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

crazy, I may as well tell you that yesterday, and again this afternoon, when I touched that thing, I got a shock.”

“A shock…”

“So help me, Claire. The thing felt hot. That’s why I thought I’d hit a buried power line.”

“Oh, Ran,” she said. “Sweetie.”

“I know, I know,” he said, “fine, whatever. Call the funny farm—you know the number—but before you tell the guys in the white coats to unfurl their nets, do me a favor: touch it.”

Claire hesitated briefly, then went to the table and complied. “Okay, what?”

“Nothing?”

She shook her head. “Nothing, Ransom. Not a thing.”

Ran, for once, could think of no response.

“Maybe the sun had been shining on it,” Marcel offered. “I mean, it’s black. It was pretty hot out there today.”

Ransom looked at him and felt a swell of love. “It was under six inches of periwinkle, Cell. Thanks, though. I don’t suppose you’d try it, just to humor me….”

He laid his hand where Claire’s had been, and Ransom arched his brows, but Marcel pursed his lips and shook his head.

“Okay,” Ran said, “once more we’ve proved that I’m a jerk, as if more proof were necessary.”

“You know, though…” As Marcel removed his hand, he brushed it as though rubbing something off and looked at Claire. “At the risk of adding darkness to obscurity, you know what suddenly occurred to me?”

“What?”

“Ben’s story. Didn’t you tell me that when the minister came out here to look for them, he found the table set and a chicken dinner scattered in the dining room?”

“Whoa,” said Ransom. “Who’s Ben? What story? What’s all this?”

“Ben Jessup,” Marcel said. “Our librarian.”

“This morning he was telling us about my great-great-great-grandparents, Ran,” Claire said. “You know the portrait in the library? That’s Adelaide DeLay. She disappeared from Wando Passo right after the Civil War.”

“Not the blonde?”

Claire nodded. “Her husband, Harlan, was a Confederate prisoner of war. He came back from up north somewhere, bought some shot in Powatan, and started walking out here, and that was the last anybody ever saw of them.”

Ransom pointed down the hall. “Her?” As though drawn by his own hand, he went to the library door and looked back. “White dress? Botticelli hair?”

“Yes, I’m fairly sure,” Claire said as she and Marcel followed. “I’m going to call Aunt Tildy in the morning.”

“Let’s call her now.”

“It’s too late.”

Ran checked his watch. “It’s eight fifteen!”

“She’s eighty-eight years old. I’ll call her in the morning.” She turned to Cell. “So what are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything. It just popped into my head. It’s probably a coincidence.”

“Unless the pot made you think of it.”

They both turned sober stares on Ran.

“Joke! J-o-k-e. Jesus, folks…Hey!” Ran slapped his forehead. “The tub! Let’s go see what came out in the wash!”

They followed him upstairs, where Ran switched on the bathroom light. The water had drained out and left a snaking spill of gray alluvium, like lava covering the remains of a small town. Ran turned on the handheld, and several stones appeared out of the rinse: a pointed black one rayed with white, a translucent piece of pink quartz crystal, one of cuprous red, shaped like a heart, a fourth which proved to be a lodestone—there were several rusty pins attached. Ran lifted a rectangle of moldy, dripping wood with fittings of corroded copper wire. Preserved in its anaerobic state, traces of stamped blue writing were still visible. “Looks like some kind of antique mousetrap,” he said. “And what do you suppose these are?” He held up a pair of rusty rings connected by a length of chain.

“Handcuffs?” Claire ventured.

“Manacles,” said Cell.

There was a horseshoe, what appeared to be a railroad spike, the head of a small doll, an ivory ring, and several shells—a lightning whelk and several smaller striped ones similar in size and shape to pasta shells. Finally, out of the black mud, the skull of some small animal, perhaps a dog.

They all stared in silence as the water drummed.

“Call me crazy,” Ransom said, “call me irresponsible, but this reminds me of the stuff you see in those shops along North Rampart in New Orleans.”

Claire looked up. “What shops?”

“The vodou stores.”

“Oh, great,” she said, “now it’s a vodou pot?”

“Hey,” he said. “We all know I’m the voice of unreason here. What’s your view?”

“What is it? Some rocks and crap. I think you dug into a garbage mound,” she said. “That’s your big discovery. I mean, they had garbage back then, too; I’m going to venture they didn’t have curbside pickup, so what did they do? They buried it. And your vodou cauldron is just some old cook pot they threw away.”

“You know, though, Claire…” Marcel picked up one of the small shells. “These are cowries. In Africa, they use them for divination. I don’t think we even have them here.”

“Okay.” Claire held up both hands and backed away. “You’ve freaked me out. Both of you. I am now Officially Freaked Out.”

“Look, everyone’s on edge,” Cell said. “Something happened earlier tonight, and here we are in an old house in the country…. All we’re missing is the thunderstorm. Chances are, this is no more than a bunch of overcaffeinated med students contracting imaginary diseases from the PDR. As far as I know, they don’t even use black pots in vodou. If they do, I’ve never heard of it. But if—and I emphasize, if—we wanted to look into it a little more, I’ll tell you who might know….”

“Who?” said Ran.

“Shanté.”

“Shanté,” Claire said. “Shanté Mills?”

Cell gave her a confirming glance, but saved the balance of his stare for Ran. “She’s here, you know.”

Ransom’s expression emptied, turning as soft and guileless as a newborn lamb’s. “Here?” he said, with a small bleat.

“About an hour south of here, on the way to Beaufort, in Alafia.” Cell looked at them as though this ought to ring some bells. “‘Authentic African Village As Seen on TV’?”

Ran and Claire both blinked.

“Sixty Minutes did a piece on it. It was started by some disaffected urban radicals from Philly in the sixties. They bought a