The Magnolia League

27





Constance Taylor wakes up in her soaking-wet bed. She is panting, her heart is pounding, her room is too hot, and her throat is too dry. Traveling all over the world, sleeping in hundreds of different rooms in dozens of different countries, has trained her to wake up when something is wrong. Right now something is very wrong. Right now someone is in her room.

She looks at the closet: The door is closed. She looks at the window, but she sees nothing there. She turns her head to the doorway, and there he is. The outline of a man standing in the hall, watching her. She freezes, but it’s too late. He’s been watching her a long time; he watched her thrashing in her sleep, he watched her wake up, and he knows she sees him.

Excited, he makes a little wet sound with his mouth and starts walking toward her. He has a doctor’s bag in one hand, and he opens it and takes out something ruined and nasty. He holds it out. It’s a dead cat.

Constance overcomes her paralysis and grabs for the bedside table, yanking open the drawer, going for the little lady’s .22-caliber she keeps there. The surgeon covers the distance to her bed in three quick strides, and his muddy hand clamps down on her wrist. He pulls her out of bed and she falls to the floor and she…

Wakes up.

The first thing Constance does is take her gun and limp from room to room, turning on every light in the house, checking inside every closet and under every bed. When she’s sure that she’s really alone, she makes a cup of instant coffee and pulls out an old, tattered copy of Aunt Sally’s Policy Player’s Dream Book. The policy is an old lottery guide that was popular in the black community. Players would use Aunt Sally’s to turn the imagery from their dreams into lucky numbers. When she and Louisa were in high school, they’d always use it to interpret their dreams. Although the topics were different then—boys, grades… boys.

Constance flips the pages, running her finger down the columns:

Surgeon (bad fortune coming, the arrival of an enemy) 4, 17, 28

Cat (a disease or malignancy, worse if the cat is dead) 7, 1, 2

She remembers the wet nastiness of the dead cat, and she looks up filth.

Filth, anything dirty (jinxing, crossing an enemy) 11, 8, 69

“Well, it certainly doesn’t sound good,” she says to herself, and she sits back and sips her coffee, desperately trying to remember the dream she was having before the surgeon’s visit. It’s all a vague rush of dim images, things she can barely remember; the harder she thinks about them, the faster they slip away. But then one image floats to the top of her mind, clear and sharp, causing her heart to crawl into her throat.

She was sitting on a grassy bank beside a highway. Down the road, a wrecked car was burning. Someone was sitting next to her, but she couldn’t turn her head to see the person. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see legs and one arm, but that was all. And so she strained and she struggled, and she used every ounce of willpower she had, and finally she got a good look. It was Louisa, with blood streaming from her hair.

“You’ve got to help Alex,” Louisa said. “They’re coming for her.”

And then Constance’s old friend was surrounded by a flock of buzzards that hopped forward and pulled her apart.