Death Brings a Shadow Page 16

  “I can’t quarrel with your logic,” Geoffrey said. “But we’ll do it together, Prudence.”

  “The resemblance must be coincidental, but it’s made me think. My father used to say that witnesses who swore they saw someone who couldn’t possibly have been where the witness placed them were the bane of a defense attorney’s existence.”

  “It happens. More frequently than you might think.”

  “I’ve had all night to puzzle it out. What if Teddy is lying? What if he did send that note to Eleanor and they did meet the night she died? But instead of returning to the house after he left her to go back to Wildacre, she walked deeper into the woods and in the dark, someone mistook her for Minda? Someone tried to take advantage of the situation and when she ran from him, followed and killed her.”

  “He couldn’t let her go because she’d report the incident, and that meant certain death for him. Someone like Minda would have kept quiet, but not Eleanor. And once the killer realized he’d tried to assault a white woman, he had no choice but to finish her off. He was facing a lynching or being burned alive.” Geoffrey nodded his head as he fleshed out the sequence of events Prudence had proposed. “It makes as much sense as anything else,” he finally said.

  “If it was one of the fugitives the Bennetts talked about and he’d been hiding out in the live oaks for a while, he probably knew Minda by sight, would have seen her going back and forth from Wildacre to her mother’s cabin. But he couldn’t have known how much she and Eleanor resembled one another, and at night he wouldn’t have seen that Eleanor was older than Minda and her skin was lighter.”

  “So an attempted rape turned into a murder.”

  “All he had to do was follow her into the swamp as she ran from him,” Prudence continued. “Then when she finally turned to fight him off, he pushed her into the water and held her under until she drowned. It wouldn’t have taken long. By that time she would have been exhausted.”

  “How does Queen Lula figure into this?”

  “I’m not sure. I think all I want is for her to confirm that Eleanor could have been mistaken for Minda. Perhaps the secret the Bennetts have been trying so hard to keep from the Dicksons is nothing more than past sins. They have to know what Northerners thought of men who preyed on their women slaves before the war, and they desperately needed Teddy and Eleanor’s wedding to take place. It was the only way to secure a piece of the Dickson fortune. Minda’s existence was a mark against them that couldn’t have been ignored. That’s why she was so frightened when I found her in the chapel this morning, and why she left in such a hurry when I began asking questions. As you suggested, she’d been told to keep out of sight, and she hadn’t.”

  “Let’s hope it’s that simple,” he said.

  * * *

  “She seen me, Miss Lula.” Minda twisted her hands in the folds of her skirt. “I weren’t supposed to get caught bringin’ them roses, but I did. He find out, he gonna skin me alive.”

  “You best tell me about it, chile.”

  “I come this mornin’ same as always. Not dark no more, but not sunup neither. Did the outside all right, then started on the inside. Laid down my cloth on the floor, started takin’ out the roses what wilted and puttin’ in new ones. Then I heard this creakin’ noise, and the next thing I know someone’s hollerin’ out ‘Eleanor.’ Like to have dropped in my tracks. I said, ‘My name Minda, miss.’ Calm as you please. But I swear I couldn’t hardly breathe for knowin’ I’d got caught.”

  “That don’t sound smart, sendin’ you over to Seapoint. That house got a passel of windows. You bound to be found out. Not smart at all.”

  “Well, it weren’t me was meant to go, Miss Lula.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Mister Teddy told Limus to bring them flowers to Miss Eleanor’s coffin, but Limus don’t see all that good no more. Didn’t want Mister Teddy to know he goin’ blind case he say somethin’ to Mister Lawrence, so told me to do it. I said I would, and then he warned me not to get caught over there. When I asked him why not, he tole me to go look at my face in the frog pond.”

  “Not a workin’ brain among the lot of you,” Queen Lula said disgustedly.

  “What I gonna do?”

  “Nothin’, just plain nothin’. You don’t say a word to Limus, and you get yourself away from Wildacre and back to your mama’s. You stay there until Miss Eleanor’s people are gone. It won’t be long.”

  “I cain’t do that, Miss Lula. Mister Bennett don’t pay but when he feels like it. If I go off to Mama’s, he surely won’t give me what I earned. And he won’t take me back. You know he won’t. I need me a blinding spell, Miss Lula.”

  Queen Lula held out her hand, nodding in satisfaction when Minda produced a nickel from her apron pocket. “Cross my palm, chile. Now you go on to Wildacre, tell Limus you took care of the flowers for him, and come on back here this afternoon. I’ll have somethin’ ready for you.”

  “Cain’t I wait, please, Miss Lula?”

  “Nobody watches when I make juju,” Queen Lula said. “Go on, now.”

  The large black cat stretched out on the voodoo queen’s lap stood up, arched its back, and hissed.

  Minda sped off to the patient pony waiting at the edge of the clearing. The wagon bed was strewn with wilted roses, but all she could smell as she whipped him into a trot was the rank, sulfurous stench of brimstone.

  * * *

  Blinding spells were among the hardest to cast and the least likely to succeed. The person to be rendered sightless wasn’t physically harmed, but only made selectively unable to recognize someone who should have been familiar to him. Queen Lula had prepared one for Aunt Jessa, but judging from what happened later, it hadn’t worked like it was supposed to.

  Queen Lula thought that what Minda really needed was more of a changeling spell, a hex cast on her rather than on a person who needed to be made to see her differently than she really was. A changeling spell was like a veil that came down over someone’s face. He or she stepped away for a while, not quite invisible, but so faded to ordinary sight as to be unnoticeable. Changeling spells were usually cast for only a day or two, just long enough to allow someone to avoid an impending disaster or convince observers that they hadn’t seen the person who was right in front of them.

  Queen Lula took a cornhusk doll out of the basket where she stored them. Until she gave them facial features, hair, and clothing, they were anonymous. Neither male nor female, old or young, white or black. It was all in the skill of the spellcaster and the words she spoke. Minda’s changeling spell required black hair, a plain dress and white apron, the juice of a nut to darken the cornhusk to light tan, and ink made from charcoal and the blood of a dove to draw on the features.

  Absorbed in what she was doing, muttering under her breath, Queen Lula ignored the black cat’s angry hissing.

  She didn’t hear Prudence MacKenzie and Geoffrey Hunter’s quiet approach until they stood at her porch staring at the work she never allowed anyone but another conjure woman to see.

  * * *

  Prudence held out her hand to the hissing, spitting cat. The animal butted its head into the curve of Prudence’s palm, its sudden purr the only sound breaking the silence in which Queen Lula sat motionless.

  “You said I was probably one of those who couldn’t be hexed, so I know that doll can’t be meant for me.” Geoffrey smiled as he spoke, doffing his hat politely.

  “I didn’t hear you comin’,” Queen Lula said.

  “Miss Prudence is wearing Aunt Jessa’s amulet,” Geoffrey replied as if that explained everything.

  “I’ve never taken it off,” Prudence added.

  Queen Lula rolled the cornhusk doll into a palmetto leaf, wrapped it around with a length of twine, and placed the package into the basket. She looked hard at Prudence and Geoffrey as if challenging them. They didn’t ask her to explain what she’d been doing.

  “Will you tell us about the white slaves who were here on the island?” Prudence aske
d, ignoring Geoffrey’s quick intake of breath. She knew she was expected to beat endlessly around the conversational bush before getting to the point of what she wanted to find out, but Prudence had had enough of that time-wasting Southern custom.

  She might be an outsider, but she’d been a voracious reader of her father’s well-stocked library. One of the books that had been shelved just beyond her childhood reach had been a compendium of photographs taken throughout the prewar South by traveling photographers who sold the images to abolitionist societies. The pictures had shocked the sensibilities of antislavery factions. The subjects appeared to be entirely white, but by the laws of the Southern states, one drop of Negro blood was enough to legally enslave any man, woman, or child who could be proved to possess it. What the individual looked like didn’t matter. It was that one drop of blood from the slave mother whose master impregnated her without a second thought.

  And that’s what Prudence believed she had witnessed that morning in the chapel where Eleanor lay. Minda was more than a descendant of former slaves who hadn’t left Bradford Island after the end of the war. She was a Bennett herself, though Prudence suspected that fact could not be proved and would not be acknowledged.

  If Eleanor had lived, she would have eventually discovered the identities of the light-skinned islanders whose existence the impoverished Bennetts would have kept secret for as long as they could. At least until they were sure the Dickson fortune was well and safely on its way into their depleted coffers. Prudence could only imagine what her friend’s reaction would have been. “I know there must have been some,” she prodded.

  “You don’t want to go pokin’ around in nothin’ like that,” Queen Lula said.

  “You told Mr. Hunter that Aunt Jessa and Jonah were murdered to keep them quiet,” Prudence insisted stubbornly. “That means to me that they knew secrets someone didn’t want revealed. Someone willing to kill to keep them hidden.”

  “Three people dead, miss. Ain’t that enough?”

  “How did it start? How far back does it go?” Prudence’s resolve to get to the bottom of the mystery was single-mindedly tenacious.

  Not even Queen Lula could hold out indefinitely against Judge MacKenzie’s iron-willed daughter.

  “Don’t rightly know when it started.” Queen Lula sighed deeply and settled back into her chair. The black cat jumped from beneath Prudence’s hand to her mistress’s lap. “Prolly the first time a new gal caught the master’s eye. Or a missus was too far along in the family way to see to her husband’s natural needs. Ain’t that the way they always tell it?”

  “It’s not something any man wants to admit,” Geoffrey said quietly. He’d grown up with the evidence of sexual predation all around him, never questioning the practice until education in the North opened his eyes to how different his way of life under the peculiar institution had been. Geoffrey changed, but when he went back to North Carolina, he found that the South had not. What he could no longer accept, he was obliged to leave. The family had not forgiven him. And he’d never managed to absolve himself of the lingering guilt at abandoning them and the society that had enriched and shaped them. He had yet to be able to explain this to Prudence.

  “Go on,” Prudence prompted, looking directly at Queen Lula.

  “The way the stories go, the light-skinned chirren mostly got sold off the place as quick as the slaver could take ’em. But ever’ now and then a girl would turn out too good lookin’ to get rid of. And her baby would be paler than she was.” Queen Lula hesitated for a moment. “If the baby lucky, it got brought up in the big house right alongside the master’s white chirren. The trouble started when that chile weren’t a chile no more.”

  “It happened all over the South,” Geoffrey put in. “Not just at Wildacre.”

  “That doesn’t excuse the practice,” Prudence snapped.

  “I didn’t mean to imply that it did. I just wanted you to know that customs were different then. The conduct you’re condemning the Bennett men for engaging in was exactly what hundreds of other plantation owners did.”

  Queen Lula nodded. “Cain’t change the past, miss.”

  “But you don’t have to suspend moral judgment just because it’s over and done with,” Prudence argued. She brought her attention back to the question Minda’s appearance had raised. “What happened to the mulatto children who remained at Wildacre, the ones the mistress didn’t try to get rid of?”

  “Nobody paid much mind if master didn’t favor ’em. They worked same as everbody else, got paired off as soon as they was old enough, ’specially if they mama was dark and they was, too.”

  “Did any of them run away? Try to pass for white?” It was a question that had been much debated in the North when the existence of seemingly white slaves was broached. Prudence remembered reading accounts of successful runaways in the literature her father had collected. Whether a runaway was free or slave had been a thorn of contention in the courts.

  “Now you hit on it,” Queen Lula said. “Only one runaway from Wildacre wasn’t never caught and dragged back. That was before freedom come.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Weren’t a he. Name was Selena. Light as light could be. Story goes she disappeared one day and was never heard from again. Dogs didn’t find no trace of her. Slavers, neither. Some say she drown in the swamp.”

  “How sad.” Prudence rubbed away the moisture she could feel prickling at her eyelids. Mourning the past wasn’t going to get what she wanted. “You didn’t answer when I asked how many of them are on Bradford Island today.” She wasn’t sure what to call the descendants of those long-ago illicit couplings.

  “A handful, more or less,” Queen Lula said.

  “I think I met one of them. She’d brought Mister Teddy’s white roses to the chapel this morning. She said her name was Minda.”

  “Yes, ma’am. She one of ’em.”

  “And her mother?”

  “Minda’s lighter than her momma.”

  Prudence understood. Queen Lula hadn’t had to spell it out for her. Young as she was, Minda had to have been fathered by a Bennett male of Elijah’s generation. Which, according to Prudence’s rapid calculations, meant she was either a half sister or a cousin to Lawrence and Teddy.

  Was this the secret Eleanor’s in-laws-to-be had tried so hard to keep from her? From Philip and Abigail? The Dicksons would certainly have forbidden the marriage had they known that at least one of the evil customs of slavery days hadn’t changed on Bradford Island when the war ended. Eleanor’s only choice would have been to elope with Teddy. But that would have meant the very real threat of being written out of her father’s will. Teddy might have braved such a consequence, but Prudence was sure the rest of the Bennett family would never have accepted it. The little Yankee gal was only welcome if she came with a big dowry and even more substantial inheritance prospects.

  Now the question was whether Eleanor, too, had encountered Minda sometime during the brief, happy hours before her death. Could she have understood what Minda’s appearance meant and determined to confront her future father-in-law? Or Lawrence? Prudence was certain she wouldn’t have wanted to speak to Teddy until she was sure of her facts. It would have hurt him too much. It might even have driven a rift between them that neither of them could navigate.

  Geoffrey had a pained look on his face, as though he was following the same train of thought. And didn’t like where it was leading.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?” Prudence asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Not even about Aunt Jessa?”

  “Miss Jessa come to me for a spell. I give it to her. But it didn’t do no good. Sometime the white and the black magic fight each other so hard don’t neither one of ’em win.”

  “What kind of spell?”

  “That be between Miss Jessa and me. Cain’t never tell nobody else what spell I cast.”

  “Was it unusual for her to come to you for help?”

  “We did
n’t never try to cut each other out, Miss Jessa and me. She need black juju, she come to Queen Lula. Queen Lula need white juju, she go to Miss Jessa.”

  Queen Lula reached into her basket and drew out the palmetto leaf–wrapped bundle. She sat quietly with it on her lap.

  The juju queen and her black cat stared at the dangerous visitors, willing them to be on their way.

  CHAPTER 18

  “They won’t discuss it with you, Prudence,” Geoffrey argued, trying to persuade her that it was folly to confront the Bennett men with her unsubstantiated accusations. “No lady ever refers to the existence of mixed-blood children in her household or the quarters.”

  “But everybody knows they’re there,” she insisted. “You told me yourself that it happened all over the South.”

  “It may have happened, but it was never mentioned in polite society. Not ever.”

  Prudence had been determined to ride to Wildacre after Queen Lula refused to answer any more questions. Nothing Geoffrey could say would dissuade her. She was more certain than ever that Eleanor must have realized that some of the island’s inhabitants were Bennetts from the wrong side of the blanket, and that she would be expected to ignore the implications of their pale skin and Caucasian features.

  Eleanor might have been so upset and distressed by what she had learned that instead of demanding that Teddy tell her the truth, she had tried to walk off her anger and disillusionment in a landscape that was as dangerous as it was beautiful.

  The more she thought about it, the more Prudence wanted to believe that her friend, unable to sleep, had gotten up out of her bed and slipped outside to pace off her worries in the moonlight. Perhaps afraid that someone might see her from one of the upper-story windows, she had gone deeper into the live oak forest than she at first intended. Lost in thought, too distraught to realize how far she had gone from the safety of the house, she had worn herself out and stumbled into a situation from which she hadn’t been able to extricate herself.

  An accident. But caused at least in part by a long history of gravely immoral actions for which no one was willing to accept responsibility. It wouldn’t change anything, but Prudence was determined to ask the questions nobody else would or could. She still wanted answers; only her focus and her suspicions had changed. She thought the theory of the possible involvement of a fugitive hiding in the swamp was probably too far-fetched an explanation of what had happened to Eleanor, though it did provide a neatly tied conclusion to the murder of Aunt Jessa. And if someone thought Jonah was leaving the island because he had seen something he shouldn’t have, that was more than enough motive for killing him.