Kindred Spirits (6 page)

“Well,” Granny says,
setting Methuselah down so he can eat off her plate, “this place bein’ like it
is, and times bein’ what they was, everybody thought Charlie T was the
murderer. Back then if somebody’s skin was dark, that alone was enough reason
for most people to think they was guilty of something. But see, there was
always things about the whole story that just didn’t add up. Like, why would
Charlie T want to kill the Jameson ladies? Some folks said it had somethin’ to
do with them not paying him for the odd jobs he’d been doing. But is a few
nickels reason enough to kill two people? And the question that always bothered
me is how Charlie T could’ve managed to shoot Miss Helen straight through the
head at the same time she was braining him with a poker.”

“I don’t guess the
sheriff asked any of those questions,” I say.

“Nope.” Granny scoops up
Methuselah and cradles him in her arms like a baby. “He arrested Charlie T then
and there. And that night the Klan rode through the colored section of town
with shotguns, rounded up all the folks and put them on the first freight train
out of town. And that’s why there ain’t no colored people in Wilder.”

My eyes snap shut, but
with my inner eyes I can see into the mind of the past. Horses ridden by
white-hooded figures gallop through a neighborhood of tarpaper shacks. A huge
wooden cross is driven into the ground, then set on fire. The white-hooded men
jab the noses of their guns into the ribs of black men, while a little brown
baby, his big brown eyes reflecting the flaming cross, cries and clutches at
his mother’s dress. In line they march, mothers, fathers, and children, shoved
at gunpoint to the waiting train. The air burns with hate.

“Miranda!
Miranda, come back!”

It’s my mother’s voice.
When I open my eyes, she is leaning over, and I am somehow lying on the kitchen
floor. “The hate,” I gasp. “The fear.”

Mom lifts me so I am
resting my head on her lap. “I know, baby. Your Sight is getting stronger, if
you can feel people’s emotions from so long ago.” She strokes my hair, and then
I see that Granny is beside me, too.

“I made you some
chamomile tea,” she says. “It’ll settle you.” She looks at my mother. “You were
right, Sarah. It was too early in the morning to speak of such things.”

“No,” Mom says, as I sit
up and take the teacup. “You were right to talk about it. All these years I’ve
protected Miranda from Wilder’s shameful past. But I should have known...the
longer you keep a difficult truth a secret, the more it will hurt when the
secret comes out.”

I hold the teacup in my
shaking hands. I can still feel the heat from the burning cross. “I hurt so
much. For Charlie T, for all those people.”

“I know,” Mom says.
“Maybe you should stay home from school today and let Granny take care of you.”

“No,” I say, and as soon
as I say it, I feel calm again. “I need to talk to Adam. I need to tell him
what the message on his bathroom mirror meant.”

“You never did tell us
what the writing on the mirror said,” Granny says.

I swallow hard. “It says,
‘He is innocent.’”

In home room before the
bell rings, Adam leans over to me and whispers, “But even if Charlie T was
innocent, what are we supposed to do about it? The guy’s probably dead by now
anyway.”

“Maybe he is, and maybe
he isn’t,” I say. “But either way, I think what the Jameson sisters want is for
us to prove that Charlie didn’t do it.”

“Why do you think they’re
calling on a couple of kids to do such a big job?”

“I don’t know,” I say.
“Maybe because most adults won’t listen to them, but we will. Besides, it’s not
that big a job If Charlie T is innocent, all we have to do is find out who’s
guilty.”

“‘All we have to do?’”
Adam laughs. “You make it sound so easy, solving a murder case that adults
couldn’t solve when it happened.”

“But nobody even tried to
solve it. They just assumed that Charlie T was guilty because he was black.
Adam, you know what it’s like being different in this town now. Just think
about how much worse it must have been seventy years ago.  How can you not want
to help Charlie T?”

Adam
throws his hands up. “Okay, you win, but I don’t think we’re going to get
anywhere with this.” He takes a deep breath. “Okay, so what do we do first,
Nancy Drew?”

When I grin at him, he
grins back. “Research. We need to read everything there is to read about the
case.”

“Well,” Adam says, “why
don’t you come over to my house after school? We can get online and see what we
can find.”

“Sure,” I say, then I
remember something and cringe. “Wait, I can’t. I promised Granny I’d go with
her to visit her friend in the hospital.” Granny loves nothing better than
visiting friends in the hospital and smuggling in all kinds of herbs and
potions she’s mixed up’ ‘the medicine that’ll really make them better,’ she says.

Granny always takes me
along on these hospital visits because her old eyes have a hard time reading
the small print on the signs and doors, and so if she goes alone, she tends to
wander around lost, too proud to ask for directions. For somebody with psychic
powers, Granny sure can get herself lost in a hurry.

“Hmm...” Adam says,
“Well, I could meet you at the hospital, then. I go over there some afternoons
and help Dad. He sends me to fetch sodas for patients and read to them if
they’re too sick to read themselves...maybe make small talk with them. He says
sometimes the best medicine for cancer patients is to get their minds off their
sickness. I bet after I’m done helping Dad, he’d let us use the computer in his
office.”

When
I get home from school, Granny is at the kitchen table, shoving stalks of some
nasty smelling dried herb into a vase of dried flowers. “See,” she says, “it
looks just like a regular vase of flowers, but these plants here is powerful
healers. Daisy can ask the nurse to bring her some hot water for tea, then let
them leaves steep in the hot water for a spell. If she drinks that right
regular, it’ll fix her up better than them old pills the doctor’s giving her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say
because there’s nothing else I can say. There’s no point in arguing with
Granny.

She puts one last stalk
into the vase and says, “There, now. If you’ll tote the flowers, I’ll get my
stick, and we’ll be ready to go.”

Granny’s walking stick is
handmade, with a carved snake that coils all the way up it; the stick’s handle
is the snake’s head. She says the snake on the staff is a symbol of healing,
but I don’t think other people see it that way. Between Granny’s snake stick,
her head-to-toe black clothing, and the long gray braid trailing down her back,
it’s no wonder that as we walk down the sidewalk, several people cross the
street to keep from passing her.

Outside the Family Dollar
Store, a toddler with white-blond hair points at Granny and screams, “Look,
Mommy! The witch!”

His mother pulls him close,
whispering, “Hush! She’ll eat you!”

If Granny notices them,
she doesn’t let on.

The hospital is on the
other side of town, so by the time we get there, I’m pretty sick of carrying
Granny’s vase of flowers. When we walk through the hospital’s clean glass
doors, the antiseptic smell hits me first, then the feeling I always get in
hospitals: flashes of other people’s pain and sickness. Granny gets it, too, so
the first time it happened to me, she recognized it. “Just let it wash over you
for a minute, then you’ll be all right,” she said. And I was.

Since
I’m not too proud to ask, I let the lady at the front desk give me directions
to Granny’s friend Daisy’s room. As Granny and I walk down the fluorescent lit
hall of patients’ rooms, Granny says, “Read me the names on the doors. I want
to know who’s here.”

“Granny, that’s nosey.”

“It ain’t nosey if you’re
a healer and want to know who’s sick.  I might need to bring somebody else some
herbs.”

As we walk past the
doors, I softly read the names,Bertha Todd, Margie Cox, Harold Buchanan, hoping
the people behind the doors can’t hear me. The next name I see is Daisy’s.

Daisy Perkins is one of
the few real friends Granny has in Wilder. She says her late husband’s mother
had the Sight, so she knows it’s not something to be afraid of.

When we go into Daisy’s
room, she’s propped up on the pillows in bed, her white hair flattened to her
head. “Well, look who’s here!” she says, her wrinkled face breaking into a
smile. “My sweet friend and her pretty granddaughter.”

“We brought you some
flowers,” I say, glad to be able to finally set the vase down.

“But they ain’t just for
looking at,” Granny says, touching the leaves. “You’ll want to make a tea out
of these here. They’ll have you on your feet in no time.”

“I’m ready to be back on
my feet and back in my house,” Daisy says. “The doctor says it won’t be much
longer til I can go home. They think that one little place they cut out was all
the cancer I had. I’m so grateful to you, Irene, for telling me to go to the
doctor.” Daisy looks at me. “Do you know, honey, that your Granny could tell I
had the cancer just by squeezing my hand? She saw me in the store one day,
squeezed my hand to say hello, then she kindly winced and said, “Daisy, honey,
I don’t want to scare you none, but you need to go to the doctor.”

This
isn’t the first time I’ve heard about Granny being able to detect illness. I’d
even experienced it myself. Granny predicted my chicken pox two days before I
started to show any symptoms. She’s also famous for putting her hand on
pregnant women’s bellies and being able to tell if the baby is a boy or a girl.
“It’s amazing what Granny can tell just by touching a person,” I say.

“It sure is,” Daisy says.
“And I know some folks’d say your granny’s powers come from the devil. But if
you ask me, she’s an angel straight from heaven.”

“Miranda?” I turn around
to see Adam standing in the doorway with Dr. So.

“Well, looky there,”
Daisy says. “It’s that sweet little Chinese boy that comes to read me the
paper.”

I decide to let the
“Chinese” thing go. Granny says it’s not polite to correct old people, and that
probably goes double for sick old people in the hospital. “Adam’s a friend of
mine from school,” I tell Daisy.

“Well, why don’t you go
play with your little friend while me and Daisy sit a spell?” Granny says. “You
can come back and get me in half an hour.”

“Okay, Granny,” I say.

“Besides,” Granny says,
“I’ve got a few things I want to say to Dr. So about Daisy’s treatment.”

Dr. So looks like a
trapped animal as Adam and I leave him.

In Dr. So’s office which
is full of medical books with disgusting full-color photos we pull up two
chairs to the computer. “We need to do a search,” Adam says, pulling up a
screen. “What words should we search for?”

“How
about Charlie Thomas?” I say.

“You’ve not done many
searches, have you?” Adam says. “There are probably ten million people named
Charlie Thomas.”

“My family doesn’t even
have a phone. Why would I know anything about internet searches?” “Hmm...” Adam
says. “Let’s try ‘Charlie Thomas’ and ‘Wilder’ and ‘Kentucky.’” He types the
words in, and a list of articles appears on the screen. The first one is titled
‘Unsolved Murders.’

When he pulls up the
article it says, “Although the Wilder murder case was allegedly ‘solved’ by the
arrest and conviction of Charlie Thomas, many legal experts have suggested that
Thomas was probably not the guilty party. Thomas, an African-American youth who
may have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, could very well have
been a victim of the hostile racial climate of the South in the first half of
the twentieth century.”

“Interesting,” Adam says.

“Yeah, interesting, but
not helpful. We already know from the writing on the mirror that Charlie T is
innocent. This doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know.”

“Well, then...” Adam
clicks back to the screen we were on before. “Let’s see what else we’ve got.”

A website called ‘Shadow
World’ a Guide to America’s Most Haunted Houses’ has a short article about the
Jameson place: “The so-called Jameson House in Wilder, Kentucky, has sat empty
for years because it is supposedly haunted by the ghosts of two sisters who
were brutally murdered there by a young man named Charlie Thomas. Some locals
claim to have heard ghostly bloodcurdling screams echoing from the abandoned
mansion.”

“Funny that the real
estate agent never mentioned that when she was showing us the house,” Adam
says. “Those bloodcurdling ghostly screams would’ve been a real selling point.”

“But
you never have heard screams, have you?”

“Nope. A bump in the
night once in a while but no screams. The screams must just be a story the
people in Wilder made up...like the ones about you being the daughter of
Satan.”

I laugh. “Shoot, I’ve not
even heard that one.”

“No kidding? That’s one
of the first things I heard about you. That’s why you don’t have a dad around,
you know. He’s busy running things down in hell. Some people say your Granny
paired off with Satan, too, and that’s where your mom came from.”

“Really, could people be
dumber?” I look at the list of articles, and a name jumps out at me’ ‘Charlie
Thomas, Jr.’ “Hey,” I say, “look at this one.”

“It’s just a website
advertising some restaurant,” Adam says.

“Look at it,” I say.
“I’ve got a feeling about it.”

He clicks on it. “Whatever
you say, Daughter of Satan.”

The screen opens with a
cartoon smiling spider that spins a web that spells out the words:

The Café Anansi
African Cuisine and Southern Soul Food
Charlie Thomas, Jr., Proprietor

“I told you,” Adam says.
“It’s just advertising a restaurant.”