Dead to Her(17)

A deep, throaty chuckle from behind cut between them, the sound like a sudden breeze in the still air, and both women turned. An elderly black woman with umber-orange hair was standing behind a bench to their right, in the leafy shade of the overhanging trees. Laid out across the wooden seat were various trinkets and candles, as well as little charm bags, like Marcie had seen in New Orleans. Marcie stared. The woman was tall, over five eleven, and with the barrel of fat around her stomach she appeared vast and formidable. How had they not seen her as they strolled past? Marcie frowned. She looked like the woman who’d been sitting in Colonial Park Cemetery, but it couldn’t be the same person. She couldn’t have gotten here so fast and set up her things.

“Ghosts,” the woman said, slapping her thigh and laughing harder, wiping her eyes, before looking up at them. “Ghosts indeed. Ghosts you may be, but I see you,” she said. She raised one hand and pointed a fat finger. “I see both of you, light and dark and dark and light. All your secrets. I see all to come, and I see what will become of you. I dreamed you. Oh my.” She laughed again, shaking her head as if in wonder at something. “Ghosts right here. Oh my.”

She picked up her cane from where it rested against the bench and gripped it, the handle carved like a snake’s head, before banging it against the ground three times. The oddness of the movement made Marcie shiver, and beside her Keisha had stiffened.

“Oh my,” the old woman repeated, before turning and starting to stroll in the opposite direction, abandoning her wares and leaving the two women staring after her.

“Well, that was . . . odd,” Marcie said, eventually.

Keisha was staring at the items laid out on the bench as if one might leap up and bite her. “She sounded like she knew you. Knew who we were. What was she talking about?”

“I have no idea,” Marcie said. “I guess that shit is her sales pitch. Freaks people out and then gets them to part with their money for all this trash.”

“It’s not trash,” Keisha said softly, eyes still scanning the objects.

“Well, if it isn’t, why did she walk off and leave it all here? Maybe she’s drunk.”

“Maybe.” Keisha didn’t sound convinced, and her eyes darted over to where the woman was strolling away. Was Keisha afraid?

“Do you want any of this?” Marcie looked down at the strange bags and vials and strings of colored beads and small wax carvings laid out on a large patterned scarf. Only now that she was closer could she make out the small chalk markings under the bench, symbols etched in white on the ground. This old woman took herself seriously, or maybe it was all for any passing tourists’ benefit.

“No!” Keisha looked shocked. “I wouldn’t buy it, let alone steal it. Those charm bags could be for anything.”

“It looks like a heap of cheap tourist crap if you ask me. Jason and I brought some like it back from New Orleans a few years ago,” Marcie said. She was quite enjoying seeing Keisha so unsettled. “But if she doesn’t come back someone will steal it.”

“Then they’d be a fool. My family are from Nigeria. They call this juju. Do good, get good, do bad, get bad. And bad can get really bad. It’s all about karma. These bags and stuff should protect you from it.”

Marcie smiled. “She’s an old drunk conning tourists out of a few dollars when they stray from their road trips and think they’ve found some Louisiana voodoo. And if she is drunk, then she’s ahead of us.” The overhanging trees suddenly felt claustrophobic. She was trying to laugh it off, but Keisha was right. The woman had talked like she knew them. This crazy city full of crazy people made crazy by the heat and too much liquor in the sun. “Let’s get back to yours and fix that.”





11.

Keisha had been stuck between Virginia and Emmett ever since they’d got back and she hadn’t gotten to talk to Jason and Marcie at all. Virginia had swooped down on her and that was that. The diamond glinting against her possibly surgically enhanced bosom was a match for the sparkle of gossip in her eyes. She hadn’t shut up. First, she’d gone on about her children, one in Paris studying fashion, one graduated from Harvard and living in New York, and the youngest, Richard, still here in Savannah sharing an apartment downtown with three others and setting up an Internet start-up that Virginia laughed about not understanding even though she was paying most of the bills for the venture. After that she was all fawning about how nice it was to see William happy again, asking a few questions about London, but then going on about the sainted Eleanor—whose portrait was still on the wall, Keisha noted—and how tragic it was she’d been lost so relatively young.

Relatively young was right. People in Keisha’s tower block back home died young. If it wasn’t the teenage gang stabbings, it was drugs or drink or just the weariness of poverty; a government that squeezed the poorer members of society as the rich got richer. Keisha came from society’s disposable stock. At least Eleanor had had the best care and a wealthy life. She’d had a family who no doubt treated her like a princess and gave her everything she wanted, before handing her over to William, who then did the same. Eleanor hadn’t had to pay anything back. She wasn’t held accountable for anyone else’s failings like Keisha had been. As if it had been Keisha’s fault that her mother drank herself to death when she arrived in England, forcing Auntie Ayo and Uncle Yahuba to have to raise her little girl, now wanting every penny they’d spent on her returned and then some. It was hard to feel sympathy for Eleanor.