She turned back to me. “You went up there, didn’t you? To my rooms. You saw what I did.”
“Yeah.” I shifted uneasily, self-consciously putting a hand on my stomach. “Why didn’t it work?”
“Balance shifted,” she shrugged. “I’m an old woman; I can only do so much.”
“What are you talking about?” Max’s words were tired. “Emily wasn’t even in the house when this shit went down, and Claire’s brand new to the place. If the balance shifted in any direction, you’d think it’d be in our favor.”
“Mmph. You get the books?”
She was staring at me still, and I shook my head. “There are books?”
“Should be. Little smoke won’t worry them anyhow. You should use ’em, if you can. If it doesn’t hurt.”
I thought about my hands, the sweet smell of her clothing even through the smoke. Holy oil, I was willing to bet now. Props.
But props served a purpose. “Do you know anything from back when everything first happened that could help? Anything at all?”
She twitched a hand on her coverlet, the spotted, gnarled fingers looking newly frail beneath the snaking tubes and harsh white tape. “It was a long time ago.”
“Grandma,” Max pushed.
“Give me a minute.” She smoothed the coverlet out, her gaze shifting to the window but not really seeing out of it. “A long time ago, like I said. Longer’n what it even seemed, since we were out in the country. The pace of the city didn’t hit us so hard, notreally. It was a place to kind of store up rest so you could go out and work some more.”
Max had drifted back to me during her ramble, and I was glad I was sitting down. Grandma Kate smiled softly, but there was no joy in it. “Emily, when she came down from the city that summer, she was so tired. Such a pretty thing, but you could tell in her skin, her hair, that she was running herself too thin. Those first few days, she slept round the clock, then she was like a flower opening up in front of us. She was a sweet girl.”
I tried to reconcile that image of Emily with what I’d seen over the past few weeks. Laughing and bold, brazen and cunning. Hard. That was the picture I mostly had of her. Emily was a tight and bitter woman, not a girl at all. Certainly not a sweet one.
“Were you in the house when Carol Ann cursed her?”
“What?” Beside me, Max shifted so far back in his chair that he knocked against the wall, while Claire gasped from her perch by the door. “What the hell does that mean?”
But Grandma Kate merely sighed and fixed her gaze on me. “I was there. We all were there, really, which was part of the problem. Carol Ann was more gifted than she knew. More troubled too. But I couldn’t see that back then.”
“She didn’t like Emily.”
“Oh, she didn’t mind the Emily that came to us at the start of the summer. The broken bird Emily, who’d just come off a bad run of auditions in L.A. and was too ashamed to go back up to the city and face her friends. She liked that Emily. She was quiet and a little sad. Pretty, but in a beaten-down way.” She waved a thin-boned hand. “But that Emily didn’t last.”
“Why the occult, though?” I pressed. “Why did she choose that way to find an answer?”
“Why do kids do anything? She read about it, heard about it. Occult was in the movies. Joe might have even said something, I don’t know.”
I nodded. “And that night? What do you remember?”
“I remember that when she started playing her little game with that nasty board, there were five of us in the house. But by the time she stopped, there were easily a dozen more.” Grandma Kate fixed her gaze on me. “And they never left.”
We expectedto return to find a quiet house, but we were wrong. Sam and Max’s parents had returned, and the Bells were there as well, along with a horse trailer large enough to contain the entire Kentucky Derby.
“More horses!” Claire practically bounced in her seat, laughing self-consciously when I glanced back at her. Max smiled beside me. A nice smile, open and hopeful. Something in my face made Claire’s joy ebb off a bit. “What? I think they’re good luck.” She turned to Steve. “Don’t you think so?”
He nodded in agreement, even gave her a smile, and I turned back forward, feeling happier than I trusted myself to feel. Was I happy that Steve was making a new friend? Or just glad that he wasn’t focused on me…and shouldn’t that make me sad? Or angry? Or…something? I batted away these pointless thoughts, impatient and irritated with myself. I needed to focus.
We left Steve and Claire at the barn and walked toward the house, Max watching the paddock the whole way. Now there were a half-dozen horses back there, and Mr. Graham stood against the fence, his hands gripping the top crossbar like he needed it for support. “This was your idea, wasn’t it?”
Max shrugged. “I figured if they were already old and infirm, they would soothe him. Dad, I mean.”
He left unspoken the end of that thought. That if his father had taken another gun out to the paddock, at least the horses were at the end of their lives, unwanted by anyone else.
I patted his hand. “You’re good people, Max. I don’t care what they say about you.”
