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Emmy beamed, lowering her hand from his hair to his eyeball. He jerked back. “Ouch,” she said, all sympathy apart from a giggle.

Theo flinched and reached for her; Bridgers handed Emmy over easily, rubbing at his eye. “Expert defense,” he said.

“Do you know my brother?” Lou continued, her eyes narrowing even further. Theo set a hand on her back in what he hoped was a soothing gesture.

“Maggie and Bridgers are new in the village, Lou. This is my sister, Louise. Lou, the Cruthers are living in the old photography studio, I think I mentioned?”

Lou’s eyes snapped from thin to wide. “The one with the dead people?”

“Marvelous that our home has a legacy,” Bridgers said, not a drop of sarcasm in his tone. His eye was pink and swelling slightly.

“Ah. So, you’re the …” Lou looked her up and down, and Maggie visibly stiffened under the scrutiny. “Spirit-talker.”

“Was,” she said smoothly. “I appear to have lost my gift, hence our presence here.” She offered a serene smile.

The two women stared at each other, the tension tightening like a laundry line until Bridgers gently touched Maggie’s elbow. He cheerily announced that they, “needed to return home but wasn’t this meeting lovely, thank you again for your generosity, we will surely be in again for some chicken or a roast or beef tongue or something, most certainly,” the words tripping together as he steered his sister out of the store with a deftness Theo found surprising.

More surprising was that Maggie twisted, just for a moment, to catch a glimpse of him before being shuffled out the door.

Shocking was the faint pink that crawled up her face like rising smoke.

Chapter

Five

The room was too hot. Or the bed was too small. Maggie kicked the blankets off her body, yanking the skirt of her nightgown up around her hips to expose her legs to the air. She’d been bothered ever since the textile store, weighed down with the image of Theo Barrow looking at her like it was a treat to do so, holding his daughter and laughing with Bridgers.

She flipped over, pressing her chest into the mattress and burrowing her face into the pillow. Perhaps she could suffocate herself in this too-warm room with the too-soft pillow and she wouldn’t have to feel feelings anymore.

Bridgers Cruthers. It had never sounded anything less than patently ridiculous. When Maggie had joined them all those years ago and they decided to pose as a family, she routinely forgot their false last name (she could not recall it even now … Billings, perhaps?) until Tom and Bridgers had taken pity on her and insisted they all take hers. Their act had been so sloppily thrown together it was a wonder they had been successful at all.

When Bridgers had reached for Emmy, she had the oddest tug in her chest, like a cord being pulled sharply. She had almost no experience with children, and Bridgers’ natural ease with the toddler had been a bit of a shock. Theo joking with her brother; his rose-thorn of a sister probing their story; Emmy staring with unrelenting judgment—it all sent an uncomfortable, not necessarily unpleasant, thrum through her.

She turned over again, staring at the ceiling. That feeling coursing through her was slightly sore, like a muscle stretching. It felt distantly sad, or numbly joyful. Something thin and elusive she lacked words for.

Theo’s sister, Louise, had been hostile from the second she had clapped eyes on Bridgers holding Emmy. Even now, hours later, Maggie felt a thrill of irritation at the expression on the other woman’s face, eyeing Bridgers as if he were going to steal the baby away in the night like Krampus.

Sleep was not going to happen, and Maggie gave up. She swung her legs off the bed and stood, reaching for a thick shawl she had knit herself. It was lumpy but warm, her skills in that area more related to functionality than fashion. She padded her way to the kitchen and lit the stove. Warm milk had never once helped her sleep, but the ritual provided a sense of calm that was perhaps more useful. Light stove, open icebox, withdraw bottle of milk. Warm in pan, pour into mug. Sit at table. Dwell. Sip.

Dwell.

Maggie missed her mother. It was not a common occurrence, but it was happening now, in the cozy kitchen of the possibly haunted apartments above a cursed storefront in a quiet village.

Marianne Cruthers had been a doting mother to balance the bored aloofness of her husband. Maggie had a distinct memory of running down their gravel drive with her friend Giselle one day and tripping on a protruding rock that she was quite sure had not been there her entire life. She had fallen flat on her face, scuffing up her cheeks to the point of bleeding and nearly cracking her nose. Tears streaming, she had run (unwisely, perhaps, given her recent history) back to the house, whereupon her father had patted her head absently without taking his eyes off the newspaper, and her mother had picked her up and taken her to the kitchen for a snack and a cuddle.

She could use a snack and a cuddle right now. She sipped her milk morosely. Marianne had died when Maggie was eight years old, some fever that had done its work quickly while Maggie and her father panicked. She had been sent away during the illness, and her memories of the time were fuzzy and unfocused; all she really remembered was being whisked away to her godfather’s house, a small cottage hours away in rural Illinois, so unlike her home in Chicago. The fireplace smoked, the cook had a limited repertoire, and Mr. Jeraphat had a booming sort of voice that always sounded like he was scolding you even if he was trying to kindly inquire after your day. When she had returned home, there was no more Mama. Just Papa and a long, still silence.

What would she say about this? The question lurked in Maggie’s mind most of the time. Her mother would have been horrified at her befuddled reaction to the baby; by twenty-eight, a woman of their class would usually be a mother at least once-over. The lack of maternal instinct would have distressed her more than her daughter living with two men who fucked each other.

Another sip of lukewarm milk. It wasn’t that Maggie disliked babies, per se. Babies were quite innocent and did little to warrant animosity, unless you blamed them for their squawking, which seemed unfair. She would squawk too, if she were unable to verbalize her grievances. They were certainly pleasant enough to look at; one would have to be very cold-hearted to not be wooed by their little sausage-looking arms and chubby, rosy cheeks. She had even felt a little pang of longing to hold Emmy but hadn’t been brave enough to ask Theo, the accursed man. Which was, in a way, the crux of this whole situation with the butcher: Maggie was normally a bold person, but that intrepidness seemed to melt into some sort of frustrating meekness around him. She could see him coming a mile away and still gape at him like a land-stuck fish when he stopped before her, smiling and open.

She finished the milk, now cold again, and tucked the mug and pan into the washing basin for tomorrow. The hallway to the bedrooms was pitch-black, Bridgers having insisted on hanging curtains to block out the streetlamps, and she made her way down by running her fingers along the wall. She heard a faint moan just before her and froze. She didn’t believe in ghosts, not really, but an environment that had hosted a parade of corpses wasn’t exactly comforting.

The moan was followed by a delicate squeak and a sharp intake of breath.

Oh.

Oh. Oh no.