Sweet Unrest (8 page)

“Hey, Piers. Come take a look at this.” My dad was pointing to the doorway.

“Red brick dust,” Piers said. “Believers think that scrubbing the steps with it or putting a line in front of doors and windows will keep out spirits and people who mean you harm. Look here, by the window. There’s more of it.”

I crouched down to take a closer look and, with a couple clicks of my camera, documented the strange line of fine powder in the doorway. “It’s funny how it’s still so neat,” I said. “I mean, if this Thisbe person disappeared way back when, you’d think it would have blown away by now.”

“This was done recently,” Piers said. “This kind of charm needs to be reapplied fairly regularly if it’s going to retain its power. That’s why the steps are that funny russet color while the rest of the porch is just worn wood. Someone must still be scrubbing these steps with dust on a regular basis.”

“Who would go to so much trouble to protect an old shack?” I wondered.

“Could be any number of people around here, Luce,” my dad said. “The university has been trying to get this place for a couple of years now, but there were people in the community who made it difficult. From what I understand, people around here were brought up on stories about Thisbe.”

“That’s also probably why the cottage hasn’t tumbled down to nothing by now,” Piers added. “A hundred and fifty years of Louisiana summers and this old place shouldn’t be anything more than a ruin.” He bounced a bit on the porch to demonstrate his point. It lurched but held.

“So, someone’s been taking care of this place?”

“And keeping up the charms on it,” Piers confirmed.

“We’re going to have to make sure security knows about that,” my dad told Piers.

Piers nodded and made a note on the pad he was carrying. With a quick swipe of his foot, he scattered the red line before opening one of the French doors and going in.

“Come on in,” he called from somewhere deep inside the house.

My dad and I stepped carefully over the threshold and looked around.

“This is incredible,” Piers said, returning to the front room. “It’s like this house hasn’t been empty for more than a few years.”

The dust we’d disturbed tickled my nose, and I fought back a sneeze. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized Piers was right. Except for a thick coat of dust and wisps of gauzy cobwebs draping from every surface, the house didn’t look like it had been abandoned for more than a century.

“Someone must have been living here,” my dad said.

“Maybe,” Piers agreed. “But if that were the case, you’d think there’d be some more modern stuff lying around. Trash or something. I don’t see anything that indicates the twentieth century has ever come through this door.”

“Maybe someone’s been treating it like a shrine,” I ventured as I set up my equipment to get some pictures of the front entryway. My dad had already wandered into a room farther back.

“You may be onto something there,” Piers said.

“Piers, can you come take a look at this?” My dad’s voice carried from one of the back rooms.

Walking through the musty darkness of the house, Piers and I came to a long room lined with shelves. On one end were the remains of one of the home’s two brick fireplaces; on the other, a low, cot-like bed and a roughly made table.

“What do you make of this?” My father showed Piers a wooden box he’d pulled out of a cabinet. Mold blackened its exterior.

When my dad opened it, Piers took out a small, gnarled-looking starfish. When I came closer for a better look, I realized he was holding was a small, primitive doll. Someone had wrapped a reddish string around its torso, under and around its arms and legs, so that the string formed an inverted star against the figure’s body.

“Looks like a hand-carved voodoo doll.” Piers studied it thoughtfully as he turned it over in his hand. “I’ve seen a lot of old dolls and poppets, but I’ve never seen one carved quite like this.”

“What’s different about it?” I asked, raising my camera to document the find.

“These markings, for one,” Piers told me, pointing to a series of tiny indentions in the doll’s arms and legs. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it’s some kind of additional charm. I’ll have to do a little work to find out what it means.”

“Well, what do we have here?” my dad murmured, having already moved on to something else in the room.

I went over to see what he’d found. He was crouched down, carefully brushing at the debris with his gloved hand until he revealed a crumpled mass of fabric. Even with his gentle touch, he couldn’t keep it from crumbling in places as he unfolded it. It was a painstaking process, but little by little I started to make out the shape of a shirt or coat.

“There’s something in this pocket,” he told us as he eased his fingers into a flap in the ancient material and extracted a small object that reminded me of a booklet. “Amazing.”

I knew what it was before he opened it. I’d recognized the embossed design bordering the cover almost instantly, and I felt a wave of panic run through me. I knew that behind the fragile cover was a single image, and I knew exactly what that image would be. My mouth went dry as I watched in disbelief, wishing futilely that no one would open it.

“Do you think this might be a picture of Thisbe?” Piers asked, oblivious to my distress.

“Maybe. There were definitely a lot of slaves with skin that fair, but see the glass? This is a daguerreotype, not a simple photograph. And according to the records I’ve seen, Thisbe was much, much older than this girl when the technology for this type of image was being used,” my dad answered.

As I inched closer to them on unsteady feet, I had the
strange sense that both my dad and Piers sounded very far away. It was almost as if everything in my consciousness was focused only on the object, on willing myself to see anything there but the single image I knew it held.

But it didn’t work. While Piers and my father debated the age of the image, I met the gaze of a girl with dark hair and flawless skin who, if the portrait had been in color, would have had eyes the exact same color as my own. Eyes that hungered for the person behind the camera.

Armantine
. It was the last thing I thought before my vision went black.

Ten

Pain and darkness and the cold wet of death surrounding me. And I’m falling, sinking until my lungs burn with the fetid water that has pulled me into its embrace.

“Luce? Lucy, honey. Come on sweetheart, wake up for me.” My dad’s worried voice sounded through the depths, pulling me
up, up toward the starry night above
. Up toward the world.

“She’ll be fine, Dr. Aimes. It’s probably the heat that got to her.” And then Piers, his low voice rumbling through the liquid and buoying me up as well.
So close
.

“I think she’s coming to. Lucy? Lucy, honey, can you hear me?”

My eyes fluttered open and then closed against the brightness of the day. “’M fine.”

Strong hands pushed me up to a sitting position as I
tried to figure out how I’d gotten outside and why I was lying on the porch. “What happened?”

“You fainted.” My dad’s face was tight with worry, even as his voice was gentle.

“What?” I blinked in confusion. “I don’t faint.”

Piers frowned. “I could definitely testify otherwise.”

“The heat must have gotten to you,” my dad said.

“My camera.” I groped frantically at where the strap should have been around my neck.

“Piers has it—he caught you before you went completely to the floor,” my dad said.

I felt heat creep into my cheeks. “Thanks,” I muttered, hoping he wouldn’t tell Chloe about my swan dive.

“No problem,” Piers said, holding up my camera. “But I wasn’t fast enough to save it.”

“My baby,” I moaned, holding out my hands to take my cracked camera. The lens was definitely busted, and it looked like the casing was pretty banged up as well.

“We’ll take it into town and get it fixed this weekend,” my dad said. “But for right now, let’s get you back home. You feel okay to stand up?”

I nodded. “I don’t know what happened.”

“That makes three of us,” he said, helping me to my feet. “I think that’s enough for you today. I’m officially giving you the day off. Get into the air conditioning and get some rest.” He brushed at the dark circles I knew were beneath my eyes. “You haven’t been sleeping enough.”

I ignored his concern and gathered up my bag, checking my camera again—it was still as cracked and damaged as it was a moment before. Gently I tucked her into my bag, but before I could sling it over my shoulder, Piers plucked the bag out of my hands and added it to his load.

“You don’t have to—” I started to say, but the look he gave me stopped me cold. “Thanks,” I said instead.

“Should we gather up the artifacts before we go?” Piers asked.

My dad shook his head. “We’ll need to leave them for Byron to catalog first. You two go on back and I’ll lock up here.”

Piers and I started back across the field that separated Thisbe’s cabin from the Le Ciel property, back toward the pond and the big house beyond. As we stepped into the thick line of trees, I glanced back only once, glad to have the cabin behind me.

“So what’s Armantine?” Piers asked.

“Who?”

“So, it’s a who?”

“I … uh … ” I blinked at him.

“‘Armantine.’ You said it right before you went down.”

“I’m not sure,” I told him.

It wasn’t really a lie, I told myself. I didn’t know for sure that the girl in the image was the same as the one in my dreams. Old pictures have a tendency to look the same, and there was no way of telling if a girl named Armantine had ever even existed.

But I knew deep down—in that place where we know things instinctively—that the uncanny familiarity of the image threatened all the careful, rational explanations I’d been constructing about the dreams I was having.

Then, as we approached the edge of the line of trees ringing the pond, I saw Alex leaning stiffly against a thick pine. The thing that had been growing tighter and tighter in my chest all morning, ever since waking from the dream about him leaning over Lila’s dead body, loosened when I saw him standing there, half in hidden by the trees.

The mid-morning sun cast dark shadows over the angles of his face, and the light filtering through the trees picked up the gold that ran through his hair and highlighted the tones of his skin. My fingers itched to capture those contrasts in a photograph—the angles and softness, the shadows and light—but my camera was busted.

I’d wanted to see him again ever since he’d walked away from me that day by the pond, but it was more than mere curiosity that drew me to him. He was attractive, sure. Maybe even beautiful. But there was something else about Alex that captured my attention in a different way. There was something
compelling
about him—about the way he’d seemed to be holding himself back that day, while at the same time daring me to figure him out. Because I’d sensed that he didn’t mean to tease or lead me on, part of me wanted to take his dare, to scratch beneath the surface of the calm neutrality he wore and discover what he was hiding beneath.

I had been wondering if maybe the dream about Lila’s death was my subconscious warning me about Alex, but as he stood there, bathed in dappled light, he didn’t look any more capable of murdering someone than I was. I started to raise my hand to wave to him, but his mouth tightened and he shook his head, silently urging me not to draw attention to his presence. And then, ducking back into the trees, he was gone.

“What is it?” Piers asked. Apparently he was still watching me with those sharp gray eyes of his.

“Huh?” I turned to look at him.

“It looked like you saw something over there.” He pointed to the empty place where Alex had been.

“I didn’t see anyone,” I lied.

“I didn’t say it was a someone.” Piers narrowed his eyes at me.

I looked away, ignoring his unspoken question.

“That’s two, Lucy. You’ve had a rough morning, so I’m going to let it slide. But you should know right now that I’m not someone you can lie to.” His voice was low, but there was steel running through it.

“I don’t know wha—”

“Don’t,” he told me, the clipped abruptness of the tone silencing me.

I nodded, more to myself than to him, and we walked on in silence. I did look back again, hoping to see Alex one more time, but he was gone.

That afternoon, I found Chloe leading some tourists back to the gatehouse. Her pale green gown swished rhythmically as she walked along the path, and when she noticed me watching her, she raised her hand and waved.

After she’d deposited the last of her group at the gates, she turned back and found me. “Piers said you took quite a tumble today.”

I felt my face grow warm. “Told you already, huh?”

“My man tells me everything,” she said, but then her smile faltered. “Or at least everything he thinks I need to know. He wanted me to check and see if y’all were okay, when I got off my shift, but it looks like you saved me a trip.”

“Glad to be of assistance,” I said dryly.

“So,” she said, dragging out the syllable in anticipation. “Tell me everything.”

“About what?”

She slugged my arm affectionately. “About what? About Thisbe’s place, girl. You know you and your daddy are the first people to go through those doors in a long time, don’t you?”

“Piers was there too.”

“Oh, he’s too busy today for me to bother him, and I’ve got you here now, so tell me
everything
. Did you see a ghost? Is that what made you go down like some wannabe Scarlett O’Hara?” She made a show of putting her hand to her forehead like some wilting Southern belle.

“No. No ghosts. Just a bunch of dust and spiderwebs,” I told her, trying to dismiss the trickle of unease running down my spine.

She wrinkled her nose at that, her smile dimming a bit. “That’s it? You gotta do better than that if you want me to tell you what Mama Legba said yesterday about reoccurring dreams,” she said slyly.

“You asked her?” I perked up instantly. “Tell me.”

“You first,” she insisted.

“Look, Chloe, there’s not much to tell. The house is just kind of grimy and dirty, but I didn’t see any ghosts. It was actually mostly empty. Well, except for the box my dad found in an old cupboard.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” She looped an arm through mine as we walked along the path toward the employees’ dorm. “What was in the box? Old shrunken heads and Voodoo charms?”

“No shrunken heads, but there was something Piers seemed to think might have been used a Voodoo doll. You’ll have to ask him about it, though. It all looked like old junk to me.” Well, except for the picture. But I didn’t tell Chloe about that. I didn’t even want to
think
about the picture.

“It would, Yankee girl.” She said the words without malice.

“Okay, your turn. What did Mama Legba say about the dreams?”

“She wouldn’t tell me anything.”

I stopped abruptly at that. “What? Then why were you holding out on me?”

“I wanted to hear about Thisbe’s place,” she said mischievously. “Besides, she didn’t tell me anything because she wants to talk with you herself.”

“Really?” After the strange dream and the stranger morning I’d spent in Thisbe’s house, part of me wasn’t in any rush to go see the old Voodoo Queen again. But another part of me couldn’t help but be excited about the chance to maybe get some answers.

Chloe nodded. “You busy tomorrow night? She told me to bring you to St. John’s Eve and she’ll talk with you then. You got something white to wear?” She looked doubtfully at my usual dark T-shirt and faded plaid shoes.

“You mean, like a shirt?”

“No, you have to wear all white, head to toe. Or I guess you don’t
have
to, but you’ll stick out like the Yankee interloper you are if you don’t.”

“I’m sure I can throw something together,” I told her as I mentally browsed through my closet. “What time’s the party?”

“Don’t let anyone hear you calling it a party. That’s like saying you go to church every Sunday for a party. It’s not a party. It’s a ritual.”

The word “ritual” brought with it images of snakes and fires. Of limbs moving rhythmically to tribal drumbeats and blood blooming across lifeless, broken bodies. “What kind of ritual?” I asked warily.

“It’s a celebration of the summer solstice,
and Mama Legba will ask the spirits to intercede for a good harvest. She’ll do a ceremony on the bridge that crosses St. John’s Bayou, and then we’ll all eat and dance.” She frowned. “Okay, maybe it is a little like a party. Anyway, we’ll need to leave around five. I can pick you up if you want.”

“That would be great,” I said as we reached the employees’ dorm.

“I’d love to stick around and hang out, but I promised my momma I’d help her out with some stuff at the house this afternoon, and I’m already later than I told her I’d be,” Chloe told me as she mounted the steps.

“Yeah, I have some stuff to do with the shots I was working on. I’ll see you tomorrow night?”

“Absolutely. And don’t forget to wear white.”

“I won’t,” I told her.

Chloe left, and I turned to walk back to my family’s cottage, but as I got closer to it, the thought of sitting indoors and staring at a computer screen didn’t appeal to me. So I just ran inside and printed off a few of the pictures I’d taken the last few days, including the ones from Thisbe’s cabin that morning, and then headed out to the pond. I hoped I’d see Alex there. I had some questions I wanted answers to—starting with why Chloe didn’t know who he was.