by Devon Glenn
Elerick looked over at the cashier to see who she was. “Oh hey! I work in the spa. I’m just restocking the massage room,” Elerick lied. He reached up to the top shelf to grab another bottle. “Don’t worry; I’ll update the inventory list after we’re done.”
“Oh, sorry, Elerick,” the cashier said, putting down her weapon. “Thank god. I’m way too lazy to go chasing down shoplifters.”
“We’re almost done here,” Emily assured her.
Sadie watched Elerick stuff his pockets with the tiny bottles. “What are you doing with those?” Sadie asked with a provocative smile. “Tell me you two aren’t turning this place into a brothel.”
Emily opened her mouth to say something when the shop bell jingled and the door swung open.
“Who’s turning this place into a brothel?” Burt said from the doorway. He stiffened when he saw his daughter standing next to Elerick.
Elerick didn’t have to be a father himself to know that Burt did not want to know the answer to that question. Burt wore the expression of a man who had opened the door for the pizza delivery guy, only to discover that it was the repo man. Sadie had turned white; Emily took one look at her niece’s stricken face and burst out laughing.
Elerick, meanwhile, searched for a response that didn’t involve the facts of life.
“Hi, Dad,” Emily said brightly, and Sadie looked appropriately sheepish. “Elerick and I are coming up with new aromatherapy massages for Valentine’s Day. Want to help us pick out the scents?”
Elerick sighed with relief. His bluffing skills were no match for Emily’s. He nodded at Burt, hoping he’d be able to continue the ruse long enough to get far away from the gift shop.
“Well, sure,” Burt agreed. He sounded relieved. “What are my options?”
CHAPTER 32
Rhododendron
“Let’s go to the séance room: I’ll show you.” While Emily led Elerick and Burt up the stairs, Sadie went to Emily’s room to grab the flower book.
Emily wished there were a way to distill and bottle emotions like they were scented oils. Seeing Sadie’s face when she was caught in the act of failing to mind her own business gave Emily the kind of satisfaction that she would like to rub all over her body at least once per week to remember how hilarious it was.
But it would take thrice-daily showers over several lifetimes to scrub off the horror of seeing her father’s face when Sadie accused her of abusing the massage oils.
“Where are you off to?” called a voice from below. Emily turned to see her mother resting against the handrail at the foot of the stairs. The woman never left the house without perfume—she’d be perfect for the task at hand.
“To the séance room,” Emily replied. “Want to come?”
Joan followed the others to the séance room, where Emily pushed the chairs around the table and motioned for everyone to sit down.
Emily lined the oils in a semicircle on the table. One by one, she opened the lids and closed them again without smelling the contents. She was looking for something more visual. Jasmine had no effect, but when she opened a bottle of rose oil, a bouquet of lush roses immediately sprang into view—hers, at least—just as it had on the day that Elerick arrived. She locked eyes with Elerick, who confirmed with a nod that he knew where she was going with this.
Curious about her process, Burt picked up a bottle and started to open it, but Emily snatched it out of his hand, telling him, “Just a minute.”
She continued down the line until every bottle had been opened and sealed tightly, discarding the ones that didn’t bring up the image of a flower. She also set the larkspur to the side, already knowing the effect it would have on her and Elerick. That left Emily with a handful of oils: rose, daffodil, lilac, stargazer lily, hyacinth, and rhododendron—one bottle for each person in the room. “Elerick wants to plan ahead for Valentine’s Day, so he has asked me to help him pick out some fragrances for a couple’s aromatherapy massage,” Emily told the group.
“Yes, absolutely,” Elerick agreed, a little too heartily. Emily nodded for him to continue. “These ones all have the right healing properties, but maybe you can help me decide which ones smell the best.”
“And Sadie has brought a Victorian flower dictionary to look up the meanings,” Emily said, “and make sure that the scents we choose have the right symbolism for a romance package.”
“Ah yes,” Joan said with approval. “That book came from our old attic. We found it with a red rose still pressed inside. Rumor has it that Darthilda Crossing had an affair with a businessman from Kolkata who had stayed at this hotel when it was still called the White Cottage. Apparently, they were about to run away together when the storm hit. Of course, this was back when interracial marriages were still outlawed in some states. Can you believe that it took the Supreme Court until 1967 to finally declare those laws to be unconstitutional?”
Emily looked at her mother in dismay. “You never told me this story.” It certainly explained a lot about the scene she and Elerick had witnessed.
Joan shrugged. “I didn’t think you were old enough to hear it. Now you are.”
“So what happened to them?”
“Darthilda’s body was found washed up on the beach. Most people in town assumed that Rahul was lost at sea, but he wasn’t. As the storm surge carried him away from the beach, he caught the branch of an oak tree in front of Darthilda’s house, crawled in through the window of her bedroom, and waited until the storm subsided. The walls of the house had buckled, crushing Darthilda’s mother on the second floor, but the turret on the third floor remained intact. From there, Rahul climbed out, ran to the train station, and left before the police arrived.”
“How do you know all this?” Elerick asked.
“A few years later, he wrote a letter to the desk clerk at the White Cottage Inn explaining his whole ordeal. He had borrowed a book from the inn’s library and wanted to return it. In the package he sent was the flower dictionary and a poem he found in Darthilda’s room. He asked the desk clerk, Stewart, to keep the items safe—and, oddly enough, that they remain in Cape May. Stewart must have returned them to Darthilda’s house after it was restored and moved to its current location.”
“That’s where I found them when I bought the house,” Burt added.
Emily leaned forward in her seat. “But what happened to Rahul after he returned to India?”
“This is the most surprising part of the story,” Joan said. “He married a girl he had met through a singles ad in the newspaper—I didn’t even know that they had those back then. There was some kind of mix-up, too, where the editor had written to Rahul’s parents to apologize about a misprint. The Kajarias had originally accused the girl’s parents of using her sister’s photo instead of hers, but it was the editor who had submitted the wrong picture, not the parents. Rahul said the girl was pretty enough, anyway—and apparently very sweet. He closed the letter with something like: ‘Although things did not turn out as well as I had hoped, all is well indeed.’”
Emily’s eyes watered at the thought of Rahul and his humiliated newspaper bride—a match made in error. She also thought of Darthilda, who must have known that he had moved on while she could not. She had waited all those years for his return. “That’s the unhappiest ending to a love story I’ve ever heard!”
“Well, yes and no,” Joan countered. “Rahul also said that his family’s jute mill was doing quite well. The Indian nationalists supported local businesses like his to help free India from British rule. He had been in Cape May to sever ties with his American business partner, and he was in a very good position when he returned home with a business that was one hundred–percent Indian owned. The resistance movement couldn’t have been easy for him, but it was ultimately successful. Rahul played an important role in history.”
“Playing ‘an important role in history’ is not exactly living happily eve
r after,” Emily said. “Not if he loved her.” She looked at Elerick, who nodded.
“Emily’s right,” he said. “He had unfinished business.”
“Right you are!” Joan said, clapping her hands. “And speaking of unfinished business, what do you need us to do with these bottles?”
“I need you all to smell the finalists and tell me which one speaks to you and why,” Emily said on Elerick’s behalf. Her instincts told her that Rahul had left the book behind as a tool to help free Darthilda from Cape May. The answers were somewhere inside those bottles.
“Do we all need to agree?” Burt pressed. “How many oils do you need?” He was already overthinking it, and for half a second Emily regretted the decision to invite her parents to this meeting. The truth was that Emily didn’t know how many oils she needed. All she knew was that scents were powerfully connected to memories, and if she was going to interpret Lorelei’s message properly, she needed all the help she could get.
“We’re just brainstorming, Grandpa Burt,” Sadie said, stepping in. “Elerick needs some descriptive words to put in the brochure.”
Joan nodded in understanding. Her work writing press releases for the arts commission had prepared her well for an afternoon of ghost hunting disguised as unscientific market research.
“Everybody, take a bottle. If you like it, keep it. If you don’t, try another one. We can keep going until everybody finds something they like.”
Joan went first, drawing a long breath with her nose pressed against the rim of the lilac oil. She scrunched her nose and put it back in the center. “This smells like something I might have worn in college,” she said dismissively. “It’s too delicate for me now—I need something bolder.”
At the mention of the word college, Emily took the same bottle and gave it a try. “I like this one. It smells hopeful.” She took the flower dictionary from Sadie to find the flower’s meaning. “Offer lilacs to your first love,” she read aloud.
A bouquet of lilacs appeared, and Emily could hear Darthilda echo the words: First love, followed by Rahul: My one and only love.
“That would be great for a couple’s massage,” Elerick said, pulling a small pen and notepad out of his pocket. Emily felt a wave of affection for Elerick, who was so committed to playing along that he was even taking notes.
Joan tapped her bottle triumphantly on the hard wood surface of the table. “This fragrance is much more my style,” she said with satisfaction, passing the bottle back to Emily for her appraisal.
Emily inspected the label—stargazer lily—before taking a whiff. Like it did to Darthilda at the time, the pungent aroma of the flower made her sneeze. For the sake of the others in the room, she flipped to its entry in the dictionary. “Ambition!”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Elerick added, parroting Darthilda’s words. He scribbled another note in his notepad before picking a bottle from the table. He didn’t look at the label before he opened it. He inhaled, nodded, and passed the bottle to Emily. “I like this one. It’s natural without being overpowering.”
“Daffodils are for chivalry,” Emily said, and the others smiled.
No one among them chose the same scent. It was as if Darthilda had planted a garden of memories for someone else in the house to unearth.
Emily was especially puzzled when Sadie chose the hyacinth, summoning stalks of yellow blooms that dipped their heads toward Emily. Sadie was jealous, Emily realized, remembering Rahul’s warning about the flowers. “Envy,” she said gently, hoping that she wouldn’t embarrass Sadie. “What do you have to be jealous about? You’re off to NYU. And you’ve got talent. Remember what Lorelei said?”
Sadie folded her hands in her lap and looked away “I’ve got some talent,” she said. “But your talent is practically a super power. I don’t think there’s anything I could learn in New York that even comes close to being able to see ghosts.”
Elerick watched as Emily got up to give her niece a hug, her face scrunching with the weight of what he knew would be a downpour of tears. “I’ve been so jealous of you getting to go off to school while I have to stay here and live with my parents,” she said through sobs, and it wasn’t long before Sadie was crying, too. Emily looked at Joan and Burt. “Sorry, Mom and Dad.”
“That’s all right; we understand,” Burt said, but his voice sounded sad. Joan laughed.
While the two younger women were busy arguing over who would be more likely to succeed, Elerick repeated Sadie’s words in his head: your talent is practically a super power. He had been thinking that it was Emily’s lack of discernment that made her vulnerable to ghosts. But maybe it wasn’t her weakness that they were responding to. Maybe it was her strength.
“You haven’t picked a fragrance yet, Burt,” Elerick said to keep things moving. He knew he was getting closer to figuring out Lorelei’s clue.
“Finally, someone wants my opinion!” Burt said with glee. He took the last bottle on the table and waved it under his nose several times, but his smile quickly turned to a scowl. “It’s the last one,” he said dejectedly, “and it smells terrible. It’s so cloying.”
“Which one did you get, Burt?”
“Rhododendron.”
Elerick waited with baited breath. For clusters of flowers to appear would be a sure sign that danger would follow, but no petals appeared. He was both relieved and disappointed that this last bottle didn’t hold the answers to Lorelei’s clue. Burt would have to try another scent. Elerick scanned the table for a suitable alternative, but he knew that Emily had already picked all of Darthilda’s flowers from what was there on the table. He checked his pockets one last time to see if he had left any behind. Feeling a cold, hard, bottle-shaped lump in his left pocket, Elerick pulled out a fragrance that he couldn’t believe he had overlooked: orange blossom.
“Try this one,” he said, handing the bottle to Burt. “This one is very special.”
Burt inhaled for several seconds, set down the bottle, and sighed. “I agree. This one is much more refreshing.”
“I was drinking orange blossom tea when we met,” Joan added. “Do you remember that day, Burt?”
“I do. I had just retired from the postal service and turned my home into a bed-and-breakfast. I saw you sitting by yourself in the living room, staring out the window. I asked what you were thinking about. You told me you had just quit your teaching job and were planning your next move.”
“And then you asked me, ‘Where would you like to go? What would you like to do?’” Joan added.
Burt put his arm around Joan. “And you looked around the room, and you said, ‘Here. This.’”
“In the time it took to drink a cup of tea, I had found a new home, a new career, and a new family. Your life can change in an instant. For better or for worse.”
Joan leaned in to Burt. This story had been repeated so many times that it practically had its own choreography, and Emily knew all the steps. “A few months later, they were married on the lawn outside that very window,” she finished for them as they embraced. “And not long after that, I was born.”
“Funny you should say that,” Sadie interjected, turning to the right page in her book. “Queen Victoria wore orange blossoms at her wedding.”
Once again, Elerick waited for the flowers to appear. Nothing had happened when Burt gave his assessment of their scent, but the moment Emily opened her mouth, the tiny white buds formed a crown in her hair and spread down her back, covering the floor like the train on a wedding dress. He gasped at the sight of her, at the beauty of the moment.
Unfortunately, this was the same moment that the rhododendron kicked in, forming an imposing centerpiece for the table that blocked Elerick’s view. His pulse raced as he considered Joan’s remarks about Darthilda’s death. “Where was Darthilda going with this Rahul guy when they ran away?”
“Well, let’s think about this,” said Joan
, who was clearly relishing the role of historian. Now he knew where Sadie had gotten the theater bug. “If they couldn’t get married in Cape May, I suppose he might have tried to take her with him to India. That means they would have likely taken a train to another point along the coast where they could get on a ship.”
“They weren’t just going to his hotel room then, but out of the country?”
“Absolutely,” Joan said flatly. “They had nowhere to hide in Cape May—at that time, there were thousands of tourists in the summer, but there were only about sixty people who lived in town year-round. They would have all known each other. And Darthilda was very close to the innkeeper’s wife, who was a notorious busybody. I read an old gossip column about how the innkeeper wouldn’t even take her with him to Washington, DC, when he ran for office. He was too worried that she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”
Elerick leaned back in his chair. Darthilda had died trying to escape Cape May, but she hadn’t made it to the Other Side. No wonder Rahul had needed to put flowers around the room to protect Darthilda. If this woman had truly been clairvoyant like Emily, she would have known that it would be in her best interest to cross over. Edgar must have been responsible, and he must have had a reason.
Elerick thought about the symbolism of the flowers. A couple of them could explain Edgar’s motive. Stargazer lilies stood for ambition, but Darthilda had said there was nothing wrong with that. Jealousy was as deadly a sin as they come, but Sadie’s flowers hadn’t summoned the rhododendron, the orange blossoms had.
It was the marriage that had set Edgar off. He didn’t want Rahul and Darthilda to be together. Edgar, whoever he was, had wanted Darthilda all to himself.
CHAPTER 33
Second sleep
Emily awoke to the sound of Elerick breathing softly beside her, his firm chest rising and falling beneath the sheets. She was tempted to spend the rest of the morning spooning him, but she feared what she might see if she fell back asleep. She slipped out of bed and moved to her computer. Her stomach dropped when she saw a new message from someone at Orbies. This sender, strangely enough, was from the cruise line where Elerick had spent the last year. Emily read the message.