave it a slight swirl. “I'm sorry, I'm really very sorry, but this isn't something I can help you with.”

The old woman's eyes were starting to well up. “I told you, Clarence, I told you—”

Clarence put his hand on Gladys's and squeezed. “Miss Covington, we don't expect a miracle, but we've been fighting to keep this investigation open for years.”

“What do you think I can do?”

“We just want to tell you our story, and share with you a few things that belonged to Peavy, and then just see if you get an impression, or any feelings. Or maybe you'll have a dream. Anything that opens up a fresh lead for us.”

“The police have been useless,” Gladys interjected.

“What is it you think I can help you with?”

Gladys opened the shoebox and took out a color snapshot and handed it to Martha. “This is Peavy.”

The boy in the picture looked to be twelve, maybe fourteen. Large eyes, close-cropped hair. Wide, toothy smile.

“His mother wasn't around much. She had a lot of trouble with the law. Most of the times he saw her, it was inside the penitentiary,” Clarence said.

“The visitation room,” Gladys added.

“We raised the boy.”

Martha took another breath. She could feel that most of the color had run out of her skin, but she tried to hide her reaction, carefully modulating her voice and manner.

“I'm so very sorry. I don't know what gave you the impression—” Martha paused and thought about the folk remedies she had dispensed to her neighbors, the informal psychic “counseling” sessions.
Of course
her reputation had spread.

She bit her lip and looked down at the picture. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“It was six years ago, come this March. He was over at a friend's house and Jerome's mother was supposed to be watching them, and Peavy wanted to go down to that old playground where they took out the neighborhood to expand the airport.”

“Took out a neighborhood?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Clarence continued. “The area used to be called Lineville. They bought out the houses there and tore them down. But the playground was still there, and a field next to it. It was kind of overgrown. Peavy wanted to go down there and throw the baseball back and forth, so they went.”

“Here's the baseball,” Gladys said. She lifted the ball out of the box and placed it on the glass surface between them. The white leather was discolored from use, the red stitching slightly frayed. Martha felt a shudder start at the base of her spine. She pushed the feeling back.

“The only witness to what happened that evening was Peavy's friend Jerome,” Clarence said. “He said the sun was going down and they were getting ready to walk home when a car came through. The boy said it was a Buick sedan.”

“Green, with whitewall tires,” Gladys said, leaning forward.

“It pulled around the circle across from the park. There was a man and a woman in the car. The man rolled down the window and called out to Peavy.”

“He knew his name,” Gladys said. “He called his name out and said, ‘Hey, Peavy.' ”

Martha nodded.

“Jerome said Peavy handed him the baseball and told him to wait while he went over and talked to that couple,” Clarence said.

“The ones in the car,” Gladys said. “It was a white couple, maybe European. Jerome said he thought they had a funny accent.”

“Jerome said he waited for a few minutes, but they just kept talking,” Clarence continued. “It was getting dark and he knew his mother would start to get worried, so Jerome shouted over to Peavy that he was going home, and Peavy just said all right, go ahead, he'd catch up a little bit later.”

“And then Jerome went on home, and that was the last anyone—” Gladys's voice broke, and she put the crumpled tissue to her lips.

“What we can't understand,” Clarence said, “was that Peavy never told us about knowing someone like that. A foreign couple with a green Buick. And Peavy was never one to keep secrets.”

“He was always so extroverted,” Gladys said. “Never met a stranger. Everyone liked him.”

Martha looked at the snapshot. She could see the neckline of an orange baseball jersey. The boy's brown eyes shone with a hint of mischief.

“Now, they searched that area for weeks,” Clarence said. “Sent dogs out and dug up the old sewer lines and everything else you could think of, but there weren't nothing there. They put his picture on milk cartons and mailers and so forth, but nothing's ever come up except occasional false hope.”

“The police thought Peavy was mixed up with drugs,” Gladys said, her gray eyebrows descending. “But there weren't a word of truth to that. His mother may have been a wild one but Peavy was different. He did well in school. He wanted to become a professional baseball player.”

“Are they still looking for him?”