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

social whipping boy for nineteen years, you can at least allow me to gloat for thirty seconds, can’t you, before you sic the thought police?”

Her stony face was her reply.

“Sistah!”

Ignoring him, Claire turned to Shanté. “Clarisse was Cuban. She was black.”

“She fits the bill,” Shanté agreed, “except one thing. No woman would have had licencia—permission—to make a prenda. Not even in Cuba today, much less in the nineteenth century.”

“Do witches ask permission?” Ransom asked.

“Why do you need witchcraft to account for any of this?” Claire asked.

“She wanted to get rid of Addie,” he replied. “Don’t you see? She wanted to get rid of the white wife.”

“How do you know that it was Addie in that hole?” Claire asked.

“She was having an affair,” he said. “Harlan came home and caught her.”

“And?” Claire challenged.

Ran met her stare and then Marcel’s, and for a moment—only one—they were together in a different, darker room, and it had ceased to be entirely clear that the subject was the past.

Ran broke eye contact first.

“Even if they were,” Claire said, “what makes you think they just lay down for it? How do you know the bodies out there weren’t Harlan’s and Clarisse’s instead of Jarry’s and Addie’s?”

This notion bollixed him. Ran had simply never thought of it.

“And, I repeat,” Claire continued, on a roll, “why do you need witchcraft to account for any of this? I mean, whoever the murderer was, he—or she—used a shotgun, right? I don’t mean to be obtuse, but spirits don’t use shotguns, do they?”

“My answer to that,” said Shanté, “is that when spirits get involved, it increases the likelihood of shotguns being used. It increases the chance of people getting hit by buses, falling off cliffs, committing suicide, having aneurysms, and the like.”

“And maybe by Occam’s razor,” Claire replied, “whoever committed the murder was simply a murderer and responsible for his acts like every human being is, like everybody in this room. Why throw the blame on spirits?”

“Very true, Claire,” Shanté said, “but Occam’s razor, as I understand it, is the simplest way to account for all the observed facts, and your explanation doesn’t account for the fact that there’s a prenda sitting on your sideboard as we speak. You have two dead bodies in a hole. I don’t pretend to know who they were, but it does strike me as, at the very least, curious that you have title to a South Carolina rice plantation passing to a mixed-race child in, what—1865?—a time when such a thing was about as likely as a person of color being elected president or flying to the moon. Even if you dismiss that as fluke or happenstance, someone with knowledge made this prenda and drew a Palo firma in the bottom. Clarisse was Cuban, she was black; based on everything you’ve said, she certainly had motive. What I’m still hung up on, though, is why she would have made a cauldron of Zarabanda. Zarabanda is the god of justice. His energy doesn’t lend itself to evil acts. If this had been meant for witchcraft, what I’d expect to see is a nganga bomba or a sacu-sacu, a kind of prenda made in a burlap bag and hung in a tree. Instead, you have an iron cauldron with Zarabanda’s firma and the proper carga. Which inclines me back toward Claire’s opinion. Nothing about this really smacks of witchcraft. In Palo Nzambi—‘good’ or ‘legal’ Palo—the Palero and the spirit make a pact, a contract. The muerto goes into the pot and serves by choice. ‘Sometido por su voluntad.’ Remember, Ran? ‘Subject by its will’? I don’t see anything to indicate that it was any different here. What it looks more like to me is that something went wrong. Something led Clarisse—or someone—to bury her prenda in an anthill, upside down, which, for a Palera, would be like burying your mother on her head. Why would she destroy her pot? My guess is, she broke the pact. Whatever promise she made the muerto went unfulfilled. If the spirit is still here, that’s why. It wants something, and what it wants now is probably what it wanted and was promised then. I think we have to find out what that is. But, first, we have to find out who the muerto is.”

“Wait,” said Ran. “You’re saying a specific person was put into this pot?”

“Specific, yes,” she said. “A person, no. It was a person once upon a time, but who we are in life is not who we become after we die. According to Congo metaphysics, human beings are composed of three interwoven faculties: the nitu, the kini, and the mwela. The nitu is the physical body, or ‘death-body,’ which we leave behind. The kini and the mwela, together, are the ‘life-body.’ The kini, which is also called the energy body, looks exactly like the nitu, but it’s incorporeal. When you see a ghost, that’s what it is, the kini, hanging around. The mwela is the soul, which Africans identify with breath. The mwela is immortal. At death, it goes to Mpemba to live with the ancestors. It’s said that the mwela never divorces the kini, they’re married eternally, but the kini can be split off, and this is the part a brujo would be most likely to put into a pot. In fact, this part most often becomes the working spirit, the ndoki de la prenda, of any nganga, whether used for good or evil. The ndoki or kini preserves some aspects of its former personality and short-term human memory, but not the real character or soul. It’s equivalent to what Jungians call the shadow and is in fact identified with it. My best guess is, we’re dealing with the ndoki with whom Clarisse made the pact.”

“But if what it wants now is the same thing it wanted then…”

Everybody looked at Ran.

“Come on, people, you know what I’m saying….”

“No, Ran,” Claire replied. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying whatever it wanted then led to Addie and Jarry…or Harlan and