His Last Wife

“What is all this crap?” Kerry whispered. “And who builds a basement in a cabin—in Georgia?”

“Rich white folks,” Val answered as they stepped through the maze toward the room. “Probably been planning to live down here when the black revolution comes.”

Even with fear surging through her, Kerry laughed at the joke.

“You’re a mess,” she said.

Neither Kerry nor Val would ever remember who stepped into the little back room first. But they’d recall that Kerry was the first to see the bodies. The men with open eyes and mouths on the floor. One with blood pouring out of the back of his head. The other with his stiff hands still clutching his throat. They’d remember it was Kerry who first put this horror-flick scene together in her mind because it was she who’d gripped Val’s hand from behind and said softly, yet urgently, and almost as if she’d been accustomed to such images, “Back up! Back up!”

Val was the one who screamed when she took it all in. It was Leaf who was bleeding and some man she didn’t recognize who was beside him. She’d remember the gun on the floor.

As if a bomb detonator was ticking over a loudspeaker sounding throughout the cabin, Val and Kerry backed up from the visual like one of the men would wake up and come crawling toward them at any minute and then turned and bolted up the stairs, through the hallway, across the living out the front door.

Hard as she was, Val called out for Jesus and every orisha she could think of the entire way. And though her feet led her to the driver’s-side door, every muscle in her body was in shock and she had no idea what to do when she was inside.

Kerry said, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

But Val was nearly in a catatonic state with her incantations, so Kerry hopped out of the car and pulled Val out of the driver’s seat. “I’ll drive,” she said, leading Val to the passenger’s seat.

Rocks and pebbles popped out from the back of the car after Kerry pressed her foot onto the gas pedal to hustle out of there. Both hands on the steering wheel, she made a big circle in the front yard and sped out the driveway to the road.

“What the hell! What the hell? What the hell!?” Val repeated in different tones of urgency as she came to during

the escape. “Was that Leaf? Leaf’s dead?”

“Yes. It was him,” Kerry said, swerving as she tried to handle the car’s speed on the road in their escape from whatever. “Who was the other guy?”

“I have no idea!” Val looked out the back window like someone could be following them. Suddenly, she remembered her clandestine meeting with Leaf that day at the jail and then his last words to her about mentioning the meeting to no one and making sure not a soul followed her to the cabin. “I’ve never seen him before. And Leaf didn’t say anyone would be there.”

They passed Delgado’s car on the side of the road, but had no reason to really notice it.

Kerry looked over at Val quickly. “You think that man—he killed Leaf?”

“I don’t know. I saw a gun on the floor. I don’t know. That’s what it looked like,” Val answered.

“Well, what happened to him?”

Just then, Mama Fee was awakened from a restless nap where she’d seen Delgado fall to his knees and die in a dark room.

“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know,” Val said, not knowing of her mother’s work. She looked out the back window again. “All I know is that we’re out of here. Right? We’re fine. We’re cool,” she said. “No one knows we were here. We can get back to Atlanta and just forget about this. Right?” She nervously looked out the window again. “Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”

“No. You told me not to.”

Val rubbed her hands along her lap. “Good. Good. And the door was already wide open, so we didn’t touch anything in the house. And if there’s a—”

“Wait!” Kerry stopped Val. “I touched the light switch. Remember? I turned it on.”

Val closed her eyes and told Kerry to stop the car.

“Why?”

“We have to turn around. We have to go back.”

“For what?”

Val reached for the steering wheel. “We need to clean the switch.”

“What? Are you crazy? I’m not going back to that creepy house. What if the police are on the way? What if—I’m just not going back. No way. What do you think this is? We’re not crime-scene cleaners.”