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.
“Hoodoo belongs to the people down here. But there are women all over the world who can do what you and I do. They’ve got different names for it in other countries, but we all share the gift.”
“The gift?”
“The dead call to us,” Nessa’s grandmother explained. “In our family, there’s always been a woman in every generation who can hear them. I heard my first haint when I was your age. My auntie told me what to do if it happened. So I went out looking, and I found a body washed ashore by the river. Her name was Belinda. Her lover had held her head underwater after she told him she was with child. After Belinda, I didn’t find another girl for thirty-five years.”
“How many haints have called out to you?” Nessa asked.
“Fourteen,” her grandmother said.
“Now they’ll call to me too?”
“Not just yet, Nessa,” her grandmother told her. “If a girl’s got the gift, it makes itself known before her bleeding begins. Then the haints go quiet so you can start your own family. They won’t call out to you again till you’re older and you know what to do.”
“How much older?” Nessa asked.
“It’s different for all of us,” her grandmother said. “But one day your life will grow quiet, and that’s when you’ll be able to hear them again. Like my auntie used to say, the gift arrives after the curse ends.”
The dead hadn’t gone away completely. Nessa had always sensed they were there. Occasionally, she would pick up snippets like static on the radio. Once, when she was in college, she’d passed an accident on the highway and seen a young girl standing outside a mangled vehicle watching EMTs working feverishly to extract her body from the wreckage. The girl looked over her shoulder at Nessa as she drove by, but never uttered a word.
When Nessa began working as a nurse in Queens, she saw the dead more often. She’d walk by a hospital room where a patient had passed and see them standing at their own bedside. They always seemed resigned to their fate. Most of the ghosts didn’t even acknowledge her. They knew where they were and had no need of her gift.
One night, she’d stopped to pay her respects to a patient who’d died shortly before Nessa had started her shift. She had cared for the comatose Jane Doe for over a week, changing her bandages and cleaning her drug-ravaged body, knowing it was unlikely the woman would ever wake up. When Nessa reached the room, she found a figure standing at the bedside, hat in hand. It wasn’t the patient but a police officer named Jonathan. He was the one who’d discovered the woman eight days earlier. She was a sex worker in the neighborhood he patrolled. A client had beaten her senseless and shoved her, half naked, from a moving car. Nessa watched from the doorway as the policeman prayed over the woman’s body. He took his time and did it right. Whether he knew it or not, his prayers were the only ones aside from Nessa’s that the poor woman would likely receive.
They were married six months later, and the fifteen years Nessa spent with Jonathan were the best of her life. Then, shortly after their twin girls turned ten, she’d woken up in the night to find Jonathan standing by her bedside with a face full of sorrow. He should have been working late, interviewing an informant in an ongoing case. When she saw him there, she knew he had come to say goodbye.