Glancing at Avery, I said, “It’s much more dramatic when you’re living with it.”
Avery stood again. “Look, I don’t know who you two are or what you want or what kind of game you’re playing, but it’s sick. It’s time for you to leave.”
Delia stood up, walked over to the fireplace, and waved Haywood over to her. As soon as he came closer, my head started pounding and I knew Delia’s had to be, too.
“Come here,” she said to Avery.
She recoiled. “What? Why?”
“Please,” Delia said on a sigh.
Reluctantly, Avery walked over. Delia faced Haywood. “When I count to three, Haywood, float into my body, okay? And stay there.”
Yes.
“Carly, as soon as he does, count to three. Hay, when Carly reaches three, you back out. Got it?”
Yes.
I wasn’t sure what she was up to. This wasn’t something I’d ever seen before.
Delia turned to the mirror, and positioned Avery to face it as well. “One. Two. Three.”
Haywood floated forward. In an instant, Delia’s image in the mirror faded away, replaced with Haywood’s ghostly one. His blue eyes went wide with wonder.
Avery fainted.
? ? ?
An hour later, Avery still had a look of shock haunting her eyes. We all sat on the floor around the coffee table, coffee cups in hand.
We’d explained everything to her the best we could. The hows and whys of being able to see ghosts. I told her of my dealings with the Harpies, and how we suspected Avery was Haywood’s daughter.
She said, “Haywood approached me out of the blue nearly six months ago and told me he’d been married to my mother.”
Six months. When the first blackmail letter showed up.
“That was a shock and a half,” Avery went on, “as I’d never known she’d been married at all. She’d been gone for more than a year at that point, and I’d never found anything in her papers that mentioned a divorce. Buried deep in a box in a closet, I did find a picture of her while pregnant with me kissing a man, but it wasn’t Haywood. But even more shocking than the divorce news was when Haywood said he suspected he was my father.”
“Hello, bombshell,” Delia said.
“Exactly,” Avery agreed. “I hadn’t ever doubted my mother’s story that my father was dead. She painted it as a tragic love affair kind of thing, and I had no reason to believe that she’d lie to me. I’ve been stressing about it ever since I found out. Why wouldn’t she just tell me the truth? Why keep me from my father, who by all accounts was one of the nicest men around? It doesn’t make sense, and I can’t help but think all the answers are in Hitching Post.”
“Why’s that?” Delia asked.
While we talked, Haywood paced the kitchen, listening. I had the feeling he was learning some new things today as well.
“She was very skittish about her time spent in Hitching Post in general. She didn’t like to talk about it. It upset her greatly.” Avery swallowed hard. “I don’t like thinking about that, but I always believed it was because my father had died tragically, leaving her to raise me on my own. That clearly wasn’t the case at all. Yet, something happened there that made her vow never to return.”
I recalled what Mr. Dunwoody had said about Twilabeth’s battle with depression. Did Avery know of that? If not, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. Her mama was dead. Let her rest in peace now.
“She was happy here,” Avery said. “She used to regale me with stories about packing her things and moving down here, starting life over. She bought this house, had me, and eventually became a law professor at the university. We traveled and had all kinds of adventures. She was absolutely the best mom ever. I miss her every day.”
“She sounds wonderful,” Delia said in a way that made me believe she was thinking of her own mama’s shortcomings.
Avery took a sip of her coffee. “She was.”
“Did you know about the blackmail letters Haywood had been receiving?” I asked.
“Not at first. He eventually told me about them. They infuriated him to no end. So much so that after my paternity test came back he left a note at the drop site instead of money.”
“Paternity test?” I knew only about the one that revealed Haywood was Tyson Ezekiel’s son.
“I have it if you want to see it. I asked Haywood to do it. I just wanted to be sure. Ninety-nine percent positive that Haywood is . . . was . . . is . . . my father.” She glanced hesitantly toward the kitchen. She smiled and rolled her eyes. “He wanted to tell the whole world. That’s why I was at the party. He was going to share the news about me . . . and about his own parentage.”