The Line (18 page)

I couldn’t look at her. I wanted to say yes, but I didn’t want to make a promise I was afraid I might not be able to keep.

“Promise me you will at least think about it, and that you’ll talk to me before you leave. No disappearing in the middle of the night. You can give me that, right?”

“Yes,” I replied, the sleepless night having caught up to me. I was too tired to argue.

“Good, then,” Iris said. “I’m going to back to my room then before your Uncle Connor wakes up. He’ll never stop pestering me with questions if he realizes you were at Peter’s all night, and I’ll have to tell him lies to shut him up. You get upstairs too and change clothes. Go on now.” She swatted at me playfully.

When I leaned down to kiss her on the forehead, she smiled at me with so much love in her eyes. I wasn’t sure what Jilo was selling, but I couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe that this woman who had raised me—or, for that matter, anyone in my family—had anything in their hearts for me other than the best of intentions. Iris glided out of the room, and I followed her up the stairs. When I reached my bedroom, I went inside and closed the door softly behind me. Dawn had begun to break, so I closed the blinds before slipping beneath the sheets. Within moments I was dead to the world.

SEVENTEEN

When I awoke, I knew that someone was in the room with me. I felt the weight of unfriendly eyes on me, and I scrambled up in bed with a gasp.

“No need for all of that,” Connor said. “It’s just me.” He had pulled the chair from my makeup table over to the foot of my bed and was sitting there watching me sleep. The chain of his pendulum was laced through the fingers of his right hand.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Now don’t get all riled up,” he said, letting the pendulum fall to its full length. “I wanted to have a talk with you in private.”

“So you chose to sit there watching me sleep like some kind of boo hag?” I asked. The boo hag was the low country’s own version of the boogeyman—well, maybe more of a cross between the boogeyman and a vampire. It was a creature that sucked the life out of you as it watched you sleep. Connor had cracked open the shutter behind him just enough for a sliver of light to pour in. Since it was coming from behind him, I could only see him in silhouette, his features were obscured by shadow. Flooding the room with sunlight might have helped dispel the sense of menace, but something told me not to risk walking by him to throw open the shutters. I reached over and snapped on my bedside lamp.

The light revealed an odd look in his eyes that I would never have expected to see there. Regret combined with tenderness, a caring that shook my sense of who this man was to me. “You sure are your mama made over,” he said. “A little discipline would have done her good too,” he said. The hardness I was accustomed to returned to his eyes.

I pulled a pillow in front of me and hugged it. “What do you want to talk about?” I asked, a sense of vulnerability adding an edge to my question.

He smiled. “I want to talk about the day Ginny was killed. Something’s been bothering me about that day,” he said, leaning forward a little. The chair squeaked beneath its heavy burden. “I was going to let it go, but then last night you pulled the anchor lot.”

He allowed a pregnant pause, but I said nothing.

“It’s just that my pendulum kept giving me some odd answers that day when I asked it to show me the location of the weapon used to kill Ginny.”

“You said it wasn’t there,” I said.

“Well, that was a wee bit of a lie,” he said and began to swing the pendulum in a slow circle. “Every time I asked for the location, it pointed at you.” He stood up and came closer my bed.

“I had nothing to do with Ginny’s murder,” I said. “And I’d really like you to leave my room now.” I was afraid to hear what he might have to say.

“Are you so sure about that?” he asked. “Or maybe what you really want to do is to take this moment, when it’s only the two of us, to tell me everything you know.”

“I don’t know anything I haven’t already told you,” I replied. “Now, please leave.”

He ignored my request. “Ginny was angry with you. You were mad at Ginny.”

“I didn’t hurt her,” I responded.

He sat next to me on the bed, and I pulled my arms more tightly around my body. “Oh, I believe you there,” he said. “That’s where things start to get interesting. The pendulum was so insistent about you that I asked it then and there if you had killed her.” He stared deeply into my eyes, and damn it, I blinked. “It told me emphatically no.” He stood abruptly, and the mattress squeaked as he moved.

He began to pace a bit back and forth. “So the message I got was that you were the weapon used, but not the hand that wielded the weapon. Any idea what that means?”

“None. Go ask your toy.”

“I have, and I’ll continue to ask for clarification, but I was hoping that you’d open up, maybe tell me what you were up to that was pissing Ginny off so much.”

I glared at him. “Who knows? It was always something with Ginny.”

“That’s true,” he allowed. “She was a touchy old bird.” He stopped pacing and turned to face me. “Like I said, I would have let it all go, chalked it up to confused energies, except for the fact that you were chosen to take Ginny’s place.”

“You yourself said that was a mistake,” I countered.

“I know what I said, but I was just trying to look out for you. And I was trying to right a wrong that was being done to Maisie. I don’t know what you’re up to, but somehow you have gotten in way over your head,” he said, shaking a finger at me. “You should have never tried to take what was intended for you sister. You keep it up, and you are going to get yourself squashed like a bug.”

“That’s enough. We are done,” I said and threw the pillow I had been holding across the room. I swung my feet onto the floor and stood, stretching as tall as I could make my body go. “I haven’t done anything.” I reached out and poked him hard in the chest. “And I haven’t tried to take anything.” I poked him again. “Anything. Period.” I got right up in his face. “Now get out!”

He took a step back. There was a smile on his face, but no warmth in his eyes to back it up. He didn’t say another word; his expression said it all. He knew I was guilty of something, even if he hadn’t quite figured out what it was yet. I tried not to think of Jilo, but try not to think of an elephant, and all you see is trunk. Oliver could have read me with no problem, but thank God, Connor was weak. After a long moment, he turned and left the room. I shut the door behind him, locked it, and then I rushed over to the window to open the shutters and let the sunlight flood in.

EIGHTEEN

Several moments later there was a light knock on my door. “Everything okay in there?” Ellen asked. “I heard you yelling.”

“I was having a bad dream. I’m okay,” I said a little shakily and then added, “Everything’s fine.” I opened the door so that she could see for herself that I was in one piece.

“All right, then.” She hesitated a moment. “Listen, I’d like to talk to you about last night if you feel up to it. Maybe we could get out of here for a while? We could get dressed up all girly, and I’ll treat you to high tea at the Gryphon.”

“I’d love that, but I need a shower first,” I said.

Ellen was exactly the person I wanted to talk to about last night—not the drawing, but what had happened with Peter. In a normal world, I would have rushed upstairs this morning to tell Maisie about it. I wondered if not having her around was going to become the new normal.

“I’ll be in my room,” she said. “Come and get me when you’re ready.”

I showered and dressed in a vintage 1950s cocktail dress that Ellen herself had gotten for me. I let my hair hang loose and put on the string of pearls that Iris had given me for my eighteenth birthday. After adding on a pair of ballet flats I had excavated from my closet, I felt much more girly than I had since I turned twelve and stopped wearing princess costumes for Halloween.

When I reached Ellen’s door, I could heard Wren’s voice from inside. I was about to knock and ask Ellen if she was ready, but the opportunity to eavesdrop on the two was too tempting. I strained to hear through the thick oak door.

“Maisie scared you.” Wren’s falsetto was as clear as a bell through the wood.

“Yes, she did,” Ellen replied, her voice more muffled.

“She scared me too,” Wren confessed, and I suspected that Ellen had pulled him close to comfort him in the ensuing silence.

“I won’t let anyone hurt you, baby,” she said soothingly.

“I love you,” Wren piped. I wondered if it was possible for Wren to feel real emotions.

“I love you too, little man.” I bit my lip; she used to refer to Paul as her “little man.” It didn’t seem healthy for her to call Wren that.

“Is Maisie bad?”

“Why no, sweetheart,” Ellen said, sounding surprised by the question. “She’s young and confused. A lot of responsibility has fallen on her shoulders. But she’s not bad—far from it.”

“I think she is bad. She stole from Mercy,” my ears pricked up at this comment, and I leaned closer to the door. “The power didn’t want her, it wanted Mercy.”

I suppressed the urge to laugh out loud at the ridiculous notion that the power might have chosen me after ignoring me so completely for nearly twenty-one years. I doubted that it had suddenly changed its mind and elected me homecoming queen.

Ellen stayed silent for a few seconds. “Maisie isn’t bad,” she pronounced summarily. “She’s my baby niece. But I think you could be right. I don’t understand what went on last night, but my gut tells me that the right sister drew the red lot. I can’t explain it, but I’m certain that this isn’t as settled as Iris would like to think. Nothing was ever cut-and-dried with Emily, so I wouldn’t expect for anything to be cut-and-dried with her girls.”

“Why is your hand shaking like that?” Wren changed the subject while I was still trying to grapple with what my aunt had said.

“It’s nerves baby, just nerves,” Ellen replied.

“You’d feel better if you had a drink,” Wren said. My mouth gaped open.

“No. I need to keep the promises I’ve made to the family, to Mercy.”

“I won’t say anything. A little bit will help. It’s Maisie’s fault.” That little bastard. Was he just giving voice to Ellen’s own rationalizations, or was he afraid of losing his battery in the event that Ellen pulled herself together? I needed to talk to Iris and Oliver about him, and soon.

I tapped on the door, desperate to stop her before she gave in to Wren’s advice.

“Yes?” Ellen called out.

“It’s me,” I responded.

“It’s unlocked,” she said, and I tried the knob. When the door swung open, she was sitting alone at her dresser. “I’m almost ready,” she said. I suspected that Wren was still in the room but hiding himself from my view. I came in and stood behind her, looking at our combined reflections in the glass. She smiled at me and returned to her lip gloss. “What is it, sweetie?” she asked in mid-application.

I put my hands on her shoulders, and leaned in to kiss her cheek. “It’s only that I believe in you. I really do.”

She smeared the gloss above her lip and reached for a tissue. Wiping away her error without comment, she reapplied the gloss, using the action to mask her shock. Turning to face me when she was done, she immediately changed the topic. “I sense something different about you today,” she said.

I felt a blush of warmth flush my cheeks—it wasn’t embarrassment, it was happiness. I smiled and sat on the edge of her bed. “Last night,” I began. “Peter and I—”

It was all I could manage to get out before Ellen rushed over to the bed and took me in her arms.

“I am so happy for you!” she said and then she paused, giving me a weighing look. “We are happy about this, right?”

I smiled and nodded my head yes. “Well, no wonder you’re glowing today. Tell me all about it—well, obviously not all about it,” she sputtered. “Oh, hell, just tell me you’re in love.”

She seemed so happy for me that I couldn’t bear to bring Jilo into the picture. “Yes,” I responded. “I am.”

“That should really help settle things with Jackson then,” Ellen said to herself. She shrugged when she realized that she’d said it out loud. “Sorry.”