Hoodoo Woman (Roxie Mathis Book 3) (6 page)

Nadine Mathis had worked as a secretary at City Hall since before I was born. She rarely missed a day’s work, typed eighty words a minute, and knew everyone in the county worth knowing. That’s how she used to put it to me, and it always rankled. Money and power didn’t make a person worth knowing any more than defying conformity made a person suspect, but these were some of the central tenets by which Nadine lived her life. Some cosmic accident of birth made me her daughter, a joke neither one of us thought was funny. At least we had that much in common.

Just popping by to see her at the office was not something I’d ever done. Had in fact been told expressly to never do. This was likely to be my one chance at the upper hand with her so I took it. I stood in line at the front desk waiting my turn to speak to the primary gatekeeper when Nadine appeared around the corner of the drab gray cubicles. I stared, marveling at how little she had changed, now in her late fifties. Frosted hair teased into a helmet, she still favored eye-bleeding print blouses paired over mercifully black slacks. Spangled accessories and shoes looked like they were pilfered from the
Golden Girls
set. Good
lawd
, she even still wore the same blue eye shadow and screaming pink lipstick.

My worn jeans, White Stripes t-shirt, second hand leather jacket, and patched messenger bag would appall her, as would my loose unstyled hair and minimal makeup. But then pretty much everything about me appalled her, so I didn’t sweat it.

She stood in the hall clutching a file folder and talking animatedly to some portly middle-aged man. Animatedly being a kind way to put it. Nadine was loud, a good ol’ girl who craved attention and approval. But only the right kind of attention, and approval from those people deemed worth knowing. I shook my head and tried to dispel the ugly thoughts. She was my mother. I had to respect her for at least that much.

I stepped out of line and toward the barrier separating the lobby from the cubicles. She glanced my way, looked back at the man speaking to her then looked back at me again. This time recognition dawned. For a brief flicker I saw the old panic in her flinty eyes, the metallic yellow of her aura flashing like a solar flare before she put a lid on her feelings.

“Hello, Mother.” We’d never had the kind of rapport that invited calling her momma.

“Roxanne,” she said as if she couldn’t quite believe it. “This is a surprise.”

“I’m in town for a day or two. Thought I’d stop by and say hello.”

Curious gazes followed our exchange. I ignored them, focusing on Nadine. The man she’d been talking to excused himself, nodding a greeting to me as he left. I nodded back, throwing in a little smile. For the first time I wondered, seriously wondered, what people thought of me after all these years. Freak, witch, weirdo, Satan-worshipping heavy-metal listening slut, and those were just the insults I could remember right off the top of my head. Heavy metal had never been my thing, I didn’t believe in Satan, and respectable Deputy Ray Travis was the only man in Blythe ever able to entice my inner slut. Well, okay, a couple of guys in high school, but they hardly counted.

She said, “You’ll have to come by the house and catch up. You still living in a trailer or are you back in a real house now?”

Bitch. I sighed inwardly. She couldn’t help herself and I had long ago decided to try to be the better person. “Still working on a down payment to start rebuilding. The FEMA money’s in the bank but it’s not enough.” Just to remind all the eavesdroppers about the flood that took my home.

Nadine blanched and I immediately realized my mistake. She thought I was here for money. I said, “I’ve got a job in town so I’ll be busy but I’ll be sure to make time to stop by.” That was as close as I could get to exclaiming,
relax, I don’t want your money
.

The deep line between her eyes smoothed out. “What sort of work are you doing?”

“Research assistant for a writer.”

She raised a heavily penciled eyebrow. “Oh? What sort of research would a writer have you be doing?”

I really, really, really wanted to say something along the lines of
trying out sex toys
, but I didn’t. “He’s got a blog about Southern ghost stories and supernatural legends. I’m helping him do some research so he can turn it into a book.”

“A blog?” She looked mystified.

I refused to explain. Let her look it up or just be clueless. Her perfume was choking my allergies and I wanted out of there. “Yeah, so I’m gonna get going. Need to check some stuff at the library.”

She nodded, tapping the folder on the open palm of her free hand. She made no move to approach me for a motherly hug and I followed her lead. With an awkward goodbye I left.

The library was two blocks away. I hustled through the blustery spring day, head down against the wind. Stepping into the library felt like greeting an old friend. As soon as I was able I’d started spending as much time as possible away from home, usually either Rozella’s house or the library. The building was in severe need of upgrading but there were better and more computers and a huge flat-screen television in the magazine reading corner turned to cable news. The TV felt incongruous but I ignored it and went to the circulation desk to ask about using my laptop, hoping for Wi-Fi.

Praise the Baby Elvis, the library did indeed have free Wi-Fi. I picked an out of the way desk and plugged in, first checking my email. Nothing but junk there so I found the website for the
Blythe Ledger
and attempted to search for articles about the death of Britney Parker. There was nothing in the past week which was as far as I could go without purchasing a subscription. That made the Baby Elvis sad and I cursed old media for not giving me what I wanted for free. Laughing at myself, I resorted to a general web search.

The generation after mine was comfortable showing their grief in public. I found social media mentions of Britney’s death and a website dedicated to her memory. The garish look of it brought back memories of the inside of high school lockers. Bless their plagiarist heart, the person who put up the site appeared to have copied
Ledger
articles word for word. Leaving in the byline was my first clue. I did a little copy and pasting of my own, saved the articles in a new folder on my desktop and clipped some of the pictures too. A few were school photos but most were candid shots and much more recent based on the changes in her face. She was a stunning girl, with all-American beauty queen looks.

Even crappy cellphone pictures couldn’t hide the intelligence in her eyes. This was a smart girl, a self-aware girl. A dead girl.

The
Ledger
articles didn’t tell me much. Frankly, I hadn’t expected them to. Not a lot of muckraking goes on in small town papers. I just wanted a place to start. Testimonials about what a great girl Britney had been were just as useless but I did copy down every name I found. Done with that, I found a few more generic articles from some other West Tennessee new sources and finally Daniel’s planted bit in a ghost-hunting forum.

Then I went back to the
Ledger
. The day’s edition had just hit the web, a nice big color picture of Ray standing by his patrol car as others suited up in hazmat gear to bust up a meth lab. He had his hands on his hips and he squinted against the bright lights set up for the drug task force to work by in the dark.

I had no trouble believing plenty of women routinely offered him pie.

I spent the rest of the day avoiding town, holed up in the lake house reading and napping. Mostly napping. Not wanting to discuss my evening plans with Daniel, I slipped out before he woke for the night.

Ray lived on the opposite side of the county, about fifteen minutes from downtown Blythe. He’d inherited his grandfather’s house and kept it in excellent condition. I parked next to his patrol car and climbed the steps to the porch. It took knocking three times for him to answer the door.

Soaking wet. Wearing only a towel. Yeah, Ray Travis could definitely still get all the pie he wanted.

Ray had played football in high school, star quarterback. With him being a decade older I didn’t remember firsthand but he used to keep some trophies and pictures in one of the upstairs rooms of the house. He’d kept in good shape, his wet body rippling with muscle most guys over forty could only dream of. A light dusting of chest hair curled over fair skin. It was too early in the year for his fisherman’s tan. Even better than the muscle though was the grumpy teddy bear look on his face. I liked the sight of that more than I should have.

“So.” I smiled, hoping he remembered how charming he used to find me. “I’m a little early.”

His lips twitched. He remembered. “Yeah, you are. Come on in.” He gestured for me to come inside and closed the door behind me. “You know your way around. Make yourself to home. I’ll be back when I’ve got some clothes on.”

“Don’t go to any trouble on my account.”

Grabbing my wrist, he stepped close enough I could feel the heat rolling off his skin. “We’re gonna have to set some ground rules. For both our sakes.”

I’d stepped over a line. I always did with Ray. It was something I couldn’t seem to help, even now. “Okay.”

“You have a boyfriend, so no flirting.”

Thoroughly chastised, I nodded. “You’re right. No flirting.”

He rubbed the inside of my wrist with his thumb. It made me remember things I shouldn’t. “It’s hard enough to look at what I can’t have,” he said, voice husky with a longing that shocked me.

“Ray.”

Moving away, he said, “You and me are going to try something new. It’s called being friends. I hear it’s nice.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Yeah, that’ll be nice.”

He held my gaze for a long moment then looked away. “Be right back.” He climbed the stairs quickly.

I whirled and stumbled into the living room then dropped onto the couch. Brushing away sudden tears, I focused on the job. Dead girl, ghost haunting the town. Boyfriend hundreds of miles away and wanting me to banish part of myself. Flirting with an ex like the slut my mother thought I was. Going back to the lake house and drowning in Daniel’s liquor supply sounded like a good idea.

Desperate to think about anything else, I surveyed the room. Most of the furniture had been updated, the main pieces being the plush microfiber couch on which I sat and the recliner facing the big flat screen TV. His grandmother’s old rocking chair still sat in one corner, flanked by family photos on the walls. A bookcase full of mystery novels dominated the wall opposite the windows. The case was new, as were many of the books, but there were titles I recognized him having years ago. Still a Tony Hillerman fan, as well as Michael Connelly and Robert Crais. Dennis Lehane had been added, and an author he had in common with Daniel, Alan Furst, who wrote World War Two spy novels set in Europe. Not the traditional mysteries and police procedurals Ray had always liked but I could see them being a good fit.

Feeling on somewhat firmer footing emotionally, I only stiffened a little when Ray returned. He wore jeans and an untucked red and black plaid flannel shirt, hair still damp and mussed from being towel-dried. His feet were bare and he was still buttoning the shirt as he entered the room.

“The files are in the office,” he said, jerking his head for me to follow.

I did. The rooms were small, it being an older house, but there were four bedrooms. The one on the ground floor had been converted into an office almost as soon as he moved in. Ray preferred dark paint to the paneling he’d removed himself, choosing blues and grays with white trim. A memory of teasing him about his good taste popped into my head. I pushed it away. The room had the same color scheme but a newer, bigger desk and desktop computer with a large monitor. Three wooden filing cabinets took up most of one wall. Where a map of the county used to be was a white board, Britney Parker’s name emblazoned at the top in Ray’s careful script. I would have read all the various notes on the board but the contents of the last wall drew my attention.

It was a bookcase, smaller than the one in the living room, nearly full. The books were all metaphysical titles. Not fiction, either. Books on witchcraft, hoodoo and voodoo, ghosts, tarot, various other supernatural subjects. I recognized almost all the titles. Some of them, if I wasn’t mistaken, used to belong to me.

Ray noticed what I was staring at. Scratching the stubble on his jaw, he said, “Yeah, that stack there.” He pointed at the books I was eyeing. “Those are ones you left behind. Take ‘em back if you want.”

A couple of them were Wicca primers from when I thought that might be a place for me. Another pair were tarot books. The one on top, wrapped in a tied leather cord, was a journal. One of my ill-fated attempts to keep a diary, book of shadows, spell book, whatever. All of the above.

“I threw that stuff in the trash.”

“I got it out,” he said. “You were pretty upset that night. I thought you might want them back. That you might come back for them. But you left before.” He stopped abruptly. “Anyway, your letter made it clear you were never coming back and we were through. So I stuck them in a corner and left ‘em.”

I burned with shame thinking about that letter, for more reasons than one. Kneeling, I retrieved the books and shoved the journal in my messenger bag. Eyes on the carpet I said, “I always hated that I couldn’t be someone you’d be proud to be seen with. I know you were ashamed of me.”

Ray dropped to the floor beside me, taking my hands. “I was never ashamed of you. God, don’t ever think that, baby.”

“You never wanted anyone to know.”

“You were nineteen.” He brushed my hair from my face. “I was ashamed of myself for getting involved with a girl so much younger.”

“You aren’t that much older than me.”

“It feels that way now but I was an adult and you were barely out of high school. It makes a difference.” He sat with his back to the bookcase, drew his legs up and rested his hands on his knees. “You know what I hated? Being such a damn coward. Momma wouldn’t stop pushing women at me, wanting me to get married. My brother and his wife were the same. Friends, even. I had people setting me up with women from three counties. Know why?”

I sat next to him, clutching at the old books like a lifeline. “You’re a catch, Ray Travis.”

“I’m an idiot. I’m such a good cop, good
investigator
, I didn’t even realize people did know about us. That’s why my family was putting every available female they thought was suitable in my path. They were afraid I’d do something crazy and marry you.”

The looks his mother used to give me when I’d run across her were cold enough to burn. “Was it me being a witch they objected to or me being a slut?”

“Don’t do that,” he said, a granite forcefulness in his tone. “You’re no slut. You never were then and you aren’t now. Don’t let ignorant, judgmental assholes define who you are.” He shook his head, his expression bitter. “One of my biggest regrets is not calling people out for the way they talked about you. It disgusts me that I was such a coward and I’m sorry, Roxanne. I am truly sorry.”

The books slid from my hands as tears clouded my vision. Something cracked open deep inside, the bricks and mortar I’d used to build walls around my deepest self. The self I thought for so long wasn’t worth anyone’s love, anyone’s respect. Even with Blake, I knew I still held back, not able to feel secure in my feelings for him or his professed feelings for me. Crazy, freak, weirdo, slut, bitch, embarrassment, all the labels and words I gathered close and built into the foundation of those walls, still reverberated years later. I heard them all, shouted, whispered, directly to my face, in the next room when my parents thought I wasn’t listening. An echo reaching for me from the past, trying to drown out anything good. If I were honest with myself I’d have to admit I’d been hearing them a long time. But for the first time something else came through louder, stronger.

Ray pulled me into his arms, gently removing my glasses. I sank into his embrace, feeling something I didn’t want to name or think about. Instead of thinking about the past or the present, I cried out years’ worth of tears and regrets.

“I’m sorry, baby.” His lips brushed my hair as he rocked me in his arms. “I’m so sorry.” He was crying too.