Chapter 3
Out of the corner of her eye, Ingrid saw the sheer lace curtain in a window of the town house to the right of hers flutter and drop.
Behind it, Gloria Ledieu’s powdery white face, blue-black hair, that slash of coral lipstick was visible for a brief second.
She’d obviously heard the exchange between Ingrid and Miles.
Dried-up, Bible-quoting vampire, Ingrid thought darkly.
Once, when Ingrid was a little girl, Gloria had told Edie she didn’t know how Edie could worship Satan and not be afraid of going to hell.
Edie hadn’t deigned to answer her, but later, when Ingrid asked her about it, she said who had time for someone who didn’t know the difference between a pagan and a Satanist, for Pete’s sake?
Lately, every time Gloria ran into Ingrid and Miles outside their houses, the old bat said in a pinched, high-pitched, baby voice that she’d buy Ingrid’s town house if she ever wanted to sell. She sometimes added that she was praying for them.
Gloria probably couldn’t wait for the whole roof to cave in on Ingrid and Miles so she and her red-faced husband, Harmon, could unload their much plainer brick town house next door and buy Ingrid’s prettier place.
In fact, Gloria Ledieu was probably on her knees right that very moment, before that framed picture of Blond Jesus she had hanging in her living room, practicing her own form of witchcraft—that old Bible magic known as “name it and claim it”—telling God she wanted the place for herself.
Dear Lord, how does a Satan worshipper like Ingrid White deserve to live in such a historically important piece of property? With such intricate ironwork? And plaster ceiling medallions and herringbone oak floors? It’s blasphemy, Jesus, that’s what it is …
Ingrid was glad there was no foot traffic.
She wasn’t in the right frame of mind. She went back inside and pulled the iron door shut with a deafening clang.
She hoped the neighbors heard it, that it had scared the bejesus out of Gloria Ledieu and knocked Blond Jesus off the wall, falling right on that judgey noggin of hers.
Maybe it had given her other neighbor, Dean Remington, a fright, too.
Such a fright that one of his precious eighteenth-century French porcelain soup dishes slipped from his pale, elegant fingers and shattered into smithereens on his waxed floor.
Old Dean wanted her house as well, so he could make it into an Airbnb that his much-younger husband could run instead of modeling or acting or whatever the guy pretended to do while he actually smoked weed all day by the soaking pool in their manicured courtyard.
But no one was getting this place.
No one.
It was Ingrid’s place of business. Her home and her birth-right from the last remaining family member she had.
This is what the Ledieus and Dean Remington and his lazy husband could never understand.
She didn’t care how the paint peeled, or the roof leaked.
They would carry her out of this place dead before she gave it up.
She closed the inner door, letting her head rest against it.
She closed her eyes. All she had on the books for the remainder of the day—a gorgeous Saturday in May, Memorial Day weekend—was a single bachelorette party.
One single bachelorette party, when every hotel, bed-and-breakfast, and Airbnb in the city was fully booked.
When downtown was crawling with tourists.
When no one could get a seat at The Grey or Saint Bibiana or The Olde Pink House, she had one measly bachelorette party.
Despair crashed over her. She was fooling herself to think she could keep her neighbors or anyone else who had enough cash away from this place. She was going to lose her home. It was only a matter of time.
She pushed away from the door. Her hands were shaking, her breath coming out in short, scary puffs.
A panic attack. She could feel it coming, and the fear of that was almost greater than the original fear.
She had to calm down before the bachelorette party showed up.
Otherwise, she couldn’t hear anything the Goddess had to say to her.
Her readings would bomb, and if that happened, there was no chance of a tip.
Her panic grew. She owed the Chatham County tax commissioner $8,900 in exactly one month. What was she going to do?
Nothing, right now. Right now, she had to calm herself. She looked around the room where she received clients—her grandmother’s parlor—and catalogued all the things she saw in the calmest way she could.
Pink marble table (in the center of the room) …
Moss-green velvet Victorian settee (by the door) …
Threadbare, mismatched armchairs (flanking the settee, there since 1969 when Edie first opened up shop) …
She breathed in and out, slowly and steadily.
There used to be a grass rug covering the pine floor back then, but when Ingrid had gotten Litha, the cat had scratched it to ribbons, and Edie’d had to throw it on the curb.
When her grandmother had taken to her bed, confused from the cancer, and refusing to eat or bathe, Ingrid had dragged a dusty Turkish rug out of one of the guest rooms and down the stairs.
Edie …
Edie, where are you? I need you …
And yet her grandmother did not appear. Ingrid stood and walked farther into the depths of the garden level, through the warren of bare brick and pine floors that had been Edie’s storage rooms. The cramped bathroom had a single light bulb that cast a sickly yellow glow from the ceiling, a corner sink with a crumbly rubber stopper on a chain, and a toilet that sounded like a 747 taking off when it flushed.
She splashed her face with water and looked hard at the medicine cabinet’s corroded mirror. She looked paler than usual with shadows under her deep-set hazel eyes. In this light her eyes looked dark and depthless, full of fear. Not good. Not the kind of aura that drew clients in.
She smoothed the curtain of light brown hair that hung around her narrow face, the bangs that lay across her forehead.
She swiped under her eyes. Lifted her hands up beside her face and swished outward, brushing away the nasty stuff those boys had brought in with them.
Brush, brush, brush. All the negative energy moved away from her.
Moved to another place. Wave, wave, wave in the good, the light, the fortune.
She closed her eyes and pictured Edie. Not the Edie at the very end who lay in bed, thin and gray, hands like claws, with her mouth hanging open, teeth unbrushed because she fought Ingrid’s attempts with the toothbrush.
Not the Edie ravaged by a cancer of the lungs that made the doctors frown in bewilderment because, not only had the woman never smoked, she hated the smell of cigarettes.
No. She pictured Edie the way she was when Ingrid first came to live with her.
Edith White had been short like Ingrid, with birdlike arms and long, loose, gray hair held back by twin gold barrettes.
She had kind brown eyes and pleasantly wrinkled, pink-as-a-bunny-rabbit skin.
The day Ingrid arrived, Edie was wearing a shapeless linen dress, a lavender mohair sweater, and Birken-stocks with moisture-wicking socks.
She’d welcomed Ingrid with three brisk kisses, one for each cheek and one on the forehead.
Then she had served her a plate of warm gingerbread topped with whipped cream.
Ingrid was six years old and at the time, nobody had explained anything to her.
Her mother, Tess, and Tess’s nameless boyfriend, not Ingrid’s father, had simply dropped her off at Edie’s and driven off in a cloud of Dodge Charger exhaust. Edie told her granddaughter that she was there because Edie was a widow and lonely and had wanted Ingrid to come live with her.
Had insisted on it, frankly, so many times that Ingrid’s mother finally relented and dropped the girl off for a forever sleepover.
But now that she was grown and Tess was lying in a grave somewhere in Florida that Ingrid had never seen, she knew the story was bullshit. A fantasy concocted by a grandmother to make a little girl feel loved. Still, the story made her feel warm inside. It made her love Edie even more.
Eyes closed, Ingrid could see her grandmother in perfect detail.
The version who opened the black door of the pink plaster town house when she was six years old, standing alone on the small marble stoop, clutching her nylon duffel bag.
Ingrid saw Edie’s smile, a smile that bathed her in warm, liquid light.
She followed the sharp eyes that darted down to the Dodge idling at the curb, then back up to Ingrid’s face.
She heard the message they sent: You are mine now. I will take care of you.
And she had. She had loved Ingrid and taught her everything she knew.
She had left her all her worldly possessions.
And she had charged her with a mission, even though that mission remained as murky now as it had when Edie bestowed it two years ago.
A bunch of vague talk about righting balances and keeping an eye out for pirates.
It was the cancer talking, she’d convinced herself. Definitely not something she could figure out by trying.
“Edie,” Ingrid said now, out into the small bathroom. She mentally bent that very same light that had connected the two of them all those years ago, using it to link her heart to her grandmother’s spirit. “We are connected.”
The room was still. She could hear Miles banging somewhere above her, up on the roof.
Her brow furrowed as she imagined the light looping around each chamber of her heart, blasting open the valves and shooting directly into her grandmother’s spirit. Help me, Edie. I’m so alone. I don’t know what to do. I need your help …
She waited, but the air in the bathroom was still. She opened her eyes. Her face looked exactly the same, except now, there was a distinct bloom of red in the corner of her right eye. Probably a speck of dust from this crumbling house. Great.
She switched off the light in the bathroom and headed back to the parlor.
At the old rolltop desk, which had also been her grandmother’s, she checked the green-and-gold ledger, where Edie used to record her appointments.
It even still had the last few clients Edie had seen before she died, the appointments written on the first few pages in her elegant, slanted handwriting.
The ledger was enormous, taking up most of the surface of the desk, with large pages of thick vellum that required an actual finesse when turning them and therefore felt somehow of import.
Like she was some kind of medieval mage, thumbing through an ancient codex.
She’d used the ledger when she’d first taken over for Edie, eventually transitioning to the calendar on her laptop for convenience. But that laptop had given up the ghost a few months ago and she didn’t have the funds to replace it, so she’d returned to the ledger.
Ingrid flipped the page to the day’s date and ran her finger down to the one o’clock line and the name she’d written there.
Sailor Loeffler, bachelorette, 5
As she read the entry, she felt a strange prickling up the back of her neck and over her scalp.
Also, at that very same moment, she heard the iron door rattle and whine on its hinges.
Then the inner door opened, and sunlight filled both the anteroom and the parlor, almost immediately followed by a heady cloud of multiple brands of perfume.
Ingrid turned toward the open door to greet the party. For a brief moment, she was blinded by the bright sunshine, which made the shadowy parlor look even darker, but then her eyes adjusted, and she was able to perceive the outline of a woman. The woman who stood in front of the others.
Her.
She.
The most important one. The one who mattered.
She stood out from all the rest. Her … she …
was tall and willowy and graceful. Dressed in an extremely short, ruffled flower print dress that showed legs, long and sculpted like a ballerina’s.
Her hair was a cool vanilla blond that spilled over one shoulder and all the way down to her waist. It framed a face made of sharp, smooth, flawless planes with wide-set, startlingly blue eyes.
Not merely homecoming-queen pretty, this woman was a real, honest-to-God beauty.
When she turned to say something to her friends, the hair swung and wrapped around her shoulders and arms …
Salt water and cane sugar, Ingrid thought instantly.
Then the other girls came into sharp focus. Four of them and not girls, actually. Women in their mid-twenties. All beautiful, too, in various ways. Short, tall, curvy. Each impeccably dressed, each bejeweled, carefully coiffed, and expertly made up.
Richies, Miles would call them.
“Oh my God, she’s staring at you,” said one of them. “She must be seeing something in the spirit world.”
There was a ripple of laughter. Ingrid flushed, looked down at the floor.
“Finley.” The girl, the leader—her … she—spoke in the tone of someone who was comfortable being in charge, always being the final word, in both praising and reprimanding. The tittering ceased.
In the sudden quiet, Ingrid looked up. She was smiling at her, not with the practiced smirk of an Instagram model but with a pure sincerity. As she did, her eyes crinkled, and her perfectly straight, white teeth flashed.
“Hi, Edie,” the girl said to her in a mellifluous voice. “I’m Sailor Loeffler. It’s so nice to meet you.” She held out her hand, forthright and frank, and Ingrid took it. Squeezed once, gently, then released it.
Weak in the knees. Isn’t that what they said when you met your Prince Charming? Ingrid wouldn’t know; it had never happened to her. But this … this felt like something awfully close to that. Not romantic or sexual. Something much, much more important. Something like destiny.
She finally found her voice. “Edie was my grandmother. I’m Ingrid, actually.”
“Ingrid. I love that name.”
Ingrid flushed. “Please come in. Everyone.”
Ingrid might’ve said everyone, but she kept her eyes on Sailor Loeffler.
The words were said to her and her alone, because, in some strange way, in the way Edie had taught her to trust, Ingrid knew that the only one who would ever matter to her in that room, the person who was going to change her life forever, was Sailor Loeffler.