On the opposite wall, beneath a window, was a rust-stained porcelain sink that looked like it belonged in an antique shop. A round-shouldered 1950s Crosley Shelvador refrigerator hunched against another wall under an old-fashioned clock that said it was just a little past one. The floor was dark green linoleum, worn through in front of the sink and table. The walls were a lighter green, dingy and darkened with smoke over the cook stove. A round oak pedestal table and two wooden chairs stood in the middle of the room. In the middle of the table was a crystal vase filled with fragrant sweet peas and iris, with sprigs of parsley and rosemary and trailing stems of vinca.
“That’s exactly what I said when I saw it,” Claire replied. Her voice was thin and reedy. “Wow. You could cook for an army in here.”
There was a long silence while Ruby took it all in. “Well, I hope you’re not cooking on that,” she said at last, pointing to the iron stove.
Claire shook her head. “No, but my great-aunt Hazel cooked on it until she died. Which is maybe why she died.” She chuckled wryly. “I’m just kidding. Mom talked Aunt Hazel into getting the gas stove installed, and a water heater, too, so there’s hot water for laundry and baths. But to tell the truth, I haven’t been doing a whole lot of cooking since…for a long time,” she added in an apologetic tone. “Soup and sandwiches are usually enough for me. I hope you didn’t come for the gourmet food.”
“Hey,” Ruby said lightly, “who needs gourmet? We’re having an adventure, aren’t we? It’s like being away at camp or something. We can live off the land. We can roast weenies over a fire in the backyard and get all sticky with s’mores. Or we can drive into Round Top and pig out to our heart’s content, which I highly recommend, come to think of it.” Claire needed to get some real meals under her belt, Ruby thought. She had always been slender. Now she was much too thin. Taking a breath, Ruby added, “Aren’t you going to show me around?”
“Y…es.” Claire was hesitant. “But maybe it would be good if we talked a little bit first. You probably have lots of questions.”
Questions? Ruby thought of the woman with the basket of white roses and shivered. Yes, lots of questions, although she wasn’t sure that Claire would have any answers.
“Sure,” Ruby said easily. “If there’s something cold to drink in the refrigerator, we could have a piece of the world-famous pie Saint Ruby has brought just for you. As you say, it’s been forever since we’ve been together. We need to catch up.”
“Iced tea?” Claire opened the refrigerator door and pulled a dinky metal ice cube tray out of the tiny, frost-crusted freezer, which was just about big enough for the tray and a quart of ice cream. The ice cube tray looked as antique as the fridge.
“Super.” Ruby opened the pie box. “Knife? Forks? Plates?”
Getting out a pitcher of tea, Claire nodded toward the cupboards. “Over there. You’re bound to find something.” Half to herself, she added, “I can’t figure out why there are so many dishes. It’s like somebody was planning to do some serious entertaining—half the county, maybe. It’s the same with the linens. There are two linen closets, stuffed full of old stuff. High quality, but really old, all of it monogrammed with a B, for Blackwood, I suppose. A lot of it has never been used.”
Ruby pulled open a drawer and found the silver, opened a cupboard and took down two small plates. “When did you get here?”
“Two weeks ago.” Claire banged the ice cube tray on the table and the cubes spilled out. “The longest two weeks in my life. To tell the truth, there’ve been days when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. Nights, too. Nights especially,” she added, in a lower voice.
Considering that, Ruby found a knife and began cutting the pie. “You’ve been staying out here all by your lonesome?”
“Well, yes and no.” Claire was putting ice cubes into two glasses. Her voice was flat, hesitant, as if she were measuring her words. “There are the Rawlingses, of course. Sam and Kitty. Mr. Hoover—he’s the lawyer for the estate—hired them to look after the place. Sam does the mowing and keeps up the outside work. Kitty helps out in the house and manages the veggie garden. She keeps a few chickens, too, so if we run out of food, we can always raid the henhouse for eggs.” Claire nodded toward the flowers. “She brought me those this morning. The sweet peas are blooming all over the garden fence.”
Ruby moved her shoulder bag onto the floor and put down their plates of pie. “I met Sam,” she remarked. “He was…” She stopped, not quite sure how to put it. There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile
“Abrupt?” Claire prompted, into her hesitation. “Impolite, maybe?”
“Try bad mannered,” Ruby said. “As in rude.”
Claire made a face. “I’m never sure whether he’s doing it on purpose or whether he’s so naturally tactless that it just comes out that way.” She poured the tea and put the glasses on the round oak table, and they sat down across from each other. “The place has been empty for so long, he’s begun to think he owns it. I’m not comfortable with that.”
“He thought I might be with one of the oil companies,” Ruby said, picking up her fork. “If I were, I could turn the car around and get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Those companies have been a serious nuisance,” Claire said ruefully. “The big guys send letters or work through the landowners’ lawyers. But the little guys just show up at the front door, and they don’t want to take no for an answer. Kitty had some trouble with one a few weeks ago, and it pissed Sam off. He doesn’t like intruders—which is good, I guess. He’s like a watchdog, a Rottweiler, maybe, or a pit bull. And judging from past behavior, it’s even possible that his bite might be worse than his bark.”
“Kitty is Sam’s wife?”
“Uh-huh. She’s pleasant enough, but she’s shy. It’s hard to get more than a couple of words out of her. Sam has her pretty much under his thumb. The two of them take quite a bit of time off—a day or two a week, sometimes. If I stay, I need to find somebody else to live in the cottage and help. But then again…” Her face looked drawn and tired. “Mr. Hoover says it’s not easy getting people to work out here. And if I’m serious about turning this place into a paying proposition, it’s going to need a ton of work—plumbing, electrical work, painting. And money, of course. And I have to—”
Claire’s voice became indistinct, as if it were drowning in a dim distance, and Ruby lost track of what her friend was saying. She looked across the table and saw a gray shadow, like a fugitive wisp of fog, curling around Claire’s head and shoulders. There was a faint metallic odor, and she shivered, feeling suddenly, helplessly cold and shimmery and remote, as if part of her had become detached and moved outside of her, above her, and was looking down at two women—herself and Claire—seated across from each other at the table. The image rippled, broke, and reformed, as if she were seeing through water.
The feeling was profoundly disorienting, and Ruby knew that if it went on for more than a moment, she would start to feel the flickerings—quick flashes of thought, images, sensations, emotions. She would know what Claire was feeling, thinking. And she didn’t want to. She never wanted to know what was going on inside her friends. For one thing, it could be painful. Once, just out of curiosity, she’d let herself go into China’s mind. She’d seen that China thought she was a flake, a sweet, silly, lovable flake, but a flake just the same. At the same time, she’d understood that China envied her intuition and her perceptive abilities. China saw her as someone who—
But Ruby had stopped right there. It was one thing to guess what a friend might think of you. It was another to peer into her mind and know. It simply wasn’t fair. Everybody was entitled to her own private thoughts without other people poking around, turning things over to look inside and underneath, like curious buyers in a shop.
These uninvited, inadvertent glimpses into another person’s mind had occurred often when Ruby was younger, when she trying to learn how to manage her gift. But they came less frequently now that she had
figured out how to defend herself against them. When the shimmer began and the flickering came, she had trained herself to throw up what she imagined as her deflector shield, a metaphor that she had picked up from Star Trek reruns years before. In the beginning, it had taken a great deal of focused, sustained effort to raise the shield and keep the flickering at bay long enough for her to get control of what was happening, to dial it down or flick it off altogether. After a while, it got easier: she would be talking with somebody and start to feel shimmery and up came the shield almost automatically, like an arm flung up to deflect a slap. A moment later, the flicker faded, the shimmery feeling disappeared, and the conversation went on just as if nothing had happened. The other person never noticed a thing.
As time passed, though, Ruby had learned that it was possible to skim across the shimmers and flickers and use them without getting sucked in too deep. When she was doing birth chart readings, for example, or transits. Most of the time, she just stuck to reading the chart, which almost always gave more than enough information. All by itself, an astrological chart was incredibly revealing when you knew how to read it. You didn’t have to be psychic to get what was important; you just pointed out what the chart said and let the client do the work of making the connections to her inner and outer life. It usually meant more to the client that way, too, when she made her own personal discoveries.
But sometimes the chart blossomed out like a suddenly significant Rorschach and Ruby caught a flicker she wanted to hang on to for a moment without lowering the shield too far. Or she might be teaching a class in runes or tarot or I Ching, and the shimmer would come, along with a quick flicker of something interesting that she could pass along to her students without getting pulled in very deep.
That kind of thing was harmless, Ruby told herself, it was just fooling around, playing games. She had often wondered how professional intuitives managed. They took money to do readings for people, which meant that they were obligated to go as deep as they could. How in the world did they protect themselves? How did they keep from going too far into someone, too dangerously far? How did they avoid getting tangled up in other people’s stuff, like a diver getting tangled in a bed of kelp? What kind of defenses did they use? Or maybe they treated it like a game, the way she did. Or were only pretending (which was probably true of at least some of them).
Ruby occasionally worried that she was trivializing Gram’s gift by using it in such a superficial way. But the other thing, the whole thing, felt much too big and risky, and the few times she had used it seriously, it had terrified her. She was afraid of being overwhelmed or even swallowed up entirely by some power she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. It was like standing at the opening of a long tunnel that sloped away beneath her feet into utter blackness, with no light visible at the far end. It was easy to step inside a few feet, because she had the option of jumping back out at any time. Who knew what might happen if she went farther, went all the way? Who would she be when she came out at the other end? Would she come out at all or—
Ruby steadied her breath, making a strong effort to pull all of herself back to the chair she was sitting in, and risked another glance. The wisps of gray fog around Claire’s head had disappeared and her words were more distinct.
“—I have to get that woman—that ghost or whatever she is—out of this house,” she was saying, her words hard and edgy. She leaned forward. “You remember, don’t you? The woman you saw on the stairs that time? When we were here together, when we were kids?”
The fragrance of the sweet peas had dispelled the metallic odor, and the shimmery feeling was going away. Ruby began to feel warmer and connected again, all of a piece. She heard herself say, in a light, half-amused tone, “Oh, that. I scared you silly, didn’t I? I told you I’d seen a ghost. But you know how kids are. Surely you didn’t believe—”
“A woman in a long gray skirt and a gray shirtwaist with a black tie.” Claire’s voice was taut and thin, like a plucked string. “Dark hair, piled up on her head like a Gibson Girl. That was how you described her the day Mom brought us here to visit Aunt Hazel. And then you told me about your grandmother’s…gift. And we talked about it. Not just then, but later.” Her voice went up a notch. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember, Ruby! I can’t bear it if you do.”
Ruby met her friend’s eyes. “Yes, I remember,” she said, after a moment. “That was what I saw. And yes, we talked about it.” She paused, wondering if she should tell Claire what she had seen from the car this morning. But something stopped her, at least for now.
“Good. I’m glad I didn’t make it up,” Claire said, sounding relieved. She put her elbows on the table. “Anyway, after you told me about her, every time Mom and I came here to visit Aunt Hazel, I would go to the foot of those stairs and look up. I wanted to see your ghost.”
“My ghost?”
“That’s how I thought of her,” Claire replied. “Ruby’s ghost. But I could never see her. I finally decided that you must have been pretending, or maybe I had to have your grandmother’s gift to see what you saw. Or that the ghost or whatever she was had gone away. But none of that is true.” She had given up all pretense of eating her pie, and now she pushed the plate away and clasped her hands in front of her. “You weren’t making it up, and I didn’t need your Gram’s gift to see her. And she hasn’t gone away. She’s here, Ruby. Now. Still. After all these years. And I don’t mind telling you, I am scared.”
Ruby put down her fork, her own pie untasted. Outside, there was a distant rumble of thunder. Inside, the air was hot, heavy, almost steamy. “You’ve…seen her?”
“Three different times.” Claire wore a vulnerable look, and she was twisting the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. It was her wedding ring, Ruby noticed with some surprise. She was still wearing it, although Brad had been dead for a couple of years. “The first time was on the back staircase going up to the third floor, late one evening. She was carrying a kerosene lamp in one hand and lifting her skirt with the other as she climbed the stairs. She didn’t look back, and I lost sight of her when she reached the third floor hallway.” She swallowed. “Another time, she was just going into the cemetery, early in the morning, right after the sun came up. My bedroom faces in that direction. I saw her through the window.”
“There’s a cemetery here?” Ruby asked. But that wasn’t unusual. Many old houses in rural areas had graveyards. They dated back to the days when families lived in the same house, generation after generation. Now, a lot of them were abandoned.
“Uh-huh.” Claire flicked her tongue across her lips. “If you go out the back gate and take the path that goes off to the left, you’ll come to it. Aunt Hazel took me there once when I was a kid. That’s where old Mrs. Blackwood is buried, and Aunt Hazel. But there are other headstones, too, a whole row of them, and a big, white Victorian marble angel. The woman I saw that morning was carrying a basket filled with white roses. I got the idea that she was taking the flowers to put on the graves.”
So that was where she was going, Ruby thought to herself, feeling suddenly chilled. The woman I saw from the car. She was taking flowers to the graveyard. I wonder who’s buried there.
Claire tightened her fingers as if to control the shakiness in her voice. “She looked more or less like…like a real person, dressed up in a Victorian blouse and skirt. But she was, well, indistinct somehow, and not quite…sort of shimmery, I mean.” She cleared her throat. “Wavy. Rippled. Like I was…like I was seeing her through water.”
Ruby tried to speak calmly, thinking about the kinds of logical questions that China might ask if she were here. “Is it possible that the Rawlingses might have something to do with this? Like, maybe Kitty dressed up to fit the part?”
But how would Kitty Rawlings know what kind of clothes to wear? Unless, of course, Claire had said something to her. “Did you happen to tell her what this woman looked like?”
“Uh-uh.” Claire shook her head emphatically. “I haven’t spoken to
Kitty about it. I thought of asking her if she’d seen anything, but I decided against it.” She chuckled ruefully. “For one thing, I thought it might scare her. She’d probably tell Sam, too, and for some reason, I didn’t want him to know. Anyway, the woman I saw was tall and elegant and graceful. Kitty is…well, kind of dumpy. You’ll see when you meet her. You’d never get the two confused.”
Ruby asked the second part of the question. “So you don’t know if she’s seen anything? Or if her husband—”
“Uh-uh.” Claire shook her head again. “I suppose I could ask. Only, if they haven’t seen anything, it’s going to sound a little nutty, don’t you think?” Her chuckle sounded forced. “‘Excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings, but I’m wondering if you’ve happened to notice a ghost wandering around—maybe out near the graveyard? Carrying a basket of white roses? If you see her, give her my regards, would you?’”
Ruby had to agree. It definitely sounded screwy. “You said there were three times. Once on the back stairs with a lamp, once on the path near the cemetery. When was the third time?”
“Just before I called you the other evening. I was walking beside the creek. We’ll have to go down there later, Ruby—it’s really beautiful, especially with all the wildflowers in bloom. It felt so good to get away from this house for a little while.” Claire took a breath and went on hurriedly. “But that’s another story. Anyway, when I was coming back up the hill, I glanced toward the house and saw her—the woman—on the widow’s walk, up on the roof.”
“On the roof?” Ruby asked in surprise, and then thought to herself, Why not? Why shouldn’t she be on the roof, just as easily as the stairs or the path to the cemetery? “What was she doing up there?”
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