Page 28 of Giving Up The Ghost
I nodded. “That would be fantastic. Thank you.”
“D’accord! I’ll be back down in a bit. If the light goes off”—she stood, waving one hand overhead to pass in front of one of the sensors—“just like that, yes?”
She left me on the cellar floor with the first box of my family history open in front of me. “Shit,” I muttered. “I should’ve asked her to get Ezra and Julian to bring down the binders!” A quick check showed me my phone had no signal, so I stood to follow her up with the intent of conscripting Julian and Ezra into doing some heavy lifting. The cellar door was sticky, necessitating me throwing my shoulder into it to make it open, before finally swinging wide and banging off the corridor wall.
“Oscar!” Charlotte chided, emerging from the kitchen at speed. “What are you doing, breaking the house?”
“Sorry. It stuck. I was hoping to get Ezra and Julian,” who had followed her from the kitchen and were standing in the corridor, looking mildly confused at my appearance, “to help bring down those binders. I was thinking we could correlate the information in them with the boxes by year and see what we can see.”
Julian’s smile was bright and fast, flooding my belly with warmth. “You really do know how to sweet talk me, Oscar. That sounds like a fantastic idea?—”
“I thought you were gone to Landon Price’s wake,” Ezra interrupted, stepping forward so he was even with Charlotte. “You said he was gone.” His tone wasn’t so much accusing as suspicious. “Did you already leave, Oscar? Or was that something planned for later?”
“Uh… neither? I had no plans to go, honestly.” A tiny twinge of guilt sparked at that. I should go, I thought. He was Grandmere’s friend, and a fellow medium…But you didn’t really know him, did you? And the few times you did speak, he was rude and treated you like you were some sort of freak for being better at this than him.“I thought maybe send flowers,” I added to assuage my trained-in guilt.
“Charlotte,” Julian murmured, “why did you tell us Oscar was gone for the morning?”
“Oh,” she fluttered, hands twisting in her blouse hem, “I misspoke. Sometimes, it’s difficult, even with fluency, to make the words come out right.” Offering them an apologetic smile, she continued, “I meant that Landon Price’s family was holding a wake today and perhaps Oscar might like to attend, as it is this morning. I was going to ask when I went down to check on you,” she said to me. “If you’d like, I can drive you. The funeral itself is tomorrow, however.”
“No,” I said slowly. “I’m good.” Ezra and I exchanged a speaking glance. His suspicion was well-founded, even if I wanted to deny it. Between her sudden issues with the language, forgetting my own fluency in her native tongue, and being caught out in a lie… “Is everything alright, Charlotte?”
“Of course! Of course, of course! Just,” she made a face and swept her hand across her forehead in awhooshgesture. “I mixed up my meanings is all.”
Liar.
“It happens. Well. I’ll be in the cellar, should the two of you need me.”
“We were going to head into town in a bit,” Julian said. “If you want us to wait?—”
“Oscar is going to be quite busy,” Charlotte said firmly. “He has many boxes to examine!”
I hesitated, then nodded. “I really do.” Julian’s flutter of disappointment might have been missed by anyone else, but it was written in flashing neon to me. Ezra’s annoyance was harder to miss, the rolled eyes and muttered curse words as he threw up his hands making it clear just what he thought of my choice. “Can they bring down the binders at least?”
Ezra, still stiffly irritated, nodded and started towards the study. “No problem.”
Charlotte’s jaw worked on a mouthful of vitriol while she watched Julian and Ezra carry the heavy binders downstairs. Well, mostly Ezra. Neither of us let Julian carry much, something which definitely annoyed him. But all I could picture was him falling down the narrow stone steps with their lack of handrail, landing on the glittering stone below, his body broken, this time beyond recovery.
“Here,” I called to him when Ezra went up for the next armload, past Charlotte lurking at the top of the steps gargoyle-like. “Look at this.”
Julian crowded close to me at the open box and let out a low, impressed whistle. “What’s going on here?”
I told him the story Charlotte had given me and handed him the black binder. “Apparently my ancestors were accused of witchcraft or something similar. I don’t know if there were indications of our abilities before these two or if they were the first. That’s something I wanted to dig into.” When I looked up at him, he was staring back with open excitement in his eyes. Warmth suffused through my veins, and I was unable to stop myself from leaning into his side, slipping my arm around his back with a squeeze. “I think maybe this is it,” I whispered. “Maybe this is what I needed to find. I never knew about them, about any of this. Grandmere kept it all so sanitized…”
Ezra clattered down the steps to set the box of binders down against the wall at the foot of the stairs. “Few more to go,” he announced. “Alright?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Julian muttered. I nodded in agreement and Ezra gave us a slow, narrow-eyed nod in turn.
“Tonight,” I added. “After dinner. Meeting.”
That seemed to take some of his hesitancy away and he nodded again, bounding up the steps and past a glowering Charlotte.
In the end, Ezra proclaimed they were going to Landon Price’s service. “After all, I’ve met him a time or two,” he interjected when Charlotte tried to sputter something about inappropriateness and vultures. Julian just shrugged, resigned, and gave me a quick, dry kiss on my jaw, limping behind Ezra to the rental car. Charlotte was working herself into a slow-burn tizzy, lurking at the top of the stairs and muttering abouttimeanddutyand things in French under her breath. Julian’s promise to look through the binders with me tonight featuring heavily in her displeasure. I tuned out her mutterings, though, too enraptured by the possibilities before me.
The cellar was big, obviously pushed out to create a long, rectangular space with the footprint of the original cellar creating a lopsided, ragged square starting at the foot of the stairs and stretching for about ten feet in each direction. The ceiling was lower in the original section, and the stone older than the glittering bits used in the rest. It was also cooler and damp to the touch, making my bones ache as I knelt, then sat, on the floor in front of the first box. The twins had left as their legacy a set of polished discs made from stone and metal bearing some etchings around the edges that I could not decipher.Add that to Julian’s list of things to do,I decided, taking a picture of the marks just for good measure. They’d also left two bags of what I took to be dice, at first, but upon closer inspection, they proved to have images on each side rather than dots or numbers. The images were hard to make out, worn smooth with time and use, but a few revealed themselves to be a cup or chalice, a cross, and a skull. Some of the folded papers were delicate and I was afraid to open them, so those were set aside as well. Charlotte would fight me about it, no doubt, but I could insist on these being handled by someone trained in doing so. I’d throw the wholepreserving our legacything out there to convince her, I decided.
Moving on to the next box, I found similar items, and this time, a wooden cask with stones inside, each one inscribed with symbols similar to those on the twins’ dice, and a smooth metal orb on a long, tarnished chain.
“A pendulum,” I breathed. “Oh! The discs must be mirrors like mine!” I wanted to rush back upstairs and grab my scrying kit before I remembered I’d left it back in Houston—this wasn’t meant to be an investigation and leaving it behind had been my way of underscoring that for myself. Removing temptation to use it should the situation arise.
