Page 5 of The Mirror

As Trey came back with a bottle and glasses, the phone in his pocket played Grand Funk Railroad’s “Please Don’t Worry.”

On a half laugh, Sonya dropped her hands. “Clover never misses. Just a little musical pick-me-up from my nineteen-year-old ghost of a grandmother.”

Trey set down the bottle. “Did it work?”

“I guess it did.” When Yoda put his paws on her lap, she scratched his head. “And here’s more,” she said when the eye-patched Jones pranced into the room on his sturdy legs ahead of Cleo and Owen.

“We stopped by your room to get you a sweater in case you’re still cold.”

“Better now, but thanks.” She took the sweater, then Cleo’s hand. “Big thanks for looking out for me. For calling Trey and Owen.”

From Cleo’s phone, Dionne Warwick announced “That’s What Friends Are For.”

“True enough.” Cleo sat, looked at Owen. “Buy me a drink, sailor.”

He poured three generous fingers in each glass. “To being here,” Owen decided. “Right here, right now. That’s a damn good deal right now.”

“It is.” Sonya lifted her glass, took a gulp. Shuddered.

“All right. Okay. I know you want to know what happened, but can we start at the start? I don’t know how I ended up in the ballroom, but you were with me, Cleo. Did I wake you up?”

“No. But somebody did.” She took a long, slow sip, let it slide, let it settle. “I heard the clock at three, the piano, and someone crying, and someone who sounded like they were in pain. You know.”

She looked at the others, shoved at her curling cloud of hair. “Theusual middle-of-the-night manor entertainment. I’m just going to roll over and go back to sleep, but… Somebody touched me. My shoulder,” she said, laying her own hand on it now. “And they said your name. ‘Sonya,’ just ‘Sonya,’ but there was an urgency in it.”

“My name?”

“That’s right. I turned on the light, and thought I’d probably dreamed it, but that urgency? It stuck, and I got up. I was going to check on you, but there you were, just coming out of your room. Sleepwalking, trance-walking, or whatever the hell it is. I ran back for my phone, and I called Trey as I followed you.”

She turned to Trey. “Owen told me you were at his place. He filled me in on your client, your friend who was hurt by her drunk bastard of an ex. I’m glad she’s going to be okay, her and her children.”

“I was pissed off. You were right about that,” Trey said to Sonya. “I went to get Mookie from Owen’s, and dumped on him. Crashed in his spare room.”

“A good thing you did,” Cleo continued. “You went up to the third floor, Sonya, and I could hear that weeping woman, so clear. You stopped outside that room—a nursery once, right? You opened the door, and I swear, Son, I could see and hear the chair rocking along with the sobbing, and you said… Something like how night after night, year after year, Carlotta grieves for her boy.”

“Hugh Poole’s second wife, about six years after Marianne died in childbirth—having twins, Owen and Jane. They had three more kids, Carlotta and Hugh. One died as an infant.” Sonya drank again, shuddered again. “It’s in the book.”

“I remember, too. I texted Trey so he’d know where we—you—were going, and I kept telling you I was there. I was afraid, I’m not ashamed to say, that you’d go down to the Gold Room, that bitch’s room. I could see a red light glowing around it, and smoke curling out. You looked right at the door, and I thought, well, Jesus, just don’t. You said she exists to feed, on fear and on grief. I should’ve turned the recorder on my phone to get it exact, but I didn’t think of it.”

“I wonder why?”

At Owen’s comment, Cleo managed a snicker. “You said more,about her drinking tears, night after night, year after year. Then, thank the goddess, you turned in the other direction.”

She held out her glass to Owen. “Hit me again.”

And she drank some more.

“Someone cried out in pain, in what had been the servants’ quarters. You went to a door, and I swear to you I could smell the sick, and the bed creaking like someone was in it, tossing and turning. You said, sad, so sad, you couldn’t help poor Molly O’Brian.”

“Molly,” Sonya murmured. The spirit who made the beds, lit the fires, tidied up.

“You said she came from Cobh and found a home here, how she loved to polish the wood, and you cried for her. You said you could only bear witness.

“When you turned, I thought: Shit, Gold Room. But you started toward the ballroom, so I let Trey know that. I turned lights on because it was so damn dark. Then you opened the ballroom doors, and I turned the lights on in there.

“And there was the mirror. It hadn’t been there. We’d all been up there not long ago, and it wasn’t there. But it was. It was so goddamn cold, and I could hear the pulsing from the Gold Room. Like the damn ‘Tell-Tale Heart.’”

Now Cleo shuddered, just a little, before she continued.

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