"That does sound productive."
Maggie's flat delivery seemed to fluster Allison even more.
I remembered at brunch Allison practically bouncing in her chair at the idea of a séance. We should have conducted a séance last night and asked Evelyn who killed her. She'd said it like a woman proposing a fun little parlor game, delighted at her own cleverness, and Taylor had shut her down with a poppycock and Vivienne had gone somber about forces we don't understand, and Allison had let it drop. Hadn't pushed. Hadn't mentioned it again.
Until she had it all set up alone, in secret, on the one night she'd manufactured an excuse to stay behind.
That was the part that felt weird. Not the ouija board itself—a lot of people probably had a ouija board somewhere in a junk drawer, right next to a deck of cards and some dice. It was the timing. The privacy. The fact that a woman who'd been so eager to make a game of it at a table full of witnesses had waited until she had the house entirely to herself.
"Did you get anything?" I asked, keeping my voice easy. "Spiritually speaking."
"No." The answer came too fast, the kind of no that arrived before the question had even finished landing. Then, softer, like she'd heard herself. "Nothing that made sense. It just kept spelling the same letters over and over. Gibberish. I think I was moving it myself without realizing. That happens, apparently. The ideomotor effect. I looked it up."
"What letters?"
"I don't remember exactly." She stood, gathering her laptop off the side table with hands that weren't quite steady, and I noticed a legal pad tucked half beneath it. Lines of handwriting, a few words underlined twice. I couldn't read it from where I stood, and I wasn't about to lunge across my own parlor to try. "I should really get some sleep. It's been a night."
"It has," I agreed. “There was an accident at the Celebration of Life.”
“Good grief,” Allison said, pressing her palm to her chest. "Is Hyacinth going to be all right?"
"I certainly hope so." I was already plotting my fake relationship with her to get information from the hospital staff tomorrow morning. I wasn’t going to be able to relax until I knew she was okay.
“Such a shame,” Allison clucked. “Goodnight, you two."
She was up the stairs before either of us could stop her, if stopping her had even been the plan, which it hadn't been.
There was no plan.
Other than washing my arm and changing our clothes. We did just that, me lending Maggie some sweatpants and a T-shirt. She changed while I scoured blood off my skin. It wasn’t that much. It just felt like I’d starred in a Stephen King novel.
I came back into my room from my ensuite bathroom and picked up a bottle of hand lotion. I needed to cover myself with floral scents in some sort of attempted comfort.
Teddy watched from my bed, sniffing my pillow with a touch of disdain.
“What was up with the ouija board?” Maggie asked, sitting on my bed and scratching Teddy. “That was weird.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes she seems flighty and scattered, other times calculating.”
“Statistically, now many people play with a ouija board solo? It has to be very low.”
"You sound like Reginald."
"I'll take that as a compliment, since he seems smart enough." Maggie pushed her Doc Martens out of the way when she stood up and held her hand out for the lotion. "What's your take on all of this?"
“I don’t know.”
We went back downstairs. I sat down in a club chair.
“Should we order food? I never got to try the divine shrimp.”
“Good idea.”
I looked at the candles, which gave me anxiety all over again when I thought about the possibility of the house catching on fire. Lighting candles on a rug seemed like a very distracted and idiotic thing to do, frankly. Not something an intelligent research buff would do.
What was in Allison’s notebook? Had the board told her something? I tugged it out from under the pillows. “Where the heck did this even come from?”
“My guess is Amazon.” Maggie started scrolling through her phone. “Mexican or Thai?”
