Cursed (5 page)

“You’re going to a psychic?” he demanded, fed up with the occult after his day. “Tell me you’re kidding!”

“This one is supposed to be real. Kimmie’s cousin went yesterday and said they have this new tarot reader who was like, crazy accurate,” Tara said. “Don’t you think this stuff is cool?”

“No, I don’t. It’s ridiculous. And this isn’t even in a nice part of town. No tourist would wander this far away from the nice part of the Garden District.”

“Who peed in your cereal?” she asked. “Oh, there it is! Park, Jay!”

He slowed, searching the car-lined streets for a parking spot. The only ones available were a block or more away.

“I’ll let you out and park,” he said, stopping the vehicle. “I can’t believe you dragged me here for this.”

“Ice cream, big brother.” She flashed a smile and got out of the car, heading towards the rundown storefront.

Jayden shook his head. He parked and got out, walking down the street past a few eateries and small shops. He paused outside of Madame Estelle’s, begrudging the unknown psychic for being the latest to trample on his patience. Brightly colored lettering advertised psychic services, tarot readings, and communications with the deceased.

Jayden walked into the shop and sat down in the empty waiting room.

He’d been accosted by magic from three directions today. First at his grandmama’s then in revelation of the family legacy. And now, he sat in a psychic’s shop, thanks to Tara. If he was remotely superstitious, he might think the spirits were trying to tell him something.

Madame Estelle’s was divided into four rooms behind a shallow front counter. Each of the girls on staff had their own room that consisted of heavy black curtains covering all four walls and a table in the middle with two chairs. The two psychics had decorated their rooms in gypsy-like, jewel-toned colors with colorful rugs, fringe on everything, and candles.

Adrienne St. Croix was too new to have decorated her room yet, though she made another mental note to bring in something to fill the empty space. Sometimes she felt lonely, even knowing the spirits of her family and ancestors were crowded around her.

She studied the six cards on the table before her that had been drawn by the girl seated in the chair across the table from her. Reading tarot cards required a combination of understanding the symbols, interpreting the feel of the cards, and for her – translating the messages the spirits gave her. She combined all three to give the cards life and tell a story. Born of a long line of voodoo priestesses, she inherited the ability to communicate with the spirits from her mother.

But every once in a while, the spirits could be difficult. The story the cards were currently trying to tell her was more disjointed than usual. Four of them went together and presented cheerful predictions of a happy event.

Two sat to the side, their feel much darker to the point of being disturbing. The distance between the four and two was one of the subtle signs the spirits gave her. These two cards were away from the happy ones. They just didn’t fit the story the others were trying to tell her.

She chewed her lip.

“You look like you’re my age,” her client said. The girl had given her name as Tara, and she was well-dressed and gorgeous.

I wish you’d go back to texting,
Adrienne responded silently.

The client was ignoring her request for silence yet again. She needed to concentrate, but understood repeat customers were always needed in a small shop like this, which meant she had to make small talk.

“I’m seventeen,” Adrienne said.

“Me, too!” Tara smiled. “Do you start school tomorrow?”

“Yeah.” Adrienne clenched her hands under the table, nervous about the new school. She glanced around her room, wishing she’d thought to bring in her small altar to Papa Legba or something to hang on the wall.

“What do they say?” Tara prodded, her excited gaze on the cards.

Adrienne picked up one – Death – and Tara gasped.

“Omigod! What does it mean?”

“Transition. Death is the ultimate transition to a new state,” Adrienne said, gazing at it. “It means major change is coming.” She looked over the rest of the cards. She set the card down and tapped the one next to it. “Did you bring someone with you today?”

Tara nodded.

“This card ain’t yours,” Adrienne said. She placed the Death card aside. “This one ain’t neither.” She moved the Devil card over. “Sometimes, someone else’s energy sticks to you when you come in.”

“So you can read my brother’s cards, too?” Tara asked.

“Not fully.” Adrienne couldn’t take her eyes off the cards for a moment. They felt … wrong. Not bad, more like the spirits thought she
needed
to see them. On instinct, she drew another and set it beside the first two.

“He’ll totally kill me for this, but what do his say?”

“This is him,” Adrienne held up the Devil.

Tara giggled.

“It don’t mean he’s bad.” Adrienne rolled her eyes. “It means he feels trapped by something. This one means it comes from his past.” She held up the new card, Six of Cups, then the Death card. “And this means he is about to face change. Something really, really important is gonna to happen to him.”

“Wow,” Tara breathed. “He’s so smart and athletic. I bet he gets a scholarship or something!”

Not sure the cards are giving good news
. Adrienne kept the observation to herself. The energy lingering around Tara wasn’t enough to provide her a full picture, but she suspected the cards were a warning of some kind.

She shook her head. “Okay. Onto yours.” She drew two more to replace the Devil and Death.

“Where in the South are you from?” Tara asked, showing no sign she was about to let Adrienne have the quiet she preferred.

“Atlanta,” Adrienne replied. “Just moved here to live with my daddy.”

“Cool.”

Before Tara could interrupt her again, Adrienne rushed on. “Your cards are real good. You have a lot of positive opportunities in your near future, to include making a difference in someone’s life.”

“Hmm. Boyfriend?” Tara asked hopefully.

Adrienne hesitated. “Not near term, no. These are more focused on your family and school. This will be a very good year for you.”

“I guess that’s good.”

Tara was beautiful and wearing gorgeous clothes that fit too well to come from consignment stores where Adrienne shopped. She didn’t seem like someone who had trouble with boys, unlike Adrienne, who had the issue of a family curse that was hanging over her. It made for awkward introductions with boys back in Atlanta, and she guessed that the guys in New Orleans would be even less willing to date her. People in Georgia just thought she was strange while the people here knew too much about voodoo for her to hope that they didn’t shy away from her if it came up.

“The cards are saying that whatever you asked them, the answer is yes,” Adrienne added, wishing her client understood just how positive the premonition was. She’d give anything to have a reading like this.

“Really?” Tara brightened. “I want to design clothes so I asked if I’d get the internship with Louis Vuitton.”

“Looks good,” Adrienne said.

Tara beamed. “You are awesome!”

Adrienne smiled patiently.

Tara rose and left, tipping her a twenty, another indication the girl didn’t have money issues.

Adrienne waited until the curtain closed behind her client then collected the cards, except for the three that were for Tara’s brother.

These she spread out before her.

“C’mon, spirits. Give me more.”

The energy was too faint. Shaking her head at the cards, she replaced them in the deck and reshuffled.

The cards stuck with her, though, throughout the next couple of hours.

When her shift was over at five, she ducked in to wave to Madame Estelle and then left for the nearest bus stop.

Adrienne walked the opposite direction of the touristy section of the ward towards the river. The air was heavy and still, smelling of one of the water treatment plants. Her nose wrinkled at the scent, and she was sweating uncomfortably in her long skirt and long-sleeved blouse by the time she reached the bus stop. A native of Atlanta, she didn’t yet know if it was possible to reach the Iberville Projects via foot, and she wasn’t certain she should try.

After all, people said there was a serial killer loose in the Projects.

Devil. Death. Six of Cups.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the cards. They stayed on her mind throughout the bus ride that dropped her off forty minutes later at her stop at the St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery, near the Projects.

The sounds of a funeral were distant but clear, the blare of horns reaching her as she stepped off the bus. Her father lived on the exact opposite corner from where the bus dropped her off, and she began walking through the slums, lost in her thoughts.

The Iberville Projects had not yet been fully restored after the hurricanes, and she grew sad seeing the signs of the damage that still lingered. Sensitive to the spirits that still remained in the neighborhood, she tried not to let herself imagine the amount of people who had been hurt.

The spirits here were despondent, many of them lost. She didn’t need her cards to feel their pain and suffering. Many were trapped between life and death and had not been properly freed from their bodies through the
dessonet
rite practiced in the South meant to help them transition.

Their sighs and whispers were like music to her, a song too faint for her to grasp fully, but present enough for her to ache for them. They took her mind off the cards until she reached her father’s apartment building.

Pulling the heavy door to the building open, she entered a dingy lobby whose lights flickered and scent was that of must and mold. The elevator in the corner was semi-reliable at best. Most of the keys didn’t light up when pressed, and the ceiling of the lobby and elevator both sagged.

She crossed to it and waited for the elevator doors to open, entering the tiny space. Adrienne rode it to the fifth floor and hopped off.

She entered her father’s apartment and automatically paused to listen for signs he’d beat her home. The cramped apartment was silent. Tossing her keys in the bowl on the kitchen counter, she hummed as she went to her room. It was large enough for a twin bed, small dresser and not much else. A floor lamp lit up the room while the shades of the window that faced the brick wall of the neighboring building were closed.

She moved the ironing board out of the way, so she could get to her closet.

A few minutes later, she heard the front door open.

“Addy, you got a package.”

She had just finished changing out of the long skirt and blouse she wore to Madame Estelle’s when she heard her father’s voice. She poked her head out of her tiny room.

Grizzled and tired, her father had worked late today despite it being Sunday. He still wore the overalls from the shop where he was a mechanic and held a six-pack of beer in one hand. He kicked the door closed with his foot and held out a bubble mailer.

Curious, she walked down the shallow hallway and took it.

“You expecting something?” he asked.

“Not really,” she replied. Turning it over, she caught the small symbol in the corner: a snake and protective symbol of Papa Legba – the guardian god of the voodoo pantheon - that decorated her mother’s shrine back home in New Orleans. “Might be from Mama.”

Her daddy said nothing at the mention of his ex-wife. Adrienne returned to her room, where the ironing board took up the space between her bed and the door. After her shift reading tarot cards yesterday, she’d spent an hour on the pleated skirt of her school uniform and did her best to iron the wrinkles out of the white shirt. The more she ironed, the more accidental wrinkles she put into the shirt until finally she’d given up.

Adrienne plopped onto her bed and tore open the package, not recognizing the black leather journal inside. She was about to wad up the mailer and throw it away when she saw a small note inside. It was a familiar, square sticky note in pale yellow.

Keep this journal safe.
Another symbol of protection was in the corner, a hastily drawn skull and crossbones.

She stretched for her rickety nightstand and opened the top drawer to pull out her Bible. She’d received two other notes like this one and hid them where her daddy wouldn’t look. The first she’d received upon arriving to New Orleans a couple of weeks before. It had appeared on her pillow one day. The second surfaced a week later.

Adrienne added the third mysterious note to the other two. If neat writing were any indication, they all appeared to have been written by women. Although it looked to be three different women wrote the notes.

She set them aside and opened the front cover of the journal. She gasped.

Property of Therese St. Croix

DO NOT READ!!!

Adrienne read the words over and over, unable to believe she held her dead sister’s journal. Therese St. Croix had disappeared five years before and was presumed dead, the first victim of a serial killer who had eluded the police for five years. He took a new life in the Lower Ninth Ward every month for the first year and then sporadically for another four years. The police claimed the serial killer was probably keeping his first kill as a gruesome trophy and insisted it wasn’t possible she was still alive.

Where had the journal been all this time?

Adrienne studied the bubble mailer closely. While the journal’s pages had yellowed from age, the mailer was new and crisp. There wasn’t even a postage stamp on it, as if someone had dropped it off at the building.

“Daddy, why did the mail come on Sunday?” she called down the hallway.

“It didn’t. Someone stuck it in Mrs. Hatchett’s box, and I ran into her on the way up.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Adrienne ran her hands over the journal, imagining her sister as the last person to hold it. Her eyes misted over at the thought.

Therese, the oldest of five girls, moved away to live with their father in New Orleans after the sign of the family curse appeared on her. Their mother hoped someone in New Orleans could help her escape the curse, while Therese had hopes of being scouted by the jazz music industry and earning a record contract that would help their impoverished family. It was a dream Adrienne shared with her.

She recalled how beautiful Therese was and how she could light up a room with her smile. People loved her, even the crotchety old ladies at church, where Therese sang weekly until she left for New Orleans when she was seventeen.