Page 6 of The Sisters of Crimson House

Charley exhaled in disgust. This was the party line delivered every time she questioned her nonmagical origins. Her mother did not fare much better, giving her daughter a look of such pity over her “condition” that Charley had learned to stop asking.

“But not gifted like Miranda.”

“You each have your own special destiny.”

“Sadie, I thought—” she began and then stopped, words and courage both failing her. “Maybe I—” she tried again, searching for the right words while her grandmother studied her. What exactly had she seen earlier that evening? Was a mirage in a champagne glass an important clue explaining what had happened to Miranda? Or was this line of thinking just an attempt to show that she, too, had a “special destiny”?

Sadie rose from her seat, draining the last of the champagne and effectively ending the conversation. “I’m just going to answer that, and I’ll be up shortly to tuck you in. You may stay in the Rose Room tonight.”

Charley stared after her, puzzled. “Answer what?” The house was as silent as a prayer.

From Sadie’s office, a phone began to ring. Charley rolled her eyes. Best known of Sadie’s gifts was psychometry, the ability to get impressions of the past or the future by touching an object. The woman had recovered stolen millions after merely handling a store receipt, located missing children from touching a beloved toy or a stranger’s jacket, yet she couldn’t resist the equivalent of a parlor trick. The phone continued to ring unabated.

Charley did not want to go to the Rose Room. She wanted to be in her own home down the street, in her own bed, finishing Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and listening to Oingo Boingo as a nighttime lullaby. She never got to trick-or-treat, but she’d be damned if she was going to spend Halloween without celebrating the holiday in her own way.

The phone rang and rang.

“Are you going to answer that?” she yelled. She knew better than to holler for Celeste. The last she’d seen of her aunt, she’d absconded with a bottle of champagne and headed upstairs, her fingers stained red with Miranda’s blood.

No response came from the office.

“Sadie?” Charley slid out of her chair, on alert as she made her way across the entry and toward Sadie’s private study. She rounded the corner and stopped at the office’s open door, unprepared for what she was seeing.

Sadie, on her knees, staring at the phone.

“Sadie?” Charley asked again, hearing her voice go small. She moved carefully to her grandmother’s side, frightened to see tears streaming down her face. Charley tentatively put her hand on her grandmother’s arm. “Aren’t you going to answer the phone?” she asked softly. Sadie folded into herself, weeping uncontrollably. Not knowing what else to do, Charley reached past her grandmother and picked up the plain cream-colored phone Sadie insisted on keeping plugged in for house calls. “Hello?”

***

No one had seen it coming. While this was standard, if not the very definition of most accidents, this was not how things worked with the Brydes. Accidents were the kind of thing her family was paid to discover and paid double to prevent. Nothing ever slipped by unnoticed, not by the Bryde family.

This much they could see: On the industrial stretch of Elizabeth Street, their unconscious daughter in tow, Nicole and Charles had clipped a fire hydrant with their car and crashed into a tree.

And drowned.

When the police first arrived on the scene, they found a 1963 BMW crumpled against the mottled white trunk of a sycamore tree, the windows rolled up tight, the car a virtual aquarium with two dead bodies floating inside.

“Like a magic trick you’d see David Blaine do on TV,” said an officer at the scene. The local police remained mystified by the forces at play: The how of all that water. The why of two able-bodied people trapped inside a car that was easily unlocked by a deputy. What was clear was that Charles and Nicole had fought desperately to escape. The front windshield bore tiny, ineffectual cracks from the interior, possibly from a high-heeled shoe or Charles’s fist, which was found splintered and bloody from blunt force.

Miranda was found on the grassy median fifty feet from the BMW, unconscious and seemingly untouched, a magic trick of her own. She was brought to the hospital not so much for observation but for the screaming that wouldn’t stop once she came to.

Carefree Charles and the dark, lovely Nicole. Gone. Charley’s universe had blinked out in an instant. Overnight, the speculation in Memphis’s magical community went wild. The Brydes were betrothed to the devil himself, a blood ritual marking his Brydes with a Star. The Prince of Darkness collected their debt, seeing fit to take out two of the family with signature panache. What other kind of ending would you expect from a family naming themselves Brydes? And how had Miranda gotten out of the car without her parents following suit? Prince. Of. Darkness.

One of the more shameless rumors was that a storm magically brewed up by a business rival had descended on the stranded passengers and drowned them. Fancying herself the target of this rumor, Mistress Mimsy Lee, clairvoyant, wrote an angry letter to the editor of the Memphis Flyer, denying the accusations and announcing her discounted psychic services in the same paragraph.

But the loudest rumor wasn’t a rumor at all.

If the Brydes were such almighty psychics, why hadn’t any of them seen what was about to happen to two of their own?

Four

September 25, 2008

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Astrid Black announced to the throng of sweaty tourists standing in a tidy semicircle around her on the sidewalk. “We have reached our final destination: 878 Elizabeth Street, better known as Crimson House.”

With her pale skin and golden hair bleached the color of prosecco, there was more than a touch of the eighties rock vixen about her, helped along by the threadbare vintage Pixies T-shirt over fishnets and a brown pleather miniskirt. Astrid paused to wipe the sweat from her brow, snapping a cream-colored lace fan to speed the process. It was always a crapshoot, Memphis in September. Could be well into proper fall, but today might as well be Memphis in the tropics, the humidity casually oppressing every passerby.

With her fan, Astrid directed the group to study the monstrous Queen Anne mansion decomposing behind a nearly impenetrable thicket of red azaleas. Not the tidy neighboring Victorians; she had fast-walked them past the buttoned-up houses with professional lawn care and period-perfect paint jobs that were the delight of book club lunches and neighborhood tours. They would not be entering those homes. Today’s destination was the hot mess of Elizabeth Street. Myriad shingles had fallen from the various rooflines over the years, peeling paint and streaked windowpanes amplifying its lifeless look. The house’s signature architectural stunner, a fourth-story turret that had once looked like part of a storybook castle, could now easily be keeping a princess hostage. Most egregious was the blue tarp covering a hole on the south side of the turret. Sometimes it was discreetly tucked into the roofline, but today it hung limp and forlorn, like a wrinkled shirt they’d hung out to dry.