Page 11 of The Sisters of Crimson House

Charley loved when tarot was right. She really hated it when it was right and rubbed it in her face.

Six

September 26, 2008

Charley lingered at the base of the stairwell, summoning the will to climb to the top and face the darkness beyond. This was Sadie territory, a depressing archipelago where flowers, compliments, and other nice gestures were sent to die. Charley leaned heavily on the rickety wooden banister as she made her way up the stairs with a Caesar salad on a tray, knocking gently on the door. “Sadie?” she called quietly.

She heard the whispers then, a soft hissing sound, making Charley think of snakes. She tried to pretend that the whispers in the stairwell were the dead speaking to her. She lived in a haunted house; certainly, a specter from beyond could be warning her away from what waited beyond the door. The hissing drifted closer, the hair rising on the back of her neck. She wasn’t sure which was more terrifying: the thought she would open that door and find Sadie speaking to the beyond, or that the beyond was whispering back.

Charley opened the door. The whispers stopped. Sunlight seemed reluctant to spend much time here despite Charley’s best efforts to make the room as cheery and bright as possible. The old woman sat at her usual post by the window in the tower room’s alcove, her back to Charley as she sat hunched over a thick, tattered novel in an upholstered yellow wingback chair. If Charley were honest with herself, she thought, as the floorboards groaned under her feet, the dead were not whispering to her grandma here. Sadie was crazy and keeping herself company in the most unsettling way she knew how.

“Lunch!” Charley announced brightly while she set the tray down on a wicker side table. She frowned at Sadie’s breakfast of granola and yogurt, which looked untouched. “That granola is from Thistle and Bee, the local honey people you like,” she admonished as she scanned the rest of the room. “Don’t want to waste it.”

Waste away more like it. The woman barely ate, let alone did anything that passed for exercise. Charley had placed a yoga mat and some light hand weights by the window, a copy of Yoga for Dummies dutifully gathering dust on her bedside table. She took note of the sameness of the room, the lack of life despite her still-breathing grandmother in the chair beside her. Sadie’s bed was neatly made, the blanket Great Leo had crocheted folded at the end. Could be worse for a prison, Charley thought. She picked up a vase of dahlias that had gone limp with age and dumped the water out in the adjacent bathroom sink.

“I’ll pick you up some fresh dahlias. I know how much you like those.” She brought her grandmother fresh flowers every week. It was an extravagance that didn’t really feel like one as she bartered a weekly tarot card reading with Mrs. Alvarez, the wholesale florist whose roses assisted Charley’s favorite magic trick. More importantly, if her grandmother insisted on staying in here, then Charley would just bring the outside in. The twelve-by-fourteen room was for all intents and purposes a greenhouse with the amount of monstera and mother-in-law’s tongue and elephant ears she’d dragged up the steep attic stairs over the years. But maybe that was just window dressing to detract from the actual hole in the ceiling of the bedroom.

Late the previous spring, straight-line winds had torn through the city in the dead of night, uprooting trees and downing power lines with the fury of a giant. They’d been asleep when the eighty-year-old black walnut tree delivered a glancing blow to the corner of the turret roof. Not enough to cause major structural damage, but just enough that a growing hole sitting unattended was rapidly becoming its own disaster. In the peak of the storm, Sadie had refused to leave her room. From her yellow chair, her hair wild like it was its own weather pattern, she had directed Zavier and Charley to rig up a tarp to keep out the elements.

Charley had refused to meet her friend’s eyes, knowing the warning she would see there—worse, the pity. The great and terrible Sadie Bryde had transformed into a mystifying agoraphobe in an untenable living situation. Both Charley and Zavier routinely inspected the tarp for loose edges and leaks during the inevitable storms. God knew it had thrown her neighbors into a letter-writing frenzy when it first went up—phrases like keeping up appearances and lowering property values had quickly devolved into threats of city council meetings and eviction, so she was regimented about keeping the tarp nailed in place. She did not have enough tarot cards to trade for a new roof, and Sadie refused to leave that room, hole or not. Maybe the dahlias Charley brought made her grandmother feel better. They made Charley feel like she was putting a Band-Aid over a bomb in the turret roof.

“I’ve got to go to work. But I’ll be back to check on you, okay?” Charley smoothed out the cream-colored duvet that looked like it hadn’t been moved in weeks, her heart twisting in her chest. They were right, of course. Keeping her up here, letting her act out this Miss Havisham fantasy in the attic, was cruel, even if it was what Sadie insisted she wanted. The one time Charley had brought up the idea of assisted living, she realized that the old girl had some life in her still. The vase of zinnias Sadie had thrown inches from Charley’s head had underscored her point.

“What are you reading?” Charley moved closer to spy the title. “Ah, Tale of Two Cities. A classic. ‘It is a far, far better thing…’ or something,” she mumbled. “I think we read that the one week I was in school.”

Charley looked at the bookcase that lined her grandmother’s wall. Those shelves contained most of Charley’s high school education. After she’d busted the last caretaker Great Leo had hired to watch over Sadie trying to make off with the family’s sterling silver, Charley had realized it was better if she just stayed close. Since poor Leonore the Lovelorn had passed some years before, there was no one left to argue the point with Charley. Not that the school seemed to care if she had never been in attendance. Perpetually overcrowded Marshall High hadn’t seemed to mind the loss of one extra student. College brochures that found their way to the Crimson House mailbox went ignored.

But the books. They were Charley’s school. She pored over all the classics that the district deemed as such and the ones she read and read and read until the pages were like onion skin under her fingers: A history of Emile Swedesborg. The Fox Sisters and spiritualism. Any Octavia Butler she could get her hands on. Eastern philosophy texts and a kids’ King James Bible just for kicks. Closer to home, the histories of hoodoo and conjuring on Beale Street, the road less than a mile from the house and world famous for its soul-searing blues and Black culture. She read for passion. She read for company, getting lost in the worlds set in other galaxies, in her own backyard.

But mainly she read to solve one of the greatest unsolved mysteries she knew. There was no one around to teach her the history of why the Bryde women were the way they were. Sadie dismissively said the women in her family were just “born with it” like they were the stars of some supernatural Maybelline ad. Not even in Brydes: A History, a slim cotton-bound, shockingly dry account of the past one hundred years of Brydes written by Beatrix when her twin daughters had been barely twenty, was there any indication of where the magic came from. There was no valid explanation for why Charley was the first Bryde woman to be born without the Seeker’s Star. If the answer was somewhere in the collective written history of magic, Charley still hadn’t found it.

“I’ll see you later, okay? Maybe we can talk Dickens when I get back.” Charley made her way to the door, stopping when she heard a strange sound. Sadie’s voice.

“I’d like that.”

Charley turned and stared at the back of her grandmother’s head. “I’m sorry?”

“I’d like that, I said. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Sadie Bryde was making conversation and being feisty about it. So maybe the cards had it all wrong, Charley thought, as she made her way back down the stairs. Sadie had officially retired when Charley’s parents died, and she’d meant that through and through. No public readings, even though eight years later, the phone would still ring with hopeful requests. But most mystifying—she gave no response when Charley tried to ask her about Miranda. Surely the famous locator of missing people could do her this one favor, tell her if her own granddaughter was still alive. Sadie would only give her a placid smile and say, She’s fine, and return to whatever book she was reading. So Charley talked to the cards.

When Charley asked the tarot about her grandmother, Sadie appeared in the form of the Tower. One of the most feared cards in the deck, the Tower depicted bodies falling from the top of a stone precipice as lightning struck its foundation. But maybe it was just being literal. Sadie lived in a tower that had been hit by a tree, damage that was an ongoing hardship. Otherwise, the Tower was the card that represented radical change, transformation, and rebirth. Perhaps the outcome for the old lady in the attic was…good radical transformation? If so, into what?

Charley would not draw a card to learn the answer to that question. Maybe then she could keep pretending that everything was going to be just fine.

Seven

November 8, 2000

Keep your voice at a whisper. The quiet is best. The bones are sleeping inside Elmwood’s chest. Charley ran her finger over the inscription that time had failed to completely erase. It was Miranda who had written the words on the wall of the mausoleum with a Sharpie on a dare when they were kids, as if the letters themselves might coax the dusty remains of Beatrix Bryde out of her tomb to haunt them. The mausoleum walls were cold to the touch, always had been, even in the hottest, swampiest Memphis summer when they would play hide-and-seek among the eerie yet beautiful city of the dead.

The vast acreage of shaded emerald lawn with its tilted marble crosses and monuments had been their playground. Their parents would set up a picnic outside the Bryde mausoleum after sweeping away errant branches and refreshing the fading lilies on neighboring tombstones with a fresh bouquet. It was an annual tradition after the Halloween Spectacular, attending to the cemetery on All Souls’ Day. A family reunion, as her mother would label it before tucking into elegant silver tins of chicken salad from La Baguette. She always put out a little extra helping for Great-Great Grandmama Beatrix and brave, beloved Great-Aunt Eugenia, Leo’s sister, who’d passed from what she had fancifully described as lunacy. Charley had needed to look up the word. Lunacy: madness caused by the moon. Charley always pictured her great-aunt’s twin like some sad silvery werewolf.

Before today, Elmwood had possessed the distinction of being the most beautiful cemetery in the city. Now it was the place that would store her parents’ bones before they disappeared into dust. Charley pressed her hand harder into the mausoleum wall, willing her warmth to spread throughout the bleak cement tomb. It tore at her heart that her parents would be banished to spend eternity in a chilly grave when in life they had radiated sunshine.

“Come, sugar.” Sadie’s voice was soft, strained. She held out her hand, and Charley reluctantly took it, feeling the cold of the mausoleum pass into her grandmother’s flesh, the Star pressed between them. The older woman shivered.

The service was mercifully brief. Charley processed very little, just standing between Sadie and her sister, Miranda, who stood as still and sullen as one of the many cemetery angels. Charley wondered if the Brydes beside her sensed her parents’ presence. If the wind in the trees was her mother’s sigh. The leaves swirling by her feet, a blessing from her father.