Sel dips his head, pink flooding his cheeks. “Thank you for having me, but I’ll stay outside. To do a perimeter sweep and patrol. If you’ll excuse me.”

She makes a “hmph” sound that might be approval, and Sel leaves. I could intervene, I think, but this isn’t my home, and Sel made his own decision. Pushing Miss Hazel to accept him would backfire, and the history here is too much for me to handle in the middle of the night as a guest in someone’s home.

After we eat, Miss Hazel shoos William to the back of the house to settle in. William goes gladly, with a “Thank you, ma’am.” Valec takes Mariah’s car back to the Lounge and says he’ll return tomorrow.

Mariah urges me and Alice to join her on Miss Hazel’s screened-in porch.

Miss Hazel calls out, “Y’all girls sit. I’ll fix us some tea.”

I duck under bound herbs hanging at intervals from the porch ceiling. Mullein, sweet mint, and others I don’t recognize in bunches of leaves and gathered roots wrapped tightly in wheat-colored twine.

The porch extends in a square out the back of the house, a peninsula in the green expanse of her backyard. Beyond the yard is a deep wooded area where daylight goes to rest. Woods like that pull you in because they feel like an adventure. But you just know those same adventurin’ woods will send you back with all the souvenirs nobody wants: poison ivy oil, then a rash; ticks in your collar; chiggers in your socks.

“What do you think?” Mariah folds her legs underneath her on a wicker loveseat.

I drop into a dusty, creaking Adirondack chair and stretch my legs out. “I’m so stuffed that I’m not sure I can think right now. That was straight-up Thanksgiving food.”

Miss Hazel calls to us through a window over her sink. “Used to be we’d eat like this every Sunday.”

Mariah shakes her head with a smile. “Some of us still do. My mother lives in Fountain, North Carolina, and I think she makes fried chicken once a week. And hush puppies.”

Miss Hazel whistles. “Yes, Lawd.” The kettle clinks onto the gas burner. She pushes through the screen door to join us. “Pitt County Fountain?”

“That’s the one,” Mariah says.

“Coupla granny women out that way.”

“Yep.”

I drop my head back against the chair. “What’s a granny woman?”

Mariah smiles. “Root doctor. Herbalist.”

Miss Hazel taps her foot to get her rocking chair going. “Not many of us around nowadays, but I still see a few.”

She sips her tea and fixes me with a long stare. “That Merlin boy. You trust him?”

Alice and Mariah both wait for my answer. “I trust him with my life….” That’s all I can manage, but it’s true.