“Maybe.”
“I’ll call your daughter Rebecca,” Kendall threatened.
Ady’s oldest girl was fifty-two, a lab technician at the morgue, and a no-nonsense woman who loved her mother dearly. She sometimes came in for a tarot reading herself. “Just for fun,” she always said, and it was fun; she and Kendall always ended up talking about all the different things the cards could mean.
MissAdy stared at her stubbornly, frowning. “The tea leaves say I can get better?” she asked. “’Cause if not, I am not going to be poked and probed and have needles stuck in my arms. Folks like me, we’ve had a good time of it, we’ve been blessed. We don’t mind dying. We just want it to be in our own homes.”
“You’re not going to die, not if you go to the doctor,” Kendall insisted.
“Well, all right, then.”
“Come on. We’ll make an appointment for you right now,” Kendall said.
When they reentered the front of the shop, Mason, who had been showing a customer a spectacularly pretty crystal, looked up in surprise as Kendall and Ady went straight to the phone. As they called the doctor and arranged for an appointment, Mason made the sale. The gentleman who bought the crystal held the door open for Ady to leave.
“What was that all about?” Mason demanded.
“I think she has cancer,” Kendall said.
“What?” Mason looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “Since when did you start believing your own PR? Why on earth would you scare an old woman like that?”
Just what the hell had happened in there? Kendall wondered. She wanted to shake it off; she wanted to tell herself it was nothing more than the fact that she cared about Ady, and it wouldn’t hurt to have her make a trip to the doctor, just to check things out. But no matter how hard she tried to explain things to herself, she still felt uncomfortable. Something about this was genuinely frightening.
As frightening as it had been the first two times. But she had been doing tarot readings then, and it was easy to get tired when she was concentrating on the cards and her customer, easy to see things that weren’t really there.
“I…I think it must be because I spent so much time with Amelia,” she said quickly, because Mason was staring at her.
“So now everyone who is older has cancer?”
“No, of course not. Maybe it just gave me an instinct. Or maybe I’m wrong. You know I would never do anything to hurt her. But it can’t hurt for her to go to the doctor, so I’ll be a bit late on Thursday. I’m going to take her to her appointment.” Kendall walked toward the counter, then added, “If anyone else wants their tea leaves read today, you do it, okay?”
Mason looked at her quizzically, then shrugged. “Sure. If that’s what you want.”
“Thanks. It is.”
When he arrived at the plantation, Aidan found that the structural engineer they’d booked had arrived early. Luckily Jeremy had been early, too. They were already walking through the house. Aidan met the man and shook hands with him, saw that Jeremy had the inspection under control and left them to their own devices.
Aidan walked back out front and stared up at the house, though he didn’t know what he was looking for. Yesterday he had been certain he had seen a woman in white on the balcony. Had it been Kendall? It must have been. What other possibility could there be?
But when he had met Kendall at the door, she hadn’t looked like the woman he’d seen. That woman had been paler, and dressed in white. The woman in white. Clearly he’d read too many old ghost stories in his day. There had been no woman in white. It had been a trick of the light, of the strange weather, with its wind and roiling dark clouds, followed by sun and clear skies.
He closed one eye, staring at the house almost defiantly. What bothered him most, he knew, wasn’t the woman he’d seen, who really might have been a trick of the eye. What bothered him was his gut feeling about the house. There was something disturbing about the place, something dark and forbidding.
He gave himself a mental shake. Houses didn’t have personalities. They were wood and brick and stone, nails and plaster.
He walked back toward the house, but didn’t go inside. Instead, he found himself tracing his steps past the house and back to the last slave cabin, where he had found the soup cans and the bone. The place looked as if it had been invaded by moles, the police had dug so many holes, looking for other bones or anything else suspicious. He hunched down, looking at what the search had turned up. There had been other bones at the site: chicken bones. They went nicely with the discarded container from a fast-food restaurant.
Nothing very intriguing in that. Some homeless person had been using the area as a base. With the number of people still displaced by the storm, that shouldn’t be surprising.