My head hurt and I couldn’t move. After a grunt and a stab of panic, I remembered to open my eyes and found myself in an old wood-framed greenhouse. It was big—about sixty feet long and perhaps twenty wide—and looked at least a hundred years old. The once-white paint was flecked and chipped. The panes in the gabled roof were stained and opaque and let in just enough light to let me know it was daytime, but that was it. The windows on the sides, which sat atop the three-foot stacked-stone foundation, were equally unhelpful. My host stood next to her workbench, tending the large wire-framed aviary whose occupants hunted and pecked, flapped and hopped. A few even flew free. She didn’t seem to notice them. Or me. She wore a different calico dress than before and had replaced her apron with a dirty smock. She was barefoot now and seemed to prefer it. Her toes wriggled joyfully on the moss as she hummed some old country tune and heated a miniature tea pot over a candle.
I lifted my head slowly so as not to make a sound. The rafters under the glass were overgrown with white-flowered ivy whose leaves had woven themselves like thread between the dried brown strands of their forebears. Bunches of drying herbs hung upside down from a trellis at the back. The trellis arched over a long wooden table covered in potted plants of all sizes, from tiny sproutlings in rectangular beds to a giant speckled monstrosity whose green tentacles spilled over its tub and swept the ground. The floor seemed never to have been cleaned. Soil was left wherever it spilled and was slowly taking over the stone-slab floor. Velveteen moss covered every open patch and kept the tiny curling ferns at the margins. A faded bag of mulch, dropped in a corner and forgotten, had long since split down its length and given birth to a four-foot sapling.
The bulk of the space, all the way to the barnlike double doors at the far end, was filled with planter’s boxes, waist-high on stilts, two feet deep and four feet on a side. I saw a cluster of rare orchids next to a shrublike beach apple tree—a manchineel, quite possibly the deadliest plant in existence. There were purple monkshood flowers, several species of henbane, a tangle of nightshade, and more. All the boxes were neatly organized, their inhabitants grouped like with like, and they were full to overflowing—probably because of how they were being fed. Each raised box sported an IV stand, which stood in its soil like a scarecrow. The bags at the tops trailed clear tubes all the way to the dirt. There was a dozen at least, stretching from one end of the greenhouse to the other, and every one was full of blood.
That’s where I was planted—kneeling in one of those boxes. The crumbly brown soil reached mid-thigh. My arms were bound at the wrists and shoulders to a wooden T-frame, like you might use to hang tomato plants. There was an IV stand next to me, filling from my brachial artery. My neighbor, a full wisteria, was blooming and kept my nostrils full of fragrance, which was good. I was so weak and queasy from the henbane that if I’d caught a single metallic whiff of my own blood, I would’ve puked all over myself.
“When I was a youngin’,” Granny said without turning from her tea, “my momma’d mix up some soapy water in a dish for us to play with.” She set the pot on the workbench. “She’d turn up a clothes hanger like this.”
She’d made a ring from a stiff wire. She poured half the foamy contents of a bottle into a flat dish and made circles in the liquid with the wire. She took it out and blew bubbles. Most of them popped immediately.
“As beautiful and as fragile as a life,” she said. “It was a lesson. That’s how Momma was. Even when we was playin’, we was learnin’. It’s the same lesson them men learned, the ones what passed you in the hall the other day.”
The other day.
“Which men?” I asked weakly. My throat was hoarse. It felt like someone had run an onion slicer over my vocal cords and left them to dry. I coughed. I was so thirsty.
“Them fellers in suits who come out ahead of you. Know who they was?”
I shook my head. I fought the urge to pull against my bonds, which dug into my skin and cut the circulation to my tingling hands. I struggled to make fists, but I was weak. I figured I only had one or two half-strength tugs in me before my muscles gave out and I decided it was better to save them for when I had some chance of escape. If one ever came. That wasn’t likely seeing as how I was too weak to manufacture one myself.
“Them fellers own a bunch of websites. You know those? Even one that will tell your fortune. They got a whole buncha ladies in a office somewhere, and you call up or go on the website and they’ll pull tarot for you or look at your palm. There’s a program for it. Can you believe that? A computer to read the stars.”
Granny swirled the wire again and blew bubbles with tiny refractive rainbow swirls. “I sent them a nice note and told them bad things happened to folks who read the heavens but don’t pay the right honors to the ghosts and spirits, but they didn’t believe me. I even went out to their offices one day to warn ’em, and they laughed. Their PR woman patted me on the back and even went so far as to suggest, without sayin’ of course, that the whole thing was a scam.” She scoffed. “Well, weren’t long before that bubble burst.”
She blew again before dropping the wire in the dish. “Seems like one of them fellers’ daughters had a terrible accident recently. She’s in the hospital with a rare infection. Might not survive, poor thing. And the other fella, he found out he’s a cuckold. The boy he’s been raising as his son in right truth came by another man. Painful.”
She moved back to her tea and poured some of the greenish clear liquid into a cup. It was teaming.
“I told ’em. I told ’em both that was just the beginning of their misfortunes, and that there weren’t nuthin’ that could be done about it now. That seemed to upset them mightily. ’Specially since I’d told them before that I could protect them.”
I snorted. So that was it. Protection.
“Fortune tellers give you a cut, Granny?” I coughed again.
“Every darn one.” She took a sip. “From here to Niagara. Healers and exorcists, too.” The old woman with the arthritic hands picked up half an apple and a knife and sliced it one-handed, dropping the slivers into her mouth. “You don’t sound so good, Doc.”
My host pulled one of three wooden chairs from under the workbench and turned it around to face me. It had half a dozen tiny snails, like living knots of wood, poking from its legs. I noticed then they were all over the greenhouse—small enough to fit three on a quarter and so numerous you might be forgiven for thinking they were seeds as you crunched a few underfoot.
Granny took a seat with a long groan. “Doc, Doc, Doc . . .” She took another sip of her tea and looked me over. “I didn’t want any a this. You know that? After I lost Mister Tuesday—in the war—I didn’t want nuthin’ to do with nuthin’.”
“Which war was that?” I joked.
She smiled patiently. “The only one. When it were finally done, I did alright for a time. But then old age come, like it do for all of us, and I couldn’t go driving round the hills and dells ministering to country folks like I used to. Hard life in the mountains.” She nodded to me. “You know how it is. Time come to settle down.
“So I come to the city. There’s really only one. Lots of folks in the city. All close together-like. Makes it easy for a old woman. Don’t have to travel. And then I met this . . . this black woman.” She emphasized the word. “Bethula Hatchie, she were called. She had the nerve to tell Granny she couldn’t do none of the palming and growing she’d done all her life—not without paying her some of my take.
“It never occurred to me before, that folks could tell other folks what to do like that. But she did. Folks listened, too. And they came to her to take their troubles away, paid for it even, when there weren’t no place left to go. When they were desperate.
“She said I had a choice. She said it in a nice way, but I knew her meaning. It were an easy choice, to tell the truth. I never knew how to do nuthin’ but what I do, what my momma taught me.”
She had finished most of her tea. She reached across and set the glass on the workbench before pushing herself up from her own knees. She shuffled to the nearest planter’s box. It held six odd-shaped rose bushes. And of course an IV stand. The bag was almost empty.
“Bethula Hatchie was the first person I planted in this here blood garden. I remember when she went in. She couldn’t believe it. None of them ever can. Like this fella.” She ran a gnarled hand over one of the rose bushes. “This here is the right Reverend Elmore Garrity. From Harlem. Baptist minister and pain-in-the-ass.” She spoke each word distinctly. “He said we was takin ’vantage and he come with the power ‘a Jesus to shut ol’ Granny down.”
I didn’t see any evidence of a man in the box.
“Lookit him now. All bloomin’ and peaceful.” She turned to me. “But I gotta be fair. The reverend was a fighter. We couldn’t quite get the roots to take, so we had to dig him up and cut him down smaller and replant all the bits. Then he took just fine.”
After she mentioned the butchery, the shapes of the bushes made a little more sense. A head. A torso. Couple arms and legs. Like the topiary of a mad man.
I looked down at myself, buried thigh-deep in potting soil. Thorned vines were already touching me, sharp and prickly, like hungry grabbing hands.
Granny went on. “His eyes were as wide as turnips when we went in, like he never once figured the world could be that cruel. It’s the same look some of my clients get when Granny has no more chances left to give them. Some people expect you’d drain the ocean ’fore runnin’ out of second chances. They prey on that. Take advantage.”
Seemed to me then that Amber had told me the exact same thing at dinner.
“But ya gotta pay your debts in this world,” Granny said with a nod. “Granny don’t like to be taken ’vantage of. So tell me, Doc. Do you know that look? The one folks get when they realize for the first time just how nasty a place the world really is?” She studied my face. “You ever gave anyone that look? Or have them give it to you?”
I nodded.
“Good!” she said with genuine glee. “I’m so glad. It’ll make all this so much easier if we don’t have to start from scratch.” She held up the silver coin. “You don’t know what this is, do ya?”
I shook my head weakly. I didn’t see the point in lying. I was too weak to play the chef’s game. It didn’t seem to matter anymore anyway.
“I didn’t think so. If you did, you never woulda come. Nothin’ I have to trade is worth this silver. Not even my own life. This is a genuine, certified Moirai Penny.” She ran her thumb over the face. “A rare thing. Doesn’t happen but once a King’s Moon, a coin like this—all tangled in chance and destiny. This here is the silver that Robert E. Lee flipped on his retreat from Richmond. Did you know that?”
I shook my head, mostly to clear it so I could contemplate my options. There didn’t seem to be any.
Granny sat down again with a groan.
“Lee knew Sheridan and his army were comin’ up from the south, but he didn’t know quite where or when. The question was whether to turn north and try to outflank Grant, who was on hard chase, or to follow the Appomattox River and try to outrun ’em both and hold out for fresh men and supplies. If it were heads, they’d turn on Grant. If it were tails, they’d follow the river. It were tails. Sheridan come up, Lee got trapped, and he surrendered to Grant at the courthouse at Appomattox and just like that, the glorious rebellion was over.
“But this silver weren’t done. No, sir.” She admired it. “Some forty years later it was in the pocket of Orville Wright, who had a disagreement with his brother that mornin’ about whose turn it was to take out the flying machine, and they flipped for it.
“Of course, between then and there it did quite a few other things, too. Got a woman hung at nine months pregnant. Caused a flood on the Missouri River. Triggered the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. But those first two are the ones of high note, so to speak.
“You can buy a lotta things with a Moirai Penny,” she said wistfully. “The Three Sisters don’t like these in circulation. No, sir. They gum up the works. Turn everything topsy-turvy. So they’ll take ’em in trade. The legal tender of fate. That’s what this is. Yessir, you can buy a helluva lotta things with a Moirai Penny.”
She turned to me. “So, how about you tell me how you came by such a wonder as this.”
I’d like to say that was the part where I crafted some master plan, where I lived up to my reputation as the clever man. But my head was throbbing and my hands tingled painfully and I could barely think to breathe. And I knew absolutely zero magic. I didn’t even believe in it.
“I see.” Granny nodded. “We found this in your pocket.” She unfolded a sheet of white paper and showed me.
It was blank.
She turned it around.
The back was blank as well.
“You wanna tell me what it said?”
“Not particularly.”
“Why not? Don’t you trust me, Doc?”
I laughed. It was her way of asking whether or not I believed she would really do all the terrible things she threatened. But to my delirious mind, it sounded like a joke, especially in that garden of all places, which you might have to be a biologist to really appreciate. I saw new hybrids—crossbreeds—of wolfsbane, hemlock, monkshood, and half a dozen other species. I saw red foxglove-like flowers almost certainly loaded with digitalis-derivative beta-blockers. I saw spikes and thorns covered in ricin-class neurotoxins. I saw beds of filamentous fungi filled with schizophrenia-inducing hallucinogens. Who knew what else?
Most of your wild-type poisons are easily diagnosable these days, even when present in trace amounts, but only because modern science has learned what to look for. And since most people work in offices rather than on farms and don’t have the knowledge or time to grow and isolate poisons, relatively few people are murdered that way anymore. But before the modern era, before the mass production of cheap firearms, when even a good sharp knife was hard to come by, poison was the killer’s first choice.
The plants Granny was breeding were 100% organic and could’ve easily produced entirely new compounds that silently induced heart or renal failure, central nervous system shutdown, or insanity—completely and invisibly mimicking normal-onset diseases like nephritis and dementia. To her victims—and their doctors—it would seem as if they’d suffered an unfortunate but natural calamity. Just plain bad luck.
There was no doubt in my mind that we had found the source of the mysterious mushrooms. But it also seemed clear she was merely the producer. Granny was a businesswoman, nothing more. She was paid to do a job, and she did it.
I wanted to be happy. I’d finally made progress, after all. I took a risk and it had paid off. I’d found the source. Theoretically, it should’ve been easy to get from there to the perpetrator—if right then I hadn’t been five steps from dead.
Granny Tuesday tossed the paper onto her workbench. “You know what’s funny? That paper was all we found. No wallet. No car keys. No fancy cell phone. That says you came ready for this here eventuality. But . . . you didn’t know what the coin was fer.” She frowned. “So who sentcha?”
I didn’t answer.
“Awww, come on, Doc. Just ’cuz you come in here a patsy don’t mean you gotta go out one. Have a little gumption. Stick up fer yerself! Tell whoever sent you to shove off and give Granny what she’s asking for and you and me’ll be all right.”
“You gonna let me go, Granny?” I coughed again. I couldn’t help it. My throat was sand.
“Not at all. But I’ll kill ya quicker. That’s a promise.”
I laughed again. More of a giggle actually. I was so lightheaded. After the initial giggle, which sounded so ridiculous, I started laughing at my laughing. I wondered how much blood I’d lost and laughed at that, too.
“Alright.” She stood on her spindly legs. She sighed. “Alright, alright. What do you say we test her out then?” She held out a hand. “Horace, be a dear and hand me that shotgun.”
The white-shirted orderly from before, the linebacker-looking one, stepped from behind the planter’s box. He’d been so quiet I had no idea he was even there. For all I knew, there were ten more back there with him. He handed Granny a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun with two fat hammers. The stock was snub, more like a pistol than a rifle, and she had to grab the gun with both hands to cock it.
She held up the silver with one hand, shotgun dangling at her side. “Heads, we kill ya right now and be done with it. Just save ourselves all the bile and headache.” She turned it around. “Tails, we letcha hang on a day ’till them thorns start crawlin’ under your skin and you feel like squawkin’. Whaddya say?”
Before I could even raise an objection, she flipped the coin with her thumb. I watched it spin in the air and bounce off her open palm and hit the floor and roll under the workbench.
“Oh, poo!” She tossed the shotgun on the table—hard enough that I wasn’t entirely sure it wouldn’t go off right then—and carefully lowered herself to the mossy carpet like someone with bad knees and a stiff back. She groaned.
Finding the coin took some time and more than a little grunting effort. I waited with pounding head.
“Ah ha!” she exclaimed. I saw her lean into a long reach. “Well, lookit that.” She struggled to her feet. She brushed her hands. Then she showed me. “Tails.”
My head dropped in relief.
Granny Tuesday stood on bare feet. Her toes were wriggling. She was giddy. “Excitin’!”
She looked at the shotgun. “Best two out of three,” she said and flipped again before my stomach was out of my throat.
I saw the coin spin in the air. My heart was pounding so hard—half from blood loss, half from fear—that I could actually feel it moving my chest. She caught it this time and grinned like a little girl about to set her favorite doll on fire.
“Heads. Well, well. Now we got ourselves a wager. Anything you wanna say before I flip the last time?”
I wasn’t sure who I was protecting or why, but it hardly seemed to matter.
“I’ll make it easy for you,” she said. “I’ll say a name, and you nod your head, yes or no. How’s that sound?”
“Just do whate—” My throat snagged on itself and I started to cough.
“Alright,” she said. “Suit yourself.”
The coin flipped again. We both watched it spin. It hit her hand and slipped free and bounced hard on the work table and stopped. Just like that.
The Moirai Penny landed in a heavy groove between the slats. Neither heads nor tails was showing—or maybe they both were, like some cruel quantum experiment. The coin stood vertical, straight up on its narrow edge, immobile, perched so precariously that the slightest breath could’ve turned it over. For a moment, fate hung like a jury. Nobody moved. Even Granny was surprised. Our eyes met. I think in that moment we both knew what it meant.
Granny went right for the shotgun and swung it around as the barn doors burst open. She fired and the recoil knocked her to the ground. The first man through the door took buckshot to the chest. His smooth white shirt made the circles of blood easy to see. It was Virgil, the second orderly who had dragged me from Granny’s room. It wasn’t until he slumped to the ground that I realized Dench had been using him as a human shield. Dench had a large gun in his hand, but he was still at the other end of the garden.
The first orderly, Horace, picked up the shotgun as Granny moaned and tried to right herself. He cocked the second hammer and raised the weapon just as Dench fired his .357. Big sucker. Even at thirty paces, the bullet ripped through Horace’s chest and broke a pot at the back. The orderly crumpled and went down like he’d been punched in the gut. His hands clenched as he fell, pulling the shotgun trigger. Buckshot ripped through the glass in the roof and the pieces fell over me.
Milan strode forward and tugged at my bonds as Dench kept the Magnum leveled at Granny Tuesday. He walked slowly to the spent shotgun, which had fallen under one of the planter’s boxes, and kicked it out of the way just as the chef strode into the greenhouse, hands in his fantastic coat. He looked at the body near the doors. Virgil’s white shirt was riddled with buckshot holes. Leaking blood now covered most of his white shirt.
“Don’t you worry none,” Granny said to me from the ground. “Ain’t the first time them two fools got themselves kilt. They was dead when I found ’em. I’ll raise ’em again later.”
Étranger walked through the poison garden toward his host. “Hello, Livonia.”
One of my bonds came loose and my hand fell like a lead weight. “You wanted her to use the coin,” I accused, my voice cracked and hoarse.
But he didn’t even look at me. He was watching Granny Tuesday. Intently.
“It gums up the works, right? That’s what she said. Turns everything upside down. You knew she wouldn’t be able to resist. All she had to do was flip it and—”
I fell forward, over the lip of the planter’s box and onto the floor, taking quite a bit of soil with me. My bonds had been loosed enough that my weight, which I was too weak to support, did the rest. I groaned. It hurt.
Milan pushed me back against the table. “He needs fluids,” she said to the chef.
Etude nodded to Dench, who walked to a sink at the back and got me a glass of water.
“Wash it out first,” Milan ordered. She glanced to Granny. “You don’t know what was in it before.”
Granny Tuesday sat up on the moss and dusted her hands off. She squinted one-eyed at the chef.
“Had to try. Have a seat. Take a load off. Give your dog a break.” She nodded to Dench.
But the chef didn’t sit. He walked to Granny Tuesday and held out his open hand. She sat with her butt on the moss and didn’t budge.
“We all have our time, Livonia,” he said. “We must each make the most of it.”
It was only then that I realized the coin was missing. I thought it must have fallen to the floor in the melee. I wondered how it had landed, heads or tails, and whether the result was binding.
Granny Tuesday scowled deeply. “Aw, hell.” She reached under her fat worm of a tongue and produced the silver Moirai Penny. But she hesitated. “I took it off him fair and square,” she objected, nodding to me. “Least you can do is trade me for it, rightwise.”
Étranger neither argued nor relented.
“There was a pocket watch,” Granny pleaded. “It was a gift from Mister Tuesday, inscribed with a little message. It were about the only nice thing he ever said to me, the sonuvabitch. I lost it. Years ago.” She motioned to the pockets of the chef’s fantastic coat. “It means nothing to nobody but the world to me. Whaddya say? A fair trade’ll keep the Three Sisters happy.”
That seemed to persuade the chef. I could see his hand move inside his coat pocket, like he was feeling around for an old receipt or something. He removed a closed hand. He held it out. He opened it. In his palm was a brass pocket watch and matching chain. Granny Tuesday dropped the coin into the man’s tattooed hand and snatched her prize. She didn’t even look at it. She snuck it right into the pocket of her smock like she didn’t want anyone to see.
Étranger put the coin, and his hands, in his own pockets and sat in the open chair. “A circle burns around the city,” he said.
Granny got up slowly. “You’re a pox on two legs, you know that?”
“A circle that large can only have one purpose,” he countered.
Granny Tuesday pulled another chair from under the workbench. It had snails on its legs. “Don’t patronize me.” She sat. “It ain’t my fault they found your precious book. And I ain’t the one what wrote it. I’m a businesswoman. I provide a service. I don’t get involved in my clients’ affairs and I don’t take sides. Didn’t in the war. Don’t now. Certainly not with the likes ‘a you.”
Dench leaned in then and sniffed. Right over Granny’s head. And not like he was checking out her rosewater cologne. It wasn’t a whiff like when I pick a shirt up off the floor and try to decide if its dirty. This was deep, like two dogs greeting. He looked at Étranger and shook his head in the negative, as if he knew the old woman was lying.
She cursed and spat. Then she leaned back and locked her fingers casually over her belly. “If you’re gonna shoot me, you heartless bastard, then do it quick.” She was talking to Dench. “And for fuck’s sake, don’t cock it up like you did with that Arab fella.”
“Keep it up, Granny,” Dench warned, brandishing the monster revolver in his hand.
“Who paid for the mushrooms?” the chef demanded.
“I don’t know anything ‘bout any mushrooms.”
The chef looked to Dench, who sniffed again and nodded as if in the affirmative.
“That can’t be,” I objected. “She has to be the one. She has—” I choked again and coughed.
“Calm down, Doctor,” Milan urged.
Étranger turned his gaze across the greenhouse, slowly, before stopping at the workbench where Granny had been standing when I woke. Whatever he saw didn’t make him happy. He stood and inspected the tea cup.
“Not sayin’ I didn’t. Seems like the kinda thing I’d do, to be honest. But if I ever did know anything ‘bout any mushrooms, I musta cast it outta my mind.” She waved a shaking, arthritic hand over her white hair. “Ain’t nuthin’ good can come from knowin’ some things.”
Étranger pinched some of the powdered leaves in his hand. Then he tasted them like a cop testing drugs. He dabbed some on his tongue and spit. He rifled through the drawers near the bird cage, then lifted a single leaf from a bin. It was vaguely hourglass-shaped. I didn’t recognize it. The chef turned to the old woman, holding it up as if in demand of an explanation.
“Oh, dear,” Milan said under her breath.
Granny started cackling. That’s the only word for it. The sound rippled through the room like the snap of wet logs on a fire. She threw her head back and everything, like someone had just told her the funniest joke of her life. I could see quite a few missing teeth.
The chef wasn’t happy. But he seemed lost in thought then.
“It sure seems like whoever you’re chasing,” Granny went on, “knew better than to leave ol’ Granny flappin’ in the wind. I had them leaves and some instructions what said if anyone was to come lookin’, I was to make myself a cup ‘a tea.”
Granny Tuesday cackled again, softer, at the look on his face. “New moon tonight. Dark tidings. Seems to me, if you’re right about that circle, then whatever it’s for is nigh upon us. Wasted too much time on this fella.” She spat toward me. The spittle darkened the dirt and contracted like a dead spider. Then she leaned forward to gloat. “He beat you,” she told the chef. “Admit it. He beat you.”
His reaction was intense but subtle. I could see a snaking vein on his bald head. He stared into the tea cup, tilting it slowly like he was reading the leaves and contemplating the future. Then he looked up. “The game is not yet over.” With that, he replaced the cup and strode for the door.
Granny started laughing again, even louder this time.
“Don’t you dare!” Milan barked at the chef. “Don’t you think that’s exactly what he—Dammit!” She turned to Dench. “Help me get him to his feet!”
As the three of us struggled to get my wobbly legs under me, I caught Granny peering at her prize. The pocket watch dangled in front of her face. I caught a glimpse of it then and did a double take a moment later. The numbers were backwards. Twelve was still at the top, and the hands still ticked forward, but the numbers counted down: 11 in the place of 1, 10 in place of 2, and so on.
“You should listen to your friend,” The old woman called after the chef. “He’s gnawing on your soul, you ol’ fool!” She cackled again. “Every time you use his chair. I can see it. You got teeth marks on your heart!”
Milan had turned pale. “Nononononono,” she chanted, unrelenting, as the three of us hobbled out the doors. “Nonono.”
We all heard the Jaguar start.
“No!” Milan let go and ran as Dench quickly braced my chest with an extra hand.
But the chef had already driven away.