Chapter 49
Virgil stops the car in the middle of the one-lane field road. I don’t even have to tell him that this is where Bobby stopped that night, the exact location where my heart was nearly beating out of my chest when Bobby killed the engine and turned to me with a lecherous grin and told me he loved me and would make me rich one day.
“Your energy,” Virgil confirms before I can ask. He points through the woods. “There’s a faint burst of purple energy waves out there. Definitely your energy. It must’ve been terrifying for you because it was so strong at the time that it’s still here after all these years. I noticed it in the swamp the first time we came here back in the spring through the back of your mom’s farm. Your old energy is here in the timber and all over the swamp.”
So Virgil had known something was amiss from the beginning, but he’d kept my secret and my mom’s, minding his own business until I let him become part of my business. No one else but an energy-seeing witch would have noticed.
“He parked right here. He got the tent and some camping gear out and started preparing the campsite right over there where the pines are now.”
I point to the place where Virgil indicates my energy signature is still vivid, at least to him. Just as with the smell of my own skin, I can’t discern my own energy because I’m so accustomed to it.
“I was so scared, Virgil. He’d promised my parents that I’d have my own tent, and he’d even carried my pillow and a blanket of mine along for what he’d said would be my tent under a big oak tree. But I saw the one tent, and I knew his intentions were horribly wrong. I didn’t know what it meant exactly, but I knew he wouldn’t be keeping his hands to himself, and no one would be here to protect me or to discourage him just by being nearby.”
I shake my head in disbelief. Bobby was bold enough to fondle me with my parents in sight. Of course, this was going to be worse.
Breathing in deeply and then exhaling slowly, I find my voice again. “It wasn’t until I was older and met other teen girls he’d been nosing around in his own town miles away that I understood better his plans for me that night. Or that he must’ve been delighted that my parents were the only ones around who thought he was a really nice old man who just enjoyed buying presents for preteen girls and didn’t expect anything in return except to teach me how to pitch a tent and start a campfire. How did no one not think about how creepy that was?”
In the driver’s seat, Virgil makes a noise in his throat like a growl. “I looked into it after your mom told me when I visited her in the behavioral ward that Bobby Hartford was haunting her. Though she didn’t tell me exactly why, just that she’d told you everything you needed to know. She was in and out of clarity that first week. No wonder your uncle was coming all this way to groom you right in front of your parents—at that point, he had eleven restraining orders against him. Only from a distance could he have convinced his extended family here that he was still a successful and honorable businessman. But get this: his assets have been in a managed account run by lawyers for the last four decades, mostly forgotten but accruing interest in his absence.”
“We all knew Bobby had a lot of money. Or at least, that’s what he insisted on every visit. But as far as I know, his lawyers never followed up, and nobody came looking for him after, um, that night.”
“I’m not surprised. The lawyers got their annual fees so no one was pushing to locate your uncle. The lawyer buddy of his who set up the account died a few years ago, and the lawyer’s heirs were clueless, so they had all his client records incinerated. The account sorta fell through the cracks, but it’s still there, just sitting there, waiting to be declared abandoned and turned over to the State to locate the rightful owner.”
I stare down the long field road ahead of us to where it disappears into shadows. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I recall Bobby telling my dad about all how he was sheltering his assets and how we as a family would be his heirs because we treated him well. I’d been a kid, so none of their conversations interested me. Actually, nothing about Bobby interested me. Nothing. Especially not his money or his gifts.
“But here’s the part you need to know, Laurie: your uncle changed his will to name you as his beneficiary—less than a month before his planned camping trip with you. Emmett came to see me yesterday, nosing around and asking questions about you and what I remembered from back then, but that was before you were my babysitter and I was all of eight years old. The discovery of the will is why Everett is dead-set that you had something to do with your uncle’s death. You get everything when he’s declared dead, and he’s now been declared dead. You’re going to be a very wealthy woman.”
I stare at Virgil. I want to throw up.
“Never!” I hiss. “I don’t want anything of his. Nothing.”
I take several deep breaths to calm my racing pulse. If Daddy had known back then what Bobby’s real intentions were, he never showed it. Bobby had been his idol, his role model. Bobby had frequently talked about leaving his fortune to my dad because my dad had been the son Bobby had never had. Still, for my dad, his relationship with Bobby hadn’t been about money so much as admiration from the man he looked up to. That meant indulging weekly visits and showing his appreciation for a creepy old man who doted inappropriately on his preteen niece.
My throat tight, I open the passenger door and step out into the trampled grass. My ballet flats sink into a patch of mud. Thanks to Virgil’s magick, the swamp—or crime scene—has seen consistent rain for weeks but a quarter mile away, the dirt road is dry and dusty.
“This is where it happened. Where I decided to not be the good girl my mama had taught me to be or that my daddy expected me to be. This is where… where I ran. For my life.”
Unsteadily, I brace against Virgil’s front fender. He joins me at the front of the car and extends his hand to steady me. I’m calmer now. Something about the blue fire of his aura soothes me.
“Bobby didn’t even finish pitching the tent and setting up the gear before he was all over me, trying to kiss me, tongue and all. I remember trying to figure out where to run, where to hide, where I could go that somebody would help me. I thought about running to the old Coleman place where you live now, maybe hiding in the barn or in the big magnolia tree out back. Any other direction, and I would be even farther from help. Regardless, I was going to be in hot water with my dad the next day, and Bobby would be back. I was twelve, Virgil. Twelve. I wasn’t even old enough to see a movie without an adult present if it had the F-word in it. I wasn’t old enough to check out medical books from the local library to see drawings of my own anatomy, and middle school faculty sure didn’t let me read books with molestation or assault in them. How was I supposed to know anything? Church? My over-protective-except-for-real-family-pedophiles parents?”
The raw anger in my voice surprises me. It’s not the same emotion I felt at twelve, but it’s just as strong. Still, there’s more power in anger than in fear. I sigh loudly.
Okay, so I still have a few things to work through with a counselor.
“So, you ran. You did the only thing you could.”
“I did the only thing I could. Yes. I was able to put him off until after dark. He didn’t see as well at night. Cataracts. So I knew I stood a better chance of hiding at night. And that’s when I ran. The thing was, I’d only heard about the swamp. I’d never gone that deep into the wetlands, so I didn’t know how wide it was. Or how deep. I knew there were alligators and snakes because I’d heard stories. Terrifying stories. Little girls who didn’t mind their parents, swallowed whole by alligators and identified later when the alligator was killed and split open and there was the girl’s birthstone ring in the gator’s stomach. Urban legends like that. But what Bobby had planned for me frightened me more than anything else in that swamp.”
For a moment, I’m back in time. Full moon rising. Bullfrogs and crickets chorusing. The stench of decay and dead leaves and stagnant water filled with green slime. The crunch of leaves and small sticks under my bare feet as I tiptoe, then full-out run.
“This way.” I lead Virgil down the path I still see in my head. “I hid near the big lake that used to be here. It was pretty in the moonlight. Smooth as glass. A ripple where a frog jumped in. He kept walking past me, calling my name, getting madder and madder. Oh, he wasn’t worried that my parents would be upset with him for losing me in a swamp where I literally could have been eaten alive. Nope. He was mad at me for escaping. Kept talking about everything he’d done for me and how I owed him respect and how I was being bad. Fucker was actually trying to guilt-trip me into allowing him to rape me.”
The land is so different now that the wetlands have nearly vanished and the field road has been nearly destroyed by the heavy equipment and recent traffic. My old memories, like an overlay of visions, shows me the way deeper into the swamp.
“That night, he would walk right past me and not see me, but he’d swing his lantern out in front of him and it would gleam off the eyes of the alligators in and around the lake. I knew I had to get to safer ground but still out of his sight, so every time he turned back, I ran again with just the light of the full moon above me. Must’ve been hours. Or maybe it just seemed that way.”
Virgil is silent beside me, his breath short and ragged. The lines around his frown deepen. He looks like a man grappling with the world’s mysteries, throwing up his hands in frustration. I can’t read his thoughts, but I can almost see the churn of emotions behind his frown, the heartbreak in his eyes.
“Finally, he had me cornered. Him or the alligators. And that’s when I called on the Old Gods. That’s when The Morrigan appeared, and She claimed me. Not for then but after I’d had a chance to live my life more fully and choose to come back to Her, which I did. She showed me the way out that night. There was this tree that had fallen across a narrow finger of the lake to another tree that was, for a farm girl like me, climbable. Climbable for Bobby, too, if he could reach it. Bobby had me trapped at the lake’s edge with alligators all over the place, and he knew it, but I did as The Morrigan told me and stepped out onto that fallen tree over the water. I could feel it swaying under my feet. Rotten wood. Bobby followed me. I heard the wood cracking before I reached the other side. I jumped for higher ground. Bobby went down with the dead tree. I scampered up the oak and spent the night in the bough, listening to Bobby wailing and splashing until he wasn’t doing either.”
I shiver at the memory.
“Bobby managed to get to land, what was left of him, and used his belt as a tourniquet. Finally, the mud had swallowed up all of him but his face. When the sun started to rise, I crawled down from the tree, used some low limbs to get to higher ground, above what I thought was his dead body, and started making my way out of the swamp through the thorny mayhaw trees, and that’s when my mom found me at the edge of the pasture and took me home. She never spoke of what happened that night. For my whole life, I thought it was my magick that killed him.”
“But it wasn’t.”
I jerk my head up. “No.”
“Your mom went back and finished what the alligators didn’t. She showed me, Laurie, when I was helping to clear her path for when she leaves this incarnation. She never considered herself a strong woman psychologically, but it was her one chance—as she saw it—to protect you. If he had survived, he would still have been a threat to you.”
Breathe in, breathe out.
It’s over. Closure is a gift that life doesn’t always give us, but now I know how it feels. It may not have come the way I wanted it to, or as quickly as I’d needed, but I’m grateful for it now. My whole life, I’ve carried with me the feeling that my safety wasn’t as worthy as a creepy old man’s opinion.
I stop suddenly. “I don’t sense him here. Virgil? The times we’ve come here before, I could see Bobby’s energy. I’ve seen him walking into the swamp with a lantern, looking for me.”
“I, um, walked him home.”
I spin on Virgil. “You what?”
“It’s what I do. I help people transition from this life to their afterlife. Why do you sound so surprised? You know this.”
“So he’s, like, in heaven now?” If I remember correctly, Bobby had once been a revered deacon in his church.
“I didn’t say that. But he’s been roaming this place for four decades. He didn’t want to be caught here anymore than you want him here. Besides, he was bothering your mom.”
“Wh-when did you free him?”
“Eh, ‘free’ isn’t quite the right verb. I sent him on his way. A few days ago. Your mom and I have been sharing a lot.”
“How? She’s not even lucid, and she doesn’t have the energy to speak any longer.”
The best she could do last night when I signed her into the nursing home—something I’d sworn I’d never do—was open her eyes to slits and stare at me without knowing who I was.
“In the way that few of us can,” Virgil says as he leads me back to the passenger seat.
Moments later, as he turns around the car, he clears his throat, pauses, then clears his throat again. “She doesn’t want you to come back and see her like this. She wants you to remember her how she was, before the strokes and the dementia. She’s asked me to come back and sit with her this afternoon while you get some rest.”
“No. No, no, no. I should be there with her. She shouldn’t be alone.”
“She won’t be. I’ll be there. And a whole host of loved ones who’ve passed. She’s been seeing her parents. Talking to her mother. Old school friends.” He hesitates. “Some boy who went to war and never came home. They’re very much with her to comfort her, but unless you can see in the way that I can as a deathwalker, you’d never know they’re there. When I felt you reaching out to me while Everett and his entourage were giving you grief, she felt it, too, and told me to go. She’ll wait for me to get back. But she can’t leave if you’re there. She won’t because it would hurt you more to witness her departure. But she’s ready to go. She’s ready to leave this frail, pain-filled body and wrecked mind. She doesn’t want you to torture yourself for not being there—she needs to leave on her own terms. She’s close now. But alone? Hardly. There’s a long line of women ancestors with her, all of them singing in unison some song about cherries.”
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