Persephone Underground Read online

  Great, I mused, I’m waking up in Hayden’s red canopy bed again. This will never be over. I’m back in the deepest, fieriest bowels of the Underworld.

  But the sensation beneath me wasn’t hot. There were no drooling dogs or red rose petals in these bed sheets. Someone had brought flowers, though; a dozen white roses, looking fresh in a vase. The only red I saw was from one of those tiny flashlights trained on my innermost eyeballs – a cool latex glove prying them open. I could see veins. My eyes looked like grapes.

  The hospital accommodations around me were simple enough to suggest this wasn’t the ICU.

  Someone in hospital scrubs was bent over me, talking to a white coat about my chart. The word “miracle” floated between them before the doctor left. It was a miracle I recovered from so many broken bones, and yet another traumatic brain injury since my mom’s DUI accident when I was little.

  Just how I had sustained another TBI, I was not yet sure. Was my broken body recovered from Mexico after Mami Wata pushed me?

  My eyes had been closed so long, a nurse felt compelled to squeeze eye drops into them; when the bleariness cleared, the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen hovered over me.

  It was Mom – mom taking care of me in the very hospital where she worked.

  “But you’re dead. You were shot and killed, Mom. I saw it.” My voice was dry; trying to speak made my throat hurt so badly, I winced.

  Mom elevated the bed and put a glass of water to my lips, explaining that my IV pole was probably no longer needed, since I had emerged from my medically induced coma. She talked about how the neurologists had never seen so much brain activity in a supposedly comatose patient. When my many fractures healed and rapid eye movement returned, it looked like I’d survive my fall of so many stories at our apartment complex.

  I tried again to ask what had happened to my mom, if her getting shot and all those kids at Bad Ass Academy dying in a hail of bullets was just a bad dream.

  “No, sadly, no bad dream,” mom said. She raised her nurse uniform so I could see the jagged scar on her stomach. “A 10 hour surgery to remove bullet fragments and repair damage. He just missed my vital organs. The shooting was months ago. I’ve been on the mend a while now.”

  “He – the shooter was a he?”

  “He wore a ski mask – all I could describe to police was his voice – and it’s a familiar voice but I can’t name it – it’s like I’m on the edge of remembering and then I just…lose it. Anyway, they can’t find him. His fingerprints weren’t on the murder weapon he left in our apartment or anywhere in your classroom – only yours.”

  “So, there’s a cop standing outside my door and I’m going to jail,” I bemoaned, trying to sit up and see if I detected police presence out in the hall. “Mom, I didn’t do it! I didn’t kill my friends or try to kill you!”

  “I know, sweetheart. It breaks my heart this monster – whoever he is – framed you. I cleared your name – the only living witness to his mass murder.”

  She kept playing the pronoun game. Why wouldn’t she just say Lucas Furr?

  “Obviously, all I want to focus on is your complete recovery.”

  “Just say his name!” I groaned. I was deflated, weak in my bed.

  I was enormously relieved and happy my mother had survived, yet heartbroken the shooting happened at all. I also wondered if I were bat shit nuts. Maybe Miz Furr was right, and I had committed this atrocity all by myself. No court in the land would believe my stories about Mami Wata, the Underworld, and a devil/dog going berserk with an AR-15.

  My mother attempted to shush me as I rambled about the Furr Family – its matriarch, the voodoo queen.

  “Speak of the devil!” she said, turning to greet the visitor who entered my private room.

  It was Hayden’s grandmother herself, dressed in her nicest flowing caftan, her hair swept up in a matching yellow turban. She held a teddy bear against her breast – an impulse buy from the hospital gift shop.

  “Mami Wata has called me every day, wanting to hear updates about your condition,” mom said.

  “I know after spending the whole summer together, you two are close. I’ll leave you; I’m on shift,” my mother explained.

  I was still connected to equipment that measured my pulse. The rapid beeps should have sent a flock of alarmed nurses into the room – but this was Mami Wata and with a mere glance she’d brainwashed my brilliant nurse of a mother into believing it was A-Ok to leave me alone with her.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I said after Mom had left. “You didn’t need to hypnotize her right away. What do you have to say to me anyway?”

  “That I underestimated you, Persephone. I thought you’d stay with us forever if I let you have your mom back.”

  “I realized she wasn’t my real Mom at that picnic table back in Mexico – before you pushed me out of a friggin’ hundred-mile-high temple, you nasty witch.”

  “It’s getting harder and harder to bring you back and forth between the Underworld and the surface,” Mami Wata said defensively.

  She paced the room, and fingered a dozen roses in the vase beside my bed. The card inside got dislodged from the center of the blooms, and I could see who they were from.

  “Demi sent me flowers?” I puzzled, reading her handwriting on the note.

  It said she couldn’t wait until I was better. She was desperate to visit me. My old teacher had signed it with love. I guess she didn’t believe I shot her husband to death.

  “Yes, she knows who is to blame for all this,” Mami Wata sighed. “In spite of my best efforts.”

  “You know what?” I said, my rage gathering. “I think you can be a nice person, I really do. But I also think you get a big kick out of messing with me.”

  “It’s not a kick. I string you along out of pure fascination, Persephone. You are practically the only girl out of the hundreds we’ve stolen for Hayden who can straddle both places. There was only one other girl who could do that, and I’ve brought you tidings from her.”

  “Come again?” I demanded, sick of her voodoo and her riddles.

  Mami Wata dropped the teddy bear on my bed and prepared to leave, but she did offer a precious gem of information before walking out the door.

  “You must be immortal like all of us Furrs; either that, or you have the gift of witchcraft. You and Ronnie are the only two who have seen The Underworld and managed to return to the surface. You are the only ones able to repeat the journey as often as you like.”

  On these final words, Mami Wata swept out the door.

  I was alone again in my room and left to contemplate the plush bear in my lap, which also bore a gift tag. It was from Ronnie, who also expressed her great relief I hadn’t died when I fell from my apartment’s balcony, desperate to catch the real school shooter.

  Chapter

  29

  To say I was glad to check out of the hospital is a colossal understatement. I couldn’t do anything, chained to that bed. I was quickly discovering a lot of people in this town didn’t like me. Also an understatement. The nurses and doctors came through a revolving door to test me and question me.

  There was no time to keep tabs on Ronnie, or bring Demi’s dog, Oreo, back to her. I really did intend to break into Mami Wata’s house and return Domino back to his rightful owner. But being out in public and left in peace – something I had always taken for granted – was near impossible for me now.

  Sure, my mom believed I was innocent of killing a room full of people. But many remained unconvinced. Rooms would go quiet when I entered them. I had been expelled from Bad Ass Academy, with piles of books left for me at home on how to obtain a GED.

  Things were so bad that when Mom brought me home, it was a new home entirely. She told me a death threat came through her window at the apartment, forcing her to move. There was a note attached to a brick that said:

  Your daughter killed my kid, you piece of shit!

  This is what the world believed. There was no amount
of voodoo that could talk them out of it.

  Even if I hadn’t done it and merely hid in a supply closet the whole time, I was going to be hated for my cowardice. It would have been a lucky break if people thought hiding out were the extent of my crimes. The background checks done on me all but guaranteed my guilt. Just shake open the daily rag and read it for yourself.

  Persephone Gonzales had learning disabilities from a head injury as a toddler. It made her jealous of her brighter classmates. She lived in a different world composed of murder fantasies. She kept company with a voodoo queen. She dated a boy that shared his grandmother’s penchant for the black arts…

  Million dollar, incendiary words were printed about me in newspapers nationwide. A movie producer wanted to build a franchise off of me. Someone mentioned selling Persephone dolls. New York Times columnists wrote about me. Talk show hosts gabbed. It was all my mother could do to pay my legal fees, without caving into the offers that poured in daily.

  Now that I was well enough to walk into a courtroom, there were a number of hearings scheduled. My case was really tricky. I’m not sure how or why I got out on bail, but Mom was putting everything we had into keeping me with her until this was all settled.

  I told her she should consider a multi-million dollar book deal.

  Sometimes I wondered if I had Mami Wata to thank for staying out of jail and the electric chair. Some people grease the right palms, but she hypnotized the right minds. I was made to wear an ankle monitor and stay on house arrest. When I leveled with psychiatrists about Hayden, they prescribed me powerful anti-psychotic medications.

  One of the shrinks suggested I MADE UP the entire Mami Wata and Prince of the Underworld story as a way to reconcile my past as a foster kid. Well, I stormed out of that appointment. And then got my heart set on visiting the old voodoo queen.

  I was sleeping too much to pay a visit to the Boulevard of Champions and give Domino back to Demi like I wanted to. I was just eaten alive with the impulse to bring back her long lost dog. After everything she’d lost in the wake of the shooting, the desire made me itch like a case of the hives.

  If I was too tranked out with drugs to go to sleep, yet too sleepy to move, I read every article I could find on the shooting. The community response had been epic. My city was awarded a million dollar grant to build a special temple in commemoration of the victims. It was called The Temple of Lost Time and set to be burned – as cathartic healing for the victims’ families. I’d ask my mom to take me – break house arrest just so I could pay my respects and mark up the temple walls. Thousands of people had left messages for the dead on this piece of public art.

  I read that quite a few people – the ones who thought I was the shooter – had written messages to me in that temple – claiming they’d pray for my soul. It made me angry enough to pass out. Angry at the devil.

  Lucas Furr had committed those murders without leaving the merest trace of DNA or blood trail leading back to him – to The Pomegranate Night Club. I saw in the news, he was running for Congress – an R for Republican after his name, of course.

  He had invited heads of state to a campaign kick-off at the nightclub, all of them given a solid A+ rating by the NRA. They were all gun toting, anti-choice, anti-immigration shills and Demi was set to entertain them with her comedy act. The article mentioned she would perform her stand-up this weekend at The Pomegranate.

  I promised myself I would attempt to meet with her privately, before she told her jokes to a bunch of assholes. Thank god Demi had sent me those flowers in the hospital. Because of that vase full of roses, I knew she didn’t hate me – didn’t think I was the murderer. I had the courage I needed to see her.

  I also thought of the teddy bear gift from Ronnie – that fed my courage too. Other people believed in my innocence. I needed to figure what was up with Ronnie before I made any more moves. She was a piece in this big puzzle, after all, and once I solved that puzzle, my name would be cleared of all murder charges.

  Why had Mami Wata brought the teddy bear and not Ronnie herself? Did they have her, trapped in the Underworld?

  Apparently, Mami Wata had been too distracted that day in the ICU, to bother stealing my compact mirror – a direct line into her sordid voodoo world. What I realized looking into that mirror now, was that it could show me anyone I wanted it too.

  Snapping it open in my bed today, I asked it to show me Ronnie. I saw nothing reflected back in the glass except her luxurious home on Delray Beach – the one I had fled on that ghastly night Hayden killed himself.

  I had been thinking a lot about Ronnie these days, and it hit me how it was a little weird she was so wealthy – that all the things she surrounded herself with didn’t look like her style. Her bungalow in Delray had been like an Ethan Allen showroom. It just didn’t look lived in.

  I heard commotion in my mirror, and looked closer. A married couple and their realtor were touring Ronnie’s living room, asking about who had lived here before the property went up for sale.

  “It’s been vacant for years,” the realtor explained, adding the owner refused to lower the price. She said an up and coming politician from Ft. Lauderdale owned it, and he wasn’t budging.

  “They’ll never get $2 million for this house,” she said, shaking her head. “Makes no sense, really. It’s not like the Furrs are short of money – running that nightclub in Las Olas.”

  The couple lamented the bungalow being so outside their budget and eventually the realtor led them out, locked up, and left.

  It was amazing information to come by, but it didn’t answer anything about Ronnie. Who was she? What was she? According to Mami Wata, she was the only other girl besides me who didn’t have to clinically die to be in the Underworld. She could visit hell like a tourist and pop right back up on land.

  So, I googled my mysterious friend until my fingers turned blue. Mom asked what I was doing when she brought my lunch to me on a tray. I told her the truth between distracted bites of turkey club. I was looking for the whereabouts of a woman I thought to be connected to the school shooting. When I gave her Ronnie’s full name, mom turned white.

  The story came pouring out of mom – peppered with apologies. She was sorry, so sorry for never mentioning I had a half-sister. But since Ronnie had passed away when I was a baby, she didn’t see any point.

  Hadn’t you had enough hardship already? Mom had cried.

  “Your dad was married before me, and I think I’ve mentioned he was much older. I don’t know exactly how old he was, but I’m gonna say at least 30 years older than me. He was freaky about his age. He didn’t want anyone to know his true date of birth.

  Anyway, his daughter from a previous marriage – her name was Veronica – Ronnie for short. She died around the time you were born. We had already broken up by then. It was such a nasty parting of ways, I never even called your Dad to offer my condolences. I only read about Ronnie’s funeral in the paper.”

  Mom gave me some background information on Ronnie that had been in the article – how it was a sad end to a girl who had already endured so much in high school. As a former student of Bad Ass Academy, Ronnie had worked at The Pomegranate and disappeared for several years. She turned back up to tell her story – of how she had been abducted and escaped – only to die decades later from something else.

  I was flabbergasted. “How did she die?”

  “An accident – a DUI just like the one I was in with you. Ronnie had been traveling as a passenger and was ejected when the drunk guy slammed into them. Your dad felt awful. They had just come from having dinner together. It was Father’s Day.”

  I wanted to show mom a picture of Ronnie – to get her to corroborate the story by matching a name with a face – but I realized I didn’t have one. I flashed back to my date at the coffee shop with my half-sister – the weird look on our waitresses’ face when we ordered a brownie and coffee. That waitress had looked at me like I was talking to myself.

  But how could I explain the S
pringers seeing Ronnie? How could I explain the jump she gave me when my car had died that night at Mami Wata’s? She had borrowed Demi’s car, explaining at some point during our night together that the Springers let her do that all the time. As for her showing up at the Springer’s dinner party that night, I never saw a car pull up. She put some kind of spell on people with her beauty and charm, Ronnie did. The Springers just opened their door to her as though they’d known her forever.

  It was a curious friend the Springers had in my dead half-sister, their being so new in town, and freshly moved here from California. Why had Ronnie been drawn to Marc and Demi?

  Then it hit me. Mami Wata had used her like a pawn, knowing my half-sister was the perfect way to infiltrate things, and get a relationship going. Not just with me, but the Springers, too. She wanted their dog and so much more. She wanted their first born.

  I looked into my compact mirror again, which drew questions from mom. I was glad of the distraction because I wanted to crack this case before she did. I wanted mom to be completely ignorant of everything pertaining to the Furrs – so they’d leave her the hell alone.

  “That’s beautiful, sweetie. Who gave you that mirror?”

  “A gift from Mami Wata,” I smiled, turning its glass toward mom’s face. It caught the light so sharply mom ducked and winced, complaining of its glare. I took a chance, suspecting maybe this gesture with a voodoo queen’s magic mirror erased her interest in Ronnie – her place in all this.

  I was right. Mom sat up from her bed, dusting sandwich crumbs from her lap. “Do you want anything else to eat or drink, sweetie?”

  “No, mom. Just answer me this: what did you say Dad was again? His job before he left us? I know you said he was a magician, but what kind of magician are we talking here? A cheesy one, or like a scary, super powerful one? I know you said you barely knew him.”