Eustace shrugged. “Why did Mom do most of the things she did? Like take up with losers who stole our furniture?”
“Oh God,” Cordelia said, recalling. “Remember the one who set fire to the neighbor’s garage?”
“How could I forget?” Eustace snarled. “We were evictedbefore the fire engine pulled away. She didn’t even break up with the bastard.”
“That’s how we ended up at the Veranda house,” Cordelia remembered. “Eventually.”
She didn’t mention the nights in between, tucked under the sprawling branches of a red oak tree, cold and sleepy, until Maggie found a job at a nearby motel and shuffled the girls between vacant rooms for the next three months, her arsonist boyfriend crashing whenever she’d let him. When they moved into the Veranda house, he moved right in with them. But when Maggie left over the roses, he stayed behind. The place was paid up for the month, after all.
Unlike Cordelia, Maggie never mastered exploiting theknack.She had her own uncanny ability to turn up in the right place at the right time, like when she wandered into the motel lobby to inquire about a room just as the previous desk clerk was storming out. The owner took one look at Maggie’s open, pretty face and honest smile and asked if she wanted a job. But she never really worked it to her advantage. She just took it for granted when things fell into her lap. Looking around, Cordelia wondered if her mother had never formulated a plan for her life because before leaving Connecticut, it was unthinkable that she would need one.
“She could never justsettle,” Eustace griped. “Like she was afraid to put roots down anywhere.”
“Even here,” Cordelia whispered. That all this wasn’t enough to hold Maggie Bone still seemed inconceivable. And what did she trade it for? A string of hopeless relationships, dead-end jobs, and a couple of tagalong girls.
A slow chill began to creep up Cordelia’s arms, wrapping around her throat.Unless…she thought, recalling the spectacular grimace on the portrait behind the desk. Unless there was areason Maggie left Bone Hill behind, a reason she never stayed in one place too long, a reason she kept this secret. She might have been a restless enigma of a woman, but she was a caring mother. If she didn’t bring her girls here, maybe she didn’t think it was safe.
Before Cordelia could voice her thoughts, a low creak sounded overhead where the stairwell wrapped around and met the second story. She started, and the frame she was holding slipped from her fingers, crashing to the floor, shattering the glass. “Who was that?”
“It’s an old house. They make noise,” Eustace said with a shrug, bending to pick up the picture frame.
Cordelia crouched beside her as Eustace turned it over, pulling their mother’s photograph from the jagged glass. “I’m sorry I dropped Mom.”
“I’m not. She deserves it.” Eustace stood back up with the photo in one hand and the frame in the other, but another picture fell out, landing at Cordelia’s feet.
Cordelia reached for it, lifting it slowly as she stood. It was black and white with that soft, yellowed quality vintage photographs often have, taken outside when the light was low. Three ominous figures circled a young woman impossibly suspended between them. Her arms and legs dangled off the ground, antlers grasped in her hanging fingers, the white skirting of her dress draping down. Her head hung back, throat exposed, open eyes staring into the camera. Black powder rimmed them in thick smudges, drawing violent slashes across her face, marking a symbol on her forehead where her fiery hair fell away. But her irises were gone, the eyes rolled so far back only the whites were showing. Her mouth twisted open in an ecstatic cry.
“Get a load of her,” Eustace said, looking over Cordelia’s shoulder. “Who is that?”
Cordelia gaped, unable to process what she was seeing. Sheturned the picture over. A hasty inscription in black ink was scrawled across the back.The Bone Witches, 1959.
The picture began to tremble in Cordelia’s hand. She turned to look at Eustace, who stepped away.
“I had a friend who was Wiccan once,” Eustace said. “She used to carry crystals in her bra and burn a lot of incense.” She took another step back, glancing around the stair hall, taking in its dark furnishings with new eyes. “But she never did shit like that.”
“Maybe they meant it metaphorically,” Cordelia suggested weakly.
“Does that look metaphorical to you?”
Above them, the same low creak sounded again, longer this time.
Eustace bolted for the majestic staircase, pausing only a moment at the curling newel post topped with a bronze woman riding an owl, her left arm clutching the base of a giant glass torch that rose above her—a lamp.
“Is someone here?” she called as she started up the first flight, craning to look higher. When no one responded, she glanced back at Cordelia and pointed, indicating she was going to check the second story, before rounding the corner and disappearing.
Cordelia stood there trying to shake the feeling that she wasn’t alone in the hall, the haunting picture still hanging from her hand. Remembering it, she dropped it suddenly, backing away from where it landed among the broken bits of glass. That’s when she noticed the inlay at her feet, an eight-pointed star in pale wood with a dark outline and bands of dark wood between each spoke. Everything seemed to radiate out from its center like it was the navel of the house.
Cordelia walked slowly around it. She’d seen medallions in floors before. Like grained compasses, they lent a sense of direction and order as much as they did flourish. But something aboutthis one, like so many of the details in this house, wasn’t quite right. She wondered where each spoke would lead if she dared to follow them but quickly decided she’d rather not know. If she stared long enough, she feared the design might suck her into its heart and hold her there, the way a spider sticks a fly in its web, every desperate move to escape only tangling it further.
The sound of footsteps overhead indicated someone was making their way to the third story. Had Eustace decided to climb higher? She looked up and realized she could see all the way into the tower, where an ever-narrowing staircase rose to a fourth, foreboding platform.
“Is that you?” she called up to her sister, but got no reply. “Eustace! Is that you on the stairs?” she tried again.
Cordelia took a step back and peered into the musty shadows of that highest reach, a nest for wayward corvids. She thought she could dimly make out a figure—just an arm really, white and graceful, the trailing hem of a long skirt—ascending along the railing. What did they call those things? A widow’s watch. The name caused her to recoil. There was a reason for names like that, and it was never good. She imagined the tower as a forsaken woman, the windows her many eyes peering out, waiting for some lover’s return. Eustace had to be crazy to go up there. Who knew if those boards were even stable? It’s doubtful their aunt had climbed them in the last thirty years.
“Eustace! Don’t go up there! It’s not safe!” Cordelia yelled into the shadows, cupping her hands around her mouth.
“What are you shrieking about?” she heard her sister ask with irritation from the second floor as she appeared over the rail.
