“I can’t just turn the gift on and off like it has a switch, you know,” Leonora protested, even as Uncle Ham and Karen and Mario fell back out of their way. The hall was long and narrow, white-painted bead-board with a hardwood floor. Nicky, with Leonora in tow and John following, charged up it like the little engine that could. The others had to practically run to stay ahead of them, and as a result, they all popped out into the kitchen like spray shooting out of a shaken-up soda bottle.
“I know that, Mother.”
Hanging on to her patience with grim determination, Nicky pulled Leonora across the kitchen while at the same time giving Livvy, who had paused with a heaping spoonful of Rocky Road halfway to her mouth to watch, a dagger look that dared her to say or do anything to further complicate the situation.
“The connection happens when it happens. I have to feel it. And I’m not—definitely not—feeling it tonight,” Leonora continued.
This time Nicky couldn’t stop herself: Her eyes rolled practically of their own accord. Her mother, fortunately, didn’t see.
“So fake it, Mother,” she said through her teeth.
The hissing sound that filled the sudden silence, Nicky realized, was Livvy sucking in air.
“Now you’ve done it,” her sister said.
Even without looking at her mother, Nicky knew it was true: She could almost feel Leonora swelling. Her own shoulders tensed in anticipation.
“I . . . never . . . fake it,” Leonora said awfully.
“Was that ever the wrong thing to say.” Livvy sounded almost gleeful.
“Oh, finish your ice cream,” Nicky snapped, shooting her sister a shut-up-or-die look. She was already regretting her words. Occasionally, on her mother’s defunct
TV show, the producers had used certain special effects to, as they put it, “enhance” the experience for the audience. It was still a sore spot with Leonora.
“I don’t need to fake it. I would scorn to fake it. Only charlatans ever fake it.”
“I know, Mother. I’m sorry, Mother. You know I didn’t mean fake it as in fake it.”
Nicky verbally backtracked as fast as she could while towing her sputtering mother out through the screen door, which banged shut behind them, and across the narrow covered porch that ran the length of the back of the house. Twybee Cottage was a beach house, and just like all the other oceanfront houses on Pawleys Island, it was situated so that its back faced the street, while its front looked out over the dunes and sea oats and sand toward the ever-changing sea. It was full dark now, and all she could see of the ocean was a glimmer of shiny black between the end of the crepe myrtle hedge that lined the driveway and the side of the house. The murmur of the waves was almost drowned out by tree frogs and crickets and other assorted nocturnal noise makers as they engaged in their nightly sing-along. The moon was a pale disk floating low in the inky black sky. It gave off just enough light to outline the pea gravel driveway in barely-there silver. The night was warm as it nearly always was on the island when it wasn’t downright hot, but a sudden gust of cooler wind blew in just then from the ocean, smelling of seawater and heavy with the promise of rain. It rustled the glossy leaves of the giant magnolia that shaded the porch and parking area, and lifted Nicky’s hair away from her face and neck. Her skin was damp with perspiration, and the quick rush of air felt wonderful. She lifted her face to it in automatic appreciation as the words I’m home flashed through her mind. In many ways, she loved this island better than any place on earth. Until she came back to it, she always forgot how deeply the sights and sounds and smells of her childhood were ingrained in her soul.
“Just what did you mean then, Nicole?”
When her mother called her Nicole in that tone, Nicky knew she was in deep doo-doo, which she had to admit that this time she deserved. Suggesting that anything about what Leonora did was faked was the verbal equivalent of waving a red flag in front of a bull. She knew that. The only explanation was that stress was disordering her senses. Fortunately, her rented black Honda Accord was parked right at the base of the porch steps. She was able to reach it and yank open the passenger-side door before Leonora got worked up enough to balk again.
“I meant just do what you usually do and don’t worry about the outcome. Whatever happens happens. If you make contact, good. If you don’t, well, that’s the way it goes.”
Leonora stopped dead to glare at her. “So then your program runs a solid hour of me just wandering around empty rooms, saying things like, ‘Nope, nothing here,’ ‘Sorry, nothing’s coming through,’ ‘I’m drawing a blank, folks, the ghosts seem to have better things to do than talk to me tonight’?”
Nicky had forgotten how well her mother did sarcasm.
“Come on, Mama.”A tug got her mother moving again.
“You think I want to look like a fool on live TV?”
“You aren’t going to look like a fool on live TV.” Doing her best to stay in soothing mode, Nicky bundled her mother into the passenger seat, even bending to lift her feet from the ground and tuck them safely inside the footwell. “If nothing comes through tonight—and that’s a very big if, and you know it—you’ll look like the legitimate psychic you are, who tried and simply was unable to make contact with the Other Side.” Nicky tried not to contemplate the prospect of televising a live séance at which not a single ghost showed up. Heads would roll. No, correction, a head would roll: hers. “Anyway, how many séances have you done? You could probably do one in your sleep. And you always get something.”
“Hundreds, probably,” Leonora replied gloomily as Nicky pulled her seat belt around her, fastening it less as the loving gesture it looked like and more as a precaution against her mother attempting a quick exit. “People always ask for séances. They don’t realize you don’t need to do that to get in touch with those who’ve crossed over. Séances are basically just entertainment. At least, the kind people always picture—where a group sits around a table, holding hands with their eyes closed—is.” Leonora sniffed dismissively. “That’s not how I work.”
“I know. So just do what you do and don’t worry about it.”
Closing the door on her mother, she rushed around to the driver’s side before it could occur to Leonora that she could, theoretically, get back out again. Nicky was curling a hand around her door handle when the banging of the screen door caused her to glance up. Karen, cell phone to ear, was running down the back steps with Mario behind her, heading toward their own car, a rented blue Neon parked in front of the garage. Karen gave her a thumbs-up as she went past, which Nicky surreptitiously returned, knowing that if her mother saw her, there would be hell to pay. Another bang of the screen heralded the appearance on the porch of Uncle Ham and Uncle John, who also hurried down the steps toward, Nicky presumed, their car, which she also presumed was parked in its usual spot behind the long, low frame building that was the three-car garage, which was situated between the house and the street and went a long way toward making the back porch and the parking area totally private. Having been converted into an office/hangout spot for Harry, the garage hadn’t housed cars for years. A third bang, and there was Livvy. The single quick glance that she spared her sister was enough to tell Nicky that the table had been kind. The boobs were nothing. Livvy’s belly was so big that she looked like she’d swallowed the Goodyear Blimp. Whole.
“Nick! Nicky! I want to come. Wait for me,” Livvy called, waving. She hurried along the porch, flip-flops smacking the wood floor.
On the verge of pretending she hadn’t heard, Nicky had an inconvenient attack of conscience and glanced up again in time to watch as Livvy, in unflattering white stretch shorts that she wouldn’t have been caught dead in seven months before, practically waddled down the steps. Once widely acclaimed as the prettiest girl on the island, her mother’s perfect daughter with the perfect husband and the perfect life, Livvy had fallen far. No matter how urgent the circumstances and how sure she was that Livvy’s presence could do nothing but complicate an alr
eady fraught situation, Nicky discovered that it just wasn’t in her to hop in her car and leave her sister behind.
“Hurry up,” Nicky growled in her sister’s direction as the Neon sped past them down the driveway. She was still watching the flying pea gravel that was stirred up in the other car’s wake when she was distracted by Uncle John and Uncle Ham, who appeared on either side of the Honda, opened the back doors, jumped inside, and slammed the doors shut again.
Just like that. Nicky was left with nothing to do but blink in surprised dismay at the closed door nearest her.
Life on the island: It always had been, and evidently always would be, a never-ending three-ring circus. How could she have forgotten what it was like? The constant commotion was the reason—one of the reasons—she rarely came home anymore. Unlike her nearest and dearest, she liked things calm and well organized and predictable.
“Wait a minute,” she protested, sliding into the driver’s seat and slewing around to look at her uninvited male relatives. Not that she didn’t love and appreciate them, of course, but keeping tonight’s chaos level as low as possible seemed the wise thing to do. Leonora all by herself was more turmoil than a full-blown hurricane. Add in her sister, and . . . “Livvy’s coming. There’s not going to be room.”
The left rear door opened, cutting Nicky off.
“I’ll scoot over.” Uncle Ham suited the action to the words. Livvy plopped into the backseat in the spot he had vacated and closed the door. Given Livvy’s bulk, the three of them were wedged in tighter than tennis balls in a vacuum-packed can, but they looked perfectly happy. Anyway, Nicky was out of time to argue.
They were due to be on the air, live, in eighteen minutes. Hopefully somebody—“Where’s Marisa?” Nicky asked as she started the car—was setting up. Leonora liked things done in a certain way, and, as their family mantra put it, “If Leonora ain’t happy, ain’t nobody gonna be happy.”
“She left,” Leonora said coldly. As Marisa was her mother’s longtime assistant and faithful friend who knew just how Leonora liked things done, such coldness could only mean that Marisa had failed to take Leonora’s latest attack of diva-ism seriously enough.
“She went on over to the Old Taylor Place to start getting things ready,” Uncle Ham explained. “We were supposed to bring Leonora with us.”
Good job, guys, Nicky wanted to say as she threw the car into drive, but she didn’t. Leonora, in her queen-of-the-universe mode, was more than a match for Uncle Ham—indeed, more than a match for most people.
“Seat belts.”
Nicky threw the reminder over her shoulder as she swung around in a tight circle that barely missed clipping her mother’s husband, who’d stepped outside the garage just at that moment, probably drawn by all the commotion. The doorway behind him backlit his tall, well-built form and thick, white hair. Sixty-seven years old, he had the calmest disposition of anyone Nicky had ever met. Which, she supposed, was how he had survived six years of marriage to her mother without going totally bonkers.
She waved at him through her window. As her front bumper whizzed by, a scant few inches from the knees of his dark-blue slacks, he simply smiled and waved back at her. Then he was out of sight, and Nicky sent the Honda rocketing down the driveway so fast that churned-up pea gravel peppered the closed windows.
“Whoa,” Uncle John said, grabbing the back of her seat. “You might want to slow down a little, Nicky dear.”
Nicky did, just long enough to turn left out of the driveway onto Atlantic Avenue, which was a straight stretch and practically deserted, and which she knew like the back of her hand—certainly well enough, under the circumstances, to speed as necessary. And it was necessary. She, personally, was sweaty and flush-faced and about as camera-ready as Livvy. And her mother still had to be powdered, pacified, and put into position. And . . .
She wasn’t even going to let herself think about any more “ands” until she got there.
“She drives just like you,” Uncle John said to Uncle Ham, in a tone that didn’t make it sound like a compliment. “Like Leonora, too. It’s that red hair. Does something to the brain, I’m convinced. Reckless as hell, the lot of you.”
“Are not,” Uncle Ham replied, verbally bristling. Nicky gritted her teeth. Like many couples who had been together a long time, these two had a tendency to bicker. And tonight, of all nights, she was not in the mood to listen.
“Quick-tempered, too,” Uncle John continued, undeterred, as Nicky hung a quick left onto South Causeway Road. The headlights sliced through the darkness as she turned, flashing past an expanse of knee-high scrub grass, a stand of bristly palmettos, and a pair of glow-in-the-dark eyes of what was possibly either a possum or a raccoon. The Old Taylor Place was nestled on a high point on the bank of Salt Marsh Creek, facing the mainland. It was, perhaps, a ten-minute drive from Twybee Cottage—if she kept to the speed limit, which she had no intention, under the circumstances, of doing. The only thing worse than having no ghosts at the séance would be having the program start with endless seconds of dead air because both the host—that would be her— and the star—that would be her mother—were late. The mere thought made her shudder and stomp the gas. The houses that whizzed past as she accelerated were newer, cheaper construction that had been clustered in the middle of the island, away from the now ruinously expensive waterfront. Lights were on inside most of them, giving this area the look of a miniature Christmas village.
“Red hair’s a genetic marker. For all kinds of things,” Uncle John said. “Like decreased pain tolerance. I showed you that study. And—”
“That study was a load of crap.” Uncle Ham’s voice was tight. “All having red hair means is you’ve got red hair. Anyway, at least our hair color is natural.”
“Are you saying mine isn’t?”
“All I’m saying is this: Clairol’s Summer Blonde.”
“That package wasn’t mine, and you know it.”
Livvy, meanwhile, had apparently been struggling with her seat belt the entire time they’d been in the car.
“Ohmigod, it won’t fasten.” She let her breath out with a whoosh as though she’d been holding it. The sound was accompanied by the slither of the abandoned seat belt as it slid back into its moorings.“It doesn’t fit. I’m a cow—a whale. I could just die.”
Startled out of her preoccupation by the very real pain in Livvy’s voice, Nicky glanced at her sister through the rearview mirror.
“For God’s sake, Liv,” she said. “You’re seven months pregnant. You can’t expect to be a size six.”
“That . . . that bitch looks like she’s about a size two,” Livvy wailed.
“That bitch” was understood by everyone in the car to be the woman Livvy’s husband had left her for.
“You’re prettier than she is,” Uncle Ham said, wrapping a comforting arm around her shoulders. “Even . . .”
He broke off, apparently realizing the infelicitousness of what he’d been about to say. Livvy, no fool despite being supersized, supersensitive, and supercharged with hormones at present, didn’t seem to have any trouble filling in the blank.
“Even if I’m huge?” she guessed, on a note of quivering despair.
“You’re not huge,” Uncle Ham, Uncle John, and Nicky all said in instant, loyal unison.
“I am, I am.” Livvy burst into noisy tears. “I’m big as a damned stadium, and you all know it.”
A stop sign emerged out of the darkness. Nicky saw it, and the car proceeding through the crossroad it heralded just in time. She hit the brakes. The Honda screeched to a shuddering stop.
“We want to find ghosts, not be them,” Uncle John said after the briefest of moments, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of Livvy’s sobs. Ignoring him, and her sister, and everything except the necessity of making it to their destination in time, Nicky waited for the intersection to clear and then hung a left. They were almost there. . . .
“I don’t know how I let you talk me into this,” Leonora
moaned to Nicky, seemingly oblivious to the hubbub in the backseat. “I can’t do a séance if I can’t connect.”
Her hands were sliding up and down her arms as if she was cold. Recognizing this from experience as a bad sign, Nicky started to feel the first real stirrings of alarm. Maybe there was more to her mother’s reluctance than sheer bloody-mindedness. Maybe she would get on camera and freeze. . . .
“You can do this, Mama. You have a true gift, remember?” Nicky did her best to stifle her own budding panic and keep her voice calm and reassuring—which wasn’t exactly easy, given the fact that her sister was having a meltdown in the backseat, her uncles were arguing about which one of them was most to blame for upsetting her, and her mother was giving every indication that she was going to unbuckle her seat belt and bolt at the next stop sign.
Not that Nicky meant to stop for it unless she absolutely had to. Number one, they were so late. Number two, she’d dealt with her mother’s histrionics before, and she was perfectly well aware of the lengths to which Leonora was willing to go.
If these were just histrionics. Which, if she was really, really lucky, they were. Once a camera was on her, Leonora would be fine. Nicky knew how her mother worked—and, knowing she deserved every bit of what she was getting, she reflected dismally. She’d been a fool to let her mother anywhere near anything that involved her career. But Twenty-four Hours Investigates had been tanking in the ratings, the producers had been desperately casting about for some way to provide a big boost in the numbers for the May sweeps, and her mother had called to ask Nicky if she could use her influence (“What influence?” Nicky had wanted to snort; Nicky’s show was about a one-point drop in the ratings from being cancelled, and she herself was one of three not all that highly regarded on-air reporters) to get her mother a well-paying, short-lived TV gig. The timing of these three occurrences had been close, so close that Nicky had had a eureka moment and connected them.
At the time, it had seemed like fate.
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