Читать книгу The Cherokee Rose - Tiya Miles - Страница 10

1

Jinx Micco walked the path to her Craftsman cottage, breathing a sigh of false relief. After work, when she could be alone with her thoughts, used to be her favorite time of day. But that had changed with the column. She fumbled in her messenger bag for her keys, ignoring the ugly garden beds beside the doorway. If her Great-Aunt Angie had still been tending them, the beds would have brimmed this time of year with long-lashed black-eyed Susans and heavy-headed sunflowers. Nothing grew in those old plots now except for the odd clump of scrub grass, which Jinx knew her great-aunt would have plucked the moment she saw it.

She stepped into the husk of a house, breathing in the musty smell of 1920s plaster. The place was hers now, its walls covered with a faded floral wallpaper, its furniture curve-backed and overstuffed, its rayon Kmart curtains edged in scratchy lace. Photographs of family members, framed and mounted, crowded the walls like scrapbook pages. Jinx was not a lace-and-flowers kind of girl, but she had kept it all anyway. She hadn’t changed a thing in this house since the inheritance—not the throw pillows, not the dishes, not the harvest-gold appliances. The cottage looked exactly as Aunt Angie had left it.

Jinx changed out of her khaki pants and slipped into comfy cutoff sweats. She unwound her hair from its braid to let it fall loosely around her face, toasted now after countless walks in the Oklahoma summer sun. Jinx settled into her aunt’s easy chair and dove into one of Deb’s charbroiled burgers, watching a rerun of Charlie’s Angels on the old rabbit-ear TV set. She wished she had some strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert; she was sure she had ordered a slice. Instead, she settled for a handful of Now & Laters, annoyed at having to unwrap each candy square. Jinx washed her dinner plate, switched off the television, and raised the windows. A moist breeze ruffled the curtains as she settled into her great-aunt’s study to start her evening’s work.

Angie Micco had been a pack rat, collecting any and every book on Muscogee history, saving each Sunday issue of the Muskogee Phoenix, and scouting out past editions of old Creek-area newspapers. She had century-old back issues of the Phoenix, the Eufaula Indian Journal, the Muskogee Comet, and the Muskogee Cimeter stacked to the roofline of the terra-cotta bungalow. Leaning over an open book at her great-aunt’s desk, Jinx tried to focus on her research. But she couldn’t shake the nagging sense that something was wrong. Ever since her last column, she had felt out of sorts. The source of her discomfort was not internal, like a stomachache or guilt pang; it was external, like a free-floating irritant in the air. And now she was up against a deadline for her next installment of the “Indian Country Yesterday” column she had created. Her editor, a third cousin through a second marriage, was getting antsy. Read, she told herself. Focus.

She was supposed to be researching the Green Peach War of 1882, a major event in late-nineteenth-century Creek history. “Traditional” Creeks led by Chief Isparhecher, the ousted judge who wanted to maintain a tribal government, had waged a flash battle with “progressive” Creeks led by Principal Chief Checote, who wanted to run the Creek government like the United States. The traditionalists were the heroes of the story, the progressives glorified sellouts. When it came to the black-and-white of Creek history, Jinx took a hard line. Gray was just not a color she believed in. She had never been one of those hesitant students who had trouble making up or speaking her mind back when she was taking graduate-school seminars. One professor who she knew didn’t think she belonged there had even called her work “potentially polemical.” She had shot back that he was “potentially racist” and asked why no Native American historians were on his syllabus. He gave her a C in the class, tantamount to an F in graduate school, and wrote in the margin of her final paper that her analysis “lacked sufficient nuance.”

Jinx leaned sideways and plucked the folder on Chief Isparhecher from the “People” drawer of her great-aunt’s filing cabinet. She loved that Aunt Angie had kept paper files on historical figures in the Creek Nation. She skimmed an old clipping on Isparhecher and his motley crew of anti-assimilationist activists, squinting at the tiny print and pushing back a loose skein of hair. She jotted down interesting points on her legal pad. Later, she would turn those points into an explanatory argument and send in her column for the Muscogee Nation News.

Jinx’s hand itched. Her legs felt cramped. Something was wrong in her great-aunt’s house. Something was out of balance, like a dish off a shelf, a door off its hinge, a weed in the garden.

c

“Morning, Deb,” Jinx said from her perch on a stool at the L-shaped diner counter.

Deb Tom was a big-boned woman with bay-brown skin and silver hair that rolled down her back in waves. Some tribal members considered it a flaw that she had such prominent black ancestry, but they didn’t dare show their feelings out in the open. Deb’s words could be sharper than her homemade hot sauce, and the helpings just as generous. And Deb didn’t hesitate to throw offending customers out of her café and on to the street corner. Everybody loved Deb’s home-style cooking too much to cross her. That’s why Jinx was there.

“Well, well, well, if it ain’t Jinx Micco. Didn’t think I’d see you around ’til dinnertime.” Deb held a coffeepot in one hand, made the rounds refilling mugs, took her own sweet time circling back to Jinx. “Coffee?” Deb said. She knew Jinx didn’t drink it.

“No thanks. I’m saving myself for Coke. I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day, about my column on Mary Ann Battis. What didn’t you like about it? Why were you so pissed off?”

Deb was a regular reader of “Indian Country Yesterday” and usually had positive feedback. But she had given Jinx flack for that piece on black Creek Christians, the one that mentioned a mission-school student named Mary Ann Battis back in the East. As a descendant of Cow Tom, a famous black Creek interpreter from the nineteenth century, Deb had taken offense—unwarranted offense—at the nature of the subject matter.

“Maybe you should leave poor Mary Ann alone. She was just a girl.”

“Maybe I should, and maybe I shouldn’t. I can’t tell yet. You were mad enough at me to forget the dessert in my carry-out last night. Don’t you think I have a right to know why, Deb?”

“How come you had to be so hard on Mary? Telling the story like she betrayed her own mama? The way I read it, you made that girl responsible for the entire downfall of Creek traditional religion.”

Sam Sells, a retired breakfast regular who always took Deb’s side, turned his eyes away from his eggs to glare at Jinx.

“Come on, Deb.” Jinx lowered her voice. “The story wasn’t even mostly about that student. It was about the Methodist missionaries’ failed attempts at converting Southern Creeks in the early 1800s. I had to write that Creek traditionalists rejected Christianity, and that the Creeks’ black slaves were the first to accept the faith, because that’s the way it happened. Those first slave converts were the ones who laid the groundwork for Creek conversion to Christianity down the line. Battis was just an example. Who would have thought that a part-Creek child of an Indian mother and black father would want to stay behind with white missionaries while her mother was removed to Indian Territory? It made an interesting ending for the column. Is it really that big a deal? Can’t you forgive me? And could I have some Coke, please, and some pancakes with bacon?”

Deb was staring, apparently unimpressed with Jinx’s argument and command of the facts. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You see her life as no big deal, but she was big to somebody. Didn’t your auntie, the great tribal historian, teach you that words can be swords, that words can be scalpels—and saving graces, too? What you wrote is the last impression anybody has, the last thing anybody might remember, about that girl. They’ll say she was a sellout who rejected her own mama in a nation that reckoned kin along the mama’s bloodlines, and they’ll be citing you. Oh, yeah, and they’ll say she was black—that’s the essential ingredient of your traitor story.” Deb threw her hand on her hip. “Benny,” she called back to the kitchen, “go ahead and get Jinx’s order up!”

Jinx dove into the glass of icy Coke that Deb set before her. After a long moment, she looked up again. “Deb, come on. I don’t care that Battis was black. I mean, I do care, but I don’t care. She was just as much Indian as you or me.”

“Don’t you dare try that colorblind crap on me. I know you too well, Jennifer Inez Micco, ever since you was a baby. And I can’t say as I’ve noticed you calling any of your other Indian figures, no matter how mixed with white they were, ‘part-Creek’ in your column.” Deb paused, then dropped the grenade she had been hiding in her apron pocket all along. “Like auntie, like niece, I guess.”

“What?” Jinx exploded, causing Sam Sells to slosh his coffee over the top of his chipped ceramic mug. Deb’s other morning diners were craning their necks to get a look at who was making the commotion. Her mother would hear about this before ten o’clock, Jinx was sure. “Are you calling my aunt a racist?” Jinx wasn’t afraid to use the race card either. If Deb could deal it, she could play it.

But Deb was Deb; she stood her ground. “Angie Micco was a lot of things, some good and some bad. But one thing she wasn’t was open-minded about people who were different.” She looked intently at Jinx. “Any kind of different.”

Jinx chipped her words off the ice of her thoughts, gripped the sweating glass, empty now of soda. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do, honey. I think you do. Here’s your breakfast. Eat up and get on over to the library before you make yourself late.”

c

Jinx hiked over to the slab cement public-library building and stowed her messenger bag. For a part-time job, it wasn’t bad, even if only schoolchildren and members of the Saturday ladies’ book club found their way into the local branch. The children bounced in like balloons for story time and then were gone in a swirl of color and motion. The ladies’ club read historical romances, which Jinx could probably appreciate if they contained just a sliver of irony. She had taken the job more for the books than the people. Books were constant company and had personality to boot. Spending her days at easy book work kept her mind clear for the evenings too, when she did her writing and cataloged her great-aunt’s files. Her library income paid the taxes on Angie’s house, which didn’t sit on tribal land in their checkerboard Oklahoma town where former Creek Nation lots had gone to white residents over the years. It also paid for her fruit-pie habit at Deb’s, her Twizzlers habit at the 7-Eleven, and her daily Coca-Colas.

When Angie Micco left her house and everything in it to Jinx, no one in the family had minded. From the time she was a tiny girl, Jinx had gravitated to Aunt Angie, circling her ample form like a small moon to its planet. There were photos of Jinx as a sixth-month-old sitting on Aunt Angie’s lap, sucking on the end of her aunt’s thick eyeglasses. At family feeds and cookouts, she toddled behind Aunt Angie, clasping soggy fry bread chunks in her fists. Everyone said it was Angie, not the kindergarten teacher, who taught Jinx to read. At picnics in the arbor, the two of them would settle on a blanket all their own, reading old Indian Territory newspapers and reacting in tandem to the goings-on of historical figures Aunt Angie had taught Jinx to know. Except for Jinx’s mother, who would pause beside them now and then to smooth back Jinx’s hair and refill Angie’s coffee mug, the relatives had left them to their studies.

For Jinx’s twelfth birthday, Aunt Angie gave her a series of early-edition Creek history books that had been sold by the tribal college after it updated its library collection. When Jinx turned sixteen and finally asked Aunt Angie an Indian history question she couldn’t answer with certainty, Aunt Angie had smiled and said it was time for Jinx to leave the nest. At seventeen, Jinx went off to college on scholarship at the University of Tulsa. “That one’s a smart cookie, trained by Angie,” everyone back home had said. Four years later, Jinx set off for graduate school to pursue her doctorate in history. Aunt Angie, then seventy-six with dyed purplish hair and the same oversized eyeglasses, had ridden shotgun next to Jinx on the cross-country trip to North Carolina, telling Jinx what turns to make and which lane to drive in, even though she herself hadn’t driven a day in her life. Eight years later, Jinx had yet to earn her degree. When her mother called to say Aunt Angie was gone, Jinx packed up the notes and files for the dissertation she would never finish and returned straight home to Ocmulgee.

“There you are, Jennifer! I was about to send out the troops!” Emma called when she spotted Jinx in the empty reading room. Jinx’s cheery coworker was dressed in a delicate yellow sundress and flat-soled sandals, her hair neatly clipped with a matching barrette. Emma’s looks whispered librarian, while Jinx’s shouted tomboy. Jinx sported her favorite oversized cargo khakis and the cherry-red Converse high tops that made some of the older patrons blink in surprise.

“Send in the troops?” Jinx said.

“Right! Do you have any plans for the morning? Mindy’s day-care group will be here at ten. If you don’t mind, I thought I’d take them.”

“Knock yourself out,” Jinx said. “I’ve got some returns to process, and the nature section is a mess after that Boy Scout troop rifled through it yesterday.”

“Thanks, Jennifer! I just can’t wait for the school year to start. Then we’ll have classroom visits once a week. All of those kiddies with their new lunchboxes and stuffed pencil cases. They’re just so cute.”

“Too cute,” Jinx said. “I’ll be in the back, if you need me.”

Jinx made her way to the cramped office area where Emma’s cuddly-kittens calendar swung from a bulletin board and her pointelle knit sweater draped the back of a chair. Emma would be busy for a while setting out puzzles and selecting stories for the kids. Their branch director, Marjorie, hardly ever came in on Friday mornings and wouldn’t be the wiser. Jinx plopped down in front of the computer and settled in to surf the Internet.

Mary Ann Battis got no hits when she typed it into the Google search bar, but the name of the mission where she had first gone to school returned a series of articles. Jinx opened a link concerning Alabama state historic sites that blurbed the Fort Mitchell Asbury Mission School, next to the photo of a historical marker. The Methodist mission school in the Creek Nation, located on the Georgia-Alabama border, had been destroyed by fire in the early 1800s. Most of the children were relocated to nearby white Christian homes, but advanced students had been transferred to a Moravian mission school in the Cherokee Nation, housed on the estate of a wealthy Cherokee chief named James Hold. When Jinx Googled James Hold, a score of tourist websites popped up profiling the “devil-may-care” Cherokee “entrepreneur” and describing his “showplace” plantation on the Georgia “frontier.” Jinx clicked on a link about the Hold Plantation museum, this one to a recent newspaper article: “State Cuts Pull Rug from under Cherokees, Friends of the Hold House.”

She skimmed the article. The historic Hold Plantation site was being pawned off by the state like a broken turntable. It wasn’t as bad as when the United States government had put the Creek Council House up for sale in 1902, but it was bad enough. This plantation was the last place Mary Ann Battis was known to have lived. Traces of her might still exist among the auctioned household items. The home would be sold within a month and would probably fall into some rich white man’s hands, just like most Indian land of any value. But maybe the door had not completely closed. Maybe the house was full of old museum documents she could request copies of.

“Story time, children!” Jinx heard Emma sing-songing out in the multipurpose room. “It’s Mary Poppins today! And then we’ll make tissue-paper umbrellas!”

Jinx printed out the pages from her search, then scooped up the pile of book returns. Someone had been on a supernatural-romance binge and was partial to Heather Graham. Someone else—a middle-schooler, she guessed—had finished a summer science project on undersea volcanoes. And someone fond of sticky notes—most likely a gardener—had tabbed several pages in a book called Dangerous Plants.

c

Jinx didn’t stop by Deb’s that night. She warmed a can of pork and beans and ate it with toast and a hunk of commodity cheese her cousin had brought over. Then she sat in her aunt’s desk chair and reread her last week’s “Indian Country Yesterday” article. She still didn’t see anything wrong with the argument she had advanced that black and black Indian Christian converts like Mary Ann Battis had furthered the cultural assimilation of the tribe. True, her readers could infer that she questioned Battis’s choice in shunning Creek family life in exchange for the Christian faith. But her facts were correct—of that Jinx was certain. If Deb Tom wanted to claim that her writing wasn’t sensitive enough, that was fine with Jinx. She didn’t deal in sanitized history. That was a job for the Pine-Sol lady.

Jinx opened a dog-eared book on the history of the Green Peach War. She compiled more facts in her notebook, glancing up at the windows and walls, distracted by the strange undercurrent in the air. She sighed, craving pie and feeling uneasy. Maybe Aunt Angie had information on Mary Ann Battis in her collection of papers.

Jinx turned to her aunt’s filing cabinet. Battis was there. The wafer-thin folder had only four microfilmed letters inside, from the Creek Agency records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Jinx shifted toward a shelf and pulled down the general Creek history books, searching for Battis in the indexes. She found her listed in two studies. The authors disagreed about whether the girl’s mother or father had been black and whether her black parent had been enslaved or free. But the authors, like Jinx, agreed that Battis chose to remain with the missionaries while her Indian family suffered the trial of compulsory removal. It was the only conclusion that could be reached from the documentary record. There was nothing new here—nothing Jinx could see.

She closed the file on Chief Isparhecher, opened the top drawer of her great-aunt’s metal filing cabinet, and slid the folder back inside. Then she opened the second drawer to put the Battis folder in place. Jinx looked from drawer to drawer, realizing for the first time that these files were not in alphabetical, chronological, or even thematic order. She slung open every drawer then, running her fingers along the razor-edged folders like a blind person speed-reading Braille. Could it be that her great-aunt’s biographical files were organized by race, full-bloods positioned at the top, mixed-bloods placed in the back, and black Creeks stuffed into a segregated second-tier drawer? Could it be that Jinx with her almost-Ph.D. had come along two generations later and maintained the same color-coded filing system? Deb Tom’s accusations against her great-aunt—against her—rang in Jinx’s head.

“Holy smokes,” Jinx said to no one. She abandoned the study, snapping off the painted floral lamp. She brushed her teeth in the subway-tiled bathroom and pulled on a pair of boxer shorts. Her bedroom—her great-aunt’s bedroom—was shadowy and still. And then a cool breeze floated through a window, tangling with the flat interior air. Jinx turned in surprise. It was early September in Oklahoma, where even nighttime breezes were sticky and warm. The curtains fluttered as she watched. Jinx had never taken those curtains down, never washed them or dusted the rods. She reached out, gently touching a lace-edged hemline that left a faint trail of dust on her fingertip.

c

When Jinx walked into Deb’s Diner early the next morning with her messenger bag slung over her shoulder, Deb just looked at her for ten still seconds. “Sit,” Deb finally said, gesturing toward the counter.

She set a glass of Coke beside Jinx, along with a napkin and fork. Sam Sells was having sausage and biscuits smothered in gravy. He nodded a silent greeting at Jinx from beneath the rim of his John Deere baseball cap. Jinx breathed in relief.

“Nobody talks about Mary Ann Battis much these days, among the freedmen descendants,” Deb said. “There’s some pain there, I guess, pain still felt from a story long forgotten. Mary Ann’s daddy—they called him Battis—was a black man who took his own freedom. I always heard he came through Alabama Creek country on a forged government passport back in the 1790s. And her mama, well, she lost touch with the girl once the family came out here to Indian Territory. Her mama got one letter and never heard tell of poor Mary Ann after that.”

“That’s some story, Deb,” Jinx said. “Sad.”

“That’s only part of the story. The rest of it, we don’t know. But you could find out for all of us. You could head back east. Go to Alabama, where Mary was from. Find her grave. Sit with her for a spell. Get your information from the real source instead of some book.”

Jinx didn’t dare cut into the fluffy blueberry pancakes that Sadie, one of the waitresses, had delivered to the counter. Deb was looking at her too intensely, waiting to see if Jinx would accept her assignment. Communing with the dead to corroborate a loose oral story was not one of Jinx’s usual research methods. But there was that plantation for sale in Georgia, and there were those hypothetical house-museum documents.

“Wait here,” Deb said, having made some mysterious decision. “I might have something for you.”

Jinx was left to worry and wonder while she packed in mouthfuls of pancake.

When Deb returned, huffing and puffing from her exertions, Jinx was sure she had walked all the way back to her shotgun house down the alley from the restaurant. Deb was holding a wrinkled manila envelope twined shut with a thin red cord.

“What is it?”

Deb leaned forward on the counter, exposing cleavage in the deep V of her neckline. “This was part of my great-grandfather Cow Tom’s papers. The family kept them stashed away in a cardboard box all these years. I take them out from time to time and read them, share bits and pieces with the freedmen’s descendants groups. I never could make heads or tails of this letter. But I bet you could if you set your mind to it.” Deb paused. “It might just be the push you need to finish that dissertation.”

Jinx snapped her head up. “I didn’t finish because my great-aunt died. I had to come home.”

“No, baby. You didn’t finish because once things got tough out there, once those university folks challenged what you thought you knew, you tucked tail and ran. Your auntie’s death was hard on you, that’s true, but it was also a ready excuse for you to give up. You were born to study history, Jinx, born to write about it. You’ll soon find out that life’s too short not to chase your dreams. Here, hon, open it.” She handed the envelope to Jinx.

Stung by Deb’s blunt words, Jinx hesitated, but she couldn’t resist the call of that envelope. She untwined the thin cord and drew out a saffron page. The paper was cracked and brittle, flaking at her touch like the salted surface of a pretzel stick. She worried about the oil of her fingertips damaging the document. If this had been an archive, she would have been asked to wear white gloves before handling something so fragile. Down the counter, Sam Sells waved to Sadie for a refill of coffee. Behind the counter, Benny fried eggs and wiped his brow with a forearm. Jinx scanned the paper, taking in its prominent features: shape, texture, date, script. Antiquated cursive loops, beautiful in form, trailed across the page.

April 18, 1826

Dear Mother,

I pray this letter reaches you before much more time has passed, whether you be in the West or still here in the East. I hope it can be read to you, for when we last saw one another, neither of us could speak or read the English language. My mind turns to you on this tenth anniversary of the death of my godmother in Christ. I could not accept the loss of her then, as I could not, a lifetime ago, accept the loss of you.

I do not blame you, Mother. Do not blame yourself. You had no means to feed me. The mission school at the fort took me in and placed me among their pupils. At the tender age of eleven years, I was one of the eldest. I learned the ways of civilization and tried my best to be good, but ghosts haunted me at the school; ghouls grasped at me. They pulled my gown in the dark, split my braids in two, unfolded my insides, and stole me from myself. I had a child. She did not survive. What was I to do?

I set the place on fire and watched it burn. They would not let me return to you, would not let me see your face, even when you came to beg for my return, even when my uncle came dressed in white men’s clothing to strengthen your entreaties.

And so I was exiled to the Cherokee Rose and given the gift of a second family. I have lately heard the news from my godfather that our lands in Alabama will soon be claimed by that same ravenous horde who settled our lands within the borders of Georgia, and that more of our people will go west. I cannot come to you, Mother, despite my affection, which forever abides. I must remain here always, to do the Lord’s work and tend the graves of my other mothers. Even as I write you, I sit in my godmother’s chair, reading the pages of her Bible, worn from the tread of her finger: “Whither thou goest I will go, and whither thou lodgest I will lodge. Thou people shall be my people and thy God my God. Whither thou diest, I will die, and there will I be buried.”

I seek only to do the bidding of the Lord. I pray that you and my uncle are safe, that my brothers and sisters care for you even as I would have done. I pray that the new land in the West is fertile and rich and that a future may be possible for our people.

Yours forever in the wounds of Christ Jesus,

MAB

Jinx dragged her eyes from the page. MAB. Mary Ann Battis.

Deb Tom was watching her with that same intense stare. “We’ve been waiting over two hundred years to learn what became of our Mary Ann. That’s damn sure long enough, even on Indian time. I think you’re the one who can find out. The question is, will you?”

Deb was not the first person to ask Jinx for information in the five years since she had been back in Oklahoma. Right away, people had started coming to her with their research questions. “Your great-aunt Angie used to say you’d know this,” they’d begin as they put a question to her about a fifth cousin, once removed. “Your aunt Angie said to ask you, if she wasn’t here,” they’d explain when they inquired about a rift on the nineteenth-century Tribal Council. That was how Jinx came to know that she had inherited not only a house but a role as well: family historian. Because the Creek Nation was one big family of families, all interwoven through the cartilage of kinship and history, and because Jinx was not just Creek, but Cherokee, too, on her father’s side, the role of family historian could be the work of a lifetime. Aunt Angie had devoted herself to the study of history. Jinx had failed at it.

Jinx replaced the letter in its envelope and handed it back to Deb without speaking. She reached inside her pocket for a ten-dollar bill, placed it on the counter, and took one last long swig of Coke. Beneath the tinkling of the diner’s bell, she made her escape.

c

“Are you going to Deb’s tonight?” Jinx’s cousin Victor said on the telephone.

Jinx had spent the afternoon on the back porch of the bungalow typing up her column. Now she was in the living room fiddling with Aunt Angie’s ceramic figurine collection.

“I’m getting a little tired of Deb’s cooking. I thought I might go to Applebee’s or cook at home. Do you and Berta want to come over? I can make Indian tacos.”

“Okay, spill it.” They had grown up like sister and brother, and Victor could still read her mind.

“Long story or short?” Jinx fingered the fringe on her cutoff blue jeans.

“Short,” Victor said.

“I messed up my last column and might have told only part of the truth. Deb Tom is pissed off and wants to send me out on assignment.”

“ ‘Early Christianity in the Creek Nation.’ I read that one. A little dry, maybe, but that’s no crime. Don’t let Deb Tom push you around, Jinx. I know you feel close to her, but there are limits. You don’t need to be all torn up about some column. I mean, you didn’t lie. You didn’t slander anybody.”

“Libel. Slander is when the defamation of a person is spoken. Libel is when it’s written.”

“Fine, you didn’t libel anybody. What does she want, anyway, some kind of retraction?”

“She didn’t say that, not directly. She wants me to go to the Southeast and research this girl. She wants me to find out what really happened to her.”

“A road trip? Now you’re talking. Does Deb Tom pay mileage?”

“You don’t think I should go, do you?” Jinx said, freezing in front of the figurine shelf.

“I think you want to go, or you wouldn’t be upset about it. And I think you could use a vacation. You need to get out of that house. It’s like a mausoleum in there. If you don’t watch out, twenty years will pass and you’ll be on Hoarding: Buried Alive with a wall of old newspapers blocking your door. So if Deb Tom is giving you a reason to get out of there for a while, I say you should take it.”

“I’d have to get time off from the library,” Jinx said, walking into the bedroom to pace in front of her great-aunt’s dresser mirror.

“If you give me a week to arrange things, I’ll come with you,” Victor said. “Where is it we’re going?”

Jinx smiled at that. “Georgia.”

“What? The Coca-Cola capital of the world, and Jinx Micco’s still sitting there? When do we leave?”

“Victor, you’re a Hotshot. It’s fire season. You can’t just take off.”

“But you can. The children’s library will make it without you for a week.”

“The library’s not just for children, Vic. We have other programs.”

“The Saturday ladies. Right.”

“How is it that you always end up pissing me off?”

“Because I know you too well, little sister. You’ve already got Monday off for the holiday, so it’s like the weekend hasn’t even started yet. Pack up your stuff and come over. We’ll chart your route on MapQuest.”

c

Jinx wheedled a week’s vacation out of Marjorie and spent the late afternoon making plans in Victor’s trailer. If she got as far as the Arkansas border tonight, then did just six hours a day, she would have two days each way for travel and four days in between for the research.

Back at the bungalow, she packed a nylon duffle bag with T-shirts, cargo pants, underwear, and athletic socks. She stuffed her orange canvas messenger bag with the Mary Ann Battis file, a Craig Womack novel, and a Nancy Clue mystery. She stuck her toothbrush and deodorant into a plastic baggie and left a message on her mom’s machine telling her not to panic. She didn’t contact Deb Tom.

Grabbing a fresh can of Coke and an unopened bag of Twizzlers, Jinx headed out of the quiet house. She locked the door behind her and climbed into her Chevy. It was the same truck she had driven cross-country thirteen years ago, setting off for graduate school with Aunt Angie beside her. Jinx could almost see her now, a ghost riding shotgun, with burgundy curls, soft-veined hands, and thick eyeglasses.

Headlights blazing, gas tank full, Jinx flew out of town.