And the one I was looking for, the yellow Nike box, with the locket that had sent Amma off the deep end. I opened the box and pulled out the smooth leather pouch. Hiding it had seemed like a good idea last night, but I put it back in my pocket, just in case.
Amma shouted up the stairs again. “Get on down here or you’re gonna be late.”
“I’ll be down in a minute.”
Every Saturday, I spent half the day with the three oldest women in Gatlin, my great-aunts Mercy, Prudence, and Grace. Everyone in town called them the Sisters, like they were a single entity, which in a way they were. Each of them was about a hundred years old, and even they couldn’t remember who was the oldest. All three of them had been married multiple times, but they’d outlived all their husbands and moved into Aunt Grace’s house together. And they were even crazier than they were old.
When I was about twelve, my mom started dropping me off there on Saturdays to help out, and I had been going there ever since. The worst part was, I had to take them to church on Saturdays. The Sisters were Southern Baptist, and they went to church on Saturdays and Sundays, and most other days, too.
But today was different. I was out of bed and into the shower before Amma could call me a third time. I couldn’t wait to get over there. The Sisters knew just about everyone who had ever lived in Gatlin; they should, since between the three of them, they had been related to half the town by marriage, at one time or another. After the vision, it was obvious the G in GKD stood for Genevieve. But if there was anyone who would know what the rest of the initials stood for, it would be the three oldest women in town.
When I opened the top drawer of my dresser to grab some socks, I noticed a little doll that looked like a sock monkey holding a tiny bag of salt and a blue stone, one of Amma’s charms. She made them to ward off evil spirits or bad luck, even a cold. She put one over the door of my dad’s study when he started working on Sundays instead of going to church. Even though my dad never paid much attention when he was there, Amma said the Good Lord still gave you credit for showing up. A couple of months later, my dad bought her a kitchen witch on the Internet and hung it over the stove. Amma was so angry she served him cold grits and burnt coffee for a week.
Usually, I didn’t give it much thought when I found one of Amma’s little gifts. But there was something about the locket. Something she didn’t want me to find out.
There was only one word to describe the scene when I arrived at the Sisters’ house. Chaos. Aunt Mercy answered the door, hair still in rollers.
“Thank goodness you’re here, Ethan. We have an E-mergency on our hands,” she said, pronouncing the “E” as if it was a word all by itself. Half the time I couldn’t understand them at all, their accents were so thick and their grammar so bad. But that’s the way it was in Gatlin; you could tell how old someone was by the way they spoke.
“Ma’am?”
“Harlon James’s been injured, and I’m not convinced he ain’t about ta pass over.” She whispered the last two words like God Himself might be listening, and she was afraid to give Him any ideas. Harlon James was Aunt Prudence’s Yorkshire terrier, named after her most recent late husband.
“What happened?”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” Aunt Prudence said, appearing out of nowhere with a first aid kit in her hand. “Grace tried ta kill poor Harlon James, and he is barely hangin’ on.”
“I did not try ta kill him,” Aunt Grace shrieked from the kitchen. “Don’t you tell tales, Prudence Jane. It was an accident!”
“Ethan, you call Dean Wilks, and tell him we have an E-mergency,” Aunt Prudence instructed, pulling a capsule of smelling salts and two extra-large Band-Aids out of the first aid kit.
“We’re losin’ him!” Harlon James was lying on the kitchen floor, looking traumatized but nowhere close to death. His back leg was tucked up underneath him, and it dragged behind him when he tried to get up. “Grace, the Lord as my witness, if Harlon James dies…”
“He’s not going to die, Aunt Prue. I think his leg is broken. What happened?”
“Grace tried ta beat him ta death with a broom.”
“That’s not true. I told you, I wasn’t wearing my spectacles and he looked just like a wharf rat runnin’ through the kitchen.”
“How would you know what a wharf rat looks like? You’ve never been ta a wharf in all your life.”
So I drove the Sisters, who were completely hysterical, and Harlon James, who probably wished he was dead, to Dean Wilks’ place in their 1964 Cadillac. Dean Wilks ran the feed store, but he was the closest thing to a vet in town. Luckily, Harlon James had only suffered a broken leg, so Dean Wilks was up to the task.
By the time we got back to the house, I was wondering if I wasn’t the crazy one for thinking I’d be able to get any information out of the Sisters. Thelma’s car was in the driveway. My dad had hired Thelma to keep an eye on the Sisters after Aunt Grace almost burned their house down ten years ago, when she put a lemon meringue pie in the oven and left it in there all afternoon when they were at church.
“Where you girls been?” Thelma called from the kitchen.
They bumped into each other trying to push their way into the kitchen to tell Thelma about their misadventure. I slumped into one of the mismatched kitchen chairs next to Aunt Grace, who looked depressed about being the villain of the story again. I pulled the locket out of my pocket, holding the chain in the handkerchief, and spun it around a few times.
“Whatcha got there, handsome?” Thelma asked, pinching some snuff out of the can on the windowsill and tucking into her bottom lip, which looked even weirder than it sounded, since Thelma was kind of dainty and resembled Dolly Parton.
“It’s just a locket I found out by Ravenwood Plantation.”
“Ravenwood? What the devil were you doin’ out there?”
“My friend’s staying there.”
“You mean Lena Duchannes?” Aunt Mercy asked. Of course she knew, the whole town knew. This was Gatlin.
“Yes, ma’am. We’re in the same class at school.” I had their attention. “We found this locket in the garden behind the great house. We don’t know who it belonged to, but it looks really old.”
“That’s not Macon Ravenwood’s property. That’s part a Greenbrier,” Aunt Prue said, sounding sure of herself.
“Let me get a look at that,” Aunt Mercy said, taking her glasses out of the pocket of her housecoat.
I handed her the locket, still wrapped in the handkerchief. “It has an inscription.”
“I can’t read that. Grace, can you make that out?” she asked, handing the locket to Aunt Grace.
“I don’t see nothin’ at all,” Aunt Grace said, squinting hard.
“There are two sets of initials, right here,” I said, pointing to the grooves in the metal, “ECW and GKD. And if you flip that disc over, there’s a date. February 11, 1865.”
“That date seems real familiar,” Aunt Prudence said. “Mercy, what happened on that date?”
“Weren’t you married on that date, Grace?”
“1865, not 1965,” Aunt Grace corrected. Their hearing wasn’t much better than their vision. “February 11, 1865…”
“That was the year the Fed’rals almost burned Gatlin ta the ground,” Aunt Grace said. “Our great-granddaddy lost everything in that fire. Don’t you remember that story, girls? Gen’ral Sherman and the Union army marched clean through the South, burnin’ everything in their path, includin’ Gatlin. They called it the Great Burnin’. At least part a every plantation in Gatlin was destroyed, except Ravenwood. My granddaddy used ta say Abraham Ravenwood musta made a deal with the Devil that night.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the only way that place coulda been left standin’. The Fed’rals burned every plantation along the river, one at a time, till they got ta Ravenwood. They just marched on past, like it wasn’t there at all.”
“The way Granddaddy told it, that wasn’t the only thing strange ’bout that night,” Aunt Prue said, feeding Harlon James a piece of bacon. “Abraham had a brother, lived there with him, and he just up and disappeared that night. Nobody ever saw him again.”
“That doesn’t seem that strange. Maybe he was killed by the Union soldiers, or trapped in one of those burning houses,” I said.
Aunt Grace raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe it was somethin’ else. They never did find a body.” I realized people had been talking about the Ravenwoods for generations; it didn’t start with Macon Ravenwood. I wondered what else the Sisters knew.
“What about Macon Ravenwood? What do you know about him?”
“That boy never did have a chance on account a bein’ E-legitimate.” In Gatlin, being illegitimate was like being a communist or an atheist. “His daddy, Silas, met Macon’s mamma after his first wife left him. She was a pretty girl, from New Orleans, I think. Anyhow, not long after, Macon and his brother were born. But Silas never did marry her, and then she up and left, too.”
Aunt Prue interrupted, “Grace Ann, you don’t know how ta tell a story. Silas Ravenwood was an E-centric, and as mean as the day is long. And there were strange things goin’ on at that house. The lights were on all night long, and every now and again a man in a tall black hat was seen wanderin’ ’round up there.”
“And the wolf. Tell him about the wolf.” I didn’t need them to tell me about that dog, or whatever it was. I’d seen it myself. But it couldn’t be the same animal. Dogs, even wolves, didn’t live that long.
“There was a wolf up at the house. Silas kept it like it was a pet!” Aunt Mercy shook her head.
“But those boys, they moved back and forth between Silas and their mamma, and when they were with him, Silas treated them somethin’ awful. Beat on ’em all the time and barely let ’em outta his sight. He wouldn’t even let ’em go ta school.”
“Maybe that’s why Macon Ravenwood never leaves his house,” I said.
Aunt Mercy waved her hand in the air, as if that was the silliest thing she’d ever heard. “He leaves his house. I’ve seen him a mess a times over at the DAR buildin’, right after supper time.” Sure she had.
That was the thing about the Sisters; half the time they had a firm grasp on reality, but that was only half the time. I had never heard of anyone seeing Macon Ravenwood, so I doubted he was hanging around the DAR looking at paint chips and chatting up Mrs. Lincoln.
Aunt Grace scrutinized the locket more carefully, holding it up to the light. “I can tell you one thing. This here handkerchief belonged ta Sulla Treadeau, Sulla the Prophet they called her, on account a folks said she could see the future in the cards.”
“Tarot cards?” I asked.
“What other kind a cards are there?”
“Well, there are playin’ cards, and greetin’ cards, and place cards for parties…” Aunt Mercy rambled.