“Well, that’s no fun,” said Jennifer with a determinedly cheerful air. “Nothing good in the mail?”
I riffled through the stack of mail. “Bills and junk. Two catalogs. Is that good?”
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed slightly before the lines smoothed out . “Well, I suppose it depends on where they’re from!”
Nathaniel’s expression closed, but his eyes slipped to her. He could hear the false note as well. What was she hinting at?
Matt’s letter. But how could she possibly know about that? Unless... I felt slightly sick. Unless she’d told him to flirt with me in order to keep me out of the way. Would she have revealed her intentions to her brother? Suddenly I remembered her voice in the fog, exhorting an unseen man to do his part. I stuffed the letter deeper into the pocket of my jacket.
“I did get a postcard from my sister in college.”
“Where is she?” Jennifer asked.
“St. Louis. She’s pre-med, so the classes are hard, but she’s loving it.”
“Pre-med? That’s impressive.” Nothing in Jennifer’s tone indicated that she was impressed. “But medical school is very expensive.”
Nathaniel saluted with a coffee cup and slipped from the room. He hadn’t spoken a word since I’d interrupted the argument.
I focused on Jennifer. “We’re hoping for a scholarship. But every penny I can earn helps, so you don’t need to worry about what we talked about this morning—no foolish ideas will derail me from getting a good reference so I can go on to another job after this one. I know you understand the importance of family. Wherever she’s accepted, I’ll want to move to be near her. After this job ends, of course.”
An out-and-out lie, as I had no intention of leaving Hartford, where I had job security, to hover over my grown sister like a prying nanny, but with any luck it would reassure Jennifer. I needed her to back off. I might have to give up hope of ever having her help with Liza and whatever clung to her, but I could not afford to fight her interference at the same time as I found an unseen force.
“I totally agree.” She dropped into a seat and took a sip of the coffee in her hand. “You’re a smart woman, Molly.”
Yeah. Smart and more than a little crazy.
“My brother was quite taken with you, I think.”
“He’s very sweet. But as I said, I’m focused on Ali’s education.”
She nodded. “Like I said, smart. Well, he can wait. He’s good at that. You have to be to make it through law school and then all the years of being a peon at a big firm. Don’t count him out too soon.”
Now that I recognized her motives, my own path became clear. I could not control my emotions, but I could let Jennifer believe her plots were succeeding.
“I won’t,” I promised.
Chapter 16
I managed less than ten minutes alone in the kitchen after Jennifer left. It was barely enough time to shed my outerwear, suck down a cup of coffee with heavy cream, and devour a couple of pieces of toast slathered with jam. As I finished my hasty meal, Liza joined me.
“Shall I make you some breakfast?” She was too thin. When I’d arrived, her slight appearance had seemed part and parcel of her psychological damage. A child who did not speak could hardly be expected to eat properly, after all. Now, it seemed more threatening. I could almost believe the otherworldly force was depleting her from the inside, hoping to bring her across by simple attrition.
She pulled a tea bag out of the tin on the counter, set a the kettle on to boil, then popped open the pantry door and stared in. After a moment, she turned her head slightly, acknowledging me with the barest of glances. “Daddy wants to see you.”
Of course he did. I would want to see me, too. But why hadn’t he come himself?
“He’s in the shed.” Her voice was still a raspy whisper.
“Is your throat sore?”
She shook her head. “Just hard to talk.”
“It may be swollen or get tired easily since you haven’t used it for so long. Try cold drinks if the hot ones don’t help.”
I poured more coffee into my mug and wished Nathaniel had chosen to meet in the house, rather than have me slog back out through the snow. But he had likely caught on to Jennifer’s ambitions long before I had and was trying to avoid making her jealous. How did he feel about her? My mind shied away from the idea of the two of them together.
“Where’s your cousin?”
“With aunt Jenn.” Liza carried a box of cereal to the table and I caught a private, wicked smile flickering over her lips before she took a deep breath and spoke in a rush. “I mentioned the pattern books to aunt Jenn and told her to pick out what she wanted me to make for her. I think she’s trying to limit the damage.”
I remembered Jennifer’s pleasure in inflicting a first-timer’s project on her brother and tried not to laugh.
“You’re a terrible child.” I winked at her.
She preened slightly, finally facing me full-on, and I laughed outright.
“All right. You keep them busy. I’ll be back soon.”
The shed sat slightly behind and to the right of the garage. Unlike the driveway, which Nathaniel had plowed, the path leading from the garage to the shed had been shoveled out by hand. The icy walls had collapsed in several places overnight and I slipped as I crunched through the clots of snow and ice.
The shed itself resembled a miniature barn, the same style as the garage, only smaller. One of the double doors stood open, wedged into the crust of icy snow to prop it back, but I could see no movement in the dark interior. Cautiously, I stepped inside.
“Nathaniel?”
“Back here.” A disembodied voice floated toward me from behind a rack of gardening and woodworking tools. I wove my way past a substantial riding lawnmower, a rack of paint cans and brushes, and an industrial shelving unit holding window air-conditioning units. With each step farther inside the shed, the air became dustier and more chemical. By the time I reached Nathaniel, who had wedged himself behind another set of shelves and was trying to pry loose a red plastic toboggan, my nose was running and my throat tickled.
“What’s up?” I sneezed. “It can’t be healthy in here.”
“Yeah, I know. I plan to clean it out in the spring. Some of this stuff has been here since I took it over from my folks. We hardly ever come in here, so cleaning it out always falls down to the bottom of the to-do list.“ He handed me the sled. “Put this out there somewhere, will you? I have to get the other one.”
“What did you want to talk about?”
He stopped his rummaging. “I should think that would be obvious. We need a plan.”
I blinked. “Are you...a plan for what, exactly?”
“I’m not willing to say that any supernatural force is out to harm my daughter, if that’s what you’re asking. But she believes it is, which is the important thing. I have come around to that. The psychiatrists she saw all told me not to enable her, not to indulge her fantasies. As a result, she stopped talking to me. I like to think I learn from my mistakes, so I mean to go on as if there really were an evil in the house, a curse on me and mine. And I need to fight it. I need Liza to see me fighting it.”
“Okay.”
“The thing is, I have no idea how to vanquish a ghostly foe.” He yanked on a piece of plastic and a pile of assorted junk tumbled down as the second sled came loose. “I’m accustomed to more mundane evils. The contractor who doesn’t finish his work. The extortionist banker. Which is, by the way, why I checked where the ladder usually sits. The dust is disturbed, but anyone could have done that. The saws are all still here. Still in their correct places. Even if we fingerprinted them all, the chances of finding anything out of place are minimal. And I am not willing to have the cops out here to upset the girls on that kind of chance. Besides, proving that a human is out to get me won’t convince Liza that a ghost isn’t also on the scene. So tell me, what’s your recommendation?”
”Ghosts aren’t part of my everyday life,
either.”
He sidled out from behind the pile and gazed intently at me. “I need to apologize to you. I never should have said what I did about your family.”
“It’s okay.”
“No. No it really isn’t. But I can’t fix it, so all I can do at this point is promise to try to do better.” He blew out a breath. “I’ll likely upset you again. I still can’t believe this ghost story is real. But if you’d asked me a week ago whether such bigoted words would ever come out of my mouth, I’d have said not a chance.”
He touched my cheek with one long finger and I felt the shock of it right through the numbing cold of the shed. “It’s important to me that you understand that.”
I nodded, my throat dry.
He drew slightly away and blew out a breath. “You mentioned ‘carnival queens’ as fakers. Are there...what would you call them...fortune tellers, seers, mediums...who aren’t fakers?”
It cost him, that question, so I considered it carefully. I thought of the woman in the park, the whiteness of her skin and roundness of her eyes as the customer had touched the board, the fear that oozed from her pores despite the bright sun, and my mother’s orders never to pull aside the veil. Had she been a carnival queen? Had that been an act? I doubted it. The fear in her eyes had been too real.
“Maybe,” I said at last. “I’ve never tried to find out. But logically, if ghosts exists, surely so do people who can contact them.”
“Then that’s today’s project. To find one.”
“How?”
“It’s going to snow again soon. We’ll be cut off. I’ll propose a trip to town for supplies. You say you’ll stay home. I’ll figure out how to ditch Jenn and come back for you, and we can go meet a couple of local…practitioners. One thing about Maine—if you’re looking for something strange, you’ll find it here.”
I doubted Jennifer would allow herself to be ditched so easily, but that was Nathaniel’s problem. Mine was facing up to the fear of what might happen if we managed to find a true sensitive.
Nathaniel handled Jennifer masterfully. He mentioned the snow forecasted for Tuesday and said they ought to lay in supplies. He asked the girls whether they had everything they needed and then tossed off a question to Jennifer about whether she needed to cancel any appointments for the following week, “you know, for the hairdresser or anything.”
“Do I need it?” She touched her perfect, shiny locks.
“Oh, not at all. But I know you like to go occasionally, to get it—well, whatever you do to make it look so nice—or to have a massage or spa day instead of spending all your time cooped up here.”
“Mom, let’s have a girls’ day out,” said Hailey. “We can go to the spa.”
“You should all go,” said Nathaniel. “I can do the shopping.”
Liza shook her head, that familiar stubborn frown settling over her features. “I’d rather go sledding. I don’t want to go a spa.”
“I’ll tell you what,” I offered. “Why don’t I take Liza sledding, Jennifer and Hailey can spend the day at the spa, and you can run your errands without any of us?”
Nathaniel shrugged. “Works for me. Jenn?”
She considered for a long moment. I almost held my breath, afraid she suspected the conspiracy, but then she nodded. “Let me call and see if they have appointments.”
Half an hour later they were on their way. Liza and I watched the Range Rover pull away, and I offered to take her sledding.
“It will be at least an hour before he can drop them and get back here.”
She shook her head. “I don’t really want to. What did you guys talk about in the shed? He didn’t have time to tell me, just warned me to complain and say I didn’t want to go into town.”
I explained that he was hoping to find a medium in town and her eyes widened. “He believes me?”
I couldn’t lie. “Not entirely. But more than he did. He’s opening his mind to it.”
“A medium.” She hummed in the back of her throat. “So even though you said it’s not my mom, you think it’s a ghost.”
“Maybe. And maybe medium is the wrong word. A sensitive. Someone who knows more about this type of thing of than any of us do.”
Her forehead wrinkled and she glanced over my shoulder. A chill went over me. What did she see? Was the thing standing there, invisible to me, speaking words only she could hear? She blinked several times and narrowed her eyes before refocusing on my face.
“Won’t she have to come here? “
“They can’t visit the house. How on earth would we explain it to your aunt? We’ll have to hope for the best.”
She glanced over my shoulder again then shook her head. Was she talking to it, or had it left, secure because we were not bringing anyone into its domain? I brushed off the question at Liza’s next words.
“What about the book? We should read until Dad gets home.”
I’d hoped she would forget about the bloody book once she could communicate with us, but Lady Luck had never been a frequent visitor in my life. “You’re sure you wouldn’t rather go sledding?”
Her mouth set in its stubborn line and I gave in. I brought the book and my notebook down to the kitchen, but instead of continuing from where we’d left off, I suggested going back to the passage about how to tell a true sensitive from a carnival queen. I copied the questions the author suggested asking into my notebook, taking my time in order to minimize the amount we could read before Nathaniel’s return.
Still, my stalling was no match for Liza’s determination. After the Ouija chapter came a section on automatic writing and one on mirror scrying.
“But all these things say you have to know who you’re trying to contact in order to talk to them, and we don’t. And the mirror trick—she says you can see them, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. I mean, it’s no good if you can’t actually have a conversation.”
“Why do you want to talk to a ghost?” And hadn’t she been talking to it? But no she’d said it spoke to her, not that they conversed. And I had never seen any indication that she could initiate contact.
She frowned, and the wings of her eyebrows met over her nose. Not for the first time, I thought life might have been kinder had she slightly less of her father. What looked strong on him seemed dark and sullen on her.
“How can I help her if I don’t talk to her?”
Help? Her? But something else occurred to me with Liza’s words. “Liza, why did you decide to start speaking again?”
She turned that dark, thin face up to me and blinked. “Because you saw her. And didn’t care if anyone knew.”
Hysteria bubbled near the surface. Oh, how utterly wrong she was. I had no desire at all for anyone to know what I’d seen. In fact, I’d have hidden it if I possibly could. But now that the truth was out, I could not regret it. So I smiled.
“Why do you want to help the spirit?”
“Because she needs something. Can’t you feel that when she visits you?”
It felt more like a craving to me, like an addiction completely out of control. But I supposed that was need of a kind.
“And what will happen if you help her get what she needs?”
She ducked her head and shrugged, suddenly uncertain. “I…are you sure she’s not my mom?”
“Sure? Like one hundred percent? No. But pretty sure, yes.”
“I always thought she was. And wouldn’t you want to help your mom if she came to you? Even now?”
“Of course. But we have to be careful. Will you promise me not to try to contact—whatever this is—without me or your father?”
She rolled her eyes in an expression so typically teenaged that it lightened my heart. “He already made me promise that.”
We drove into town and had lunch at the same pizza place we’d eaten at with Matt. The casual flirtation and laughter of that night seemed a hundred years past.
“We need a plan of attack,” Nathaniel said around a mouthful of cheesy dough. He’d brou
ght up a list of five psychic businesses around town. Two we discounted right away because they leaned too heavily on New Age mysticism and Celtic mythology. The other three he called. All were by appointment only, but all three had openings and he set us up for appointments at every hour starting at one.
The first meeting was with a man, a Dr. Tom Davidson. “Wonder what his doctorate is in,” Nathaniel muttered as we approached the brick storefront with its black wooden door and single window draped in heavy burgundy velvet.
“Shut it,” I said and immediately regretted it. What viper had taken over my mind, shutting down the logical woman who kept such comments to herself?
But he just chuckled and rang the bell.
Davidson was a short, chubby man, with little round glasses tinted a dark gray and a bald spot that gave him the appearance of a tonsured monk. He hardly looked the part of a carnival queen.
“Now,” he said when he’d seated us at a small round table in his parlor, settling Liza between me and Nathaniel, “what can I do for you?”
“Shouldn’t you know that?” Nathaniel raised an eyebrow and the desire to slug him, hard, had me clenching a fist.
Davidson took no offense, however. “A skeptic,” he said, delighted. He removed his glasses to reveal nearly colorless eyes. I’d never seen their like and goosebumps rose on my skin. Contact lenses. Had to be. But I could see no lines, no matter how hard I studied them.
“I do prefer to work with at least one skeptic. It keeps me sharp. But usually, skeptics don’t bring their children. Only true believers do that.”
Those strange eyes moved between the three of us, resting for a long time on Liza. I squirmed, but she did not react in any way.
“How interesting.” He blinked twice, as if clearing grit from his vision. “You’ve tried a psychiatrist, then?”
I jerked. He smiled.
“Oh, no. That’s not psychic, I’m afraid. That’s simple body reading. The child belongs to you,” he told Nathaniel. “Though she looks enough like this lovely lady to be her daughter. You would have taken her to a psychiatrist for whatever problem she has long before you allowed anyone—even your...girlfriend? No, that’s not right, but someone you care very much for—well, you wouldn’t allow anyone to bring your daughter to me unless all else failed.”
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