Page 18 of The Sisters of Crimson House

She let those words hang as she rounded the corner to Elizabeth Street. Was she a monster? Did lying to people about the messages she claimed were from their loved ones make her a monster if those messages brought comfort? If it allowed her to eat? What business was it of his to destroy a perfectly working system?

Crimson House loomed like a fortress in the gloom, and for once she felt grateful to be swallowed up in its darkness. That’s where monsters belonged. She reached the walkway, heard the Camry idle to a stop.

“Will you be okay?” he asked.

Her feet ached in time with the throb in her hand. She risked a glance at her palm. The blood had dried, sending streaks down her arm like arrows. She might live a hundred years and not have the answer to that question.

“Thank you for making sure I didn’t die.” She turned to look at him then, his face hidden in the shadow of the driver’s seat. Only his hands were visible, tightly gripping the steering wheel, and she imagined the conflict on his face, the concern in those dark eyes.

“I’m in town if you’re finally ready to go head-to-head. Prove to me and all of science that you’re legit.” He fairly shouted this last part so he could be heard over the idling engine. She could imagine that smirk on his face. She could imagine smacking it clear off.

“When they have a contest proving you’re not a creeper for following me around, I’ll get back to you.” She didn’t wait for a reply. She walked toward the front entrance and listened to the Camry drive away, immediately wishing she could summon him back.

The front door to Crimson House was wide open.

Her senses on alert, she cautiously made her way up the porch steps onto the landing.

“Astrid?” she called into the dark foyer. Astrid didn’t answer, but Charley hadn’t expected it. She knew she was still at work at Schwab’s, Zavier likely on his way to get her that instant. Maybe he had been careless, just forgetting to lock the door behind him. But what if it was an intruder?

The house was oppressively dark, not helped along by a new moon cloaked by black rain clouds. “Hello?” she called again. An eerie calm greeted her as she made her way into the foyer. Leaves crunched underfoot, blown in from the sudden autumn storm. Just underneath the sounds of the crunching leaves, faint at first, was the sound of a piano. Someone was in the parlor. She crept toward the entrance and then stopped at the threshold.

A woman was curled over the baby grand, her back to Charley, sweeping her arms across the keyboard like she was buffeted by the wind stirring outside. A gorgeous mass of sound tumbled out of the instrument, the woman lost to the music she was creating. Charley’s heart thundered in her chest, yet the music was stronger, filling every inch of space. Charley found the courage to step into the room, and like a spell broken, the music stopped. The woman froze over the piano, a haunted statue. She slowly turned, and she locked eyes with Charley.

Charley struggled to find her voice. “Miranda?”

The great Miranda Bryde shuddered, as if shaking the cobwebs from her head. “Chopin, actually. Nocturne Number Nineteen. Gonna learn it if it kills me.” She stood up from the bench, her knees suddenly buckling.

Charley reflexively ran to her, gathering up her sister in her arms. Miranda smiled at her radiantly.

“Hey, Chuck,” she said, her smile faltering as she studied her sister’s face. “You’re bleeding,” she added before crumpling into a heap on the floor.

Nine

September 6, 1999

No one would have outright called Beatrix Bryde a con artist. Just like no one was certain if the house had been the first to catch fire or if it had been the adjacent stable with the Caldwell family’s precious quarter horses. But in what was now Bryde family lore, Beatrix—born Sarah Caldwell—ran into the fire to save her beloved Appaloosa, Margo, from a fiery death. When she awoke days later, her lungs raw from smoke inhalation, her skin the pink of a plucked chicken, she was declared a miracle. The two large misshapen stars that appeared seared into the palms of both hands were declared the work of the devil himself. County doctors refused to continue treatment. Faith leaders begged Sarah to repent. The fervently Protestant community that had raised her no longer claimed her as one of their own. As far as Sarah Caldwell was concerned, she’d never left that barn. When she told the story, it was Sarah who ran into the smoke, and Beatrix Bryde who was carried out, baptized by fire to carry out a divine mission.

And, indisputably, the mission was money.

Beatrix Bryde embarked on a cross-country odyssey that snaked along a young country in the grip of war and disease, holding séances in spiritualist circles for the countless grieving widows and mothers keening for their sons lost in the war. She would skip town when the magical stars on her hands no longer afforded her an invitation. After an extended stay in the City of Angels, she traded the glamour of California for a fresh start in Memphis, the town on the Nile of the New World. Memphis was their chosen home and where the Brydes had now been anchored for nearly sixty years. The portrait of the woman with jet-black hair and violet eyes had hung in the foyer that long.

“So the original Bryde had two stars and zero ability?” Miranda asked their mother one afternoon, lazily studying the star on her own palm instead of the homework in front of her.

Charley tried to ignore her across the dining room table, her copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper” not forceful enough a shield against her sister’s presence.

“I wouldn’t say commanding a room and earning thousands of dollars as a single mom zero ability,” Nicole replied dryly. Not a con woman. An opportunist who’d managed to create a magical dynasty from scratch.

“Zero family ability,” Miranda stressed. “She worked with nothing but her wits. Chuck here got zero stars and zero ability?” She laughed, watching as the words found their target. “Somehow that’s so much worse.”

Charley felt her face go red, fighting the itch in her palm that begged her to look, confirm that, indeed, she was the freak of the family. She wouldn’t give Miranda the satisfaction.

“Miranda!” Nicole said sharply, and then she said nothing, because what could she say that hadn’t been repeated a million times? They all had destinies. Miranda’s was to be celebrated; Charley’s was to be the endless butt of her celebrated sister’s jokes.

When the fights had been especially bitter and they were too young to protest, the girls were banished into the wilds by their parents in the hope that they would return like “normal children.” Charley did not know who these normal children were supposed to be. The only other kids she encountered as she crisscrossed Overton Park on her bike threw rocks at her from the drainage ditch. No one was inviting them to hang out and spray-paint graffiti on the retaining walls. This was one of the few things she and Miranda had in common: They were two witches threatened by stoning in the twenty-first century.

Memphis may have technically been a city, but in this Midtown kingdom defined by a forest defiantly thriving in its center, the sisters were automatically marked as the town’s weirdos in residence. It didn’t matter that they lived in the small house with creeping vines that marked the park’s perimeter. Everyone knew they were the weird kids whose family worked for the devil.

Miranda didn’t ride her bike alongside Charley through the park’s trails. She kept far enough away as her version of a protest, but Charley liked to think she was close enough to hear her in case a monster emerged from the trees and dragged her from her bike. She’d liked to think that her sister would pedal back for her.