Stay Dead by Anne Frasier Page B

feeling you get when your senses are flooded with the overwhelming beauty of the moment. It’s a feeling that comes out of nowhere, probably the same kind of euphoria a dog feels before it begins tearing madly around the yard, just high on life. Or the drunken woman at the end of the bar who suddenly loves everyone. That’s the wave that came over her. She loved David. She loved her teenage daughter, who was at that moment on a short-term foreign exchange in Sweden even though Audrey had begged to stay in Savannah after her mother’s ordeal.
    Elise would heal, but the near-death experience made her question all of the turns in her life, and the choices, good or bad.
    Should she have become a detective? Should she have exposed her daughter to the seedier side of Savannah? To the criminals and the murderers? Maybe she should have become . . . what? A doctor? A real doctor. Or a veterinarian. Or a florist. Or a farmer. Or an artist. Or a writer. Or a bookstore owner. Or a café owner. Audrey could work at the café too, and they would both wear white aprons, and if a customer stepped in and said, “Hey, did you hear about the murder last night in Forsyth Park?” Elise would just shrug.
    Too bad, but she had beans to grind. Too bad, but she had a latte with a whipped-cream heart to make. She would be all about bringing a bit of comfort into her customers’ dark lives. She wouldn’t be stepping into those dark lives. She wouldn’t see what those lives looked like from the inside, from the hearts of murderers and victims. She would return home smelling like fair-trade coffee, not a body that had been lying on a living room floor for three days in the heat of a Georgia summer.
    Elise never thought she’d become one of those women on a quest for the meaning of life, the meaning of her life, but she suddenly found herself looking inward. Who was she? Elise Sandburg, detective? Elise Sandburg, daughter of a root doctor? Elise Sandburg, the woman abandoned in a cemetery as an infant?
    The cemetery incident alone could do a number on a person, and she’d spent the bulk of her life trying to prove she wasn’t a weirdo and a misfit. And in so doing, she’d denied her heritage. Shame? Had it been shame? Maybe. But also fear. Being the daughter of a root doctor carried with it a responsibility she hadn’t wanted. Years ago, with her father’s death, the mantle had been passed to Elise and she’d done nothing with it. Just watched it drop at her feet.
    How could a detective believe in mojos, in root magic, in hoodoo? And she didn’t want tobelieve. But as much as she denied belief, a part of her wondered . . . was it real? Or did the simple act of believing make it real? So much of magic and superstition was belief-based, and yet root doctoring was supposed to be in a person’s blood, passed down from generation to generation.
    Elise should have died. She’d been beaten and tortured and stabbed, but as she lay there bleeding out, thinking of Audrey, thinking of David, she’d called upon a chant that had been taught to her years ago by an old woman who’d lived down the road. Knowledge she’d put aside. Swept aside. Kicked aside. In that moment, when she should have been embracing death, saying good-bye to life, she’d turned to the old chant. If it really meant so little to her, why had she reached for it in what she thought to be her final moments of life?
    Crisis belief. Yes, it was a powerful thing.
    She didn’t die. A chant—root magic saved her.
    Nonsense. She’d lived because her blood had excellent clotting properties. She’d lived because she’d outsmarted her captor. She’d lived because she was relatively healthy and she’d been able to endure the abuse her body had taken.
    Root magic hadn’t saved her. Elise had saved herself. And the man she’d outwitted, Atticus Tremain, aka the Organ Thief, was now in a coma that he would most likely never awaken from. A depraved sicko who’d been obsessed with