The Killings by J.F. Gonzalez, Wrath James White

face, just staring down at her hands with those blind eyes. Finally she looked up at me and I could swear she could see me, even through the cataracts. It was like she was looking right through me. She said she’d used the same magic on her grandson to keep White folks from hurtin’ him and his mother, but that she had made a mistake. She said that, and then a tear rolled down her cheek. She didn’t look so scary after that. She just looked like a sad old woman. And she looked scared then. She looked terrified. Whatever it was she’d done, it scared the hell out of her.”
    “How old were you then, Wayne?”
    “I was only ten or eleven. I might have even been nine.”
    “So that was in the late sixties then?”
    “Yeah. I guess so.”
    “Slavery ended in 1865, Wayne. If she remembers being a slave, Grandma Sable would have had to have been well older than a hundred.”
    On the tape was a long silence followed by some shuffling noises and the sound of someone clearing his throat.
    “Uh huh. Yeah, she was pretty old.”
    The recording ended. Carmen continued to mull over Wayne’s words. She knew there was no way Grandma Sable could have been old enough to have been a slave. But she had mentioned having a granddaughter. Could it have been possible that it wasn’t Grandma Sable Wayne had spoken to when he was a kid, but her granddaughter impersonating her? But why? Why would she want everyone to believe that she was her own grandmother?
    It didn’t make sense, but neither did the other possibility, that the old woman Wayne had spoken to as a child really was well over one hundred-twenty years old.
    Carmen was driving on autopilot, barely aware of the other vehicles around her, while her mind labored over the murders. Too much of what Wayne Williams had said made sense. Either Wayne was innocent, which she doubted, or there were two murderers or a long series of murderers stretching back a century in a nearly unbroken chain.
    The sunset burned across the horizon. The reds, yellows, and oranges looked like blood and viscera, a deluge of gore bleeding from the sky. Carmen imagined she could hear the screams of young children and young women, countless victims murdered by whatever dark force haunted Atlanta’s African American neighborhoods. She had found evidence of serial murders in Atlanta going back as far as 1909, including the case of “the Atlanta Ripper,” who’d made headlines in 1911 and 1912 with the murders of nearly two dozen Black women.
    Right before the Atlanta Child Murders made national news, another string of murders beginning in 1978 went virtually unnoticed. The bodies of thirty-eight African American women were found shot, strangled, or stabbed, and authorities believed the true death toll to have been at least double that. As Carmen dug deeper, she’d found that not five years had gone by without some evidence of serial homicide in Atlanta’s African American community. The murders were scattered all over Atlanta, not concentrated in any one neighborhood, but they were all African Americans.
    The shocking thing was, no one else seemed to notice. Every so often, someone was arrested and convicted of the murders, but they never stopped. Occasionally, the MO changed. The victims changed from women to young boys to young girls to transvestites to prostitutes and back. The cause of death in each series of killings sometimes changed from a severed jugular to strangulation to shootings to stabbings. But the killing never stopped. Now there were fourteen women dead courtesy of an unidentified subject the police were quietly referring to as “the Atlanta Lust Murderer.” It made no sense ... unless what Wayne Williams told her was true and there was a curse alive in Atlanta’s Black community, a curse that began with an old former slave named Grandma Sable who may have been close to one hundred-twenty years old when she died in the late 1960s, making her the oldest woman in recorded history. But the