Four and Twenty Blackbirds

"She told the Porters she'd been raped by those damned dirty Yankee soldiers, and they felt sorry enough that they took pretty good care of her, by all accounts. She gave birth to a little boy, and she named him Avery.

"Maybe five or ten years later, the soldier came back looking for her, wanting to thank Lissie for saving his life. When he learned about Avery, he tried to be distantly helpful. He wasn't willing to have any contact with his half-breed son lest his wife find out, but he felt guilty enough to throw money at him. Some years later, the soldier—I guess I should mention his name was Harvey—maybe Lissie was trying to halfway name his son after him, the names do sound alike, don't they? Anyway, Harvey got divorced and then married again, to a much younger woman. She bore him two children. The younger one was a girl born around the turn of the century, and that's old Tatie Eliza, who you've met.

"Eliza never married and never had any children, but her brother did. His daughter was Malachi's grandmother, or great-grandmother I guess. Something like that . . . sort of a distant thing. So Eliza is my great-great-aunt, approximately. That's what tatiemeans—aunt. It's what all her family members call her, I think maybe because if they say it the French way, it's not such a public admission that they're blood to her."

"What happened to Avery?" I asked. "Why does Malachi hate him so much?"

"Well, Avery grew up. By the time Eliza was born he was probably thirty years old, and by the time he learned he had siblings he was married with a child of his own. At some point he took his child, his wife, and her two sisters down to Florida. I'm not sure why they all left—I think Lissie had other family down there or something. But they did, and no one ever heard from any of them again. One of the sisters, though, had a baby she left behind for her mother to raise. That baby was named James, and most everyone says that James was probably Avery's baby too. There seemed to be a lot of sharing going on. While no one really knows what happened to Avery and the girls, James and his wife, Susan, became my grandparents. They died in a car crash when I wasn't out of the cradle. I never knew them."

All very interesting, yes, but she was beating around the bush; or maybe it was all just a long story and I hadn't seen the point yet. "You still haven't answered my question: what was wrong with Avery that Malachi is still trying to kill him a hundred years later?"

Lulu held still, choosing her words and arranging them like Scrabble tiles before putting them down for me to know. "There's a word for it, for what they thought he was. There were rumors," she stalled, "that Avery was a sorko—a sorcerer. Lissie's parents were brought from Niger, and she was a witch in her own right. Lord Himself knows what she taught him, but he took to those African tribal and Indian religions like a duck to a pond. He felt powerless growing up; and sometimes people look for power in places they shouldn't go.

"And in case it's escaped your attention, your cousin Malachi is not so right in the head. Stir a healthy fear of God into the loony mix, and you get a kid who thinks his great-uncle was an immortal witch. I honestly don't know the specifics that make him tick, and I wish I did. Maybe he knows something from Eliza that I don't. It's never made sense to me that he chose to hunt you because you saw the ghosts. But then again, it's not such a far leap for a zealot to make—to say that a girl sees dead people so she must be a witch. That's how it works with some of those religious people, you know. Anything they don't understand—and sometimes, anything they don't like—it all must come from the devil. How he dragged Avery into it I couldn't say. I'll have to stand by my original story that the boy's a crazy fuck stick."

"What did happen to Avery and the women, Lulu? Someone must know."

"I don't. And you're the one who sees them, honey. If you really want to know, you could ask them. But there are some things that are better left alone. After all this time, it doesn't matter. I told you, Avery doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what he did, or what became of the sisters. You may not like the answer you get."

"Maybe I'll ask them anyway. I can handle the truth."

"I wouldn't recommend it."

"Why not?"

"Your mother couldn't."

5

Blood Tells

I

Newly fueled with information about long-gone family members, I decided to step up my hunt for information about closer relations. It took me half an afternoon of dedicated searching, but I finally found it. I located the cemetery right away, and you'd think finding an entire road right nearby wouldn't be so hard. Turns out the two-lane strip springs off the street at an angle that makes you think it's only a driveway. I must have passed the turnoff a dozen times before I saw the green sign, bent nearly to the ground.

Pine Breeze Dr., it said, plain as day—once I'd pulled up alongside it and craned my neck until my head was horizontal. I turned my small black car, affectionately dubbed the Death Nugget, up the steep road and downshifted.

Both sides of the drive were overgrown with hundreds of years' worth of vegetation that arched across the sky and made the day feel darker than it should have been. I rolled down my window and hung my head out, craning my neck to scan the sharp, tree-cluttered hills that loomed in close around me.

I drove slowly, but there were no other motorists to grow angry with me. No one came up behind, and no one approached from the other lane. This was the forest primeval, barely outside the city limits. Its dense thoroughness left me disquieted; this was not like the mountain, where the woods are patchy and easy to navigate. These trees were knitted together with infinite nets of kudzu that blocked out any friendly squares of light. This ravenous, parasitical weed spilled down over the grass and extended its needy tendrils to the road, where they were only barely stunted by the occasional traffic.

Yellow flashed sudden and brief, high up to my right.

I hit the brakes and slid to a stop, once again thankful for the solitude. I backed up and set the car's parking brake, then climbed out and peered up the hill. A bulldozer was parked in place where the green thickness cleared. Then, as I stood longer, a straight line implied itself. Then another. A wall, or a corner. Part of a building lost in the woods. I got back into the car and maneuvered it to the rock-strewn track.

My tires spun against the whitish dirt, spraying it out behind me in a telltale cloud. I wasn't approaching quietly, but there was nowhere to park down on the street, where the asphalt disintegrated into a deep ditch instead of a shoulder. About fifty yards up the hill, I pulled up next to the bulldozer and shut off my car's engine.

Another bulldozer and a couple of trucks shared the spot with me, and though I didn't see anyone manning them I could see they'd been busy. The foundations of two small buildings lay in rubble, and a third was half-demolished.

When I got out of the car I was greeted by silence, and again I had to remind myself that I was barely a stone's throw from civilization. "Hello?" I called out. "Is there anyone here?" Birds scattered from the treetops, but otherwise I received no reply. It was a Saturday, after all. I shouldn't expect to see any workmen.

"Hello?"

My scuffed old combat boots crunched in the gritty mess of weeds, pebbles, and crushed concrete. Beside one of the machines were scattered a few pieces of broken tile. I picked one up and turned it over in my hands. It was black and charred, as were the others. One smokestack held its ground, marked in construction-worker spray paint with a bright orange X that signaled its days were numbered. "The furnace house," I said to myself. They'd started their demolition with the charnel rooms.

I tossed the tile into the square pit beside the smokestack and turned my attention to what remained. A gymnasium squatted beside one of the buildings I recognized from Dave's pictures. I approached it first, but found it locked with a thick chain. I might have wandered around the fringes to see if I could gain entry, but the door on the other structure had fallen off its hinges, and the open doorway beckoned.

On, then, to easier conquests.

I paused at the tattered threshold, a pang of nervousness seizing my chest.

"Hello?"

No one responded and no human sounds approached or retreated, but my own breathing was loud in my ears and my heart knocked heavily against my rib cage. And just on the edge of my peripheral hearing . . . what was that? I could swear I heard an echoing heart, a repeating, lurching breath that mimicked mine.

"It's this place," I said, stronger than a mumble. "It's this creepy-assed place. There's nobody here."

A brownish lizard ran up the doorframe and darted inside, but everything else was still. Somewhere in the distance I thought I heard water dripping, but I could have been mistaken. I shook the half sounds out of my head and forced myself to proceed.

The small, rectangular concrete porch cracked beneath my weight where rain and time had weakened it. Inside I saw a set of stairs, and what was possibly an office, with a big wood desk. Also I saw soda cans and cigarette butts, and newspapers camouflaged by a dusting of dead leaves.

The lizard popped its head around the wood and licked its shiny eyes, then disappeared. I thought about the knife I had in my car's glove compartment, and about the flashlight in the trunk. It was broad daylight, and all the windows in this building were broken or open, so I didn't need the light. But I might want the knife, with its curved, serrated blade. It was a good knife, a solid, sharp knife—supposedly a climber's knife. I joked from time to time that I could filet a bear in under a minute with that knife.

I refused to remind myself of Dave's warnings about transients and vandals—but on the other hand, I might need to pry open a lock, or get into a drawer. With this handy, ego-preserving excuse, I ran back to my car and grabbed the weapon. I then returned to the dilapidated porch, feeling much safer.