Persephone Underground Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About The Author

  Jennifer Russon is a reporter, covering news in Coral Springs, Florida, where she lives with her family. Food editor at Jorj.com, her freelance work also includes ghostwriting. Persephone Underground is Jennifer's third published novel, and the stand alone sequel to A Forest Full of Roses; a third book in this trilogy, Runningwolf & the Roses, is planned for release in 2021. Valeria's Passport, a romantic comedy, was published in 2018.

  Chapter

  1

  Before I went under…

  I’m gunning to get accepted into college early. When the letters started coming in, I took them to my favorite place to get bad news, because when you look around a cemetery you are reminded things could always be way worse. I drove out to Our Lady in Heaven just off the Boulevard of Champions, and parked myself on the marble bench by Allyson’s grave.

  Deep breaths, deep breaths

  The responses were from 6 different colleges. I’ll wait until I’ve meditated here a while, I thought, until I’m finished talking with Allyson.

  I come here at least twice a year – on her birthday and again on the anniversary of her death. Today is her birthday. She would have been 35 had she survived. That’s Mom’s age.

  To be dead 14 years isn’t forever, but it seems like forever to a high school kid like me, obsessed over my own dirt nap. I don’t know why, but I seriously pray every lone wolf to cross my path doesn’t have a gun. I worry about every little physical symptom or pain to shoot through my mortal body. I may be fascinated with the details of how YOU will die, even if the thought of dying myself is too horrible to face.

  My mom is a nurse so that’s good. I have her look me over a lot, and hold my hand at doctor’s appointments to determine why I’m like 30 pounds underweight. I make excuses about the deep scratches on my arms and legs…even if they are…gulp…put there by me.

  My baggy, gothic dresses with long sleeves hide more than just protruding ribs. Maybe my size is the reason I’m an introvert. My best friend is whatever interloper happens to be hanging around.

  Oh, that’s you? Okay, new bestie. Allow me to fill you in on the Who, What, Where, When and Y of Persephone Gonzalez. And, please, just call me Seph.

  I go to a public school in the heart of the projects – bars on every window and drug dealers lurking around. I call it Bad Ass Academy, but I love my teachers and it seems everyone there wants me to succeed. My principal, who students address as Miz Furr, recruited me to work in her husband’s nightclub this summer. I have my interview at The Pomegranate right after my visit with Allyson…Allyson who I need right now for moral support.

  If I don’t get accepted into any good colleges, I’ll just console myself with the likelihood that I don’t deserve to be happy…because of what mom and I did to this girl.

  Allyson, if you are wondering, is the young woman my mother hit with her car in 2005. It could have been my fault. I was a squirmy toddler in the back seat at the time. On that God forsaken rainy night, after a few drinks to drown her sorrows over my dad walking out on us, mom’s car slid into the one Allyson Cox happened to be riding in, and killed her instantly. Mom was charged with vehicular manslaughter and went to jail. Me, I bounced around in foster care like a Halloween leftover nobody wanted, until she’d served her time and a family court judge put us back together again.

  I will never forget the way that judge stared at my heavy black eyeliner and raven colored dress at the reunification hearing. I have Mexican blood running through me, thanks to the dad I’ve never met, and while ghostly pale from Mom’s Irish genes, I do have his dark eyes and dark hair. My features are something I actually like about myself. My style too. I wear crushed velvet that looks straight up haunted. I mean, why not? I’m as haunted as they come. Regretting shit is my identity.

  Mom and I both think of Allyson, and what we robbed her of, every single day. It’s kind of like a life sentence to tell you the truth. She was a dean’s list college student before the car crash – on a date with her boyfriend.

  I know every detail of that October night. Allyson and Bobby-sittin’ in a tree-K-I-S-S-I-N-G, went for ice cream but never made it to the parlor. Well, she made it to the funeral parlor, I guess you could say…

  I know all about Allyson’s family and how understandably devastated they were. I even half way support them for hating my mom. When they literally jumped up and down upon hearing my mother’s harsh 10 year sentence for the DUI, I forgave them. What kind of monster would I be if I hadn’t?

  One of my earliest memories is of Mom apologizing to the Cox family, bursting into tears as she was led away in handcuffs. The court house had their Halloween decorations up in some of the rooms they herded me through. I remember fake cobwebs draped over doors and strangely comforting skulls painted with Mexican designs near a secretary’s computer.

  She had said in Spanish that my mom was estranged from my grandparents. No one from the Joy Doyle family would be coming for me. Worse yet, no one could get a hold of my mysterious Dad.

  My dad is – or he was – a magician on a cruise ship. It’s a long story everyone eventually gets to hear if they bother getting to know me well.

  Anyway, when I went into foster care, it wasn’t as bad as people think. I’ve had foster parents who want me to eat a sandwich, and fosters who just want me to eat a sandwich and go away. Some were actually nice. Some took me out to the prison to visit Mom.

  We read books and colored together in the drab visiting room – sometimes we even touched hands. Those guards always gave my mom the stink eye, though. They gave me nothing but pitying glances. Word had gotten around, you see, that I wasn’t quite right in the head.

  I hurt my head when mom crashed into Allyson, and still have a learning disability called dyscalculia from that. It’s why my college letters are trembling in my lap. But I’ve worked hard and outgrown a lot of it, and Mom is a patient tutor, helping me with my Math and burning up her Saturdays getting me ready to retake the SAT.

  If you think I resent mom for putting me in a situation where I’d have to wear a ring on my hand to know my left from my right up until about 6th grade, well, you’d be right. But it’s a dirty secret, and I’d like to think she has no idea I’m still so angry.

  She loves me hard, so she can’t know. She can never know. Her name is Joy and she lives up to it. Joy hasn’t stopped smiling since she got me back from foster care 4 years ago.

  Joy bought me a great car. She gives me everything I want – and to tell the truth, her efforts run a lot deeper than the material stuff. Mom tries, she really does, and at the end of the day, I just want to cut myself for not loving her back.

  She caught me with a pack of razors, having made the slightest incision on my forearm and within a few hours, I had an appointment with the best therapist in town. I ha
d to tell this bearded old man, who was a cross between Sigmund Freud and Santa Claus, not only that I was a cutter, but that I “checked out” a lot in school.

  I daydream. I live in different worlds. Earth to Persephone everyone says. I can’t remember to do things in the right order, and appointment dates and timelines run all screwy in my head. It’s kind of like I’m on a merry-go-round at the playground. It’s turning at a dizzying speed and when I get off and on, I’m not sure what’s happened already and what’s gonna happen next.

  I draw and write in a journal I lug around: part picture book, part diary, it’s mostly full of graphic art about the undead – zombies in forests; roses all around them. I hope to be a graphic novelist one day. At worst, I know I’ll never make it. At best, I can keep on keeping on, in a world of my own.

  Sucking in my breath, I tell Allyson Cox I am going to start opening the letters now.

  I sure do hope at least one of these letters says I’m eligible for some sweet financial aid…

  Mom’s career as a nurse was delayed for obvious reasons, and playing catch up meant we didn’t have a lot of money. I’d need financial aid. If anything, getting this job at the Pomegranate Night Club was more important than being accepted into college.

  With all this excitement, I might forget to go to my interview and Miz Furr will be pissed….

  Mom doesn’t know I’m interviewing at The Pomegranate. She’d hate it. I gently argued with Principal Furr, who insisted I try for the hostess position – told her I wasn’t old enough to work in a place that served alcohol, but she insisted her family had “ways of getting around that”, and it would be a pity if I didn’t meet her son.

  Miz Furr had a smoking hot son named Hayden in his early 20s, who worked there as a dishwasher. He could stand to meet a nice girl like me, Miz Furr had practically begged.

  It’s a distraction in and of itself – thinking about Miz Furr’s pretty, yet evil face. I’ve sketched it many times in the margins of my diary. There is a coldness in her eyes, and her lips are usually pressed into a frown. She is Caribbean – from Belize. The kids at Bad Ass Academy whisper about the voodoo in her family – how her mother is a freak named Mami Wata, telling fortunes with blood and chicken bones out of a ramshackle little house on the Boulevard of Champions, not far from this cemetery.

  My heart is pounding so loud, I swear it’s messing with my vision. The first college said no, and the second and the third. There were 3 more to go when the wind picked up and blew the letters right off my lap.

  I stood up from the marble bench and wiped disappointed tears from my cheeks, knowing in my gut, my SAT math score was the reason the rest of the those letters were likely gonna reject me too.

  The Florida heat in June is so oppressive, chasing down the stupid letters was like walking into walls of solid heat. I bumped into a woman who seemed to materialize like a damn ghost as I stooped to pick one up.

  “Oh!” was all she said.

  At first, all I saw were her sandals. She wore gold, gladiator sandals that tied up around her impressive legs like a ballerina. Her white sundress was short. A gold belt cinched her waist. She was dressed way too pretty for this place. It was like she just hiked down from Mount Olympus – a goddess of some kind.

  She appeared to be Hispanic. She wasn’t pale like me, but so close to my own appearance it was like looking into a mirror and made us both gasp. The woman was older than me – maybe middle aged, but we could still be sisters. She said her name was Ronnie.

  “I assume these belong to you?”

  Ronnie handed me the rest of my letters, apparently sent from the University of Dream On Dummy. My tears had dried at that point, and now I just felt angry over such hardcore rejection.

  I thanked the strange lady and introduced myself by my full name of Persephone.

  “That’s pretty,” the woman said and left it at that. Hardly anyone ever did that: learn my unusual name and let it drop. I usually had to sound it out for them: Per-Seph-funny. I loved her smile – so wide and accepting. She seemed happy, like maybe she just enjoyed walking the paths around this cemetery and wasn’t here to mourn anyone.

  “Is Ronnie short for something?” I asked my older doppelganger.

  “Veronica,” she said.

  “Well, Ronnie, I wish I could stay and get to know ya, but I’m on my way to interview at The Pomegranate.”

  Ronnie’s smile evaporated and her whole face darkened at this news.

  “I’ve lived in Ft. Lauderdale a long time. Long enough to know that place has a terrible history associated with it. Aren’t you afraid? I wish I had been afraid. Hayden Furr showed me….no mercy,” she added ominously.

  The sound of Hayden’s name stopped my heart, but I wasn’t going to let some crazy remark from a stranger deter me from interviewing. Of course I knew what Ronnie was referring to. The Pomegranate had been the scene of MANY alleged abductions of young women, from the late 1970s right on up till now. None of them had ever been seen again. It didn’t scare me so much as intrigue me because I longed to disappear too. Not die, mind you, but fade away just enough that it left a trace of romanticism in my wake; romanticism and Band-Aids and Neosporin from my life on earth as a cutter.

  I can’t stand the way this lady’s looking at me. What excuse can I make to get away?

  Of course, I didn’t say what I was thinking – just assured her I’d keep my wits about me. She picked up both of my hands and squeezed them. She had weird hands. Even though they looked supple and soft, they were ice cold and fragile to the touch – to a point where I thought I felt her bones breaking.

  It was equally excruciating for me. It felt like she was burning a message into the palms of my hands. That’s because she was.

  “Be safe, sister” Ronnie said, adding in a soothing whisper to also close my eyes.

  When I opened them, she was gone. My hands, which throbbed, had a message written into them, using a network of spidery little veins that glowed a violent shade of purple just long enough for me read them.

  Beware of December. The Furr Family will come for you. Mami Wata wants you dead.

  My head ached severely while I read it – made me swoon – made me think something in my brain had burst. And then, just like that, I could remember none of it. I forgot Ronnie most of all. I know, I know! It sucks I can’t remember anything, but even if I did, what good would it do? I don’t know the people Ronnie talked about. I mean, I know Miz Furr, but her mother, Mami Wata was just an urban legend floating around my school, and Hayden and I had yet to meet.

  Or maybe I’d already met the love of life and am remembering it wrong.

  This story doesn’t have a normal beginning, middle and end. It’s a merry-go-round, spinning a little more absurdly than usual today. When I disembarked it that day in Our Lady in Heaven, it was as though I’d been hypnotized. The extra spacey feeling remained for the better part of a year, and I keep walking in and out of seasons in the wrong order.

  Case in point, I flat out forgot to go to my interview at The Pomegranate. I went home instead, deferring my epic trip underground just a little bit longer.

  I’m inviting you, Bestie, to come don’t there with me, and see the things I’ve seen for yourself, but first….

  You need to understand, not only that I was kidnapped, but WHO kidnapped me and why I chose to stay. I do want your sympathy, I really do! If I tell this UNBELIEVABLE story with all its events in order, you won’t feel much for me other than disgust. You’ll think I’m just a stupid kid.

  Soooooo…

  I submit to you, these two entries in my diary. I’m gonna tell you about the best day of my life – the summer day Hayden Furr and I officially fell and love, and the worst day, which came the season thereafter. There’s no point telling you about my journey through Hell until you see how much the prince of darkness loved me, and I him.

  It wasn’t his fault that our love came too late, when Mami Wata’s saga with the Rose Family and John Runnin
gwolf had already built the hell we all had to live in.

  Chapter

  2

  The Best Day of my Life: Walking through a Forest Full of Roses

  1/of 2 Diary Entries

  Dear Diary,

  It’s the end of July, and I’ve been held a prisoner in Mami Wata’s house on the Boulevard of Champions for several weeks now. I take to my journal when she isn’t around to drug me half out of my mind, and I can actually write. I can actually see what’s happening around me and describe it and draw it.

  (I underlined that part with magic marker and drew a picture of Hayden and me, laying on a blanket at the park.) In the sketch, we’re staring up at the sky and picking out the shapes we see in clouds – telling each other how this cloud’s a rose and the other a skull. We see Goldilocks and the 3 bears up there, castles and vines – fairy tale puffs of big white summer clouds.

  “Big white summer cloud,” Hayden said chuckling. “Sounds almost like an Indian name. My grandfather was a Miccosukee Indian, did you know that? His name was John Runningwolf.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, snuggling close to him. This was easily the best day of my life. I told Hayden I knew all about John Runningwolf because my cleaning duties in Mami Wata’s house entailed dusting his picture.

  Mami Wata had a collection of photographs beside her bed. A few of them were of a pretty blonde woman and her two kids. I snuck the pictures out of their frames once, and read the handwriting scrawled across the back. The woman was Teresa Rose and her daughters were twins, apparently. They lived in a place called Blue Jordan Forest, in a house apparently located on Scrub Jay Lane.

  Piecing together how the smiling faces in Mami Wata’s shrine of photos were all connected, I came up with the theory that Teresa Rose had employed the old voodoo queen as her children’s nanny once upon a time. In a few of the pictures, John’s head was cut off, or he was folded out of view, leaving only Teresa and the children standing there.

  It seemed Mami Wata ran hot and cold over her Miccosukee Indian. Like she wanted him out of the picture, but at the same time lusted after him too. I found naked pictures of John Runningwolf under one of her pillows once, and put them back in a panic, planning to never breathe a word of what I’d seen.