Hourglass

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 1

M
y 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.

My brother had a gift for making broken things shine. I was pretty sure he was hoping that tonight his magic would work on me.

Losing our parents four years ago threw us together, even though Thomas and I hadn’t been close when I was growing up. I was a surprise baby, and there were almost two decades between us. He hadn’t exactly been ready to raise his younger sister, and I’d done my best to keep my particular brand of crazy out of his life. Receiving that scholarship had been an answer to a prayer. I wanted to get away from my hometown, all its memories, and Thomas’s renovation sites. I didn’t like the position I was in, now that my scholarship had evaporated.

Mainly because of “my problem.”

“Hello.”

The unfamiliar voice threw me off balance. I spun around to see a man standing by the wall of windows, looking unreasonably at home and completely out of place at the same time. Exceptionally handsome, tall, and slim, he was dressed in a black suit. A lock of hair the color of wheat fell over one eyebrow but didn’t mask the elegant features of his face. Slipping a silver pocket watch attached to his vest into his pants pocket, he clasped his hands behind his back.

“Can I help you?” I tried to keep the sound of apprehension from my voice but couldn’t. He hadn’t been there a second ago.

“My name is Jack.” He made no attempt to move toward me but stood still, his bright blue eyes assessing me. I shivered. He was giving my goose bumps a field day. I sure hoped this wasn’t the new contact Thomas was talking about. He was a little creeptastic for my taste.

“Are you here to see my brother?”

“No, I don’t know your brother.” A slight smile lifted the corners of his mouth, causing my heart to skip a beat. “Actually, I’m here to see you, Emerson.”

The pocket watch and the suit could be from another generation. His hairstyle didn’t fall into any specific era. Maybe this guy was one of my hallucinations, but if so …

How did he know my name?