Page 36 of The Sisters of Crimson House

Charley vaulted from the bed, the world moving sideways. She could feel the cool, wooden floorboards under her bare feet, the creaking of each step ringing out like gunshots in the quiet house. She reached the stairwell that led to Sadie’s bedroom, stopping when she felt it underfoot. Water. She looked up the flight of stairs, alarmed to see rivulets streaming down toward her.

“Sadie?” She was yelling now. Charley dashed up the stairs, her hand already shaking as it closed around the doorknob to Sadie’s room. She could feel the nascent Star pulsing on her hand, raw and inflamed as she pushed the door open, but she didn’t care. She was standing at the mouth of a stream, the current pooling around her feet. The door to the bathroom was closed. Sadie wasn’t in her chair. She was always in her chair, forever standing sentry at that lonely attic window. Charley ran to the bathroom door and tore it open. She immediately tried to unsee it, shut her eyes from the nightmare in front of her.

Sadie’s arm dangled over the side of the tub, so much blood pouring from where the Seeker’s Star had been cut out of her palm. Someone was screaming, a high keening sound. Miranda on her knees, channeling nothing but her own raw terror. Charley struggled to stay standing, taking in what was splayed across the bathroom wall, a phrase written in Sadie’s blood.

CAROLINE MAKES IT GO AWAY.

Nineteen

October 31, 1999

“Who is going to come up and sit with me?”

Several guests seated in the rows of rented Chiavari chairs stretched their arms up, shaking their fingers like children eager to be seen, to be chosen. Charley knew that this was mostly performative. The Bryde women spent many an evening poring over the guest list, discussing the flow of the evening, the politics of the chosen versus the excluded. Sadie always asserted that she was like water, moving where the magic took her. But even Charley knew that tonight, the real magic was selecting the guests most likely to make an especially generous donation to the family’s chosen charitable cause.

A man wearing what appeared to be an actual crown and a suit more expensive than the family’s Midtown bungalow ascended the stage and sat next to Sadie. Charley’s gaze immediately began to wander. She wasn’t interested in hearing about a nefarious business partner or if his family’s bonus gold was stashed in this mountain and not the other. It was a strange thing witnessing the collective privilege in the room, eating from the same buffet but most definitely not sharing the same stock portfolio. Her family certainly benefited from the largesse of the collective wealth gathered in the Crimson House parlor. But at the end of the day, her family members were vendors, candlelit costume-party service providers for the 1 percent. The wealthy paid for a peek behind the veil; the Brydes were the witchy and wild facilitators.

It was Sadie’s soft “it’s okay” that immediately directed Charley’s attention back to the stage. The man was already weeping, Sadie watching him, not unkindly but the way a cat studies its shadow. A lot of things came to mind when Charley thought about Sadie: Metal. Diamonds. Hard elementals. She was an aficionado of draped fabrics. She owned a fleet of Diane Von Furstenburg wrap dresses and complementary statement necklaces, a curated goddess-among-men vibe that suited her well. But it never disguised her steel. If she was a goddess, she was Shiva the destroyer.

The man hid his face in shame. Certainly, he’d never cried, let alone in public, and here he was weeping like a child as he held out what looked like a small worn blanket with the head of a sheep or maybe a dog. Charley was too far away to tell. But it wasn’t dissimilar from her own Sammy, a lamb whose body was a nubby blanket she’d practically worn into dust from endless naps and cuddles when she was a baby. Sadie gently took the blanket from the man’s hand, waiting patiently as he collected himself, wiping tears from a tanned face. She never glanced at the blanket, keeping her eyes trained on the man’s face.

“Your daughter has a photo of you on her bedside table. Not on it—it’s in a book, one you gave her.”

His eyes widened in recognition, and he nodded through a fresh round of tears. He took off the crown, which had tipped forward, holding it in his lap while he wiped at his face. It softened him.

“The Little Prince,” he said quietly. “I read it to her every night.”

So, another lost girl found. Sadie’s specialty. At least this one wasn’t dead.

“She does not want your money. She is safe,” Sadie said with certainty. “She’s in a home surrounded by a lot of love.” The news should have buoyed him, but he seemed to crumble further. “You’ve raised a strong one. But she will come back.” The man looked at Sadie, and she gazed back, firm. “It will require stamina. Patience. But love will win out. Send her another book. You taught her to love through stories. You will earn her back as you tell her new ones.”

He smiled at her finally, grateful, so vulnerable that Charley looked down at her slippered feet to avert her gaze. It was a hopeful story. It was not a Dennan story. Those often happened offstage, where Sadie would hold a jacket, a toy, and any hope that their missing loved one was still alive.

She had brought home so many lost souls. Reunited the missing with their families. But not Ashley Dennan. When Sadie had held the one shoe that had been found close to where the little girl had disappeared, she saw the little white house, the weeds that curled like ribbons by the south-facing window. She could see in her mind’s eye that Ashley had been brought to that house, just as much as she knew at that moment that Ashley would never leave it. It didn’t matter that Sadie could see the street numbers clear as day, taunting her. The vision had come too late to save her. Charley’s mom said that there was the Sadie before that day and the Sadie after. Ashley was the reason for the champagne, the costumes, the bidding, the Spectaculars. Most of that money went to the Dennan Family’s foundation to ensure that other families struggling with that enormous loss might have resources to navigate their broken hearts. The rest went to supplementing the Brydes’ ongoing work. Sadie never charged for the missing persons cases, and yet her fame only grew. She’d sat for countless magazine articles with questionable titles that ranged from “Cold Case Queen” to “The Southern Gothic Detective.”

Memphis had never quite known what to make of the mysterious matriarch with the peculiar family that worked so publicly to save others, but they knew she made for a great story. There was one article that Charley had kept, a copy that she knew her family would be furious if they knew still existed. It wasn’t even a quote from Sadie but a fellow medium that claimed to have sat with the psychic when she was young, when she was testing out the boundaries of her own abilities. “There’s a great darkness in that one,” Sheila Moseby was quoted as saying after reading the young Sadie’s palm. “Sometimes it takes such a darkness to hold so much space for others’ pain.” But that wasn’t the quote that had bothered the family so much, had stirred up such a hornet’s nest that the Great Leo called the editor of the magazine and insisted on a retraction.

“Sadie just couldn’t understand why her own family refused to tell her about what they saw,” Sheila had said. “She came to me to ask about her future, and I told her it was clear as that Star shaped into her palm. Sadie Bryde was foretold to save many families. She would also be responsible for the destruction of her own.”

Twenty

October 8, 2008

There was no funeral, at least not in the way the luminous Sadie Annabelle Bryde deserved. No daughters to mourn her, Nicole long dead and the other symbolically so, Celeste lost somewhere to the wind. Charley just couldn’t believe that her aunt wasn’t here, her imposing stature a match for the marble obelisks that dotted the cemetery. She would want to mourn her mother, regardless of how they had parted ways.

The coroner had yet to submit an official report, but suicide was what they all said with their faces and polite coughs and averted stares while Sadie’s granddaughters watched her body be taken away on a gurney. A man with a notepad asked some questions, and Charley saw him write the words attic and seclusion with three lines under it for emphasis. There would not be a table laden with Spectacular-level appetizers and treats and increasingly drunk old-timers toasting Sadie and sharing secrets from her halcyon days. No well-meaning neighbors dropping off casseroles and condolences, though Charley had spied some nosy Elizabeth Street dwellers clustering around the local news reporter doing a stand-up report outside their house.

She couldn’t even imagine what was being broadcast to the outside world. Egregious case of elder abuse results in an unsurprising demise. Batty old recluse meets tragic end. Say what they would about Charley, but that people could even think Sadie crazy was another dagger to her already broken heart. Of course she’d looked insane to the outside world, the old lady languishing in her tower. She looked insane to Charley! But she would be lying if she said, deep down, she didn’t think there was a legitimate method to her madness. Had she known all along this was coming? That she would spend her final moments fighting like hell, just to die like her daughter? At least the killer had left a note this time. Because that’s all Charley knew: Sadie’s death had not been on her own terms. Something had tried to kill Charley inside the Luciann Theater. When it had failed, it had gone after Sadie instead.

Charley took a hit from her flask, the bourbon a blunt instrument against her central nervous system. She watched as Miranda paced in front of the family mausoleum, crushing leaves of purple and gold under scuffed-up Doc Martens. They’d just had a sobering meeting with the cemetery director to discuss mausoleum internment, a word that Charley was certain she was too young to understand let alone discuss, and now she just wanted to self-medicate against the horrors. Next would inevitably be more lawyers; someone she’d never met would surprise her with a will whose existence she’d been meaning to ask Sadie about but now never would. Charley would be out on the street. She would be saved by some proclamation Sadie had written on the back of a receipt, proving that the house was Charley’s. She took another shot of bourbon. Tomorrow’s problems. The overnight fifty-degree temps had caught their sunbaked bodies by surprise, and Charley tried not to rest directly against the mausoleum wall lest she get an additional chill. But she would have been out here in dead-ass middle of summer. Anywhere but inside that house.

“Do you remember Mom making us have picnics here on the weekends?” Charley said, not asking the question she wanted to.

Miranda nodded. “Dad would always take the last biscuit and then make one of us split it and the other one choose, like King Solomon.”

“You always chose.”

Miranda made a noise, not quite a laugh, as she adjusted one of Nicole’s vintage scarves she’d dug out of Charley’s closet. She rubbed the cotton between her fingers like a talisman as she walked an invisible line past a row of Victorian cradle tombstones. “Of course I did. Big-sister privileges.”