“Take this.” She handed me a threadbare handkerchief, careful not to let her hand touch mine. “Now you wrap that thing up in here. Right now, right this second.”
This was beyond going dark. She was totally losing it.
“Amma—”
“Do as I say, Ethan.” She never called me by my first name without my last.
Once the locket was safely wrapped in the handkerchief, she calmed down a little bit. She rifled through the lower pockets of her apron, removing a small leather bag and a vial of powder. I knew enough to recognize the makings of one of her charms when I saw them. Her hand shook slightly as she poured some of the dark powder into the leather pouch. “Did you wrap it up tight?”
“Yeah,” I said, expecting her to correct me for answering her so informally.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Now you put it in here.” The leather pouch was warm and smooth in my hand. “Go on now.”
I dropped the offending locket into the pouch.
“Tie this around it,” she instructed, handing me a piece of what looked like ordinary twine, although I knew nothing Amma used for her charms was ever ordinary, or what it seemed. “Now you take it back there, where you found it, and you bury it. Take it there straightaway.”
“Amma, what’s going on?” She took a few steps forward and grabbed my chin, pushing the hair out of my eyes. For the first time since I pulled the locket out of my pocket, she looked me in the eye. We stayed that way for what seemed like the longest minute of my life. Her expression was an unfamiliar one, uncertain.
“You’re not ready,” she whispered, releasing her hand.
“Not ready for what?”
“Do as I say. Take that bag back to where you found it and bury it. Then you come right home. I don’t want you messin’ with that girl anymore, you hear me?”
She had said all she planned to say, maybe more. But I’d never know because if there was one thing Amma was better at than reading cards or solving a crossword, it was keeping secrets.
“Ethan Wate, you up?”
What time was it? Nine-thirty. Saturday. I should have been up by now, but I was exhausted. Last night I’d spent two hours wandering around, so Amma would believe I had gone back to Greenbrier to bury the locket.
I climbed out of bed and stumbled across the room, tripping on a box of stale Oreos. My room was always a mess, crammed with so much stuff my dad said it was a fire hazard and one day I was going to burn the whole house down, not that he’d been in here in a while. Aside from my map, the walls and ceiling were plastered with posters of places I hoped I’d get to see one day—Athens, Barcelona, Moscow, even Alaska. The room was lined with stacks of shoeboxes, some three or four feet high. Although the stacks looked random, I could tell you the location of every box—from the white Adidas box with my lighter
collection from my eighth grade pyro phase, to the green New Balance box with the shell casings and a torn piece of flag I found at Fort Sumter with my mom.
And the one I was looking for, the yellow Nike box, with the locket that had sent Amma off the deep end. I opened the box and pulled out the smooth leather pouch. Hiding it had seemed like a good idea last night, but I put it back in my pocket, just in case.
Amma shouted up the stairs again. “Get on down here or you’re gonna be late.”
“I’ll be down in a minute.”
Every Saturday, I spent half the day with the three oldest women in Gatlin, my great-aunts Mercy, Prudence, and Grace. Everyone in town called them the Sisters, like they were a single entity, which in a way they were. Each of them was about a hundred years old, and even they couldn’t remember who was the oldest. All three of them had been married multiple times, but they’d outlived all their husbands and moved into Aunt Grace’s house together. And they were even crazier than they were old.
When I was about twelve, my mom started dropping me off there on Saturdays to help out, and I had been going there ever since. The worst part was, I had to take them to church on Saturdays. The Sisters were Southern Baptist, and they went to church on Saturdays and Sundays, and most other days, too.
But today was different. I was out of bed and into the shower before Amma could call me a third time. I couldn’t wait to get over there. The Sisters knew just about everyone who had ever lived in Gatlin; they should, since between the three of them, they had been related to half the town by marriage, at one time or another. After the vision, it was obvious the G in GKD stood for Genevieve. But if there was anyone who would know what the rest of the initials stood for, it would be the three oldest women in town.
When I opened the top drawer of my dresser to grab some socks, I noticed a little doll that looked like a sock monkey holding a tiny bag of salt and a blue stone, one of Amma’s charms. She made them to ward off evil spirits or bad luck, even a cold. She put one over the door of my dad’s study when he started working on Sundays instead of going to church. Even though my dad never paid much attention when he was there, Amma said the Good Lord still gave you credit for showing up. A couple of months later, my dad bought her a kitchen witch on the Internet and hung it over the stove. Amma was so angry she served him cold grits and burnt coffee for a week.
Usually, I didn’t give it much thought when I found one of Amma’s little gifts. But there was something about the locket. Something she didn’t want me to find out.
There was only one word to describe the scene when I arrived at the Sisters’ house. Chaos. Aunt Mercy answered the door, hair still in rollers.
“Thank goodness you’re here, Ethan. We have an E-mergency on our hands,” she said, pronouncing the “E” as if it was a word all by itself. Half the time I couldn’t understand them at all, their accents were so thick and their grammar so bad. But that’s the way it was in Gatlin; you could tell how old someone was by the way they spoke.