Oncle Julien wasn’t in the door. Had to be careful. Those visions were not the real thing. But the real thing was coming.
Mona walked along the flagstone path to the side of the house, and then back to the flags, past the side porch where Aunt Deirdre had sat in her rocker for so many years. Poor Aunt Deirdre. Mona had seen her from the fence many a time, but she’d never managed to get inside the gate. And now to know the awful story of the way they’d drugged her.
The porch was all clean and pretty these days, with no screen on it anymore, though Uncle Michael had put back Deirdre’s rocking chair and did use it, as if he had become as crazy as she had been, sitting there for hours in the cold. The windows to the living room were hung with lace curtains and fancy silk drapes. Ah, such riches.
And here, where the path turned and widened, this was where Aunt Antha had fallen and died, years and years ago, as doomed a witch as her daughter, Deirdre, would become, Antha’s skull broken and blood flowing out of her head and her heart.
No one was here now to stop Mona from dropping down to her knees and laying her hands on the very stones. For one flashing instant, she thought she saw Antha, a girl of eighteen, with big dead eyes, and an emerald necklace tangled with blood and hair.
But again, this was making pictures. You couldn’t be sure they were any more than imagination, especially when you’d heard the stories all your life as Mona had, and dreamed so many strange dreams. Gifford sobbing at the kitchen table at Amelia Street. “That house is evil, evil, I tell you. Don’t let Mona go up there.”
“Oh, nonsense, Gifford, she wants to be the flower girl in Rowan Mayfair’s wedding. It’s an honor.”
It certainly had been an honor. The greatest family wedding ever. And Mona had loved it. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Gifford watching her, Mona would have made a sneaky search of the whole First Street house that very afternoon, while everyone else swilled champagne and talked about the wholesome side of things, and speculated about Mr. Lightner, who had not yet revealed his history to them.
But Mona would not have been in the wedding at all if Ancient Evelyn had not risen from her chair to overrule Gifford. “Let the child walk up the aisle,” she had said in her dry whisper. She was ninety-one years old now. And the great virtue of almost never speaking was that when Ancient Evelyn did, everybody stopped to listen. If she wasn’t mumbling, that is.
There were times when Mona hated Aunt Gifford for her fears and her worry, the constant look of dread on her face. But nobody could really hate Aunt Gifford. She was too good to everybody around her, especially to her sister, Alicia, Mona’s mother, whom everyone regarded as hopeless now that she’d been hospitalized three times for her drinking and it hadn’t done any good. And every Sunday without fail, Gifford came to Amelia Street, to clean up a bit, sweep the walk, and sit with Ancient Evelyn. She brought dresses for Mona, who hated to go shopping.
“You know you ought to dress more like a teenager these days,” Gifford had volunteered only a few weeks ago.
“I like my little-girl dresses, thanks,” said Mona, “they’re my disguise. Besides if you ask me, most teenagers look tacky. I wouldn’t mind looking corporate, but I’m a bit short for that.”
“Well, your bra cup is giving you away! It’s hard to find you sweet cotton frocks with enough room in them, you know.”
“One minute you want me to grow up; the next minute you want me to behave. What am I to you, a little girl or a sociological problem? I don’t like to conform. Aunt Gif, did it ever occur to you that conformity can be destructive? Take a look at men today on the news. Never in history have all the men in a nation’s capital dressed exactly alike. Ties, shirts, coats of gray. It’s appalling.”
“Responsibility, that’s what I’m talking about. To dress your age and behave your age. You don’t do either, and we’re talking about two contrary directions of course. The Whore of Babylon with a ribbon in her hair just isn’t your garden-variety teenage experience.”
Then Gifford had stopped, shocked that she’d said that word, whore, her cheeks flaming, and her