Hoodoo Woman (Roxie Mathis Book 3) (8 page)

The next day I had no new emails from Blake. I needed to write to him, though. What should I say? Glad you’re having a great time at your hippie witchcraft commune, shove your banishing rites up your ass, I miss you?

The truth was, I’d been missing him for a while, even when we were in the same room together. Growing apart had been steady but still unexpected. It seemed like we’d barely had a chance to grow close but I knew that was mostly my fault. I loved him but I didn’t do commitment well. Too independent, too private. What I should have thought of as keeping secrets, I just considered keeping my own counsel. I had no one to blame but myself when he did the very same thing.

After several false starts I did the best I could.

Blake,

Glad you’re having a good time. Daniel and I are in Blythe on a case. We’re staying at the lake house. You might want to check on Shelby, they had a fight.

Love,

R

I hovered the mouse over the send button for several moments, wondering if I should say more. I had no idea what that more might be, so I sent the missive on its way and closed the laptop.

The books Ray had saved waited for me on the nightstand. I curled up at the head of the bed and spread the books out to inspect them. The two Wicca books were like something out of a half remembered past. I had great respect for Wicca but I’d never felt comfortable with the level of ritual involved. Magic had always been an organic thing for me, not a religious practice. The tarot books had notes in the margins and page corners turned down. I’d studied the cards harder than probably any school subject and never did really get them until I tossed books and tutorials aside and took a more intuitive approach in recent months. Just another way my practice had changed. Another way I had changed.

The diary was the main thing I wanted to look at. The cord binding it was still tight, tiny leather flakes falling off as I untied it. Ray had never opened it. All these years of holding on to what he knew was my journal, and he’d never opened it. I could tell not only from the cord but the slight warding I’d placed around it too. No one had broken it.

I held the diary to my chest for a moment. Did I really want to open this time capsule and face the past it showed me? I’d gotten pretty good at dividing my life into compartments labeled Then and Now. Being back in Blythe, being in the same room as Ray Travis, put enough strain on the borders I’d drawn in my life. I still couldn’t think too much about his apology and what it meant to me, what crying out all those years of bad feelings in his arms meant. I remembered enough about the type of writing I’d done in this journal to know it was likely to be too clear a window on the past and I might not be entirely comfortable with what I saw through it.

After what felt like hours I chickened out and placed the journal in a drawer. I had a busy night to prepare for anyway. No time for dwelling on the past. Time to get ready for my date with the ghost of Stanley Haschall.

* * *

Cold moonlight spilled across the cemetery. I walked through the gate, leaving coins for any protective spirits that might be out and about. Daniel followed, sober and toting a shotgun over one shoulder. With my glasses stowed in their case in my messenger bag, I scanned the area for anything in the auric field or any kind of spectral activity. What little I saw was nothing to be concerned about. I nodded to the spirits as I passed. Some were able to acknowledge, some were caught in their own loop of repeated activity. At least one seemed to understand my purpose, her gaze tracking to the woods behind the cemetery where I would be doing tonight’s work. Her clothing suggested the early nineteen hundreds. The grave she stood over read Haschall.

I took her to be one of the sisters Stanley murdered when he slaughtered his entire family. Perhaps the one with abilities of her own, who attempted to stop Stanley when his practice took a turn for the dark side. If so that would make her the first of his family he’d killed. Like a sepia photograph held under rippling water, her image wavered as I passed. I took it as a greeting and nodded.

The wards around the edge of the woods were old and weakened by time. I passed through them easily. Daniel had a harder time. I heard him hiss behind me. He would need to be clear of the wards before I strengthened them to ensure he would be able to leave. The spell I’d developed was specifically for Stanley Haschall but any impure entity could theoretically become ensnared by it. It didn’t get much more impure than a vampire.

It didn’t hurt to have him watch my back while I set up. Last year after the flood I was hired by the owner of a bed and breakfast called Maple Hill to rid the place of ghosts that took up residence after the chaos. The worst one of the lot was Stanley Haschall, a spirit I’d recognized. Years ago he killed a friend of mine one night when we came to this very cemetery ghost hunting. My friend Jody, a healthy twenty year old, died of an apparent heart attack. What he really died of was fright. Haschall scared him to death.

Ray was the first law enforcement on the scene because I called him in a panic. He had to investigate the death, as well as me and my friends. Rumors of drugs and a satanic ritual in which we offered up Jody as a sacrifice were rampant. I told Ray what happened of course and he believed me, but it wasn’t something he could put in a report. The ensuing firestorm of hate got so bad, I was getting death threats. One girl, though, went forward in church and said we’d all made a deal with the devil. I always thought she did it to smooth things over with her family but that didn’t help me the night someone tossed a brick through my window and narrowly missed my head. It didn’t help my already tense relationship with Ray or the hellish one with my mother. By then Rozella had already passed away and I felt like I had nothing keeping me here.

Ultimately I wasn’t the only one who left town. Out of my small group of friends, none of whom knew about Ray or my abilities, three of us left town, one stayed in Blythe and got Born Again, another stayed in Blythe and somehow made her own way, and another died of an overdose sometime in the intervening years. I found out too late to come home for the funeral but I might not have come home anyway. Hiding so much from them kept me from developing truly close friendships with any of them. Even in such a motley group I was terrified of rejection. Of being the scary freak, dangerous, just a plain bad person.

When the people who are supposed to love and know a person best keep telling that person something’s wrong with them, eventually believing the worst is the only thing that makes sense.  It took a long time to shake that, longer still to start rebuilding myself or rather, start finding out who I really was. I didn’t feel finished, not by a long shot, but I must have been steadier than I’d thought because I felt no fear as I stood on this ground where a friend had died. I had the only family that really counted anymore at my back, I had a supernatural assistant to call on, and I had myself.

There was a time not too long ago that I would not have counted myself as an asset.

Pushing the swirl of varied thoughts away, I took a moment to sharpen my focus. Stanley was there. I could feel him in the fullness of the dark, a cancerous presence so strong it could not be excised. Not even I could truly banish him. Some spirits were like that, hanging on through decades and perhaps longer. With one like Haschall, who so enjoyed the taste of his favorite cocktail of blood and fear, the best you could hope to do was imprison him in strong wards. Once upon a time a local witch was employed to do that very thing when prayers from the nearby church were ineffective. I doubted there was anyone around who would even consider paying me for what I was about to do, but it needed doing all the same.

I had deliberately held onto a portion of the ingredients I’d used to remove Haschall from Maple Hill. Dirt from his grave and from the family members he’d killed, as well as dirt from the forest floor where Jody died, mixed with whiskey, smoke, coffin nails, this and that, and my blood, all to draw him into a bottle trap for safekeeping. Daniel had been the one to make a hasty trip to this site one night and bury the bottle at the foot of the tree where Jody died. I had been too exhausted, too distracted, and frankly too big a coward. It wasn’t Haschall I was afraid of, though, it was coming home. That quick trip to retrieve the graveyard dirt resulted in seeing Ray again for the first time in years.

Once again I had to push intrusive thoughts away. I stepped further into the dark, pulling my jacket tighter around me. The woods smelled coppery, like blood after a fresh hunting kill. Clicking on my flashlight, I surveyed the ground, my auric vision overlaid on top of my regular vision in an impressionist miasma of red. At the base of the tree directly above where Daniel had buried the bottle lay a dead rabbit, its blood staining the ground. What was left, anyway. Most looked to have seeped into the soil, almost as if pulled down. Drank, even. I suppressed a shudder and stepped closer, kneeling.

Candles, graveyard dirt, roots and herbs. Everything I needed was in my bag. I set it all up quickly. Halfway through I detected a whiff of smoke, the tang of cheap booze, and best of all the whine of dirty blues. Stack. His presence brought a smile to my lips, bolstering my confidence. With him at my command, I could do this. I could do the hell out of this.

I stood and walked to Daniel. “Hey, Bubba.”

“I don’t like how it feels here. Makes my fangs itch and that’s never good.”

“Haschall likes blood, remember? It’s his will working through.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I remember.” He took one last look around then kissed my cheek, his lips cold. “I’ll be right outside the tree line.”

I watched him go, moonlight glinting off his blond hair and the oiled stock of the shotgun. The blues swelled and dipped, Stack’s way of saying howdy.

“Good evening, Stack.”

He shimmered into view, a mix of grayscale and sepia tones. “Hoodoo woman. We gonna make us a storm?”

I turned my face to the sky as the wind kicked up. “Call the lightning, call the thunder. We got work to do.”

For the better part of an hour I raised energy, starting by lighting the dozen candles I’d set out with a single push of will. Chanting never worked for me. After I began working with Stack I realized the obvious and started using music, singing and humming whatever felt right. Usually that meant the blues. RL Burnside served as my guide tonight. I blended bits and pieces of different songs, not worrying about the meaning of the lyrics, just taking hold of the rhythm and dancing it around the perimeter of the wards. Lost in a trance-like state, it took a while for it to sink in that the rite was working.

The first thing to respond was the wind. Already kicking up at that first blush of extra energy brought by Stack’s arrival, the night air turned into a near living thing. It moved through my hair like a lover’s hands, stealing inside my jacket to caress my skin. I poured extra energy into keeping the candles upright and burning.

The first crack of thunder in the distance sent a thrill through my blood. The night grew darker, the woods seething with malevolence. Haschall didn’t like me, didn’t like what I was doing. He didn’t get a vote. I carried on, waiting for the flash of lightning through the trees.

Stack’s voice echoed through the dark, a wordless singing and a hint of guitar. We weaved through the trees and the forest floor, dancing around more than with each other. With each pass the wards meshed together tighter. Despite the cold of the spring night I was sweating by the time the first drops of rain hit my face.

For the initial seconds it stayed a gentle downpour, then I called to Stack and we unleashed the cone of energy we’d been building. A massive boom of thunder was followed by blue-white lightning hitting the tree next to which was buried the bottle holding Stanley Haschall’s spirit, turning the night briefly into day. The sky opened, sending down a hard rain.

I pushed through exhaustion and kept dancing, riding out the storm to complete the spell that sealed the wards. A howl of anger sounded as the spell snapped into place. I felt it as it happened, the final push of magic that finished the working. It left my muscles burning and my vision gray. On unsteady feet I reached the spot where I’d left my bag, cleaning up as quickly as I could under the circumstances.

Stack rarely manifested solid enough to touch but he did then, the weight of his hands guiding me out of the forest and across the border of the ward so Daniel could take over. My legs quit working, Daniel catching me before my knees hit the ground. He was soaking wet.

“Let’s go home.” At least that’s what I thought he said. I was already half asleep.

After nearly twelve hours of sleep I woke up refreshed but starving. It was the middle of the day so Daniel was still in bed. I didn’t feel like cooking, though. I called Ray and we arranged to meet.

All those years ago we never had a public date. Sitting down with him in a restaurant where people could see us and point and whisper, or not bother to whisper, was beyond strange. I focused on the menu, pretending not to notice the attention.

Ray had no qualms about bringing it up. “It’s starting to get out that you’re back. A few folks have asked me about you. Asked if I’ve seen you.”

“What did you tell them?” I tapped my feet to the mariachi music playing in the background. This place was new, at least to me.

“I said I’d seen you. I said you were doing fine and still trying to rebuild after the flood.”

A waiter arrived and took our order. Ray crunched a few chips from the tortilla chips and salsa appetizer while I tried to casually look around at the lunch crowd. A couple of faces looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t attach names to them.

“Any talk of throwing me in the lake to see if I can swim?” Centuries ago women accused of witchcraft were tossed into lakes and rivers to see if they could swim. Witches were believed able to swim so if a woman survived, she was executed for witchcraft. If not, she drowned. I was only half joking.

“It’s been a long time,” he said. “People change. Calm down. Folks may be talking about you being back but no one’s going to throw accusations around.” He reached across the table, giving my arm a quick pat. “Just relax and enjoy the meal. Tell me more about some of the cases you did in Nashville.”

I couldn’t work the knots out of my shoulders but I went back to ignoring the stares. “You know a little about Maple Hill, right?”

“Stanley Haschall?”

I nodded. “I went out there last night. Gave the wards a big shot of power. It’ll be a pretty good while before they need recharging.”

He skimmed the top of my hand with his fingers. “Thank you, Roxanne. I know how important it is to keep him on lockdown. I know it couldn’t have been easy for you to go out there, either.”

“It needed doing.”

Our food arrived, the plates hot and loaded down with way more than I’d be able to eat. Maybe. As much energy as I’d expended the night before, I might have been able to clean my plate and part of his. The food was good and we ate in silence for a while. He was on his lunch break after all and only had an hour.

He must have noticed my feet tapping to the music. Flashing a quick grin he said, “You dancing under the table?”

“Sorry.” For a brief second I considered bringing my feet under control but said to hell with it. He didn’t seem bothered. “Did I step on your toes?”

“You were always too good a dancer for that. Some things about you haven’t changed.”

“Meaning some things have?”

The waiter breezed through to refill our tea and leave the check. Ray thanked him by name and took the check before I could get to it. He said, “You’re calmer in some ways. Settled into yourself, I guess. Back then you didn’t know who you were, what you wanted. Seems like you know who you are now.”

“I just need to figure out the
what do I want
part.” I hadn’t meant to say that out loud but there it was.

He rattled the ice in his glass before taking a drink. That meant he was thinking things he’d rather keep to himself. It should have disturbed me that I still knew this man so well, after so many years away, but instead I found it comforting.

“You know some of what you want,” he said. “A home to call your own. A business that lets you be independent. You want to use your gifts to help people. That’s something new.”

I tried not to visibly cringe. “Yeah, I guess I was pretty selfish back then.”

“No, you weren’t selfish. You were young and didn’t know what to do with yourself. You weren’t exactly encouraged to see the good in your abilities. See the possibilities. No disrespect to Mrs. Kent but I think sometimes she didn’t know what to do with you.”

It took me a second to connect “Mrs. Kent” with Rozella. She’d never made me call her that. It was always “Miss Rozella” or “ma’am.” I said, “I don’t think she’d ever had a white apprentice before.”

“Had nothing to do with color. Not in the way you’re thinking, anyhow. She was always afraid if she taught you too much, your parents would go off the deep end and try to have her arrested. Then it finally happened but.” He stopped talking. I guessed he could see it in my face.

Heat flashed through me, made of rage and shame. My parents tried to have Rozella arrested? And I never knew? “What in the ever loving
fuck
?”

He rubbed his face. “Shit. I thought you knew and just never wanted to talk about it.”

“I never knew. How do you know?”

“She lived out in the county. I was the deputy sent to talk to her. I figured you never wanted to talk about it because there was so much else you never wanted to talk about.”

Rozella died when I was eighteen, right before I graduated high school. I started dating Ray not quite a year after graduation. “When did this happen? I was a legal adult, there was nothing they could have had her charged with.”

“You were sixteen. You were underage. They wanted her arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

“Fucking bullshit!”

Ray grabbed my hands, shushing me. I nearly came across the table at him. “Roxie! Just calm down, we’re in public.”

The empty plates we’d pushed to the side rattled with movement. Ray kept one hand on both on mine, messing with the plates with the other, darting his eyes around the room. At that moment I didn’t care who saw the display of power. It was nothing compared to what I could do, what I wanted to do.

Ray gave me a pleading look. I slowed my breathing, suppressing the wild magic that leaked out of my pores, full of anger. He pushed a tea glass at me. Drinking helped ground the magic and gave me time to calm myself. “Tell me about it. Please.”

“They found out where you were spending so much time. I don’t know it all but first they thought you were dating a black kid.”

“First of all, let’s clear up one thing. You say they but what you really mean is Nadine. And I just bet she went round the bend at the thought of me dating a black guy.”

“Yeah, I think so. I don’t know. I didn’t get involved until they found out about the hoodoo. Nadine came out to the sheriff’s department and tried to file a complaint. Somebody talked her down, I don’t know how. I got sent to talk to Mrs. Kent because I was friends with Sammy.”

Sammy was Rozella’s youngest son. “How’d you know him?”

“We played ball together in high school. All four years, went to State. He’s in Chicago now but we still keep in touch a little bit here and there.”

I remembered then they’d been the same age. “So what happened?”

“Mrs. Kent made me a cup of herbal tea and we talked about gardening.”

“You’re kidding me.” He still had the fingers of one hand laced with mine.

“No. We had us a real nice conversation about working egg shells into your soil as fertilizer. That trick works too, I do it with my tomatoes.”

“Ray Don Travis, stop bullshitting me.” He hated being called by his full name. Hated it. His jaw looked tight enough I expected teeth to start shooting out, little bone missiles indiscriminately taking out unsuspecting diners. Now what I suppressed was a laugh.

Through gritted teeth he said, “I am not bullshitting you. We talked mostly about gardening.”

“What was said about me?”

He looked away. “It was made clear to me that trying to charge her with anything was nonsense and I would do well to go back and tell your momma nothing was going on. You were helping an old woman out with her housework and reading to her since her eyes didn’t work so good anymore but she didn’t want to give up books just yet.”

I snorted, imagining my mother’s face at that. The local paper and TV Guide was about all she read. “So Rozella had you lie? Knowingly lie? And you went along with it?”

“Look, Sammy Kent’s good people and I knew his momma was too, no matter what anybody said about any hoodoo.” He still wouldn’t meet my eyes. Interesting.

Reclaiming my hand, I fished a ponytail holder out of my bag then placed my glasses on the table so I could fix my hair. Ray glared at my innocent little glasses, then turned his grumpy teddy bear glare on me.

“Come on, Radioactive. Tell me what really happened.”

Ray’s cheeks went through about fifteen shades of pink and red in the space of seconds. The unfortunate combination of Ray Don - he’d been named after his grandfathers - had led to him being nicknamed Radioactive when he played football in high school. He was a good player, good enough he probably could have gone further if he’d wanted. Every time he was introduced at a pep rally or scored on the field, a mid-eighties song called
Radioactive
would blare from the speakers. He hated both the song and the nickname with an equal passion.

“No one calls me that anymore.”

“Why not? It’s cute.”

“Because I hate it,” he hissed. “And I carry a gun.”

“I’m not scared of you or your gun. Tell me what Rozella did to run you off.”

He thinned his lips into a tight line and looked away again. “You remember when we first met?”

“Yeah, you ran me out of a cemetery at night.”

He shook his head. “No, we met before then. Remember when I was the resource officer at the high school for about a month when the regular deputy was out having back surgery?”

I flashed on a memory of him standing in the front lobby of the school, stiff and uncomfortable around kids not much younger than him. And another memory of the way the girls talked about him in the bathroom. “Yeah. Not that we actually met then. I just saw you around the school but we never talked.”

He clammed up again. I kicked him gently under the table. He gave my glasses a pointed look, shaking his head once. He’d never liked me looking at his aura. Not because he had anything to hide, he used to tell me, but because I worked so hard to keep myself at arm’s length. If I wouldn’t reveal myself to him, it wasn’t fair for me to take advantage of my ability and see things about him. That fight had stung worse than others but I’d agreed. Even now, when I no longer needed the glasses as a shield against the riot of color that could swarm the spectrum, I did my best to keep my auric vision averted from him. Taking my glasses off was a tease and nothing more. He didn’t know that, though. I put them back on and said in my most reasonable voice, “Would you please tell me what happened?”

“I never told anybody. Never breathed a word of it to a single soul but somehow she knew. She said I was more in danger of corrupting you than she was.”

“Ray!”

“She scared the hell out of me. Sitting there as calm as you please, sipping her herbal tea and looking like the sweetest little old lady you ever saw.” He lowered his voice, already at a whisper. “At the same time it was like she could see into me. Like she knew…stuff.”

“You were attracted to me when I was in high school?” This was mind-blowing. No wonder he’d carried so much guilt about our age difference. I reached for his hand. “But it’s not like you acted on it while I was still jailbait.”

That was the wrong word to use. Face bright red, Ray grabbed the check and fled the table. I was still collecting my jacket and bag when I heard the screaming from the kitchen. All I could make out in the flurry of Spanish was “
el fantasma
.”

The ghost.