Chapter 1
My small Southern hometown is beautiful in the haunting way an aging debutante is beautiful. The bones are exquisite, but the skin could use a lift. You could say my brother, the architect, is Ivy Springs’s plastic surgeon.
I shuffled through a relentless late-summer downpour toward one of his renovation projects … our home. I couldn’t care less about the weather. I was in no hurry. My brother might know what to do with feng shui and flying buttresses and other architectural things, but with me? He had no clue.
Before I’d escaped to take out my frustrations on a treadmill, Thomas and I had argued about my upcoming senior year. I didn’t think attending school was necessary. He, being a traditionalist, disagreed.
I reached our building only to find a wide-eyed Southern belle wearing a Civil War–era dress blocking the front door. A silk parasol and a full hoopskirt completed her ensemble. I wore something like it to a costume party once, but hers was an original. Frustration was back, and now it was in my way.
In the form of freaking Scarlett O’Hara.
Sighing, I stuck my hand through her stomach to turn the knob, meeting no resistance. I rolled my eyes as she gasped, fluttered her eyelashes, and disappeared in a puff of air.
“You know, Scarlett, Rhett didn’t give a damn, and frankly, I don’t either.”
A loud crack of thunder sounded as the wind slammed the door shut behind me. I trudged up the stairs and made my grand entrance into our loft—actually a “warehouse to loft apartment conversion”—with my long hair plastered to my face and my pink raincoat dripping water. I found my brother at the kitchen table, a set of massive floor plans spread out in front of him.
“Emerson.” Thomas looked up to greet me, folding the plans in half and then unfolding them again. His hopeful smile was the twin of my own—three years’ worth of first-rate orthodontia— except I wasn’t smiling back today. “I’m glad you’re home.”
That made one of us.
“I thought I might have to hitch a ride on the ark.” Not mentioning my encounter downstairs with Miss O’Hara, I shook the rain from my coat, causing him to wince as a puddle formed on the floor beneath me. He probably had an umbrella stashed somewhere that color coordinated with his outfit. Thomas the Boy Scout, perpetually prepared. That part of our family’s gene pool missed me altogether.
We shared the same blond hair and moss-green eyes, but Thomas inherited our father’s square jawline while my face was heart-shaped like our mother’s. He was also blessed with Daddy’s height. I got shorted in that department. In a major way.
Thomas smoothed out his floor plans a few more times than necessary, hedging. “I’m sorry about our … disagreement earlier.”
“It’s fine. It’s not like I have another option.” I looked at the floor instead of at him. “I can either go back to school or let a truancy officer haul me to juvy.”
“Em … we could try new medication. Maybe it would make going back easier?”
“No new meds.” Actually, no meds at all. Not that he knew that. The guilt of keeping such a secret almost forced a confession from me. It was on the tip of my tongue, so I opened the fridge to grab a bottle of water and hide my face. “I’ll be fine.”
“At least you have Lily.”
Lily was the only childhood friend I had who still talked to me, and possibly the only good thing about coming back from the boarding school where I’d spent my sophomore and junior years. The official line was that my scholarship for senior year had been cut due to “dwindling alumni donations,” but I wondered if maybe they’d just run out of charity for girls with dead parents who occasionally hallucinated and made their classmates uncomfortable. I had money for incidentals from the small trust fund my parents left, but not enough to cover my last year of school. Thomas offered to pay for my senior year so I could stay in Sedona, but I declined. Often and loudly. I would live with him because he was my legal guardian, but I wouldn’t accept his money outright.
Back to Tennessee it was. Surely I could survive anything for a year, even public high school.
“I had something else to talk to you about.” Thomas flattened the plans again. I kept expecting the ink to rub off the paper. “We … We have a new contact. A consultant who says he can help.”Every few months or so Thomas heard a rumor about someone who could help me. So far, they had all been freaks or flakes. I slammed my water bottle down on the counter, crossed my arms over my chest, and leveled a glare at him. “Another one?”
“It’s different this time.”
“It was different last time.”
Thomas tried again. “This guy—”
“Has a third eye you can visibly see?”
“Emerson.”
“I don’t have a lot of faith in your contacts,” I countered, crossing my arms more tightly, as if I could protect myself from the onslaught of unwanted “help.” “I swear, you must get their names from the popup ads on the paranormal sites you search all the time.”
“I only did that … twice.” He tried not to grin. He failed.
“Where did you find this one?” It was hard to stay mad when he was trying so hard to help. “Fresh from rehab?”
“He works for a place called the Hourglass. The founder was part of the parapsychology department at Bennett University in Memphis.”
“The department that was shut down because no one would fund it? Stupendous.”
“How did you know about that?” Thomas asked in surprise.
I gave him a look that loosely translated as: I’m a teenager. I know how to work a search engine.
“The Hourglass is a very reputable place, I promise. My contact—”
“Okay, okay … if I say I’ll meet him, can we stop talking about it?” I asked, holding up my hands in mock surrender. Thomas knew he would win. He always did.
“Thanks, Em. I only do it because I love you.” His expression turned serious. “I really do.”
“I know.” He really did. And regardless of any disagreement, I loved him, too. Eager to avoid any displays of emotion, I looked around for my sister-in-law. “Where’s the wife?”
Thomas and Dru were a renovation dream team—interlocking pieces of a puzzle—their skills complementing each other perfectly. I once watched Dru take a sledgehammer to a wall to help speed up work on a job site. When she finished, her manicure was still intact.
“At the restaurant with the new chef. He wanted her opinion on which wines to serve tonight.”
“She would know.” Her taste was impeccable. Thomas’s cell phone started chirping. Seeing my chance at escape, I threw my empty water bottle into the recycling bin. “Getting late. Need a shower.”
As the door swung shut behind me, I inhaled the scent of new paint. Dru had recently refinished the walls in the front room with a deep red Venetian plaster. Cozy leather couches with silk-covered pillows in sepia tones complemented hardwood floors. One wall was nothing but plate-glass windows; another was lined with bookshelves holding leather tomes and ragged paperbacks. I ran my fingers across their spines, itching to grab one and settle in. Not tonight. Thomas and Dru had renovated the old phone company into a chichi restaurant that they actually decided to keep and operate instead of selling to an investor. The big opening was in a few hours. My attendance had been requested, sort of as a reintroduction to town society.