Cordelia narrowed her eyes. “Yes, how could I forget?”
“I want to show you something!” She dragged Cordelia to the kitchen, pulling a stack of ledgers off the counter and pushing them across the table to her, holding one back. “I was waiting until I was certain.”
Cordelia took them carefully, their pages stiff and stinking of mold. “What are these?”
“The ledgers from the study. I’ve been trying to put my finger on where the money came from. Look.” Eustace opened the one she held and spun it around, pointing to an entry that readOct 12, stud fee… $90in a slanting cursive hand. “There arehundreds, maybe thousands, of these listings throughout the earliest ledgers.”
“What’s a stud fee?” Cordelia asked.
“Horse breeding,” Eustace told her. “At this price, it would be the only possibility. Dogs would earn considerably less.”
“We’re horse breeders?” The idea struck her as incongruent. The only time she’d ever even seen a horse was at a birthday party. The other girls had scrabbled to get in line for a short ride, but Cordelia hung back in fear of something so large and misshapen—all that bulk, legs like toothpicks. She didn’t have an equestrian bone in her body.
“I think it was a front. Otherwise, that was one tired horse. I haven’t seen barn one on this property.”
“Like money laundering? What would they need to cover up?”
Eustace sniffed. “Something illegal. I have a theory, but there’s no way to know for sure. Do you remember the wooden shovels we saw in the basement?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
Eustace inhaled deeply. “They were often used in the nineteenth century for, um…”
An acrid twinge, anxious and retreating. Cordelia held her breath.
“Body snatching,” Eustace finished.
Whatever she was expecting, that was not it. A surge of nausea threatened to revive her last meal. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
“The bodies were dug up using wooden shovels because they were quieter and then sold to universities and doctors for study,” Eustace said. “It’s kind of progressive, actually. There were some very backward laws then. Doctors were desperate to know more about human anatomy so they could better treat their patients.Shocking to think we were so primitive only a couple of hundred years ago.”
Cordelia gaped. “That’s the part you find shocking?”
“Don’t overreact,” Eustace told her in a steady voice.
She always hated that big-sister tone Eustace would get whenever she thought Cordelia was being hyperbolic. “You just told me our ancestors dug up corpses and sold them illegally to build our family fortune, and you think I’m overreacting?”
“To supplement it, most likely. The year of the ledger I showed you is 1835. The stud fee entries stop sometime after 1890.” Eustace picked at a half-eaten cookie on a plate. “Of course, I could be wrong. It could have been something more mundane, like gambling. But who’s lucky that often?”
Cordelia was sickened by how calmly her sister was absorbing this. “You saw that photograph of our grandmother same as I did,” she said. “You’ve heard the stories in town. If what you’re saying is true, if they orchestrated an underground body-snatching ring, do you really believe it was all in the name ofscience?”
“What are you suggesting?” Eustace asked.
“What if they were using the bodies in their rituals? Think about all of Mom’s secrecy and rules, forbidding us from doing anything that would instigate our powers, suppressing her own even when we were in dire need. What if they weren’t just stealing corpses, what if they weremakingthem? I’m talking about blood magic.”
Eustace paled.
Cordelia pressed on. “I’ve been doing some research online into ancient cults and magical practices. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think. Blood is considered the elixir of life. And magic always comes at a price. To get something you have to give something. It’s the ultimate trade.”
“But I saved Marvel’s life. You saved that appraiser’s andGordon’s. Look at me, how I’ve healed. How can what we have be bad?”
Cordelia shook her head. “The more pieces we collect, the uglier the picture becomes.”
“Then I have something else to show you,” Eustace said quietly, going back to the solarium and pointing to a pale green fern-like plant under a cassia tree. “Looks like a weed, doesn’t it?”
“I would have thought so.”
“Well, it’s not. It’s chervil—a medicinal and culinary herb.” She pointed to several other weed-like, herbaceous plants. “The solarium is full of plants like this. The garden is too.”
