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.
Although Adrienne was considered a better singer than Therese, the crotchety old women never accepted her. In all the years she’d been dutifully showing up Sunday mornings to fill her sister’s shoes, they had never smiled at her the way they did Therese. There was something special about Therese. Her sister had never been forgotten by anyone who ever knew her, and Adrienne’s whole life had been filled with comparisons of how much she wasn’t like her sister.
We shared so much more than our looks, Adrienne thought. Even knowing her sister had been dead for five years, she still found herself checking the mail to see if Therese wrote the way she had every week during the year she was in New Orleans.
Would Therese’s journal be filled with writing about school, boys, their father? It was marked with the year she disappeared.
Fingering the soft leather of the journal, Adrienne turned to the first page filled with writing.
The cover was black, plain, and the writing inside red. It was neat and feminine, interlaced with geometric veves. Like the rest of her mother’s family, Therese had been a follower of the mysterious religion brought over to the Americas originally from Africa.
Adrienne tried to read through the first page and frowned. Half the writing was in French, the other half in English. The words, though, didn’t fit together. Some letters were randomly capitalized and the sentences were nonsensical. The only thing that she was able to make out with any certainty was the protective symbols scattered throughout each page. Skulls and crossbones, crosses, and the veve of Papa Legba were carefully drawn.
“I’m sorry I missed hearin’ you sing at church this morning, pun’kin. You ready for your first day at the snob-school tomorrow?”
Adrienne jammed the journal under her pillow just as her father appeared in the doorway. His potbelly, drooping shoulders, and dull eyes were signs of how rough the past few years had been. He had been the most handsome man she ever knew at one point, but no longer.
“I think so,” she replied. “I ironed the daylights out of my uniform yesterday.”