So who had?
We were alone, the three of us, in that isolated house.
Mama was stricken pale. Even Miz Verlow looked distressed. It fell to my lot to deal with the matter. And to me, Calliope Carroll Dakin, whose initials were on the deck of playing cards on the little triangular table before us, it was perfectly obvious whose voice had sounded in the stifling front parlor. I looked in the mirror. Her face looked out, not at us, but as if through a window. Her eyes were wide and teary with terror.
“Mamadee, is that you?” I asked.
It is, and it isn’t.
“Shut up!” Mama snapped at me.
I kept my eyes fixed on the mirror but before I could tell Mama to look into it, Mamadee’s voice spoke again:
You don’t have to be rude, Roberta Ann.
Mama jumped up and strode toward the door, preparing to fling it open—even though she knew as well as I that the voice was not coming from the hallway or from any other part of the house.
I am not out there, Roberta Ann.
Mama stopped with her hands reaching for the door. Then she took a step backward as if the door itself had spoken.
Miz Verlow rose. “Are you in here?”
She was like a miner, digging deep to rescue a child tumbled down a disused shaft. Breaking open a crumbling wall, she softly questions the dead, soft darkness, Are you in there?
I understood then that neither Miz Verlow nor Mama saw Mamadee in the mirror.
I don’t know. I don’t know where I am. But I know I see who killed me—
“She’s lying. Mama’s not dead.” Mama looked at me hard. “If my mama were dead, we would know about it.”
“Are you dead?” I asked aloud.
Mama grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard. “Stop pretending to be Mama!”
Then she looked around her, as if something were hiding behind her back. Eyes wide as ever I had seen them, she was visibly shaking.
“Mama!” she wailed. “You caint be dead!”
Suddenly the room was colder, as if someone had opened a window. The candle flickered and went out. Thin threads of white smoke rose from its wick.
The voice exclaimed in outrage: Roberta Ann Carroll, that is my candlestick on that table!
Mama was not to be diverted by mere issues of ownership.
“You want to make me feel bad!” she cried. “Well you caint make me feel bad because number one I did not kill you, and number two I never even knew you were dead, and number three, I don’t believe you are my mama because we don’t have ghosts in our family! There are no Carroll ghosts!”
The ghost—or whatever it was—had no response to Mama’s barrage of illogic. Mama dug her fingers out of my shoulders. Miz Verlow started to move toward the door. She was going to try to get us out of there before anything else—and anything worse—happened.
Then, abruptly, Mamadee spoke again, asking a confused, tentative question: Roberta Ann, where on earth are you?
“What does she mean?” Mama whispered to me.
I replied in the voice that seven-year-old girls use when reciting an Easter verse at the front of the church: “We are in Pensacola, Florida, Mamadee. In Miz Verlow’s house. She is distant kin to the Dakins but not related to them by blood.”
Again the voice came, soft and fumbling, addressing Mama and ignoring my reply and me.
I am looking at a chair, Roberta Ann, that chair right behind you—my mama did the bargello on that chair. So where on earth did you get it? Because I know that chair burned up. It burned up in 1942. Are you in Mama’s house again, Roberta Ann?
“No!” Mama cried, “It’s 1958 and this is Pensacola Beach!”
It’s Banks, said Mamadee’s voice, and this is a house that burned down, due to your carelessness with candles, before Calley was born. So if you are here, then you are dead—both of you—and I’m glad….
“She doesn’t mean that,” Mama whispered hotly in my ear. “She doesn’t wish we were dead.”
“Why are you glad we’re dead?” I asked Mamadee.
Because then, Calley, you wicked wicked little witch—Mamadee laughed, the same laugh she used to laugh when she read in the morning paper that someone she did not like had died before she had—because then, Calley, I will not have to warn you about what’s going to happen to you. So now maybe they will let me go back. So maybe—
I guess “they” did let Mamadee go “back,” because she left right then in the middle of her thought, and we never heard her voice again.
Thirty
MAMA’S mind fastened not on what had happened but on what it might mean to her. If it had truly been Mamadee’s ghost who had spoken, then Mamadee was dead. The idea of Mamadee dead and gone threw Mama into unbearable panic; it meant that the rope she had been hauling on all her life was all at once loose at the other end. The reality of Mamadee’s death could hardly be countenanced; it stuck in her craw like a mouse in a snake’s belly. Before she could digest it, she had to figure out why she had been informed of the fact—if it were a fact—by such extraordinary means.
If that were not enough, Mamadee’s cryptic remark, I won’t have to warn you about what’s going to happen to you, was guaranteed to unsettle us. Mama had to find an interpretation of that sibylline pronouncement that was not a portent of evil.
I was willing to say it had been Mamadee’s voice, simply because, if it were, Mamadee might very well be dead. I certainly hoped so, with all my heathen heart, and was only disappointed that she had not complained of the singe and stink of hellfire. I could think of no reason that Mamadee should tell the truth just because she happened to be deceased. To this day I have found no reason to believe that the human soul, duplicitous to its core, suddenly becomes truthful just because it comes to be divorced from a corporeal form. I knew that I had held a conversation with Mamadee. I held my tongue, awaiting further developments. Waiting for Mama to realize the obvious.
Miz Verlow quietly collected our scattered cards and dropped them into a wastebasket. She picked up the candlestick.
“Lordy, I am cold,” she said. “I believe I will indulge myself in some hot tea. If you should like to join me, I am sure the kitchen will be more comfortable than this ever-so-depressing dark room.”
With this very reasonable excuse to escape the parlor, we repaired to the kitchen. It might have been the one time in her life that Mama went into a kitchen eagerly. The sudden conviction seized me that Mamadee had spoken not to inform us of her death and not to give Mama or me a warning but because I was in the room with Mama and Miz Verlow. From beyond the grave, she was pointing one of her knotty, meticulously manicured fingers at me. She wanted Mama and perhaps Miz Verlow to believe that I was either the source of a deception—or else her killer. Or both.
Miz Verlow settled the candlestick on the table. “Do sit down, Miz Dakin. I am going to fetch a shawl against the chill while the kettle boils. Would you like me to bring you a shawl or a sweater? One for Calley?”
Mama nodded.
Miz Verlow filled the kettle and lit the gas under it, then left us alone for a few minutes.
I busied myself fetching cups and saucers, teaspoons, a teapot, sugar and a cream jug from the butler’s pantry, as I had been so recently trained.
The kettle shrieked as if to herald Miz Verlow’s return. She smiled at me when she saw how busy I had been. Around her shoulders she had drawn a very fine soft wool shawl of a slate color.