Page 22 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland

You know why those who have passed over come to talk to us? It’s so we won’t be scared, so we know that there’s life after death. But do we listen? No. We scream and pull the covers over our heads. Imagine how that makes them feel! Why are we such assholes all the time?

—Evie Oxby to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show

C onfusion was too clean and simple a word for how Beatrice felt after Cordelia’s visit.

Questions stacked in her brain, growing more bewildering the harder she thought.

She sat with the grimoire for an hour, but every page she turned deserved dozens more Google searches, which were almost impossible without Wi-Fi.

She did her best to ignore the sealed page, only running her finger along the waxed edge once.

Then Beatrice tucked the grimoire into a bag and headed out for the civilized world. She’d almost made it to the library, where she planned on setting herself up with the book and some of that sweet, sweet high-speed internet, when someone called her name.

“Beatrice!” Minna stood in front of the barbershop across the street. She looked both ways and then scampered across, giving Beatrice a hug that was a full-force flop of bodily joy. “I’m so glad to see you!”

“Well, I’m glad to see you . You look adorable.”

Minna had draped a lacy red capelet over a black tank top.

Black-and-white-striped pants came up high on her waist, and the flat black boots that laced up to her calves were painted with silver sparkle.

“I do, right?” She tugged her hand through her black hair.

“Thanks. Good thrifting a couple of weeks ago. You ready for that tattoo yet?”

Beatrice laughed. “Not yet. But thanks.”

“Always worth a shot. What are you doing right now?”

“I thought I might do a little reading at the library. Later Reno’s going to work on a bookcase for my new houseboat, but I gave her the spare key yesterday, so I might spend all day here reading—who knows?”

Minna pressed her hands dramatically over her heart. “You bought the Forget-Me-Knot . You’re staying . I knew it.”

“For a while, yeah.” If staying meant getting to know this kid better, there was no better reason to stay. Even though I might be dying.

No, come on. She wasn’t. She’d have to make sure Cordelia didn’t mention the prediction to Minna. It wasn’t real, but Minna would probably genuinely believe it.

“Wait, and you hired Reno?”

“Yep.”

“Seriously?”

Uh-oh. “Should I not have?”

“No, she’s the absolute best, but… she just doesn’t trust many people. It’s kind of a big deal she agreed.” Minna’s eyes widened. “Which I think is great .”

“Well, I’m glad.”

“And you trusted her. Just like that.”

“You’re making me worry now.”

“ No. Don’t worry. There’s just some people in town who say shit about her.

But she’s literally the best and you did the right thing.

Anyway, forget reading in the library. Mom texted that she left our grimoire with you.

She made me swear not to tell Gran.” Her eyes lit up.

“Your plans just changed. I’m taking you to my favorite place, and I’ll show you what’s in that book. ”

Minna’s favorite place was the graveyard. Of course it was. When Beatrice was her age, she liked the one near her father’s house, but it was a rather boring, flat piece of grass-covered land, each marker either set flat into the ground or tastefully upright and regularly cleaned. Very mundane.

This?

This place was different. Set into the undulating hillside behind Cordelia’s house, just past Reno’s motor home, the graves wandered up through the grass.

Through overhanging trees, the sun dappled enormous blocks of chipped stained marble.

A cool breeze came off the glinting water in the distance.

The space was friendly. Mostly. Maybe in the darker spots it looked spooky and spine-tingling, but not actually frightening, which was a distinction Beatrice had never had to make before.

Minna leaped from broken flagstone to grassy hummock. “That’s where my second-grade teacher is buried. She died in her sleep of old age, which my mom says is the best way to go. And that’s the guy who invented a machine that makes paper clips. See the paper clips etched all around the stone?”

In some places, the grass grew high, more weeds than plants, and a few of the old stones were broken and crumbling. “Do they still use this place for burying people?”

Laughing, Minna jumped off the edge of an old, dry fountain.

“Use is kind of relative, right? Are these bodies using it? But no, there’s a new town graveyard closer to the highway, and it’s covered in boring grass that’s mowed once a week and they throw out the flowers you leave after a week.

It’s way more respectable than this old place, which is why I love it here.

Hey, speaking of relatives, check this out! ”

Minna led her down a row of aboveground crypts that looked like small marble houses.

Some were ornate, with open doors that allowed the breeze to push leaves through.

Peeking into one, Beatrice saw a grime-covered stained-glass window at the back, and a vase holding plastic flowers tipped onto its side.

On either side were plaques with names, and presumably, the original owners of the names were lying behind them.

“Look.” The crypt Minna led them to wasn’t huge—maybe half the size of a single-car garage.

Holland was carved grandly at the top of the door’s arch.

Beatrice inhaled sharply.

Her family, right here.

Engraved in smaller letters was Anna Holland, daughter of Valeska Holland .

The next line: Rosalind Holland, daughter of Anna Holland .

Decorative fleur-de-lis wound over the marbled sides.

The tomb had one door, also marble, which looked firmly closed.

There was no handle, nor anything else that suggested an entrance, just a single slot that might fit a key.

“Gran really wants to get permission to be buried in there with her mom and grandma. She also wants me and Mom to be shoved in there, too, although honestly, that’s not her business, is it?”

Mutely, Beatrice shook her head. She had a living will in which she’d stated she wanted to be cremated and placed in Grant’s prepurchased plot at Forest Lawn. That was going to have to be amended. Sooner might be better than later.

Minna went on, “Gran wants to get in and clean in there, too, but we’ve never been able to find the key, and no one at the city council seems to know what to do next about getting permission to remake one. Anyway, over here, I have something even better to show you!”

Her niece hooked her hand around the top of a stone pillar and swung herself around it so that she was facing the lettering. “Here we are. Meet your earliest foremother to live in Skerry Cove.”

Xenia Holland, b. 1827, d. 1919. Below that, carved into the marble in a light script: She who sees must share her vision.

Minna crossed her ankles and sank to the grass, patting the ground next to her. “Sit with me? We’ll spend time with the ancestors. First with the ladies. My dad’s here in the graveyard, too, but I’ll show you his spot later.”

Ancestors. Her very own. “So who is this?”

“Xenia is my great-times-five-grandmother, so she’s your quadruple great.

She came to the island in 1851 with the first wave of white colonizers.

Even though Xenia’s husband left to hunt for gold in California, her daughter Valeska was born here in 1857, and she refused to leave.

Valeska married Theodore Velamen in 1877.

” She shot a quick glance at Beatrice. “He wasn’t a good man.

She’s not buried in this graveyard because of him.

Gran won’t tell me much about them, but I’ll get it out of her someday.

Valeska’s daughter is Anna, who’s in the family crypt I showed you, with Rosalind, her daughter.

Rosalind was Gran’s mother. I met her when I was a baby, apparently, but I don’t remember. ”

Beatrice sat, the grass’s coolness rising through her jeans.

She reached forward to touch the marble, and of course, it was cold, much colder than the grass.

But she also felt an odd banked warmth, like the side of a cold mug when you’ve just poured the coffee in, the second before the ceramic heats.

Maybe the sun had warmed it all morning, even though there was no sun overhead now, just dark, looming clouds.

Minna nodded as she unzipped the top of her backpack. “You can feel it, right?”

Beatrice yanked back her hand. “What?”

“That weird warmth.”

She wasn’t going to admit it. “Xenia and Valeska. Not common names.”

“I think they’re Slavic, maybe? I’m not sure if we know where Xenia’s family came from, but we know they were both powerful AF. I’ve been trying to get Valeska to talk to me for ages but nothing yet. Don’t tell Mom, though. She worries.”

Beatrice sank her fingers into the grass. “And by getting Valeska to talk, you mean…”

“Oh, Aunt Bea.” She looked shy suddenly. “Can I call you that? I want to, but I won’t if you hate it.”

Even though the sun was still hidden behind the clouds, the top of Beatrice’s head warmed. “I love it.”

Minna gave her a brilliant smile. “Yay. Oh, my god, Aunt Bea, we’ve got a lot to go over.”

Beatrice opened the grimoire, flipping through it until she found the page that had been folded back on itself, almost to the very center of the book.

In the two-millimeter gap where the edge of the page touched the middle, a thin layer of wax had been laid down, sealing the page to itself.

“Can we go over this?” She pulled at the half page to see if she could peek down into it without breaking the seal.

“ No. ” With a look of horror, Minna yanked the book out of her hands. “We don’t open that page. Ever. Unless it’s the end of the line.”

Beatrice felt chastened. “I was only teasing.”

“Seriously, we don’t even joke about that.”

“Okay.”

Minna’s expression was fierce. “I mean it.”

When had Beatrice turned into the kid and Minna the adult? “Fine.” She tried to believe it really was, in fact, fine. “Tell me some things about magic.”

“Tell you? I’m going to make you do magic.”

For the next two hours, Minna tested Beatrice, getting her to say and do things that made no sense. Minna would open to a page, then she’d give Beatrice a collection of words to say, sometimes in verse, sometimes just a jumble of disparate phrases that felt ragged in her mouth.

Then a solid block of nothing would happen.

As the morning wore into afternoon, the clouds overhead darkened, and the scent of impending rain rolled in. They stayed seated, though, Minna correcting Beatrice’s pronunciation.

Still, nothing.

Beatrice found this unsurprising, but every time she did a magic belly-flop, Minna seemed flummoxed. “Huh. That should have been an easy one. Okay. This one—you’ll totally be able to do this one. I could do it when I was five. This will make the grass move.”

When Beatrice said the words, the grass did move.

“Good job! You did it!”

Beatrice licked her finger and held it up. “The grass moved because: wind.”

“But maybe—did it blow the opposite way for a second?”

No. It hadn’t.

That morning, when she’d sat with Cordelia in the galley of the boat, Beatrice could admit that she’d felt a poignant tug of hope. Silly, of course, but anyone might have. It had been a fresh new day, the book had looked so beautiful, and who didn’t want magic to be real?

But now, she was sitting in the real world, humoring her real niece, and she didn’t want to keep disappointing Minna. “Maybe that’s enough for one day? Try again another time?”

Minna looked up from a page covered in red and black ink. “You still don’t believe. You need more proof.”

She sighed. “Minna, I’m a math person. I’ll always need more proof until I can see for myself that something is true. It’s okay, I believe that you believe it.” Even as the words came out of her mouth, she regretted them. What a stupid, unhelpful thing to say.

Minna frowned. Then she closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but what she said was too quiet for Beatrice to hear.

“I’m sorry—”

Minna held up a hand. Her lips kept moving as her eyelids fluttered, as the wind lifted and dropped her hair.

Fine. Beatrice would wait for whatever this was, then she’d praise the girl for whatever she eventually said, and then she’d go check to see if Reno needed her for a bookcase consultation, before returning the grimoire to Cordelia at the store.

Minna’s eyes flew open. “In your home, you have a secret shrine to the woman who was your alternate mother inside a blue suitcase that you keep at the top of a closet.”