“But we’re family,” Eustace countered.
“Are we? You heard Mr. Togers—leaving the estate is like leaving the family. Our mother obviously left some bad blood behind when she moved away, and now we’re paying for it.”
Eustace’s gaze lingered on the fox, her fur clean and bright at this point. “What about Mom? Aunt Augusta? Did Morna do that too?”
Cordelia sighed. “I don’t know. I just know that what we read and what we saw sound too close to overlook.”
Eustace shook her head, curls sprawling. “I think it’s our blood. That’s what someone is hunting. Just like the wall in the basement—our line. The fox wasn’t the message, or the papers. The blood was.”
“Why? What’s the connection besides our genetics?”
“The power,” Eustace rounded on her. “Themagic.The way I’ve gone from skin-and-bones cancer patient to glowing portrait of health overnight. And you—the dreams and the ghosts and whatever that was with the door and the rain. It’s what we all have in common. How can you keep denying it?”
Cordelia grimaced. “I’m not denying it. It’s just… it’s different for me, Eustace,” she said softly. “Don’t you see that? You’resome kind of channel for life, beautiful to behold. It’s not like that for me.” Eustace was thriving while Cordelia was drowning. Everything she touched shattered. “I don’t have control over it like you do, and it’s destructive,dangerous.Mom knew that. It’s why she taught me the rules. Inside me there is a door, and death waits behind it. Every time it seeps out, something goes wrong. Horribly, awfully wrong.”
“But you saved that man, Cordy—the appraiser. He’s alivebecauseof you,” Eustace argued.
“He was alsoherebecause of me. If I’m not careful, Eustace, people get hurt. Innocent people. The day I saw that woman in the house with the blue shutters was the same day Mom’s boyfriend, Kenny T., put that little boy from down the street in the hospital with his Pontiac Firebird. And look at everything that’s happened with John, and now this.”
“Kenny T. was a drunk and a moron, like most of Mom’s boyfriends, and John is responsible for his own bad behavior. Honey, you’re taking way too much credit for other people’s bullshit and a whole lotta coincidence. You had nothing to do with that accident, and you’re not to blame for your husband’s criminally poor decisions. You were a child who experienced multiple traumas in one day, and your mind has drawn connections that aren’t there. Now, I’ll admit I don’t know how it all works, what’s going on inside you, but I know you have a gift, sister, and it’s there for you to use it.”
Cordelia dropped her eyes. It wasn’t just the bedlam she saw unfolding all around her. It was also what came after, the inevitable period at the end of the sentence. What would become of her if she broke the rules, if she opened herself and the dead poured through? What hell awaited her then? “What if Mom was right and they can carry me away? What if I lose myself here?”
Eustace wrapped her arms around Cordelia. “That will never happen. I won’t let it.” She released her. “We have to lean in,Cordy, not shrink back. Open up, let go, learn to use what this family has given us to help ourselves. Mom was wrong—running was never the answer. It’s time for us to set things right. And we start by getting to the bottom of it all, dragging their secrets out into the light.”
Her sister didn’t know what she was asking. Every day Cordelia spent at Bone Hill, she felt less grounded. She was spinning out. Unraveling. Thirty-plus years of knots coming undone, like an old knit returned to a skein of yarn. But what would be left? If she gave herself over to this place, this power, who would she be?
She left the solarium, intent on trying to check in with the estate attorney in Hartford, but the clock echoing through the stair hall stopped her dead. It bound her skull like a tourniquet, strangling her brain. She could not endure another stroke.
She stormed into the turret room, grasping the clock in both hands. She wanted nothing more than to dash it against the wall, but Mr. Browning’s crumpled car made her think twice. Clutching it to her chest, she carried it into the stair hall. The distinctscreeof a slowly opening door on the third story sounded down—the first real sound she’d heard from the house all day. Cordelia had not yet been that high. And Bennett Togers said that floor was reserved for servants’ quarters and storage. Which seemed a perfect place to tuck the clock away. She began to climb.
It was laid out much like the second floor—a suite of rooms, smaller and less polished than those below, with a straight hall dividing it in half. She poked her head into one of the rooms. There was no wallpaper or elaborate trim. The furnishings were spare. Smooth, white walls. A narrow iron bed. A thin, worn quilt. Above it, the dusty outline where a small wooden cross had once hung, leftover from a long-gone cook or maid.
She moved down the hall to a door at the far end standing suspiciously open, clock beating in time with her heart. Figuring this door must be the one she heard from downstairs, she foundherself staring into a nursery. A spindly cradle stood empty, a layer of dust over the mattress. A yellow chaise lounge and wood-framed fireplace dotted opposing walls patterned in a small green print. A child’s table and chair sat empty beside a plain chifforobe and a wooden horse.
But it was the woman who stood out—the gauzy, green layers of a chiffon peignoir set and that mane of red, spiraling hair. Her arms were cupped before her, but Cordelia couldn’t see what she was holding. Humming through her smile, she reached an arm into the crib to adjust a blanket that wasn’t there.
It was then Cordelia recognized her. The woman from the photograph. Her grandmother, Violetta. Her other arm was tucked close to her breast as if to hold a child the way Cordelia was cradling the clock, but there was nothing there. Leaning over the crib rail, she deposited her invisible bundle onto the bare, stained mattress, a baby only she could see.
“My littlevolva,” she whispered, the word thick with an accent Cordelia didn’t recognize.
Her mind rankled. She swung the door wide, but as it hit the wall, the red frizzy hair, the mint-green gown, the smile on her grandmother’s face, the sound of her voice—all of it was gone. Cordelia was perfectly alone. She could still smell the powdery scent of violets hanging in the air.
Setting the clock on a table, she sunk onto the chaise lounge and dropped her head in her hands, loosing the emotions she was keeping jarred inside. Fear. Anger. Confusion. Who was she—this woman who ranted about her dreams and shrunk from every shadow and chased every unsettling sound? Certainly not the controlled professional, proud boss, image-conscious sweetheart of the suburbs. This Cordelia imagined ghouls around every turn and refused to leave the house and believed she could command the weather. John wouldn’t even have recognized her. She didn’t recognize herself.
The rolling scrape of the rocking horse sounded against the thin rug. Cordelia wiped her face with both hands, watching the horse make gentle arcs against the floor.
“What do you want?” she demanded. She imagined Morna hanging over the crib like a funeral shroud. “What do you all want from me?”
There was a tinkle of notes as the old mobile over the crib turned slowly, its vintage music box still functional. The tiny sparrows twisted in circles, their painted wings stuck fast to their sides.
She moved toward it, noticing a disturbance in the dust on the mattress, nearly an inch thick in some places. Reaching out, she grabbed the mobile, forcing it to stop. Silence dropped over her. Even the clock had hushed itself. She looked down. There in the dust was spelled out her answer.
Cordelia crushed her knuckles against her mouth to stifle the scream that was building.
REVENGE
Backing away, she nearly toppled head over heels when her foot hit something small and hard on the floor. She picked it up, examined it in her palm. A band of twisted, tarnished silver, large enough to fit her wrist and open on one side, each end hammered flat between three lines, like a duck’s webbed foot. The metal came alive in her hand, glowing faintly beneath dirt and silver sulfide, hissing against her skin. She closed her fingers over it.
