After Always Read online

  …

  Did I want the séance to be real?

  I was flushed all day as the question throbbed hotly in my ears like a beating heart. For weeks, I’d been teased, almost harried, by events that defied explanation, but if Tristan wasn’t gone, what would he communicate through Mme. Shreves?

  There’d been a tension in me rising like a wave since I’d first been driven up to Stonebridge. Since I’d seen that dark figure in the distance near the waves. It continued to rise from ankles to thighs to waist to chest until I felt the press of it against my throat.

  Now, this.

  Mme. Shreve was going to communicate with the dead.

  Octavia Jericho.

  Her husband.

  Tristan?

  How could he come back for me from an ocean away, from worlds away? Surely I was safe now. I was alive. He was dead. Even if his promises of forever were true, even if he’d meant them, how could we be together again…unless I died, too?

  I wiped my clammy hands on my shorts as I worked. Michael had rearranged the furniture, but I was Mrs. Brighton’s hands and legs as we staged the rooms. One was the moderately large ballroom I’d never entered because it was kept shut up at the back of the house.

  Mrs. Brighton had hired a service in the spring to polish the floors and clean the windows. All that was left for me was to show the florists where to place flowers and to dust off the aged stereo system that would provide music for the dancing that was to pass the time before midnight. A live band was beyond the budget the group wanted to spend.

  Luckily, there were hundreds of albums kept neatly stacked and sleeved by the turntable…including Chopin.

  I chose an old jazz standard to test the equipment. I’d never placed a needle on a record in my life, but I’d seen it done on movies and television. The amplified sound of the metal in the vinyl groove and the resultant static set my teeth on edge, but soon a full mellow orchestral rendition poured forth from dusty speakers.

  I backed away, unaccountably soothed yet oddly affected by the music. Piano echoed in the distant reaches of the high ceiling.

  I was expected to attend the party. Della was going to set up the sideboard with light hors d’oeuvres so the guests could serve themselves. Mrs. Brighton and I would attend as guests ourselves.

  And Michael.

  He was invited as well.

  I’d packed my favorite recital dress. Mrs. Brighton had told my mother there would be at least one formal occasion. As the music played and I arranged the tablecloths, I couldn’t help wondering if Michael would come.

  The dancing was only to pass time. The séance was the main event. Every year the group returned on the night Octavia Jericho had died. There had never been any major contact. Thumps. Bumps. Moans from Mme. Shreves’s lips.

  That didn’t stop me from worrying. This year they might prove luckier than they’d been in the past. Things had changed. Tristan had died. I was here. I couldn’t help a fission of fear. If anyone had ever existed who could defy the nothingness of death, it would be Tristan.

  A force of nature.

  Mrs. Brighton had said people described Jericho that way, but it could easily have described Tristan as well. And sometimes a force of nature was devastating—an earthquake, a tornado, a lightning bolt that charred everything in its path. There was no shame in needing time to recover, to restore, to reclaim what the force of nature had devastated.

  Listening to the grainy music that seemed perfectly suited to Stonebridge’s abandoned ballroom, I easily fell back into memories of Tristan.

  He’d been so quiet and still and intense. Every situation he stepped into, whether classroom or music practice or study hall, had immediately gone tense and breathless, waiting for him to speak, waiting for him…just for him.

  He didn’t have to do anything at all to command the interest of the entire room. Or so it seemed to me.

  Many people got loud around Tristan. They tried to draw him out. Jokes were told. Stunts performed. The world churned up around him like he was the shiny pebble thrown into a quiet pond to disturb dull waters. Everyone rippled around him in concentric, dissipating circles.

  But not me.

  I didn’t know how to be boisterous and loud. I could only be quietly watchful. Intense, he told me later, in my own thoughtful way.

  It worked, though I’d had no plan to capture his interest. I’d only been silently fascinated by him, but that drew him more than any effort would have. I found myself the object of his interest, and his aura of mystique encompassed me in a rush of sensation I’d never experienced before.

  He smiled, for me.

  He talked, to me.

  His kiss when it came was a hot intimacy with a flickering flame no one else could touch.

  It took a long time for me to see that what I’d identified as peoples’ fascination with the beautiful, poetic boy I now walked with, hand in hand, was actually fear. People got louder and more demonstrative around Tristan the same way they might whistle in a dark alley at midnight.

  He was unpredictable.

  He was moody.

  His words could elevate like a euphoric drug or cut you down like a well-honed knife.

  He was a wild blend of darkness and light that constantly kept you off balance and uncertain, high then low in a sudden rush of falling or rocketing to the sky.

  It had been the same for Octavia.

  I had no warning. This time without Jericho’s eyes or a baby’s cry, the air went soft around me. The oxygen didn’t leave the room. It merely stilled. My ears hummed at the sudden muffling of sound. The floor beneath my feet was firm. My lungs expanded and contracted. My heart beat. But the rest of the world around me went distant and vague.

  All alone in the ballroom, I “met” Alexander Jericho for the first time. I saw it all as if I’d lived it. Just like Tristan, Jericho had been beautiful in both appearance and a sort of enigmatic grace that drew the room buzzing around him in a frenzy of bows and curtsies.

  But not Octavia.

  She’d been enigmatic in her own silent way. Stunning in evening regalia of the time, in this very room, she’d drawn his interest with her quiet fascination. She’d watched him approach with a fluttering heart, and he’d seen its flutter in her widened eyes and her slightly parted lips.

  Had that been what drew Tristan to me? There was something predatory about the thrill and the approach. Jericho stalked Octavia when he first saw her across the ballroom. He was dressed in evening attire, but there was something less than civilized in his vivid gaze. Had that been the way Tristan had approached me? I watched Jericho step toward Octavia, and I experienced the moment with her.

  I flushed as Octavia flushed. I gasped when Jericho took her hand. I shivered when his lips touched the skin at the base of her glove. My body thrummed as they danced…as we danced. He was strong, powerful, and his barely contained energy was very unlike the rest of the cool, polished gentlemen in the room. They’d been content to be refused. Jericho hadn’t bothered to ask.

  The adrenaline that surged in her a hundred years ago found an answering surge in me. I breathed too quickly, certain Jericho/Tristan wasn’t gone. He would never be gone. That kind of dark, predatory intensity could never fade away. I recognized the pleasurable, electric attraction, but also the first tingles of fear.

  The needle scratched against the paper at the center of the record, bumping back to play the last note again and again. The world was no longer vague. The air circulated around me once more. The sun was setting. A vivid glow of luminous purple shone through the sparkling floor-to-ceiling windows around the room. I had finished the tablecloths but I had stood, awash in Chopin through the entire album.

  Chopin.

  Not the jazz record I’d put on when I’d first come in the room.

  My back was stiff. My shoulders tight. But they didn’t cause me to turn slowly. I turned slowly because I was afraid of what I’d see. The darkest of romances was still beginning in my mind.


  A young woman who must be Hannah Shreve was at the turntable. She lifted the needle from the record and placed it back on its rest. She turned the knob to stop the spinning record, and it slowly wound down to a halt.

  “I’ve never seen one of these before. Even my mother has an iPod,” she said.

  I understood the “even.” With her flowing dresses and ringed fingers, Mme. Shreve seemed much older than her probably forty-ish years. Maybe she walked in other times even though we saw and heard her here. Or maybe she wanted to inspire that kind of fanciful thinking.

  Part of her act.

  A performance. Like cosplay, but with the purpose of building her psychic reputation.

  Or a genuine result from dwelling partially in another plane where the past wasn’t very far away?

  “I only knew how to turn it on because the dials were labeled,” I confessed.

  Had Hannah changed the records without me noticing? How long had I stood there lulled and listening to Chopin?

  “User friendly,” Hannah said.

  She smiled a small little smile with ruby glossed lips. Where her mother was big and blowsy and filled an entire room with her scent and her voice and her colorful presence, Hannah was pale and quiet with shiny, bobbed hair and doll-like features. I liked how the brightness of her lips and the flash of her light blue eyes were vivid against her skin. She made an impression without having to try nearly as hard as her mother.

  I’d noticed the whole group of guests from the society had a flipped schedule. They slept late in the day. They were awake at all hours of the night.

  Probably the reason I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Hannah until this moment.

  “This is the first time I’ve been allowed to come to Stonebridge. I’ve heard about the shadowy halls and the cove, the poppets and the masks. About Captain Jericho’s portrait.” At that she shivered. “This is the first time I’ve seen it all for myself.”

  She didn’t like Jericho’s painting. Her bright lips stood out against her skin. Where her mother’s lipstick was garish and messy, Hannah’s was perfectly applied in a feminine bow, but the bow was tightly pursed with distaste.

  I suddenly wanted to tell her all about my summer and my loss. About my worries for what kind of future stretched in front of me. About my fear of Tristan and my feelings for Michael. I felt pent up, as if I needed the release of confiding to a sympathetic friend.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Resist the urge to confide in me. You have no idea how awkward it can get if you give in.”

  “What is it?” I asked. I kept my secrets inside with supreme effort. An avalanche of confessions trembled on my lips. Me, the girl who usually only expressed myself through music.

  “My grandmother was amazing. You should have seen her. She was a complete flapper. Kind of like my mom is disco bohemian, but my grandmother meant it. She swore she’d been a singer at a speakeasy in 1923 even though she was born in 1964. She was real. What she could do. Was real. She channeled spirits. She practiced tarot. She could see weeks and months in advance,” Hannah said. “She also drank too much.” She shrugged. “Trade off. It happens sometimes.”

  “But what does she have to do with me wanting to talk to you?” I asked.

  I’d walked toward her without meaning to. She’d backed away and sat in a high-backed upholstered chair against the wall. She wasn’t in costume. Not bohemian or flapper. Her simple sundress—black dotted with roses—was cut in a current style that fell in a handkerchief hem around her knees. She smoothed the folds now, and even though her hands were steady I found the move nervous. It hinted she wasn’t as calm as she seemed.

  “It skips a generation. The Shreve abilities. That’s what it has to do with you. You want to talk to me because I have the gift of seeing what you don’t say. It makes me seem empathetic. You want to talk to me because you perceive I already know some of what you will say. You anticipate my understanding. I needed to tell you that my mother is wrong. You shouldn’t come to the party. Not the dance and not the séance. In fact, you shouldn’t be in this house if you can help it. You should leave,” Hannah said.

  If possible, her face had gone even more pale, as if she blanched at some of her thoughts as she warned me away.

  “I don’t believe. I don’t believe in any of this,” I said.

  Surely my desire to speak to her was ordinary loneliness and isolation. I’d had many friends before Tristan moved to Seattle. He’d slowly but surely whittled away at my time. Only he’d been sharp and edgy like a gleaming scalpel. I’d felt very little pain. At first. After, I hadn’t known how to pick up old friendships without seeming lame.

  “Do you often listen to jazz?” Hannah asked.

  No. No I didn’t. Never. Why had I picked the record I’d picked?

  “That was a gift from my grandmother. She tends to hang with me a lot. She was trying to help you,” Hannah said.

  “And the Chopin?” I asked. Already knowing what she was going to say.

  “That was from Octavia Jericho. I played it because she wanted me to help you, too,” Hannah said. “You were lost in the past in your head. Yours and hers. Gone. The Chopin brought you back.”

  “I don’t believe in any of this,” I repeated. Numb and tingling all over like a limb that had gone to sleep needing its nerves to be stimulated before it could feel normal again.

  “But you did believe in someone. One particular someone. He filled you up, every atom, every cell, until he was gone and you were left a hollow girl. What most people don’t know is that you lost him before he died. He deserted you the first time he hurt you. You’ve been empty since then,” Hannah said. “But you aren’t hollow anymore.”

  The last was almost an eerie sing-song. The rising and lowering lilt of her words skittered along my spine.

  You aren’t hollow anymore.

  I clenched my teeth.

  Someone had told her my boyfriend had died. And maybe she’d seen me with Michael.

  She wasn’t psychic, but she was strange. I no longer wanted to tell her my secrets.

  “I have to go and get ready. Mrs. Brighton wouldn’t want me to miss her biggest event of the season,” I said.

  “Inadvisable, but I get it. That black hair. Those green eyes. Dreamy,” she said.

  She couldn’t know Tristan had had black hair and green eyes. She must be talking about Jericho’s portrait. I went to the turntable and put Chopin back in its sleeve. Then I buried it under a pile of other albums. Maybe she thought light brown hair and brown eyes were dreamy. Maybe she wanted to be the only young woman at the party because Michael would be the only young man…if he came.

  “Dreamy or nightmare-y,” Hannah said behind my back as I stepped into the hall. “Captain Jericho is more nightmare than dream, I’d say. But, then, you’re used to guys who turn out like that.”

  “Is,” not “was.” I would remember that later on.

  …

  The west landing mirror was broken. I came to the top of the stairs and paused for my usual test of courage only to find the middle of the mirror crushed in and the rest of the glass shattered outward in jagged shards like a mosaic gone violently wrong.

  I had found several other broken mirrors in the last week. I’d cleaned up the glass and told Mrs. Brighton. We’d guessed clumsy guests or hooks that had sagged in aging walls.

  But this was impossible to explain away. An errant bump wouldn’t have broken such a large mirror, and its frame was still securely fastened to the wall.

  I saw my eyes in the glass. They were focused, narrowed, and much less vague than I’d seen them before.

  The shattered glass showed a shattered Stonebridge behind me. Now that I knew one of the rooms was the closed-off room with Octavia’s portrait, the reflection seemed more sinister and surreal. My eyes were drawn to that particular door, and even though it was shut tight I knew it wasn’t always…

  I thought about the footprints in the dust across the floor. The worn path in the Pers
ian rug.

  I’d been afraid to mention the room to Mrs. Brighton. I thought maybe I wouldn’t mention the landing mirror, either. In the center of the glass where something had impacted with ferocious force, I saw blackened blood.

  My heart lurched, and even though my whole body felt drained of courage, I stood there in front of the broken mirror for a long, long time.

  …

  When I returned to my room to prepare for the party, one of the poppets lay on the windowsill. I wished for shadows. The light from the window showed too clearly the details of the small burlap doll’s construction. Messy stitches had created its arms and legs. They bit into the cloth too tightly so that its seams were painfully pinched.

  Its eyes were two button beads tiny and bright in its rough face. They were gray. The strands of hair that showed here and there peeking through the cloth were black. But, worst of all, a piece of silk fabric sewn onto its torso with a lashed, crooked stitch, I thought I recognized as matching the cloth of my maxi dress. The one I’d ruined in the sea.

  I tore the scrap of dress from the doll. My hands shook, but I didn’t stop there. I pulled the beads off, one by one. I picked and pulled until every stitch was separated. I took the white cotton batting and the strands of hair that I feared as too familiar and threw them and the rest of the dismantled poppet in the trash.

  I tied the trash bag tight and carried it out to the cans behind the kitchen. Only when the destroyed poppet was out of the house did my pulse slow and my fingers stop shaking.

  It had only been one of the dolls from the basket in the mask hall. Some guest had innocently moved it…to my room. The scrap of cloth had been similar. That was all. But that dress had been lost in the laundry. Maybe someone had determined its silk spoilt by the saltwater. Maybe someone had thrown it away.

  When I brushed my hair, I couldn’t help a shudder at the memory of those long, black strands.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “And more inconstant than the wind.”