Gabby added, “Jealousy, conceit, hatred fear, prejudice, bigotry.”
“Or any negative anything…” added Alastair as all three watched the children go.
“Like when you can’t stand yourself,” Jane said.
He looked at her realizing how much alike the two of them really were. “Or your own kind…”
“But you can’t get away from who you are, now can you?” she asked.
Gabby suddenly rushed a few steps toward the retreating children. “Wait! You can change things!” This while the children continued disappearing before their eyes. She took a few more tentative steps toward them, seeing Audra lingering behind. “You can build on things, travel, learn, get an education!”
No one stopped to listen, and Gabby watched as Audra dropped the doll she’d given her. Audra didn’t look back. The doll might be a trap, so she instead raced to catch up to King Robin and the tribe.
Jane went to Gabby, crouched and lifted the soiled doll, and handed it to her daughter. “Audra may be back for this some day.”
“You think so, Mother?”
“There’s always that hope.”
Mother and daughter hugged, and Alastair saw Audra, just before the tribe disappeared around a final corner, look back to see the embrace.
Slowly, reluctantly, Alastair, Jane, and Gabby picked their way over broken glass, discarded paint buckets, soiled bedding, cardboard boxes, boards, and brick to finally set foot on a clean street and out from under the viaduct.
Alastair grumbled, “They didn’t say a bloody word about Bloody Mary.”
“They’re afraid to say her name out loud,” replied Gabby.
“Then what makes Audra so brave?”
“Her father was a soldier in the war.”
“An angel in the war between good and evil, you mean?” asked Ransom, trying to quash a grimace.
“No, the War Between the States.”
Audra surprised them all when she showed up the following day and knocked at Jane’s and Gabby’s door. Ransom was having breakfast with Jane when the girl was ushered in by a smiling, elated Gabby. “I knew she’d come back to us!”
“We can meet with Danielle’s coven,” Audra informed them.
“Really?” asked Alastair.
“Danielle’s coven?” Jane inquired.
“They stay close to the Salvation Army’s emergency shelter. Can we have another carriage ride there?”
“First a bite to eat,” suggested Gabby, seating Audra before a plate of warm pastries.”
While Audra devoured her roll and juice, Gabby rushed out and returned with her doll. Audra and Gabby hugged at the three-way reunion, the doll squished between the young people. It made Jane laugh and Alastair smiled his approval.
They were soon on their way to meet Danielle’s coven.
There came a point where the cab could go no farther, and they must walk through a gangway, so-called for the habit of gangs slipping from sight, usually after a robbery.
Audra led the way. Ransom gestured to the cabbie to hold for their return. To assure the man’s allegiance, Ransom waved an extra large bill in the air.
Jane whispered, “Do you believe this? How these children live under such pressures. Amazingly, profoundly sad.”
“Perhaps so, but how is it relevant to my case?”
“Our case,” she corrected him.
A part of him wanted to burst her idyllic bubble about Dr. Fenger, tell her of the deal he and Kohler had cut with Senator Chapman, but he held off. Again he asked, “What’s it to do with our case, then?”
“I’m not sure, but I have a feeling it is…somehow relevant.”
They soon found Danielle’s camp-its epicenter an abandoned old livery stable near a burned-down warehouse shell. A nearby drainpipe large enough to drive a horse dray through-part of a reservoir system-ran alongside this area.
Danielle looked like a youthful man instead of a woman, a sad weariness to her features, but she could not be much older than King Robin. She too held a large stick, cleaned of its bark and varnished, as a scepter, and she too barked at people in the language of muleskinners.
Once she decided that Alastair, Jane, and Gabby could be trusted, because she trusted Audra, she opened up. Her first words were, “I gotta disagree with King Robin and his followers. This war shouldn’t be treated like some kinda secret holy society that keeps others out. I want converts!”
Alastair liked this girl’s attitude. She meant to spread the word of the war between Heaven and Hell going on now in the Prairie City and across America.
As a result, Danielle quickly warmed to her topic.
“One demon working for Satan is the worst, and children know her by her English name here, but she also has a Spanish name”
“Bloody Mary,” said Audra.
Danielle whispered, “La Llorona.”
“The Crying Woman,” said Alastair, knowing a little Spanish.
This impressed the homeless children gathered about Danielle, several of whom were Spanish. Alastair raised his shoulders as if to say “what,” when Jane and Gabby stared at him, sharing a look of surprise.
“The woman weeps blood,” one child added.
“Blood,” echoed another, “and sometimes black oil tears.”
“From ghoulish empty sockets.”
“And she feeds on a child’s terror,” added Danielle. “It’s why you can’t be scared, and why you can’t be a child.”
Why you can’t be a child, the adults rolled over the comment in their minds, thinking how sad the words, when a sudden chorus of the homeless children began talking over one another.
Danielle silenced them all with her upraised scepter, a thin stick. “When a child is killed accidentally or murdered outright, La Llorona sings out in delight and joy.”
“And if a child goes missing?” asked Ransom.
“She is feeding on him…or her.”
“Ffff-feeding on a child?” asked Gabby.
“If you wake up at night and see La Llorona, and you hear her song,” began Danielle, “you have to go with her, cause…just because…”
“-cause it’s like being hypnotized,” added a young black girl.
“You’re chosen, you gotta go,” Danielle grimly said.
A stunted boy with a withered arm said, “Bloody Mary’s clothes’ll be blowing back, even in a room where there’s no wind.”
“If you see her, you know she’s marked you for death,” explained Danielle.
“But you’re not afraid to say her name,” said Alastair. “I thought if you said her name aloud, you brought her anger down on you? No?”
“Robin’s a good leader, but he’s wrong about this,” she explained. “You show the demons any sign of fear…they even smell it, you’re dead. That’s how it really goes.”
“What about the angel lady I heard about?” asked Alastair. “The Blue Lady of the Lake, is it? Tell me something about her.”
All the children began jabbering at once, talking over one another, anxious to tell all they knew of this lady, one shouting, “She’s like my mum was!”
“She’s kinda like my mum,” repeated one boy with a thick British accent. “Has aliases.”
“But the Blue Lady’s secret name?” Jane wanted to understand their thinking. “Nobody knows it? So her power is limited? Can you tell me any of the Blue Lady’s aliases?”
“One is Alia,” Audra blurted out, emboldened in her new role as emissary between Danielle and the strangers.
“Another is Elisyan,” said one of the older boys.
Danielle added, “That’s all we know.”
Their secrets keep them safe, Alastair thought, and they keep their secrets safe…almost. So much symbolism.
Alastair began questioning Danielle about her life. Her parents had emigrated from France and had kicked around New York for years and had relocated to Chicago on the hope of finding work as tailors. Instead, her father abandoned them. Her mother now worked in a sweatshop in the garment district, and Danielle pretty much lived on the streets, “Hating the hole mum pays rent on,” she finished.
Alastair elicited additional information from Queen Danielle. Her mother had gone through three attempts to get clear of an addiction to heroin, and was trying to get her life back in order. Danielle was French on her mother’s side, Spanish on her father’s side, which accounted for her jet black hair and exotic features.