"Insane but effective."

"I'm calling my insurance company today. I'm getting a new window and CD player. And a car alarm."

She looked at him with skepticism.

"Oh, I suppose the sound of a car alarm is like a lullaby around here."

"I was going to say like the chirping of crickets."

He dug a towel from the trunk, took a few swipes at the crumbled glass, then tossed the towel over the front seat. Two minutes later, they were heading for his apartment. David reached for the radio, then clenched his fist at the black hole staring at him from the dash. He liked to listen to the local station on the way to work in order to keep up on the hysteria level of the city.

"You had to get married, didn't you?" David asked, giving Elise's profile a quick glance as he fought morning traffic.

"Had to get married? What time period did you transport here from? Nobody has to get married anymore."

"You know what I mean."

"Do you find that amusing?"

"I'm surprised, not amused. You come across as someone who knows exactly what she wants, who doesn't make mistakes."

"Audrey wasn't a mistake."

"I'm not talking about Audrey. I'm talking about Thomas."

"Don't trivialize my life."

"I'm not."

"You are."

He stopped at a red light. "How long were you married?"

"A year."

"Did you ever love him? Or was it just a teenager crush kind of thing?"

"That's none of your business."

"I think it is. You're my partner."

"When did that finally occur to you?" she asked, secretly glad he'd finally noticed. This was good. Things were progressing. He'd spilled his guts last night; she was more than ready to share. "I thought I loved him," she admitted. "I was confused."

"You were a kid yourself."

"Seventeen."

"A confusing age."

Not that life was any less confusing now.

The light turned green. He checked for traffic and pulled through the intersection. "I've heard some interesting things about you," he said casually. Too casually.

"Like what?"

"That you're some kind of voodoo priestess or something."

She let out a strangled laugh. "Who told you that?'

"People talk."

"Well, they talk shit. What you should know is that the Savannah Police Department is like an eccentric aunt with a multitude of stories to tell, most of them lies."

"That's just a romantic way of saying the place is infested with gossips," David said.

"You Yankees are so blunt. What would Savannah be without romanticism? Just another port city."

"Do you know that some people are actually a little afraid of you?" he asked.

"Are you afraid of me?"

"No."

"Were you? At the beginning?"

"Of course not."

Time to tell all. "I'm surprised you haven't heard the whole story." She suspected he had by now, or at least some variation of it. But with any departmental gossip, it was always best to go to the subject.

"I heard you were abandoned as a baby. In a cemetery. That you're the daughter of some famous witch doctor."

"Root doctor is the accurate term, but most people say conjurer or witch doctor. No one really knows exactly where I was found. In a cemetery? Yes. On a grave? Maybe. Whose grave? Nobody knows."

"That's very cool."

"Cool? I've never had anybody say that before. Weird. Creepy. Scary. That's what I usually get."

"So then you were adopted?" he asked, prodding for more information.

"The story quickly grows boring," she confessed. "I was adopted by a nice religious family and raised in a traditional household. My father worked as an accountant until he retired, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom."

What she didn't tell David was that people were freaked out by her. Her family had adopted her because nobody else would take her and they'd thought it was the Christian thing to do, not because they'd wanted another child. And even though her parents were kind and tolerant, she was still a charity case, never a real part of the family.

"Brothers? Sisters?" He hit Whitaker and took a left.

"Two sisters, and a much older brother. All of them are married now and have moved out of the area. My parents retired, sold their home, and moved to Tucson." They stayed in contact. Christmas cards. The occasional phone call. "But we're not extremely close."

Another left and he was circling Forsyth Park. "Never felt like you fit in?"

"Exactly. My adoption wasn't a secret, but I never knew the details. When I was seven, my sister Maddie and I had a fight and she told me I'd been found in a cemetery, on a grave. At first I didn't believe her, but she didn't have much imagination and it was a pretty wild story, so eventually I asked my mother and she said it was true."

He turned into the lot next to Mary of the Angels, slid into a spot near Elise's car, and shut off the engine. "And the conjurer?"

"His name was Jackson Sweet. When I heard that he might be my father, I became obsessed with finding out everything I could about him. I suddenly had a history, and a damn interesting one. By the time I was in high school, I'd learned a lot of incantations from an old woman who lived down the street."

While her sisters occupied themselves with after-school projects, Elise pursued what at the time she'd decided was her life calling. The old woman didn't have any living relatives, so she was glad to teach Elise everything she knew. In bad health, she'd been looking for an apprentice in order to pass the mantle.

She lived in a shanty with the doors and window trim painted blue to repel evil spirits. Elise had never known the woman's real name. Everybody just called her Peppermint, because of the peppermint sticks she always had in her mouth.

The ability to perform spells, whether they worked or not, became Elise's best line of defense when it came to her siblings. All she had to do was gather a few ingredients together, and they became loving and well behaved.

"I used a Barbie-well actually Skipper, Barbie's little sister-to cast my first real spell."

He laughed.

"Spells are a serious thing. Spells are real. Or at least some are."

He turned to face her, his left arm draped over the steering wheel. "How can you say that? You're a cop.

A detective. Your daily performance is based on logic."

"Not everything in the world makes sense. Not everything can be explained. Our eyes and our memories constantly deceive us. A good detective knows that."

"Did you ever cast a spell that worked?" he asked, still smiling. Still a nonbeliever. That was the big difference between a Northerner and a Southerner. A Southerner would believe.

Elise had been a seventeen-year-old lovesick girl just playing around. Thomas had passed her again and again with unseeing eyes. But once she cast the spell, he had looked her way… and kept looking, as if unable to help himself, as if his eyes were locked on her.

After entrapping Thomas and getting them both tangled up in a disastrous marriage that should never have happened, Elise got rid of every notebook, every herb, every scrap of paper that spoke of any kind of conjuring, no matter how innocent. At the time, she tried to convince herself that there wasn't such a thing as root doctoring and spell casting. Thomas had noticed her because she'd been staring at him with the fever and intensity of a passionate crush.

"I'm not talking about something vague, like making someone's headache go away," David said. "Come on. You can't honestly tell me that you ever cast a spell that actually worked. Something you could be a hundred percent sure of."

"Oh, but I did. On a person."

"Who?"

"Thomas."

"What'd you do to the poor guy?"

"Made him fall in love with me."