by Devon Glenn
Dar’s eyes widened. “You know I can’t wear that!” How could she defend herself against a murderers’ row of skeptics—in matters both paranormal and paramour—while wearing a big crimson bull’s eye?
Lottie didn’t respond. She calmly held Dar’s chin in one hand, and with the other, she painted Dar’s lips the color of roses. “There,” she said. “Now they won’t be able to resist you.”
“What if I want them to?” Dar’s resolve wavered back and forth like a buoy in the chop. She loved hosting her séances, but she wanted the crowds to come of their own volition, with good energy and intent.
“Just give me the signal,” Lottie said, tapping the side of her nose. “I’ll sneak out of the room, stand in the hallway, and moan like a ghost. When they start pounding at the door in sheer fright, I’ll throw a sheet over my head and chase them all the way back to the hotel.”
“Thank you. And if Stewart falls through the ceiling again when they get there,” Dar added, “please tell him to make sure my suitors never recover.”
Lottie’s laughter erupted into full-blown cackling, making Dar forget for a moment that she was ever publicly called a fraud.
“But really,” Lottie said, “how are you going to handle a room full of doubters?”
“Not everyone believes in ghosts,” Dar replied, “but everyone believes in death. I’ll win over the group by the end of the night.”
Dar’s housekeeper, Mrs. Fields, had known about tonight’s removal of the tablecloth and polished accordingly. Dar ran her finger along the length of the table, inspecting for dust and finding none. She settled into her chair and drew in one long, slow sip of air to settle her nerves. She then held her breath with her tongue pressed against her front teeth to slow her heartbeat.
After a few seconds Dar exhaled, feeling her corset loosen its grip on her rib cage as her shadow slowly climbed the floral wallpaper, the velvet curtains, and the crown molding in time with the setting sun.
Lottie had busied herself—specifically her hands—by making shadow puppets. She pecked at Dar’s shadow with what appeared to be a crow.
Eventually, Dar pulled back the curtains to peer at the lawn below. The tableau of guests lining the lamp-lit street would have made a fine gift shop postcard. Despite her mother’s promises that this evening’s guest list would be a who’s who of single men who were not easily spooked, the ratio of women to men was suspiciously balanced—and most of the women in floral hats were walking arm in arm with their husbands.
Lottie leaned forward in her seat to get a better view. She tapped her finger on the window at a tiny woman in black, marching toward the house clutching the arm of what Lottie took to be her adult son. “I think I’ve found your future husband!” she exclaimed.
Lottie couldn’t be serious. The man had the longest, curliest mustache Dar had ever seen. Dar shuddered, imagining those hairy tentacles wrapping around her throat like a noose or, worse, tickling her upper lip when they kissed. “I hope the room is big enough for the two of them,” she said. “That man’s mustache might need its own chair.”
“His mother looks like she’s here for an exorcism,” added Lottie. The cross the woman wore around her neck was nearly large enough to stage an actual crucifixion. Dar took it as a sure sign that the woman believed in ghosts. (Holy ones, at least.)
“Who do you think—” A rap at the door cut Dar short. It meant that the first guests had ascended the stairs. She cleared her throat. “You may enter.”
Lottie leaped from her chair to greet the couple at the door. They must have already been waiting in the parlor. “Dar, you remember my brother-in-law, Carl, and his wife, Clara,” Lottie prodded.
“Of course,” Dar said quickly. According to Lottie, Robert had quarreled with his father shortly before his death. As a result, Carl, his older brother, had walked away with all their father’s assets. When people remarked that Robert must have married Lottie for her stunning beauty, they were being polite. Robert became a self-made man thanks in no small part to Lottie’s own sizeable inheritance. Lottie had openly loathed Carl for years until he married Clara and made Lottie an aunt, at which point she willingly traded polite smiles for baby kisses. The baby, now a pretty thirteen-year-old girl, was off with her gaggle of friends, which left Lottie to entertain the girl’s less amusing parents. But that was ages ago. By now they would surely be pleasant guests.
“I’m not here for the séance,” Carl announced. “I’ll just watch.”
Or not. Dar fought the urge to show Carl the exit: out the window and straight into the rose bushes. If you fall into the sea, you’ve gone too far.
Her neighbor Mr. Worthington was also having difficulty getting into the spirit of the evening, but for different reasons. Dar saw him jump when he noticed the candles and the Ouija board, sending his glasses tumbling off the bridge of his nose and swinging from the chain around his neck. She mentally put Mr. Worthington on her “do not conjure” list.
The tiny séance room swelled with first-time guests. It seemed that many of the women who had ignored Dar’s séances several summers in a row were suddenly very interested in spirits. So much for my mother’s matchmaking scheme, Dar thought as she watched more and more women fill the empty chairs along the walls. The room had nearly reached capacity, and the glass bowl that Dar had set on the table to collect her fee was now overflowing with coins and bills. As she turned to greet another guest, she hit the side of the table with her enormous skirt, sending the bowl tumbling to the floor, where it rolled on its side and spit out its contents. She cursed under her breath. By charging a fee, she had been accused of “lifting pennies from the eyes of the dead,” but without it, her most grief-stricken clients would never leave her séance room. Uncomfortable with such a vulgar display of her profits, she hurriedly scooped up the money with her hands and stuffed it back into the bowl. She glanced around for somewhere to put it when Lottie snatched it from her hand and carried it away.
“We’re still waiting on one person,” Lottie called hopefully over her shoulder.
“Who?” Dar replied as Lottie handed the bowl to Mrs. Fields.
Lottie brightened. “Our newest guest is visiting from India,” she said. “His—”
“Mr. Kajaria,” Carl said, cutting her off. “Rahul Kajaria. He’s one of three—soon to be two—investors in a jute mill in Calcutta. I’m unloading my share. He came to sign the paperwork. The front desk said he was headed here. He’s late.”
If Carl Digges could end a business partnership as quickly as he fired off sentences, Mr. Kajaria would be halfway to India by now. But Dar could tell by the rustling of taffeta and the sudden whir of ladies’ fans that her mystery guest had something more to offer than just a signature.
“I invited him,” Lottie whispered as the door squeaked open once more.
CHAPTER 2
A Ouija board and
a wedding veil
Rahul entered the room cheerfully and without fanfare, dropping his briefcase into Mrs. Fields’s waiting arms. His dark complexion confirmed that he was, in fact, a native of India and not an Englishman living abroad, but he was dressed in a three-piece suit and tie to match his English American partner. He glanced at Carl Digges and, seeing that the chairs on either side of him were occupied, took the only seat left—next to Dar’s mother.
“I tried my best, but it seems that your séances appeal solely to women and their dragged-along husbands,” Virginia was saying, leaning toward her daughter and lowering her voice so only Dar could hear. “If you want to be married, you’ll have to find a new hobby.”
When Rahul took the seat next to hers, Virginia quickly composed herself and pinched a smile.
Rahul smiled back, and so warmly that Virginia had to spread her fan to cool herself.
“Welcome, Mr. Kajaria,” Dar said, and when he turned his face to look at her, it was as if he were lifting a la
mp to light her path. “Shall we begin?”
Rahul leaned forward at the mention of his name. Dar was unaware that her beauty fell across the room like a shadow when she spoke. She took it as a reprimand for her diction when he said, “You may call me Rahul.”
The other guests regarded Rahul with great interest, especially the women. Dar noticed the way they smoothed their dresses and worried their curls, while the men shifted in their seats to improve their posture to his.
The men in the room, she suspected, knew better than to leave their wives alone with the object of their fascination, so there they were, twirling their mustaches and bracing themselves for a night of fainting spells and unbridled emotion.
Dar drew a large breath and recited the introductory speech she had prepared for the evening: “We are gathered tonight to honor our loved ones in the afterlife, to commune with the former residents of Cape May, and to use the lessons from the past to inform the future.”
Dar thought she heard a snort coming from the other side of the room. She straightened her shoulders and continued. She focused her energy on her safest target: Mrs. Crowe. She was not so old that she was near death herself, but she was old enough to have lost a grandparent or two from natural causes.
“I’m sensing a soul that would like to come through,” Dar said, turning her face toward the far corner of the room. “It’s coming from this direction.”
The others turned their heads toward Mrs. Crowe, while Dar waited for a spirit to appear. Dar was stumped. While she could plainly hear the rustling of a dress and feel an electric charge against her skin, she couldn’t see a body.
Dar was moving her head back and forth, looking for the spirit, when Rahul cleared his throat. “Maybe the entity is closer to the floor,” he suggested.
Dar leaned over to one side and peered under Mrs. Crowe’s chair. She was startled to see a tiny girl, no more than four or five years old, lying face-up on the Oriental rug while moving her arms and legs up and down. Her spirit sparkled and faded like sunlight dancing on freshly fallen snow.
“There’s a little girl here!” Dar exclaimed. Her heart ached for Mrs. Crowe, whose eyes were already shimmering at the mention of the child.
“What is she doing?” Mrs. Crowe asked.
“She’s making snow angels,” Dar said. “Who are you, sweetheart?” she said to the girl.
“Victoria,” the girl replied without stopping.
As Dar revealed the identity of her little visitor, Mrs. Crowe pulled a handkerchief out of her dress pocket and sobbed. “My granddaughter,” she explained through her tears. “I was supposed to be watching her while her parents were ill this winter. While I was pouring a hot bath for her, she wandered outside into the snow and got lost. Her tiny feet broke through a thin patch of ice on a stream. The water wasn’t deep, but it was cold. We didn’t find her until the next morning, huddled against the rocks, frozen to death.”
Clara gasped, and Carl patted her shoulder. Dar wanted to kick herself for starting out the night with a dead child. Those who weren’t convinced of her talents yet would think she was playing to the vulnerabilities of grieving parents—and charging them handsomely for it.
But she couldn’t dwell on that point for too long. Dar knew the little girl had come for a very important reason. The medium brightened as Victoria toddled over to her chair and whispered in her ear with cold lips.
“Victoria says she brought you here this summer because it’s warm,” Dar told Mrs. Crowe. “She is sorry that she disobeyed you that night. And she promises you will see her again in the afterlife when you and her parents are ready to join her.”
Victoria smiled and took off her gloves, wiggling a pair of rosy, dimpled hands. Dar continued. “She’s showing me her hands right now. She doesn’t need gloves.”
Mrs. Crowe smiled through her tears. “Her little body was frostbitten when we found it,” she said quietly. “Does this mean that she looks the way she used to?”
Dar was grateful for a question about the spirit world that had a happy answer. “Most spirits, once they’ve crossed over to a higher realm, appear to be in good health,” she explained. “Older people will even show up as younger versions of themselves.”
She could feel young Victoria fading away, so she reached out for one last tidbit for Mrs. Crowe. The little girl stretched out her hand and grabbed the hand of a second shape that flickered into view.
Dar smiled knowingly. “I think your husband comes to visit her here as well,” she said. “Was he handsome in his youth?”
“Very!” Mrs. Crowe laughed. “Tell him I miss him, won’t you?”
The deceased Mr. Crowe, who appeared to be no older than thirty, reached into a pocket and pulled out a watch on a gold chain. Inside was a picture of him and Mrs. Crowe on their wedding day. Her dainty lips were closed in a serious expression, but her long lashes were cast down demurely, as if she couldn’t bear to share her happiness with the camera. Dar felt a twinge of longing, wondering if she would be wearing such a blissful expression once her mother had wrangled her beneath a wedding veil.
“He knows,” Dar said. “But you’ll be together again someday, and he says you have many years ahead of you that will be happier than this one was.”
With that, the two spirits faded. Mrs. Crowe’s story had been a sad one, but Dar could tell from the fans and handkerchiefs that had come out to tend to sympathetic tears that she had already won over the other women. Her guests were in for the night.
The next step was to win over the men that her mother had invited. There was nothing Dar loved more than a good challenge from a skeptical party guest. She looked at Mr. Mustache in the corner—he who had snorted.
“You, sir,” she said. “What is your name?”
“Shouldn’t you know that already if you’re psychic?”
Dar sighed. “I’m clairvoyant,” she said, “not omniscient. If I learn anything about you, it will be from someone on the Other Side.”
The woman sitting next to the man slapped his arm with her fan. “My son’s name is Horace,” she said. “And I’m Elva.”
Virginia stiffened from across the room. “Senator Horace Burns and his mother, Mrs. Elva Burns,” she hissed, adding under her breath, “You should know that already.”
The next thing Dar heard was a rap at the window. With all eyes searching for the source of the noise, she walked across the room, looked down at the yard, and saw what appeared to be a pirate in full sailor regalia, carrying a sack of gold doubloons.
“Well, come inside already,” she said. “Senator Burns is waiting for a haunting.”
“Who is outside?” Horace asked her. “My dead dog, I suppose?”
“No,” Dar said. “A pirate. He says he’s your great uncle Finn.”
Horace’s eyes lit up at the mention of Finn, but he cleared his throat and mustered a scowl. “You could have looked up my family history in the library before you got here,” he said. “I’m descended from a long line of pirates.”
Finn, who had scaled the garden hedge and climbed in through the window, let out a hearty laugh and leaned in to Dar while she closed the window behind him.
“He says you’re in the family business,” Dar said with a smile. “You’re still hiding your doubloons overseas, just like he used to do.”
Horace turned white. “I’m an investor in foreign markets, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, that’s not what I mean at all,” Dar said. “He says it’s your booty, or your profits, that are hidden offshore.”
Horace looked at Dar like his dead dog had, in fact, come back from the grave—to give him financial advice. His eyes widened, and his nostrils flared in a silent warning to his hostess.
But Dar’s attention had moved to the other side of the room, where Virginia was rustling in her chair, ready to snuff the candle on the whole evening. Th
ough Dar wasn’t capable of invading the private thoughts of others, she hadn’t been entirely honest with Horace: when people called on higher powers for help, those thoughts became public to higher beings and ghosts in the astral plane. And irresistible to mediums like Dar.
The nerve of my daughter to talk back to Senator Burns came Virginia’s thoughts. Dear Lord, who will marry her with a mouth like that?
I think her mouth is lovely, a male voice cut in, as if from a telephone pressed to Dar’s ear. Especially her lips. The voice was low and slow, and dripping all over her—it was Rahul’s.
Dar’s stomach flipped. How could he have heard her mother’s thoughts? And how had Dar received his silent reply? She scanned the room for Rahul’s face. When their gazes met, the moment suspended in amber. Or was it a trick of the candlelight that his eyes shone a warm shade of gold? Rahul looked surprised but not displeased as she finally smiled, cheeks burning in the heat of his gaze. If he liked her mouth so, she would put it on fine display talking back to Senator Burns.
“While I’m certainly not one to give financial advice at parties,” Dar continued to Senator Burns, “Finn says that you are not the only person who can use a map to find his treasure. But it’s best to leave it buried until it is forgotten.”
The most complicated part of Dar’s profession was deciphering the images that the dead sometimes used in lieu of words. In this case, Finn was hunched over a map, looking behind him as if troubled by someone reading over his shoulder.
Senator Burns stiffened at the continued mention of his so-called treasure, his expression growing ever darker.
Sensing tension in the room, Dar silently pleaded for Finn to change the subject. The pirate glanced around the room for inspiration, pausing when he saw what was on the table. “Finn would like to use the Ouija board to prove to Senator Burns that he is really here,” said Dar.