Clara

47

I was seething when I found them hidden away in that ramshackle cabin, seething when I marched them to the car, and still seething when we drove away from there. I didn’t even know how to begin to voice my considerable displeasure. I hadn’t even given the girls time to pack but had thrown all their clothes in the trunk in a jumble. I had retrieved my wallet, though. It had been lying there, just right out in the open, between slices of cheese and a pear on the kitchen counter. I suppose money was nothing to my nieces, seeing how they’d always had too much of it.

“Do you have any idea what you have done?” I asked as I slowly maneuvered the car through the thick woods. The dirt road was a disgrace and overgrown from disuse. From time to time, a low-hanging branch would scratch against the car roof. “Do you have any idea how utterly humiliating it was to have to go to the police and admit that you had run away? I even had to call your lawyer, for God’s sake, to ask if you had been in touch—and your parents’ fancy friends in the city!” No need for my nieces to know that Sebastian had been the one to make those calls. “Do you think that was fun for me? Do you think that put me in a good position?” I turned my head to look at them, but only for a second, seeing how the road twisted before me. The two of them sat huddled together in the back seat. Lily’s eyes were as cold as always, and she did that Iris thing with her mouth again. Violet mostly looked spooked and it delighted me. She certainly deserved it—and more. Not for the first time, I allowed myself to imagine that it was indeed I and my meddling with Ben’s equipment in the garden shed that had caused their parents’ ice-cold demise. The thought was as sweet as honeycomb and felt utterly, unquestionably just.

When neither of my nieces deigned to answer my question, I continued. “You thought yourself so clever, huh, coming up here? As if the lake house isn’t on record? It didn’t take a genius to figure out where you had gone; it was the only reasonable conclusion. Did you really think I wouldn’t find you?” I paused my tirade to breathe. “You think you have it bad, huh, living with me? There are girls in this world with far harsher fates than yours—girls who don’t deserve what the world has in store for them one bit, while the two of you have made every inch of your beds yourselves, calling up ghosts and whatnot! If only you had left the past well alone, none of this would have happened!” It was all absolutely true, but I thought it wise to leave out the part where their meddling had actually been to my advantage, bolstering my struggling finances.

Lily finally found her voice and started up her tired old tirade. “Violet gets sick. She can’t do the séances anymore.”

“Well, that is my call, isn’t it? Seeing how I am the guardian?” I snapped back.

“Maybe,” she admitted. “But I think you’re doing it wrong. You are supposed to protect us, not try to earn any money from us.”

“Oh, is that so?” I pretended to be astonished. “I really wish someone would have told me that before! Do you think I’m stupid, Lily?” I dared to look away from the road for another second to crane my neck and scowl at her. “Do you really think that I do not know what a guardianship entails?”

“Well, you don’t behave like you do,” she replied, but the righteousness in her voice had faded, and I took that as a good sign.

“Running away like that.” I shook my head. “You two have to be the most ungrateful, entitled brats in all the world! Leaving me to fend for myself when you know how I cannot even feed myself, and that it’s all because of you! If we’re weighing wrongs, it is you who have made my life a misery!”

“How did you eat?” Violet asked, seemingly immune to my accusations.

“I found a way,” I muttered, not wanting to share how I had paid a maid at the Silver Star to feed me leftover salad and plain bread—and I would certainly not share how the first maid I had asked had looked at me as if I was a deviant, shaking her head and backing away. Before all that had occurred, however, I had been forced to drive to the bank to get more cash, since my nieces had completely robbed me. Thankfully, they had left the car keys behind, and I always kept my driving license in the glove compartment. Without that stroke of luck, God only knows what would have happened to me, stranded and alone at a run-down motel.

“I told you Aunt Clara would be fine,” Lily said to her sister, which meant that at least one of them had had the decency to be concerned, which strangely felt like a consolation.

“There is nothing that money can’t buy,” I said, “but I’m sure you are well aware of that fact. What was your plan, then, Lily? Were the two of you supposed to live up there for four years? What about the education that is so important to you? What about your music? I can assure you that no music teacher would have made the trek up there—”

Lily cut me off. “I hadn’t decided yet.”

“Whatever your parents wanted for you, I’m absolutely sure that spending years in the wilderness was not on their wish list!”

“Neither was living with a murderer,” she informed me. “Or with someone who makes Violet sick, and who thinks about killing us all the time.”

“I do not,” I lied.

“You do,” Lily replied. “Dangerous things are purple, and you are very purple.”

“What complete, utter nonsense—”

“How can you not think of killing us after what Violet has done, bringing back the ghosts and finding out your secrets?” That, at least, was a fair point. “And where are you taking us now? Back to the Silver Star?”

“No. We’re going home, even if I have to drive all night.” It was harder for them to escape from Crescent Hill—and easier for me to control them there. Taking them out on the road like this had clearly been a huge mistake.

“You can’t keep us cooped up forever.” Lily realized my intentions at once.

“No, but I can keep you contained until I can trust you again.”

“At least you won’t have to do the séances now,” Lily said to Violet.

“Maybe I’ll find a way,” I snapped.

“It won’t make Violet put the ghosts back.” My niece sounded delightfully worried.

“We’ll just have to see about that,” I muttered, unwilling to give them as much as an inch. I did have a hope, though, that somewhere down the line, if only I pushed her enough, the girl would come up with a way to do it. It only made sense that if she could bring them back, she had the skills to send them away again, too—even if she didn’t know how yet.

As the night darkened around us, I drove on, the fury still lashing in my chest. The anger was almost like a living thing, one that burned and ached.

Iris used to call it monstrous.

I remembered one time in particular. It happened just as I was about to leave for nursing school, and I had pleaded with my mother to let me stay. We had been alone in her bedroom—a pink and frilly disgrace of a chamber that always smelled of spilled champagne and expensive floral perfume. Her clothes were everywhere: Silk, satin, velvet, and lace fought for space on her bed. Some of the dresses were still on the hangers, while shoes with heels pointed enough to kill were scattered on the carpeted floor. On her vanity lay a heap of jewelry, discarded. Her pearls were there, and some diamonds, too. Not the pink one, though. It was still on Iris’s finger.

“Please,” I had said, although I loathed that word. “I won’t be a good nurse, you know I won’t. I promise to keep out of your way if only you let me stay.”

Iris sighed as she stood before me, wringing her hands. Her candy-floss hair was like a halo around her head, and her pink silk robe draped like that of a goddess. “It’s not that easy, Clara. There are other concerns—”

“I know that you don’t like me,” I said. “I know I remind you of him and everything that happened back then, but I won’t be any trouble, I swear—”

“Clara.” She held up a hand, palm out. “It has nothing to do with that.” Her eyes narrowed and her brow furrowed. “It’s that anger in you,” she said. “It’s no good, Clara. It scares me. I just can’t trust you with Benjamin—”

“I won’t hurt him, I swear!” It had been an unfortunate thing that my mother found the half-burned doll I had knitted, stuffed with Ben’s soft hair and baby teeth.

“But, Clara…I—I just don’t trust you.” Her green gaze slid away from me to land on a silver shoe on the floor. “Maybe you will get better,” she said. “Maybe life will mellow you out.”

I had been hurt by her words for a very long time, but she had been wrong. Because that anger had served me just fine in life, and God only knows where I would have been without it.