She kept watching us, me especially, and then sighed. “I guess I was a little rude last time, wasn’t I? But you know how I get when I’m woken up from my nap. Now what is so urgent that this couldn’t wait until morning? You’re lucky I was just in a trance and not sleeping.”
“Sorry,” Rose apologized again, and it struck me how much she acted like a young girl when she was around the Mambo. The hardened, tough-as-nails Rose was gone. It was almost refreshing, except Rose’s strength in the situation probably would have put me more at ease.
“Where is Ambrosia?” Rose asked.
Maryse narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“Is she here?”
“Yes. She’s in her room sleeping.”
“I didn’t know she lived here all the time now.”
Maryse waved at her dismissively. “Good care is hard to come by. I teach Ambrosia and she takes care of me. I haven’t left the house in two years, you know?”
“Excuse me,” Perry said politely. “I’ve had to pee since New Orleans. Could I use your bathroom?”
Maryse eyed her with disdain but nodded down the hall. “Second door, child.”
Perry flashed her an apologetic smile and walked down the hall.
“Is there somewhere we could talk?” Rose asked.
“Is here not good enough?”
Rose shook her head but didn’t elaborate.
Maryse sighed and got out of her seat, the cat leaping to the ground. You could almost hear her bones creaking. Her long, scraggly grey hair hung around her skinny face. In the lamplight you could see just how sick and old she was. Her face was drawn and ashen, her mouth lined with a million wrinkles. Only her eyes remained sharp, even though they’d clouded over slightly, like an old dog’s who still knew a few tricks.
“Very well. Follow me.” She gingerly made her way to the hallway, back hunched over, and turned on the flickering overhead lights just as Perry was coming out the bathroom, looking flushed and up to no good. Maryse squinted at her again and we went down the hall, Perry tagging behind me.
“What is it?” I whispered at her. “Pee smell funny?”
She looked disappointed. “I wanted to see if Ambrosia really was in her room.” She nodded at the closed door beside Maryse’s bedroom. “She is. Sleeping.”
I felt strangely smug that Perry was wrong, because if Ambrosia was here the whole time, she probably hadn’t set up the Voodoo lab in the attic, which meant that was one suspect we could cross off the list.
Maryse opened a narrow door at the very end of the hall, one I had assumed was a linen closet, but it looked cavernous until she pulled on a hanging lightbulb and began to descend down a set of stairs.
“Aren’t we going underwater?” I whispered to Maximus, who was in front of me, but the stairs were only four feet deep and we found ourselves in a cellar of sorts.
A cellar of horrors.
The ground was sawdust, perhaps rock underneath, and the air was filled with a mix of competing smells—sweet and cloying, damp and musky, rich and smoky. The walls were painted red and filled with every imaginable Voodoo horror you could imagine. There were shrines in all corners of the room, statues covered in beads and jewelry, mounds of candles in every color, poppet dolls made of yarn and tribal-patterned cloths, tied together with string. There were skulls—humans and animals—hanging on the red-painted walls, along with various tribal masks. Mason jars filled with herbs, spices, and who knows what were lined up on shelves. If the veranda was the overstock room, this was where all the magic happened. Pun intended.
We were all silent, looking around us in awe, even Rose, who looked more respectful than anything else. I began to wonder how much Voodoo had rubbed off on her from being around the Mambo for so many years.
“Please take a seat,” Maryse said, and sat down in a high-backed leather chair, motioning to the three wicker chairs that sat across from a round, fortune-teller style table.
“I’ll stand,” Maximus volunteered, as if that made him a better man or something.
Maryse gave him a look, one I couldn’t read. She wasn’t impressed either way, and I wondered if she was going to start pointing at him in horror again and calling him mortal.
“Now, tell me Rose, what is it that is life and death and so magnificently important.” She crossed her bony white hands in front of her. Curiously, she had gold and silver rings on all of her hands with all sorts of gemstones. The weight of some of them looked like they’d break her fingers in two.
“Well,” Rose began, and then looked at Maximus. He launched into what happened at the bar last night, then into his side of things at the house, and paused when it came time to tell her what I saw. Then we finished it up with the zombie of Tuffy G coming after Perry, me beating him with a floor lamp, and him running straight out the window and falling to his death number two.
“Oh,” I added, “then I guess I knocked over the candles in the attic, because the attic went up in flames, and we all ran out of the house and pretty much came straight here. And to answer your question before you ask it, no I didn’t see any names on the candles.”
“What did the candles smell like?” she asked.
Was she kidding me?
“Like Eau du Zombie. I don’t know.”
She pursed her wrinkled lips until they almost disappeared into her skin. I tried not to grimace. She got up and shuffled over to a shelf of oils and pulled one off of it. She popped the top and came over to me, holding it under my nose.
“Does this smell familiar?” she asked impatiently.
I breathed in. It did. That cloyingly sweet smell, like baby powder.
“Yeah, I guess it smelled like that. A bit more coppery though.”
“The blood from the poor snake,” Maryse said, sitting back down. “That was the copper smell. What was rubbed on all the candles was Follow Me Boy oil. Calamus root.”
“Follow Me Boy oil?” Perry asked incredulously.
“I was expecting something more sinister than that,” I added.
Maryse wasn’t amused. “It is called that because sex workers in the city would apply it in order to get ahead of the competition, so to speak. Every brothel had this for their ladies. It’s supposed to work on sexual attraction, but the key component is dominance and control. Most likely, those candles were probably meant for the deceased man.”
“Could the candles have been for any of us?” Perry asked.
She considered that. “It’s possible. But considering zombies have to be controlled by someone, I would think they were there to ensure he followed through. That said, it is interesting that they were black candles. We call them black devils. Usually, if you anoint a black devil with a commanding type of oil, you’re asking for revenge or retribution against someone. Or you’re just being a jerk.”
So either the zombie went after Perry on purpose because her name was on the candle, or the zombie’s name was on the candle, the person controlling him going after their own sort of revenge. It didn’t really matter since we would never find out, although Ambrosia and Tuffy did have history together. Perhaps she was after revenge.
The thought was ludicrous, the idea terribly elaborate. Still, because I knew Perry was thinking it, I decided to voice it out loud.
“Maryse, do you think it’s possible that Ambrosia could be involved in any of this?”
Perry smiled while Maximus let out an audible gasp. Maryse didn’t look too surprised, however.
“I can see how you’d think that, since she and I are closest to you. But in order to do what you say happened, what you’re suggesting, you have to be very powerful. Ambrosia hasn’t finished her training, she has years left before she’s considered a Mambo. To be frank with you, I don’t think she has it in her to do it, energy wise nor personality wise. She’s a sweet, kind girl.”
That was true all right. Very sweet, kind, beautiful. A flash of her smile, the feel of her skin.
Perry spoke up, snapping me out of it. “But what if she was working with someone else? Helping another Mambo behind your back?”
Maryse narrowed her eyes at the thought. “I hate to think that but I suppose it’s possible. I’ll keep an eye on her over the next while, how about that? Last thing I want is to be blindsided by my own pupil.”
“And what about you?” I asked.
“What about me?”
“Obviously you have the power to do all this, to raise the dead. You know we’re here and what we’re up to.”
“I suppose you would think the world revolves around you, wouldn’t you?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“These zombie rituals are nothing new in New Orleans, and even now, this has been apparently happening for some time before you got here. To think that they are now focused on you is absurd. And no, I am not the one behind it. Contrary to what everyone thinks of me, I am not a Bokor, I do not and have never used my skills for evil. I am a dying woman, as you can see, and I barely have any energy to keep on living. Doing any of those hoodoos would kill me instantly. The most I can do for myself right now is that.”
She nodded to a side table where a yarn poppet had a nail sticking out of it. An honest to God Voodoo doll.
“Who is that?” Maximus asked suspiciously.
“I don’t know who it is,” she said, folding her frail arms against herself. It was colder down in the cellar. “But it is a Nkondi. Traditionally, it is used to hunt down evil sorcerers or threats to the Voodoo community. Here I have used it to drive my illness back to the spellcaster, whoever he or she might be.”
“You believe your illness is a…a curse?” Perry asked.
Maryse nodded then focused her eyes on her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, ladies, I would love to talk to the two gentleman alone here.”
Maximus and I exchanged a worried look. What the hell did the Mambo want with us?
I guess Perry and Rose were thinking the same thing, because they were staring at her in confusion.
Maryse gestured to Rose. “Please, Rose, take your friend here and go upstairs and wait for us. Shut the door behind you and try not to wake Ambrosia.”
Rose and Perry slowly got out their chairs, Perry’s eyes wild with fear for me. I gave her a tight-lipped smile and a nod.
They reluctantly left the room. I could feel them glancing over their shoulder as they ascended the stairs until the cellar door closed behind them.
“So,” Maryse said, turning a wicked smile toward me. “Dex Foray. I suppose you’d like to find out who your friend here really is.”
Maximus stiffened, his eyes downcast. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. A thousand suspicions from thousands of moments clouded my head.
She continued, calmly staring at me, knowing she held all the cards. “And why of course you’re the exception.”