The air outside was so thick, they might as well have been swimming. They could see the whole universe in the sky above. They hadn’t taken a flashlight. Neither one of them had ever been afraid of the dark. Mosquitoes buzzed around but only seemed to bite Nessa. She swatted them away and never once thought about turning back. Her grandmother was a serious, hardworking woman who’d never been prone to fits of fancy. Wherever she was going was important, and she wouldn’t have let Nessa come unless her presence was necessary.
They followed the sound down one road, then another. Her grandmother seemed to hear it more clearly. She walked with a limp—a leg broken in her youth hadn’t been set properly—but she moved quickly, even when the asphalt turned to gravel and the gravel to dirt. They were miles from town, with only a single forlorn house far away in the distance, when Nessa’s grandmother turned off the road and into the swamp.
They waded through waist-deep water that Nessa knew for a fact harbored snakes and gators. But her grandmother charged forward without fear and Nessa stayed by her side. They found the woman floating facedown on a clump of swamp grass. Dolores gently rolled the body over and brushed the wet hair from her face. She had been beaten too badly to identify. Her tangerine dress was torn straight down the front. Its tattered edges rippled with the water.
Nessa spotted a young woman wearing a ruffled orange dress perched in a tree a few feet away, looking down at the body. Dolores saw her too and sighed.
“Dear God. It’s Loretta’s daughter.” She bowed her head and said a silent prayer. “You can go now, baby, I’ll tell your mama where you are,” she called out, and the girl in the tree disappeared.
“She’s dead.” Nessa was horrified. “We didn’t reach her in time.”
“She was dead when she called to us,” her grandmother told her. “She wanted to be found. She would have stayed here until someone stumbled across her. I’ll go see her family tonight. Let them know where she is.”
“Someone did this to her. Shouldn’t we call the police?” Nessa asked.
Her grandmother gave Nessa the same look Nessa had been getting from people since she’d traveled down south—a mix of sorrow and surprise, with a hint of envy. The world she came from wasn’t perfect; far from it. But it was still so very different from theirs. “No, baby. That’s why she wanted us to come. Men like that won’t care about a poor girl like her.”
“Still.” Nessa couldn’t just let it go. “Whoever did this has got to be punished.”
“That’s not our job. There are other women who see to that.”
“Who?” Nessa demanded.
“’Round here, it’s my friend Miss Ella.”
Miss Ella was an old white lady who lived in a fishing shack that her granddaddy had built on an island in the middle of the swamp. You needed a boat to reach her, and given the gator population, it wouldn’t have been smart to leave your gun at home, either. But none of that kept a steady stream of visitors from knocking on her door—and anyone with the guts to visit was always welcomed. She was the only one around who knew where to dig up the plants that could soothe a fever or how to grind the roots that would set an enemy’s insides ablaze. Nessa had met her once already, outside the church where Nessa’s grandmother claimed a spot in the second pew every Wednesday and Sunday. Miss Ella had given the girl a good looking over.
“This grandbaby’s special,” she’d told Nessa’s grandmother before heading off toward the swamp. Miss Ella had no time for church—and wouldn’t have been welcomed inside if she had.
Now, at last, Nessa knew what the older woman had meant.
“Is what we do hoodoo?” Nessa asked as they made their way toward the home of the dead woman’s mother. She’d heard talk of islands off the coast where rootworkers and conjure men lived.