“Well, Avery grew up. By the time Eliza was born he was probably thirty years old, and by the time he learned he had siblings he was married with a child of his own. At some point he took his child, his wife, and her two sisters down to Florida. I’m not sure why they all left—I think Lissie had other family down there or something. But they did, and no one ever heard from any of them again. One of the sisters, though, had a baby she left behind for her mother to raise. That baby was named James, and most everyone says that James was probably Avery’s baby too. There seemed to be a lot of sharing going on. While no one really knows what happened to Avery and the girls, James and his wife, Susan, became my grandparents. They died in a car crash when I wasn’t out of the cradle. I never knew them.”

All very interesting, yes, but she was beating around the bush; or maybe it was all just a long story and I hadn’t seen the point yet. “You still haven’t answered my question: what was wrong with Avery that Malachi is still trying to kill him a hundred years later?”

Lulu held still, choosing her words and arranging them like Scrabble tiles before putting them down for me to know. “There’s a word for it, for what they thought he was. There were rumors,” she stalled, “that Avery was a sorko—a sorcerer. Lissie’s parents were brought from Niger, and she was a witch in her own right. Lord Himself knows what she taught him, but he took to those African tribal and Indian religions like a duck to a pond. He felt powerless growing up; and sometimes people look for power in places they shouldn’t go.

“And in case it’s escaped your attention, your cousin Malachi is not so right in the head. Stir a healthy fear of God into the loony mix, and you get a kid who thinks his great-uncle was an immortal witch. I honestly don’t know the specifics that make him tick, and I wish I did. Maybe he knows something from Eliza that I don’t. It’s never made sense to me that he chose to hunt you because you saw the ghosts. But then again, it’s not such a far leap for a zealot to make—to say that a girl sees dead people so she must be a witch. That’s how it works with some of those religious people, you know. Anything they don’t understand—and sometimes, anything they don’t like—it all must come from the devil. How he dragged Avery into it I couldn’t say. I’ll have to stand by my original story that the boy’s a crazy fuck stick.”

“What did happen to Avery and the women, Lulu? Someone must know.”