Stuck with a Spell (3 page)

“
Liza, what is it?” I
asked.

Her china cup rattled against its
saucer.

“
Nothing. I’m
fine.”

“
Don’t bullshit a
bullshiter. What’s the matter? I heard your landline ring a few
minutes ago, and you’re clearly upset.”

“
It’s Darryl.”

“
Who’s Darryl?”

Yeah, I asked. But I had a pretty good
idea who Darryl would turn out to be. Her phone call had to be
related to mine. I just had to hear it straight from the horse’s
mouth.

“
Darryl Riley, my no good,
twenty-timing asshole ex-husband, that’s who!”

“
And?”

“
Well...he sort of had a
little accident.”

“
A traffic
accident?”

“
Not exactly.”

“
Let me guess. He got a
piece of food stuck in this throat and almost died.”

Her head cocked to one side. “No. What
would make you think that?”

“
Funny you should ask. I
just got a call from a hospital in New York. Would you like to
guess why they were calling me?”

“
No!”

She cupped her hands over her mouth,
and her eyes grew as wide as our tea saucers.

“
Yes! But I have to say, I’m
surprised that you’re surprised. Actually, I’m pretty much freaked
out that you’re shocked by this.”

And I was freaked out! How could she
just toss out these spells without knowing there would be
consequences?!

“
It was never my intention
to really hurt Darryl...or Hank. I just...”

“
Listen, Liza. I didn’t fall
off the turnip truck yesterday. You’re talking to a New York City
gal. You can’t tell me you haven’t done this before.”

“
Of course I’ve hexed
people. This ain’t my first rodeo. It’s just the first time things
got so damn messed up.”

“
Messed up?”

“
Yeah. I mean...I just like
to play around with Darryl. He’s such an asshole, and he deserves
all the bad mojo he gets,” she said swatting at the air as if this
were no bigger deal than a pesky fly buzzing our tea
party.

There was no way I was going to sit
here as if I was just blowing all of this way out of
proportion.

“
Liza?”

“
Okay...so, I mess with him
a lot. But I’m not a total psycho. I’m just trying to level out his
karma field.”

“
L
evel out his karma field?” I asked.

“
Well...It’s just like it
sounds. Darryl is a no-good asshat who’s led a mostly charmed
life.”

“
Okay. But...”

“
No buts. He doesn’t deserve
to lead that kind of life. So, from time to time, I help karma a
little bit. You know, make the universe a more balanced place in
which to live.”

“
If you don’t mind me
asking, what did he do that was bad enough to make you want to
dabble in his karma field?”

Liza’s karma dabbling reminded me of a
saying on one of the Bitchy Signs I collect: Dear Karma, I have a
list of people you missed.

Except there’s one major difference. I
simply collect the signs, while apparently, she acts on
them.

“
Oh, I don’t mind sharing at
all. I could plum talk your ear off about his sneaky little
ass.”

And she did. It didn’t take long for me
to realize that Liza had good reason to be meddling in the life of
her ex. He put her through a world of shit.

Oh, he was a real charmer. Swept her
right off her feet, but it wasn’t long after they were married that
old Darryl was off pursuing other women like it was his primary
occupation. And yes, I said women. Plural. When it came to Darryl
Riley and the opposite sex, there was no reason to employ the
singular.

“
He wasn’t even careful
about hiding it,” Liza said. “It was like he just didn’t care if I
knew. Of course, he would always deny it and turn on his charm, but
it was just so damn obvious. He drove me crazy.”

“
I can sure relate to that,”
I said and meant it.

My ex could also be stamped an “asshat”
in Aunt Liza speak.

“
But how did the whole
Voodoo thing start?” I asked, thinking it had to have gotten worse
than this in order for Darryl to have his own shelf full of Voodoo
dolls.

“
We were living in New
Orleans. Darryl was stationed in Belle Chasse with the 3rd
Battalion 23rd Marines. There I was, a young military wife, living
far from home, with a philandering husband.”

“
Nicky never told me you
lived in New Orleans,” I said.

I love that city and its amazing food
too.

“
Well, I’m not surprised he
never mentioned it. My memories of that place and time are mostly
bad, but I did pick up a couple of things down there that’ve come
in handy over the years.”

With a faraway look in her eyes, she
reached over and patted a box of shotgun shells sitting on her
coffee table.

Every surface in the room had a box of
shells. And yes, it disturbed me that shotgun shells seemed to be
her decorative accessory of choice.

“
Old Sweat Pea, for example.
She was a gift from Darryl. He wasn’t always an asshole. Sometimes
he could be the sweetest man alive, and others...”

She gave her head a little shake, left
the past, and came back to the present. “Not long after we were
married, he gave me Sweet Pea along with this snubnosed .38
revolver.”

And damn if she didn’t pull out the
revolver from underneath the sofa cushion.

“
Plus, he taught me to
shoot,” she continued, caressing the gun as if it were one of her
multitude of cats. “Of course, I grew up around guns on the farm,
but Darryl shared some pointers he picked up from his Marines
marksmanship training.”

“
Don’t the Marines use
rifles?” I asked, wondering how many more guns she kept
around.

“
Yes, primarily, but he
thought the shotgun would be better for home defense. You know,
covering a wider area and plenty of stopping power.”

She sure as hell wasn’t kidding about
that. Possibly the understatement of the century. A .10 gauge
shotgun wouldn’t have a problem stopping a grizzly, let alone some
happless human intruder.

“
And I’m guessing the other
thing you brought back from Louisiana was Voodoo?”

I couldn’t help myself. I had to get
her back onto the topic at hand and get that revolver out of her
hands.

She nodded, and I carefully took the
.38 away from her and set it on the table next to my end of the
couch.

“
Most of the time, I was
alone down there and bored out of my mind. So, I took long walks.
My favorite thing was to wander through the old cemeteries and take
in all the lovely tombs.”

In association with the word tomb,
lovely isn’t the first notion that would pop into my head. But,
anyhoo...

“
Cemeteries?”

“
There’s so much history
and...” She folded her hands in her lap before continuing. “It
doesn’t matter. The point is that I met someone.”

“
Go on,” I said, hoping we
were getting closer to her Voodoo experiences.

“
My favorite place to visit
was St. Louis Cemetery #1, and I visited often. I kept running into
the same person. An older woman named Marie. We’d always say hello,
and eventually, we fell into conversation. As it turned out, she
was dealing with the same kind of man troubles that I
was.”

I made a mental note that learning
Voodoo must begin with tomb walking and man troubles.

“
Marie was a wealth of
knowledge. I learned a great deal about the history and characters
of New Orleans. After many weeks of her random lessons, she stopped
in front of a particular tomb.”

“
Whose tomb was
it?”

“
The name on the stone
marker was Glapion. It was a family tomb, but the most interesting
person lying inside was Marie Laveau.”

A second Marie, I noted. Apparently,
there are lots of Maries in the Voodoo world.

“
That name rings a bell, but
I can’t place it,” I said, searching my head for a connection with
Marie Laveau out of the years of research I’d done for my
writers.

“
Her name’s been used here
and there in popular culture, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve
heard it. Marie Glapion Laveau was a powerful Voodoo priestess who
lived in the 1800s. Her and her daughter were hugely famous.
Thousands of people would gather to watch them perform their
rites.”

Damn, if all this wouldn’t make a great
story, I thought, making another mental note to see to it Nicky
included his Aunt Liza’s background in a future book. I sipped my
tea, ready to hear more.

“
That’s not all I learned
that fateful day. The Marie I was walking with was the
great-great-great granddaughter of the original Marie
Laveau.”

“
Wow! Fascinating! So, I
take it you began to learn Voodoo from
your
Marie?” I asked, needing to rush
this history lesson a bit to get to the gist of what she’d done to
our exes.

“
Yes. That’s when I first
began to play around with it. At first, Marie only shared bits and
pieces, but as she got to know me better, she began to open up
more.”

“
Maybe we should start with
how these spells work,” I suggested, honing in on the exact scoop I
needed to begin to figure out how to fix this hex mess.

“
Work? Well, they’re all
supposed to work in different ways.”

“
What do you mean in
different ways?”

“
Just what I said. Each type
of spell has its own peculiarities. But...I’m not always certain
how they’re going to work out.”

Nice
.
Real nice
.
So, you just cast a spell on some poor sucker and don’t have a clue
as to what the consequences will be. That’s comforting.

“
How about filling me in on
the particular spell that you were using earlier today?”

“
Well...”

“
What is it, Liza? Why are
you hesitating? Because of your spells, we’ve got two guys in the
hospital who are lucky they didn’t end up in a
cemetery.”

“
It’s just that Marie asked
me not to share information about the spells. She said that if the
details fell into the wrong hands, then terrible things could
happen.”

Wrong hands? That’s rich coming from
Liza, I silently harrumphed. I wondered if Marie had any real
notion of the type of person she’d decided to share with back in
New Orleans.

Knowing I needed to put Liza’s mind at
ease in order to drag this information out of her, I decided not to
voice my concerns regarding Marie’s lack of discretion.

“
Listen, Liza, I don’t need
you to tell me how you go about casting these spells. I’m sure not
looking to get into the Voodoo business any time soon.”

Or ever, to be perfectly honest, now
that I’ve seen your handiwork, I thought, again without uttering a
word coming from my bitchy subconscious.

“
I’m just trying to get a
handle on what you were trying to accomplish and then, from there,
what might have gone wrong. That’s all. Do you think you could help
me out?”

“
I suppose so. I’m not sure
what that could hurt. Where to begin...okay...first of all, despite
what most people have picked up from movies, Voodoo spells
generally aren’t for hexing others or for revenge. And the whole
thing about sticking pins in dolls to cause an enemy physical pain?
That’s pretty much a Hollywood thing too.”

“
So then, what are these
spells used for?” I asked, willing to admit I didn’t know anything
other than what Hollywood thought it knew about Voodoo.

“
Voodoo spells are generally
used for positive reasons: to get a lover back, success in
business, good luck in gambling, personal protection, healing, you
know, that sort of thing.”

“
But none of those positive
reasons sound anything like what you were trying to accomplish
today.”

“
No. You’re right. The truth
is, when it comes to Darryl, I usually try to tweak one of the
common spells to...well, to mess around with him in a
not-so-positive way.”

“
Tweak a spell? How do you
do that?”

Great
. Now I had to learn the basics of Voodoo plus the tweaked
version too.

“
It’s not an exact science.
I try to figure it out by trial and error. I started by combining
what I learned from Marie with the Santa Muerte rites.”

“
Santa Muerte? Isn’t that
the saint associated with the Day of the Dead in
Mexico?”

Oh boy. We’d shot straight out of the
light and plunged deep into the dark side of karmic
balance.

“
That’s right. She’s also
known as Lady of the Shadows. You see, Santa Muerte and Louisiana
Voodoo are sort of related in that they both come from mixing
traditional religions with Catholicism in the New
World.”