Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

streets looked like my aunts and uncles.”

“Sort of like the little birdie?”

“Okay, Ran. Okay. Touché.”

“They’re all related, though, right, these religions?”

“Sure,” she said. “As Southern Baptists are related to Swedish Lutherans are related to the Church of Rome.”

“They can all tell you what happened on the cross, though, right?”

She conceded him a grudging smile. “They can all tell you what happened on the cross. At that level of generality, they’re related.”

“So, nobody since Simon?”

“I’m celibate,” she said.

“Celibate?” This came out sharper than he meant. “Why?”

“Religious reasons.”

“Meaning…”

“Meaning, none of your business…Now, look, I won’t be gone long. Why don’t you shower, fix something to eat, and lie down.”

“Hey, Shan…”

“What?”

“I was sorry about your mom.”

She softened a bit. “Yeah, I know, Ran. Thanks.”

“You know I dreamed of her last night?” Leaning toward Dolores’s photo, Ran noticed, hanging on her crucifix, on a fine gold chain, a Saint Christopher no larger than a dime. “Hey”—he lifted it—“hey, is this…?”

Shanté smiled a quick, bold smile that brought things back. “You gave me that, didn’t you?”

“What, you forgot?”

“No, I remember. Do you?”

“Are you kidding? Hell, yes, I remember. Hale, yeah!”

His Killdeer accent finally made her laugh.

“That thing cost me four Saturdays scrubbing down the head at Dixie Bag,” he said. “Know where I bought it? Alston-Heller.”

“That was a pretty tony place.”

“Damn straight,” said Ran. “That’s where all the rich kids got their sterling baby cups and pinkie signet rings. When I came in the door, the alarm went off automatically. Armed guards in camouflage rappelled down from the roof on ropes. I shit you not. They searched my body cavities three times before they let me pass.”

Shan continued smiling as he talked, but her expression had turned thoughtful in a way that Ran, at all costs, had hoped to avoid.

“Come on!” he protested. “This is my best stuff. Why aren’t you laughing?”

“Well, to give you credit, you were never cheap.”

“Hey, tell that to my wife!” Ran instantly knew this was a tactical mistake. “I swear, Shan,” he continued, hurrying on, “it seems like just last week we were on the Ferris wheel at the state fair, gazing over North Raleigh, making plans to run away. And then we blinked, and half our lives are gone. We hardly know each other anymore, but you know what I really feel, Shanté?”

“What?” she asked, with an expression that seemed wistful.

“In another way, it’s like no time has passed at all.”

“It has, though, Ran,” she said. “We aren’t the same people we were then.”

“I am,” he said, with his bright face. “Aren’t you?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not.”

“How come you seem the same to me?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess the answer has to be because you want me to.” She reached out and took his hand. “Why are you here?”

“I don’t know,” he said, fighting sudden tears and angry with himself for them. “Is that okay? Does there always have to be a reason for everything, for every fucking little thing we do? Don’t you ever do things without knowing why?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I guess I do.”

“Don’t.” Ran held his finger up. “Don’t do that to me, okay? Don’t look at me like that.” He got up and walked away.

“How am I looking at you, Ran?”

“Like that,” he answered, turning back. “Like Claire. Did she tell you two dead bodies turned up in our yard yesterday? Was it yesterday?…Yesterday. Did she mention anything about a black pot?”

“She said you dug one up and that you seem to think it’s having some effect on you.”

“I’m asking you flat out,” Ran said. “Are they used in vodou…hoodoo?”

“No, not in vodou, not in hoodoo. In Palo Mayombe they are.”

“What’s that?”

“Palo is another form of Congo practice, Ran. It developed in Cuba. The pots are called ‘prendas’ there. But for a Cuban prenda to turn up on a nineteenth-century South Carolina rice plantation is a stretch.”

“But Claire’s people had all sorts of Cuban ties, Shanté!”

She considered. “Claire thinks it’s just a cook pot—I expect she’s probably right.”

“Are you sure, Shanté? Are you positive? Because one of those bodies was Claire’s great-great-great-grandmother, Adelaide DeLay, and the other, I’m pretty sure, was the plantation steward, a slave named Jarry. I think they were having an affair. I think she was pregnant with his child, and Addie’s husband came home from the war and murdered them.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know how I know! Because a little birdie told me so, all right? But, really, Shan, it’s connected to this pot. It’s like the pot, or something in the pot, is telling me. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s like it’s dropping pebbles in the woods for me to find, and if you really want to know, I think it sent me here to you. I mean, why would a cook pot be buried with manacles and cowrie shells in it? Why would it be wrapped with chain?”

“The pot you found was wrapped with chain?”

“Uh-huh. Does that mean something?”

Her expression now was grave. “Was it buried, by any chance, in the shadow of a tree?”

“A tree?” Ran said. “I don’t know, maybe. There are trees around. Actually, it was in an anthill.”

“An anthill…The pot you found was buried in an anthill?”

Ransom nodded. “Why?”

She didn’t answer. “Look,” she said, in the martial tone he liked. “Look, I’m listening, okay? But first things first. I really, really have to get back to the shop. You eat and try to rest. As soon as I get back, I’ll tell you what I know about black pots.”

FORTY-THREE

With the victories in Virginia, Charleston’s mood is gay that winter, 1861, but Addie, on a brief visit to her aunt’s, finds herself out of step and put off by the gaiety. At a St. Cecelia’s Ball, her cousin, Lavinia Lesesne, shows up in a dress from Paris that cost eight hundred dollars, it is said. It was run in through the blockade on a dark, fast ship with six thousand