Autumn Bones

delivery dating back decades. No one ever got to go inside the house, though. The bill was paid in advance by a check drawn from a business account and deliveries were left in the shuttered, decrepit wooden gazebo in the front yard. Generations of schoolkids had haunted the place, trying to catch a glimpse of our local Boo Radley, to no avail.

Anyway.

Mr. Leary’s cottage was infinitely more pleasant, a charming little place with a wonderful garden. Late- blooming cosmos and zinnias provided a riot of color, and a line of tall sunflowers nodded alongside a weathered picket fence.

“Daisy Johanssen!” My former teacher hailed me from the screened porch, hoisting a glass as I came up the front path. “If it isn’t my favorite teleological conundrum. Would you care for a glass of iced tea?”

I did a little bit of a double take; first, because I’d never known Mr. Leary to voluntarily partake of nonalcoholic beverages, and second, because he had company. As far as I knew, he was a lifelong bachelor, and I’d always found him to be fairly reclusive outside the classroom even before he retired. But no, there was a woman on the porch with him.

And then I did a triple take, because I knew her. Emma Sudbury. I’d, um, killed her sister.

It’s a long story, but the upshot of it is that Emma Sudbury’s sister, Mary, was a ghoul, cast out from heaven and hell for drowning her infant son and believing it was God’s will. That happened back in the late 1950s. For the next fifty-some years, Emma took care of Mary, growing older and more desperate while Mary stayed ageless and batshit crazy. Right up until the end, at least. At the very end, after doing some pretty terrible things, she had a moment of lucidity and begged me to administer Hel’s justice.

I swallowed hard, my right palm tingling at the memory of dauda-dagr’s hilt clutched hard against it, the shudder of Mary’s final death.

“Come in, come in!” Mr. Leary held the door open for me. “Miss Daisy Johanssen, may I present Miss Emma Sudbury?”

“We’ve met,” I said softly. “Nice to see you again, ma’am. You’re looking well.”

It was true. When I’d first encountered Emma Sudbury, she was haggard and unkempt, worn down by grief and terror. Now her white hair was rinsed and set, and she wore an attractive old-lady pantsuit.

But the shadow of sorrow was still there. It would never leave.

“Thank you, dear,” she said with quiet dignity before turning to Mr. Leary. “Thank you, Michael. I’ve enjoyed our chat, but I should be going.”

I watched him usher her out the door and down the front path, his head with its leonine mane of white hair bent solicitously over hers. The last time I’d seen her, Cody and I had delivered the news of her sister’s death. I hadn’t told her it had been by my own hand, only that her sister Mary was at peace with it. We hadn’t volunteered details and she hadn’t asked for them.

I wondered if she suspected she’d rather not know.

Mr. Leary returned to the porch, the expression on his saturnine face unreadable. “Please, have a seat. May I pour you a glass of tea?” He indicated a pitcher sweating on the table. “It’s a blend of jasmine and lemongrass, with just a hint of ginger.”

“Yes, thanks. It sounds wonderful.” I accepted a glass. “How did you and Miss Sudbury meet?”

He took a sip of tea, swishing it delicately around in his mouth. “We met at the senior center. That infernal do-gooding busybody Sandra Sweddon persuaded me to attend a function there. I believe she’s a friend of your mother’s?”

I nodded.

“Well.” Mr. Leary set down his glass. “As it happens, it wasn’t as entirely dreadful as I’d imagined, and Emma has an interest in gardening, although of course she hasn’t pursued it for many years. I like to think our chats have helped draw her out. Hers is a terribly sad story, you know.”

“I know.”

His gaze lingered on me. “I daresay you do. So!” His tone lightened. “How may I enlighten you today, Daisy?”

On the one hand, Mr. Leary was probably a good bet for some satyr lore; on the other hand, his knowledge was largely academic. If I got him on the topic, I’d most likely get an earful of Euripides or Sophocles, not practical information regarding satyrs’ rutting cycles, which was what I really needed. And once Mr. Leary got the conversational bit between his teeth, it was hard to get him to change course. So I went ahead and asked him about what I really wanted to know.

I guess Sinclair’s revelation bothered me a little more than I realized.

“Obeah,” I said. Usually, all it took was one word. I waited for Mr. Leary to go into his familiar mnemonic trance, tilting his head back and closing his eyes before rattling off a string of facts, anecdotes, and conjecture mined from a lifetime of arcane research.

Instead, he frowned. “Alas, I fear obeah is far and away the most oblique and poorly documented of the Afro-Caribbean belief systems. But I have some excellent resource material on vodou or Santeria if that might help.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. How come there isn’t more on obeah?”

“Why,” he said.

“Um . . . why what?”

“Why isn’t there more information available on obeah,” Mr. Leary said sternly. “Not how come.”

Once a strict grammarian, always a strict grammarian. I winced. “Sorry. Why isn’t there more information available?”

He crossed his legs. “For one thing, unlike other belief systems emanating from the African diaspora, obeah doesn’t appear to have been syncretized with Christianity.”

“Could you, um, elaborate?”

“Plantation owners in the Caribbean did their best to suppress any expression of faith rooted in the traditions of African slaves and their descendants,” he said. “They feared, not without cause, that those they oppressed would find sufficient inspiration in such worship to entertain notions of rebellion. In some places, such as Haiti and Cuba, practitioners continued to worship in a covert manner. They simply established an association between their own existing deities, their loas and orishas and what have you, and Catholic saints. For example, Papa Legba in Haitian vodou, a probable descendant of the Yoruban Elegua, is the god of the crossroads. He’s commonly associated with Saint Peter, who performs a similar function as a gatekeeper.”

“So someone could appear to be praying to Saint Peter when in actuality they were praying to Papa Legba?” I asked.

“Precisely.” Mr. Leary nodded. “Or Saint Lazarus, I believe . . . something to do with a cane and a dog. I’d be happy to look it up for you if you think it might be helpful— Oh, but you were asking about obeah.”

“Right.” I sipped my tea, which really was insanely refreshing. “Which wasn’t syncretized. So that meant it was driven deeper undercover?”

“It’s conjecture on my part,” he said modestly. “It’s also entirely possible that little is known simply because there’s little to know, that rather than a complex, multifunctional belief system, obeah is merely an umbrella term for a particular accretion of superstition and folklore.”

I give Mr. Leary a lot of credit for the fact that I have a not-totally-embarrassing vocabulary for a small-town hell-spawn with a high school education, but it took me a few seconds to tease the meaning out of that one. “Maybe.” I had the sense that the Right Honorable Mrs. Sinclair’s Mom was involved in something a bit bigger than an accretion. “But I wonder, does it work?”

“Does it work?” he echoed.

“Obeah magic.” I swirled the tea in my glass, making the ice cubes rattle. “How can it? You know the saying: As below, so above. As far as I know, Jamaica doesn’t have an underworld. So I don’t see how it can have functioning magic.”

“Ah.” Mr. Leary laid one finger alongside his nose, a la Saint Nicholas in “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” “Forgive me for being trite, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But that, my dear Daisy, is your bailiwick. I can tell you what history has or has not recorded of obeah. I cannot tell you if it works.”