The Real Mrs. Price Read Free Page A

“Hello?” she asked, half-awake.
    She’d been dreaming. Goodness gracious! Marlowe’s eyes widened as she scanned the space in her room.
    â€œIt’s me,” Shou Shou said without apology. Shou Shou was Marlowe’s aunt. “I had an intuition,” the old woman told her.
    Marlowe sat up in bed. The last time Shou Shou had had an intuition, Marlowe’s twin sister, Marjorie, died.
    â€œWhat it look like?” Marlowe asked anxiously.
    â€œIt look like you,” Shou Shou told her. “I want you to do something for me.”
    â€œSay it,” Marlowe responded. “You know I’ll do it.”
    â€œI want you to read the bones, Marlowe. Don’t wait ’til sunup. Get up and read ’em now.”
    Marlowe could count on two hands how many times she’d read the bones in her lifetime. But if Shou Shou was asking her to do this, then it had to be important.
    â€œYes, ma’am,” she said nervously. “You want me to call you back and tell you what I saw?”
    â€œNo,” she said simply. “It ain’t for me. It’s for you. Do it now, before midnight. Don’t go back to sleep, Marlowe.”
    â€œNo, ma’am. I won’t.”
    â€œNot ’til you read them bones. Then go back to sleep if you can, darlin’.”
    â€œYes, ma’am.” Marlowe hung up, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and looked at the clock. “Shit.” In twenty minutes, it would be midnight. She climbed, naked, out of bed and went to the bathroom to pee and slip into her robe before heading out into the sunroom at the back of the house. Marlowe kept the bones in a black velvet bag at the bottom of an old flowerpot in the corner on the floor. Reading bones inside her house, even in the sunroom, was something she’d never do.
    Shou Shou had always told her to take them outside. “Bones can bring good news, but they can bring bad news, too. Always read ’em outside in case the news is bad. The last thing you want is to let that mess loose inside your house.”
    By mess, she meant foul spirits.
    Marlowe knelt and spread her casting cloth out on the grass in her yard and then opened the black pouch and poured the possum bones into her hand. Cupping both palms around the bones, she shook them, held them as she took a deep breath, and watched them fall. She studied the positioning of each of them carefully as they related to each other and to themselves.
    Shou Shou’s words came back to haunt her. “Sometimes you can see the devil in the bones. He don’t look like you think he looks. But you can tell it’s him.”
    A dreadful feeling snaked up her spine. “Is that you, devil?” she murmured, trying not to give in to the fear rising up from that casting cloth. She had dreamed him, and the bones confirmed her fears.
    Were the bones trying to warn her about Eddie? Because if they were, then they were too late. She’d married him already. He’d been inside her house and inside her body too many damn times, so she was tainted with him, soiled and spoiled, and left dirty from him. She studied the bones intensely a few minutes longer and realized that they weren’t showing her the devil who had come; they were warning her of the one yet to come.
    The thought came to her, Don’t let him in. Marlowe shuddered.
    Marlowe had learned a long time ago that discerning spirits wasn’t always a good thing. Looking down at those bones, she had no choice but to commit to the ugly and unwelcome truth. There was a threat in the bones, shrouded by something or someone so dark and dangerous that she trembled at the thought of him. She didn’t know who he was or why he had any business with her, but the bones didn’t lie, and Marlowe couldn’t deny their truth.
    â€œThat’s you, all right.” She swallowed fearfully.
    She wanted no part of him, whoever he was, but that dream still had her