Bone Appétit (13 page)

The official word on Marie Laveau, according to a number of Web sites devoted to her, was . . . vague and confusing. Apparently, there was a Marie Laveau I and II, a mother and daughter, and both were thought to be voodoo priestesses. Legends about the women and their powers abounded. But one story contradicted another, making me wonder if perhaps Marie I and II deliberately obscured their backgrounds. And talents. I mean, if you were really the Mistress of Satanic Darkness, would you advertise it?

As I read the sites devoted to the New Orleans women, I searched for the Saulnier name. At last it came up, a mention of Rubella Saulnier, a devotee of Marie Laveau II in New Orleans in the late 1850s. Rubella Saulnier was also considered a spy—she collected information at the behest of a Confederate officer, a man she’d fallen in love with.

Despite my cynicism, I found myself captivated by the story of desperate love. In the 1850s, New Orleans was a rich blend of cultures and an active port city. According to
the Web site, Rubella was a beautiful young woman who ran a flower and fruit shop in the French Quarter. She met and fell in love with James Gramacy, a New Orleans merchant. Their love, of course, was not acceptable to the Gramacy family, who viewed marriage as a tool to bind power to power. Rubella’s Creole background was considered unsavory.

One version of the story was dark—the love shared by Rubella and James was not born of free will. Rubella used a love potion concocted by Marie Laveau to win the young man’s heart through voodoo. Her love for James was obsessive and consuming, a love that drained the young man of his health and wisdom.

When the War Between the States erupted, Gramacy joined the Confederacy, as all young men of his social rank were expected to do. Fearing for her lover’s life, Rubella, who had become one of Marie Laveau’s most successful students, employed her skills to extract information from the families of Union sympathizers to keep James and his fellow soldiers one step ahead of the Yankee troops.

In a second version, it was James who visited Marie Laveau to win the hand of the haughty Rubella. The potion worked so well, Rubella devoted her life to serving Marie Laveau for the promise that Marie would insure James’s safety.

In several variations of the tale, James and Rubella never married, but she did bear him a child, a daughter.

The most chilling aspect in all of the stories was the condition placed upon Rubella by Marie Laveau: Each generation of Saulnier women would produce a female child who would serve the voodoo priestess’s spirit. It wasn’t exactly the type of information I’d hoped to find regarding our newest client. Even though it was impossible to check the legends for accuracy, the Web sites ignited my anxiety.

I looked up the Pearl River County, Mississippi, Web site for Hedy Lamarr Blackledge. Nada. But the name Saulnier came up with a list of three names. All female. And one was Hedy Lamarr Saulnier. The Blackledge name was not used.

I wrote down the phone number and physical address and turned off the computer. I had just enough time to prepare for my next cooking lesson. If I didn’t grab the shower first, Tinkie would soon be in the room taking over the bath, hair dryer, and other gadgets necessary for personal grooming.

Still wet from the shower, I bent over to rub one of the thick white towels over my hair.

“BAM!” The vocal explosion at my right ear startled me. I inhaled a gulp of air—and a whiff of pepper.

Before I could do anything else, I sneezed so hard I almost fell over. Tears flooded my eyes and I sneezed four more times, stumbling forward and backward. Someone mimicking television’s Batman was in the bathroom with me and I was blinded. Had the intruder squirted me with pepper spray?

“BAM!”

More pepper. Even with my eyes shut tight against the pepper and the overwhelming need to sneeze, I knew who’d infiltrated the sanctity of my bath.

Jitty had returned to Greenwood.

“You like my spicy thang, you? Maybe we could stir up
some gumbo, yes?” she asked in an almost indecipherable dialect.

“It’s a good thing you’re dead already, because I would do my best to kill you again if I could,” I said, just before another sneeze nearly exploded my head. “Get that pepper out of this bathroom.”

“It’s the finest green, white, and black blend, yes?” she continued with her strange stilted accent.

Opening my eyes, I found that she’d put on a good bit of weight around the middle. Her hair was coal black, and her chocolate eyes twinkled beneath a tall white chef hat. Once again, Jitty was impersonating someone I knew. “Emeril Lagasse?” I hazarded a guess.

“The spices of Louisiana put zip in any meal, yes? You?
Oui
?”

I glared at her. “Drop the phony accent. Emeril doesn’t sound like that. In fact, he sounds like he has good sense and knows how to cook. You sound like Gary Coleman trying to play Peter Sellers playing Inspector Clouseau.”

“BAM!” She tossed more pepper under my nose.

After another round of sneezes, I had no energy left to battle her. “Where did you get pepper in the Great Beyond?” Jitty couldn’t manipulate corporeal things. Like pepper. Which meant . . . I was more delusional than I imagined.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she said. “Ask something useful, like why I’m here.”

“I was thinking about you in the shower,” I said. “I conjured you, didn’t I?”

“Get a grip, Sarah Booth. If you could conjure me, that would imply I’m not real and you’re losing your mind. Or already lost it. Or, maybe, have never been sound of mind.” She let that sink in. “I came on my own to tell you something.”

I put some mousse in my hair and fluffed it up. A Daddy’s Girl would apply hair dryer, curling iron, and hair spray. Good hair was an element of good ancestry and a selling point on the marriage market. In the refined blood-lines of the Buddy Clubbers, those men born to the manor, breeding a woman with bad hair was tantamount to asking for genetic flaws in the children. At least flat feet could be covered up in shoes.

No DG worth her salt would have unruly, untamed, or un-touched-up hair. The slight natural curl in my tresses flared into rebellion during the humid summer months, which made California look good from a hair perspective. Too bad. I was done with hair preparation. A little blush, some mascara. Heck, I was going to cook, not strut the runway.

“You so busy primpin’ you forgot you had a question to ask me.” Jitty leaned against the bathroom wall.

“It won’t do me a bit of good to ask anything. You’ll tell me what you want to when you want to spill it. But I’ll ask. Because it gives you such pleasure to withhold from me. What did you come to tell me?”

“Not really
tell
you,” she hedged. “It’s about Marie Laveau.”

“How appropriate to disguise yourself as a Louisiana master chef to discuss a Louisiana voodoo priestess. I love the parallelism of your presentation.”

“You aren’t taking me seriously,” she said with a frown.

“You think? You show up here tossing pepper in my face, wearing a hat that looks like you stole it from the Pillsbury Doughboy, and speaking in a ridiculous accent. Now you want me to take you seriously. That’s a tall order.”

“Folks didn’t take Marie Laveau seriously. Some of them died.”

It wasn’t her words as much as her tone that arrested my attention. Jitty had inside knowledge of the Great Beyond, where voodoo might be a somber issue. “Why are you here?”

Satisfied I was now taking her message to heart, she sat down on the closed toilet. “Remember when your mama came to talk with you when you were in the hospital?”

“Yes.” This was no laughing matter. Some folks would insist I’d dreamed the rare moments with my dead mother, or hallucinated them, but I knew for a fact my mother’s spirit had come to comfort me. There was no dark art involved, only love.

“There are things no one understands, Sarah Booth. I’m not trying to scare you, but you need to be careful.”

Her words swept over me like a cold, damp wind. “Is Hedy or her family connected to voodoo or Santeria?”

“I don’t know. I’ve poked around, but I can’t be certain.”

Jitty never helped me on a case. Heaven forbid she do something really useful, but it never stopped me from asking. “Brook’s and Janet’s deaths were terrible. Did the same person murder them? Was it a pageant contestant?”

Jitty pushed back her chef hat to fully reveal her face. “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t eat anything prepared by any of those girls. At the barbecue tonight, avoid all the food.”

Once she pointed it out, it was an obvious action. “I’ll warn Tinkie, too.” A sudden realization stopped me. “But what about Millie? She’s judging. She’ll have to taste everything.”

“Killing off the judges would disrupt the contest. Maybe cancel it. You be careful, though—you or Tinkie aren’t necessary to finish the pageant.”

I heard the room door open.

Jitty gave one last very low “BAM” before she faded away with a wink.

The door closed and Tinkie came to the bathroom door.
“Who were you talking to?” she asked, glancing around. “I heard you in here while I was trying to find my room key.”

“Just myself.” One day I might explain about Jitty, but not now.

“You talk to yourself in some kind of weird Cajun accent?” Tinkie gave me a strange look.

“I was singing. Sometimes I sing in an accent.”

“Does Graf know about this tendency?” she asked.

I had to deflect this conversation. “It’s almost time for our date with a chef. Are you wearing that?” I let my gaze rove down her, assuming an expression of disapproval. She looked perfectly fine, of course.

“I’ll grab a shower and we’ll head over for the cooking class. But first I have to tell you what Hedy said.”

“I’m listening.” I wasn’t fond of a client who lied.

“She couldn’t tell us Marcus had called her, because we didn’t know about Vivian then. If she’d said Marcus called, that would have opened the door to a whole new line of questions. We would have asked why, and then she would really have had to come up with a reason for his call and why she agreed to meet him.”

“A reasonable enough explanation, but it doesn’t mitigate the fact she lied.”

Tinkie faced me. “You’d do the same thing to protect your daughter. Don’t even try to deny it. Hedy was out of the room when Janet Menton was killed. That’s what matters. And she did go and play her violin. So she didn’t really lie.”

Staring into Tinkie’s determined eyes, I saw she believed Hedy. The sad truth was, so did I. “Okay. Fine. It was a lie of omission to protect her kid. Have your shower and then we’ll suss out the judges.”

“I was thinking the same thing.” She dropped a trail of clothes as she made her way into the bathroom. Two
seconds later, I heard the shower turn on. Tinkie began to hum the haunting melody Hedy had played during the talent competition. I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps there wasn’t a gypsy strain as well as voodoo woven in Hedy’s complicated background.

We were late for our date with epicurean destiny, so we hurried across the street and skidded to a halt just as the master chef, Godfrey Maynard, began his comments on the purpose and design of main courses.

We were to work as teams—naturally Tink and I partnered up. We drew up our menu, which Chef Maynard approved, and then we set to work preparing a feast fit for a king, or at least important dinner guests. Tinkie and I chose to go Southern. She prepared a pork roast, and I peeled and cut up sweet potatoes and put them on to boil. My ambition was to create a whipped potato and cinnamon-apricot paste to stuff in the pork.

My mind stewed on the case while my potatoes boiled. When they were done, I moved on to stage two of my recipe. Whipping the taters into a puree.

“Sarah Booth, where is your mind?” Tinkie elbowed me in the ribs as hard as she could.

Mashed sweet potatoes spewed across the room as I accidentally pulled the electric beaters from the bowl of potatoes I’d begun to fluff. Two ladies who were the recipient of my yammish generosity gave me a glare that would curdle yogurt.

“Sorry,” I said, wiping a glop of orange from one of their noses.

“Do it again and I’ll plant that beater where the sun don’t shine,” the woman growled too low for Chef Maynard to hear.

I started to reply, but Tinkie pinched my arm. “Behave!” she commanded. “What is wrong with you? You haven’t paid a lick of attention to what you’re doing. You’ve only made a huge mess here.”

“Guilty as charged.” I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was on Hedy, voodoo, and a barbecue competition due to begin soon. “Tinkie, would you be upset if I took off now to find the pageant judges?”

She looked around our workspace. It was clear that rather than helping Tinkie, I’d only held her back. Without me, she’d stand a chance of winning Chef Maynard’s approval and at least a friendly greeting from the other participants in the class, who by this time were ready to string me up.

“Go on,” she said, and sighed. “No point staying here if you aren’t going to listen and learn.”

“Thanks!” I couldn’t even pretend remorse. The idea of sweet potato stuffed pork made my mouth water, but the process of getting from raw meat to dinner on the table didn’t interest me at all. Not today. Jitty had put a bee in my bonnet to talk to the judges, and I couldn’t wait to find them.

A million scenarios floated through my head as I hurried back to the hotel to change from my potato-stained clothes into another pair of jeans and a blouse. At the front desk, the clerk said Dawn Gonzalez and Harley Pitts were staying at the Alluvian. Belinda Buck was not. The hotel staffer either couldn’t or wouldn’t say where she might be sleeping over.

Clive Gladstone, the fourth judge, lived in Cleveland, Mississippi. He wasn’t registered at the hotel, so I figured he was home. Since I only had a couple of hours until the barbecue cook-off, I decided to concentrate on the judges close by. I used the house phone to call Dawn Gonzalez’s room. She invited me up without hesitation.

She opened her door and signaled me in. Though her pageant years were two decades behind her, Dawn was a beautiful woman who took excellent care of herself.