Angela frowned. “You think that Senator Holloway was having an affair?” she asked incredulously.
Mama Matisse shrugged then. “His wife is a lost soul, and he’s a man in power. Perhaps not an affair. Perhaps he just saw another woman. Perhaps I am wrong. But I liked the senator less that day. He hung up, and came to his wife, and he was caring, but I think that he just wanted her out of the place. He wouldn’t want people saying that his wife was trying to commune with the dead through a voodoo priestess. He came to her and held her, and he was dismissive. He barely glanced at me. He said, ‘Pay the woman, Regina, and let’s go, please.’ You could see that he was contemptuous of the shop, and of voodoo.”
Angela tried to reconcile everything she had heard about the senator with this new information. It was possible that a good man could do bad things. His wife had been beyond consolation, and he had been trying to hold to himself, to his career and a semblance of life.
He was human. No man was perfect; no politician could keep every promise, be it to his family or to his constituency.
She started to rise.
Mama Matisse stopped her. “May I have your hand, child?” she asked.
Angela settled in the chair again and reached across the table. She held Angela’s hand for a long moment, hers so lean and brown, showing the signs of her age, Angela’s like snow against it. Mama Matisse closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them. “You are strong,” she said, “and you are smart, but you’ve suffered tragic losses in your life, and they have left you open to many things. Good things, and bad things, if you don’t learn to buffer your heart. You have great power within you because you have a great heart, and you see the suffering of others. Spirits guide us…they may be mischievous, and they have messages. You may listen to the messages, but you must never cross the line.
“The world is filled with ghosts, ghosts of times that have gone by, and the images in time and space of those events that were cataclysmic, tragic and even joyous. And spirits remain in the in-between world because they cannot or will not leave, because of what they know, or what they, in their wisdom, hope to prevent.” She paused for a moment, looking at Angela. And Angela felt that the woman was reading everything in her soul. Mama Matisse knew. She knew that Angela saw things, or dreamed them, but even in dreams, saw them clearly as when they had happened. For a moment, Angela felt a chill. And then, it seemed that warmth and power came into her hand, the hand that Mama Matisse held, and began to travel all the way through her. “You must be strong, and you must also trust in others,” Mama Matisse told her, “because no man—or woman—can take on the burdens and the tragedies of the past without the strength and vitality of life around them.”
Mama Matisse released Angela’s hand. She had finished; she had said all that she had to say. She arose, arrow straight and thin and with incredible dignity. “Now, if you ever need me, you come back. With or without Whitney, and bring any of your friends. Don’t worry if you believe in voodoo or do not believe in voodoo. It is a religion, as many others. We all see our paths in different ways. A spirit may go by many names.”
Angela and Whitney stood with her.
“Thank you, Mama Matisse,” Angela said gravely. “I will come back.”
Mama Matisse flashed her a quick smile. “I’m glad, and I believe you will. Now, Whitney, child, give your Gran-Mama a hug, and be on your way.”
A few minutes later, they were out of the shop and on the street. “Well?” Whitney asked Angela. “Do you think that maybe he was having an affair—and that maybe Regina found out about it, and that was the last straw, and so she killed herself?”
“Whitney, we looked at the balcony, and we studied pictures of Regina’s body in situ, and it would have been impossible for her to propel herself so far—backwards! No. She didn’t commit suicide. It was murder,” Angela said.
“But Jackson isn’t pulling the police in to point that out yet,” Whitney said.
Angela shrugged.
Whitney studied her for a moment. “You’ve seen something in that room,” she said.
“Sadly, I’m not seeing anything that will help us—not yet,” Angela told her.
“But you’ve seen something,” Whitney said, her tone matter-of-fact. “Let’s go and get in somewhere off the street. My friend owns a place just down a few blocks. Nice quiet courtyard at this time of day, and best pecan coffee you’ve ever tasted.”
Whitney did know the little nooks of the city, certainly better than Angela did. In a matter of minutes, they were sipping really delicious coffee and dining on her friend’s shrimp po’boys, definitely some of the best Angela had ever tasted.
“Gran-Mama was really impressed with you,” Whitney told her. “And the way she held your hand…Gran-Mama can read people. She knows that you have what is called ‘the sight.’”
“Well, not really,” Angela began to protest.
But Whitney laughed. “Why would you deny something like that? Mine is so limited. That’s why I became so fascinated with all the things you can find with film and sound equipment. Oh, I have a sense of things. To most people, I’d be impressive. But I have a feeling that your sixth sense is way superior to mine.”
“Well, I’d never say that,” Angela told her, shrugging and smiling. “We’re brought up to deny the unusual, and we get to be very good at it.”
“But don’t you think it’s obvious? Adam brought us together so that we would support one another. Adam sees ghosts, you know. Well, he sees one ghost. His son, Josh. He couldn’t see his son for years, and then, finally, he did. And it’s the greatest comfort in his life.”
“He sees him?”
Whitney grinned. “Yes, which of course, is strange to people who don’t know what he does—Adam didn’t have a real gift. Josh did. Josh was killed in an accident, but he handed on something very special to the friend who was with him. She was the first person Adam worked with, I’m pretty sure. And that was several years ago now. Anyway, at first, Adam began really discreet investigations. He kept a very low profile. But people in power began to know about him, and he knew about people here and there and he called on them when he needed them. I guess he decided to try putting together an actual team, a unit to stick together, and go about on some of these unusual investigations.”
Whitney spoke in a straightforward manner—as if Adam Harrison had been a contractor who had been doing piecemeal jobs, and then had decided to open his own company. Even working with police who knew a great deal about her, she was still certain that they looked at her as an anomaly fairly frequently. Even when she went through the academy, she was teased, some of the recruits tried to pick on her, but some friends also let the too-obnoxious know that she had suffered a loss, and she was tough and they might not win a fight with her.
She wasn’t so sure about that; she was tough. She worked hard, and she maintained her strength with cardio equipment. But she didn’t know how many of the really huge guys she’d ever take down through sheer brute strength.
“Well, this is an unusual situation,” Angela said.
Whitney was relentless. “So, what are you seeing in the room?”
“It’s not like a vision in a crystal.”
Whitney waved a hand in the air. “I’m not expecting one. What are you seeing?”
Angela sighed. “Children—a little girl, Annabelle, and her older brother, Percy. They were among the first victims of Madden C. Newton.”
“Your face turned green,” Whitney told her.
“Green?”
“Yep, an ashen green. So—I imagine you’re seeing them dead?”
“Worse—I see them getting dead,” Angela told her.
“Hmm,” Whitney said thoughtfully.
“What’s hmm?”
“The children aren’t evil spirits, and they should be resting in some form of gentle afterlife. Of course, you’re seeing a ‘residual’ haunting—something that must happen over and over again. If the children are active—”
“The children are active,” Angela said.
“But—”
“Percy has stood over my bed.”
“Now, that’s interesting. I wonder if Regina Holloway saw the children,” Whitney mused. “Maybe.”
“Maybe she was gifted. Or not. Maybe she was susceptible,” Whitney said.
“To the suggestions of others?” Angela asked.
“That’s always possible.”
“But who would suggest she hurl herself off a balcony?”
“Someone human,” Whitney said. “Or—”
“Or what?”
“The strongest ghost who ever existed.”
Angela laughed suddenly. “Okay, so, we both agree that your great-grandmother is an exceptional woman, and she said that a banishing spell done correctly would allow for ghosts to move on. Which is it? Ghosts exist, but they don’t believe in banishing spells, or they don’t really exist, but someone suggested to Regina that there was a ghost in her bedroom, and so she saw the ghost of a little boy, and he was so strong he hurled her over the balcony?”
“That’s what we’re supposed to find out,” Whitney leaned across the table. “So, how did you really find the skeleton in the basement?”
Angela looked back at her new friend and sighed at last. “I thought about the killer, and I thought about the victim, and I imagined a scene between the two of them. My skeleton would have been Newton’s first victim—in New Orleans, at least—and he would have been testing his skills along with the logistics of committing murder. Easy. Have the man in the kitchen, get him ahead of him on the stairs and bash his head in with a prestashed spade or the like. Get him down—and finish the job. The sound couldn’t possibly have carried, and since the basement is part of the foundation, he had plenty of dirt down there, and he could also hide the stench down there. Fill the place with some kind of herbs while the soft tissue rotted and then the skin mummified around the bones until it became earth to earth as well.”
