Heart pounding, Tammy lifted her eyes to the rearview mirror.
The flatbed was smoking and quiet on the highway. But that wasn’t what grabbed her attention. In the back seat, she saw the top of a slate-gray head, parted with an edge like a razor and slicked with grease.
Tamara choked on her own spit and spun around—but the seat was empty. Phyllis clapped her on the back as she coughed and coughed.
“What is it?”
“Vic—Victor—I swear, Pea, I swear I saw his hair in the mirror—”
She turned to the empty seat, and looked back at Tammy. “Like hell.”
Tamara reached into her purse and pulled out a silver flask. “I ain’t joking!”
“I don’t see anything.”
“He’s gone now.”
“What? His ghost? You can’t be serious.”
“Well, we all knew he used that juju, don’t we? That he stole all those hands? What’s to say he couldn’t find a way to haunt us?” What’s to say he couldn’t have come back to save her? The thought ought to have been comforting, but it left her queasy. She took a slug of bourbon.
Phyllis gave Tamara a long look and turned the engine. She pulled them back onto the road. “Well, if he’s back,” said Phyllis, “I’ll just find a way to kill him again.”
This was—though there was no way for either of them to know it—an unwise thing to say. Phyllis’s hands, so beguilingly quiescent these past few weeks, flexed entirely of their own accord and moved to grasp the knives in her holster. Phyllis gasped, but she could no more control them than she could kill a ghost.
They stopped it, this time. Tamara did not feel reassured. She drove the rest of the way, checking the mirror every thirty seconds. But she would not turn back—Tamara wouldn’t make that mistake a second time. In the stories of the dead, that’s what they said—if you heard something while crossing that river, you kept your eyes on that promised by-and-by. If you turned around, they would keep you. If you turned around, your eyes would fill with smoke and you weren’t never coming home.
2
The women arrived at dusk, with flurries of snow brushing the frozen driveway up on the hill. The wind gave it an impression of shape, a smear of motion and form that lingered in their sight long after the flakes had bowed and risen and scattered. Phyllis stared in silence at the red front door, the trellis covered in sleeping vines. After a minute, the door opened.
The woman on the threshold was white, just a few years shy of what Tamara felt she could reasonably call “old,” but she projected age, nonetheless—a querulous disdain that some white women equated with dignity.
“Sweet Jesus,” whispered Phyllis. “Why didn’t Dev tell us Mrs. Grundy was white?”
“I don’t think he ever met her,” Tamara whispered back. “She answered the ad in the Gazette.”
Phyllis closed her eyes. The woman in the door tapped her foot.
“Get in, then! You’re letting in the cold.”
“Right,” Phyllis said, laughing a little. “You deal with her.”
“Me? You’re the fancy lady of the house.”
“I don’t do fancy anymore,” Phyllis said. “Besides, I want to check the garden.”
The garden was a strip of charred earth littered with chunks of ice like dirty meteorites. Even the rosebushes had been reduced to a series of crooked spindles, dark gray against the lighter gray of the house’s faded whitewash. Phyllis tramped through them in her city boots and Tamara cursed her under her breath before climbing the stairs. She held out her gloved hand. Mrs. Grundy looked at it like a very worthy specimen at the museum.
“And your friend?” she said. She had a funny accent—straight and clipped, like Tamara’s own white-people voice. Rich white people generally spoke whichever way they wanted, so perhaps she and this newspaper-ad housekeeper shared a certain experience of judgment. Still, Tamara put her gloved hand back in her coat pocket, unshook.
“She won’t be long,” Tamara said faintly.
Phyllis walked through the naked roses, removing the spines gently when the branches snagged on her coat. Her movements were angular but not rigid, what Tamara would have labeled a Graham method–inflected Bauhaus style, were she still the mistress of the Pelican’s off-nights, a student of the modern arts.
But she wasn’t, not anymore. Now Tammy was just a girl with an old deck of playing cards in her right pocket and her heart in her throat.
Phyllis moved in a kind of prayer, a ritual invocation of the dead or sleeping earth, of the powers that saw fit to touch her and touch her baby, of the cruelty felt in the palm of the Lord, and his beauty. There was death in that dance, defiance and fear.
She knelt between the two tallest bushes and dug her naked hands in the dirt. Her mouth moved, but neither Tamara nor the housekeeper could hear her over the wind and the river. In any case, Tamara might have guessed—Phyllis was speaking to the man she had married just one month before out here in the snow, full knowing they might never see one another again. Dev had told her to sprinkle his ashes in the garden.
Phyllis hiked up her heavy woolen houndstooth skirt just high enough to reveal the green hilt of the knife strapped to her thick silk hose. The housekeeper gasped, but did not in fact speak—an interesting datum that Tamara might have noted if not for what her friend did next.
Phyllis threw her knife high in the air, caught it and slammed it into the earth. The two larger knives in her holster followed half a second later, marking the bottom vertices of a long triangle.
“Pea, are you—”
“I wasn’t told about any weapons on the—”
“Stop, damn you! Damn you! Oh, Christ almighty, please…”
Phyllis twisted and jerked, a rag doll struggling against the living hands at the ends of her arms. She threw herself down, her torso tangled in the thorns of the roses. When she lunged again for the three green hilts that marked the resting places of her
