The Storycatcher (29 page)

I stepped away. “The last thing I want is a story about mamas.”

“You need to listen to this one. It’s important.”

I looked at this beautiful colored woman. “I got to hurry. Missus is waiting on me.”

“Persephone was out picking flowers one day when she came upon the most beautiful of flowers, a flower placed there on purpose to lure her. See, someone wanted her very much, enough to trick her. When she picked the flower, the earth opened up and Hades—Persephone’s own uncle and god of the underworld—grabbed her, taking her back to his home to be his queen. Now, Demeter never noticed Hades’s obsession with her daughter. She closed her eyes to it. She became so depressed when she discovered her beloved daughter was lost that she did nothing but search. Her job was to keep the crops plentiful, among other things. She stopped taking care of the earth. She was so upset, she caused a terrible drought to fall on the earth, so bad that Zeus, Persephone’s
father, told Hades to let his Persephone go before Demeter destroyed everything. Hades didn’t want to let her go. See, there’s good and bad in everyone. Hades was no different. While he was the god of the underworld, he had good parts to him, only the bad outweighed them. So, instead of just letting Persephone go free and clear, he tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds. This way, several months out of every year she had to come back to the underworld and be his queen. Demeter was angry her daughter had been deceived and decided those months Persephone had to go to the underworld would be bleak and dead. Everything died out, slept, and turned dull. But if Demeter had been on guard, her daughter would never have been taken and fooled.” She looked at me. “What do you think the story means?”

I walked to the window overlooking the marsh. “It’s a story about how we got winter.” I shrugged. “The old folks on the mountain talk about planting by the signs. You just told a story about the barren sign.”

“What’s the barren sign?”

“Never try to plant seeds, harvest, or do anything besides weed and clear when in the barren sign, ’cause it will all come to naught. It’s like coming on a barren soul, wandering around the earth in hopes of living in someone else’s body. No good can come from it, naught. If you’re not careful and don’t let go when it’s time, you’ll become a barren soul.” The island where Shelly stayed was just visible. “I have to use my death quilt on a soul. Then I’m finished.”

“Who is the soul?” Mary Beth Clark asked.

“He is my Hades.”

She nodded. “Then you have to leave. Understand?”

Maybe.

H
E MOVED AROUND THE MOUNTAIN
in the black of night. I seen him, a dark shadow against the smoky moonlight in the backyard. The souls in the woods, the ones stuck like me, began to moan. Shelly’s mama didn’t even know he was there, scooting across her porch while she and that white granny woman talked. The angel be gone, and that woman took her. Why oh why would someone want my angel? Things were going to go bad before they ever got good. That woman loved my angel, needed her, but she took something that wasn’t hers to take.

The white granny woman was busy showing Shelly’s mama something she had spread out on the table. Me and Shelly’s mama was one and the same in many ways. She was thinking on how she could catch him once and for all. So was the white granny woman. The light from the overhead lamp hit what they was staring at on the table and it sparkled. And there it was, bigger than that whole mountain and tiny
enough to fit in a pea pod, the cross. No wonder Pastor done lost his mind, staring in the window, almost pressing his face against the glass like some desperate boy. The cross.

“Stupid, stupid women,” he hissed.

Them two women was walking on a sheet of thin ice, and their feet wasn’t even feeling a bit cold.

“I seen this thing many a time.” Shelly’s mama touched the cross. “That be his.” A chilly wind blew in out of the west, wet with a summer rain. Lordy, I knew all about that cross, way too much.

“Them two won’t do this to me,” Pastor whispered, and took a step back.

And that was the end of that. Those two fine ladies was going to pay, and if Shelly was here, she would too. That girl still hadn’t opened that book. ’Cause I would have felt the knowing scattering in the air. I thought I could count on her. She be the one who can tell.

“God, I am a soldier in your army,” Pastor whispered. He moved across the yard into the solid darkness of the storm headed toward us.

I pushed every bit of power I had at him.

He stopped still. Then turned. “I know you, girl.” His voice was silky-sweet. “I see you. I know why you’re here. It was told to me as a bedtime story, so I would learn never to cross the line and stand against God. I know the damnation you brought to our family.” He pointed at me. “My soul is like Paul Dobbins’s. That’s why you are with me. You’re looking for him.” He laughed hard and crazy. Could have been because he’d already started his crossover. Sometimes that happened to the worst ones.

“You and me aren’t so different, girl. We’re both looking to end something.”

“A
MANDA?” THE CABIN WAS EMPTY,
and she wasn’t in her garden. Charles Dobbins’s house was quiet. I opened the door to my truck, and Amanda stepped onto the back porch of the big house. She waved and walked toward me.

Her smile was kind, like an old friend. “Hello, Miss Tuggle.” Something had passed between us that eased our differences.

“I’m going back to Ella Creek Cemetery. Do you want to go with me? I want to show you something.”

A shadow crossed over Amanda’s face. “It’s getting late. We’ll have to hurry. I don’t want to be in the woods after dark. Haven’t seen a thing from Pastor since he found out Mrs. Dobbins and Faith was gone. He hasn’t even been home for the food I’ve left out. It’s too easy. I keep looking over my shoulder for him to show up.” She gave me a
stern look. “I ain’t never been afraid of no one in my life. Couldn’t. But, Miss Tuggle, I believe I’m afraid of Pastor.”

“I think you have good reasons to be afraid, Amanda. Can I leave my truck here while we walk?”

She frowned. “Park it out back of the cabin. I keep feeling like he’s out there watching me.” She gave a little shiver.

We walked the path in silence. The birds sang in the trees. Amanda gave a little jerk.

“What’s wrong?”

“A shadow crossing my grave, I reckon.”

I smiled.

“Smell the rain?” She looked at the snatches of blue sky showing through the treetops. “I can’t help but think on Shelly and what she’s doing. I miss her.”

I sniffed the air but failed to smell rain. “If I know Shelly, she’s doing fine, reading her heart out on some book she’s found or took with her. She’s such a smart girl.”

Amanda beamed. “She is smart, but lately she’s had her heart in struggles on this mountain. Maybe it comes with her age. But we’ve always had something that held us at arm’s length from each other. Could be it’s ’cause I’m the mama and she’s the daughter.”

“I remember fifteen was the age I began to question my mother. I no longer believed everything she said. I had to find out on my own.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s Shelly. Finding out on her own.” She shrugged. “But I ain’t no perfect mama, mind you. I’ve done my stuff. She lost her brother and I wasn’t worth a diddle to her. That was the summer she found out she had sight.”

I looked at her. “Is there a perfect mother? I think the world would like to paint mothers as perfect and place that expectation right on our shoulders, but we’re just human whether we’re mothers or daughters or both.”

“I guess some is worse than others.”

“Yes.”

Dragonfly River was loud, and the cool breeze blowing across the water soothed me.

“Something ain’t right.” Amanda frowned at me.

“What do you mean?”

She held her finger to her lips. “We’ll talk at the cemetery. These woods got ears. This place is tainted with a spell.” Her words mingled with the sound of rushing water. Tainted. Maybe that was the right word. Tainted.

A shadow scurried across the path ahead of us. I stopped.

“What be wrong? What’d you see?” She frowned.

“Nothing. The light is playing tricks.”

She laughed quietly. “Tainted.”

The path wound away from the river. “What is between Pastor Dobbins and you, Amanda?”

Her face became guarded. “I think the better question is what settles between the missus and me. That be the question.”

I kept quiet.

“A story way too big and full of omens to tell to you. But it’s what makes me a mama with a passel of shame.”

The sun hit the black iron gates of the cemetery. “Amanda, I took an angel from here and put it in my garden. A marble angel.”

Amanda studied me with an odd expression. “Sometimes we just got to follow our wants. But how did you get her down this part of the mountain?”

“Wheelbarrow.” I motioned her around the gates. “There are some graves I want to show you.”

“I dearly hate the gravestone of the lost girl. Don’t take me to her. It be too sad. Nobody ever found her.” Her words echoed through the cemetery. Somewhere an animal made a moaning sound. Or maybe it was the wind in the top of the trees. “That’s why her spirit roams this mountain.” She looked off into the woods.

“Do you really believe that, Amanda?” I tried to be quiet, but I just couldn’t help myself.

“You took her angel, Miss Tuggle. She was known to sit at its feet in the evening. Some hurt went all the way to that girl’s bones.” She looked at me as we stepped close to the gravestone. “They found a missing necklace that belonged to Miss Daniels hanging on that angel’s wing when the colored girl disappeared.”

“What kind of necklace?” I asked.

Amanda looked at me. “I don’t know. But that Miss Daniels up and married a pastor from New Orleans. Your Pastor Dobbins that be buried over there.”

“So you knew about his grave.”

“No disrespect, Miss Tuggle, but I had to think on your intentions before I talked.” She gave me a wise smile.

“Do you think he is related to Pastor Charles Dobbins?”

“Lordy be. My heart can’t take these stories like it used to.” She laughed.

“Amanda, do you think Pastor Dobbins could have forced himself on Arleen Brown?”

Amanda backed up a step. “You got to know something. You talk first.”

I looked away.

“Is that why you brought me up here? To ask me that question?” She waited. “Pastor could just about do anything to anybody. Anything. Arleen wouldn’t have been no problem for him.”

I shivered. “I have something to show you.” I pulled the cross out of my pocket.

Amanda frowned at me. “What you got yourself into, Miss Tuggle? Let’s go to my house and have a better look. Not here in this place.”

WHEN WE GOT TO THE
cabin, it was nearly dark. “Come on in here and let’s talk about what you got.”

I followed her. Amanda lit the gas lamp hanging over her little table and the room glowed.

I spread the cross out, and Amanda took a deep breath. “Pastor’s cross. How’d you get this, Miss Tuggle?”

“Would you tell the sheriff this was Pastor Dobbins’s cross?”

She narrowed her look at me. “Answer my question.”

“I got the cross from Faith before she left the mountain.”

Amanda stood still, arms folded over her chest. “How?”

“I don’t know where she got it.”

Amanda frowned at me. “Miss Faith wouldn’t steal a thing, Miss Tuggle. She just wouldn’t do it. She ain’t been herself. He be bad, Miss Tuggle.”

“I’m trying to help Faith and her mother. I’ll make sure all of you are safe.”

She gave me a disgusted look. “You sure can’t keep me safe from him if he decides he wants to do something. I ain’t no fool.”

“But he has to be stopped, Amanda. I want Shelly and Faith to come home to a safe place. I think he could kill them.”

She looked away. “You be right about that. But first he’d do a lot worse than kill. I reckon I have to help you, but no good will come of any of this mess, Miss Tuggle. You remember what I said.”

The pitch black of night stood outside the cabin. I saw my reflection in the window. My face looked different. Maybe it was fear.