Page 1 of The Sisters of Crimson House

One

October 31, 2000

Miranda Bryde was dying, and Charley Bryde stood on tippy-toes to see, grateful not to be the one with the air slowly being pushed from her lungs like a python’s squeeze.

But she was jealous all the same.

It wasn’t that she wanted her sister to die; it’s just that Miranda always got so much attention in the process. Charley looked over the costumed guests assembled in her grandmother’s double parlor, noting how perfectly still everyone was in their feathered plumes and Renaissance garb, like they all existed inside one held breath. They waited and watched Miranda onstage: pale, freckled skin, bulging, bloodshot eyes, a black silk cocktail dress that suggested she had gathered everyone together for dinner, not to choke to death for the evening’s main event. A tear worked its way from underneath the black lace mask she wore as her Halloween costume, glittering in the candlelight like a diamond. Even in death, Charley thought, leave it to Miranda Bryde to look like a movie star.

“Help me,” Miranda gasped, one hand leaving her throat long enough to reach out toward the audience. Her gaze landed on a woman dressed in a royal-blue sari affixed with dozens of teal feathers (her interpretation of a peacock) seated a few feet from the makeshift stage. Still clutching the thick bone-colored invitation that served as entry into the Spectacular, the woman shrank back in her seat in terror, using the card stock as a fan as she burst into tears. The guests had been instructed to remain calm “regardless of what might occur on the stage,” and no one was willing to risk their hostess’s charity, especially when the hostess was proving to be a psychopath.

But this guest wasn’t interested in being party to a suffocation. Jumping up from her seat, the woman in the sari ran down the aisle and fled the parlor, nearly knocking Charley off her perch on the velvet chaise, her DIY dragonfly wings nearly toppling the porcelain statue of an ibis. It was absurdly tall yet somehow the least ostentatious item in a room with twelve-foot ceilings and a chandelier adorned with horn-playing cherubs.

Guests were afforded the best views in the seats closest to the “stage,” risers brought out of storage that took the place of the black baby grand that typically held court in the parlor. Family clustered around one of two ornately tiled fireplaces or perched on antique furniture like Charley did currently, hunched over like a gargoyle in the flickering candlelight. Happy shrieks and screams of trick-or-treaters running past Crimson House drifted faintly through the stained-glass bay window behind her—past being the operative word. In the thirty-two years the Spectacular had operated as the most notorious affair to grace Elizabeth Street, no one had yet summoned the courage to ring the doorbell of the strangest house on the strangest block in the city of Memphis, Tennessee, on Halloween night.

Dwarfing the surrounding Victorian cottages with its three stories, Crimson House was not stately so much as poised to strike with its gabled roofs culminating in a stark fourth-story watchtower. Perhaps it was the ten-foot-tall Medusa on stilts who serenaded the guests with a sinister violin as they made their way up a torchlit walkway. Or maybe it was the scrum of limos prowling the curb like sleek remoras, waiting for their charges to spill from the mansion giddy with the secrets of the dead. Or maybe it was the whispers that the massive pink Queen Anne Victorian lurking at the dark end of the street was where the devil called home. Whatever the reasons, the bowl of candy that was dutifully left on the front porch every year remained full the next morning until Charley helped herself to a handful, the only perk of the job. But it’s not like anyone would be handing out candy at Crimson House. There was no trick-or-treating when there were paying customers to entertain on the most important night of the year.

A hand steadied her elbow. Her father, Charles, gave her a wink through his red mask and took her icy hand in his. She let him. Charley was fifteen, too old to be acting this vulnerable in front of him, but she didn’t want him to let go of her hand. He squeezed it, hard. He looked like he’d stopped breathing, too. On the other side of him, her mother, Nicole, whispered a prayer under her breath, a shower of silver stars threaded through her curtain of black hair. She was dressed as a shooting star, a variation on an annual theme: galaxy, universe. Her mother was the sun, her father forever in her orbit. But in this rare moment, their focus was not on each other but on the front of the room.

Standing to the right of the stage but no less commanding a presence than the girl struggling on it was the mistress of ceremonies herself, Charley’s grandmother Sadie Bryde. Sadie was not watching Miranda but gazing into the back of the room, her eyes locked onto her daughter Nicole’s. Her mouth was smiling. Her hazel eyes were not. They said, Wait. And so they waited as instructed. Waited and watched as Miranda turned a darker shade of scarlet.

In all her years of witnessing the annual Bryde Halloween Spectacular, Charley had watched her sister do many peculiar things while serving as an open channel for the spirits. She’d delivered a lecture on the arctic biome in Portuguese, courtesy of a renowned scientist who’d passed in the 1970s. She had held the hand of a woman dressed as a whale, a diaphanous silver tulle shroud serving as the downspout, whispering to her the last lines of an unfinished poem her husband wanted to share before he passed. But this was a new one. Charley had never watched her sister actually die.

One last desperate gasp for air, and then Miranda was a crumpled heap on the floor. The crowd cried out in fear, but no Bryde moved to help, Sadie still and mysterious as the sphinx next to her.

Charley couldn’t watch. She buried her face in her father’s cape, unable to look at the stage. Miranda was gone. Already Charley’s mind went to the places it shouldn’t—the elaborate funeral, hundreds of mourners. Her beautiful mother, world-famous healer Nicole Bryde Reynolds, her blue-black eyes welling underneath a black lace mantilla, would drape herself over the casket, devastated by the loss of the Vessel, the Bryde family jewel.

They will wish it had been me instead.

There’s a commotion in the front of the room. Opening one eye, Charley could just see over the crowd that Miranda was carefully sitting up with help from Sadie. Miranda blinked, calmly looking out over a sea of concerned, confused faces.

It was Miranda, but it was not Miranda. Slipping off her Zorro mask, she stood and studied the audience in front of her, her black hair styled in sleek waves that tumbled past her shoulders. Her lips curled into an arrogant smirk, the very shape of her oval face subtly different. Even from her vantage in the back of the room, Charley could tell by the way its hands grazed its hip bones, elbows bent in formation like a dancer’s, this Miranda-shaped thing was getting its bearings in this new body. Where her sister had disappeared to while this occurred was a different matter entirely. With a slight incline of her head to the front row, Miranda took a deep breath, and on the exhale, what sounded like a low moan built in pitch and crescendo until the room nearly vibrated with its shocking power. She was a ghost, and the ghost was singing.

“Regnava nel silenzio alta la notte e bruna…

“Colpia la fonte un pallido raggio di tetra luna…”

The relief that hit Charley made her dizzy, then furious. Miranda wasn’t dead, but damn her to hell for making Charley care. The finer points of mediumship evaded Charley, but what she had observed over the years boiled down to this: Thrilled by the invitation, some spirits slipped inside like a letter, Miranda the lovely, compliant envelope. Then there were the ones who tried Miranda on like a new dress, perhaps a little too enthusiastic for the chance to have an audience. How perfectly Miranda it was to invite in the one passenger possibly more melodramatic than she was.

Charley watched as her parents practically swooned with relief, Nicole beaming and clutching Charles’s elbow as they marveled at the performance onstage. Her handsome father, tall and sandy-haired in his pin-striped suit, grinned at his oldest child, his smile electric with pride. As Miranda’s voice soared, some in the front row shrank back, unsure of this spectacle unfolding so close to them. Charley’s skin crawled at this raw power and strength exploding from Miranda’s slight frame. But nobody could look away. Charley could see it, their desire for magic, their need for it so plain on their stupid slack-jawed faces. She hated them all. She hated herself for the way the goose bumps raced up her arms as that voice climbed and threatened to overtake her senses.

The final note hung in the air, then vanished like smoke. A beat later, the room was awash in cheers and applause, Chiavari chairs scraping against mahogany floors as they all stood to marvel at Miranda’s extraordinary performance. A man quietly wept next to Charley, whispering, “Grazie, grazie.” She knew it was coming before he did, saw the man’s legs buckle as if his body could no longer withstand being in the presence of such beauty. He sank to his knees and listed to the right like a sinking ship, the thud of his head hitting tongue-and-groove floors camouflaged by the deafening applause.

Charley sighed. At least it was a guy this time. Her dad would have to help her out with this one.

“We’re up, kid,” said Charles, nodding at the guest sprawled on the floor. There was always a fainter, someone with too tight a corset or excess champagne, and Charley and someone from catering would maneuver them into a corner with a water and a prechilled washcloth. Considering he’d anted up $5,000 for the privilege of walking through the door, Charley figured he’d earned two bottles of water for the trouble.

The man was already coming to, cradling his head tenderly as her father crouched next to him. Charley grabbed the water and a washcloth from a tray stationed in the back, observing as her father carefully helped the man to his feet.

Charles Reynolds did not possess the gifts that were the birthright of the Bryde women. He couldn’t predict the weather, let alone what the future held for his lovely wife and daughters, but Charley thought his charisma and genuine heart might be equally as powerful. He nodded at Charley to flank the man as they carefully threaded their way through the small crowd before gently depositing him in a chair in the corner. Charley placed a bottle of water in each of his hands, awkwardly pressing the washcloth to his forehead like he was a feverish child. He smiled up at her, still weeping, from pain or awe, Charley wasn’t sure.

“Sì, bellissima,” he whispered to her through tears, and Charley forced a smile. If he knew what a pain in the ass Miranda was in real life, she thought as she rejoined her father in the back of the room, the man’s freshly plucked wallet hidden in her palm, he might not be so overcome by the spectacle.

“We are deeply honored to have you as our guest, signora,” said Sadie as she joined Miranda back onstage, giving her a polite bow.

“Prego. It was my pleasure.” Miranda’s voice sounded strange to Charley’s ears, low and husky but no less musical than her singing.

Draped in a shimmery copper dress as an updated take on the warrior goddess Athena, Sadie turned to face the audience. Sadie Bryde was in her sixties, cagey as hell about her birth year, and widowed for at least twenty of them, but she moved with a lithe grace that kept her many suitors visiting Crimson House for more than psychic consultations. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I present La Divina…the legendary Maria Callas.”