“A wasp?” I asked.
He finally looked at me, if only for a moment, then rapidly away, as if my sensible cotton nightgown was an incitement to debauchery. “Doubtless you could have identified it more specifically.”
I snorted. “No, no. Not while it was flying at my head—”
(black-and-yellow fly buzzing at my face)
“—I couldn’t. I’m sure Dr. Halder could.” I had to stop and catch my breath. “Forgive me. I’m not fully recovered, I don’t think.”
Ma Kersey clucked her tongue and got to her feet. “Sweet of you to visit, Mr. Phelps, but Miss Wilson needs to rest.”
“Yes. Of course.” He nodded sharply to me, then turned away. I got a better view of the bandage, which was large and stood out starkly against the darkness of his hair.
Ma Kersey escorted him into the studio and I heard the murmur of their voices for a minute, culminating with her raising her voice and saying, “Stop picking at it!”
She was back a moment later and dropped back into her chair. “Always the same,” she muttered. “They pick and pick and then they complain it’s not healing quick enough.”
I smiled. Ma Kersey settled her shawls like a hen settling her feathers and sat back down.
I was tired, it was true, though mostly I had wanted to get rid of Phelps. No matter what I told myself, I was still half convinced that he must know I had been in the shed.
Which was another argument for mynothaving seen a dead body, wasn’t it? Surely Phelps wouldn’t just blithely accept dead bodies lying around. According to the Kents, he was even more of a zealot than he seemed in casual conversation. Surely good Christians would object to that sort of thing?
Halder had presumably asked Phelps to check on the beetles in his absence. Phelps and Halder had known each other for years, after all. What was it Jackson had said? That the two of them had been present when the supposed blood thieves were killed? That they werein at the death.Yes, that had been it.
Which reminded me of something that I had dismissed at first, before I had realized just how sharp Ma Kersey was.
“Ma Kersey,” I broke in, interrupting a lengthy anecdote about a church service that had gone awry when birds had roosted in the organ pipes, “you told me about the three-month babies? When we were talking about the killings that happened in the woods? Whatreallyhappened there?”
She fell silent. I was watching her face and saw her smile fade. She didn’t frown, but her face went slack, as if she were no longer inhabiting the skin. I plowed ahead. “You never saidwhyyouthought the two people that were killed were the ones you’d delivered.”
“Ah…” Ma Kersey shook her head grimly. “I didn’t, not at first. But see, they killed ’em once and buried ’em—”
Once?I thought, but didn’t interrupt.
“—but then people started thinking maybe that hadn’t been enough. Lotta stories about vampires sleeping in a coffin and when you dig ’em up, they’re looking all healthy, while half their kin have dropped dead. So somebody came asking me what I thought.” She pursed her lips. “Me, I thought it was all a load of nonsense, but I said if they were that worried, well… probly some people care if you dig up their bones, but given what those two’d been up to, I didn’t much care what they thought. So a group of us all went trudging off—me and the preacher and about half the men who did for ’em in the first place—and dug ’em up again. That’s when I knew.”
Ma Kersey was a born storyteller, same as Jackson. She didn’t much like telling this one, I thought, but she still knew how to tell it. I knew my place as well. “What happened?”
“The man was dead, right enough. They’d shoved a stake through him and the worms had been at work on what was left. The woman though… she’d been alive at some point, under all that dirt there. They didn’t get no coffins, just a deep hole, and the woman wasn’t lying dead on her back like she’d been placed. Her body was almost sat up, like she’d been digging her way out. Looked like she’deatena big mess of dirt. To make room, maybe? No idea. Damndest thing I ever saw.” She leaned back in the chair and studied the ceiling tiles. “Anyway, general opinion was to burn ’em, and the preacher wasn’t minded to put a stop to it. Truth is, I think we were all a little scared the woman’d start moving again. So they laid ’em both out and burned ’em right then and there. Probly the man didn’t need it—a shot to the head kills you no matter what you’re made of, I’m thinking—but the woman… I dunno. I’ve seen some things, but that was oneof the worst, her belly all stretched out full of dirt like she was gonna chew her way out of the ground.”
I felt a bit ill, whether from the story or malaria or too much sausage gravy. Still, I couldn’t see how she’d known that they were the same ones she delivered.
“It was the teeth, child,” said Ma Kersey, rearranging her shawls again. “When we were all looking at her mouth, the way she’d been chewing through red clay like it was taffy, I saw it. Some of ’em had broken, but she had a mouthful of milk teeth like needles. So did the man. Just like a kitten. Just like the day they was born.”
I stared at her. It was impossible, the whole story was impossible, but while Jackson might have been putting me on, I’d swear on a stack of Bibles that Ma Kersey believed she was telling the truth.
“Once I realized, I went out to their grandaddy’s farm,” Ma Kersey said, gazing out the window now, where the trees shifted their leaves against the light. “Found the old shed. Full of chains it was, and big iron cuffs like the plantation bastards used to put on slaves.” Her mouth worked like she was going to spit, but she remembered that she was indoors and didn’t. I thought of the manacles that I had seen—no, that Ihadn’tseen, that Icouldn’thave seen—and put a hand to my forehead.
“Full of chains,” Ma Kersey repeated, “and the house empty, like nobody’d been there in a year or two. I s’pose if any of the neighbors came looking, they assumed the old preacher up and left during the war. I doubt it though.” She put her head to one side, eyes bright and cold as a bird’s. “But I’ll tell you this—they never did find his body.”
CHAPTER 15
Ma Kersey went home the next morning, informing me that I was out of the woods but to take it easy for a few days. I was both sorry to see her go and relieved to no longer be considered an invalid requiring round-the-clock nursing. I tried to give her money, but was informed that the doctor would be covering the bills as part of the household expenses. I didn’t know what to think of that. I didn’t like to think well of Halder, but I couldn’t deny that it was a load off my mind.
My sleep was still troubled.Troubled, ha. Awful, frankly. My dreams no longer had the horrible immediacy of delirium, but that was the best that could be said. Nightmares about wolf worms and mummified bodies flowed into Ma Kersey’s stories about the three-month babies and the possum scratching endlessly at the door. My own fault for asking, I suppose. Not that I believed for a moment that the blood thieves and the three-month babies were the same. If one family is prone to a congenital deformity like pointed teeth, then it’s no surprise if it pops up elsewhere in the region. Darwin’s inherited traits explained a great deal.
Even if she had been a killer, the thought of the poor woman buried alive, trying to bite through the dirt with her mouth full of malformed teeth, joined the imagery that populated my nightmares. Sometimes I was trapped underground with a body, trying to claw my way through the earth to escape. Sometimes I was trying to dig down to find someone. Often it was Louisa,even though I didn’t know what she looked like, even though Ma Kersey had assured me that she’d gotten away.
