She hurried to the dumpster and struggled to lift the bag over her head. After a few attempts, she managed to shove the bag onto the lip of the dumpster. Another hefty push, and it disappeared into the depths.
Panting from the effort, Adrienne planted her hands on her hips and gave the dumpster a satisfied nod.
“Therese?” The man’s voice was low, smoky and close.
Adrienne jumped and whirled. She didn’t hear his approach from the direction of the alley’s center. He wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up far enough to shade his face. His hands were jammed in his pockets and his jeans dark. The shadows of the alley seemed to cling to him and obscured his form. He was tall, but that was the extent of what she could make out.
She stared at him, ready to run.
“Sorry. My mistake,” he said and turned away.
He was a few steps away before his words registered.
“My sister’s name was Therese.”
“Was.” The stranger stopped and shifted his head over his shoulder without facing her. “Why was?”
“She, um. Died. Five years ago,” she replied.
The man was quiet. He didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe.
Adrienne looked him over, suddenly aware that she was alone with the stranger. Her father warned her about this. The man’s sweatshirt was dark red, the color of the robed figure in Therese’s journal.
Unsettled, Adrienne took a step back, hoping to be discreet when she put distance between them so she had a better chance of escaping.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said at last. There was terse emotion in his voice that made her stop. “What is your name, sister of Therese?”
The stranger was waiting for her response in a way that made her uneasy. As if it was far more important than she warranted it to be.
To give your name is to give someone power over you. Her mother’s superstitious warning returned. Be careful who you trust with yours.
Adrienne had never taken the warning seriously, until this moment. On one hand, it was lame not to give him her name. Everyone knew it. If her mother was right, then wouldn’t everyone have power over her?
On the other hand, Adrienne had seen strange occurrences while with her mother during voodoo ceremonies, most of which she couldn’t explain except that something supernatural happened. She had that sense now, that whoever this stranger was, he wasn’t entirely of this world. What if that was the difference between giving her name to someone normal and to someone … unnatural?
“Is your daddy still in five twenty?” he asked.
Adrienne swallowed hard. How did this stranger know where she lived?
“Do me a favor. Stay out of the alleys after dark. Someone like you can get hurt. Or killed. Or maybe just disappear without a trace. You wouldn’t be the first.”
At her scared silence, the man began walking again.
Adrienne watched him, feeling a chill despite the balmy southern weather.
Therese is a common name down south, she told herself. Still, she watched him walk down the alley. He turned the corner at the end and vanished behind a building.
Knowing her daddy’s apartment wasn’t a coincidence, even if guessing Therese’s name was.
Adrienne bolted. She didn’t stop running until she stood in front of the elevator, waiting for it to open. She hit the button a few times, scared for reasons she didn’t understand. Only when she was safely locked in her father’s apartment did she relax. She paused at the door, staring at it intently.
The strange encounter in the alley had to be some horrible coincidence. Maybe the guy got his car repaired by her father, and somehow, her daddy told him where he lived. Maybe five years ago, he was a neighbor who met Therese before she disappeared.
But the more she thought, the more she realized that there was simply no way the stranger in the alley knew her sister or where her daddy lived.
“Where have you been?” her dad called, jarring her out of her thoughts.
“The chute was overflowing. I took care of it,” she replied quickly. “I’m fixin’ to go to bed, Daddy. Kinda nervous about tomorrow.”
“Okay. Sleep well.”
“You, too.” She glanced into the living room once more as she walked down the hallway.
Her father was a zombie, starring glassy-eyed at the television. Adrienne saddened at the sight of him. The man she recalled from her youth used to smile and laugh. In the two weeks she’d been in Atlanta, he hadn’t smiled once. Had he been this sad since Therese’s death?
Adrienne returned to her room and maneuvered the door closed. She flopped onto her bed and pulled the journal free again, opening it. Would she find the mysterious man from the alley in there somewhere?
She flipped through the entire journal, pausing only at the drawings. She reached the end without finding the hooded man. Disappointed, she closed it.
“You’re so lame, Addy,” she told herself, rolling her eyes. “Even he said it was a mistake.”
She stretched for the pocket sized French dictionary in her book bag and rolled onto her back. She looked up a few of the French words in the journal. They made no more sense than the English words. Frustrated, Adrienne turned to the last page of the journal.
The entire left hand page was of a robed man in red with the strange symbol doodled almost absently into all the white space around the figure. On the right hand page was a short sentence in French.
Adrienne looked up one word then spoke them all aloud.
“He is coming.”
Beneath them was a cross with a skull and crossbones at its center surrounded on all sides by veves of the gods.
The journal ended there.
Adrienne closed it, pensive. She stretched to reach her sticky notes and read through them again in the order she received them.
I’m glad you’re here.
Be careful. He is coming.
Keep the journal safe.
Free us. Find the key.
All were written in different handwriting, but bore the same protection symbol in the same corner, the only unifying factor. They appeared in her room randomly, placed there by someone, maybe the same person who dropped off the journal.
Whoever left them wasn’t trying to scare or hurt her, though. If anything, the opposite was true. Whoever it was, wanted her there. Wanted her help.
“You should totally leave better instructions,” she said to whatever spirits might be listening. “This is kinda creepy. Just leave me like, one long letter instead of all them sticky notes.”
She tucked the notes into the back of the journal and replaced the dictionary in her backpack. She didn’t think her father would search her room the way her mother did, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
Whatever was going on, it was important. She just didn’t understand why.
What is your name, sister of Therese?
The stranger in the alley scared her. Had she just run into the serial killer lurking in the alleys of the Lower Ninth or was he just some creepy guy who knew too much about her?
She opened the top drawer of her nightstand and pulled out the deck of oversized tarot cards she kept with her at all times. Her gaze went to Therese’s shrine. The deck had been hers and was sent back to New Orleans with the rest of her things after her disappearance.
With little money to spend on such things, Adrienne adopted the cards as her own. They were unusual, the backs of each one featuring a coiled snake, a sacred symbol in voodoo representing Papa Legba, the protector and head of the gods who communicated with the one true god. She suspected they were custom made for Therese, because she’d never seen any printed in such a high level of quality, certainly not at Madame Estelle’s.