Chapter 41
Every day after that, Ingrid followed the same routine.
In the morning, she would select one of Edie’s dresses to wear, grab coffee and a muffin, go downstairs, and do a series of protection rituals in her altar room. She would then spend the day doing readings.
By the end of the week, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t figured this out years ago.
She felt so at home in Edie’s clothes. Protected and powerful.
Like she’d taken on the literal mantle of her grandmother.
Like they were working together at last. She decided she might as well move all of the contents of Edie’s entire closet into hers.
When she asked Miles to help her, he gave her a quizzical look. “Why don’t you just move into her room?”
It was the perfect solution. It would enable her to align with Edie, to get in her skin, so to speak.
She was convinced that Edie had intended her to get close to the Loefflers so she could right the balance, but she couldn’t do that unless she could find her way back to Sailor.
She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it herself.
Ingrid gave the Daffodil Room a rigorous cleaning, vacuuming the rug, dusting the chandelier, polishing oak, mahogany, walnut pieces.
She shook out the heavy curtains, wiped the dust and streaks from all the windows, and even though it was hot out, threw them open to let the fresh air in.
She felt guilty that she’d let Edie’s room get so filthy, but now she was putting everything to rights.
The cleaning also cleared Ingrid’s mind. There was so much Edie hadn’t told Ingrid about her past. About her thorny relationship with Rill. While it made sense that Edie had kept all that information private, it was crucial now that Ingrid understood fully who she was up against.
Know thy enemy. It was the way she was going to win Sailor back. She was going to find out who Rill Loeffler really was, what he’d done, and then she would beat him at his own game.
On the occasional Sunday morning, E. Shaver, a bookstore on the east side of Madison Square, had a sensory friendly hour of shopping.
They dimmed the lights and turned down the music in the shop, requesting customers keep silent as they browsed.
The bookstore cats that typically roamed each nook and cranny were crated.
This particular Sunday, the quiet was exactly what Ingrid needed.
Ingrid bought two books, one for Miles about navigating by the stars, and for Cas a book about the Salzburgers, the religious exiles from Austria who settled in Savannah.
Tucking them into her tote, she headed to the back of the store, to the tiny alcove dedicated to witchcraft, occult, and hoodoo literature.
In the cramped space, sitting on a crocheted puff, was a little woman in a man’s glen plaid blazer with red glasses hanging around her neck on a beaded chain. She was reading a book, holding it so close to her face the pages almost touched her nose. Potions for Beginners.
Ingrid grinned. “Miss Paulette,” she chided. “You’re no beginner.”
The woman looked up, and her face split into a wide smile. “Sugar! Come down here and hug my neck. If I get up, I’ll pop a ligament.”
Ingrid dropped down on the floor beside the puff and reached over to hug the older woman. Miss Paulette groaned theatrically.
“It never hurts to brush up on the basics. Sometimes we can outthink ourselves.” She put the book aside.
“You have the best job in the world,” Ingrid said. “Hide back here, read all the books you want. And you only have to point some poor seeker of good literature in the right direction if they accidentally trip over you. Plus, you get paid for it.”
The woman laughed. “Not enough to keep me in the manner to which I’ve never been accustomed. Good thing you and me had kin with the foresight to get into real estate back in the old days. Otherwise, our butts would be out on the street.”
Miss Paulette lived in a ramshackle town house on Washington Square that had been built back in the late 1700s and left to her by her aunt. Still, with nothing but a job at the bookstore, Ingrid couldn’t imagine how Miss Paulette paid her tax bill either.
“Amen to that,” Ingrid said.
“Praise the Lord,” Miss Paulette said absently.
She was not only a witch and connoisseur of all things occultic, she was also a deacon at her church.
Ingrid wasn’t sure how the woman reconciled the conflicting dogmas, but Ingrid appreciated her ecumenical bent. Plus, she’d been Edie’s closest friend.
Miss Paulette playfully swatted Ingrid’s leg. “Haven’t seen you in an age. Too busy hobnobbing with the hoi polloi, I hear.”
Ingrid laughed. “What does that even mean?”
“You Gen Zers. Y’all have lost the art of the idiom.” Miss Paulette stuck a bookmark between the pages and closed the book, setting it aside. She turned back, arranged her glasses at the end of her nose, and eyed Ingrid. “It means hanging out with the richies,” she said flatly.
“It’s fine,” Ingrid began. “I’m fine … and not really doing much hanging out. Anyway, speaking of that, I wanted to ask you something. About Edie and somebody she might’ve had a relationship with after my grandpa died.”
Miss Paulette wrinkled her nose and squinted over at the shelves.
“Rill Loeffler,” Ingrid said, “is who I’m talking about.”
Miss Paulette waited a beat, then turned back to Ingrid. A look of trepidation was on her face. This scared Ingrid. To the random person, Miss Paulette might seem like an eccentric, but Ingrid knew better. Miss Paulette saw things. She knew things—both in the material world and the spiritual.
“Tell me everything,” Ingrid said. “I need to know.”
Miss Paulette huffed. “Well, there’s nothing to tell. The man was plumb lovesick over Edie, even though she was a good twenty years older than him. But nothing happened. She didn’t take him seriously.”
“She didn’t feel the same way about him?”
“Well, she was flattered, of course. Who wouldn’t be? And her husband, your grandpa, was long gone, so she was free as a bird. Rill Loeffler was young and handsome. Rich as Croesus. He was a king, by the way, Miss Gen Z.”
“I know,” Ingrid said impatiently.
“Anyway,” continued Miss Paulette, “back then, if a woman was forty years old, she might as well have one foot in the grave. So, yes, Edie was flattered. And she probably entertained Rill’s nonsense more than she should have—let him make a pet out of her.
Flirt with her and overpay her, but she always kept him at arm’s length.
She knew better than to get tangled up with him. ”
“Because he was engaged to Scoot?”
“That.” Her eyes shifted back to the shelves. “And just because he was plain trouble.”
“What do you mean, ‘trouble’? What kind?”
Miss Paulette shifted her position with a bit of difficulty and another groan. “She told me once that he gave her a bad feeling. She called him a pirate. She said that he didn’t think the rules applied to him, that he made his own laws.”
A pirate …
“She said it would be doing goety if she messed with him.”
Ingrid’s stomach twisted. She had heard Edie use the term. Goety was necromancy, black magic done by summoning an evil spirit. So Edie had compared being involved with Rill Loeffler to being involved with a pirate and an evil spirit. Not good.
“What do you think made her say all that?”
Miss Paulette sighed and shook her head. “There were rumors.”
Ingrid waited. She could tell Miss Paulette was reluctant to bad-mouth a Loeffler, and she understood why. It was a heady thing to have the family as an ally, a fearsome thing to have them as an enemy.
Miss Paulette struggled to her feet, going to check outside the alcove. She turned back to Ingrid with a grim expression, her body blocking the entrance in case any oblivious customer should accidentally intrude.
“There was talk about Rill back then.”
“What kind of talk?”
“That he liked to mess around with girls. Young girls.”
Ingrid frowned. “He liked Edie, though. She was so much older than him.”
“I think Rill just liked women he couldn’t have. For him, I think it was all about breaking the rules.”
“What girls did he mess around with?”
She spoke slowly. “When Edie turned Rill away for good, he moved on to someone else.” Miss Paulette blinked a few times.
“I only know this because I accidentally stumbled on them one day. Edie had asked me to drop off some candles I’d made for her.
For her rituals. I knew where the key was hidden, Edie’s key to the garden level of the house.
I let myself in and took the candles back to one of Edie’s storage rooms. I heard something in the house.
Music playing. I went upstairs and found them—in the living room—together. ”
Ingrid felt sick. “Who?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer.
“Tess.” Miss Paulette grimaced. “I interrupted things, that was for sure. Sent that grown-ass man running for his life.” She shook her head. “Tess was just sixteen. A child. He was in his mid-twenties. I couldn’t ignore it. She begged me not to tell Edie, and I’m ashamed to say I agreed.”
“Paulette,” Ingrid said reproachfully.
“I know, I know. You can’t make me feel worse than I have for all these years. It was the wrong thing to do, but I was scared of him. Those Loefflers did what they wanted back then. Ran over folks. Took their property and ruined their businesses, if it benefited them.”
“Did anyone else know?”
“I confess that I did confide in Dean Remington. I had to tell someone; I was so upset. He told me to tell Tess she had to end it with Rill. For good. And I did.”
“Did she?”
“She did. And she left town soon after that. It was too big a secret for a girl that young to bear, I think. She had to get out of Savannah. Away from Edie. Away from him.”
Ingrid felt the horror of this revelation creep up her like a vine growing up her legs and over her body. It curled around her limbs, the nasty, snaking knowledge. And then another thought occurred to her …
Miss Paulette noticed Ingrid’s expression. “Oh, honey. No. The math isn’t right. He’s not your daddy. That’s another man Tess met when she was living down in Florida.”
The woman couldn’t have known that wasn’t what Ingrid was worried about. In fact, it hadn’t even occurred to her. All she could thing was he was in love with my grandmother … he had sex with my mother … and then, decades later, he came on to me …
Rill Loeffler acted like Cas sexting women was the end of the world. But he was the sick one. He was the one with the problem. She wanted to scream, ball her hands into fists, and knock every last book off every last shelf in this room and throw them to the floor.
“Darlin’, what’s wrong?” Miss Paulette said.
But Ingrid shook her head. “Nothing. I’m just surprised, is all.”
“Well, I expect you got a right to be. I guess your generation doesn’t know about the Loefflers the way us old folks do.
And we were used to keeping their nonsense quiet on account of …
well, on account of them being Loefflers.
” Miss Paulette moved close to Ingrid, gathering her hands and looking deeply into her eyes.
“Anyway, you got nothing to worry about. Rill married Scoot, and Tess left town, and your grandmama minded her own business. All was well that ended well.”
Ingrid nodded, but she knew nothing had ended. It had just begun.