Page 47

“Is she out there? Dobbs? I didn’t take time to look.”

“Neither did I.”

At the end of the hall, Sonya looked toward the nursery, the weeping. “So sad,” she said. “So sorry.”

But rather than walk that way, Sonya turned toward the stairs.

For reassurance, Cleo reached for Trey’s hand. “Maybe it’s—the mirror’s—in a different room tonight.”

Trey nodded as they followed. “Maybe. But she knows where she needs to go. Not hurrying, but no hesitation either.”

Halfway down the stairs, the music changed from the lament of “Barbara Allen” to something lively, and to Trey unrecognizable.

“That’s new, the music change.”

“It’s happier,” Cleo decided. “Do you hear voices? I sort of do.”

“Like an echo. Distant. Singing?”

“I think so.”

At the base of the steps, Sonya turned to walk down the hall. She stopped at the door to the music room, then stepped just inside.

“The music, the voices—all still distant. But she hears something.”

“Sees something, too?” Cleo wondered. “Do you see anything? There’s not much light, just some backwash from the night-lights we plugged in, but I don’t think we should turn them on.”

“No. We won’t turn them on. And no, I don’t see anything but the music room.”

Sonya saw the music room, and to her eye it was brightly lit. Flowers painted on pale blue globes shined from the lamps gracing side tables, and the candles in a silver candelabra on the piano flickered.

Their glow illuminated the room as dark pressed against the windows.

She saw a trio of men in suits, and women—two of them young—in pretty dresses that swept toward their ankles.

She recognized Owen Poole as he looked on indulgently while the woman—his wife, second wife and mother of his children—played the piano. Behind her, Lisbeth, her dark hair wound in a braid around the crown of her head, sang a song about the seaside.

As it had once before, a different tableau, it all went still. Theyoung man, Edward, Lisbeth’s fiancé, stopped with a glass halfway to his lips and a wide smile on his face.

Lisbeth’s mother sat, her hands still on the piano keys, her head tossed back in a laugh.

The hem of a blue dress stilled on a swirl as the young woman wearing it stopped in mid-turn.

The fire in the little hearth stopped crackling and remained frozen like one of the paintings on the wall.

In her pink frock with its flounced skirt, Lisbeth turned to Sonya.

“We were so gay that night! Mama played and played. I loved my Edward. Isn’t he handsome?”

“He’s very handsome.”

“We’d be married in just a few more weeks. My dress is a real dilly, too. Papa didn’t mind the cost one bit. Not for his little girl. Everyone’s coming. It’ll be an absolute crush.”

“I know.”

“You know,” Lisbeth agreed. “It hurt, when I died, and I was so afraid. I was sad, too. And for a while it made me even sadder that Edward moved on. He found someone else to love, and he got married, had a family. It made me so very sad. But then I loved him, so much. And I wouldn’t have wanted him to stop living, like I did.”

She smiled, simply beamed. “Though wouldn’t that be romantic? Tragic and romantic, like a novel! But I loved him too much for that. I never believed in curses. Such silliness, that’s what I thought. Now you have to stop her. You have to break the curse. Find the rings, Sonya.”