The Steep and Thorny Way(11)

“Never mind Hanalee.” Mildred yanked me inside by my wrist. “I know what she’s here for.”

“Her daddy’s ghost?” asked Bernice.

“What?” asked Mrs. Marks, the color draining from her cheeks.

“Nothing, Mama.” Mildred wrapped her arm around my shoulders and ushered me farther inside the house. “I’ve got a book in the library that I told Hanalee she could borrow. I’ll just be a moment before helping with breakfast.”

“Don’t scare that poor girl with talk of her father,” her mother called after us. “No ghost stories in this house, you hear?”

“I hear, Mama.”

Mildred guided me toward the back of the house, in the direction of some sort of machine that produced an obnoxious thumping commotion behind a closed door, down on the right. The sour aroma grew so powerful, my entire mouth tasted fermented. I covered my nose and was about to ask if the thumps and the smell came from their whiskey still, but then Mildred steered me to the left, into some sort of library or study, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of books that reeked of age and dust.

On the right-hand side of the room, beneath the sole window, stood a wide mahogany desk smothered in envelopes and official-looking papers stamped with black seals. A stuffed crow watched over the mess from its perch upon a stack of ledgers, its beady glass eyes glinting in the sunlight that slipped through the sheer curtains. The coldness in the air, the neck-prickling silence, gave the impression that I’d just stepped into a mausoleum that held the remains of the Markses’ prewar prosperity.

Mildred closed the door behind us, muffling the ruckus of the still and the chatter and footsteps of the other children. She turned toward me and smoothed out the wrinkles in her apron. Brown stains—food maybe, or blood, or some other foul fluid—speckled the white linen of the garment.

“Mama hasn’t seen your father’s ghost,” she said, “as you might have guessed by her befuddled expression when Bernice flapped her mouth about him.”

I swallowed and nodded and didn’t really know what to say other than a meager “Oh.”

“She believes in spirits; she sees them.” Mildred headed over to the desk and that beady-eyed crow. “She just doesn’t like to hear about them wandering around inside our house. Neither do I.”

I shivered and rubbed my bare arms. “What’s in that Necromancer’s Nectar you told me about?”

She pulled out the chair from the desk. “I had a feeling that’s what you were here for.”

“What’s in it?”

“Can’t tell you,” she said. “All our elixirs are family secrets.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “Fleur says there’s no such thing as any herb or flower that would allow a person to see the dead.”

“Fleur doesn’t know anything about black magic, does she?” Mildred scooted the chair toward me, the legs scraping and screeching against the floorboards. “Her granny might have been a healer, but mine was an occultist.”

I shrank back. “An occultist?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t like the sound of that at all.”

Mildred stopped pushing the chair. “And I don’t like the sound of your father pacing the floorboards of my house when he should be resting in a grave.”

My eyes stung at those words. I blinked and clenched my hands by my sides.

“You need to tell him to stop coming here, Hanalee,” said Mildred. “He’s making me feel as though I’ve done something wrong, and I don’t like it one bit.”

I squeezed my hands tighter. “Did you do something wrong?”

Mildred stepped back. “Of course not.”

“Then why is my father able to find his way to your house and not mine? Why am I not the one seeing him?”

“B-b-because . . .” She straightened her apron so it didn’t hang so cockeyed over her chest. “You’re probably too busy looking for him in the church . . . or at all your favorite shared places. He’s searching for you along the road, where all that trouble occurred, and it’s high time you look for him there. Here”—she patted the back of the chair—“have a seat. I’ll fetch you that bottle.”

“I feel wrong about taking something for free,” I said.

“This is a gift. An emergency.”

“But . . .” I glanced at the room’s faded elegance—the dust, the darkness, the bills scattered across the desk. My eyes dropped down to my right hand, where a gold band with an emerald stone glistened on my ring finger. The heirloom had belonged to my late grandmother in Georgia. My father gave it to me on my twelfth birthday.

Mildred’s eyes also veered down to the jewel.

“I’m wearing a pink satin step-in my mama made me,” I offered instead, tucking my right hand behind my back.

Mildred’s eyes brightened. “Satin?”

Using my left hand, I raised the hem of my dress well past my knees for a peek at the pink lace of the undergarment’s bottom edge. “It’s made with lace on the bodice, one-inch-wide straps, and a small pearl button that fastens to create the closure between the legs.” I dropped the skirt. “Makes a girl feel less like a backwoods bumpkin.”