The slightest smile curved on her lips. She held the stone up to me. “You see this here rock?”

“Yes, I see it.”

“Good, now you look real good at it. Don’t you take your eyes off it, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.

“You lookin’?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I responded again.

“Good,” she replied and then threw the stone right at me. I yelped as it bounced off my shoulder and onto the ground.

“Why are you throwing stones at me?”

“Just ’cause it felt so good to do so.” She was bent over with laughter.

“Well I am not going to stand here and let you hit me with rocks,” I spat out, turning to leave.

“Wait girl, don’t go off all mad, I didn’t hit you with no rock.” She continued laughing. “I just threw it. You did all the hitting yourself.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked. My shoulder was visibly starting to bruise. Jilo stopped laughing and walked cautiously toward me, like she was approaching a spooked animal; at that moment it wasn’t far from the truth. She reached out slowly and brushed my shoulder with one wrinkled hand. The pain disappeared, and the bruising faded before my eyes.

“There now,” she said patting me. “What that mean is that Jilo threw that rock, and she threw it at you. But you stop and think, though. You slow it down in your head. What happened?”

“You hit me with a stone,” I replied tersely.

“No, think it through. You see Jilo with the stone. You see her throw the stone at you, but what did you think when she threw it?”

I stopped and let the event run through my mind. “I thought the stone was going to hit me, and then it did.”

“That’s right. Jilo put the energy in by throwing the stone, but they ain’t no reason it had to hit you. It coulda fallen to the ground. Hell, it coulda flew cross the river. The power was Jilo’s until she threw. When that stone left her hand, the power went with it. It was you who took that energy and hit yourself with it.”

“Wait. You’re blaming me for being hurt? I didn’t do anything wrong. You’re the one who threw the stone.”

“You want to talk about right and wrong, you go to Sunday school. This ain’t about right and wrong. Someone try to hurt you, sure they doin’ wrong. But when they attack you, they are sending energy your way. Strong energy. And that energy belongs to you. You have every right to use it for your own purposes.”

“But that’s blaming the victim,” I rebutted. “You’re saying that they take the energy that’s sent toward them and then hurt themselves with it.”

“You ain’t listening, girl. It ain’t about fault. This victim you talk about, he accept the intention of the person trying to hurt him. He accept it out of fear. He accept it ’cause he don’t know he don’t have to accept it. You got to start small. You start with a stone, not a bullet,” she said and chuckled. “It take a lot more energy to stop a bullet, your own common sense should tell you that much. Now I admit, this only work if you aware of the dangers around you. Someone sneak up on you, that one thing. But when you see the danger coming head on, then you got the time to turn the energy to your advantage.”

“But if you don’t know someone’s trying to hurt you, what then?”

“Girl, the trick is paying attention. Always being aware and keeping guard on your blind spots. Jilo, she gonna show you how to do that, but it take practice. It don’t just come to you overnight. There. That your first lesson.” She turned from me and watched the river around the bend. “Sorry, you gonna have to find your own way home. Jilo got not more juice for you today.”

“But you promised me that you’d tell me everything you knew about Ginny if I came to you.”

“That may be, but I never said when I would tell you. I done told you Martell ain’t done nothing, so you go on home now. Jilo need her some time alone.”

“You promised me,” I said, feet planted firm.

“Do not make me angry, girl!” Jilo hissed. “Get movin’!”

My feet turned of their own impetus, as if they had more sense than my head did, and I had taken a few quick steps toward the cemetery path before I even registered what was happening.

“Mercy!” Jilo’s voice called out to me, and I turned in time to see her hurl a large flat river rock at my head. I felt a burst of anger, and the stone stopped in its course, hanging in midair. For a moment I sensed the rock as part of the air that was holding it, and then my rational mind said that air and rock were very different things. The stone fell to the ground in front of me. I had worked magic. Real magic. I was no longer on the outside looking in. The power may have been borrowed power, but it felt good.

“You passed, all right,” Jilo said with what I could almost have taken for respect. “I believe you came for the lesson and for the truth. You can leave without the truth. It’s your last chance.”

“No,” I responded, wondering if I was making the right choice. “Tell me what happened to Ginny.”

“All right then,” Jilo said. She produced a small string bag in her hand and dangled it in front of me. “You know what this is?” she asked.

“I guess it’s one of the juju bags you make,” I said. Jilo was famous for her spell mixtures. “You got herbs and stones and things like that in there, right?”

“Dirt,” she responded. “I got dirt in this bag.” With a wave of her hand the bag disappeared back to wherever she had drawn it from. “Dirt from the old woman’s yard.”

“But why would you have dirt from Ginny’s yard?”

“Like draws like. When Jilo do a spell for money, she take a little dirt from the bank and mix it in her juju. She do a spell for love or sex, she take it from where you young folk park your cars. She do a spell for death”—she paused, looking around us—“she take from a cemetery. But always, no matter what kind of spell she doin’, she add a sprinkle from the old woman’s yard, ’cause that where the power lie. That’s why Jilo’s juju work better than any of the others who try to do Jilo’s work. Course you gotta remember when you take from someone, like I took from Ginny, you gotta leave something in return, or what you taking loses its power.”

“But what does this have to do with Ginny’s murder?”

“Jilo do her own diggin’. Everywhere that is but the old woman’s place. She done told Jilo not to come around her place no more, and Jilo respected that. She never said nothin’ though about Jilo sending someone else to dig.”

“Martell,” I interjected.

“That’s right. I sent my Martell,” she said, shaking her head. “I sent him at sunrise, so he could dig when the sun first hit the earth. He heard the old lady yelling. He crept up to the window, and when he look in, well, he saw Ginny getting hit with a tire iron. Thing is, they weren’t nobody holding that iron. At least nobody he could see.”

“So someone was bending the light, like how you helped Martell disappear?” I asked, trying to wrap my head around it.