Page 93 of Night Songs

“You really don’t need to come. It’s just a virus, I promise. And it’s been good to lose myself in this project. Helps me not fixate on…it. Let’s talk again soon. We can figure out plans for Christmas.”

She hesitated, then said, “Well, all right. Bye, dear.”

“Bye.”

My calls with Phoebe and Tima produced the same results, as if they’d decided to say the same exact thing. I wished Martha were still around—she had sensed my mother was hiding something inThe Cursed Womanalbum; she would have told me everything she knew.

My next call was to the office of Mr. Blau. A few months ago, I had gotten a call from him informing me he was retiring. While I’d rarely seenhim in person over the years, he’d been a constant in my life—mailing me financial statements, calling with requests for the estate, guiding me on major decisions like the purchase of our house and cars. What I imagined a father might do, without the pesky emotional baggage.

When I called his office, I was hoping they could look at his Belle Powers files for any trace of a real name, birth certificate, or place of birth, but the attorney found nothing. When I asked for Mr. Blau’s home phone number, I was informed he was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and his family preferred he not talk or visit with anyone who might confuse him. I had no idea he’d been sick, but it seemed like him, to elegantly make his exit before anyone could see him fall apart.

My final call was to Clayton Redd, whom I hadn’t spoken to since our meeting at the state fair over a decade ago. Hess gave me his number, but when I tried it, he didn’t answer. I left a voicemail and waited. A week passed and still no word from him. So I called again, left another voicemail. Sent a few texts. No response. I wanted to ask Hess to call him for me, but I was never sure where they stood with one another. They didn’t seem exactly friendly.

In lieu of any other avenue of information, I went searching in the deeper annals of the internet. I always avoided this route in my research unless absolutely necessary, and even then, I only saw it as a source of garbage some people were gullible or deranged enough to believe.

But this time, I went looking for answers.

My mother had been known for two seemingly contradictory things—her emotional vulnerability, and her intense secrecy. Fans felt like they really knew her, and at the same time, very little was known. It was why so many rumors swirled online—why did she never show her chest? What was hiding under her wig? Where did her songs really come from? How did she really die? The internet was filled with speculation.

But what interested me the most were the subreddits and YouTube videos dedicated to the cult ofThe Cursed Woman.

These particular fans believed Belle Powers was haunted by a real curse, and the album held clues as to how she would eventually die.

On the cover of the album, my mother held her right arm out to the side, pointing west, indicating the direction of the place where she would meet her end—the West Coast, Santa Barbara, California.

The light on the cover was just at the end of golden hour, but when you flipped it over, the background was of a forest at night, indicating the time of her death.

When “Let Me Out” was played backward, fans swore it sounded like she was sayingI will crash into the seabeneath the serpentine rhythm at the beginning of the song.

I studied all of these clues for myself, including using software to play the entire album backward. I could see how someone looking for a message might hear something in the sounds beneath the guitar, but to me it sounded like recording fuzz. All of it, honestly, seemed like too much of a stretch. I couldn’t help feeling like these fans were just getting off on being spooked, rather than searching for the real truth.

And above all, this idea kept eating at me—if she knew exactly how and when she was going to die, why hadn’t she stopped it somehow? In the cabin memory, she had seemed determined to stop the curse, no matter what it took.

But they weren’t all dead ends—on one subreddit, buried deep in a link to an album of photos, I found a rare image that’d been taken at aCursed Womanshow in Austin. It showed Belle in a black dress, her hair natural and wavy, thick black shadow smudged around her eyes. The top of her dress had come undone, and I saw something on her chest. At first glance, it appeared to be a shadow or a smudge, but there was more than one, spaced out over her skin. I remembered what I’d seen years ago in that photo of her at Bellewood, the dark lines beneath the chiffon. It reminded me a bit of my own birthmark, and I wondered if we’d both been marked, and what it meant.

I posted about it on the page, and while some seemed to dig it, mostvoted me down as a poser. I apparently didn’t know what I was talking about.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I received the message. A user named maryshelley25—the name my mother famously used to check in to hotels on the sly—had DMed me a link to a lo-fi website dedicated to the conspiracy of Belle Powers’s death.

This page was different from the others—it focused on the real circumstances around her death, not secret messages in album art.

My mother’s plane crashed into the ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, around 10:30 p.m. on July 25, 1982. Micah and I had spent an afternoon in the main branch of the Nashville Public Library that first summer looking at the news clippings of the crash, but I had forgotten the details.

I clicked on a link labeled “black box evidence” and it took me to an official report filed by the National Transportation Safety Board. It stated in a thick typewritten font that the plane had not malfunctioned prior to impact. There had been no strange weather event or interference from any other aircraft. I came to the final line of the report, and my blood went cold.

It was as if the plane suddenly fell from the sky.

For Christmas, Hess came to Arizona. We usually spent it in Nashville at her house with the other girls’ families, but I made an excuse about not feeling like traveling. I was still using the miscarriage as a cover with Hess and Micah, and I wondered how long it would last.

I had stopped leaving the house very much, except for the occasional walk to the grocery store when I was feeling solid. Driving was out of the question now, as was any situation where I felt I couldn’t easily leave. Sometimes, even when I was just walking around, I would start to feel light headed, and then I couldn’t feel my feet against the pavement, and I would imagine myself walking out into traffic and ending up tangledbeneath someone’s car. Or falling over the side of an overpass onto the hard cement below. Other times, it felt like I was simply fading from existence, my body evaporating cell by cell into the desert air until I was only soft vapor.

I kept Micah in the dark about all of this, and instead made up an excuse about a sensitive project requiring an NDA. I knew I couldn’t tell him about the curse; his reaction when I first brought it up was evidence enough. He would think it was crazy, and would try to stop my research, and I couldn’t risk him derailing my efforts now. I had to keep going. I only had six months left until I turned 33.

But I agreed to go to a therapist at his request, and I told her about the new panic that was like the old claustrophobic panic but much, much worse. I told her that sometimes it wasn’t enough to be able to escape wherever I was—sometimes my body itself felt like it was closing in on me. Even more than an airplane, it was the only space I truly couldn’t escape.

I thought of telling her about the visions of my death, but that was dangerously close to the curse, which I would certainly not be mentioning. I worried that if someone had these types of visions, did the therapist assume they wished for death? Was it some sort of subconscious suicidal tendency in their eyes? I was afraid of being misinterpreted and misdiagnosed. I didn’t want to die; in fact, I was doing everything I could to try to stop it.

So I mostly kept my mouth shut, and I didn’t expect her to be able to help, but it did feel good to unburden myself in small ways to someone else.