Chapter 43

Chapter 43 of 56 · 9-minute read

I glance around to make sure no one’s listening. Even though there are surveillance cameras farther down the hallway, not a one is close enough to pick up audio as long as she doesn’t get too loud. On the off-chance that some of the local monitoring equipment might capture her words, it would be easy to blame her hallucinations on her medical condition or medications. Regardless, I feel less threatened by cameras and microphones than I do by whatever is haunting her and whatever is following me.

“Shhhh. It’s okay. Why do you think he’s haunting you?”

He’d never haunted me, and I’m the one who killed him.

“That night. That night when Bobby took you camping. I kept telling your daddy there was something wrong. I kept telling him that I was gonna go get you and bring you back home, and you had no business being there with that man. Your daddy said I was being paranoid and spreading lies about a good man. He… he locked me in the bedroom closet. I could hear Shelby crying. My baby wasn’t even potty trained then. I begged your daddy for mercy to let me out so I could take care of my little boy. But⁠—”

She stops talking to catch her breath. Her lips tremble at the memory. Maybe it’s a godsend that she hasn’t been able to recall the horrors of her marriage.

“But that wasn’t the first time that had happened,” she continues in a quivering, small voice, “so I kept the key hidden in the closet. And a flashlight. By the time I thought it was safe, and I could sneak out, Shelby had already cried himself to sleep, and your dad was in bed snoring. I picked up your dad’s deer rifle and an axe from the shed and started walking towards the swamp to get you. It was daylight by the time I saw you walking across the field toward me. After I got you home, and your dad went to work in the fields, I slipped back down to the swamp with the rifle and axe⁠—”

She pauses again to catch her breath but squeezes my hand as she does. There’s a sudden strength in her voice that comes only from controlled rage.

“You wouldn’t tell me what happened. All you would say was that I wouldn’t believe you. I put you to bed, and I took the rifle back down to the swamp to see if I could find out what had happened. And there was Bobby’s car, and a bunch of camping equipment half set up.”

Her low voice sounds exactly like acid burning through everything it touches. I’ve never heard such vitriol in her tone.

“And there… there was Bobby pulling himself up out of the mud. Belt tourniquet around his thigh where an alligator had chewed his leg off. Still alive.”

I gasp. All this time, and I thought I had killed Bobby.

“Alive? Mama? You’re sure he was alive?”

“I reckon he was. But not for long.”

She lowers her voice again. I can barely hear her.

“He had crawled up on the bank of the lake. He was trying to get to his car to blow the horn for help. He might’ve made it if I hadn’t been there. I used the axe handle to push him back into the water. He flailed around a little bit and tried to hang onto a log, but then I used the axe to roll the log over on him and trap him underwater. He was begging me to save him when he went under. He grabbed the axe and tried to pull me in with him, and I let go of it, and it and him fell back into the water under the log. And then there were alligators everywhere.”

Clasping her fragile hands in mine, I inhale slowly, exhale slowly. I feel dizzy. I’m barely believing what I’m hearing.

“I picked up everything of his that I could find and put it in his car. Like there was not a trace he’d ever been there. I couldn’t find his car keys, though. They were probably on him, and I sure wasn’t going to fight any alligators to find them. I got the car in neutral though—you could do that with cars way back then without the key—and I got it rolling straight into the deepest part of the lake not too far from where Bobby went under. I watched that car and all Bobby’s camping equipment and every sign that he’d ever been there go down in the murkiest part of the lake. Your daddy came looking for me, though. Walked up just minutes after⁠—”

Once again, she catches her breath. She rushes to get her story out before she can either no longer speak or no longer remember.

“After the car went underwater. He didn’t know Bobby was already gator food on the other side of a bunch of cypresses and an old fallen oak. I’d covered up everything pretty well, and I was afraid what would happen if your daddy was able to get Bobby out and get him to a hospital. So I told your daddy that Bobby and I had argued about him putting you in danger, and Bobby had driven off and was never coming back. Your daddy was mad about it because Bobby had promised to put us in his will. Gave me the silent treatment for the next three months. Then he started thinking when nobody in the family had heard anything of Bobby for a while that maybe I had killed him. He knew I had taken the deer rifle and axe with me, but I told him that was because of the alligators and snakes. Every time I tried to leave Buddy, he told me he’d turn me into the police for murdering his uncle. He didn’t know I did except by how I acted. Guess I told on myself. But he never said anything to the family about it because he was afraid they would hold him responsible for what he thought I’d done, and he’d fall out of their good graces.”

My mind racing, I try to remember the morning after that night in the swamp when I met The Morrigan. All I can remember of it, really, is being completely traumatized, and neither of my parents anywhere around. I’d spent almost the whole day wrapped up in a sheet on the sofa, snuggling with my two year old brother, and watching cartoons.

“That’s why Bobby’s haunting me! Because I ki⁠—”

I touch my fingertip to her lips to stop the next words. Last thing we need is for a confession to be overheard.

Is that what this is? A deathbed confession? It’s certainly been on her mind for months now, and here at the end of her journey, she has the need to spill the secret that she’s kept for almost forty years. Maybe I hadn’t killed Bobby with magick after all, but the Old Gods had certainly brought him down and given my mom the opportunity to finish him off. I played a part in that, but I am not sorry. If he’d lived, Daddy would’ve defended him and believed him over me.

I asked the Old Gods tonight for one last lucid conversation: that prayer has been answered.

“Thank you for telling me.” I brush her thin, white hair away from her deeply grooved forehead with my fingers. “You don’t have to tell anyone else. I’ll carry this for you now.”

She sighs as if relieved of her burden.

“Ms. Hartford?”

I turn to find Priyanka, the psychiatrist, standing in the doorway with a stack of paperwork in her arms and a large-buttoned portable phone in one hand. Beside her, Virgil shoots me the strangest look. I have no idea how long they’ve been standing there.

“Yes?”

“You can have a seat in my office to fill out the paperwork while I take your mother to her room and to meet her night staff.” She thrusts the portable phone at me. “There’s a call for you.”

I take the phone from her and frown at it. The orange hold button blinks steadily. I carry the stack of papers, a pen, and the phone with me into a small room to the right. I punch the hold button.

“Hello?”

“Lauren Hartford?”

“Y-yes? Who is this?”

The man’s voice sounds familiar. Too familiar.

I poke my head out the door as Priyanka rolls Mama’s gurney past. Before the caller can say another word, I rasp, “Hang on!” and bury the phone against my chest.

Ignoring everything else, I rush out for one more goodbye. I’d wanted a lucid conversation, but I’d wanted it to be something different. Maybe full of I-love-you’s and questions about Shelby and my girls or Rhiannon’s due-any-week-now baby. Instead, it was about her and me, but in a different way. About her weaknesses and fears and love.

I need time to process what she’s revealed in a few moments of clarity. I’ve heard of dying people having a sudden rush of energy where they said their goodbyes and made their peace and seemed to be reviving, only to slip backwards as soon as their reverse-nesting instinct was done. Maybe that’s why she felt the need to confess. Or maybe it was my pleas to the Old Gods for answers and a gift of closure that would otherwise never come. Or maybe it was my prayers combined with Virgil and Christabel’s like-minded efforts.

Ignoring the voice on the phone, I catch the rail of the gurney to stop it and lean in to kiss my mama’s forehead. She opens her eyes and frowns up at me.

“Mmmm,” she mumbles. “You look familiar. Do I know you?”

Crestfallen, I watch the gurney roll away. Maybe I’ll get more chances to talk with her when she’s out of the behavioral ward. I’ve seen her in my visions in the nursing home, me holding her hand, sometime in the future, so I know she’ll leave here. And now I know that it may be Bobby’s spirit she sees behind me just as she did tonight.

This isn’t over, I tell myself. I’ll get to talk with her again, alone, where I can ask her more questions about that night—if she’s willing to share again. Still, it’s so hard to see her like this. I blink away the hot tears.

“Hello? Hello!” The voice on the phone cuts through the haze.

I press the phone to my ear. “Yes?”

“I seen what y’all done. Thought you could sneak your mama outta ICU to keep us from havin’ a chat, did ya?” Everett. “I know what you’re up to. Ain’t nobody foolin’ me. Ain’t it strange that I was on my way home from your mama’s when Franny called me sayin’ y’all’d been actin’ shady?”

“You were at my mom’s house?” If that’s true, it was after my fire circle with Virgil.

Shit! He could’ve walked up on us in our sacred circle!

“I swung by to let you know we recovered some body parts from the swamp late today. That and a couple of toaster ovens and a slew of rusted-out greenhouse shelves and an old axe. We don’t have a confirmed identity yet, but I got an inklin’ it could be your kin. You and me ain’t done here neither. ‘Round these here parts, folks who hide sumpin’ are usually guilty of sumpin’. In my experience, anyways. We’ll see what that pathology report has to say, but looks like a murder to me.”

‘Round these here parts? I almost laugh. Too bad Everett can’t see me roll my eyes through the phone. Like I wasn’t born and raised here and don’t know these “parts.”

I hang up and toss the phone onto Priyanka’s desk next to my stack of intake forms. As long as my mom doesn’t tell anyone else, no one has a clue that Bobby was assisted into his afterlife in hell.

Unless Mama wasn’t telling everything.

The deer rifle. Before she rolled a tree stump on top of Bobby to pin him down under the lake’s surface, had she also shot him?

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