Page 9 of The Sisters of Crimson House

Astrid moved to Charley’s side as the audience applauded. “Well played, babe,” she whispered in her ear as Zavier gave her a discreet high five. “I think that’s cause for celebration.”

“In due time. Got homework to do.” Charley smiled, tapping Sy Prescott’s freshly plucked wallet against her chin.

Five

Her bedroom was a library in the aftermath of an earthquake, or in Charley’s case, a sliding scale of priorities with lifelong learner at the top and cleaning doomed to never make the list. The Rose Room was now Charley HQ, the hideous red drapes and chintz pillows of yore replaced with a thrifted comforter and throw pillows that helped soften the Victorian gloom. Stacks of books towered perilously on the nightstand, overlooking the actual bookshelf that was crammed sideways with fat biographies of Madame Blavatsky and Houdini and a heavily dog-eared copy of Cold Reading for Dummies. Thickly bound histories of spiritualism were stacked on top of a Ouija board still in its Parker Brothers box.

Over the years, she’d been forced to part ways with Crimson House antiques that had been the lynchpin of southern lifestyle magazine photo shoots. The women of Crimson House had once posed on a candy-striped Victorian chaise longue in the parlor that she traded for a functioning water heater. Heirloom hutches and the crystal Beatrix had brought with her from California were sacrificed to update the antique HVAC system. A chandelier that had hung in Sadie’s office ensured that their water got turned back on last year. But never the books. Those would stay.

Charley’s thrifted corset was strewn on the floor instead of draped over the vintage Chinese changing screen, Zilpha the fat black tabby currently using it as a nest. Charley sat hunched over a Celtic cross tarot formation splayed out across a wooden vanity that had been her mother’s. That heirloom wasn’t going anywhere either.

“So who is he?” Astrid asked, peering over Charley’s shoulder to look at the tarot card layout. Even with the AC working overtime, the air was stifling on the second floor. Astrid was careful in her dramatic fanning to not disturb the cards. Charley was working with a tattered Rider-Waite deck that supposedly Great Leo had won in a bet. The Page of Cups often went missing and turned up in random places like the bottom of her hamper or the bathtub, which felt appropriate for something once belonging to her unapologetically fancy great-grandma.

Charley tapped the Seven of Swords with her fingernail, the polish largely nibbled off between her teeth. The image on the card was of a man jauntily clad in a red fez and matching boots, his arms piled with the swords he had ostensibly just stolen from his enemy’s tent.

“Who he says he is. A sneaky son of a bitch named Sy.” She nodded at his wallet, which was buried under a hunk of rose quartz she’d placed on top of it in a halfhearted attempt at ceremony. Astrid was a stickler for ceremony. Flowers and candles and crystals were acquired and arranged according to the card reading to be conducted. Charley often read tarot in her bed, nothing but cat hair and crumbs as the altar to her ancestors. And unlike her ancestors, she didn’t have psychic abilities to call on, just a killer bullshit detector. The story of his weathered empty wallet was an intriguing detail. “And a poor one. I almost feel bad.”

“Don’t,” said Astrid. “He messed up your flow.”

“I thought I recovered okay,” replied Charley, a touch defensive as she turned over a clarifying card. Skeptics were nothing new on their tours. Wives dragged reluctant husbands to learn about the spirits that prowled the halls of Crimson House. Visitors deep into their cups from a pre-party on Beale had been known to harass Zavier on some of the more outrageous claims of the house’s haunted history. Just yesterday she’d chased away a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses who had harangued her over the house’s peeling paint job before accusing her of being in league with demons. But this felt different. Personal. She peered at the new card, the Knight of Swords glaring at her from the deck, his jaw set in determination. Psychic ability wasn’t a requirement to read tarot or tell the future for her clients, just an ability to read people and the stories they told you without meaning to. In the cards, swords could represent reason and intellect but often the clash of ideals surrounding it. This young knight was depicted charging into battle, holding his sword aloft; he and his horse were straining from the effort. If the story emerging on the card was to be believed, nothing was going to stop this knight from his crusade once he started it.

“Sy Prescott, lives in Austin,” Charley listed off from memory. “Twenty-five years old with brown hair and blue eyes and a Texas-sized chip on his shoulder.” An initial Yahoo search on their ancient 2001 PC hadn’t revealed much more than the cards had already confirmed. A class listing at UT Austin rooted him in Texas, but nary a photo or Friendster account to be unearthed. The guy liked to stay in the shadows. “I guess he couldn’t afford the entry fee at Graceland and tried to crash our event instead.”

“Ha,” said Astrid, studying the Knight more closely, her blond hair falling like a curtain around her heart-shaped face. “Of course you pulled the Knight. Dark-eyed mystery man doesn’t want to give up his secrets. Oh!” she said suddenly, her entire demeanor changing as she looked into the mirror. She lowered her voice. “Different mystery man entering the picture.”

Charley froze, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling. “Blue?” she said.

Astrid pretended to study the cards, nodding. “Yep,” she whispered. “He’s even got his uniform on. He’s right behind us,” she added casually. “Try not to stare.”

Charley looked into the mirror with interest. She saw nothing but her own black-lined eyes reflected back. “Your boyfriend checking in on you?” she whispered to Astrid with a sly grin. Charley had a theory. Despite being the only person in Crimson House who could legitimately see dead people, Astrid could possess zero psychic ability and still rattle the ghosts out of every attic based on cuteness factor alone. She would be intolerable if not for this being an infinitely helpful skill when running a ghost-hunting tour.

Astrid smiled down at the tarot spread. “Blue likes it when you read the cards. You tell a story. It helps him remember his.”

Despite Zavier’s enthusiastically Gothic tales of the residents of Crimson House, most of the spirits known to walk its halls were either victims of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic or one of the many men who drowned or burned to death when the Sultana steamboat, overflowing with Union prisoners of war, exploded in the Mississippi in 1865 and killed more victims than the Titanic. Based on his ever-present tattered blue uniform and cheeks hollowed like crescent moons, Astrid’s best guess was that Blue had been a Union soldier on his way home north until drowning in a near-frozen Mississippi River.

Charley surmised that the collective psychic energy of the Brydes worked as a lighthouse to attract wayward spirits to Crimson House regardless of where they’d met their actual end. It was standard stuff Astrid and Zavier covered on their various ghost tours, but Charley couldn’t help but shiver to think that the cold spots she routinely walked through were the energies of countless agonizing deaths trapped in her home. Over the years, she and Astrid had cataloged the various sightings and reports of all the undead residents, Charley often cross-referencing names at nearby Elmwood Cemetery for veracity. It was a mercy that Astrid had yet to spy a single Bryde family ghost haunting the halls of Crimson House. Or perhaps a greater mercy that she’d never told her, Charley thought bitterly.

There was a knock at the door.

“You decent?” called Zavier from the hallway.

Charley looked into the mirror, wondering if the dead man over her shoulder saw what she did, the thick eye makeup and cleavage ratcheted to the top of the push-up bra she was still wearing under a ratty Peabody Hotel ducks T-shirt. She routinely dyed and straightened her curly blond hair into black sheets that were now haphazardly twisted into a bun on the top of her head. If she couldn’t take herself seriously as a ringleted Kewpie doll telling fortunes, how could she expect her customers to do so? She wiped off the remaining red lipstick onto the back of her hand, leaving a bloody smear. She felt like the oldest twenty-two-year-old in the world.

“Depends on the definition.” Charley gave her reflection a sad smile.

The door opened, Zavier filling up the room with his massive frame and faux-hawk. “Mail call!” He tossed a thick stack of mail that landed right in the middle of her Celtic cross formation.

“Hey!”

“Sorry. And don’t shoot the messenger,” he said, sitting down on the bed and welcoming Zilpha the tabby, who gratefully curled into his lap. He was a six-foot-four Snow White, summoning anything with fur or feathers within a two-mile radius. “Wonder how much the attorneys bill for using envelopes that thick.”

The letter on top was the third from Martin Thacker and Associates on behalf of her next-door neighbor Howard Lovell, and the third she would be ignoring. She had a general policy. When you were attempting something as serious as threatening your next-door neighbor with a lawsuit, that was a fight best done face-to-face, not hiding behind fancy lawyers with thick envelopes. She briskly shuffled the envelope to the back of the stack of even angrier-looking bills. Here was a magic trick: If she couldn’t see them, how could she pay them? That was a question she felt better suited to answer than how she could keep a 150-year-old three-story house in efficient shape.

Was it her fault that unmitigated termite damage to the front porch and stairs had rendered it a potential death trap? Or was the worst offense the missing and broken shingles that made the exterior look like a gap-toothed smile? At least the Lovells had never bothered to pay for a tour inside the house, where the smell of mildew coupled with the lingering damage from a busted water heater would be sure to give the old-money couple the vapors. The fluttering tarp strapped to the turret outside might as well have announced to the neighbors that the inmates were running the asylum. There were rules to living on Elizabeth Street, unwritten ones that Charley had neither time, funds, nor inclination to follow. But she was aware she was breaking the worst one on the daily; heaven forbid the shambling exterior of Crimson House betray the tenuous mental interior of its occupants.

The final piece of mail in the stack was a letter addressed to Miranda Bryde courtesy of Celeste Bryde, with a large red RETOUR À L’ENVOYEUR stamped across the front. The last known address for her sister Miranda had been in Cassis, a coastal town in France not far from Marseille, not that any of those designations made a difference to Charley, who had never left the state, let alone the country. (A wrong turn that sent her across the bridge into Arkansas for five minutes didn’t count.) She had been dutifully sending letters to Miranda each month at her last known address and dutifully receiving RETURN TO SENDER stamped across them in response. The last formal attempt at communication on Team Miranda’s part had been received over one year before, in the form of a postcard of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a flurry of tiny European cars swirling around its base. In Celeste’s flowery scrawl, she confirmed that she and Miranda had indeed been enjoying the “expat life” in France and that Miranda was embarking on a much-needed vacation in Cassis. There was no mention of when they might ever return to the States. But she’d sent her love. Not a check or a wire transfer to the joint account that had been established in the wake of their parents’ death to help maintain a three-story, old-as-fuck house.

The most prominent feature in her bedroom was the one Charley worked to ignore. The bulletin board hung on her closet door, its surface a map so encircled in red marker that it read more like a crimson smear. It was a museum and a memorial, the last known whereabouts of Miranda Bryde. Each red circle was a show, a TV appearance, a promise her sister was alive and flourishing. Each red circle was now a reminder that the trail had gone quiet. She hadn’t heard from her in over a year. News of her performances also stopped, and her name typed into any nascent search bar yielded the same results. There was vacationing, and then there was disappearing off the edge of the known world.