Dying To Stay (Starfall Bay Midlife Magical Mysteries #3)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The Finleys were making progress.

Two months ago Dorothy had come in hot about a gravy boat. This morning she settled into her chair across from me with the careful ease of a woman who had been practicing, and Leonard materialized in the opposite corner before she’d even finished unbuttoning her coat.

“He’s here already,” I said.

“I know.” Dorothy had stopped looking at the wrong spot. She addressed the air slightly to her left now, which was about three feet off, but she was trying. “Leonard. I want to talk about the Hendersons.”

Leonard’s ghost crossed his arms, but the gesture had gone soft around the edges. He looked like a man performing stubbornness rather than feeling it. “I thought we settled the Hendersons.”

“He says he thought you settled the Hendersons.” I told her.

“We settled the silver. The Hendersons are a separate conversation.”

I relayed this. Leonard made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

“She always could hold two grudges at once,” he said, with something in his voice that sounded almost like admiration.

The October light came through the cottage windows at a long angle, the way it did this time of year, turning the small front room amber.

I had put a bowl of late chrysanthemums on the table — gold and rust — because the Merriwell tea room had started carrying flowers from a farm up the coast and I’d developed a habit I couldn’t explain.

The cottage smelled like coffee and cold salt air.

It always smelled like coffee and cold salt air.

In the kitchen doorway, the ghost of my late mother-in-law, Rosaria, stood watching the session with the expression she used when she was pretending not to be interested.

Housecoat. Hair pinned. Arms folded across her chest. Her eyes moved between Leonard and Dorothy the way they always did during the sessions — taking inventory, cataloguing details she would analyze later whether I wanted her to or not.

She was a little more translucent than she’d been in August. Not dramatically. You wouldn’t notice unless you’d been watching, and I had been watching, and I noticed.

I was not thinking about it this morning.

The session ran its full hour. By the end, Dorothy had extracted from Leonard a full account of the Henderson barbecue — which had involved, apparently, a remark about his potato salad that she had been making for thirty years and which he had considered beneath comment and which she had not realized he’d heard.

Leonard, for his part, admitted that the potato salad remark had been a small grievance he had attached to a larger one he had never named, and that the larger one was something he now understood had been his own fault, and that he was sorry for the Henderson barbecue and several related barbecues spanning the years 1988 through 1994.

Dorothy cried. Not the stuck grief of the first session, but something cleaner. Relief moving through.

“Same time next week?” she asked at the door.

“Same time.”

She patted my arm. “You do good work, Gina.”

After she left I stood in the empty front room for a moment, listening to the harbor. A gull. A boat engine. The quiet of a weekday morning in October when the summer people were gone and the town had settled back into itself.

“She’s going to be fine,” Rosaria said from behind me.

“She is.”

“Leonard, on the other hand, still doesn’t fully grasp the significance of 1994. But that’s men.” She drifted toward the kitchen. “Your phone is buzzing.”

My daughter, Carmen, had sent a text. Carmen was always sending texts. She had the energy of someone who had decided that communication was a gift you gave people whether they had asked for it or not.

Mom. Thanksgiving. We need to talk dates. I know it’s months away but Josie mentioned maybe coming and I want to lock it down before she changes her mind and if we wait until November we’ll all be stressed.

Then: Also hi. How was your morning? Did Dorothy get closure?

I smiled. I typed back: The Hendersons are resolved. Thanksgiving: I’ll talk to your sister.

I held the phone a moment after I sent it. Two years ago this text would not have existed. Carmen and Nick had been in my corner through the divorce; Josie had needed more time and I had given it to her. Now she was calling on Sundays and mentioning Thanksgiving, and I was counting that.

They had all taken the other thing — the gifts, the coven, the fact that their dead grandmother was haunting me — in stride, which I had not expected.

Carmen had asked practical questions. Nick had said that actually explains a lot.

Even Josie had simply absorbed it, filed it, moved on.

I was more grateful for that than I knew how to say.

I put the phone down on the counter and looked out the kitchen window at the harbor.

The water was gray-green this morning, a little choppy.

The Merriwell Building was visible from this angle if you leaned slightly — the upper floors, the freshly pointed brickwork, the windows they’d replaced over the summer.

The tea room had had its grand reopening in September, new sign and everything, and for two Sundays running the line had been out the door.

I’d gone there once with Lori, uneasy about stepping inside, but the scone helped. The second one helped even more.

The town was unchanged. That was the thing about Starfall Bay.

It had almost not been, and it didn’t know, and it was going about its business exactly as it always had — fishing boats coming in, kids on the harbor walk, the seasonal shops boarding up and the year-round ones settling into their winter hours.

It was ordinary in the way that only something saved could be.

Rosaria was in her chair. She had positioned herself close to the window, watching the harbor the way she did most mornings, with the coffee she couldn’t drink and the expression of a woman comfortable enough with her situation to stop performing contentment about it.

Tony called at noon, which was when he called on days he was working.

“Dinner tonight,” he said. It wasn’t a question. This was something I had come to appreciate about Tony Caruso — he had stopped pretending that dinner was optional once it had become clearly not optional.

“Where?”

“Tammy’s. She’s doing the halibut this week.”

“What time?”

“Seven.”

“I’ll be there.”

A pause. I could hear the station sounds behind him — someone on a radio, a door, the industrial hum of a building that ran twenty-four hours.

“Good session this morning?” he asked.

“Dorothy Finley finally addressed the Henderson barbecue.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means she’s making progress.”

“Good,” he said, and meant it.

After I hung up I thought about what it was like to have a man who asked about your clients without needing a full explanation, who showed up in the ways that mattered and didn’t require you to manage his feelings about the ways that didn’t.

I was fifty-two years old and I had been married for twenty-six years to a man I’d loved and then grown into a shape that fit poorly and then quietly resented, and I had been alone after that, and I had not expected this — the steadiness of it, the warmth of being known by someone who had chosen to keep knowing you.

I was happy.

My phone buzzed again.

Josie.

Not a text. A call. Which meant she was doing the thing she had started doing six weeks ago — calling on Sunday afternoons, and sometimes, apparently, on Tuesday middays as well.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

A beat. We were still in the careful stage, Josie and I. The stage where the calls happened but nobody had quite said the thing underneath the calls yet. She had stopped being angry with me and started being tentative, which was progress, and she was here, which was what mattered.

“How are you?”

“Good. Really good.” I heard how it landed, the realness of it, and felt her register it from a distance. “You?”

“Fine. Work is — you know.” She paused. “Are you doing anything tonight?”

“Tony’s taking me to Tammy’s.”

“Oh.” Another pause came through the line, textured with something I couldn’t quite read. “Okay. Good. I’m glad.”

She was, I thought. Carefully, imperfectly, with the effort of someone who had held a position a long time and was slowly allowing herself to revise it.

“I’ll call Sunday,” she said.

“I’ll be here.”

After she hung up I stood in my kitchen for a moment with the phone in my hand and thought about how long it had taken to get here and how I hoped she knew I had waited for exactly as long as it required.

At three in the afternoon, Rosaria stood up.

“I have to go to a thing,” she said.

“What thing?”

“A thing. You know, on the other side.” She adjusted the collar of her housecoat with the formality of a woman putting on a coat for church. “Don’t wait up.”

“Rosaria—”

But she was already gone. The kitchen held her absence the way a room holds the absence of someone who was recently, specifically present. Her chair. Her untouched coffee cup on the counter. The small impression of her in the ordinary architecture of the afternoon.

I made lunch. I saw my afternoon clients — a woman named Patricia who came every third week to talk to her daughter, and a retired fisherman named Harold who had one question for his late business partner and received an answer he seemed satisfied with.

I walked to the harbor. I looked at the Merriwell Building from the water side. I came home and got ready for dinner.