Page 38 of The Sisters of Crimson House

“Did she hurt Mom and Dad?”

“What did the police say? ‘It looked like a magic trick.’” Miranda gave her a hard look. “Do you think they just clipped a hydrant and drowned on accident?”

Charley’s mind raced with the implications. “But why?”

“I don’t know!” Miranda exclaimed, frustrated. “It’s not like I got let in on all the family secrets.”

“I got none!” Charley fired back. “Absolutely zero. Why wasn’t I told about her?” This entity was relentlessly hunting their family members. Surely someone could have passed that tidbit along?

“Because this wasn’t supposed to be your problem,” Miranda said, weary.

“What is that supposed to mean?” said Charley, feeling dazed. Not her problem? They’d disappeared and left a million problems in their wake.

“We mustn’t burden your sister,” Miranda said in a fair imitation of Nicole’s southern accent. “How many times did I hear that? They worked with me, Mom and Sadie and Celeste—even Great Leo once showed me ways to set boundaries, keep the nastier spirits subdued. And I was really good at it. But it was always about keeping you safe as much as me.”

“Me?” Charley shook her head, struggling to process this. “But I’m nothing.” She hadn’t meant to say it like that. Did she really mean that? But there it was. Nothing.

Miranda’s eyes shimmered. “You were free.”

The words hung between them, heavy. Was this what freedom felt like? But what if Miranda was right? What if all the time she’d devoted to bitterness and abandonment, to hating Celeste, to envying Miranda, what if she’d had it all wrong?

“You told me you’d been dreaming something terrible was going to happen, and it’s why you came home,” said Charley carefully. “What did you dream?”

Without looking at her, Miranda slowly held up her palm, revealing the Star. Charley looked at the pattern forming on her own.

“The Seeker’s Star,” she said, her voice forlorn. “In all your time wishing for one, did you ever stop to wonder who is doing the seeking?” She looked at Charley pointedly. “You were invisible, until you weren’t.” Miranda stood up and stretched and began the long walk toward the cemetery exit.

Twenty-One

August 8, 1997

The bungalow was not a haunted house. It was a craftsman built on the outer rim of the park, toeing the border between Midtown and Downtown Memphis. It was cozy, nestled by mature pink and white azaleas and guarded by towering oaks whose limbs could turn lethal in a thunderstorm. But it wasn’t haunted. That was Crimson House, almost cartoonishly creepy with its turret and leaded glass and windows arched so steeply it gave the impression it was forever recoiling in shock. So Charley would continue ignoring the thump, thump, thump she heard from downstairs.

Thump, thump, thump.

Perhaps her parents were up late, listening to albums on the turntable in the family room, bumping into furniture as one of them got up to freshen a drink. She listened. She did not hear music, didn’t hear her parents’ laughter drifting up from the first floor. They’d been married for fifteen years and still cracked each other up, a reason her mother said they were still together. Charley had wondered if someday she would be as lucky. Miranda had sneered at this, saying if marriage was so fabulous, how come their parents were the only ones in the family to make it last? But Miranda made a habit of disdaining everything that wasn’t her idea. She would probably make fun of Charley for being scared of the sound downstairs.

The noise had stopped. She opened her ears as if to scan the entire house, the silence so loud it crackled in her ears. She was being dumb. She should—

THUD.

Charley sat up, trembling, staring at her closed bedroom door.

The sound was in the hallway.

THUD.

It was knocking on her door.

“Dad,” she said, or imagined that she said, as little air could leave her lungs for her to speak. Her dad would take care of it. He would make that sound go away. A terrible silence fell as she stared at the door, waiting for that dreadful bang to come again. Then, ever so quietly, a scratching. Like fingernails on the door.

“Baby?” It was her mother’s voice, soft. She was in the hallway outside the door. Who was she calling to? She sounded wary. Frightened.

“Miranda?”

BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG.

Charley screamed and jumped from the bed, hiding behind it.