He groaned under his breath and nodded as he left the room.
Was he downplaying this thing with Carolina? Evangeline cursed herself for being so jealous. If anyone deserved happiness, it was Augustus.
But there was already Charles and Cat; Colleen and Rory; Elizabeth and Connor; Maureen and her misery.
Evangeline was twisted and broken. Objectively speaking, she was not as beautiful as her sisters. Not as interesting as Charles. Not as intriguing as Augustus. She was a genius, but in societal terms, this made her a freak, not something to be desired. Though she knew better, deep down, she woke up in the middle of the night certain the whole world could see what had happened to her, and the taint it left upon her, leaving her marked as defective. A stink that would invite predators and turn away suitors.
The quiet buzz of the electricity, and nothing else, sent a chill through her. She rushed out of the office, her brother’s keys promising at least one healthy thrill on the return to her anguish.
* * *
Homeschooling was the best.
Elizabeth had never minded the school part of going to school every day. She liked learning, though she didn’t know how much, how curious her mind actually was, until it was free to be so. The world was so big! So much to explore! And out here, in their isolated old plantation house in the country, the shackles of a tortured world didn’t exist.
There was something about the family home… about the house in particular… that muted her visions. Always had, ever since she was a toddler. She didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t care.
It felt so good not to care.
She wasn’t completely free of premonitions here, but they were vague and indistinct, like a television out of tune. Whenever Charles was around, she was filled with acute foreboding, but nothing specific ever jumped out of her. She saw anguish, but never death. Never the final act.
Charles was the first one to notice the difference in her.
“You’ve got a twinkle in your eyes, Lizzy Lou,” he said one day, after he’d come home from seeing his girlfriend. That she had seen, and she’d seen how it ended, too. “The country looks good on you.”
“Might look good on you too if you were ever around,” she accused, teasing.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time with that little Sullivan squirt. Anything I should know about that?”
“As I said…”
“Do you need me?” His smile ebbed. “Do you?”
No, but you’ll be married soon, and then I’ll see you even less. You’re the only one who’s ever looked at me and seen more than a freak to be pitied. “You wish!” she challenged, and he chased her up the stairs and into her room for some tickles, which she was very nearly too old for, but these moments were never forever.
Connor was allowed over on the weekends, although allowed was a generous word. Connor’s mother, Savannah, treated weekends like getaways from her children, and with dramatic flourish. She’d seen the opportunity for what it was, and began sending both her sons over every Friday after classes were over.
Connor’s twin brother, Thomas, was all right, but he was in a completely different league. Where Connor was shy and curious, and a touch funny, Thomas wanted to build things just to knock them down. His personality eclipsed everyone around him, not the least of which was Connor himself.
But Elizabeth and Connor, through clever planning, found a better place for the precocious Thomas: Maureen’s clubhouse. The small building was an old storage shed from the days Ophélie was a working plantation. Charles had taken pity on her and spent one summer day cleaning it out, and even gave it a fresh coat of paint. Elizabeth didn’t have the heart to tell him Maureen wasn’t going in there to play dolls.
Elizabeth didn’t want to know what Maureen was doing with the almost-thirteen-year-old Thomas, and she didn’t care, either. No one ever wondered how their choices affected her, when that’s all she could ever think about, her whole life.
Connor lay at the end of her bed looking as if the image coming to life on her Lite Brite was the next Picasso.
“Wanna go down to the river?” she asked.
He groaned in disgust. “It’s way too hot to play outside. Ask me again at Halloween.”
She returned the groan. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to play outside. She never did. But the big house had ghosts, past and present, and she never felt them as acutely as she did when she was home alone. Aside from Maureen and Thomas doing god-knows-what in her clubhouse, across the property, Elizabeth and Connor had all of Ophélie to themselves.
It wasn’t only the ghosts. She had never divined her own future, not once, and she didn’t know if that was a defect or the intended outcome of her gift, but she had a powerful fear that being alone, where she was unaffected by the anguish of others, was when she was most likely to find this element of her soothsaying come to life.
Connor sounded his victory cry and raised the Lite Brite above his head. “At last!”
Elizabeth resisted the urge to tell him it took her less than five minutes to do her templates and gave him a diplomatic, if condescending, grin instead. “Let’s see.”
He rolled back to his stomach and stretched it out to her with one arm.
Elizabeth frowned. “What is this?”
“Stop pretending. I know you can see it.”
“Ah, yes. A wizard whose robe was stolen by this strange snail in the corner.”
“It’s a damn snowman, and that’s a tree,” he barked and snatched it back. “Which I know you know because this stupid thing only has about ten different templates to choose from you and you’ve already done them all a thousand times.”
Elizabeth beamed. “You’re right. But there’s sixteen. And I’ve done them all a million times.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Did you do the math?”
“No, but it’s not possible.”
“Do the math and prove me wrong.”
She’d thought this would call his bluff, but he surprised her by digging in his bookbag for a pencil and paper. Amused, she watched him tick the numbers off in his fingers as he came to the slow realization the math he was trying to do was more than he’d bargained for.
“Didn’t bring a calculator?” she taunted as his brow furrowed into a series of tight wrinkles.
His pencil scribbled away. “Who can afford one of those?”
Elizabeth had one in her desk drawer, but wouldn’t say so. Not because she was ashamed to be from a family who could afford one for their children—his could, too, they were just more miserly about where their money went—but because she wanted the pleasure of seeing him suffer through his pride.
Connor was on her bed sorting through his math quandary in one moment, and then in the next he stood before a tomb in a cemetery, a man grown. Both hands folded across his torso, across the neat suit he’d worn for the first time burying his child, and was now wearing for the second time burying his wife.
Elizabeth gasped and fell back against the wall.
Connor was alert in an instant. He threw the toy to the side, forgotten, and scrambled over the blankets toward her. “Lizzy, talk to me.”
Rain fell, blanketing the cemetery and the shallow, muddy ground. Connor tried to reach for the hand of the one next to him, but the figure slipped farther away. He could not believe he was here. It wasn’t real. That had to be it… God would not first take his only daughter, and then his beloved wife. Life was not so cruel. God was not so cruel.
The room snapped to and fro as Connor shook her. “Lizzy, breathe, talk to me.”
The cemetery dissolved into the future, where it belonged. She’d tried, tried to see the names on the tomb, to understand what it was she was seeing, but the visions never worked that way. She tried, and tried, but they only showed what they chose her to see.
“It was you,” she said, gathering herself back into the present. She focused on breathing and on grounding herself to the room, to the bed, to the
house.
“Me?” Connor’s grip on her lessened. “You saw my future?”
Elizabeth nodded. Her mouth hung half-open, pairing neatly with her blank stare.
“Well, that’s new, right? You’ve never seen my future before.” She couldn’t tell if he was fearful or curious, or both.
“No,” she said. “And don’t ask me to tell you what I saw.”
Connor fell back into a pile of blankets. “You promised me you would if you ever saw me in your visions.”
“I never promised that.” Or had she? She couldn’t have known it would be so dark… so devoid of hope. Not for her sweet Connor, full of life.
“You did, Elizabeth.”
“Using my full name doesn’t make your point better.”
“You did promise,” he insisted. He wasn’t smiling. “You promised no secrets, and this is a secret.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Knowing I don’t want to know makes me want to know even more!”
She sighed. The last of the cemetery left her. “I should have lied and said it was about Maureen.”
“Why would you say that?”
“One day, you’ll regret knowing me,” Elizabeth said. She turned away when the tears burned her eyes.
“Nothing you’ve ever told me has made me regret knowing you, and I promised nothing ever would.”
“Yeah, well, we’re kids.”
“Kids who know how important a promise is.” He reached forward and touched his soft hand to hers. When she gave a weird look, he withdrew it. “If you don’t tell me, you’re the one who doesn’t trust me.”
“It’s fuzzy,” she said after a pause. “What I saw is just the bad stuff, but not enough of the details to help you.”
Connor shrugged. “Pretend you’re telling me about someone else, then.”
“But I’m not.”
“Lizzy.”
“Swear to me.”
“What? Anything.”
“That you won’t hate me when I tell you. It’s not my fault… I just see it… I can’t…”
“I know,” he said. “I know how it works. I promise.”
She turned her palms up. “You… have a family in the future.”
Connor smiled. “That’s not so bad.”
She inhaled hard. “Except some of them die. I don’t… I don’t know how. A daughter, and then your wife. That’s all I know.”
Connor’s expression withdrew from one of interest to one she could no longer read. “Wow. That sucks.”
Elizabeth nodded. Tears raced down her cheeks. He’d leave her now, and she’d never see him again, her only friend.
He chucked her on the arm and then grinned. “No big deal, right? I just won’t get married! The bachelor life sounds way more appealing anyway.”
“But you will marry,” Elizabeth said quietly. “And she will die.”
Fourteen
Nights in White Satin
Colleen didn’t have the heart to wake Rory. His mouth fell wide against the pillow, and he was so far lost to his dreams that he didn’t make a single sound. His mother, Josephine, had just recovered from surgery to remove a malignant tumor in her chest, and he’d spent every hour of his days at her bedside, comforting his father and siblings, retreating to Colleen’s bed in the evening for his own comfort.
She’d told herself in the beginning that she let him in each night out of something resembling pity, but she knew better. Despite what Ophelia had tried to tell her, and despite her own instincts that told her that her future was elsewhere, Colleen couldn’t cut the last and final cord needed to move on.
As he fell asleep in her arms last night, she didn’t know if she ever could.
Colleen heard whispering from Charles’ room. She paused outside his door. He was bold, bringing Catherine here, when Rory slept two rooms away. She’d kept her brother’s secret, because it wasn’t hers to share, but his carelessness would catch up if he wasn’t careful.
Irish Colleen caught her on her way out the door.
“Augustus told me you’re going to see Ophelia, the two of you,” her mother said. She tied her apron about her waist. Soon, the smells of breakfast would waft through the old floorboards and wake the upstairs.
“He’s going to meet me there. She’s home today,” Colleen responded. She tensed, dubious of her mother’s intentions. There had never been love lost between Irish Colleen and Ophelia, and though Colleen wasn’t supposed to know, this all came to a head when Irish Colleen approached the old woman in search of a more supernatural solution to Maureen’s predicament. Ophelia had said no, and then some.
“A longer stay than they anticipated, yes?”
Colleen nodded. She searched around for her purse, before realizing she’d left it in her room. She hoped she could retrieve it without waking Rory. “The pneumonia caused other complications, and she took longer to recover than they’d hoped.”
Irish Colleen ran her hands over the old fabric of the apron, which had been her mother’s, and one of the few things from her old life she’d brought into her marriage. Colleen knew nothing about the apron or her grandmother, only that the stains must tell a fascinating story. “The old woman and I are not on the best of terms. We never have been.”
Colleen said nothing. Pointing out Irish Colleen’s narrow-minded view of the family she married into wouldn’t change the fact of it.
“But she’s always been there for August and his children. And… she’s been helpful to you as well, more, I suppose, than I have.”
“That’s not true, Mama,” Colleen said quickly, though the words cut to the bone for all the truth of them. “Tante Ophelia has helped me learn more about who our family is, and that’s important. But she’s not my mother.”
Irish Colleen nodded in an offhand way, as if it wasn’t about her daughter’s response at all. “I wish her well. That’s all I mean to say.”
“Thank you,” Colleen said. She eyed the stairs, where she still needed to obtain her purse. “I’ll tell her.”
“Do that.” She turned toward the kitchen and then looked back. “Oh, can you pick up a pack of pencils for your sisters while you’re in town? I could run into Vacherie, but they charge twice as much and it makes my blood boil.”
“Of course. Anything else?”
Irish Colleen thought about it. “See if the cabbage looks healthy. The Piggly Wiggly won’t have their shipment of fresh vegetables until tomorrow. My vegetable garden seems to have been invaded by something from the devil after the cane harvest, and I wouldn’t feed it to my enemy.”
Colleen brightened. “Corned beef? What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion,” her mother said. “Though Charles has invited his girlfriend for supper, and this is a first.”
“Cat?” Colleen’s eyes nearly bugged out. “Tonight? For supper?”
Connor and Thomas were here… Rory might be here… had Charles lost his mind?
“Yes, Colleen, repeating the words doesn’t alter them in any way.”
She decided to stop worrying about her brother’s impending war with the Sullivans. Ophelia had given her the advice to stop focusing on things beyond her control, and while it went against everything in her nature, she found it liberating. To think she could just walk away from a problem!
“Don’t forget the pencils. Their last ones are down to nubs.”
“How is homeschooling going?” Colleen asked.
“Oh, it’s coming along, by the by. Elizabeth is thriving. Maureen just needs some time to get used to it,” Irish Colleen replied. She reached into her apron to retrieve the duster and focused on a spot missed earlier. “Not that it’s your concern, Colleen. I can see that mind of yours spinning already.”
Colleen put her hands up in surrender. “I was only asking, Mama.”
“No, you were searching for an opportunity, and you won’t find any here.”
* * *
Charles traced his tongue over Cat’s lower lip. It gl
istened with his come, and the saltiness was unwelcome but the soft, guttural moan passing through her mouth to his certainly was.
Her kitten heels brushed the side of his ear as he shoved his weight against the back of her thighs. God, how he loved it when she wore nothing but these red patent heels. These, only these, the ones he’d bought her, that she’d at first blushed at, and then left on for their sex games, because she knew.
They never spoke of Colin. She didn’t have to say that the sex with Colin had been boring for him to know, for every new thing he tried on her—things he’d never tried with anyone, when he thought he’d done everything—sent her over the edge in mingled shock and titillation. He loved to keep her guessing. To go right when she expected left. To blow her mind, which blew his.
Charles loved her, but they never spoke of that, either.
But he knew more about Catherine Connelly than he knew about his own sisters. She wanted to travel the world and write books and poems about her experiences. Her eyes lit up when she talked about standing at the base of the Eiffel Tower, or peering through the crackled and crumbling walls of the Colosseum at a past she could hardly begin to understand. That she would never do these things broke his heart. She was too practical. The need to please her family and achieve the goals they’d set out for her was too great.
“I’ll send you around the world,” he promised. “Ten times over.”
“How dizzy I’d be!”
Dizzy. Charles was dizzy, and for once, this sensation didn’t involve drugs. In fact, he hadn’t touched blow in over a month, and he’d even cut back on smoking and drinking. Cat was a drug, and even when he was too tired to find his clothes, he wanted her. How he wanted her. All the time. Always.
How had he never known this?
“Why aren’t you inside me?” she purred.
All the blood sailed straight from Charles’ head. But his stomach screamed at him, a reminder he’d skipped both lunch and dinner the day before. “Let’s eat and then I’ll never leave.”
She laughed and gave him a playful push. “I feel your priorities, Deschanel.”
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