Curses Are for Cads

by Tamara Berry

  I told you the way back wouldn’t be nearly as calm.

  I breathe deep and will Birdie to perdition. “If all you’re going to do is sit there and smugly tell me ‘I told you so’ every time something goes wrong, then you might as well flitter away,” I say to her. “I have neither the time nor the patience for your antics. Go haunt someone else.”

  Even in this, Sid is showing herself to be inured to shock. “Birdie again?”

  “Yes. It seems she was right about a lot of things, drat the woman.”

  As I say the words aloud, I realize how true they are. This entire time, I’ve been lamenting how Birdie always seemed to be one step ahead of me, as though she had direct access to some clairvoyant hotline available only to her. She knew where and how Harvey Renault would die. She predicted and/or controlled the weather. She knew where to find the first gold coin. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that she’s psychic, but she has had an advantage over me.

  Either that, or she had an accomplice.

  As if on cue, I could almost swear that I hear the low-throated, echoing laugh of Birdie in the distance.

  “Well, that’s it, then,” I announce, eyeing Sid with new—and unnerving—clarity. “There’s only one thing left to do.”

  I can’t tell if I’m more excited or daunted by the prospect, but all of my training and experience has brought me to this one moment.

  “One thing?” Sid echoes. “What?”

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to hold a séance.”

  Chapter 16

  I’ve never done more—or less—to prepare for a séance in my life.

  A Madame Eleanor séance isn’t an affair that happens every day. They’ve always been my pièce de résistance, the grand show at the end of a haunting, a way to lay all fears—and all spirits—to rest. My tactics have been perfected over the years, and typically include everything from wind machines and voice throwing to electromagnetic artifice.

  In other words, they’re a bunch of malarkey. As such, it generally takes me a few days and a lot of careful planning to get everything set up where I need it to be.

  That’s what makes today’s séance so strange. For once, I’ve done no advance planning. There’s no artifice, no behind-the-scenes trickery. Nothing has been rigged up in the background, and I’ve elicited no outside help. It’s just me, my cats, and a room full of people who would prefer to be literally anywhere else right now.

  “I need everyone to hold hands,” I say to the assembled group. We’re seated at a large, round table that I had Nicholas drag into the gilded salon. It’s not the darkest or the most mystical room in the castle, but we’ve spent so much time here since this whole thing began that it feels the most fitting.

  “I’ve placed a few of Birdie’s personal effects in the center of the table, so if you could focus on them, that would be a big help,” I add. “Think of her. Remember her. Call to her.”

  I have no idea how effective any of this will be, especially since the personal effects in question are, well, questionable. I couldn’t admit to having unearthed the bags hidden under her bed without casting further suspicion on my head, so I had to make do with her purple fringed shawl, a few lingering shards of one of the wine bottles she smashed, and a lock of her hair that I shamelessly cut from her deceased head.

  If the expressions on the gathered faces are any indication, they’re equally unimpressed by my offerings. However, it seems anticlimactic for me to sit here with Freddie on my lap as I try to get some sense out of Birdie, so they’ll just have to play along.

  “Here, Birdie, Birdie,” Otis calls in a purely sarcastic manner. Of everyone, he was the most difficult to coax into agreeing. It took Sid pointing out to him that the only alternative was to sit playing backgammon for the next two days until McGee shows up with his regular delivery. Between that and the likelihood of Birdie’s body reaching the festering point, he decided to acquiesce. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  Sid slaps his hand. “Hush. You know that’s not how this works. Madame Eleanor needs to concentrate.”

  “Are you sure I should be here for this?” Dr. Fulstead asks. Of all of us, he seems the most nervous. He’s seated on my right, his hand damp with perspiration. “I’m not one of the guests, and I don’t know anything about the spiritual world.”

  “Of course you’re welcome,” I say, tightening my grip. Sweaty palms aren’t my favorite thing, but I’m afraid he might try to make a run for it if I let go. “There’s nothing secretive or dark about this. It’s just a gathering of people remembering a dear friend.”

  Nicholas coughs.

  “Well, an overbearing acquaintance, at the very least,” I correct myself.

  “Can we play?” asks Ferguson from one corner. Children at a séance is never a good idea, but Elspeth and I are equally loath to let them wander the island at large. While fires are being set and women are being poisoned in their beds, it seems wisest to keep them within eyeshot. I gave Ferguson a ball of yarn and told him to keep Beast occupied, but it’s obvious he’s about as impressed with the cat as the cat is with him.

  “I’m a powerful wizard now,” Jaime insists. He’s given up on Beast and is making a finger cradle from the yarn. “My other tooth is already coming loose.”

  He’s too far away for me to make out the details, but the quiet determination of the next few seconds leads me to believe that he’s doing his best to wiggle his second incisor free.

  “Then keep up the good work. The power of the séance might help things progress.” Before he has a chance to argue—or to ask me about other spells to while away the next hour—I turn to Ashley, who’s seated on my left. His palm, unlike the doctor’s, is bone dry and paper thin. It feels almost like holding hands with a mummy. “Ashley, why don’t you begin? Tell us something that struck you about Birdie upon your first meeting.”

  It takes him a moment to decide on the right thing to say. When he does, it’s not, as I expect, a florid burst of poetry, but a much more prescient truth. “I never did understand what brought her,” he says. “You were invited, obviously, but we’d never even heard of her before. What did she want, coming here as she did?”

  “The gold,” I say, not mincing matters. “You heard her admit that if it’s cursed, haunted, or possessed, she knew about it. I’m guessing we could also add if it’s worth anything to that list.”

  Everyone looks mildly uncomfortable at this piece of truth, so I waste no time in continuing. Mild discomfort is a great first step in any séance.

  “She knew that your family was in possession of Gloriana’s Burden,” I say with a careful glance at each face. “She knew the exact history of the curse as well as the value of the gold. She knew where in the wine cellar to look for the box, but she didn’t seem surprised to find that it was empty.”

  I think, but don’t add, that although she drew everyone down to the wine cellar, she waited until I was in the room before she extracted the box. Based on the weight of it, she knew as well as I did that it couldn’t possibly contain the missing gold, but that hadn’t surprised her in the slightest.

  Because she’d been setting us up. She’d been setting me up.

  “Well, Birdie?” I ask, somewhat rhetorically. “What do you have to say about that?”

  To my surprise, she answers on cue.

  I’m not going to do everything for you, dear Ella.

  And that’s it. That’s all Birdie says—all she does. As has been the case since the moment we met, her only plan is to throw me into the middle of a mess, bow out of the way, and watch what I do.

  So I show her.

  “She was a fraud,” I announce.

  Otis grunts. “Well, obviously.”

  “No, I mean it.” I hold up a hand to prevent Otis from saying more. I half expect Birdie to chime in with a roaring defense of her own capabilities, but all that happens is that Freddie stands up from my lap, emits a tiny pink yawn, and settles back down again. “She was no more c
apable of predicting the future than you are.”

  “I?” Sid asks with a blink.

  “Yes, you—all of you. Everyone here.” I lift a finger and move it in a circle around the table. “Bridget Wimpole-White was a fake and a fraud, but the one thing she knew from the beginning, the one thing she banked on, is that I’m not. Since we first sat together on that train, her sole objective has been to serve as my right hand. The first thing she did upon hearing about the curse was to ask how I planned to counteract it. She unearthed a gold coin in a wine cellar and immediately handed it over to me for safekeeping. She sent for my cats when I needed them. She brought me Dr. Fulstead.”

  I wait in case lightning should decide to strike me dead and counteract my claim, but all I hear is the shocked silence of the room I hold captive. It’s my moment of glory.

  “Someone hired her to find that gold,” I say, taking pleasure in stating the words out loud. “The only way a fraud like Bridget Wimpole-White could have known as much as she did was if someone had been feeding her information the entire time. But the one thing she didn’t know—the one thing she couldn’t know—was the gold’s actual location. And do you know why?”

  No one answers, even though I’m fairly sure by now that they’ve all figured out what I have.

  “Because the person who hired her didn’t know, either.”

  I glance around the table once more, my gaze skimming over the faces of the gathered party, each more troubled than the last. Many of my own thoughts are echoed there. There are stolen glances and uncomfortable squirms as everyone starts to understand the implications of what we’re dealing with.

  For a moment, I toy with the idea of lying—of saying that I know who the guilty party is and waiting for the outburst to follow—but a glimmer of gold on the edge of the painting of the hunting dog catches my eye. It’s an ugly picture even without the heavy gilt frame, but there’s something about the overt ostentation that pushes it to the next level.

  I blink as another painting in a similarly heavy frame comes into focus. Then another. And another.

  I almost gasp as I realize the truth of what I’m looking at. There’s one more thing Birdie knew that I didn’t, one more thing she hid from me from the start. Her first task upon arriving on this island was to find and test the family silver to see if it was gold.

  Because if there’s one way to ensure that no one finds a giant box of gold coins, it’s to hide it in plain sight. It’s to change its shape and put it on display.

  “What is it, Madame Eleanor?” Sid asks, her voice yanking me back to a sense of reality. “Are you all right? You look as though . . . Well, as though you’ve seen a ghost. Do you know who hired her? Did she tell you?”

  I don’t answer. My mouth is too dry, my pulse too fluttering. On the one hand, I’ve accomplished exactly what I promised to do in coming to Airgead Island—I’ve located the gold. It’s here in this room, shining down on us as we commune with the dead. It’s been here all along, adhering to the rules of that silly curse and everything it threatens.

  On the other hand, there’s no way I can say as much out loud. The one thing I haven’t revealed to this gathering—the one thing it’s too dangerous to say out loud—is that because Birdie discovered too much, or because the person who hired her didn’t like the way she was going about the process, they killed her. They killed her the exact same way they killed Glenn. If someone in this room was willing to hire—and murder—Birdie in pursuit of the gold, there’s no saying what they’ll do once they realize I’ve found it.

  Kill me, most likely. Possibly everyone in this castle. There’s no way they’re getting their hands on it otherwise. Not now that I’ve revealed the truth to everyone in this room.

  “We have to get off this island,” I say. It’s a mere echo of what I’ve been trying to drive home this entire time, but my voice is firm with resolve this time. As long as we’re stuck here, we’re all at risk. We can’t call for help. We can’t put Birdie in the hands of capable forensic scientists. Accidents and illnesses can strike without risk, and the curse blamed for the whole. “I don’t care what we have to do. It’s not safe for any of us here.”

  “You didn’t answer her question,” Otis says. His expression has taken on a keen intensity, the brutish lines of his face deepened by exhaustion and grief and maybe something more. “Did she tell you who hired her?”

  “No,” I say, unable—and unwilling—to lie while so many lives are at risk. “But I’m not kidding about the rest. We have to find a way to safety, even if it means one of us has to swim to Barra.”

  I glance around the room once more. This time, I don’t see anything worth note—and I mean that literally. In the corner where Beast sits and calmly cleans her fur, there’s only an abandoned ball of yarn. Jaime and Ferguson must have used the distraction of my discovery as an opportunity to slip away.

  “The boys—” I say as I jolt to my feet. All the blood from my body drains and pools in my gut. “Elspeth, did you see where they went?”

  “Oh, dear,” she says, but not in a way that signals alarm. “I warned them to stay close, but you know how boys will be . . .”

  I do know it, unfortunately. I also know that I’m the only person who realizes just how much danger the boys are in. The one thing—the only thing—that Birdie White was successful at from the start was believing in me. If I’m going to pick up the reins and finish this for her, then I’m going to have to do the same.

  Starting—and ending—with my vision of a little boy drowning at sea.

  Chapter 17

  “There’s nothing to be so upset about, Madame Eleanor. It’s a shame they ran off the way they did, but they won’t come to any harm.” Elspeth shakes her head. “I might not be able to see the future, but I can see that much.”

  As much as I’d love to believe her, I have too much experience with visions of death to accept her words at face value. “I’m sure they are, but I need to see them with my own eyes.”

  “And so you will, once you’ve had a nice cup of tea.”

  If there’s a polite way to refuse such kindly maternalism, it’s not something I’ve learned in my lifetime. “Elspeth, please. I know it sounds silly, but this is a matter of life and death.”

  For what is probably the first time since I’ve met the woman, Elspeth allows an expression of annoyance to cross her face. I know what she’s thinking—that we were all in the gilded salon together, that no one could have harmed those boys without a witness—but that’s only part of the story.

  “Whoever hired Birdie might think the boys know more than they let on,” I say—plead, really, my voice cracking near the end. “I didn’t want to say anything during the séance, but we need to consider the likelihood that Glenn, Harvey, and Birdie were all killed in pursuit of the gold. We can’t let Jaime and Ferguson be next.”

  Something about either my words or my tone finally breaks through. Elspeth sucks in a sharp breath.

  “There’s a whistle hanging by the back door,” she says. “If you stand outside and blow, they’ll head back from wherever they’ve run off to.”

  “You want me to whistle for them? Like dogs?”

  She nods. “It’s not orthodox, but it works.”

  I lose no time in pulling a thin, silver whistle from a hook near the kitchen door. How they’re supposed to hear it over the gale of the storm is more than I can say. The wind whips around me in a howling twist, my skirt flapping against my legs and my hair in tangles.

  As soon as I bring the whistle to my lips and blow, I understand the reasoning. This sucker is loud. The sharp whine carries over the rocks and past the waves, adding to the tempestuous backdrop with its mournful cry. No animal could make this sound; no human, either.

  A ghost could, though. Or a woman frantic to find a pair of rambunctious little boys.

  “How long does this usually take?” I poke my head into the door to ask.

  “Not long. They’re never out of earshot.” />
  I have no idea how long Elspeth considers earshot to be, but I count to two hundred without catching a glimpse of anyone. Bringing the whistle to my lips again, I blow harder. If it sounded like a ghost before, it’s a whole cacophony of spirits this time. Anyone sailing nearby is likely to think that Airgead has succumbed to the curse, the entire island falling dead and dormant through Gloriana’s rage.

  After the next two hundred seconds pass by, Elspeth joins me at the door, wiping her hands on a dishrag.

  “This isn’t like them,” she says, and puts her hand out for the whistle. She gives it only a cursory wipe before placing it to her mouth and repeating my efforts.

  The sound of footsteps a short distance away cause both of us to relax—until we catch sight of the tall figure trotting up to us. “I checked down at the cavern,” Nicholas says without preamble. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to tell him about everything I’ve discovered or suspect, but the nice thing about him is that he doesn’t need to know. I want those boys found, which means he’ll move heaven and earth to find them.

  He nods at the whistle in Elspeth’s hand. “Is that what they normally answer to?”

  The sight of Nicholas also putting forth his best efforts to track down her grandsons has Elspeth growing even more concerned. She blinks up at him. “Ever since they were wee ones. It’s never failed to bring them running. They’re good boys. No one here would hurt them.”

  A grandparent’s doting fondness isn’t a thing to be implicitly trusted, but I find myself agreeing with Elspeth. It’s difficult to imagine anyone on this island taking things that far. Not Sid, not Ashley, and not . . .

  I stop, remembering the boys’ inherent fear of Otis.

  “Perhaps they’re hiding inside the castle,” Nicholas suggests before I can go too far down that road. “They wouldn’t hear the whistle if that were the case.”

  “They’re not ones to stay indoors if they can help it,” Elspeth says, worry rendering her voice wobbly. “Usually because I find a way to put them to work. Madame Eleanor, you don’t think—?”