Crescent City Connection

remedies, conventional or alternative, had the least effect, but Skip had an idea—she happened to know a coven of witches who’d agreed to try their hand at a healing. Layne could have managed without her, but she had promised to take Kenny, who was just dying to see witches at work.
    “Maybe I’ll stay overnight,” she told Steve. “You can take Kenny to the healing.”
    “Is it okay if I wear a garlic clove?”
    “Oh, forget it. I’ll be back.”
    Aunt Alice liked her—Skip felt this was due mostly to the fact that she offered the simple courtesy of not treating deaf as stupid. And Skip liked Aunt Alice—she liked her exuberance and her courage. When she visited the first time, Aunt Alice had talked candidly about a relative she thought was dangerous, though everyone else in the family had decided to find him amusing— Earl Jackson, aka Errol Jacomine.
    She greeted Skip this time in a lavender windsuit with gray trim. It was meant for walking, but Aunt Alice was heavy and moved slowly, as if what walking she did was done under duress. Her gray hair was short, upswept in front, curled on the sides, and rigid with spray—she’d just been to the hairdresser.
    She held both of Skip’s hands and looked at her like a long-lost relative. “Hey, precious. You look so pretty.” Instantly, Skip recalled the way she had taken to Alice the first time they met, partly because of the woman’s warmth but also because of her intelligence—and the sense that Alice, because of her deafness, was much underestimated by her relatives.
    Skip came and sat down. She was presented with a writing pad—Aunt Alice could talk to you, but you had to write to her.
    “Did you get my letter?”
    Skip nodded. She wrote, “Thank you. That was sweet of you.”
    Skip’s encounter with Jacomine was national news. Aunt Alice had written to say she knew Skip was just doing her job even though Earl Jackson was a blood relative, and she, for one, not only applauded, she was real sorry the bastard got away.
    “It’s good to see you again, honey. What can I do for you this time?”
    “I know it’s stupid to ask,” Skip wrote, “but has Jacomine been in touch with anyone in the family?”
    “Now, honey, you know I would have let you know.”
    “Just thought I’d ask,” she wrote, and pulled out a list of the things she’d already done to trace Jacomine: looked for his wife, looked for his son, badgered the Christian Community. “Can you think of anything else I could do?”
    Aunt Alice’s index finger, under a layer of ladylike pink nail polish, flicked at the list. “Didn’t even know he’d married again.”
    Skip’s stomach flipped over. Blood pounded in her ears: this was something. She wrote, “Again? You mean this wasn’t his first marriage?”
    “Oh, lordy, lordy. How
would
you know? Yes, ma’am, he was married, and thereby hangs a tale. Now where’d I put that thing?” She got up and left the room. Skip wanted to chase her, grabbing at the flapping folds of her purple windsuit.
    But there was nothing to do but wait, drumming her fingers, swinging her leg, all but biting her nails.
    “Here it is.” Aunt Alice handed her a clipping from People magazine, about a Texas millionaire who’d just married a nineteen-year-old fashion model who looked like she’d probably suck her thumb if she got to feeling insecure.
    Skip stared at it. “I don’t understand.”
    “See that other picture? That was Earl Jackson’s first wife.” She nodded, caught up in the utter satisfaction of having a good story to tell. “Course, she was Mary Rose then.”
    The inset at the bottom was a head shot of the woman scorned—Rosemarie Owens, a hard-looking blonde with helmet hair, very much in the Ivana Trump mode. She’d gotten an eight-million-dollar settlement, and was suing for more.
    Skip was flabbergasted. But then everything about Jacomine flabbergasted her—to her, he was a weedy-looking, slightly ferrety, crepey-skinned, slimy little salamander, hardly capable of inspiring mother love, much less the devotion of hundreds of followers.
    “How on Earth … ?” she wrote, and then she added a series of exclamations and question marks.
    Aunt Alice chuckled, thoroughly enjoying herself. “Well, she was too young to know better. ’Bout fourteen, I think—maybe a little more. She and Earl ran away together.”
    “She’s from Savannah as well?”
    “Oh, yes. Oh, it was quite a story. They ran away and then later he