NINE
Iris knelt beside the flowerbed closest to the sundial, making a great show of deadheading flowers that in truth had not even begun to fade and pulling out the sparse weeds that had managed to take root under her vigilant care. The sunhat she wore had belonged to my grandmother, and, combined with the soiled floral-print gardening gloves she had on, it enhanced the more than casual resemblance that old photographs showed she bore to her. My aunt had not been the least surprised by our sudden arrival. “How did it go?” she asked as if we had just returned from a trip to the grocery store. “You can speak freely,” she said, pointing to a large crystal, the biggest rose quartz I’d ever laid eyes on, that had been placed in the flowerbed, apparently as decoration. As she spoke, the quartz gave off a faint glow.
“What’s that?” I asked, drawing cautiously toward it.
“That, my dear,” Oliver said, “is a little charm your Aunt Ellen came up with for us.”
“Okay, but what does it do?”
“It keeps the families from being able to listen in on us, or spy on us with remote viewing. She’s planting one in every room in the house. She’ll join us when she has finished.” We had no definitive proof that we were under surveillance, but when the families convened to discuss managing me and my access to power, they seemed very certain of details none of us had discussed with them. Even conversations to which Emmet, whom Oliver openly suspected of being a spy, hadn’t been privy. “Before you share anything with one of us that you wouldn’t want the families to know, make sure one of the crystals is present and glowing.”
“But won’t the families know we’re blocking them?”
“Of course, Gingersnap, but they sure as hell can’t complain about it, now, can they? They have no right to spy on us, and they sure as hell don’t have the right to spy on you. You are after all an anchor now, aren’t you?”
“Go on, tell me what you have learned,” Iris said.
I looked deeply into her eyes. I knew she was capable of lying. She and Ellen had lied to me about my father with a naturalness and ease that worried me. When you’re lying to protect someone, there’s a certain sense of nobility to it—you know, or think you know, that you’re freeing your loved one from the weight of knowing. I myself understood this from having lied to Peter about Maisie. But I felt a little less noble about it with every other falsehood that had followed.
Lying didn’t come easily to me, which surprised people given the way I’d made my pocket money up until recently. I used to lead tourists around Savannah on the Liar’s Tour, making up lies about famous people and places. The fun of the tour came from the fact that everyone knew I was making the stories up. True deception was a different matter. My aunts had much more talent in that arena. They had lied both actively and through omission about knowing the identity of my father. They claimed to have done this to protect Maisie and me. And together, with or without Ginny’s coaching, they had concocted the story of how my mother had died at my birth after begging Ellen to use all her power to save me rather than herself. I deeply wanted to believe that their horrible lie about my mother had come from a place of goodwill. Remembering that my mother had seduced both their husbands, I felt a pang. I wanted to believe that Ginny hadn’t left them with a choice, but when my aunts had helped drive my mother away, piety may not have come into play at all.
“She did it,” Oliver said, the glint in his eye showing the great pride he took in my accomplishment.
Frankly I had no idea why what I had done was so special. “I did nothing. I just stood there,” I said.
“Well, just by standing there, you did something most witches could never dream of doing. The Akashic records don’t reveal their secrets to just anyone.” Iris removed her gloves and hat. “Where is she?” she asked under her breath.
The smile fell from Oliver’s face. “She’s nowhere.” I knew then he must have seen what I had seen, felt what I had felt.
“I see,” Iris responded, her voice catching. “I guess it was too much to hope that she could have survived the blast that took her.”
“No,” I said, and helped Iris to rise. “She isn’t dead . . . not yet, anyway. She’s kind of ‘on hold.’?”
Iris looked at me blankly and then turned to Oliver for clarification. “I guess you could say she’s frozen among a number of possible outcomes. It’s like the line tucked her safely away until it could figure out what to do with her.”
“Is she in pain?” Iris asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m sure of that.” I wasn’t just telling her this to ease her mind. The line hadn’t chosen to punish my sister; it had chosen to protect her. “Listen, I know how crazy it sounds”—I hesitated, and the two drew closer to me—“but while I was near Maisie, Jilo’s cat appeared. It spoke to me.”
Iris and Oliver stared at each other for a moment, their expressions inscrutable. “Okay, I missed that part. What did puss have to say for itself?” Oliver asked.
“?‘Schr?dinger.’ That’s all it said.”
“Let’s not take the cat thing too literally. The spell took you to a place where language is less effectual than symbol. I think we all get what message the symbol tried to convey to you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Schr?dinger’s cat. It’s like Oliver said: Maisie’s been locked in a state of flux.”
“Perhaps you can spell it out for the kids at the back of the class?” Ellen asked as she approached us, carrying a tray filled with glasses and a pitcher of sweet tea. Over her shoulder I could see Emmet staring at us through the kitchen window. “Quietly?” She set the tray down on the table near us and began to pour. We joined her. Ellen glowed with vitality. She sported a fresh bob haircut and had been experimenting with new makeup. Her face was relaxed, her eyes glimmering. My aunt had finally pulled herself together and was beginning to overcome the double tragedy of losing her son and husband on the same day. She had decided to reopen her flower shop, and had even begun scouting around the City Market for an open space. And she had put alcohol behind her, although I noticed that Oliver had surreptitiously whisked away the bottle of scotch he’d been clutching. If only she could put Tucker in her rearview mirror once and for all . . . She beamed at me. The love she held for me was real, even though I was her husband Erik’s daughter by her own sister. All the same, as badly as I wanted to believe in her, I knew that sweet Ellen was just as capable of deceit as the rest of my relatives. “So?” she raised her eyebrows and asked, an impatient shake of the head punctuating her request.
“Cat in box. Neither dead nor alive, but in a state somewhere between the two possibilities, until an observer opens the box. The observer plays a role in determining the fate of the cat,” Oliver summed it up and took a glass of tea.
“Maybe I am a touch too blonde,” Ellen said, “but I don’t see what this cat has to do with our Maisie.”
I smiled. It felt good to hear her refer to Maisie as ours. “Whoever gets to Maisie first will free her from her limbo. Right now she is nowhere. No when. Just a point among possibilities. The observer won’t merely free her, he or she will determine from the many possible outcomes what happens next for her.”
“But how do we make sure we get to Maisie first? With all this talk of nowhere and no when, for heaven’s sake?”
“I don’t know. What I saw seemed purely symbolic,” I said. “I mean, talking cats and a black-and-red door hanging in thin—”
“Black-and-red door?” Ellen interrupted me, her voice carrying louder than she’d intended. She hushed herself, glancing back toward the kitchen. “What did it look like?”
“It looked like any other regular panel door. It had red panels, but the rest of it was black.”
“Why?” Oliver asked. “Does that mean something to you?”
Ellen looked from one of us to the other, finally settling on Oliver. “Yes,” she said. “Tillandsia.” She lowered her eyes. “Tucker and some of the others recently purchased a large house out in the country to use for gatherings. It’s just past Richmond Hill. That’s where we were heading when we passed you in Colonial.”
I said nothing, but she looked directly at me and started defending herself. “I’m no longer part of Tillandsia. It’s only . . .”
“It’s only what?” Iris asked, her voice steely.
“It was just a ride. A chance to get out of Savannah for a few blessed minutes, to go somewhere no one’s watching me, expecting me to hit the hooch or go whoring.” She spat out the words, but then calmed herself. “I’m sorry, but Tucker never judges me. Nor does he hide his whiskey the second I appear,” she said with a glare at her brother.
“Okay, fair enough,” Oliver said. “It was a platonic, lily-white outing . . . So why do you think this has anything to do with Tillandsia?
“The house. It’s huge, badly in need of a lot of repair and renovation. The single thing that’s in decent shape is the front door. It was freshly painted. Red panels set against a black background. It’s hideous. I told Tucker it would have to be the first thing to go, but he just laughed. He said he kind of liked it and would probably keep it that way.” I tucked away the realization that this new Tillandsia house was Peter’s project until I would have time to process it.
Oliver shook his head. “Could be coincidental.”
“It could be,” I responded as the truth hit me, “but we all know it isn’t. Maisie and I came into this world as a result of Tillandsia’s ‘activities.’ Tucker himself told me that my mother was the one to introduce him to Tillandsia. She inducted Uncle Erik”—I still found myself calling him that—“into the group as well. Didn’t she?”
“Sweetie—” Ellen began.
“Yes,” Iris interrupted her. “But not for sex. Emily had a different agenda.” Iris turned on her siblings, anticipating that they’d protest. “The girls are somehow linked to Tillandsia. If we are ever to get Maisie back, Mercy must know what Emily was attempting.”
“You’re right,” Oliver said. Ellen nodded her assent, but pulled her arms around herself. She went and took a seat in the sunlight, nearly turning her back on the rest of us. Oliver followed her with his eyes, but when he spoke, he was addressing me. “Your little ‘incident’ the other day. With the old fellow,” he added, as if there were any chance that accidently burning a man’s heart out wouldn’t be the first thing to leap to mind. “It took a bit of power to deliver that jolt. When you drew that power, we all felt it. Any witch around here would have. Kind of like an electrical brownout.”
“That means,” Iris said, “that whenever you do something that draws a lot of power off the line, other witches will know you are up to something. If you want to do something big without setting off a magical blow horn, you have to find another way of harnessing the energy.”
“Okay, how would you do that?” I prompted when the two fell silent.
“Well, Gingersnap, it depends on the size of the thing you are attempting.”
Iris put her hand on my forearm. “If you can’t draw off the line, you are basically left to resort to your friend Jilo’s tactics. Using sympathetic magic, drawing like to like. That’s fine for tricks. In reality, though, there are only two ways outside the line to get your hands on real, big power: blood magic and Tantra, sacrifice and sex.”
“So she used Tillandsia to build up a battery of power,” I said.
“Yes. I believe that you and Maisie represent an unexpected by-product of Emily’s use of sex to amass magical energy.”
“But why? What was she trying to do with it?”
“We don’t know for sure. I guess we never will,” Iris said and shook her head sadly. “She died before we could get it out of her.”
“Oh.” My breath failed me, and the word stuck in my throat. Iris sure was doing a fine job of sticking to her story. “Not even any guesses?” I asked, and winced at the sound of my own pathetic laugh.
“We could speculate all day,” Iris said, reaching out for me. I did not take her hand. “But what we need to do is try and understand how this all relates to what’s happening with your sister.”
“But if you are right, and Maisie and I are somehow linked to whatever our mother joined Tillandsia to accomplish, we have to figure out what that was. How else could we begin to figure out how it relates to Maisie?”
“She’s right,” Oliver said. I felt apprehension flare off Iris in an almost palpable wave. “But where would we start? After Emmy died, Ginny claimed her journals.” I don’t know what it was—a lack of finesse in his tone, the absentminded way I could feel him flipping through the alternatives, or the way he didn’t even try to act smooth—but something told me he really didn’t know my mother was alive. I felt a pang of relief, but that was derailed by the massive doubts I still felt about Iris and Ellen. “And you, Gingersnap, are all too aware that those have been reduced to ash.” He paused. “We could try, and I do mean try, to search for echoes, but it all happened so long ago now.”
“Search for echoes?” I hadn’t heard of that before.
“Charge the atmosphere of the places Emily spent the most time. See if we can replay any memories the surroundings might still hold.”
“After all this time?” Iris asked. “No, I don’t think it’s worth the trouble or the risk of drawing the golem’s attention to what we’re doing.” She looked directly at me. “You know he’s here to spy. That’s the sole reason for his presence. It’s ridiculous for the families to insist that he’s somehow more qualified to train you in the use of magic than we are.”
“It’s true, Sandman is under foot, but what better way to keep him occupied than to have him show Mercy how to sift for memories?” Oliver said. “He doesn’t have to know the real reason. Just that Mercy would like to know how.”
Ellen turned in her seat. “I agree with Iris. It’s a bad idea.” I saw her eyes telegraph Iris a quick look of concern, but Iris remained stoic.
“Do you have a better one?” Oliver asked, but didn’t wait for a response. “No, I didn’t think so. It’s settled then,” he said, and then addressing me, “Let’s go find Emmet. Oh, wait”—his voice dripped with sarcasm—“here he is now.” He saluted the window where Emmet had been standing stock still the entire time.