“Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of him.”
I hugged Pappa Al, too. He picked me up, swung me around and told me he thought I’d make a fine daughter. I told him I already had a husband.
Knowledge came to his eyes. “That’s who you are,” he said. “You’re the—”
I didn’t have to use any True Persuasion to cut him off. I just gave him a human look and he didn’t finish that hideous phrase.
He set me down, put his hand on the top of my head, and said he’d pray for me. I thanked him, then ran to the car where Linc was waiting. As we drove away, I waved until he was out of sight.
“How much?” I asked as soon as we were back on the road into the little town.
“You mean how much money did he con me out of?” Linc asked, grinning. “Fifty grand.”
“What’s that? One week’s pay?”
“Less than half,” he said, glancing at me. “I thought I’d start off small before he got the studio to send my paychecks directly to him.”
We laughed together and were silent for a while. Whatever Linc gave we knew was for a good cause. For a moment I enjoyed feeling Linc’s pleasure at having found something to do with his life—for that’s what I felt that he was going to do. I wasn’t really able to foresee the future, but I could easily imagine Linc heavily involved in the school in East Mesopotamia. A school for “special” kids, the ones who caused no one any problems and so were often neglected. I could imagine Linc using his fame—and his beauty—to give benefits to raise money for the school. Or schools.
I quit thinking of Linc’s possible future when he pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall. “Wait for me while I go get something,” he said. “Need anything?”
I said no; I was content to sit alone and think. Moments later, he returned with a bag. Inside were bottles of lemonade, bags of pretzels, and a little light, the kind that clips on to a book.
“You read, I’ll drive,” he said as he handed me the plastic bag his grandfather had given him. In it was the diary written by Amelia Barrister, 1840 to 1843.
It took the whole trip back to 13 Elms to read the diary. I didn’t tell Linc but the sadness I felt from the diary made it difficult for me to hold it.
In 1840, Amelia had started the diary as a young bride full of hope. She’d grown up in Ohio, met her husband at a church social, and married him three months later. She wrote of her excitement about going to live on her husband’s “farm.” A few pages later, she wrote that tomorrow she’d see it, that she’d heard so much about the place she dreamed of it.
There wasn’t another entry for eight months, and when she did write, the tone was of a severely depressed woman.
Linc and I couldn’t imagine how she must have felt to find out that the “farm” was for breeding and selling human beings. “And her husband was the breeder,” I said.
In 1842, Amelia’s tone began to lighten; something had changed. When she mentioned Martin, the name nearly leaped off the page. “She’s in love with him,” I told Linc, looking at him. If he was Linc’s ancestor, had Martin looked like Linc?
In 1843, Amelia wrote that she was ill and stayed in her room most of the time. I ran my hand over the page. “She’s expecting a baby and she doesn’t know if it’s her husband’s child or Martin’s.” Amelia hadn’t written that but I felt it. “She wants her husband to sell Martin, to get him off the plantation before the child is born. If the child is dark she knows her husband will kill Martin.”
“What about her and the baby?”
“She knows that if the child is dark that she and the baby will be killed, but she hopes that maybe she can save Martin. But her husband won’t sell him. Martin’s too smart; he runs everything.” That made Linc smile in pride. “So what happened?”
I continued reading, but there wasn’t much more. Amelia never wrote of her dilemma, but I could feel it. At last I came to the passage, “Martin was hanged today.” Dutifully, Amelia had written that Martin had tried to lead the slaves against them, so her husband had had to hang him.
“Martin supposedly led a revolt with a plantation full of women and children?” Linc asked angrily. “Go on.”
Amelia wrote that she’d given birth to a child in the early morning so she’d not seen the hanging. The birth had not gone well and she was invalided; the doctor said she’d have to spend the rest of her life in her room. Her child was to be given to the “servants” to raise.
That was the end of the diary. I closed the book and held it. “Her husband locked her away. She was never allowed to leave the room where the baby was born. Never to go outside again, never to speak to anyone. She was condemned to solitary confinement for the rest of her life.”
“And the baby?”
I took a breath. There were times—like this one—when I wished I had no power to see or feel things. “He was moved to the slave quarters and her husband made sure his incarcerated wife saw the child grow up. The child played beneath her window. Her husband also made sure…” I took a breath. “He made sure his wife saw the boy in chains when he was taken away to be sold.”
I put my hand on Linc’s arm to calm him.
“Think one of those bills of sale was for my ancestor?”
“I think so. Martin’s name would probably be on the certificate as the father and my guess is that the child was sold to someone in East Mesopotamia, Georgia.” Suddenly, I thought of something. “You know, don’t you, that this makes you and Delphia and Narcissa blood relatives?”
Linc gave such a heartfelt groan that I laughed, and our laughter helped dispel the horror of the story in the diary. If her husband had killed Amelia, it would have been kinder. But she had been locked up, isolated. She’d been allowed to see her child grow up, but she hadn’t been allowed to hold him, kiss him. And she’d had to watch as he was put in chains, to be taken away to be sold.
“What happened to her?” Linc asked. “What happened to my great-great-whatever grandmother Amelia?”
“I don’t know. I only know what I feel from this book. Maybe there’s something else about her in the library.”
“In that glass cabinet next to the fireplace? Maybe tonight—”
“No, tonight there’s ‘something special,’ remember?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Linc said.
“We need to make a plan for tomorrow,” I said. “While you’re giving massages—”
“What?!” Linc yelled and an argument ensued. He said he was absolutely not, under any circumstances on earth, going to massage a bunch of lazy, rich women.
“You can ask them things,” I said. “It’s all well and good to find out about the past but as far as I can tell, that only tells us why your child felt at home here. His mother and he moved from one place to another, but they have remained here—at 13 Elms, I mean. Why? Is something here?”
“What was it that that Changer called it?”
“A Touch of God,” I said, trying not to betray myself. I didn’t want Linc to know how badly I wanted to know what that was. I wanted to find Linc’s son and I was beginning to feel that we would, but what I really wanted in the long run was to find my husband and Bo. A Touch of God, I thought, and wondered yet again what it could be.
“No massaging,” Linc said as we pulled into the driveway of 13 Elms. “Tomorrow I’m going to the church and talk to people.”
I said nothing. The last thing we needed was for him to go to the church and ask questions. Why had the church said that the woman killed in a car crash was Lisa Henderson when it wasn’t? he’d ask. How did Linc know another woman had been killed? they’d wonder. If it wasn’t in the newspapers that she’d had a child, why was Linc asking questions about a child?
No, I could see that it was better that Linc let me use what small ability I had to find out what I could my way and not make people more suspicious than they already were. So far, no one suspected me, with my ugly black hair, as being the woman they’d read about. Besides, that was yeste
rday’s news. But I could tell a couple of women had suspected that Linc wasn’t a look-alike, but was actually the man they saw on TV.
This time I didn’t sneak in the back way of the house, but rang the doorbell. I rubbed my eyes to make them look red, as though I’d been crying from my “family emergency,” thanked the woman who answered the bell and went directly upstairs to my bed.
I wished I could take a shower and go to bed, but I needed to sit down and meditate and see what I could do to strengthen Linc’s cover. I put a hat over the camera in the wreath, but left the microphones on. They’d hear nothing from me.
Linc
Chapter Twelve
I WAS SURE DARCI HAD DONE IT TO ME. I’D BEEN adamant about not doing massages but the next day, as though I couldn’t help myself, I gave massages. As though I knew what I was doing. Ha! I’d had lots of massages but never given any. Except to Alanna and that had been for sex—if I remembered correctly. Sex was beginning to be something I only vaguely recalled.
Even though the women whose naked bodies I was slathering with oil were out of shape and unappealing, they were women and I’d been celibate for what seemed like years. But I wasn’t the least bit turned on by them.
All in all, the whole thing was so odd that I knew it was witchcraft and therefore Darci. “Conniving, manipulative, control freak,” I muttered.
“Did you say something?” the woman on the table asked.
“I was just saying that this lavender lotion smells divine.”
That was another thing Darci had done to me: I was so nonmale today that she may as well have cut it off. As I smeared lavender-scented oil on my hands and prepared to stroke the Great White splayed before me, I thought I was going to kill Darci. Garotte her with a pink satin ribbon.
At dinner I was so angry that I couldn’t bear to look at her. I swished and pranced my way through the meal until one woman said, “What a pity,” and another said, “Isn’t it?”
As we left the dining room I got behind Darci and touched her shoulder so I could send her vivid images of all the most horrendous deaths I could contemplate.
“Twenty-four-hour spell,” she whispered, then headed off to the library with the others.
It seemed that the “something special” was just another séance. I yawned and thought about excusing myself. Maybe I’d go to a bar and find myself a construction worker. Kill her, I thought.
As I turned toward the door a couple of the women grabbed my arms and pulled me into the library. As I passed Darci I narrowed my eyes in threat. She smiled and blew me a kiss.
Minutes later we were seated around the big library table awaiting what came next. I was suffering—for the first time in my life—from ennui.
In walked a tall, thin woman with honey-blonde hair down to her waist. She was wearing tight black trousers and a tiny black shirt that was like paint on her perfect body. If I’d been myself I would have jumped up and pulled a chair out for her. As it was, I looked at my nails and said,“Clairol or L’Oréal?”
Death was too good for Darci.
The blonde looked me up and down, then dismissed me as of no importance.
Oh yes. I was going to murder Darci.
However, even in my altered state I could feel Darci’s excitement. Feel. Was that sentiment from Darci’s emasculation of me, or had I become so attuned to her that what I felt, she did?
Whatever, I looked across the table and saw that Darci’s eyes were wide open and staring. The other women’s eyes were like that, too, but I’d never seen Darci with that look on her face. Even when she was watching Devlin the Shape-Changer, she’d been calm. I’d been scared out of my mind, but Darci had acted as though she saw and talked to ghosts every day—which she probably did.
I tried to reach deep inside myself and bring the real me to the surface and override whatever voodoo hex Darci had put on me. Hmmm, I thought. Wonder if she could use her power to put me into the role of someone? So I really felt as though I were the character? For a few minutes my mind wandered to critics’ ravings about my “brilliant performance” and “Lincoln Aimes was Othello.”
I pulled myself out of my fantasy and realized that Darci wasn’t staring at the woman but at the big, round, glass ball she was carrying. How hokey, I thought. Not even Hollywood used crystal balls anymore. But here was one. It was the size of a bowling ball, clear glass around the edges, but cloudy inside. No doubt the clouds cleared when the woman’s beautiful hand was crossed with gold. Was that a French manicure?
Darci sat there staring at that crystal ball, not even blinking. Please, I thought, someone tell me that thing isn’t real. Darci could already do things no human should be allowed to do, but if she had some magic object that increased her power…
I decided not to allow myself to think about any of this, as I wasn’t myself. If I remembered correctly, the idea of adventure usually exhilarated me.
The blonde introduced herself as Ingrid; she sat down at the head of the table, put her cloudy crystal ball onto a rosewood base, then waved her hands over it. I had to work to keep from groaning out loud. This was from a bad Theda Bara movie, before the talkies were invented.
I tried to get Darci’s attention, but I couldn’t. She was staring at that crystal ball so hard I expected it to explode.
Darci
Chapter Thirteen
THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO THE LIBRARY WAS THE one who’d broken into Linc’s house and stolen the papers from his bedroom. I knew that the second I saw her. She’d also killed Linc’s agent. She hadn’t meant to. All she wanted was to destroy his records of Linc’s son. She’d gone to the agent and told him she’d wanted to become an actress. She’d flirted with him, then knocked a cup of coffee over on him. While the agent was in the bathroom, she’d put some kind of detonating device under his desk. In the wee hours of the next morning she’d set it off, meaning only to burn out the agent’s office. Unfortunately, the agent had fallen asleep on the couch that night and died of smoke inhalation. In my mind’s eye I saw that the agent had had a few drinks and was snoring loudly. He hadn’t even woken up but died from the smoke before the flames reached him.
I could tell the woman knew who Linc actually was. That he was gay didn’t seem to surprise her—and from the way Linc was acting, I knew I’d overdone my True Persuasion.
What bothered me was that she wasn’t worried that Linc was here and had found her. Had she expected it? Or did she have something—or someone—who could counteract anything Linc could do? Why was she so sure that Linc’s presence didn’t matter?
I tried to look into her mind as best I could, and I tried hard to find out where the child was, but I could see nothing. I don’t think she knows, I thought.
For a chilling moment I wondered if she had been the one to send the note to Linc. “Your kid’s missing.” Had this woman drawn Linc to her? If so, why?
All of this information, all these questions, came to me in an instant, as soon as I looked into her eyes. There were visions around her that I could see as clearly as a movie.
In the next second, all my attention went to what she had in her hands. It was a big crystal ball. It looked like something out of a cheap magic store, but I knew that there was something inside that ball that had power—great power. A Touch of God? I wondered. All I knew for absolutely sure was that I had to get that hokey crystal ball. If I ever wanted to see my husband and Bo again, I had to have it.
I had to sit through nearly two hours of fake fortune-telling. I had to listen to the women being told that they gave too much and that they should think of themselves more.
Each woman agreed with that and if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with staring at the ball, I would have gagged.
However, whatever was inside that ball was giving the woman some insight because she told a few things about the women’s futures. I felt she saw more but wasn’t telling. One woman would be dead within a year. Since I didn’t feel that she had illness inside her, I figured it would be an
accident. Ingrid told the woman she should party more, go on a long vacation, do three things she’d always dreamed of doing but never had.
I was curious what she’d tell Linc. Ingrid said he should give a hundred percent attention to his career. If he did, there were great things in store for him. In case Linc didn’t get it the first time around, she told him to put everything and every person out of his mind. Let nothing distract him. One phone call could change his life.
I glanced at Linc to see if he’d be running back to his room to call the airport, but he looked at the woman with an arched brow. “And leave all this beauty?” he said. “I couldn’t possibly.”
I looked away to hide my smile, but Ingrid didn’t hide her frown.
“What about me?” I said at last, staring at her hard. I wanted her to think what I wanted her to think.
She waved her hands over the ball and the “clouds” inside seemed to move around. She told me what I wanted to hear: that I’d find what I was looking for. The way she said it made me look at her. Did she mean the jewels I was supposedly looking for, or did she mean I’d find Linc’s son? Or did she mean I’d find my husband?
As the evening wore on I could see that my True Persuasion of Linc was wearing off. He was looking at Ingrid with interest and he was looking at me in question. Eventually, the little glasses of green liqueur were served and the women grabbed them eagerly.
“These things are lethal!” they said, giggling, and yet again I wondered why they were there. The place wasn’t great as a spa and the two séances hadn’t been worth the expense of the stay. What did they know that I didn’t? When I’d called to make a reservation I’d had to use lots of True Persuasion to get them to allow both Linc and me into the place.
Reaching across the table, Linc touched my hand for a second, pretending to remove a piece of lint. The touch showed me his idea of switching liqueurs with Ingrid. I gave a little nod and in the next second I laughed and sent my glass of liqueur flying across the room. It caused so much commotion and noise that everyone looked—and Linc switched his glass with Ingrid’s.