“Better not,” Jude said.
“I don’t see the sense. It’s almost five already. Wherever you’re going, you won’t get there till late.”
“It’s all right. We’re night people.” He put his plate in the sink.
Bammy studied him. “You won’t leave without dinner?”
“No, ma’am. Wouldn’t think of it. Thank you, ma’am.”
She nodded. “I’ll fix it while you nap. What part of the South are you from, anyway?”
“Louisiana. Place called Moore’s Corner. You wouldn’t have heard of it. There’s nothing there.”
“I know it. My sister married a man who took her to Slidell. Moore’s Corner is right next to it. There’s good people around there.”
“Not my people,” Jude said, and he went upstairs, Angus bounding up the steps after him.
Georgia was waiting at the top, in the cool darkness of the upstairs hallway. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, and she had on a faded Duke University T-shirt and a pair of loose blue shorts. Her arms were crossed under her breasts, and in her left hand was a flat white box, split at the corners and repaired with peeling brown tape.
Her eyes were the brightest thing in the shadows of the hall, greenish sparks of unnatural light, and in her wan, depleted face was a kind of eagerness.
“What’s that?” he asked, and she turned it so he could read what was written on the side.
OUIJA 
PARKER BROS. TALKING BOARD
29
She led him into her bedroom, where she removed the towel from her head and slung it over a chair.
It was a small room, under the eaves, with hardly enough space in it for them and the dogs. Bon was already curled up on the twin bed tucked against one wall. Georgia made a clicking sound with her tongue and patted the pillow, and Angus leaped up beside his sister. He settled.
Jude stood just inside the closed door—he had the Ouija board now—and turned in a slow circle, looking over the place where Georgia had spent most of her childhood. He had not been prepared for anything quite so wholesome as what he found. The bedspread was a hand-stitched quilt, patterned after an American flag. A herd of dusty-looking stuffed unicorns, in various sherbet colors, were corralled in a wicker basket in one corner.
She had an antique walnut dresser, with a mirror attached to it, one that could be tilted back and forth. Photos had been stuck into the mirror frame. They were sun-faded and curled with age and showed a toothy, black-haired girl in her teens, with a skinny, boyish build. In this picture she wore a Little League uniform a size too big for her, her ears jutting out under the cap. In that picture she stood between girlfriends, all of them sunburned, flat-chested, and self-conscious in their bikini tops, on a beach somewhere, a pier in the background.
The only hint of the person she was to become was in a final still, a graduation picture, Georgia in the mortarboard and black gown. In the photo she stood with her parents: a shriveled woman in a flower-print dress, straight off the rack in Wal-Mart, a potato-shaped man with a bad comb-over and a cheap checked sport coat. Georgia posed between them, smiling, but her eyes sullen and sly and resentful. And while she held her graduation certificate in one hand, the other was raised in the death-metal salute, pinkie and index finger sticking up in devil horns, her fingernails painted black. So it went.
Georgia found what she was looking for in the desk, a box of kitchen matches. She leaned over the windowsill to light some dark candles. Printed on the rear of her shorts was the word VARSITY. The backs of her thighs were taut and strong from three years of dancing.
“Varsity what?” Jude asked.
She glanced back at him, brow furrowed, then saw where he was looking, took a peek at her own backside, and grinned.
“Gymnastics. Hence most of my act.”
“Is that where you learned to chuck a knife?”
It had been a stage knife when she performed, but she could handle a real one, too. Showing off for him once, she’d thrown a Bowie into a log from a distance of twenty feet, and it had hit with a solid thunk, followed by a metallic, wobbling sound, the low, musical harmonic of trembling steel.
“Naw. Bammy taught me that. Bammy has some kind of throwing arm. Bowling balls. Softballs. She has a mean curve. She was pitching for her softball team when she was fifty. Couldn’t no one hit her. Her daddy taught her how to chuck a knife, and she taught me.”
After she lit the candles, she opened both windows a few inches, without raising the plain white shades. When the breeze blew, the shades moved and pale sunshine surged into the room, then abated, soothing waves of subdued brightness. The candles didn’t add much light, but the smell of them was pleasant, mixed with the cool, fresh, grassy scent of the outdoors.
Georgia turned and crossed her legs and sat on the floor. Jude lowered himself to his knees across from her. Joints popped.
He set the box between them, opened it, and took out the gameboard—was a Ouija board a game board, exactly? Across the sepia-colored board were all the letters of the alphabet, the words YES and NO, a sun with a maniacally grinning face, and a glowering moon. Jude set upon the board a black plastic pointer shaped like a spade in a deck of cards.
Georgia said, “I wasn’t sure I could turn it up. I haven’t looked at the damn thing in probably eight years. You remember that story I told you, ’bout how once I saw a ghost in Bammy’s backyard?”
“Her twin.”
“It scared hell out of me, but it made me curious, too. It’s funny how people are. Because when I saw the little girl in the backyard, the ghost, I just wanted her to go away. But when she vanished, pretty soon I got to wishin’ I’d see her again. I started wantin’ to have another experience like it sometime, to come across another ghost.”
“And here you are now with one hot on your tail. Who says dreams don’t come true?”
She laughed. “Anyway. A while after I saw Bammy’s sister in the backyard, I picked this up at the five-and- dime. Me and one of my girlfriends used to play around with it. We’d quiz the spirits about boys at school. And a lot of times I’d be movin’ the pointer in secret, makin’ it say things. My girlfriend, Sheryll Jane, she knew I was makin’ it say things, but she’d always pretend like she really believed we were talkin’ to a ghost, and her eyes would get all big and round and stick out of her head. I’d slide the pointer around, and the Ouija board would tell her some boy at school had a pair of her underwear in his locker, and she’d let out a screech and say, ‘I always knew he was weird about me!’ She was sweet to hang around with me and be so silly and play my games.” Georgia rubbed the back of her neck. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “One time, though, we were playin’ Ouija and it started workin’ for real. I wasn’t movin’ the pointer or anything.”
“Maybe Sheryll Jane was moving it.”
“No. It was movin’ on its own, and we both knew it. I could tell it was movin’ on its own because Sheryll wasn’t puttin’ on her act with them big eyes of hers. Sheryll wanted it to stop. When the ghost told us who it was, she said I wasn’t being funny. And I said I wasn’t doin’ nothin’, and she said stop it. But she didn’t take her hand off the pointer.”
“Who was the ghost?”
“Her cousin Freddy. He had hung himself in the summer. He was fifteen. They were real close…Freddy and Sheryll.”
“What’d he want?”
“He said there was pictures in his family’s barn of guys in their underwear. He told us right where to find them, hidden under a floorboard. He said he didn’t want his parents to know he was gay and be any more upset than they were. He said that’s why he killed himself, because he didn’t want to be gay anymore. Then he said souls aren’t boys and aren’t girls. They’re only souls. He said there is no gay, and he’d made his momma sorrowful for nothin’. I remember that exactly. That he used the word ‘sorrowful.’”
“Did you go look for the pictures?”
“We snuck into the barn, next afternoon, and we found the loose floorboard, but there was nothin’ hidden
