Tales from the Bayou

There's a place in the swamp outside New Orleans that isn't on any map. The old people call it the Fond. You don't find it by looking. You find it when it decides you're the kind of person it's owed.Celi reads bones, same as her grandmother did, same as her grandmother's mother before that. Small readings, mostly. Lost rings, cheating husbands, a son who's gotten himself into something he won't talk about. Nothing she can't handle from her own kitchen table.Then a woman she did a reading for turns up dead, and a man who should've been dead two hundred years ago turns up on her porch wanting to know what the bones said.What follows is a missing boy, a ghost waiting on a piece of jewelry nobody's seen in a hundred years, and a slow, careful affection growing between Celi and a man who gave up wanting anything a long time ago. Breaking his family's curse means going back into the water.Some debts get passed down because nobody ever pays them off. This one's about to come due.