Page 63 of The Sisters of Crimson House

“The psychic told her that she saw my mother meeting the man of her dreams in a foreign city. A warm place with pink buildings, she told her.”

“And your mom just left?” Charley asked, dumbfounded.

“That was the idea. Until the police found her car on the outskirts of the city. It was like she just vanished into thin air.”

A thought so horrible entered her mind, she could barely speak it. “What was the name of the psychic your mother visited?”

“Sadie Bryde.”

It wasn’t possible. “Sadie would never have told a mother to abandon her own child.” Her mind raced, contemplating the impossible. Sadie may have been many things, but she’d loved her family fiercely. She would never advise something so cruel.

“The police interviewed her,” he said. “Sadie confirmed it. She investigated my mother’s disappearance herself.”

Charley paled. “Come with me,” she said. She turned and walked into Sadie’s study, Sy following. It was noticeably cold, and she shivered as she headed straight to the massive built-in bookshelf, running a finger across the dozens of matching leather-bound ledgers Sadie had used for recordkeeping with clients over the years. Charley had thumbed through most of them, amusing herself with the requests that ranged from the mundane to the ridiculous. Needs reassurance that son will be accepted into college of choice. Wants ex-husband’s new wife to leave him. Sadie had been a psychic, not a witch casting spells, but that had never stopped clients’ wishful thinking. “Sadie was meticulous with her records. She kept lists of all her clients. When did your mother…?” She couldn’t say the words.

“Disappear?” he provided. “June of 1987.”

The year Charley was born. She found the album marked ’87 in gold foil on the spine, slipping it off the shelf and onto a large desk caked with an impressive layer of dust. She cracked the album open, carefully flipping through the handwritten ledger of names.

Another thought, worse than the last. But she had to know. Her eyes fell to the inked designs on his forearms. The cursive letter c with a flourish at its tip. Her throat went dry as she struggled to speak. “Sy, was your mother’s name Caroline?”

He stared at her for an impossibly long moment. “Her name was Margaret. Margaret Humphreys. She went back to her maiden name after my dad left.”

She allowed herself to continue breathing. Charley turned the pages to find June of 1987. There it was in Sadie’s over-the-top cursive scrawl. It was unmistakable. Margaret Humphreys. Her hands trembled as she pointed to it. Sy was just behind her, warm breath on her shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” she said, her heart breaking. “Sadie wouldn’t just tell a mother to abandon her kid.”

“But she did,” he said. “I’ve committed the police report to memory.”

It was all there, written in the ledger in her hand. Margaret Humphreys. Heartbroken from abandonment by spouse. New love awaits in a different city. That’s all the ledger said. Could a life be summed up so succinctly, so terribly? But why? There had to be a compelling reason to persuade a woman to start over so radically. Warm town, pink buildings? This advice didn’t track with the person Charley thought she knew.

“Maybe there was more to it?” she said, searching for a narrative that fit. “Sadie worked off impressions of the past. Your mother knew this place from her childhood, so it felt right. She was scouting ahead and was planning to come back for you?” Sy was already shaking his head, but Charley was determined to solve it. “Or Sadie told your mother about this new opportunity, but something, someone stopped her on the way.”

“You don’t think I’ve examined every possible angle of this?” said Sy, pacing. “According to the police report, Sadie told my mother where she would find a new love, and then she was just gone. My mother told no one what she was doing. I was at a neighbor’s house. Four years old, just watching cartoons and waiting for my mom to come home, and she just disappeared.” He took a deep breath. “Detectives checked around Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and New Orleans, plenty of pink buildings, but no sign of my mother.”

“You didn’t have any other family?”

He shook his head. “My father died not too long after he left my mom. My mom was an only child. She worked two jobs and spent all of it on psychics to give her good news. She didn’t have friends—she just had me.” His breath caught, his face tight with pain. “When she left, there was no one to take me in. So I spent two years in that big, lonely house on East Parkway waiting for a miracle. The Maguires were not the miracles I expected, but they saved my life. Gave me a home until I was adopted by the Prescotts.”

But Sadie’s gift. “You said Sadie worked with the police to help find her. What did they work with?” Sadie could’ve tracked a missing child with an often-worn jacket. She’d traced a confused grandfather from his favorite paperback thriller. Surely the police would have brought Sadie an object, something of importance that had belonged to Margaret.

Sy reached into his pocket and retrieved the business card. He held it out to her, and as her fingers closed around it, she did not need Sadie’s psychometry or any psychic powers to know what she was holding. She ran her thumb over the emblem of the Seeker’s Star embossed into the cream-colored stock, yellowed with time. Celeste’s name printed on the other side. How many times had Charley handed this card to a guest, shooed them away from Miranda? How many times had her mother been approached on the street for a magical favor, had Sadie been beseeched for advice, only to hand them a card with the promise that one day they, too, might sit with one of the Brydes?

“It had been her dream to meet with your grandmother,” said Sy. “We didn’t have Spectacular-level money. But she saved up enough to visit the woman who was known to find anything lost—even a love that could be returned to her someday.”

She knew the effort it took to move through the world with a constantly breaking heart, how she was forever piecing it back together in her chest. How Sy’s heart must have been held together with the sole promise of taking down the Brydes.

“You must hate my family so much,” Charley said quietly.

Sy looked at her and said nothing.

“You brought us flowers when Sadie died,” said Charley, shaking her head. “You could have been dancing on her grave.”

“I believe your family is responsible for the destruction of mine,” he said. There was no venom in his voice when he said it, just the utter conviction that he was right. “I base that on facts, on research, and on Sadie’s own testimony. But what I still don’t understand is what you saw today, what you knew,” he said, running his hand through his hair in frustration. “You knew things that nobody else knows.”

Charley flexed her hand defensively. “I don’t understand it either.”

“No, you don’t get it,” he said, and he was suddenly much closer to her. His blue eyes blending with the gold of a forest, damp with tears. “My sanity—my survival—is staked on the fact that there is always a scientific, rational explanation for everything. But this—” He reached out like he wanted to take her hand, stopping just short of touching her. “It doesn’t make sense, and I need it to.”