Gathering Deep (15 page)

“There's only one way to find out,” Odane said.

“We need to open it,” Lucy agreed.

Mama Legba's mouth went tight, but she didn't disagree. “We need a protection charm before we start,” she said, placing the box on the low table near the couch. “You want to try, Chloe-girl?”

It was the first time she'd offered to let me try any sort of charm since everything had happened, and I felt a little jolt of excitement as something shifted inside of me. Something that yearned to reach out and take the opportunity she offered.

“No,” I told her, slamming that yearning back into its own box. “You can do it.”

“I know well enough that I can do it,” Mama Legba said, “and I know you can do it, too. The question is if
you
know.”

I glanced away,
unable to meet her eyes. “I'm not ready for anything like that,” I told her. In truth, though, I
wanted
to be ready. I wanted to feel that same spark of excitement that had flickered through me when the candles snuffed themselves out or when Odeana's electricity flickered. But I was worried the part of me that wanted those things was way too much like my momma.

Mama Legba seemed to understand. Her hand rested on top of mine, and finally I looked up at her. “You afraid of the wrong thing, Chloe-girl. Not all magic means you linked to Thisbe, child. There ain't no reason for you to keep running from what's inside of you. I tried to tell that boy of yours that much, but now I'm telling you as well.”

It was too much of a temptation, and far too much of a risk, so I drew my hand away. “I'm not afraid,” I lied. “I just don't want to.”

Mama Legba considered me a moment or two longer, and then seemed to decide it wasn't worth arguing for now. She lit a stick of incense, and then holding her hands over the box, chanted the protection charm. Taking a deep breath, like she was trying to steady herself, she eased the latch on the box free and gently opened the lid.

We all seemed to be holding our breaths, waiting for something to happen when Mama Legba eased the lid up. When nothing did, the relief in the room was palpable.

“Let's see what we got here,” Mama Legba said, gently lifting the topmost object.

Whatever I'd been expecting, the contents of the box were a disappointment. Inside I didn't see anything at all worth protecting. The box didn't hold nothing but a mishmash of useless junk: a faded silk ribbon gone brittle with age, a few buttons, something that might have once been a Gris-Gris. And some scraps of paper, most of which had long ago turned brown.

“What is all that?” I asked as Mama Legba picked through the pieces.

“Seems like a record of some sort. They're all in a sort of order, too—most recent on top,” Mama Legba said, sorting through them.

She laid it all out on the table in front of us, piece-by-piece, as she went through them. “There are some more recent ticket stubs for flights, but the older they get, the more interesting they look. This here looks like a receipt for passage on a ship of some sort, right around the turn of the last century.” She read over one of the more fragile bits before looking up at me, her eyes dark with some unspoken emotion as they met mine. “I think this might be Thisbe's free papers. Looks like it was dated 1810, when she wasn't more than about eighteen years old.” She went to hand the paper to me, but I shook my head, refusing it.

It was hard enough knowing what my momma was without also having to think about what she'd been. I couldn't think about her being no older than I was and owned by another person.

“I wonder what she did to get her freedom,” Odane said as he took the outstretched papers from Mama Legba.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, not liking the note of amusement in his voice.

He glanced up at me with a lazy shrug. “Only that she must have had some sort of leverage to get her owner to let her go. Either that or she earned enough on the side—or someone else did—to purchase her freedom. Whatever the case, these didn't come cheap,” he said, setting the papers back down on the table.

“This looks like a record of her life,” Lucy said, looking at another bit of paper—one that looked like a ticket. “She wouldn't have been able to stay in one place without people catching on, so she traveled around.”

“Not just around,” Odane said, tapping the scraps. “Look here, this one is a transatlantic crossing to Liberia in the mid 1800s. Then she travels through Haiti and Jamaica before coming back to America.”

Mama Legba made a thoughtful noise. “There's a pattern, sure enough. She could have gone most anywhere, but she didn't. She wasn't off in Paris or Rome, like she could've been. Look here, West Africa, the West Indies—all places on the Middle Passage. And they are places that have their own practices and beliefs when it comes to the spirits,” she said. “These are places where Voodoo was born and grew up in different ways.”

“So she was learning?” Odane asked. “Maybe collecting different parts of the tradition from different places.”

“Maybe so,” Mama Legba agreed. “From the looks of it, she certainly got around enough over the last hundred years that she could have learned all sorts of things.”

Lucy picked up the last of the pile of scraps. “What are these?”

Mama Legba held out her hand and Lucy gave her the fragile bits of paper. When she gently unfolded one, it nearly broke in two along the crease. “Looks like these are some newspaper clippings that date back … ” Her brows went up. “Some date
way
back.”

Odane leaned in for a better look. “What are they clippings off?”

“I don't rightly know,” she said. “These here seem to be a couple of death notices.” She placed the clipped columns of newsprint on the table. “And these are just reports about that plantation out there Lucy's daddy works on.”

Lucy leaned in and tapped a finger on one of the scraps before scooping it up. “I remember my dad talking about this. The state was going to reclaim the property because the last owner hadn't kept up with back taxes before he died. The house was abandoned for decades before some private owner bought it for cheap, but he couldn't afford to actually restore it, so he sold it to the university.” She glanced up from reading. “That's when they hired my dad.”

“A lot of these have to do with the plantation,” Odane said, pulling another of the clippings from the pile. “Says here this guy owned Le Ciel back in the 1920s, but he went missing sailing off the coast of Cuba.” He held the obituary out to me.

Without really thinking about it, I reached for it and—

It had been years since I'd seen the place, but the mansion looked the same as it always had. Like the years couldn't touch the sanctity of those white walls.

I almost didn't go around back, to the servant's entrance, like I knew I was supposed to. I'd been so many places, learned so many things, and it was easy to forget that in this place, I wasn't anything at all.

The woman who answered the door wiped her hands on her apron as she looked me up and down without so much as a word. Her lined face didn't show any sign of recognition, but all the same I had to hold myself steady while she looked over me. When she decided I'd do, she ushered me into the stuffy warmth of the kitchen and then on past that to the coolness of the hall beyond.

“Mister La Rue will see you in his library,” she said.

“Mister?” I asked, surprised. Usually it was left to the woman of the house to interview new servants.

“Missus isn't well today,” the woman said, giving me a look that let me know that the missus was often not well, and that “not well” was a nicer way of saying something that shouldn't be spoken about in mixed company.

When I entered the library, La Rue was sitting behind his desk. His attention was focused on some big ledgers he was looking over, and he waved me to sit on the stiff-backed sofa without so much as looking up.

I did as he bade me to do, keeping my hands tucked in my lap and taking a moment to look around the place. I'd never been inside the big house, and now that I was, I hated Roman Dutilette that much more for building it.

“Name?” La Rue asked, still not bothering to look at me.

“Sarabeth Johnson,” I said, supplying the name I'd been using for the last few years.

He scribbled something down on the pad of paper.
“Experience?”

“I've been working as a domestic since I was about fifteen years old.” I pulled the forged papers out of my purse. “I have referrals from my last three posts.”

LaRue glanced up to accept the papers, but as he put his hand out for them, his dark brows beaded together and he studied me for a moment that drew out long and painful and slow. “Well, well, well.” Then his mouth curved up into a feral-looking smile. “Sarabeth, indeed,” he drawled.

My hands froze on the papers. “Roman?” I whispered, even as I knew it was impossible.

His smile widened. “Thisbe.”

As the shock of his words wrapped around me, I lost hold of the papers and—

With a strangled gasp I came back to myself, to Mama Legba's shop. My brain raced, trying to put together what I'd seen.

“Chloe?” Lucy asked. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head. “It just happened again.”

“What happened?” Odane asked.

I explained to him about the visions I'd had when I touched the charm before, and the ones I'd had in her cabin. “I thought it was maybe some kind of magic that was still on the charm or in the places where she worked those spells, but … ” I looked up at Mama Legba. “When I touched that clipping, I was back there. I was seeing her life again.”

Mama Legba was considering me with an uncomfortable intensity. “So it ain't only the charm that causes them.” She picked up another scrap of paper that had been taken from the box. “But I can't get no sense of Thisbe on these, so I don't think it's anything she's doing to you, either.” Mama Legba frowned. “Though I don't rightly know how that could work.”

“People leave bits of their energy behind all the time, Auntie. You know that. Everything in this world we touch becomes a part of who we were, what we are. She's got her mother's blood, so I don't see why she shouldn't have a touch of her power. Maybe that's why she can sense traces of this Thisbe on the things she touches.”

Mama Legba shook her head. “It don't feel right.”

“Nothing about any of this feels right,” Odane said.

“What did you see?” Lucy asked, picking the clipping from where it had fallen to the floor. She frowned a little, like she'd expected to have a vision, too.

“Thisbe came back to Le Ciel. Must have been about the time of that clipping. The guy it talks about, the one who was lost at sea—La Rue—he was hiring a new maid and she wanted to get into the house, so she applied. But he recognized her.”

“What do you mean ‘recognized her'?” Mama Legba asked.

“I mean, he seemed to know somehow that she was Thisbe and not the ‘Sarabeth Johnson' she'd called herself by.”

“How
could he have known that?” Lucy asked.

“I don't exactly understand,” I told them, “but I got the sense that Thisbe thought he was Roman Dutilette.”

Mama Legba made a small sound of disbelief.

“He didn't look anything like Roman,” I said, trying to explain. “I mean, he had the same coldness in his eyes, but he was a rich white man looking at a black servant, so maybe that accounted for his expression.”

“But Thisbe didn't think so,” said Odane.

I shook my head. “No. She didn't. She called him by name, and he didn't deny it.”

“How is that even possible?”

Mama Legba took the clipping from Lucy. She closed her eyes for a second, like she was trying to get a reading on it, but then opened them, clearly confused. “I don't rightly know, but you came back, Lucy-girl. You found your way back here to finish what Armantine left to be finished, didn't you?” She set the clipping back on the table, like she didn't want to hold it for too long. “Maybe Roman did as well.”

“But it sounds like he recognized her so quickly,” Lucy said. “When I first met Alex again, I had a sense that I was being drawn to him, but it took me weeks of dreaming before I pieced everything together and could really remember who he'd been to me.”

“Maybe it wasn't a coincidence that he came back,” Odane said. “This Thisbe found a way to live for more than a century beyond her natural life, so what's to say that Roman Dutilette couldn't have done the same?”

“How would he have learned to do a thing like that?” Mama Legba asked doubtfully.

Odane shrugged. “You can get any information you want if you're willing to pay enough for it.”

“Let me try again,” I told them.

“I don't think—” Mama Legba started, but I cut her off.

“You just said you don't sense any of Thisbe's magic on these. Whatever's causing the visions, it's probably nothing she's doing, right?”

“We can't be sure, Chloe-girl,” Mama said, but without much conviction.

“You're all here. If something happens, there are three of you and one of me. I think it's worth the risk if we can learn something more.”

Mama Legba frowned, but after a few moments of hesitation, she gave me a small nod. “You right. I don't like it, but it's what we have right now.”

“These older articles are written in French,” Odane said, already sorting through the pile. “This one looks to be from 1811.” He studied it, his brow drawing together as he read it over. “Some sort of attempted slave revolt, it looks like. My French is pretty bad, but maybe you can get something more from it.”