Garden of bone book 6, p.7
Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 7
Did she also remember that Eleri had left so abruptly? Eleri smiled and hoped not. Why would she?
She once again wandered through the store, although this time, her feet moved much faster. She remembered the general layout and headed directly for the back room, toward the shelf with the knives. She paused only to look around and make sure she was not being watched.
The knife she had touched last time had not been sold. Slowly, she reached out and picked it up, prepared for the assault on her senses—but it didn't come.
Eleri blinked and set the blade back down. Was it the same? Once again, she touched it, picked it up, and turned it over. As she did it, she heard footsteps behind her.
"Does that knife interest you?"
Eleri smiled at the woman, deciding it was a great time to get some information. It was surely the same knife. She examined it in detail now. Although, to be fair, she couldn't say she had looked at it closely the first time. She'd merely found it interesting, picked it up, and immediately dropped it before running from the shop. Perhaps that knife had been sold and this one was on the shelf was its replacement.
Taking advantage, she turned to the woman, "Yes. Can you tell me about it?"
"Absolutely." The woman came over and gently lifted it from Eleri's palm. "The blade is hand-forged.”
"Is it steel?" Eleri asked, thinking that was an appropriate question. She understood, from Grandmere, that steel was preferred for some tasks in the Hoodoo religion and disavowed for others.
The woman shook her head. "Not particularly."
Eleri tipped her head a little sideways, enjoying the expression on the woman's face as she waited patiently until the woman said, "It is a kind of steel, but it is not like the steel of the factories. It is a steel recipe that was made and handed down by my family. My uncle, in fact, owns the forge. He designs the blades and then gives them to us. We bind them and make the knives."
The woman did not discuss the spell work that the blade was obviously intended for. This one looked like a cross between an athame’s straight blade and a boline’s half-moon shape. Eleri noted the curve and the slight hook to the tip, that the sharp edge ran along the long outer side as well as the short, inner curve. This was not a knife for everyday use, nor even for specialty purposes other than ritual. She’d been reading up.
"This knife," the woman continued, "has been in my family for a while."
Eleri tipped her head again. "Yet you would sell it?"
That was hard to believe. Families did not sell their artifacts. Hell, Grandmere had bones! She would not consider getting rid of the things she had, let alone selling them. Grandmere had scraps of fabric that her own mother had collected, perhaps during WWII or WWI or earlier. None of her family’s odd heirlooms would have been sold. Grandmere wouldn’t even take two chickens and a goat for some of the stuff she did. Yet, this woman claimed she was selling her family antiques in a storefront on Rue Royal?
"Yes," the woman said, nodding sagely. "Some days, I am not particularly fond of my family."
Eleri found she had to laugh. She also felt that things would work better if she played dumb. "What do the markings mean?"
She again picked the knife up out of the woman's hands, hoping she would see one of the pictures that had flashed in her mind. The first time she’d touched it, she had seen blood dripping down hands. She had seen white dresses and large bonfires and many, many people around them. She had seen animals—goats and chickens—though they were not being sacrificed, not as many people believed was the heart of voodoo.
In fact, most of what people believed was wrong. Eleri had believed it too, and she had learned from Grandmere’s sharp words just how wrong she'd been. In the vision, when she saw the chickens and goats, she noted only that they were whole and live.
The flashes of hands and bare feet in the dirt and knives were of more interest to her now. Since it was all just random, rapid imagery, she’d taken it as an assault and fled. Now, however, touching the knife yielded nothing. She turned it over, looking at what she supposed were runes carved into the side of the pale gray handle.
"Those are powerful markings. For spellwork," the woman told her. Her wonderful accent lilted as she described what each mark was for and discussed how they created a shield to guard the user of the knife.
"Did it guard your family?" Eleri asked.
"Perhaps. My own mother lived long, long into her old age. She gave birth to me when she was well into her fifties."
"Fifties?" Eleri asked. She realized she was straddling two worlds: playing the agent, farming information out of this woman who owned the shop, and also playing the role of the new friend, standing in the store, asking honest questions about a knife that interested her. The woman tipped her head.
"What can I say? My family has a strong history of longevity."
Eleri’s thoughts ran to Grandmere and she wondered about the lifespans in her own family. Did Grandmere's brothers and sisters live a long time, too? Grandmere was the only one left, as far as she knew. It was a thought she'd never pondered, like the paintings on the walls at Bell Point Farm. It was just something that had always been. There was Grandmere. And she was the only one.
Looking back at the knife lying across her hand, she turned it over and realized something that only a forensic scientist would know. "Is this real bone?" she asked.
Even without touching her tongue to it and feeling the telltale stick, she knew. In fact, she recognized that it was bone. And it was human.
13
As her stomach turned, Eleri thanked the woman and left Mystic Vudu. This time, she didn't run. This time, she didn't have the cover of other patrons so she could sneak away without making a scene. Though she'd made some noise the last time, at least the shop owner hadn't seen.
Even so, her departure this time had also been abrupt. She’d managed enough decorum to say goodbye, and the woman had time to formally end the conversation. "If you are interested in purchasing or, if you have other questions, come back and visit anytime. My name is Darcelle."
"I’m Eleri," she'd replied and thanked her again, looking at her watch as though she had somewhere she suddenly remembered she needed to be. All of that was a lie. Eleri had looked briefly at the shelf, giving a quick visual exam to the other knives and wondering if they, too, were perhaps made of human bone or other forbidden substances.
They weren’t, she saw—or at least, there was nothing so obvious to her own eyes. The bone handle she’d held wouldn’t be obvious to an untrained observer. The piece of skeleton had been rubbed with oil, split with a thin saw, and shined with a patina. The tang of the knife was pushed down into the split and into the center gap, where the marrow had been. After that, leather strapping was wrapped around it to hold the blade tight to the handle. The cord was wrapped in a design as disturbingly beautiful as the cut of the blade was. It didn’t obscure that something—some spellwork—had been carved into the bone. It was a stomach-churning piece of art.
Eleri felt it now, the surety that the knife she’d handled today was the same one she had touched the day before. In fact, she prayed it was. Sometimes she got visions on things—and sometimes she didn't. It was clear from her history that she was more susceptible when she wasn't paying attention. It was much harder to make a vision come to her than it was to be smacked upside the head by one she wasn't expecting. Although she hadn't seen the chickens, goats, bare feet in dirt, bloody hands, blood dripping into the ground, and the sharp curve of the knife this time when she touched it, that didn't mean it wasn't the same. She prayed to every God she had heard of that it was the same knife because—if it wasn't—that would mean the shop had a cache of human bone knives.
This time, she’d seen something else while she was in there. As she gingerly touched the handle, treating it as the delicate piece that it was—despite the morbid undertones surrounding it—she realized it was not very old.
It came from a human adult arm, though there was no more she could tell from sight. The whole bone was not present. Only a portion of the bone’s length had been used. It was hard to tell, as it had been cut, sanded, and otherwise manipulated. It also sported the knob on the end of the bone, almost as a counter- weight to the blade. The fusing of the epiphyseal plates indicated the bone had once belonged to an adult—male or female, she couldn't tell from just the one sample. Sexing the bone required certain parts of the skeleton: a pelvic girdle, particular portions of the skull, or… there were lots of options, none of which were present on this knife handle. A DNA test would have yielded much more information. For just a moment, she thought she should go back and purchase the knife. It had been very expensive—a family heirloom, the woman had told her.
Darcelle. That had been her name.
Perhaps Darcelle understood what it was she was selling and that was why the price was so high.
At the end of the street, Eleri paused, standing at the light and waiting, thinking. Should she go back? Unable to decide, she walked straight across when the “walk” sign flashed and headed directly into an ice cream shop where she ordered a cone in a flavor she'd never tried before.
Though she didn't really like it, the ice cream cooled her down as the day warmed up. She found she wasn't the only one eating ice cream in the middle of the morning. Sitting at the small round metal table, she tried to make her decision. Should she tell Westerfield? Would it open an actual case? If it did, she was the only agent here in town—at least, the only one she knew of—from NightShade. Thus, she would be the one opening this brand new case when she had come for an entirely different purpose.
Then again, her true purpose seemed to have not panned out at all. The bones in the file folder did not belong to Emmaline. Eleri was crunching on the cone by the time she thought about the fact that the skeleton she’d fixated on did seem to resemble her and Emmaline, despite having come from the Northwest area.
The biome from the strontium isotopes in the teeth had placed the girl in a large area. The dental records had made her specific. As it turned out, she was from Nebraska—corn fields and all that. Then one day, she’d gone into the cornfields and had never come back. Somebody, somewhere, was now telling her family that, twenty years after their daughter had disappeared, her bones had been found. They were also relaying the disturbing news that she had made it to somewhere in the age of her late teens before she died. They’d had a decade to find her alive, and they’d failed. Eleri felt that same pain.
The girl had gone missing before her tenth birthday. Just like Emmaline. She’d grown to be a teenager, just like Emmaline. But exactly how old had she gotten? Had she made it to thirteen, but been a very mature thirteen? Or was she fully seventeen, but still developing the bone characteristics that identified her as an adult female? The problem of growth was that it was difficult to pinpoint anything more than an age range.
The ranges strictly determinable by bone development and markers got wider as the person got older. That was why so many forensic reports stated, “He was somewhere between thirty and sixty.” At least the teen years offered slightly narrower ranges.
As she finished the ice cream, Eleri decided not to go back for the knife. She would return and check again tomorrow or the next day to see if it was still there, and only then would she make a decision. She wasn’t here to pick up a case, other than the one she had first come for. She decided, as she chewed on the last corner of the sugar cone, that she was going to find Emmaline. They had all spent far too long waiting for something to break, for something to happen with her sister’s case. Eleri was going to make it happen.
She left the ice cream shop in a bit of a daze, meandering along the streets and wandering the downtown area as she had originally expected to do today. She was out of Grandmere’s house, away from the idea that the bones she’d found in the closet had been handed down generation over generation.
Sighing, Eleri thought about the numbers of bones she’d encountered. In her job, it was to be expected. But this was her normal, non-working life. She was on break. Why, then, was she still encountering human bones?
She was going to have to test Grandmere’s little collection. Tomorrow or the next day, she told herself. It wasn’t anything she could just let slide—but for today, she would.
She walked along the graveyards, enjoying the statuary and the raised tombstones. The white marble monuments were aged. Black mold had pushed into cracks, stood regal in full relief. Angels guarded the dead here: both hated and loved ones, both small and big.
It wasn’t long before she’d passed two separate graveyards, one of which clearly belonged to wealthier families. In the poorer cemetery, bodies were stacked side to side—bones to bones, almost. Some of the graves sat on top of each other, as the poor families still needed to bury their dead but couldn’t afford fresh land to do it. In New Orleans, the dead could no longer be interred underground, only stacked and pushed into the spaces. Land was too expensive for the old-school internments.
On her right, a salmon colored building with railings along the second- and third-floor balconies hosted flower boxes that trailed down pink and green vines. Flowers bloomed along them, despite the heat and humidity—or maybe because of it. Eleri didn’t recognize the plant by name, but it was one she saw repeatedly when she came to town.
Music drifted to her from one of the alleys—either someone playing a horn or something from a radio or a record, she couldn’t tell. Given the location and the number of people in the streets who appeared to not have a job to go to today, it was entirely possible someone was sitting down with a jazz horn, just out of her sight. The melody set her cadence as she headed down the street.
Lifting her fingers, she let them trail along the fence, slapping slightly and tapping each of the black, wrought-iron posts as she went by. Her thoughts disappeared. The day around her disappeared. Her fingers tapped and tapped and tapped along the spikes. When she looked up again, she saw her.
Emmaline was right in front of her, walking backward down the street, beckoning her to follow.
Eleri had no choice. This was what she had come for. What had Emmaline decided to show her?
She followed her sister for several blocks, despite the fact that she picked up the pace. Emmaline looked all of seventeen now, considerably grown up from the pictures at Grandmere’s and on the walls at Patton Hall. While no one else seemed to see Emmaline as she wove in and out of other walkers, Eleri fought to keep up as the crowds got thicker on some of the streets and then thinner on others. She walked past tall buildings. Only the colors and quality changed, but not the style. Eleri occasionally glanced up at a street sign, trying to determine where she was. Once again, they passed black, wrought-iron fences, fleur de lis finials gracing the top of each of the spikes to deter anyone who might try to climb over.
The buildings were close to the sidewalks here, many of them without any yard to keep a space between the house and the passersby. The patios often brushed against the edge of the street, where Eleri could just reach over and touch them, but she didn’t. She followed her sister, occasionally losing sight and frantically jumping to catch up.
Then Emmaline turned the corner, and Eleri did, too. Emmaline had made it there just a moment or two more, and then she was gone. Eleri was alone on the street. On her left was a graveyard, one she had not passed before—or was it? They all looked familiar. She studied it a little more closely and then felt a tap on her shoulder.
As she turned to face the building behind her, she saw a large, wrought-iron fence that opened into a courtyard. In the courtyard, a large tree grew in the corner, its roots pushing up between wide paver stones that held court underneath it.
The gates opened easily at her touch, and as she walked into the private space, she noticed bumps in the ground. Emmaline had come through here. She knew it. In fact, as she looked up, her sister stepped between the bushes and ducked out the back. For a moment, Eleri thought about following her, but it was the bumps under her feet that intrigued her the most.
Dropping to her hands and knees, she began to dig in the dirt. She had to get what was under there, though she couldn't have said why. Something important was in here and she knew it. Soon, she'd broken three of her fingernails and stuffed black loamy dirt up under the others, but she kept digging. Her purse was slung haphazardly across her back and her back was aimed toward the now-open fence, where anyone could walk in and find her. This was private property, she knew. She had no idea what she was doing here, other than the fact that she had to dig.
So dig she did, and as she did, she found what she was looking for. Slowly, she unearthed a human bone.
14
Eleri woke lazily, rolled over in her bed, and slowly blinked her eyes against the sun coming through the window. The slant of the rays told her it was much later than she normally arose.
She wasn't one of those morning people who woke themselves up with pep and the urge to go running. But neither was she someone who was irritable until she’s had her coffee and preferred to sleep until noon. Today’s late wake-up surprised her. Still, she stayed in bed, luxuriating in the feel of her own laziness for a while longer. Pulling the covers up from where they had slipped down, she rolled into a warm ball again—as though she needed anything more to make her warm. She’d probably kicked the covers off herself during the night in an attempt to regain a body temperature somewhat in the human range.
The city was sweltering and the interior of Grandmere’s home was only mildly better than standing in the sun. Eleri considered going to see a movie just for the air conditioning. But the lull of the bed was pulling her back under. She was curled up, tucked into her covers, and falling lazily back asleep when her eyes snapped open.
