Morfran looks at me through the smoke but I don’t drop my eyes. I’m not letting this go. I can’t. I owe her. And more than that. I can’t think that she’s suffering.
“Just drop it, all right?” he says, but I hear it. The resolve has gone out of his voice.
“What do you know, Morfran?”
“I know…” He sighs. “Someone who might know something.”
“Who?”
“Miss Riika.”
“Aunt Riika?” Thomas asks. “What could she know about it?” He turns to me. “I used to go over to her house when I was a kid. She’s not really my aunt, but you know, more like a friend of the family. I haven’t seen her in years.”
“We lost touch.” Morfran shrugs. “It happens sometimes. But if Thomas takes you to see her, she’ll talk to you. She’s been a Finnish witch all her life.”
A Finnish witch. The phrase makes me want to bare my teeth and put my fur up. Anna’s mother, Malvina, was a Finnish witch. That’s how she was able to curse Anna and bind her to the Victorian. Right after she cut her throat.
“She’s not the same,” Thomas whispers. “She’s not like her.”
My breath shakes out of my lungs and I nod at him fondly. It doesn’t bother me anymore that he sometimes breaks into my thoughts. He can’t help it. And the way I instantly seethed about Malvina must’ve lit his dendrites up like a Christmas tree.
“Will you take me to her?” I ask.
“I guess so.” He shrugs. “But we might not get anything besides a plate of gingersnaps. She wasn’t exactly ‘all there’ even when I was little.”
Carmel lingers on the outskirts, quietly petting Stella. Her voice cuts through the smoke.
“If the haunting is real, can this Miss Riika make her go away?”
I look at her sharply. Nobody answers and after a few long seconds, her eyes drop to the floor.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s just get on with it, I guess.”
Morfran puffs his pipe and shakes his head. “Cas and Thomas only. Not you, girl. Riika wouldn’t let you in the front door.”
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“Because the answers they’re after, you don’t want,” Morfran replies. “Resistance is coming off of you in waves. If you go with them, they won’t get anywhere.” He presses the ash in his pipe down.
I look at Carmel. Her eyes are hurt, but not guilty. “I won’t go then.”
“Carmel,” Thomas starts, but she cuts him off.
“You shouldn’t go either. Neither of you.” I’d speak up, but she’s looking at Thomas. “If you’re really his friend, if you care about him, then you shouldn’t indulge this.” And then she turns on her heel and walks out of the room. She’s all the way through the antique shop before I can say that I’m not an infant, I don’t need chaperones, or babysitters, or a goddamn counselor.
“What’s the matter with her today?” I ask Thomas, but from the way his jaw is hanging open in her wake, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t know.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thomas’s Aunt Riika lives in the middle of bumble-fuck nowhere. We’ve been driving on unmarked dirt roads for at least ten minutes. There are no signs of any kind, just trees and more trees, then a brief clearing leading up to more trees. If he hasn’t been out here in years, I have no idea how he seems to be finding his way so easily.
“Are we lost? You’d admit it if we were lost, right?”
Thomas smiles, maybe a bit nervously. “We’re not lost. At least, not yet. They might’ve changed some of the roads around since the last time.”
“Who the hell are ‘they’? Road construction squirrels? It doesn’t even look like these things have been driven on in the last ten years.” The trees are thick outside my window. The foliage has come back to fill in the winter spaces. We’ve taken too many turns now, and my sense of direction is shot. We could be going northsouth for all I know.
“Ha! There it is,” Thomas crows. I sit up straighter in my seat. We’re approaching a small white farmhouse. There are early shoots of a flower garden cropping up around the front porch, and a walkway of flagstones leads from the driveway to the front steps. As Thomas pulls the Tempo onto the pale gravel, he beeps the horn. “I hope she’s home,” he mutters, and we step out.
“It’s nice,” I say, and mean it. I’m surprised there aren’t more neighbors; the surrounding property has to be worth something. Trees have been carefully planted around the yard, shielding it from the eyes of the road but opening up in front to sort of hug the house.