Линда Ла Плант: Cold Blood

Even behind the safety of the net, balls slammed into her arms and legs through the mesh, Anna Louise first taking aim at Tilda’s body, but then at her face.

‘Stop it, please stop it,’ sobbed Tilda, looking up to see Anna Louise standing over her.

‘You stay away from him, Tilda, he’s mine. I see you with him again and I’ll make you sorry, I’ll hurt you more than any tennis ball, I’ll hurt you so bad, Tilda Brown, you’re gonna wish you were dead...’

Tilda was crying like a baby, terrified as much by Anna Louise’s verbal threats as by her violence, and she sobbed with relief when she recognized the figure coming towards them. Anna Louise saw him too, and gave Tilda a final quick, hard blow on the side of the head, then lowered the racquet, smiling sweetly, her whole manner altered.

‘Hi, honey,’ Robert Caley smiled to his daughter, then looked towards the weeping Tilda. ‘What’s happened, Tilda?’

Anna Louise linked her arm through her father’s. ‘It was my fault, you know that serve o’ mine, Papa, poor little Tilda here got right in the way of it... and you got to take some of the blame for coachin’ me to serve so hard, but I didn’t mean to hit her, I guess she just isn’t up to my standard.’

Robert Caley had one arm around his daughter as he reached out to Tilda with concern. ‘You all right, sweetheart?’

Tilda wouldn’t look into his eyes, but held her hand to her head feeling the lump where Anna Louise had hit her. ‘I want to go home, Mr Caley, today,’ she said in a low, but firm voice.

‘She is just bein’ silly ’cos she lost the game,’ Anna Louise said petulantly. She tried to keep hold of her father’s arm to stop him following Tilda, but he pulled free of her, and she was infuriated to see him help Tilda to the gates and walk her back to the house. She smashed the racquet against the tarmacked court, then examined it, afraid she had damaged one of her favourites. Long strands of Tilda’s hair were caught between the strings.

Tilda had packed, and refused to say anything else to Anna Louise through her locked bedroom door other than that she was going home at once. Anna Louise tried to cajole her, saying she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant to be nasty, but Tilda refused to unlock the door. Now Anna Louise was worried about what Tilda might say to her mother, and was beginning to think that perhaps the sooner she left the better.

‘Fine, you leave, Tilda Brown, I don’t care,’ she said angrily, but she was worried enough to decide to go and sit with her mother. Tilda would certainly want to say goodbye to her, and more than likely would tell tales. Anna Louise tapped on the door of her mother’s suite and waited; it was often locked in the mornings as Elizabeth Caley hated being seen without her warpaint, even by her own daughter. Anna Louise knocked again, then walked in: all the curtains were drawn and the room was in darkness. She called out to her mother, but receiving no reply wondered if Elizabeth was still sleeping or, worse, had gone downstairs and would see Tilda. She hurried through her mother’s sitting room towards her bedroom.

‘Mama,’ she whispered, then pressed her ear to the door, listening. ‘Are you awake Mama? It’s me, it’s Anna Louise.’

She eased the bedroom door open and peeked inside, adjusting her eyes to the darkness of the room, then called out softly again, but saw that the bed covers had been drawn back. Her mother was known to fly into an even worse rage if she was woken from sleep than if she was surprised without makeup. She suffered from severe insomnia and her sleep was precious, if rarely natural.

Anna Louise looked across to the bathroom door and heard the soft sounds of bath-water running. She was about to leave when she noticed the low, flickering light of a candle on her mother’s bedside table. The candle was sputtering, and she crossed the room to check it out, not expecting to find anything else.

The gris-gris had been consecrated, because it was positioned on top of a worn black Bible, a small white cotton sack of salt to the left and a tiny green bottle of water to the right. Above the Bible a blue candle, representing the element of fire, guttered in its candlestick; below the book was a square of sweet-smelling incense, the symbol for air. Anna Louise felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle when she opened the gris-gris bag and looked at the contents, unaware of their meaning and of what it meant to have seen and touched a consecrated gris-gris. Fascinated, she picked up the old Bible and opened the fly-leaf: in old-fashioned scrolled handwriting whose ink had faded from black to brown there was an inscription to Elizabeth Seal — her mother’s maiden name. Anna Louise carefully replaced the book, flicking through the tissue-thin pages to try to make sure it was in the same position she had discovered it.

Back in her own room, she sniffed her fingers and decided they smelt musty, so she filled her wash-hand basin with hot water and soaped her hands clean. She was just drying them when she heard her mother calling for her and returned to the suite.

‘Tilda wants to go home today,’ Elizabeth said, toying with a silver spoon on her breakfast tray. ‘But that’s silly as we’re all leaving tomorrow.’

Anna Louise sat on the edge of her mother’s bed, noticing that the bedside table had been cleared. ‘Oh, we had an argument, we’ll make it up.’ She was anxious to change the subject, so asked with concern, ‘How you feeling today?’

‘I’m just fine, honey. Now you go and talk to your friend, it’s stupid for her to go if we’re all going to New Orleans tomorrow.’

‘Okay, I’ll make up with her. Do you want me to take your tray?’

‘Mmmm, I’ll sleep a while maybe, I had a bad night. Kiss kiss?’

Anna Louise leaned over to plant a kiss on her mother’s cheek and then carried the breakfast tray out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Tilda had already left by the time Anna Louise returned her mother’s tray to the kitchen. Anna Louise was unconcerned: she’d make it up to her, buy her something expensive. She wandered into the kitchen where Berenice, the housekeeper, had just baked a tray of fresh blueberry muffins, and began picking at one with her fingers, remembering the strange, musty smell from the Bible she had seen upstairs.

‘Tilda told me somethin’ weird, something she’d seen...’ she began casually, still picking at the muffin’s crispy top.

Berenice was emptying the dishwasher, not paying too much attention to her employers’ daughter, only half-listening as she went back and forth stacking the clean dishes in the cupboards. She poured a glass of milk for Anna Louise and set it beside her.

‘Miss Tilda sure was upset about somethin’, crying her eyes out. We thought maybe she’d had bad news.’ She continued putting the clean crockery away.

‘What does it mean if you got a Bible, a blue candle and funny little bags of salt and incense, you know, like those gris-gris bags they sell back home?’

The cupboard door banged shut.

‘You don’t wanna know, Miss Anna Louise, an’ you stop pickin’ at each muffin. You want one, then you take one.’

‘What does it mean?’

The housekeeper was replacing the cutlery in its drawer now, buffing each knife and fork quickly with a clean cloth before she put it away.

‘Well, it depends on which way the cross is placed on the Bible.’

‘Ah, so you do know what it means?’

‘All I know is, if you and Miss Tilda are playing around, then you stop and don’t be foolish. That’s voodoo, and nobody ought to play games with things they don’t understand because evil has a way of getting inside you, like a big black snake. It sits in your belly and you never know when it’s gonna uncoil and spit... and if you touch another person’s gris-gris, then you got bad trouble.’