Forever and Always Read online

  As I smiled back at Darci I wondered what it must be like to live in a world of ghosts and other things “normal” people couldn’t see. But then, maybe if you’d seen ghosts all your life, they wouldn’t be any more strange to you than the next-door neighbor’s kid.

  “Let’s go get the files,” I said, and Darci and I headed toward the crypt. “How many are here now?” I couldn’t help asking as we walked.

  “All of them,” she said. “Lots of them.”

  I didn’t work her as hard as I had the night before, but last night I’d felt sure that if we left the files in the room, by morning they’d be gone. In the crypt I felt they were safe—except from rats, creeping mildew, and dead people, that is.

  I gave Darci a pile of folders to carry, loaded the big garden cart, and took them the short distance to the long building that was the slave quarters. Cheap, I thought. Instead of the expense of separate buildings, the original builder had made three very long houses, put in interior walls and lots of front doors. Row houses. At least he’d gone to the added expense of putting a deep porch along the fronts.

  When we found that all the doors were locked, Darci looked defeated. “I can’t open locks without any tools,” she said, “and I don’t think you should break the door open.”

  I took a guess, got the key to my front door, and tried it. When I opened the door, I said, “It’s cheaper to make all the locks use the same key.”

  Inside the little room were furnishings more sparse than mine. “I didn’t know they gave me the presidential suite,” I said, and Darci laughed.

  She dumped her folders on the old stained mattress that had cotton ticking protruding from it. “Think this is original to the house?”

  Darci again laughed, making me feel like a comedian.

  “My husband couldn’t make jokes,” she said. “He tried, but they always fell flat. His sister laughed at them but then Bo had had a very unusual childhood.” Her tone was so wistful that I was almost jealous. Alanna said she loved me more than life itself—but she didn’t seem to love me more than she loved playing opposite Denzel Washington.

  I looked down at Darci as she picked up an old folder. I wanted to ask her to tell me more about her husband’s family. I knew her sister-in-law had been raised by a witch—one of the evil kind. Ever since we did a show about a cult of witches that had killed a couple of people as “sacrifices,” I’d been careful to distinguish between good and bad witches. We’d received letters full of rage telling us we hadn’t done our research, that there were witches who didn’t do evil, only good. Ralph had said, “Witches want control. For good or bad, they want control and in my book, control is bad.” The director had said, “Next time we’ll call them tooth fairies. Somebody check the Internet and see if there are any tooth fairy cults.” As for me, I thought those complainers should get a life: Those who do, do. Those who can’t, complain about everybody else’s work.

  I sat down on the other side of the bed, the folders between us. “Now what do we do?” The folders looked much newer than the papers and I wondered when file folders had been invented, and who had sorted the bills of sale.

  “Martha Jefferson,” Darci read, then her voice lowered.

  “This is a bill of sale for her three children.”

  When she looked into empty space I knew what she was seeing. I didn’t want to ask, but I couldn’t keep the words out of my mouth. “What is it?”

  “A light,” Darci whispered. “The spirits are usually just vague outlines of people. I feel them more than see them, but now there’s a light and—” She paused for a moment.

  “Are you Martha? Do you want to know where your children were sent?”

  I guess I should have been afraid but, instead, the idea of helping my ancestors, or just “my people” as Moses called them, gave me a feeling of elation that I’d never had before. It was a high. Like a drug. I snatched the paper out of Darci’s hand, scanned it and said loud and clear, “Fairway Plantation, Jackson, Mississippi, to a Mr. Neville MacBride.”

  I couldn’t see “them,” so I watched Darci’s face. Her eyes widened for a moment, then she broke into a smile so bright that for a moment there was no sadness in her eyes. She looked at me in wonder. “She left. The woman heard the name and she left. Get another paper, read another name!” Darci said, grabbing the file on top, and when she did her fingers touched mine. “Me too,” she said. “That’s how I feel, too.”

  I knew what she meant. I’d never done anything that made me feel as good as doing this did.

  For the next three hours we went through folders, scanning names and reading them as fast as we could. I knew Darci felt as I did, that we couldn’t stop to think about what we were reading or we’d both start bawling. She would think about her daughter and niece being taken from her and I would think about being put on an auction block and sold.

  Not long ago I’d seen a special on TV about some archaeologists who’d dug up a slave cemetery and analyzed what they’d found. Not surprising, but still horrible, they’d found that the slaves had, basically, been worked to death. Extreme manual labor had worn them out so that few of them lived to middle age.

  What I’d seen on TV was in my head as I speeded up reading the old bills of sale. It didn’t seem to matter that Darci and I were talking over the top of each other or that we were going so fast we could hardly understand ourselves. It seemed that the ghosts could hear us and understand us and that’s what mattered.

  “Uh oh,” Darci said after I read one woman’s name. The slave called “Vesuvius,” I’d read. No last name. Vesuvius, the volcano in Italy. “She’s one of your four. Sure you want to let her go?”

  I hesitated, as though I were considering. “Is she sure she wants to let me go?”

  “The light around her just got stronger. Boy! Is she pretty. I wonder what happened to her after her child was sold? Oh my.”

  “What?”

  “She was—” Darci looked back at the pile of folders.

  “She was branded on her cheek with an R for runaway.”

  I quickly read the name of the place in Alabama her son had been sold to. “Gone?” I asked Darci moments later.

  “Gone.”

  I sighed because I’d miss my midnight companions.

  “So I guess now you’ll have to take her place.” I said this as though it was something Darci had to do.

  “With a houseful of women wanting you? I’d never have a chance. You know, with all these spirits gone, maybe the women in the Big House will be able to visit you at night.”

  “That does it, I’m outta here,” I said, and we laughed. I grabbed another folder and read the names. Even to my unpsychic mind the room felt lighter, less as though it was packed full of centuries of tragedy.

  By midnight we had finished them all. I wanted to burn the evil documents but Darci said no, that they might be needed for something later.

  We went back to my bedroom and I showed her what I’d bought, a fat bottle of Grand Marnier, the wonderful orange liqueur, plus a big chocolate orange.

  We turned out the lights in the room and went to the porch to sit and look at the moonlight. Never in my life had I felt better. It was the first time I’d ever done something so altruistic, something so much for others.

  As we sipped our liqueur out of water glasses, the only kind I had, I turned to Darci. “Do you do this kind of thing often?”

  “Not just like this, but I help…people find things.”

  I knew she wasn’t telling me everything, but then I was starring in a TV series called Missing. Since I’d met her I’d thought how real life missing people could use her talents. Of course, someone like Darci—not that there was anyone else like her on earth—would have put us all out of work.

  “Police?” I asked.

  “Not hardly. People don’t believe anyone can have any ability that they don’t have. If a person can’t see a spirit, then he knows for sure there are no spirits.”

  Why did I th