Chapter 4
Ingrid, distracted by her money woes, hadn’t realized the Sailor Loeffler in her appointment book was one of the Loefflers.
The Loefflers were not just a family, they were Savannah Sauce, the spicy, tangy, peppery condiment everyone in the Southeast (and further afield) put on …
well, everything they ate. Seafood, beef, chicken, wild game.
Barbeque and sandwiches, hot and cold. Whatever was on your plate, Savannah Sauce made it taste better.
Some people even dunked their fries in it.
But Savannah Sauce was more than just a condiment; it was an empire. So not only was Sailor Loeffler wealthy, she also belonged to the exclusive, upper echelons of the city’s society that people like Ingrid and Miles never dreamed of rubbing elbows with.
Even as Ingrid remembered these things, the minute she set eyes on Sailor Loeffler, she forgot them all over again.
Like a disembodied hand sweeping the plastic lever on an Etch A Sketch, right-whoosh, left-whoosh, her mind was wiped clean, leaving her brain a glorious, meditative blank.
Like how they say if you ever happened to be floating in the void of space, you would hear a peaceful, sustained humming of middle C.
It was as if she’d been put in a trance, and all she heard was Sailor Loeffler’s perfect middle C.
Sailor was sound and light. The young woman filled up Ingrid’s dingy, cramped parlor and bathed everything and everyone inside it with a radiating, pulsating glow.
It was both warm and inviting. The kind of light that made you forget about vulture neighbors, caving-in roofs, and soon-to-be delinquent tax bills.
The kind of light that, without being too gushy about it, made a person think about possibilities.
About hope.
“Who do you want to take first?” Sailor Loeffler asked Ingrid.
Immediately, the chorus of women behind Sailor sang out—What was she talking about? She was the bride! She was going first!—and pushed Sailor forward. Ingrid smiled and, still pleasantly floating on that sustained, outer space, middle C ringing in her head, escorted Sailor to the back-back room.
What was she doing?
This wasn’t where she took clients.
After Edie’s death, Ingrid had desperately needed to do something with herself, so instead of doing something nuts like, say, running through Forsyth Park, wailing and rending her garments like some ancient, low-tier Greek goddess, she had cleaned.
Swept and scrubbed and polished every inch of every room in the whole house.
And then she’d gotten down to the garden level, the lowest level of the house, which consisted of five rooms: Edie’s parlor, where she did readings, the anteroom, where people waited, the bathroom, and two storage rooms, which she called the back-back rooms. The back-back rooms were crammed with boxes and chests and rolling racks of spangled, swingy skirts and peasant blouses, fringed shawls and silk scarves.
Oh, Edie. How full of life and color she’d been.
She’d really put on a show in her day. Really leaned into that whole stereotypical gypsy, palm-reader aesthetic.
As Ingrid had carefully sorted the costumes, folded them reverently, and put them in stacking plastic bins, which she stored in the smaller of the rooms, she’d finally broken down, sobbing and shaking as she sat on the floor.
Spent at last, she finished the organizing then turned to the larger, now-empty, back-back room.
She decided to turn it into her own personal sanctuary, an altar room, so she painted the brick walls a creamy white and borrowed another rug from upstairs, a royal blue Oriental with pink and gold birds of paradise flowers at each corner.
In the center of the room, she arranged two white leather chairs on either side of a low Moroccan brass tray table.
In one corner, she’d put her favorite floor lamp from upstairs, a large brass and white enamel spray of flowers that looked like it was sprouting out of the floor.
Finally, she set up an altar on a breakfront sideboard, covering it with her most treasured relics.
The altar room was where Ingrid meditated and prayed and did all of her most private rituals.
She cleaned it thoroughly once a week with lavender oil and Dr. Bronner’s, burned incense, and on special occasions, when she did special sun rituals, spritzed perfume from Edie’s last remaining bottle of Ana?s Ana?s.
It was Ingrid’s most private, sacred space.
Miles wasn’t allowed in the room, nor was Litha, and she’d certainly never taken a client there.
But seeing Sailor Loeffler standing in her parlor seemed to have knocked her off balance.
She needed to do this reading somewhere else, in a special place where she could truly address the woman who was standing before her.
Sailor looked around the room. Ingrid could hear a cork pop back in the anteroom and the girls’ chatter as they passed around champagne. She shut the door behind them and turned to face Sailor.
“What a lovely space,” Sailor said. “Who did it for you?”
Ingrid hesitated. “It’s just some of my grandmother’s things from upstairs. Why don’t you have a seat?” She gestured to one of the white leather chairs and Sailor sat. “Would you like something to drink? Water? Tea?”
Ingrid was acutely aware of her still slightly damp dress that was sticking to her in more than a few awkward places. She could feel the bangs that she’d so carefully smoothed earlier curling at her temples like two little mountain goat horns.
“No, thank you.” Sailor glanced around. “This seems like the safest place in the world. It’s a little idyll, isn’t it?”
Their eyes met then disconnected. Along with being way too tall, too pretty, too perfect to be real, Sailor seemed to be a genuinely nice person. These things surprised Ingrid, although they shouldn’t have. Nobody was one thing, were they? Wealthy, poor, bully … witch. People were complicated.
Ingrid found matches in a box from The Fitzroy Bar on the breakfront.
Miles and his little gifts. Like Litha and her dead, velvety moles left on the doormat for Ingrid.
She went about lighting the candles, her back to Sailor, as a round of cackling laughter drifted from the front room.
Ingrid felt a remnant of that earlier fear swirl around her.
The panic again. What if she couldn’t do it—do Sailor’s reading?
What if her energy was blocked, and she had nothing to say?
If she botched this, Sailor would leave and the rest of them would go with her, and Ingrid would be in worse straits than before.
They’d give her bad reviews and she’d not only not get any new clients, she could lose the appointments she already had.
Her fingers that held the match trembled. The wick caught.
Or …
What if she knocked it out of the park?
What if she impressed the Sailor Loeffler?
“The wedding’s in September,” Sailor said, interrupting Ingrid’s wild, careening thoughts, and Ingrid realized the match had burned almost down to her fingers. She blew out the match and lit another.
“A little over three months away. We had our real bachelorette last month, in Turks.”
Ingrid held the match to the wick of the last candle. It caught and the flame stretched high.
“Turks and Caicos,” Sailor went on. “I got us this villa. Spectacular, with a pool and everyone got their own bedroom and bath. There was a butler and a concierge. Yoga every morning … or evening, if you wanted. I spent forever planning it … spent a lot of …” She sighed.
“They said they were bored. That there was nothing to do. Can you believe that?”
Ingrid shook her head. She honestly could not. She also couldn’t imagine being that rude to anyone who offered her a free tropical vacation.
Sailor let out a caustic laugh. “Don’t get me wrong. I love them, I do. It’s just, I go to all that effort and the whole time, all they want is some basic bachelorette party in Savannah with the bars and a strip club. Go figure.”
Ingrid couldn’t resist a smile. It was hard to picture Sailor’s fancy friends rampaging their way through town, bearing tumblers filled with cocktails, wearing cowboy boots and tiaras and sashes that read HOT MESS and MAID OF DISHONOR and SHOT QUEEN.
Sailor leaned forward. “They’re not from here originally, you know, except Poppy.
Her I’ve known since kindergarten. The rest of them don’t really know this place.
They think it’s what it was back in the nineties.
You know, with all that woo-woo mystical stuff they read in the book.
All that voodoo priestess stuff. But, I mean, you really think that stuff is better than a five-star resort?
Come on. Anyway, whatever. I found one of your flyers in my door, and they were all about it. So here we are.”
Ingrid noticed Sailor’s gaze had wandered over to the altar.
To Ingrid’s collection of her grandmother’s things.
The embroidered shawl. The silver candlesticks, cluster of crystals, jug of grave dirt, and Waterford goblet of water from the Savannah River.
There were other things on the altar, too.
White tapers, black pillars, the palmetto St. Brigid cross woven by the woman at Forsyth Park’s fountain.
“I like your …”
“Altar,” Ingrid said, sitting in the chair opposite Sailor.
Sailor’s blue eyes swerved back to her. “So you’re a witch, not a psychic?”
“I’m both.”
“You do, like, voodoo?”
“I’m not Haitian or West African. So, no.”
Ingrid didn’t like getting mired in explaining the details of the particular form of magic she practiced.
Edie had taught her a sort of homemade witchcraft, passed down from her ancestors and improvised with every succeeding generation, and more often than not, those conversations usually ended up with Ingrid having to defend why she did some things (prayed to the light) and didn’t do others (tarot, for example).
Mostly to other women who’d watched Practical Magic one too many times and fancied themselves experts.
“Oh,” said Sailor. “My mistake.”
“May I?” Ingrid nodded toward her lap, where her hands rested, one on top of the other, a mirror of Ingrid’s. “Your left first.”
Sailor offered her left hand, and, in one quick glance, Ingrid took in the essentials. Soft, smooth skin, the enormous princess-cut, emerald ring, the rounded nails, painted in some type of French manicure, pale pink with narrow brown tips.
And then something strange happened. A flash, behind Ingrid’s eyes. A clicking sound along with it.
A picture …
A picture taken with a phone then sent as a text. A text slipping into a long chain of words-only messages with a swoop and flashing onto the bright screen of another phone …
A series of photos …
Bare skin …
Slightly out-of-focus breasts … small, with peach-pink nipples …
Fingers hooked in a black lace thong …
Ingrid shivered with dismay and blinked the images away. She hadn’t expected that sort of thing, and she really didn’t want it. Surely the images weren’t connected to Sailor. Maybe some energy leftover from the boys who’d been here earlier. She would start again. Clear her mind and start again.