by Lyla Payne
I’m not sure it’s the right tack to question the claims, especially since we don’t know which end of the gene pool this guy is on, but I suppose that if there’s any chance he can help us, there’s no sense in holding back.
We’re already here. If he wants to kill us, there’s always dinner.
Mr. Bernard snorts, a strangely indelicate noise from a man who has exuded nothing but poise and class since he answered the door.
Okay, fine. Since he let us inside. Before that he was a cranky old man through and through.
“Ridiculous. Kooks, the whole lot of them.” He squints at Travis, then at me. “Don’t tell me you two are some of those Fourniers.”
“What makes you think they’re lying?” I ask, my mouth a little dry.
I don’t want to talk about the ghosts with him. I don’t want to talk about the ghosts at all if I can help it, and discussing them with a man who feels like Louis does ranks even lower on my to-do list. But if this rift between the two halves of our family turns out to be real—and deadly, if the paranoia my father shared with some of the Carlottas turns out to be rooted in reality as opposed to mental illness—then we need to understand the other side.
“The fact that ghosts aren’t real, darlin’. They’re just a way for people to feel connected to those they’ve lost, and I’ve got no problem with coping mechanisms. But people who use grief to exploit the living…that’s not right.”
“So you think they’re crazy. Paranoid, probably, or maybe even schizophrenic.”
He nods. “From what I know about your father, he was concerned about that himself.”
“What do you know about our father?” I ask. We need him to talk more and us to talk less.
“Not much. I don’t know if you’ve gathered, but our family isn’t a particularly close one. We go our separate ways in adulthood and keep to ourselves. Mostly.” He sighs, picking up his glass again and swirling the liquid. “Aren’t many of us left. Maybe a dozen all over the world.”
“And Frank?”
“I never met Francis, though that was by choice, given his lifestyle. And I don’t mean his mental illness—I mean the thievery.” He gestures around the room. “As you can see, I have many nice things. I wouldn’t want someone like that to get a good look at them.”
I can’t help but wonder if he’s worried about the two of us casing the joint, given that we’re his kids and all. He doesn’t seem to be, but he also didn’t seem to recognize my name at first. He’s good at hiding his reactions, I think. When he chooses to.
Which makes me nervous.
“Frank was a loner, from what we can tell.” Travis sits forward, slipping into cop mode. “That means it’s hard to figure who might have wanted to harm him. Can you think of anyone? Someone who would want to kill him, even?”
“No. I know that Frank stayed away from the family on purpose. I’m not alone in never having met him—I’m not sure any of us did, though as I said, we’re not close and don’t talk regularly. I can tell you that he suffered from a paranoid delusion and believed that a line of Fourniers was after him. And he agreed that it was all in his head—it’s the reason he checked himself in for treatment more than once. If he hadn’t been so opposed to any form of medication, he might not have died alone.”
My hand curls around my own glass, almost empty now. My stomach is warm and my head pleasantly fuzzy. One would think that drinking would be a turnoff after my night with Leo, but it’s more like a salve. One I badly need to survive this conversation.
“He didn’t die alone. He had me. Us, I mean.”
Travis’s expression grows stony. He didn’t have much of a chance to get to know Frank at all, but I needed to say something. Mr. Bernard is rubbing me the wrong way. Assuming Frank was crazy, and talking like his death had nothing to do with the family.
He would think the same thing about the two of us, if he knew the truth about the odd gene that connects us.
Or what we think is the truth. There’s still the slim chance that we’re both batshit crazy and everyone else is just humoring us. But that’s not likely. It’s more likely that Mr. Bernard, like so many people, doesn’t believe in what he can’t see.
And lucky him, to still have the option.
“Of course.” He cocks his ear, and after a moment, I hear the tinkling of a tiny bell. Our host gets to his feet. “Dinner is ready. I don’t imagine I’ve been that helpful, but I must admit, it is a pleasure to have dinner guests for a change. Shall we?”
He hasn’t been helpful at all, at least not at first glance. But there’s one thing we know now that we didn’t before coming here—he either doesn’t see ghosts or he won’t admit to it, and I’m guessing it’s the former. If we can find out more about the two women we wanted to visit and couldn’t, like whether they did claim to see ghosts, then we might be on to something.
Of course, that would also mean that the members of our family who have the ability are slowly disappearing. Or perhaps not so slowly.
And it could very possibly mean that I won’t have to worry about this trial at all.
Because I’ll be gone, too.
Chapter Nine
The next morning, I can’t stop thinking about what we learned—or didn’t—from our closest relative. Travis says there are two more living ones he found that we could Skype, and the first thing I do this morning is pull up the pictures of the family tree I sent him and start looking into them myself.
One woman lives in Virginia, and there’s no way I’m voluntarily going that close to Washington, D.C., even if I were allowed on an airplane. I don’t trust myself.
Her address reminds me that I need to respond to Beau’s letter, even if only with a polite no thank you. I want to say more than that, because there’s so much to say, but there’s probably no point. Amelia thinks it’s crazy to not simply ignore the missive. This is Beau, though. He’s a nice guy, a good guy, and the thought of him torturing himself over something that’s so far out of his control makes it hard for me to sleep at night.
Of course, it’s not the only thing that’s done that.
The second relative is another cousin of Frank’s who lives in Prague. It seems far away, considering that the rest of the family hasn’t ventured from France or the East Coast of America.
I can’t help but wonder if he tried running, and whether he succeeded.
I figure I should wait for Travis to try calling or Skyping them, especially since he acted like he might already have a way to get in touch. No point in spending hours searching out phone numbers and email addresses if he already has them. Instead of pursuing that line further, I go looking for information on the two women we didn’t get to see yesterday.
The woman who took the pills is, on paper, very similar to Gillian Harvey—late forties, unmarried, no kids. A lump forms in my throat at the knowledge that Mr. Bernard also seemed single. There were no photographs of family on his mantel, nothing that would suggest anyone but he and his “woman” were regularly in the house. Travis is alone. My father was alone.
I’m alone.
What if that’s the way it works? The only way it can work?
I swallow the emotions climbing up from my stomach the best I can, determined to focus on the problem at hand before going off the deep end about the status of my own, screwed-up personal life.
The report in the paper about her suicide fits with what Travis told me—open and closed. Even when I search a few weeks before and after, there’s no mention of an open case or anyone suspecting foul play. It wouldn’t be the first time someone in our family took their own life, a fact I can’t ignore after reading the last diary entry.
My heart is heavy as I start searching for information on the missing Gillian Harvey. Despite the fact that she had to have left that house a month or so ago, there’s no missing persons information on her. Having seen that house in the middle of nowhere, and the sad, empty feel of it, I’m not surprised by the fact.
My lungs squ
eeze as a search of her name in the local papers does start to turn up a few items of interest—arrest records, some of them violent.
Over the past twenty years, Gillian Harvey has been arrested half a dozen times. A couple are for breaking and entering, one public intoxication, two assault charges, though the paper doesn’t give details…and one attempted murder charge.
The rap sheet reads a lot like my own, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to judge, but someone out there killed Frank. The fact that Gillian has not only a violent record, but a possible motive to hurt him, means that I don’t have the luxury of commiserating with her just because we share a few pieces of genetic code. And a predilection for breaking the law, apparently.
It’s Sunday, my one full day off, and short of going for a run by myself in the freezing rain—which will only remind me of other things I’ve lost—there’s not much left to distract me while everything I’ve learned this morning percolates. Maybe it’s time to draft a quick email response to Beau. It’s less personal than the handwritten letter, with the stationery and the whole buying a stamp thing he did for me. Which is kind of the point.
After that, perhaps I’ll read some more about Lavinia Fisher. She hasn’t been back to bother me since the night she showed me the possibly fake day of her death, but I’ve taken care to be alone as little as possible since then. I don’t want to see her.
That tactic has ensured I haven’t seen much of Henry, either, but he’s been fading ever since he realized the Journal of American History is going to publish articles about his life and death. Or maybe it was Frank’s death that drove him away.
It’s hard to say, since the two things coincided.
I wander down to the kitchen, drawn by the vague thought of food, and then start a pot of coffee instead. I’ve started and deleted the email to Beau approximately twenty times when my email notification dings—and not the address I use for junk mail, either.
“Oh, thank goodness,” I breathe, happy to have the distraction. Any distraction, really, though another journal entry from Clara is better than even I could have hoped for.
I open the attachment and stare at the date at the top of the translation—1826. We’re back at the first Carlotta, which means the woman I’m assuming was Frank’s mother was the final Carlotta.
The final Carlotta who wrote a journal, anyway. Or whose journal we have.
The email to Beau can wait. Perhaps indefinitely, given that I have no idea what to say in response to his raw honesty, at least without ripping myself brand new holes in the process. With everything that happened with Leo the other night, my heart is already scattered inside my chest, painful and stabbing like jagged shrapnel. It’s been through enough this week.
Amelia comes up and peers over my shoulder before setting a fresh coffee and a bowl of her homemade macaroni and cheese on the table in front of me. My stomach growls in an instant response that would have made Pavlov proud. According to the time on my laptop, it’s well after when normal people eat breakfast and into when some people grab lunch. I give her a grateful smile.
“Thanks. But aren’t you supposed to be exhausted and like, letting other people cook for you? This macaroni takes forever.”
She sits across from me after grabbing her own food and drink. “Jack’s slept five hours in a row the last three nights. I found a crockpot recipe that’s pretty darn close to Grams’s original, without the time spent slaving over a stove.”
“Wow, five hours.” I take a dramatic sniff of the air. “Did you shower?”
“Yes. And honestly, I don’t know how you could stand being so willfully gross when you first moved back here. I was in there for thirty minutes and would have stayed longer if we hadn’t run out of hot water.”
“Sorry. I did dishes. I didn’t know you were in there.”
“It’s okay.” She sips her own tea and nods toward my laptop. “Another journal?”
“Yeah. We’re back to the first Carlotta. It’s dated ten years after she wrote the first one. They were going to try running away, which we know from her daughter’s first entry didn’t end up doing a whole lot of good. I’m about to read it.”
“Read it to me,” she demands in the way only Amelia can, the way that makes me want to comply instead of tell her to take a hike. “And then tell me what happened at Leo’s the other night.”
I almost ask her what she means, but there’s no point in playing innocent. She knows me too well. Instead I heave a sigh and turn back to my computer screen, angling it so I can read while slumped back with my cup of tea.
Lyons, France, 1826
We’ve been hiding, always moving, for a decade now. My sweet daughter, only a child when my mother was murdered and all of this began, is nearly a woman. Her father is looking for suitors even though our dear Carlotta has shown little interest in any of the ones he has mentioned. Ever since we moved here a year ago and she met the spirit of the great and tragic Joan of Arc, I do believe our dear daughter has toyed with the idea of eternal virginity and service to God.
It is amusing to me. She is young, she has never been in love, and thanks to her father and me, knows little of the way the world works. Has never known the pleasure of a man, or she might not be so willing to give it up.
Then again, romance is not without its troubles. There are certainly days when I think perhaps Joan and her ilk had the right idea, steering clear of it all. Certainly, there is heartbreak in my future as my husband grows weaker and weaker.
Philippe, our surprise child who arrived five years ago now, is sensitive to his father’s moods and ailments. He guessed months ago that something was wrong. I was slower to accept the truth, and poor Lotta, who loves her father with the blind devotion only a daughter can produce without effort, has not allowed herself to accept our impending loss. I fear it will be hard on all of us in ways we may not expect.
We’ll have to return to Orleans, I think, though I’m not convinced that we’re safe there after spending so much of the past ten years in and out of our chateau near the city.
Not that we haven’t had our troubles in Lyons. Lotta told one of her friends from the village about seeing Joan of Arc, and about how the spirit wanted her help locating some pieces of gold that had been dear to her in life. The medallions were not where the ghost led my daughter, and oddly, that seemed to put her at peace. As if she worried more that they would stay buried and forgotten than that she had no idea who had taken them or where they had gone.
We marked the spot, nothing more, and my daughter recorded the interaction—as I’ve advised her to record all of her spirits—in her own diary. Though I’ve advised her more than once that perhaps her abilities are best left to discussions with family, I’ve been remiss, perhaps, in not pressing hard enough. But who wants to scare their child with the reality of who, exactly, might take action if they knew what she could do? What would it do to her to steal the childlike trust that she has in the goodness of the world?
I’m not ready to answer that question, though if she does consent to a marriage and go off to live on her own, I will have to give her the warnings that have kept us all alive this long. Philippe has not expressed the gift as of yet, and he may not. It is not unheard of for it to pass over the males in my mother’s family, though most of the females in the line do possess it. When it does turn up in the males, my mother said it was often…different. Less pure, perhaps, though that could have been her own prejudice talking.
For now, we will wait. The girl from the village stirred up trouble, suggesting to the local church officials that we had found Joan of Arc’s treasure and hidden it away for ourselves, but their investigation turned up nothing. They believe our daughter daft, or perhaps merely fanciful, but they decided that she did not, in fact, see the sainted woman’s spirit at all.
The girls are not friends any longer, which was hard for Lotta. Yet for the best, I believe.
The next time I have something important to record, it could very possibly be my hus
band’s death or my daughter’s marriage. My life is changing, without a doubt, but at least my son is an unexpected blessing that will keep me occupied into my later years.
And the spirits, of course, do the same. They have not stopped asking for my help, and I have not stopped giving it. The incidents have often taken me farther into the public eye than I prefer, and they certainly have embarrassed my husband. I cannot stop, though. They are my companions, and I their only hope. How can I?
I cannot, is the answer. Not even if one day, it costs me absolutely everything.
“That’s uplifting,” Amelia says dryly after the words have lingered in our kitchen for a couple of minutes.
“Yeah. My people aren’t exactly known for rosy visions of the future.” I bite my lower lip, thinking about how often I’d shared Carlotta’s final sentiment. “It’s like she had some kind of premonition about what was coming. That her brother, or at least someone, was closing in.”
“How soon after this entry did she die?”
I shrug, trying to recall without pulling up the old entries. “Her daughter said she was twenty-one, or almost, when her mother died. So, three or four years. And she said she was alone and responsible for Philippe then, so her father must have died in the interim.”
“Like Carlotta One guessed.” Amelia toys with her long-empty mug of tea. “Are you guys psychic, too?”
“No. I think self-reflection is just something that naturally happens when you’re constantly wondering whether or not you’re going crazy.”
“If you’re crazy, then so am I.” Fire burns in my cousin’s eyes as they lock on to mine. “Don’t forget that I saw Anne, too. And Henry’s ghost saved my life.”
I let her words wash my insides with relief, even though I know in my heart she would say the same things even if they weren’t true. Then I give her a smile. Because I love her and she’s trying to help. And they are true.
It’s just that, with so many questions about mental health issues in my past, it’s impossible to take anything for granted anymore.
