The Firebird's Vengeance (2 page)

“No, no, this was not your father.” Grace shook her head and tried to gather her wits so she could make up a plausible story. The truth would not do. “When one travels on the ethereal planes, one occasionally meets with mischievous entities. Nothing truly malevolent, you understand.” She touched Mrs. Hausman’s sleeve reassuringly. Her comfortable patter drew her back to herself. “There is no danger in the work we do, but such encounters can be distracting, and occasionally the results can be dramatic.” She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead and her cheeks, just for show. She could already feel the alarm draining from her. “I am sorry if you were unduly startled.”

“Oh, not at all, not at all,” said Mrs. Hausman breathlessly. She clasped her own hands in front of her, fear replaced by excitement as she realized she had witnessed a significant spiritual event. Grace suppressed the weary, ironic smile that threatened to form. She’d be the talk of the better front parlors for a month. Again.

“I am sorry that we didn’t reach your father today, Mrs. Hausman.” Grace dropped back into her chair and assumed a further air of exhaustion. “If you were to come back tomorrow at this same time, I’m certain we would have better success.”
At least I hope we will
.

“Yes, yes, of course.” Mrs. Hausman fumbled with her purse, snapping the catch and pulling out a dollar gold piece.

Grace let Mrs. Hausman lay the coin on the table before she demurred. “Oh, no, I couldn’t. Not when you’re leaving without answers …”

“I insist.” Mrs. Hausman stood as if the gesture would add extra force to her statement. “Now, I must let you rest. Do not trouble yourself.” She waved at Grace to stay where she was. “I can find my way.”

Do not trouble yourself. Why is that always said by the ones who bring the trouble?
Grace did stay as she was, pushed up straight in her armchair while Mrs. Hausman retrieved her coat and saw herself out. The door closed and she was alone again.

Except for the dead one who is here with me
.

She took the dollar piece over to her sideboard and locked it in the top drawer. Then she pushed open the shutters to let the daylight back in. For a while she just stood where she was, staring out through her pink gauze curtains at the shadows of the street below, one hand resting on the chipped wood of the sideboard. Fronds of frost framed the view of the winter street. The wind blew in harsh gusts down Second Street, causing men to clutch their hats to their heads and women to tighten their grips on their shawls and coats. A faint draft worked its way under the window sash to chill the back of her hand. People came and went from the apothecary’s shop below. She could hear the door opening, and the steps of shoes and boots on the bare wooden floor. Yet here she stood, apart from it all, alone with her dollar piece and a head full of things she did not want to think about.

Grace was used to seeing ghosts. It wasn’t every day. Sometimes she could go up to a week without them. Then, suddenly, they’d be filling the streets—men, women, children, whites, blacks, reds. They were cold and translucent. Sometimes, they touched her, and when they did, she saw the future, or the past, sometimes the long past. On her ghost days, she could even call up real visions in the crystal ball if she wanted to. Which she did not.

But she had never before heard a voice without seeing a form to go with it, and none of those voices had ever called her by name. Not since … not since the first one. The one who’d tried to take her life to keep himself warm.

This voice was not his, though. Even after all these years, she still heard that voice in her dreams and she knew it intimately. “Is it you, Ingrid?” she whispered to the winter windowpane. “After all these years, is it finally you?”
Do you come to me now that your daughter Bridget is in the same trouble you got yourself into?

What if it wasn’t Ingrid? What if it was Bridget who called her? Had Bridget died so soon?

Should I have tried harder to keep her here?

Grace touched her frosted window. The ice melted under her fingers, leaving them damp and tingling. She had only two choices—wait for the voice to come again, or go in search of it. She let her hand linger against the glass, using the cold as an anchor to the real world, the practical and the hard. She had learned to make and live with difficult decisions long ago.

It had been almost thirty years. Thirty years of watching Bridget grow up, tall and distant. Thirty years of not being able to go to her, to tell her about Ingrid, because the ladies of the town from whom Grace made her living would look askance at such a thing. Bridget was illegitimate, which was reason enough for the disapproval of the respectable. Later, Bridget was brought to trial under suspicion of having murdered her own illegitimate daughter. This made it twice as impossible for Grace to speak with her niece. Bridget did not understand the difficulty, and Grace was sorry for that, but there was nothing she could do. It was not only inside her parlor that appearances mattered. Grace had learned that lesson slow and hard.

She glanced back at her chair. It would not do to attempt to seek out a real contact here. Anyone might walk in. Her clients would only accept her as long as her eccentricity had carefully defined limits. Those who came to her did not want to know what “the spirits” really had to say. Not one of them had ever been touched by a cold, desperate ghost, nor did they want to know that Grace had. They wanted nothing to do with true second sight. She knew that all too well from Bridget’s example. As if her bastardy hadn’t been enough, nature had cursed Bridget with visions of the future. Her inability to keep quiet about what she saw had set her even farther apart.

Grace set her jaw. Aside from her carefully decorated room, the one place she could reliably call upon genuine ghosts was the cemetery. Given the gossip that Hilda was surely spreading all across town about poor Ingrid’s wayward daughter, no one would wonder at Grace going there. They would assume she had gone to visit her sister’s grave. This once, they’d be right.

Grace buttoned up her stoutest boots, stuffed her hands into her knitted mittens, wrapped a shawl around her head and two more over her shoulders, and headed down into the street, directing her steps up Rittenhouse Avenue toward the cemetery.

There was no color in the graveyard during winter; only black, white, and grey. Snow lay smooth and crisp on the ground, climbing up the sides of the grey stones and capping off the monuments with white. Bare, black trees stood sentinel over them all.

Grace had not gone to Ingrid’s funeral. She had, however, gone once the few mourners had left. Grace had stood at graveside and waited to see her sister, to find out after all what had really happened to her.

But Ingrid had not appeared. Even dead, her sister would not come to her.

Grace had been back to the grave only once since then, to intercept Bridget and try to convince her not to go off with the man she’d pulled out of the lake.

Grace hiked up her hems and waded through the burgeoning drifts toward the back of the cemetery. The black trees scratched at the clouds with their branches, as if to tear them open and spill out the snow. In the faint shadows of those trees waited three headstones. One for a young woman, one for an old man, and one for an infant.

Grace stood squarely before her sister’s grave. Ingrid Loftfield Lederle, read the stone. Beloved Wife and Mother, March 12, 1848–October 15, 1872. Not one word about how she was also a sister, or a daughter. Grace fixed her eyes on the snow that blanketed the grave and did as she seldom did—reached into her mind and tried to open her inner eye.

Let me see you
, she thought fiercely.
I’m here. Let me see you
.

In the corners of her eyes, the ghosts began to take shape. Men and women both, mostly in old-fashioned, formal clothes. Shades of who they had been, lingering above their graves, because they remained bound to the bones that lay within.

But all three graves before her remained unpopulated. Neither woman nor man came back to the place of their bones. Not even Bridget’s poor little baby appeared.

Where were her dead? Grace shivered. This was wrong.

Then, Grace did see someone. Between one blink and the next, a fat, naked Indian appeared on Ingrid Loftfield’s grave, whittling. He sat in the snow wearing nothing but a loincloth working steadily at a stick with his stone knife. Then, she noticed his ears. His lobes stretched out so long that they dangled across his naked chest.

“Finally,” he grumbled. “Damn white women. Always making you wait.”

Grace’s chest seized up. Her first thought was to turn and run, but she held her ground. “Who are you?”

“Rude too.” The red man inspected his work and shaved another sliver of wood from the stick.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

The red man squinted at his whittling. “Better,” he said. “But still too damn rude. I’m waiting.” He blew on the stick to clear away the chips.

It was then Grace realized what else was wrong. She could not see his breath. It was so cold that her own breath steamed up in white clouds in front of her eyes, but the fat red man in front of her breathed invisibly, as if it were the warmest summer day.

He cocked one round, black eye at her and grinned.

Grace opened her mouth and shut it tight again. Anger at his impudence burned even stronger than the fear and drew her spine up straight. “Why are you waiting here?”

“I was asked to.”

This was becoming ridiculous, but Grace couldn’t stop. This … person was not right. He was not a ghost, but he was not a living being either. She needed to know what such a creature was doing on Ingrid’s grave. “Asked by whom?”

“A vixen.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You sure don’t.”

Grace resisted the urge to shout in her frustration. “All right,” she said exasperatedly. “Why did this … vixen ask you to wait for me?”

“Closer.” The Red ran his fat fingers over his work. “She wanted me to bring you a message. She says the cage won’t hold a second time. Think you can remember that?” He blinked his beady, black eyes at her.

“I still don’t see …”

“No you don’t.” He tucked knife and whistle into his loincloth’s thong. “ ’Cause you’re too scared to go where you need to.”

Oddly, Grace felt those words stab straight at her pride. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

The red man spat. “Here? What’s here but the dead? It’s what the living’s been up to you don’t want to face.” He picked himself up off the snow. “Don’t know what the fox’s game is, but I’m done with it. You remember, you forget. You find out what’s left at that lighthouse, you stay here and freeze yourself the rest of the way, it’s all the same to Nanabush.”

Then the pudgy red man was gone, and there was only a winter-white rabbit dashing away, kicking up glittering sprays of snow behind itself until the trees hid it from view.

Grace blinked hard and pressed her hand against her forehead. What had just happened here? Why was she standing about in the cold? There had been a rabbit on Ingrid’s grave … No. She squeezed her eyes shut. There had been a Red. He’d had a message …

The cage will not hold a second time
.

What cage? What was he talking about? Grace swayed on her feet. Why had she stood here having a conversation with a rabbit?

No. No. Not a rabbit. Keep your mind on what happened
. Her memories were trickling away so fast she could feel them like a stream running through her mind.
There was a Red. He told me the cage wouldn’t hold a second time. He said I was afraid to go where I needed to. That I needed to know what the living were up to
.

She shook her head. What did the living have to do with her? The living had left her flat, requiring that she make her own way in the world and they never once looked back to see how she was doing.

But now there was this voice, and it was asking for help, and it might be Bridget, calling on Grace in her trouble, as her mother had never done. Grace clenched her teeth. If these things were to do with Bridget, living or dead, there was only one other place Grace could possibly go to find out what was happening—the Sand Island lighthouse. Bridget’s home. If her shade or her body was anywhere, it was there.

She’d have to go out on the lake to the island.

Memory rolled over her as it always did. That the terror was thirty years old did nothing to lessen it. She remembered the water pressing relentlessly against her filling eyes and ears. She remembered the taste of it in her mouth, the pain in her lungs, how her fingers stretched up to the light, how her own skirts entangled her like a net and dragged her down. She remembered the silence, and her heart hammering against her ribs.

Fear tightened her throat, turning her breath into gasps. Fear shifted the ground under her feet, and Grace caught herself against Everett’s stone. The icy edge of it bit into her palm even through her mitten, reminding her where she was and in a moment she was able to stand again.

Grace pulled her shawls more tightly around her.
I could turn away. I should turn away. It would serve her right. She turned away from me
.

This time, though, the anger was a lie, and Grace knew it. It was because she was afraid. Afraid of the deep water, afraid of what lay asleep beneath it waiting for life and warmth. That was why she hadn’t gone to see Ingrid while she waited in Everett’s house to give birth to Bridget. She couldn’t make herself cross the lake again. She had thought there would be time. She had believed Ingrid must come to Bayfield at some time, and then they’d meet and then …

And then Ingrid died.

Deep inside herself, Grace felt her heart stir. If this was a genuine plea for help from the only one of her family who had ever reached out for her, her heart would break again, and this time it would not heal.

Wrapping herself as well as she could against the strengthening wind, Grace took herself down the sloping road to the lakeside and the port.

Normally, Bayfield’s port was a busy place, but winter’s cold had brought it to a standstill. The big steamers had all left for open water and big cities to the south. The fishing boats wintering at the quayside all rested in cradles on the shore to keep them from being broken by the ice that would soon form. A few men braved the cold, but they did not linger about as they would have in spring or summer. They strode purposefully between the grounded boats, chins tucked in their high coat collars and hands thrust deep into their pockets.