Chapter 34
Chapter
Thirty-Four
Breakfast the next morning was a quiet affair. Sam and his parents were still at the hospital. Emily hadn’t stirred from her room. The Bells had brought another rescue horse to the back paddock—as sure a sign of spitting into the wind as I’d ever seen, but it seemed to be working.
Claire and Steve were down by the fence. She wore a hoodie over her T-shirt and shorts despite the warmth of the morning, while he remained in the same clothes he’d worn yesterday. They stood inside the paddock with the Bells, feeding the old mare.
“I think they’re going to convince Dad to bring horses back this way, little by little.
Rescue horses can be touchy. So we could split the paddock,” Max said.
We sat staring out at the homey scene, our untouched bowls of cereal on our laps.
“Then, gradually, when those horses do okay, I think they’ll push him to bring back quarter horses. ”
I nodded. Max had stayed in his aunt Emily’s room for too long last night.
Eventually, the rest of us had fallen asleep, waking up in three huddles to find a fourth huddle in the other chair.
Max, sitting closer to Claire than to me.
Steve, for his part, was closer to me, but it hadn’t been weird. He’d just been…Steve.
I didn’t know how I felt about him—or Max and Claire, for that matter. I didn’t know how I felt about anyone who wasn’t actively possessed right now.
“How long will Grandma Kate be in the hospital?” I asked Max.
“She’s awake and pissed off, so probably not long. She is asking where her visitors are and seems affronted we’re not already there, according to Dad.”
I laughed. “They’ll let her see people?”
“Oh yeah. I half-think Dad has bribed them to keep her there for a while so we can get her apartment cleaned out. Mrs. Bell said people are coming later this afternoon to start that process—move out the furniture, anyway, see what can be salvaged.”
“Probably good for her to not come home yet.”
He slanted me a look. “Can you do stuff remotely? Heal her, or whatever?”
I sighed. “I don’t think Grandma Kate is a problem anymore. But I do think we need to go see her, after Claire and Steve finish out their pony fix.”
His gaze wandered out toward Claire again almost eagerly, and I realized she was who he’d been watching, not the horse—and certainly not Steve. I could understand that. Claire was bright and sunny. Clean. Soft. Filled with hope and possibility.
Nothing like me.
I put my hand on my belly, feeling the emptiness behind it.
“She okay after last night?” he asked.
I nodded. “Well, as okay as you might expect. I don’t think she’s going to let anyone touch her hands again anytime soon. You know, Emily seemed almost normal there, for a few minutes. Before she snapped again, anyway. It was like I was looking at someone else entirely.”
“Yeah?” He shook his head. “I really don’t know her all that well. She’s always been a little strange.”
“Well, your mom knew her, right? They’re sisters, after all. And she knew her enough to be okay with her coming here. That has to mean she wasn’t always a complete freakshow.”
“I guess.” Max shook his head. “I just don’t know what happened to make it all turn so bad.”
“Yeah, well.” I set my bowl on the wicker coffee table, most of my food untouched. “I think I know who does. We should go visit your grandmother.”
The silence inside my head was still unsettling, and it weighed on me more heavily as the morning went on.
There was no snarky commentary when the horses nickered.
No snide insights about the Bells or their history.
Just...me. My own shallow thoughts echoing in the space Palemerious had occupied for fifteen years.
I kept reaching for him without meaning to. Turning inward to ask a question that would never be answered. It was like missing a tooth with your tongue—the absence more present than the thing itself had ever been.
By the time we got to the hospital with Claire and Steve, it was nearing eleven a.m. Grandma Kate had been moved to a private room, a luxury in the small hospital, but one naturally expected by her and supplied by Mr. Graham.
Max’s parents had left a half hour earlier to take Sam out for breakfast, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I wasn’t up for them yet. One Graham Cracker at a time was my motto, for as long as I could manage it.
We left Steve and Claire in the waiting room and went up to see her.
The old woman eyed us soberly when we walked in. She had a portable oxygen mask set up beside her on the bed, but she was breathing fine without it, lifting the apparatus every few minutes to suck on it like an addict getting a fix.
“What’s going on with my room?” she croaked to Max, her voice still betraying the ravages of the night before. “Your mother is going to use this as an excuse to throw out half my things. You know she is.”
He lifted his hands placatingly. “Half your things are probably not salvageable, Grandma. There was too much smoke damage.” He paused. “Can you remember what happened?”
“I had the damned damper open,” she snapped, fussily. She lifted the mask to her mouth and took a drag. “I wasn’t born yesterday, and I’m not dying tomorrow. I know when a damper is open or closed.”
“It’s a pretty good likelihood it was closed when you hit the floor.”
“Well, that’s as may be.” She sniffed. “I’m not going to deny falling asleep. That’s what good people do at night.”
She glowered at me. “You’re going to do it tonight, aren’t you?”
I lifted my brows, going for guileless. “Do what?”
She snorted. “I’m not an idiot. I know what Max here went looking for when he came back this spring and the horses were dead, and poor Frank was half out of his mind but trying to hold it together.”
She turned to Max, training her marble-bright eyes on him.
“Your mother may have thought she was slumming when she married into the Grahams, but she chose smarter than she thought. Sooner or later that family was going to fall to rack and ruin, her and her sister both. She’s lucky to have Frank here to help pick up the pieces.
And you, come to think of it. She had you. ”
Her gaze swept back to me. “But you’ve been taking too damned long.
Father Neismeth stopped in and saw me, and he told me what you got in the church.
He asked how it went, and it about broke my heart to tell him you hadn’t done a damned thing yet.
You haven’t even said a novena for your old grandma, Max. ”
“Well, we had a few other things going on,” Max put in, gently, like he was talking to a horse he was about to put down. “It’ll be okay.”
She turned back to me. “You went up there, didn’t you? To my rooms. You saw what I did.”
“Yeah.” I shifted uneasily, self-consciously putting a hand on my stomach. “Why didn’t it work?”
“Balance shifted,” she shrugged. “I’m an old woman; I can only do so much.”
“What are you talking about?” Max’s words were tired. “Emily wasn’t even in the house when this shit went down, and Claire’s brand new to the place. If the balance shifted in any direction, you’d think it’d be in our favor.”
“Mmph. You get the books?”
She was staring at me still, and I shook my head. “There are books?”
“Should be. Little smoke won’t worry them anyhow. You should use ’em, if you can. If it doesn’t hurt.”
I thought about my hands, the sweet smell of her clothing even through the smoke. Holy oil, I was willing to bet now. Props.
But props served a purpose. “Do you know anything from back when everything first happened that could help? Anything at all?”
She twitched a hand on her coverlet, the spotted, gnarled fingers looking newly frail beneath the snaking tubes and harsh white tape. “It was a long time ago.”
“Grandma,” Max pushed.
“Give me a minute.” She smoothed the coverlet out, her gaze shifting to the window but not really seeing out of it.
“A long time ago, like I said. Longer’n what it even seemed, since we were out in the country.
The pace of the city didn’t hit us so hard, not really.
It was a place to kind of store up rest so you could go out and work some more. ”
Max had drifted back to me during her ramble, and I was glad I was sitting down.
Grandma Kate smiled softly, but there was no joy in it.
“Emily, when she came down from the city that summer, she was so tired. Such a pretty thing, but you could tell in her skin, her hair, that she was running herself too thin. Those first few days, she slept round the clock, then she was like a flower opening up in front of us. She was a sweet girl.”
I tried to reconcile that image of Emily with what I’d seen over the past few weeks. Laughing and bold, brazen and cunning. Hard. That was the picture I mostly had of her. Emily was a tight and bitter woman, not a girl at all. Certainly not a sweet one.
“Were you in the house when Carol Ann cursed her?”
“What?” Beside me, Max shifted so far back in his chair that he knocked against the wall, while Claire gasped from her perch by the door. “What the hell does that mean?”
But Grandma Kate merely sighed and fixed her gaze on me. “I was there. We all were there, really, which was part of the problem. Carol Ann was more gifted than she knew. More troubled too. But I couldn’t see that back then.”
“She didn’t like Emily.”
“Oh, she didn’t mind the Emily that came to us at the start of the summer.
The broken bird Emily, who’d just come off a bad run of auditions in L.A.
and was too ashamed to go back up to the city and face her friends.
She liked that Emily. She was quiet and a little sad.
Pretty, but in a beaten-down way.” She waved a thin-boned hand. “But that Emily didn’t last.”
“Why the occult, though?” I pressed. “Why did she choose that way to find an answer?”