“There are two possibilities. We must—” Her voice was suddenly drowned out by sirens, which wailed painfully in my ear. “Lockdown!” Gabrielle shouted. “Find the box in my attic! I will call again!”
The line went dead.
I stared at the phone in my hand for a moment, paralyzed by the overload of information Gabrielle had just given me. Horace wasn’t what he claimed to be, and to find out what he was, I had to return to the attic of the Oracle Inn. For another box. I groaned. She couldn’t have known how traumatized I’d be from the last time I’d been tasked with finding one of those.
As I considered her request, Graham’s plea from the night before echoed in my mind. There was no way I’d couldn’t look for that box of letters, so returning to the inn was a surety. But I didn’t have to do it alone. I needed backup. Fight or no fight, I wanted Graham and Striker by my side.
The call went to voicemail. I left him a message. “Hey, it’s me. Gabrielle just called. Long story short, I have to go back to the inn. I know what you’re thinking, but I won’t go alone. Call me when you can.”
My mind raced. I had a few options. I could wait until Graham got home, but I had no idea if he was still hours away in Moyard or if he was pulling into the driveway at Primrose House this very second. I needed to find a way to stop Horace from visiting me, and I needed to do it now, or I feared I would never sleep again.
The next best option after Graham would be another psychic. Someone who could help me block Horace out… or better yet, banish him.
There were only three people in town I was sure weren’t lying about their abilities. Elizabeth had smelled the scent Horace had left in the room, proving she was sensitive to the paranormal, but I wasn’t sure how strong that sensitivity was. I also couldn’t picture her saying “yes” to a request from a client—one she’d only met twice—to close up shop early and go on a mad errand to find some old letters.
Stephen’s rune reading had felt genuine. But he’d been at the cabin and hadn’t seen Horace. Only one other person there had: Daphne. She was strong enough for that, at least. I just had to hope she’d be willing to risk seeing him again. I hustled back up the street to Visions and exploded into her shop.
Her head jerked up from the magazine in her hands. “Mac! What’s wrong?”
“I need your help.”
She was on her feet in an instant. “What is it? Are you hurt?”
“No, nothing like that.” I took a deep breath, trying to gather my thoughts. “Listen, do you have any appointments tonight?”
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Why?”
The words couldn’t come out of my mouth fast enough as I explained about seeing Horace upstairs after my massage and Gabrielle’s claim that the letterbox in her attic might hold the answer to getting rid of him.
“She said there’s a secret place, a hidden compartment in the attic. I need to find it, but I know if I go back there alone, he’ll be waiting for me.” I swallowed. “Every time I see him, it’s like he’s more powerful. I can’t face him on my own.”
Daphne’s eyes widened in alarm. “How many times has he visited you?” she asked, her voice a thin whisper.
I counted on my fingers. “That was the third one… maybe more. I’ve been seeing him in my dreams a lot lately, and I honestly don’t know if that’s him or just my brain trying to process the memory of him.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I don’t know. I think it’s too risky to go back there. For people like us, I mean. He’s obviously drawn to intuitives.”
“I know. He’s said as much, but I have to go. Come with me. Please. I—” My voice cracked, and I covered my face with my hands. “I’m in way over my head. And I’m terrified. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to get involved, but I have to do something, and I’m too scared to try it alone.”
She stared at me for a few moments then stood up, pulled a hair tie off her wrist, and gathered her long hair into a high ponytail. I recognized the habit from the cabin, and my chest swelled with hope as I realized it was a sign that she was preparing to tackle a difficult task.
“Fine,” she said, proving me right. “Let’s go.”
We took Daphne’s car to the Oracle Inn. The parking lot was nearly empty; it’d been days since any new developments in the case had been announced, and the ravenous news cycle had moved on to their next target.
She headed toward the front door, but I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the back entrance. Despite Gabrielle’s confidence that the renovations hadn’t unearthed her collection of correspondence, I thought it prudent to check with Penelope before heading up to Horace’s domain. We trailed up the long driveway and rounded to the corner to the back porch where a small hump of dark fur huddled.
“Striker!” I jogged forward and scooped up my cat. “What are you doing here?”
In answer, she rubbed her face against my chin. I took that as an apology for abandoning me the night before and scratched the top of her head.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I whispered, feeling slightly silly in front of Daphne. “I’ve missed you.”
Inside the inn, Penelope’s office door was locked, and nobody answered when I knocked. At the reservation desk, the clerk shrugged when asked where she’d gone.
“She didn’t say.” He reached for a notepad. “Can I take a message?”
“Send her up to the attic suite if she gets back before we come down, okay?” I fished around in my bag for the room key then led Daphne upstairs.
The attic suite was exactly as we’d left it after filming my account of Horace appearing to me before we left for Cambion’s Camp. The king-sized bed was still made up with a fleet of decorative pillows, and the room smelled faintly of disinfecting cleanser.
We both paused in the doorway before entering, the toes of our shoes inches away from the threshold. As this had been my idea, I decided it was only fair I entered the room first, but it took several seconds of talking up the idea to myself before my body agreed to move.
“Let’s start with the floor,” I said. “Penelope told me they didn’t have to refinish it, so I’m guessing that’s where we’ll find the compartment. We can check the walls after.”
I started in the bathroom at the back, dropping to my hands and knees. Relying on memories from Nancy Drew novels I’d read at least fifteen years before, I prodded and scratched at the floorboards, trying not to think about how the floor is the dirtiest place possible and how much dirtier a bathroom was than any other room.
To distract myself from thoughts of strangers’ bare feet, I called a question to Daphne. “Did you ever come here for Gabrielle’s séances?”
“Yes.” Her answer was faint; I popped my head out of the bathroom and saw that she lingered in the doorway to the landing. “A few times. It was always… marvelous. There’s no other word.”
“I know what you mean.” Finished with the small bathroom, I crawled into the main living space and got to work beside the bed. “I only got to be here once, but it was incredible. She was so in tune with the spirits. Their mouths would move, but the words would come out of her instead.”
Daphne finally followed me into the room and mimicked my example, sitting on the floor and pressing on the boards by the door. “You saw them? The spirits who visited?”
“Yeah, didn’t you?”
“I’ve never seen a ghost. Well, before your séance at the cabin, I mean.”
I stopped what I was doing and stared at her. “Really?”
“Is that so weird? From what I understand, the gift you and Gabrielle share is super rare.”
“Yeah, but… I don’t know. I guess it’s weird you could see him but not the others.” It bothered me. Why had she been able to see Horace? What made him so special? I quickened my pace, wanting to find Gabrielle’s secret stash that much faster.
“I hope it’s not under the bed,” Daphne said. “We’d probably need help moving it.”
“
Let’s save that for last then, after the couches.”
My methodical search took me around the perimeter of the room. Soon I found myself behind the same screen where Raziel had died, and I shuddered. The memory of finding his body tried to invade my mind, but I forced it out. I couldn’t allow myself to think of the dead. If I accidentally tried to reach out to Raziel now, I was sure Horace would appear.
It didn’t take long for us to run out of unfurnished floor. I narrowed my eyes at the heavy frame supporting the king-sized bed, trying to estimate its weight. I wasn’t confident we’d be able to move it without scratching up the hardwood, and Penelope would surely kill me if that happened. Four tall, thin legs supported the frame, leaving about a foot of space beneath the box spring. I lay down on my belly and scooched forward until my head and shoulders were under the bed.
“I think I can squeeze under here,” I called from the darkened space.
“Couches first, right?” Daphne reminded me.
“Right.”
I wiggled back out into the room and helped her drag the couches and coffee table in opposite directions. As we lifted the faux bearskin to drape it over the bed, Striker shot beneath the rug. She emerged a moment later, shaking a hair tie back and forth with a growl and scampering sideways under the bed with it.
“I need a break.” Daphne settled onto one of the couches, now pushed up against the dormer window, and fanned herself with one hand. “This is more exercise than I’ve gotten in a year.”
“Deal.” I pulled out my phone and dialed Graham. The call went to voicemail, and I hung up without leaving a message, tossing the phone on the coffee table. He had to have gotten my earlier voicemail, but hadn’t called me back and still wasn’t answering. He was probably avoiding me. Great.
“There’s a coffee shop downstairs, right?” Daphne asked. “Would you mind grabbing me a latte?”
It’d been too long since I’d had a chai. I’d been afraid of encountering Horace at the inn so I’d been going without. Maybe it was the crystal around my neck or Daphne’s company, but I didn’t feel nervous about him right now. The headache that’d plagued me for the past week, a sensation I now associated with both Horace and the jewelry box, was nowhere to be found. That alone was worth celebrating with my favorite beverage.
“Definitely. Come on, Striker. Let’s grab a snack.”
Usually, the S-word brought her running, but she remained under the bed, growling at her toy.
“She can stay with me,” Daphne said.
“Okay.”
As I turned to leave the room, Striker made a high-pitched “mew” sound I’d never heard her make before. I walked back to the bed and got on the floor to look at her. She’d caught one of her claws between two of the floorboards and was tugging desperately to unhook herself. Her eyes were wide and panicked as she looked at me and mewed again.
“Stop pulling!” I told her, dragging myself along the floor on my belly.
She ignored me, yanking on her paw in a way that made me wince in sympathy. When I reached her and moved her body forward so I could release her claw, she rewarded me by swiping at the back of my hand. A thin line of blood appeared by my knuckles and I hissed in pain.
“Everything okay?” Daphne asked.
“Fine. Just typical feline gratitude.”
I reached for Striker again, meaning to pull her out from under the bed with me, but she growled and clawed at the same floorboard she’d gotten stuck on.
“Stop it! You’ll catch your claw again.” I grabbed at her, and she swiped at me a second time before going back to scratching at the floor.
Realizing she might be onto something, I gently shoved her aside and ran my hand over the floorboards. One was raised slightly higher than the others, just enough to register on my fingertips but not my eyes. I used my fingernails like claws to pry the board away from the floor. Once it was out of the way, the two on either side lifted away also, and the familiar scent of Gabrielle’s favorite nag champa incense wafted up from the dark space. The outline of a shoebox was just visible in the dark space. I dragged it with me as I pushed myself back out from under the bed.
“You found it!” Daphne hurried off the couch and knelt beside me.
I lifted the lid and the smell of nag champa grew stronger. It was as if the folded papers and envelopes had been bathed in the scent, and I imagined Gabrielle reviewing the contents down in the bookstore while the Doobie Brothers played on the stereo.
Striker rubbed her face against the box then started running laps around the attic suite. She’d always liked Gabrielle. The smell of our old friend seemed to energize my cat and make her forget about the pain from a moment before.
Leaning against the bed frame, I gingerly pulled a handful of envelopes out of the box. Stamped with postage from Spain and addressed to Gabrielle in New York City, the contents proved to be written in Spanish. The cursive handwriting was so loopy and overlapped that even if I’d spoken the language, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to read them. The only parts I could make out were the dates at the top, from the 1980s, and the signature at the end: Rosanna Suntador.
“These are from Gabrielle’s sister,” I said, passing a few to Daphne. “She must have sent them before following Gabrielle here.”
“Oh, Rosanna?” She accepted the letters from me and scanned them. “I knew her. She was the sweetest woman.”
“Can you read them?”
She shook her head and put the letters in the shoebox’s upturned lid. “I took French in school.”
I kept pawing through the box, looking for anything with a United States postmark while silently cursing myself for never studying a foreign language. Halfway through the box, I found a return address that made my heart stop.
Daphne peered over my shoulder and read the name in the upper left corner of the envelope. “Who’s Evelyn Clair?”
I swallowed down the hard lump of sadness that’d formed in my throat at the familiar sight of the slanted handwriting. “My mom.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
I’d suspected these letters existed from the moment Gabrielle had produced a set of photographs my mother had mailed her when I was a child. Gabrielle had confirmed those suspicions when she offered to show me my mother’s old correspondence… but only in return for my silence about her crimes. When I’d refused and she’d been arrested, I accepted that I’d never get to see the things my mother wrote to her.
My hands shook as I pulled the first letter out of its envelope. Nostalgia washed over me at the sight of so much of my mother’s handwriting, sloping upward on the unlined stationary. A watermark of a hummingbird filled the lower corner of the page.
The letter was dated three years before I’d been born and was postmarked from Springdale, Utah. My hungry eyes took in my mother’s thoughts about the feeling in the canyons at Zion National Park.
I think it’s a spiritual nexus, like Donn’s Hill. Somewhere the dead have an easier time crossing over. I wish you could be here to explore it with me. You’d love the desert. It looks so dry and desolate, but I can feel the energy swirling around me every time I close my eyes.
There have to be thousands of other places like this in the world, right? Is it foolish to want to find them all? I feel more connected to my family here than I’ve felt since you helped me say goodbye to my mother. I know it’s selfish to chase that feeling… but what else can I do?
The next letter was postmarked two years after the first and mailed from Crestone, Colorado. My mother began the letter by complaining she hadn’t been able to find another “nexus” in the area then switched topics to something that made my breath catch.
Also, I took your advice and let Henry take me to dinner. He’s a nice guy, but we’re too different to make it work. He laughed when I asked him if he believes in ghosts. He thought I was joking when I said that’s why I’m here.
It’s moot anyway. He’ll be finishing his dig here in a couple of weeks and then going back to Denver to
wrap up his doctorate.
“Who’s Henry?” Daphne asked, still reading over my shoulder.
“My dad.”
I hurriedly rifled through the next few letters, hoping to find one that explained if they’d gone on a second date, but everything was woefully disorganized. I skimmed pages, getting sucked into pockets of time in my mother’s life and then moving on once I realized they weren’t about her relationship with my father. A timeline began to take shape as I ordered the letters based on the dates in the upper corner of each page.
There was so much I’d never known before. She worked her way across the United States over a period of two years, taking odd jobs or waitressing as she hunted for other places of spiritual power. She returned to Donn’s Hill every April, and the subsequent letters were typically dated in June or July. I imagined she’d stay with Gabrielle and Rosanna for a month or two, studying and laughing with her friends before venturing back out into the world on her spiritual quest.
Striker pawed at the box, hooking a single claw into a crinkled envelope.
I shooed her away. “These aren’t your toys. Where’d your hair tie go?”
She made her annoyance clear by jumping up on the bed and glaring at me. I ignored her and turned my attention back to the letters.
“Find anything about Horace yet?” Daphne asked.
“Hmmm?” I looked up from the letter in my hands, feeling dazed. “Oh, sorry. I got distracted.”
She’d been picking through the letters as I put them down, and I handed her a stack of ones I hadn’t gotten to yet.
“Here, take these. I don’t have to be the first to look at this stuff.”
“Are you sure? You seem pretty engrossed. I don’t want to throw off your groove.”
I shook my head. “You won’t. Sorry. It’s just…”
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