Cursed (6 page)

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.”

“If it goes well, we can get ice cream,” he offered. “If you’re not too old for ice cream.”

“No, Daddy, I’m not.”

“I can’t believe you’re seventeen. I don’t remember seeing you grow up.”

Were his words directed at her? She wasn’t certain. His gaze was on the small shrine to Therese on top of her dresser. This had been Therese’s room five years ago, and Adrienne loved the idea that they were still able to share something more than their looks and ability to sing. They looked a lot alike: same white-blonde hair they got from their father and amethyst green eyes they inherited from their mother.

Therese had been athletic and tall, like their parents, standing almost six feet tall at the age of seventeen. Adrienne was tiny and preferred reading to sports. She barely reached her father’s shoulder.

“I’m glad you got the scholarship,” her father said. “It’s been a long time since I saw you kids. I told your mother there’s more opportunity for you here.”

“I know, Daddy,” she murmured. “It’s good to be here now. I missed you.” With a mother on welfare and a father who was a mechanic, Adrienne had only been able to come because of the music scholarship and her job reading tarot cards.

Money wasn’t the only reason she hadn’t come sooner. She loved her daddy too much to tell him that her mother still blamed him for the death of Therese. Their mother hoped New Orleans with its rich culture of magic would protect Therese from the curse afflicting the firstborn members of their family.

“Remember what I told you,” he said firmly. “Stick to main streets if you’re going to walk to school. No alleys and avoid the graveyard. And no walking after dark. If I’m working, one of the other guys from the shop can pick you up. Cops won’t come to the Projects and they gave up trying to find the psycho serial killer after the first couple of years. He pops up every few months. I won’t lose another little girl.”

She smiled warmly. “I’ll be fine, Daddy. My vocal practice is before school. I already done bought
my bus pass.”

“All right.” He lingered in her doorway, eyes on the picture of Therese again. He said nothing further and left.

Adrienne waited until she heard the sound of the television turn on. She pitied him. He needed someone to take care of him. All he consumed was microwave meals and beer, and he seemed uninterested in life in general. Since moving in, she’d taken over making him breakfast and dinner and even packing him a lunch for work. She cleaned, too, doing everything she could to help him.

It’s not your fault, Daddy,
she wanted to tell him. The curse took her sister, even if her inevitable death came at the hands of a serial killer.

Eyes on the mirror over her tiny dresser, Adrienne rose and crossed to the small shrine. Something seemed off about it this evening. Therese’s softball glove and ball, a songbook and a collection of school pictures were all that remained of the girl. The police hadn’t even found a body, which their mother attributed to the curse swallowing her daughter whole.

Adrienne pushed the thick strap of her tank top to the side so she was able to see the mark beneath it. At first glance, the discolored patch appeared to be nothing more than a birthmark. Unless one knew what it was. It was the mark of the family curse, a triangle of symbols: a cross, a misshaped skeleton key, and the number ninety-nine.

It appeared on her seventeenth birthday this past spring. Adrienne studied it, uncertain why she wore the mark of the curse when it had already claimed the firstborn of her family for this generation. Did her entire family bear the mark of the curse, or was there something more going on?

She rose on her tiptoes to make sure the veve she’d drawn with crushed eggshells under the shrine was still there. It was a little smudged, but present. She concentrated on fixing it then dropped back to her heels.

What was off about the small collection of items?

One of the pictures was skewed. She nudged it back into place only to see the pale yellow of another sticky note. Adrienne gripped its corner with her fingernails and pulled it free.

Free us. Find the key.

A chill went through her. “Free who?” she asked, looking around her room. “Or what?”

Was the key a real-live key or symbolic?

The smiling pictures of Therese didn’t answer.

Adrienne sighed. She went back to her bed and added the newest member of the sticky note mysteries to the group. She pulled the journal from beneath her pillow. She had seen too many voodoo ceremonies to be scared of a few supernatural sticky notes. Nothing was as terrifying as seeing her mother’s eyes roll back in her head when the spirits of their ancestors possessed her.

Who had sent the journal to her, if not her mother?

She flipped through its pages, pausing to study the elaborate veves. Some looked like they’d been traced while others were clearly freehand. Adrienne’s excitement grew when she ran across a page she could actually read. Instructions for how to slaughter and then prepare chickens for sacrifice were written in the same hand as the nonsensical words on every other page.

The recipe was the only passage that Adrienne could decipher. The writing was mostly incoherent, lacking punctuation and sentence structure. The wording was random and confusing.

Halfway through the book, she began to notice the strange sketches of a robed man in red. They were small at first, filling up corners or other blank spaces. As she turned the pages, the images became more frequent and larger, as if they were trying to muscle into the book in place of words. A symbol she didn’t recognize accompanied him: that of a cross splintered by a lightning bolt on the background of a malformed heart.

Who was he? Why had Therese drawn him obsessively? Why didn’t most of the journal make sense?

Adrienne glanced around. Her heart was flying like she’d just run up the stairs to her father’s apartment. She pushed the journal under her pillow. The unsettling image of a robed man in red stuck with her.

Needing a break, she went to the kitchen,. The garbage can was overflowing.

“I’m taking out the trash, Daddy!” she called over the sound of the television.

“Okay, honey.”

Adrienne grunted, pulling the overflowing garbage bag out of its trashcan. She tied it closed and moved towards the door. The television was loud. A peek into the living room revealed her father seated on the couch with another beer, the upper half of his overalls shoved around his waist to reveal the white t-shirt beneath.

He seemed to be in a trance.

Was it wrong for her to wish he took as much interest in her as he did in mourning her sister?

She left the apartment and eased the door closed. Adrienne walked down the hallway to the garbage chute and stopped short, seeing the pile of bags in front of it.

“It’s always broken,” she muttered. She’d taken more than one trip to the alley to toss their garbage.

She went to the elevator, pleased when it opened without any wait. It was seven in the evening on a Sunday, and the building was quiet. Half the numbers were missing from the buttons, and a panel in the ceiling sagged. Like the rest of the building, the elevator was worn down and falling a part. She got off on the main floor and managed to heft the bag over her shoulder.

Walking through the front door, Adrienne breathed in the humid air of September. It was mixed with the smell of exhaust and a recent rain. She walked to the alley and paused, recalling her father’s warning about being out after dark.

The dumpsters were about twenty feet into the well-lit alley. The streets were quiet, aside from the occasional passing of a slow moving vehicle. There wasn’t anywhere for criminals to hide, and she doubted anyone could tolerate the smells rolling off the dumpster long enough to hide behind it.

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.