“It means a great deal to me that you were there,” he finally says. “That’s all… It means…” She’s watching his face intently, but she’s withdrawn her hands from the edge of the table as if she fears his emotions might require a small seizure to get free.
“So,” she finally says, “I take it things didn’t go so well with Caitlin.”
She’s waited a respectful amount of time to say them, but her words still feel like a dismissal. Is she as uncomfortable with forced moments of so-called understanding between races as he is?
“She slapped me,” Blake finally says. He feels strangely as if he’s just betrayed some sort of confidence, and it gives him a slight taste of what abused spouses must sometimes feel.
“Why?”
“Because I tried to take it with me.”
“The flower?” Nova asks, sitting forward, as bright-eyed and eager as he’s ever seen her. “It’s there? You saw it?”
“It wasn’t glowing. But whatever it was… it didn’t look right. Out of proportion. Strange. I don’t know… What matters is she didn’t want me going anywhere near it. Listen, I went online before I left the house, and there are all types of hallucinogenic plants out there. But not the kind you can just get exposed to. You have to either eat them or smoke them or—”
“You think I hallucinated it? You just saw it yourself.”
“Yeah, I did, and it wasn’t glowing. So maybe it’s mind-altering in some way if you’re exposed to it in—”
“I saw it for thirty seconds through a door. I didn’t touch it, didn’t smell it. My daddy was closer, and you heard what he thought when I talked about the flower. I wasn’t hallucinating, Blake.”
“Fine, but maybe Jane Percival was when she killed Troy.”
“Then where is Troy’s body?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you’re gonna blame Caitlin’s crazy on some flower that’s making her hallucinate? You think that’s why she slapped you?”
“I think she’s falling apart. I think she’s been falling apart for a while—since even longer than all this started—and there’s not much I can do about it.”
“Kinda hard to blame a flower then, isn’t it?”
Blake has no response to this. Finally he points to her pile of papers. “Your research?”
Nova chews her bottom lip for a second. He figures she wants to press him for Jane Percival’s last words. But he’s already given her an intimate look inside Caitlin’s home and deteriorating mental state. It’s quid pro quo time, and he isn’t budging.
“So Spring House allegedly burned down in 1850—”
“Wait a minute. Allegedly? Felix Delachaise got wasted and burned it down because he was broke. He couldn’t manage the fields. An entire cane crop died on him, and he lost his shirt. Didn’t his whole family die in the fire?”
“Allegedly. There are those who claim something else happened—something that had nothing to do with Delachaise and booze.”
“So, wait. The family survived?”
“No. I’m saying they might have been killed by something more than a fire.”
“OK… And who exactly believes this?”
“The slaves who fled that night.”
“I see. So you found them all on Facebook?”
She rolled her eyes. “Close. Dr. Taylor found them on the Internet, in a manner of speaking, that is. She’s one of my professors at LSU. She’s working with a couple other universities to create something called the Lost Voices Project. It’s the most extensive database on African American slaves ever built.”
“What is it? A list of names?”
“Oh, it’s a lot more than that. There’s a professor down in New Orleans, Gwendolyn Hall, she went into old slave auction records and put together an exhaustive list of slave names and identities. Dr. Taylor, she’s building on top of that kind of research. Only all sorts of information goes into the system. Slave narratives taken before and after the Civil War. Diary entries from plantation owners. Travel logs, newspaper reports from the period. All of it gets filtered through algorithms and computer software that work to assemble a complete reconstruction of every slave. I mean, even down to their physical appearances, their mannerisms, their speech patterns. The eventual goal is to have a database where you can actually sit there and have a conversation with a slave. But that’s years away.”
“Virtual slaves…”
“Virtual ghosts. Back from the dead. Folks whose lives were ignored and tossed aside in the history books. Now they’re coming back to life ’cause of the kind of computer software that tracks what you buy on the Internet.” Nova’s excitement over her professor’s vision has her excited, straight-backed, and talking with her hands. She catches herself with a quick but deep breath and forces her hands to her lap. “I mean… it’s in the early stages. But she let me use it anyway.”
“Use it… how?”
“I searched for Spring House.”
“And that’s how you found these slave narratives?”
“Yeah. They weren’t all in one place until a few months ago. This project has assembled old documents that were scattered in archives all over the world.”
“OK. And these slaves… what did they say?”
“They said the earth took Spring House,” Nova answers. “The justice of the earth.”
“Those were their words? The justice of the earth?”
She nods. “And they all mentioned one name. Virginie Lacroix.” The French pronunciation—ver-jun-ee—rolls effortlessly off her tongue.
“Was she related to Felix?”
“Nope. She was a slave. A slave who could talk to the soil.”
“What, like… voodoo?”
“No,” Nova says, with evident distaste for the cliché. “There’s no mention of Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices. No altars. No chickens getting their heads cut off. This is much more specific. She could make things grow. That’s what they said. And apparently… she could also make them die.”
“What?” Blake asks, incredulous.
“Seriously,” Nova says. “There was a story passed among the slaves, and it was in all the accounts that came back when I did the search. They knew about Virginie’s power, but the belief was that she didn’t have control over it. She could use it in short bursts here and there but nothing that could have freed her or caused an uprising. Anyway, Delachaise was a terrible manager. A lot of the plantation owners were. Spoiled little French brats who weren’t prepared for how labor-intensive cane harvesting was going to be. There wasn’t much turnaround time each year before the winter frosts came, and there was also the refinement process and all that. Anyway, to make up for how overwhelmed he was, Felix worked his slaves half to death. So Virginie showed him what she was capable of.”
“And… what? Killed him?”
“No, once he found her out, they made a deal. He asked her to make the cane grow faster. In exchange he’d add enough new slaves to lessen everyone’s workload. In other words, he promised to stop working everyone half to death if she’d use her magic on his fields.”
“Did she agree?”
“Sort of. Enough, at least, for her to grow the cane. But it sounds like he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. Because the whole thing didn’t end well.”
“Justice of the earth…”
“Three different narratives in the database said something came up and out of the earth and literally tore Spring House apart. The fire happened second. But whatever happened first—it was so goddamn bad, nobody cared when all the slaves took off for the swamp.”