Forever and Always

  Delphia stopped me after breakfast and pointedly asked me when I was leaving. Not Linc but me. I sensed that she was planning to ask Linc to stay on. When I touched her hand I could see that she was imagining a photo of him in their brochure; beautiful Linc was guaranteed to bring in more guests and more money. And if they tired of him would they sell him? I thought.

  I used my True Persuasion on her to make her leave me alone so I could go to my room and study the ball. I spent four hours with it but achieved nothing. I could not connect with the power I felt inside it. I tried everything I could think of. I managed to make it roll across the floor, and, to my amazement, even lifted it a couple of inches. When I couldn’t hold it off the floor, it dropped with a bang. Anxiously, I ran to it and inspected it for damage. One second I was feeling like I’d dropped my baby, then the next second I flung it as hard as I could against the stone fireplace. I chipped the rock but not the surface of the ball.

  I was so absorbed in what I was doing that I forgot to protect myself. There was a knock on the door. I hid the ball inside the storage compartment under the window seat and opened the door. It was Narcissa.

  “Are you all right, dear? We heard a noise and—” She broke off, looked around the room and saw my sunhat hanging on the wreath. “What a very pretty hat,” she said, taking it down and pretending to look at it. “We wouldn’t want it ruined, now would we? That nail that holds the wreath up could damage it. Perhaps you’d better put your hat here on the mantel.”

  She was, uninvited, now standing in the center of my room, and she was looking around, trying to figure out what I was doing in there all alone. “Won’t you please join us? We have a florist coming today to show us how to arrange spring flowers. And later a woman is coming to teach us some yoga. We’d really like for you to join us.”

  Involuntarily, I shuddered. This woman looked and sounded as sweet as something off the Angel channel, but I knew she and her sister were doing something really bad. I wanted to scream at her,“Where is Linc’s son?”

  Instead, I burst into fake tears, covering my dry eyes with my hand. “I’m so sorry, Narcissa,” I said. “I’ve just had some terrible things happen to me lately.”

  As I hoped she would, she sat down beside me on the window seat and patted my hand. Again I felt the faint electric current run from her hand up my arm. Didn’t she feel the ball under us? To me, it was as though we were sitting on a star. I could feel its extreme heat and light.

  “What’s wrong, dear? You can tell me anything.”

  I could feel her trying to will me to tell her everything about myself, tell her my deepest, darkest secret. I knew she couldn’t help me with my secret but maybe I could get her to tell me her deepest secret.

  “I need help,” I said, stalling for time. I was trying to talk and work on her at the same time. That wasn’t easy. I work best when I put myself into a state of meditation and concentrate hard.

  “Help with what?” she asked. “You can tell me. I…know…lots of secrets.”

  “Not like mine,” I said, “and I can’t tell anyone what I want. It’s too—”

  “Too evil?” Narcissa asked, still patting my arm. “I doubt that it is. You should tell me. I’ve heard a lot in my life.”

  “I couldn’t possibly tell.”

  “Then let me guess.”

  I made no answer, just covered my face with my hands and concentrated.

  “You say your husband died and now you want the jewels, but it’s my guess that you don’t want the jewels for yourself. You try to appear sophisticated, but I can tell that you’re not.”

  I looked at her sharply.

  “It doesn’t matter what I’ve seen but I know things. Delphi says I have half the women’s intuition in the world.”

  It looked like jealous Delphia had reduced her sister’s psychic abilities to that derogatory term of “women’s intuition.”

  Narcissa picked up my hand and began to caress it. Instantly, I knew that she wasn’t interested in Linc or any other man. I didn’t snatch my hand away.

  “My guess is that you grew up in deep poverty, then married a despicable older man for his money, but the old goat died and left you nothing. What did he do? Convert all his assets to tangible goods, then hide them?”

  I was looking at her. What made her think I’d grown up in poverty? The clothes I was wearing and the three strands of gold around my neck were quite expensive. Did I—? I had to calm myself as her words were making me lose concentration.

  “Are you in love with someone?”

  “Oh yes!” I said.

  “I see.” She took my hand in both hers and kept caressing. “You want the jewels so you can give the money to someone else because he…she…?”

  “He,” I said, and she lightened her grip on my hand.

  “He is now demanding that you pay him or he’ll go to the police.”

  “Police,” I said, not understanding what she was saying, then it hit me. Good heavens, the woman believed I’d killed my husband and now someone was blackmailing me. I was to pay him or he’d tell the police. I needed to find some jewelry so I could pay the blackmailer. I put my hand over my face again. Murder and blackmail. Were the other women here for similiar reasons?

  “I know,” Narcissa said. “No one comes to us unless they’ve been given information about us. We advertise, but the truth is, we can’t compete with other spas.” She ran her hands over her ample belly. “Light cuisine and exercise are not what we’re known for.”

  “Then you do…do what…what I was told?”

  “We can, yes,” she said softly.

  I looked into her eyes so hard that mine began to ache.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Soon. Others were here before you, and, as you know, we can do only one a day—or even less.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder and did what I could to read the images in her mind. Unfortunately, all I could see was a vision of the cherry pies that were being served at dinner.

  “Won’t you come downstairs and join us?”

  “I’m rather tired. I’d like to stay in my room and—” I smiled at her. “I’d really like to read. Do you have any books that could take my mind off my worries?”

  “You’re free to use the library. There are some excellent local histories in there.”

  “Histories of this beautiful house?” I was afraid she’d refuse to let me see them as I was sure she’d not want anyone to know the truth of her ancestors. Instead, she turned pink with pleasure.

  “How kind of you to say that. Most people say the most dreadful things about this house. Did you know that this house was once called A Hundred Elms? There were one hundred huge elms on the property, but after the war and the plantation workers were let go, the lumber had to be sold. One of my ancestors said he wanted thirteen elms left because thirteen was an evil number and that what the Yankees had done to us was evil.”

  I couldn’t reply to that, because I didn’t think the evil had come from a Yankee.

  “Please,” Narcissa said, “read all you want. Neither my sister nor I are readers so perhaps you can tell us about our family’s history.” With that, she left the room.

  I stood there for a moment trying to recover. “Blood will tell,” went through my head. If they didn’t like to read, maybe both Narcissa and Delphia really did think that the locked room in the basement had contained the history of their illustrious family. Maybe their recent ancestors hadn’t bothered to tell them the truth. Whether they knew the truth or not, I knew that whatever they were doing now was as horrible as what Amelia’s husband had done to her.

  After Narcissa left, I put on a show for the cameras. I pulled clothes out of my closet and looked at them as though I was trying to decide what to wear. I had on jeans and a cashmere sweater so I looked at the two suits and three dresses I’d brought with me. I hung one on the bedpost, another on the corner of the mantel and the last one on the flower wreath and covered the camera lens. As for
the lens in the bathroom, I kept the door closed or I tossed a hand towel over it. Once I had privacy I withdrew the ball from the window seat and began to work on it again.

  By lunch I’d still had no success, so when I went downstairs and saw Linc I told him we needed to get together. All through the meal he was the center of attention as he teased the women—and canceled all his afternoon appointments.

  I met him at the slave quarters, the ball held against my stomach, hidden as best it could be by my big brimmed hat and a scarf. “I want you to break this open,” I said, handing it to him.

  He rummaged around in an old tool shed at the edge of the slave cemetery and found some rusty items that he used to try to break the ball, but nothing scratched it. Meanwhile, I started, yet again, going through the old slave documents. I was willing to sit outside the mausoleum and work, but Linc refused to stay near any cemetery, so we went back near the Quarters, out of sight of the house.

  “I don’t know what you’re afraid of,” I said, trying to keep pace with him. “All the restless spirits have gone in search of their loved ones, so the place is clean.”

  “Darci,” Linc said in exaggerated patience, “most people in the world don’t like cemeteries. They don’t know for sure that there are ghosts but they’re not taking chances.”

  “I’m telling you that there are ghosts but there are not any here.”

  “Great,” he said,“I’m glad we cleared that up. Now let’s get out of this place.”

  “I would have thought that after last night you’d be in a better mood today,” I said under my breath, but Linc didn’t comment.

  I sat on a bench and watched as he put the ball on the ground under a shade tree—one of the thirteen remaining elms—knelt, and raised an old hammer above it. “Would you mind telling me what you and that…that creature were doing with the wall last night? Much as I like being on stage, there are times when I do not want an audience.”

  “I, uh…” Linc paused, hammer aloft, waiting for my answer. I sent the message that he should strike.

  He struck the ball but the hammer nearly bounced off the glass—and sent Linc sprawling back on his rear end.

  I started to laugh but coughed to cover the sound.

  “What is that made of?” he asked.

  “Something not from this planet.”

  Linc looked like he wanted to contradict that statement, but instead said, “Are there a lot of things on earth that come from other planets?”

  I avoided his eyes. When I’d been growing up in Putnam, I’d been on my own. There wasn’t a person I could tell when I met someone who had died. I couldn’t tell a child, “I’ll make that heal faster,” when I saw a bruise on her cheek. I couldn’t tell a teacher that the man who lived next door to the school and raised dogs was actually a pedophile so I was going to do my best to get him out of town. There was no one to ask if I should do something and if so, how should I go about it? And there was no one to say,“Good job!” after I’d done something.

  As a result of my lack of any true contact with people, I’d wasted a lot of my time and energy trying to do things I couldn’t. When I met my husband I’d only recently left Putnam and I knew little about the power God had given me. I knew I could find things, but I hadn’t stretched myself. In Putnam, I’d found rings and a couple of wandering two-year-olds, but I’d never had to deal with a kidnapping.

  It was only after I met Adam and through him found my father, that I began to investigate what I could do. When a man held a gun on Adam and I felt for sure that he was going to kill Adam so he could take me, I found out that I could paralyze people. The paralysis lasted only as long as I could concentrate, but I could do it. In fact, I’d used it to—No, I wasn’t going to think about the four people I’d had to kill. Yes, I knew better than anyone else that they were evil, but I still didn’t want to kill them or anyone else. But I’d had to.

  After the witches were dead, after Adam and I were married and we’d moved into a house with my father and Bo, my father began to work with me. His question was, What can my daughter do? Before we found each other, he’d spent years researching my ancestresses so he knew that each one had had different abilities. Some had more power, some less.

  Since my father had studied many psychics, he knew how to test me.

  We dispensed with the idiot card games right away. He soon found that I could make him choose the circle or the square or whatever when I wanted him to.

  My husband didn’t know—or I’m sure he would have protested—that my father and I went to places that were said to contain ghosts so I could talk to them. We didn’t tell anyone, but some people from some churches called to ask me to cast out a few “demons.” I had encountered several spirits that wanted only to cause harm. I managed to dispatch them.

  Besides exorcisms and what the FBI asked me to do, my father and I tried to have some fun. We went to a few museums and his credentials got me into the basements so I could touch a few things and tell what I felt. I tried to solve a few mysteries about things like the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, and where Osama bin Laden was. I told my father who Deep Throat was and who had killed JFK.

  He wrote every word I said down in his red leather journals, which he kept in a walk-in vault in the basement of the house.

  Because of the years I’d spent with him and because of all the exploration, I’d seen some unusual things, such as a few things that had been put on earth by people from other planets.

  When I took so long to answer, Linc said, “Forget it,” and hit the glass ball with the hammer again.

  He spent hours with the ball, just as I had done. When Linc’s violence didn’t work, and my mind had no effect on the ball, I told him that once my father and I had gone to a museum and on the way back we’d stopped for lunch in a cute little town and we’d passed an antiques shop. I’d felt a pull toward the shop so I said I wanted to go in. I’d never felt that way before so I was curious. I thought maybe it was one of those finds of a million-dollar painting that had a fifty-dollar price tag. What I found was a little ceramic man, about four inches high. He was in a bowl full of dirty, broken dishes and glasses. My father didn’t show any surprise when I bought the object, and when I was outside, I said, “There’s something inside it.” When we got home, my father used a hammer to try to break it open but the ceramic didn’t even crack. Frustrated, he looked at the object under a magnifying glass and thought he saw some markings on it. Since the little man was too dirty to be able to read, my father took it to the sink to wash it. The second the water touched the little statue, the outer covering dissolved.

  “What was in it?” Linc asked.

  “A key.”

  “A key to what?”

  “I have no idea. Just a little key. Rather ordinary. I have it with me with the keys to my house and car. If you want to see it, I’ll show it to you.”

  He looked at me. “You think the ceramic covering the key was from another planet?”

  I wasn’t talking to Devlin, or even to my father, and since I didn’t want Linc to go running away from me in fear, I shrugged. “Who knows?” I said, looking away from him.

  Based on my story, we dunked the ball in water and when that didn’t work, we went to the kitchen of the house, asked where the cleaning supplies were, then proceeded to rummage. I kept people away while Linc filled a big bucket with bottles of whatever chemicals were in the big old cupboard. Back at the Quarters again, we dumped ammonia, bleach, lye (which we’d found way in the back) and even floor polish on it. When Linc started polishing the ball and pretending he expected a genie to pop out, I laughed. He had an audience so he began putting on a show of making up three wishes. He was very funny, always changing his mind about the wishes he wanted, and I laughed hard.

  After a while, he set the ball down under a tree and said, “I give up. Are you sure there’s something inside there?”

  “Positive.”

  “Hey! Maybe there’s a magical, disap
pearing keyhole and your key—”

  “Already tried it,” I said, sighing. I really had tried everything I could think of to crack that ball open, but nothing had worked.

  “What about the bills of sale?”

  “No. They don’t talk,” I said, looking at the ball. When Linc was silent, I looked at him. “Oh. You mean, What did I find in the papers?” I handed him the one that listed Martin as the father.

  Linc sat down on the bench beside me while he read it. I’m sure he put his shoulder against mine so I could feel what he did. When Linc touched the document with Martin’s name on it, I knew they were related. When he and I had read the bills earlier I guess we’d been going too fast and maybe I’d been the one to handle Martin’s bill so I’d missed the connection.

  The bill was like all the others. It described a boy, about seven years old, very light-skinned, named Jedediah, trained in field work, who was for sale for eight hundred dollars. “Deceased” had been written in the mother’s space, but the father was listed as Martin, without the dignity of a surname. On the back of the bill was handwritten “Sold to Charles Frazier in East Mesopotamia, Georgia,” and the date.

  For a few moments Linc held the paper and looked across the field that had once been full of cotton. “Field trained” the paper read. At just seven years old, the child had already been made to work in the fields.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Linc.

  He didn’t answer but I knew he was imagining his own son having to work in the fields. “When I started this I just wanted to save my own child because he was connected to me. This was all about me, not him. But now I want to get him out of whatever he’s in because of him, because he doesn’t deserve this. If he has some sort of ability that someone wants to exploit, it’s because I passed it to him from my grandmother.”

  Linc looked at me. “Darci, what can we do to find my son?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “We can go to a couple of places, like the church and the site of the car wreck, but I feel that the answer is here in this house. That spirit, that man Devlin, makes me think that everything is tied up with my husband. I know that what’s in there”—I nodded to the ball—“is necessary to finding Adam, but how is your son tied into this?”