“The thing is, it didn’t work.”
She shot him a look. “I was scared. Really scared.”
“But you’re still sitting here.”
After testing the water, he soaked a clean cloth, wrung it out. “You can barely see it now, but safer’s better than sorry. We’ll just hold it on there.”
“I don’t like being scared.” She muttered it. “It pissed me off.”
“Says the woman who likes horror flicks.”
“And novels. That’s a different kind of scared. I want her out of my house. If it takes finding the rings to get her the hell out of my house, I’ll find the damn rings. Somehow. The rest? I’ll give the rest interesting.”
Holding the compress against her arm with one hand, he brushed her hair back with the other. “Finding something just means looking in the right place.”
“Oh, is that all?”
Now he pressed his lips to her forehead. “We’re not going to let her win.”
When the cloth cooled, he took another look.
“It’s like it was never there. And it’s not sore, at all,” she added.
“Not much punch.” Lifting her arm, he brushed his lips where the mark had been. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”
“I hope so. And I hope she’s done for a while. I don’t want my mother going through that, then trying to haul me back to Boston.”
“I’m betting you got some of that stand-your-ground from your mother.”
When they reached the second parlor, where the light glowed again, he went in, opened the clock face.
“Might as well make her work for it.” This time he turned the hands to seven-ten. “Owen and I could move the clock out of the house.”
“I don’t think that would stop it, and it’s kind of a warning when it sounds. I wonder if Collin heard it. He didn’t wind the clock, but he kept it here. Not up or down in storage.”
“If you change your mind, we’ll take it out.”
He slid an arm around her waist as they walked back to the staircase.
“She was in there with us, Trey. I’ve felt cold spots before, but not like that, and not like the Gold Room. It’s a mean cold when it’s her. I guess that’s a warning, too.”
“Maybe you get rattled, Sonya, but you don’t stay rattled. My money’s on you.”
In bed, she curled up against him.
“I’m really glad you’re here.”
“So am I.”
Closing her eyes, she let the steady beat of his heart lull her until she slept.
PART THREE
Spirits
Let us have a quiet hour,
Let us hob-and-nob with Death.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Vision of Sin”
Chapter Twenty-one
On Friday, after Yoda stopped sulking because he didn’t have Mookie, Sonya cheered him up with a trip to the village for scallops, angel hair pasta, and something called unbleached flour.
She hadn’t known they bleached flour.
A quick run left her plenty of time to arrange the tulips she’d bought for her mother’s room. And start her first attempt at making bread.
“We’re not afraid, are we, Yoda? We’re not afraid of some flour and beer and butter and whatever. Not when we live in the haunted manor.
“Maybe a little afraid—but if we fail, we dump it, and she’ll never know.”
After following Bree’s instructions to the letter, she stared at the raw dough in the loaf pan.
“I guess it looks like bread dough. How would I know anyway?”
Fingers mentally crossed, she slid it into the oven, set the timer.
And decided it wasn’t obsessive not to leave the kitchen. Instead, she rearranged the fruit bowl a couple of times, paced, played a quick game of tug.
“Look! It’s sort of plumping up—it’s the beer, I looked it up. And it’s browning some, too. Can you smell that? I can smell it.”
When the timer—finally—went off, she remembered she was supposed to tap the bread and see if it sounded hollow. It made no sense to her, but she tapped.
“I guess it does. Anyway, I can’t stand it.”
After shaking the bread into her oven-mitted hand, she turned it onto the cooling rack. Stepped back.
“Now, I’m asking you, Yoda, is that or is that not the cutest little loaf of bread you’ve ever seen? And made by these hands.”
Her iPad played John Lee Hooker’s “Don’t Be Messing With My Bread.”
“You got that right.”