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Maisie dropped her hand, and I turned to face her. “Possibly. I know you are worried the woman’s body is being used as a magical substitute for you, but I was thinking more about how the demonic orders correlate to the sephirot.” She blinked and turned her head at an angle. “See, when you were out destroying Savannah’s reputation, Ginny kept me inside to learn about demonic orders.” Her hand slid from mine as her shoulders sagged. “Maybe I am crazy after all.”
“No.” I grasped hold of her hand again. It seemed impossible that this same soft hand had executed Teague, but I couldn’t let myself dwell on that. “I don’t think you are crazy at all. Tell me. Tell me what you see.”
Maisie’s eyes pointed back up toward the statues. “Like I said, they are the same but different. In its positive aspect Kether represents the crown. In its negative aspect it represents duality.”
“How is duality negative?”
“It stands for duality in what should be indivisible. Duality in God. God . . .” She seemed to ponder something that really had nothing to do with the holy. “They found something out near the Cathedral too, right?”
“Yeah, they found an arm.”
She stood still, but I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head. Then she nodded. “What is unique about Saint John’s?”
I considered her question. “Well, it’s big. It’s beautiful.” Our mother had once possessed the body of a tourist on its steps, but I doubted that was what she was looking for. “Savannah didn’t start out friendly toward Catholics.” Savannah had been established as a buffer between the British port of Charleston and the Spanish territory of Florida. Oglethorpe had feared Papists would be more inclined to support Catholic Spain than support Protestant England.
“You’re getting warmer. The squares.”
I realized instantly where she was going. Oglethorpe had laid out Savannah’s squares, and surrounded them with what he termed “trust” and “tithing” lots. Tithing lots were intended for private houses, trust lots for public buildings such as churches. “The Cathedral is on the wrong side of Lafayette Square. It’s on a tithing lot.”
“I suspect the Cathedral might represent ‘Chaigidel’ to our secret sorcerer.”
“Chaigidel?”
“The confusion of the power of God, represented by a church where a church was not originally intended to exist.”
It seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. I had begun to lose confidence in our theory when Maisie turned west. “Wasn’t the other arm found right around here?”
“Yeah.” I pointed left down Bay. “They found the arm somewhere over behind Moon River.” Then I pointed right. “The torso was out by Old Rex.”
“The torso? Not a hand?”
“That’s what Adam and about thirty traumatized tourists said. Why?”
“The lion at the Cotton Exchange fountain,” she said, but I didn’t follow. “Rex? King Cotton?”
“Okay.” I pretended I had caught on.
“The eighth sephira. In its positive aspect it stands for ‘Majesty.’ In the demonic order it represents Adrammelech, the great king.”
“So why the confusion?”
“It’s also known as the ‘left hand of God.’ I would have expected to find a hand, but maybe that only means the correspondence of the part to the site is secondary.”
“Or maybe it means I’ve brought you on a wild-goose chase.”
“I don’t mind if you have. This feels almost like old times, back when you loved me.”
I started to protest.
“Back when you really loved me. Back before I gave you reason not to.”
“I love you. I never stopped loving you. If I had, I would never have risked everything to bring you home. I just worry the sister I’ve loved my entire life never really existed,” I said and instantly regretted my honesty. Still, the truth had come out, and I felt it would be wrong to backpedal. “I’m just trying to figure out who you are.”
“That makes two of us.” She forced a smile and moved on. “What do we know about where they found the arm?”
I wrapped my arm through hers and led her back south on Bull Street, then right onto Bay Lane. “Moon River is haunted. That much I know.”
“Okay, but the arm wasn’t found in the bar. It was found near the bar. What about this area here?” she asked, making a small circle that took in a portion of the street and the sidewalk. “The basement areas and portion below the street here.” She looked up at me. “Don’t you hear it? The sound of abject misery.”
