can be one of many drugs. I help them, but never against their will. And I would never use poison from the puffer fish for that purpose. You're talking zombies and voodoo.'
'Maybe someone is eking out his own brand of justice,' Elise suggested.
Strata Luna shrugged as if the turn in the conversation was boring her. 'You police are always lookin' for a reason, a motive,' she said. 'Why are you so unwilling to accept the truth?'
'What's the truth?' Elise asked.
'That evil doesn't need a reason to exist.'
'I can't think like that. For me, everything has an answer.'
The woman shook her head. 'You'll change your mind someday.'
Elise herself had seen a lot of evil in her job as a homicide detective, but she had the feeling Strata Luna had her beat.
Interview over, she got to her feet and handed the woman a business card. 'Thanks for agreeing to meet with me. If you think of anything important, please give me a call.'
Strata Luna stood. 'I want to show you something. Come. Follow me.'
Elise followed her deeper into the cemetery until they came to a small cluster of broken, moss-covered tombstones. The older woman stopped, not in front of the stones, but before a dip in the ground. Scattered around the indentation were a telephone, a mirror, a comb, some change, and a full bottle of whiskey.
'This is why I wanted you to come here today,' Strata Luna said. 'This is your father's grave. The grave of Jackson Sweet.'
The air left Elise's lungs.
She stared at the indentation in the ground. In the distance, hidden in a dark place, hundreds of frogs spilled their secrets, the wall of sound hypnotically rising and falling.
'There can be no marker left on the grave of a conjure man,' Strata Luna explained, her voice coming from a million miles away. 'Otherwise people dig up his bones for mojoes and spells. They wouldn't leave him in peace. But some of us know where Jackson is buried. And now you know. See the hole?' She pointed. 'Root doctors come and dig here.'
'Goofer dust,' Elise said.
'And now we must both leave something. You cannot visit the grave of a conjurer without leaving a personal item.'
Strata Luna pulled off her black gloves and placed them near the indentation.
At first Elise couldn't think of anything to offer. Cell phone? Of course not. She dug through her pockets. Notebooks. ID. Gun.
Her fingers came in contact with a pen. Just a regular, everyday ink pen. Maybe he needed to do a little writing.
She placed it on one of Strata Luna's gloves.
'I have one more thing for you,' the woman said.
'I can't accept anything else.'
'This ain't really from me.' She pulled out a small leather case and handed it to Elise.
'Go on. Open it. It's something that belonged to your father. Something you should have.'
The leather was cracked and black and extremely old; the small hinges were rusty.
Elise opened it. Inside was a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with dark blue lenses.
Conjurer's glass. Blue lenses that kept out evil spirits and allowed the wearer to see things others couldn't.
'Put them on. I want to see them on you.'
She seemed so sure that Jackson Sweet was her father.
'You're alike,' Strata Luna stated.
'How?'
'Your father was a cop.'
'Jackson Sweet? No, he wasn't.' Elise would have known if Jackson Sweet had been a policeman.
'Not by your rules, but by a root doctor's. He punished bad people and rewarded the good ones. That's better than the idiots with badges we have in Savannah.'
A self-proclaimed man of the law? A man who scared the shit out of people, forcing them to mend their ways or face the wrath of a white root doctor? Was that why Elise had become a cop? Was it in her blood? Because she was the daughter of Jackson Sweet?
Intrigued, she removed the glasses from the case. The wire was thin and fragile. She carefully unfolded the antique frames and slipped them on.
Shadows turned bottomless black. The sky turned gray. Sunlight that fell through branches and leaves created a dappling of crescent moons on the ground.
Dizzying.
Disorienting.
Caused by the weird, distorted lenses? Or something else?
At that moment, Elise believed what Strata Luna was telling her. She suddenly had a past, a history.
She'd been abandoned. She'd been thrown away, left to die. But if she came from a world of conjurers and spells, then her life could never have been what other people thought of as normal. Who wanted normal anyway? Instead, she'd met the world in a weird, sensational way.
He would have wanted her. Jackson Sweet had been on his deathbed when Elise was born. Otherwise he would have rescued her, kept her, raised her. She suddenly felt very sure of that.
What about Audrey? Should she tell her? What would she think? How would she react to the news that her grandfather was Jackson Sweet?
Standing in the center of the strange, colorless world was Strata Luna, beaming at her. 'Look here, look here, Jackson Sweet,' she said. The words were tossed to someone invisible, standing just beyond her shoulder. 'You ain't never gonna believe what ol' Strata Luna brought you today.'
The two women stood there in the dark, listening to the frogs. Finally Elise told Strata Luna good-bye. She removed the glasses and walked in the direction of the church and the cars.
Strata Luna watched her go, a feeling of loneliness suddenly engulfing her.
Loneliness and fear.
She thought about unwelcome evil and was reminded of another time, a time she tried not to think about-the night her youngest daughter drowned…
Strata Luna had run from the house, a sheer white nightgown billowing around her. Down the flagstone steps, past the hedges and roses and weeping magnolias, her bare feet already whispering that it was too late.
The night sky was a cobalt blue; the trees were black silhouettes standing silent and unmoving. What she saw caused her heart to stop beating for several minutes.
Something floating in the water.
Fabric.
A nightgown.
Ebony hair.
The most beautiful, shiny, ebony hair a child could possibly possess.
No! God, no!
The night sky reflected on the water, a child's hand reaching for the moon and stars. Strata Luna tumbled into the pool, the surface shattering like glass.
She grabbed the body of her daughter. The water tugged, fighting to hold the child, to keep her. Strata Luna finally pulled her free and turned her over.
Dead, dead, dead.
Some people claimed she'd killed the angel herself, with her own hands, holding her under the water until her lungs filled with water. Sometimes Strata Luna thought it was true, since she hadn't been able to foresee her death.
But evil was a part of life.
It was the shadow that followed her. The shadow she feared had returned.
