27
Leo wasn’t around at breakfast. Jules found a bouquet of fresh-cut gardenias at a table reserved on her behalf. A lovely gesture,
though she would have traded the flowers for his company. No one to blame but myself, she thought. Before she’d left him last
night, she’d redrawn a boundary that he was intent on respecting.
Why was she so quick to shut the door? Intimacy was scarier than the ghost in the garden.
Rather than sit among the anonymous faces of the new guests, Jules requested a vase for the flowers and took her coffee and
croissants to her room. Her laptop was set up at the window seat. She was ready for the day’s work, but first she replied
to a string of text messages from Vicky, who’d made it to Arizona. This time her grandmother hadn’t greeted her with hostility.
She hadn’t greeted her at all, in fact. The elderly woman no longer responded to voice or touch. It didn’t stop Vicky from
spending hours at her bedside, reading to her from her favorite gossip magazines. The mental image alone had Jules feeling
low.
Outside her window springtime raged on. Last night she spent thirty minutes in the garden, waiting, before giving up. Looking
at it now, the garden was just a garden. Its allure was missing, the impulse to discover its mysteries gone.
Nothing called her name.
Jules got to work and, around one, ventured outdoors for lunch. After a bite, she restocked her travel-size toiletries at a pharmacy located steps from the literary society’s headquarters on Eaton Street. It would have been rude to walk past it. She decided to stop by and say hello.
Daphne was hanging out at the front desk, having a laugh with the young receptionist and snacking on a bag of plantain chips,
looking relaxed, the lecture series now behind her. She screeched when Jules walked through the door. “Goodness!” she exclaimed,
laughing. “Do my eyes deceive me?”
Jules slipped off her sunglasses. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, lady, step into my office!”
Her office was located on the second floor. On their way up Daphne asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Would you believe me if I said I missed my flight and returned to get some writing done?”
“I wouldn’t,” Daphne said, categorically. “I’d probably think you’re having an affair.”
“That’s fair, I guess.”
“Have you run into Leo? He’s still at The Aurora.”
“So am I,” Jules said. “And yes, I’ve run into him.”
Daphne laughed louder this time. “You’re not beating the illicit affair allegations!”
The office was small and cluttered with books, pamphlets, orchids on the windowsill, and postcards tacked to a corkboard.
Among all that artful mess, a framed photo of her late fiancé sat on a bookcase alongside a jar candle with the image of Christ,
his loving heart bursting with light and flames. She recalled Daphne saying she was raised Catholic. Jules wasn’t raised anything.
Her mother broke away from a nondenominational church when she left home. Jules considered the candle and thought it might
be helpful to have a set of spiritual principles to navigate these tricky times.
“My mother put that candle there,” Daphne said, “right next to my favorite photo of Felix. Now it’s a sort of shrine.
She’s more devastated than I am, to be honest. Mostly because I’ve sworn off dating, given up on marriage, and have no intention of raising children on my own.
So, in essence, I’ve robbed her of any more future grandchildren.
My brother has a son. Now that he’s divorced, it’s not likely he’ll have more kids. ”
“Is your mother a devout Catholic?” Jules asked.
“Vehemently. It’s for the best. All that volunteering keeps her busy, and I suppose it gives her hope.”
“How about you?” Jules asked.
“I’m exhausted, and slightly over it,” Daphne admitted. “I want to live my life without concern of an afterlife. Do you know
what I mean? I want to be free to make mistakes and not worry that every misstep is a step forward on the path to hell and
damnation.”
“I get it.”
Jules may not have a strict religious code, but she believed in an afterlife of sorts. She’d never spent much time thinking
of heaven or hell. She’d assumed her mother had gone to a “better place.” If that place was heaven, amazing. If it was the
cosmos and her soul burned bright in the night sky, even better. It was possible that Ruby was reincarnated as someone new
with a whole new life ahead of her. Generally, though, she hoped people of good faith would reunite in some version of paradise,
and lovers would find one another to finally live out the promises this world had failed to keep.
“I can’t believe you’ve stayed on at The Aurora,” Daphne said, returning to the topic that interested her most. “A friend
of mine manages a B and B on Fleming Street. Please call me if you need to get out of there in a hurry.”
“Why?” Jules asked. She’d been the inn’s greatest advocate. “Do you admit it’s haunted?”
Daphne sat at the edge of her desk. “I don’t know if I’d use that exact word.”
“It is haunted,” Jules affirmed. “Ayesha heard knocks on her door. Vicky had dreams. I . . . might’ve seen things.”
“Sebastien? Mathis? Leo?”
“No complaints,” Jules said. “Are you saying the women are hysterical?”
“No,” she said. “That’s an old trope. I’m saying the women were targeted.”
Dizzy, Jules sat on the nearest chair. “Aurora may not be a girl’s girl.”
“It could be anyone,” Daphne said. “That house is over a hundred years old. We can’t know everything that went down there.
Just the other day, at a property on Whitehead, they found a trove of letters lowered into an old well. We know the original
homeowner fell to his death back in the late eighteen hundreds. The letters date back to the 1960s and show the residents
pleading with the original owner to quit tormenting them. Can you imagine? Who knows who’s knocking on those doors at night.
It could be Old Man Jacobsen himself.”
Jules had never considered that. It might help to broaden her understanding of the spiritual makeup of the inn.
“How about you?” Jules asked. “Did you experience anything?”
“I had so-called dreams, too,” Daphne answered. “I slept with a string of rosary beads under my pillow, just in case, and
then, Sunday morning, I found this.” She extended her hand to show off a gold ring. “It belonged to Felix.”
Jules considered the simple wedding band. “How do you know?”
She recalled the incident well. Daphne was visibly shaken and reluctant to share details. If she believed it to be true, there was no point questioning her or demanding proof. But Daphne could back up her statement. She slipped off the ring and showed her the inscription.
Daphne, Always
“Did you find it,” Jules asked, “or did it find you?”
“Maybe Aurora intervened,” Daphne said. “If that’s the case, I’m grateful. But I’m glad to be out of that house. I sleep better.
My mind is clear. Knowing what you know, why did you return?”
“Oh . . . I don’t know.” Feigning ignorance was the best Jules could do.
“Are you at least getting any writing done?” Daphne asked. “What are you working on?”
“Line edits for my next release,” Jules replied, glad to switch topics. “I can’t wait to turn it in. And you?”
“The children.”
“Which children?” Jules asked. The grandchildren she wouldn’t give her mother or some other batch of kids?
“The children that the navy rescued aboard the William and Wildfire slave ships, the ones buried at the memorial site. Can you imagine their suffering?”
Jules had no trouble imagining it. She’d felt their pain so acutely on the trolley tour that she nearly lost her mind.
“I’m compelled to give them a voice,” Daphne said.
Throat tight, Jules nodded her encouragement.
“I’m approaching it through a series of short stories,” Daphne continued. “From the perspective of the mothers left behind
on the continent and the children themselves. I follow their journey until they reunite on the other side.”
“Do you believe there’s any real chance of that?” Jules asked. If, for example, her mother had returned to stardust, there
would be no grand reunion at the pearly gates.
“I have to believe it,” Daphne said. “Love can’t be lost forever. That’s my idea of hell.”
Jules managed to avoid Leo the rest of the day.
She didn’t go to him, and he didn’t come to her.
At midnight she resumed her vigil, returning to her spot in the garden.
But if summoning a spirit required focus, she was doomed to fail.
She could only think of Leo, and the only haunting was her desire for him.
She needed to feel his hands on her body, watch his eyes turn feverish, going mad for wanting her.
She wanted to taste his mouth again, lose her fingers in his hair, press her body to his, feel the scrape of his teeth on her tender nipples and his fingers inside her, and . . .
I’ve got to get out of here.
Jules raced indoors, leaving behind the night blooming flowers, the moist earth, the bright moon, and the shadows that moved
between the trees. She frantically touched herself in a hot shower until she came, her forehead pressed against the tile wall,
and the aching subsided. Except it didn’t.
Jules woke up spent and covered in sweat. She’d dreamed of Leo all night. In these dreams, he called her July and my love. She twisted in her sheets, her lust for him an ache in her throat, a rope around her waist, a throbbing between her legs.
Somehow she made it down to breakfast. He wasn’t there. Waiting at the usual table was a bouquet of dry lavender. She brought
the flowers to her nose and breathed deeply but felt no joy. Nothing was as good as him. The coffee was bitter, the food tasted
bland, and the fresh scent of lavender failed to intoxicate her.