Page 119 of The Turning of the Tables

I hated it.

Yes, I know. I hate everything. Which is only mostly true. There were things I didn’t hate. Pad thai. Cake. Chocolate. Coffee. Sleep. I hated trying togoto sleep, but the sleep itself was pretty great.

I didn’t hate Noah. Or Quincy. Or Elliot. Or Ward, even if I was being a bit resentful of the fact that he was giving me pity jobs. I didn’t even hate Lulu. I just didn’tlikeLulu.

I sighed, going into the minifridge that lived in the unit—which also meant that the unit had been expensive as shit, because most storage places donotwant you to have power in your unit for various, mostly good, reasons—to start pulling out some of what I might need.

I’d identifiedthe blood as belonging to a chicken. Dating the fabric had been a bit more of a challenge.

First of all, it wasn’t like you could carbon-date fabric. Well, youcould, I suppose, but the range you have on fabric life-span from that isn’t accurate enough to pinpoint a decade. AndIcouldn’t radiocarbon date from my little storage shed.

What I could do was determine what the fabric was made out of and what kinds of dyes were used in it—if it had polyester, for instance, or if the weave was fine enough to have been done on a machine… that sort of thing. I’d already gotten Ward’s permission to take a tiny sample of the fabric, which would let me do things with it that I couldn’t do just by wetting bits of it and rubbing them with swabs—which is how I’d sampled the blood.

Looking at the fibers under a microscope told me that they had been machine-woven, which post-dated them as after the early 1800s, most likely. They were also extremely worn and frayed, suggesting use or age or both. And then I got to start playing with the fancy equipment. A spectrometer would have been most useful, but I had other things I could use.

To determine if it was—as it appeared to be—cotton, I tested for reactivity to alkalies, which was positive. To make sure it wasn’t simply a reaction to the dye, I decided to see if I could figure out what had been used to dye the fabric that color green.

The color was evenly distributed—another sign of cotton—and soaked into the fibers, but there are a lot of ways to dye fabric that had been used post-machine-loom-invention, so I needed to try to figure out how it got that way. Based on the lack of color variation in the threads themselves, I assumed that the cotton had first been bleached. Which raised a few questions I didn’t know the answers to.

Fortunately, I’d brought my laptop, and I set up my phone as a hot spot so that I could check things like when people started bleaching cotton (unhelpfully, the answer is about 10,000 BCE, although modern techniques using sodium hypochlorite didn’t come into use until the end of the eighteenth century), types of green dyes post-1800, and then, based on the earlier results, whether or not I could accidentally poison myself with extremely old fabric dye.

The reason for that last one was that the fact that the shade of green on the fabric might very well have been Sheele’s Green, invented in the late eighteenth century and applied to fabrics into the 1860s. It would be a very usefulpinpoint if that was, in fact, the dye being used, but the down side was that the lovely color was produced by copper arsenite, aka, arsenic. It was colloquially referred to asarsenic green.

Deciding I very much didn’t want to add arsenic poisoning to my life experiences, I put on a second pair of gloves, the safety goggles I’d been ignoring because I wasn’t doing anything volatile, and a mask. Just in case.

The sample I took tested positive for arsenic.

Which meant that my fabric had to have been made between 1804 and 1860.

I texted Ward.

That’s fantastic!He sent back.

Also, it’s chicken blood,I added.

Interesting, he replied.

Weird,I sent back.Because that particular shade of green wouldn’t have been worn by just anyone. It was the height of fashion, and last I checked, fashionable antebellum ladies weren’t running around murdering chickens.

In this family, they might have been, came the response.

I’m going to want to hear more about that, I told him.

My phone rang.

“So why were society ladies killing chickens?” I asked Ward when I answered.

He laughed. “These society ladies were light-skinned Black women who had moved to Richmond from New Orleans, where they’d been trained by their grandmother in Voodoo,” he answered.

“Oh, wow. Didn’t see that coming.”

“This family is fantastic,” Ward replied. “Mason is going to be ecstatic.”

“I can imagine,” I said. Mason Manning was an occult historian, so the idea that this family had been practicingVoodoo in antebellum Richmond had to be right up his alley.

“I’ll bring it back with a full report tomorrow,” I told him.

“Bring me the full cost breakdown,” he reminded me, pulling the smile from my face, not that he could see it. I’d actually gotten into the research, and being reminded that I was doing a pity job brought me down from my high.