Page 12 of Dead to Rites

Hazel’s mouth twitched. “Your father would have called it a phase and suggested you get some professional help. Which, to be fair, is exactly what I would have expected him to do.”

For a moment, she paused, her gaze lingering on the coffee cup near my hand, and I wondered if she wished she could taste some French roast one last time.

“Your father wasn’t a bad man,” she went on. “He was just particular, like my brother before him. The Cosgrove men have always been a little allergic to anything that couldn’t be filed or argued in a courtroom.”

That seemed like an accurate enough description. If asked, I would never have claimed that my father didn’t love me, just that he didn’t understand me the slightest bit. In some ways, though, that estimation felt almost as bad. “And my mother?” I asked.

Maybe the faintest tightening of Hazel’s pink lips. “Your mother wasn’t a Cosgrove, Lorelei, so she didn’t have the gift, either to carry or pass along to her daughter. But she was married to a carrier, which made her the mother of a potential manifester, and that’s why I tried to tell her.”

My hands tightened around the coffee mug. “You tried to tell her?”

“Once, when you were around ten.” Hazel’s expression had gone carefully neutral. “I’d come down to Scottsdale for your birthday party — that awful one where your parents rented a karaoke machine and your friends were all trying to pretend they were Britney Spears — and I made the mistake of trying to say something to your mother about a family tendency she ought to know about, just in case. I wasn’t specific, and I certainly didn’t use the word ghost. I said only there was something in the Cosgrove line that occasionally surfaced in the women and that she might want to be aware of it as you grew up.”

I remembered that birthday party all too well…or at least, I recalled a confusion of neon colors and lip gloss and my friend Taylor performing a particularly off-key rendition of “Baby One More Time,” which wasn’t exactly the sort of song most parents would want their ten-year-old to be singing. For all I knew, that over-the-top Britney party was one of the reasons why I now wore only black.

“What did my mother say?”

Hazel didn’t exactly roll her eyes, but I got the feeling she wanted to. “She told me that I shouldn’t be filling her daughter’s head with nonsense, and if I couldn’t have a conversation without wandering into the occult, then she would rather I stick to wine at family dinners. I recall the exact words she used: superstitious garbage. Your father didn’t contradict her.”

That sounded about par for the course. I could practically see them standing in the dining room in our house in Scottsdale, my mother in a tailored blouse, even during a kids’ party, my father sort of hovering in the background the way he always did when my mother was laying down the law. And Hazel, who’d driven down from Prescott with a present for her great-niece and the notion that she should try to give them some kind of warning, had been blown off as if it didn’t mean anything at all.

“I’m sorry,” I said. That was what I always said, according to Celeste. It was a defense mechanism I’d developed a long time ago after discovering how hard it was to argue with parents who were trained litigators. I’d learned it was easier to murmur, I’m sorry, rather than try to defend my actions to them, since they never listened anyway.

“Don’t be,” Hazel said crisply. “I suppose she did what she thought was right. After all, she was protecting you from a crazy old woman.” A chuckle that was somehow dry but not bitter, and then she added, “I decided right then and there that I would rather be in your life as the eccentric aunt who sent odd cards and presents than be banned entirely for being a crazy aunt who talked about ghosts. So I backed off, and I kept my mouth shut. I wrote things down in this book for you to find eventually, whether or not you ever manifested. I also trusted that if the gift did come to you, you would find the journal, and the journal would explain.”

She made it sound so simple. “And if this ‘gift’ hadn’t come to me?” I asked.

“Then you would have inherited a lovely house and a profitable bar and a strange old notebook full of ghost stories, and you could have done with it whatever you liked. I wrote the journal to be interesting reading either way.” Her mouth twitched again, but this time, the expression looked almost like a smile. “I like to flatter myself that it is, at least.”

I glanced down at the notebook, at the seventy-odd years of handwriting it held and the careful index in the back that Hazel had stopped updating in the nineties.

So many questions crowded my mind that I didn’t know where to start. I started with the one that surfaced first. “Did you know the bee sting would do it?”

Now she chuckled. “I had no idea there was going to be a bee sting, Lorelei. I’m dead, not omniscient.” She paused there before adding in a much gentler tone, “I knew you had the potential. I’ve known since you were born. It’s a thing you can sometimes sense in another carrier. I used to hold you when you were a baby and feel it sitting there, waiting. I assumed you’d go your whole life without ever crossing close enough to the threshold to wake it up. Most carriers do. I’m almost certain that your great-aunt Eva had it, and she lived to eighty-seven without ever seeing a thing.”

I blinked. My great-aunt Eva was the youngest of that generation and lived down in Tucson, so I hadn’t visited her very often. I didn’t remember her very well, except that she always seemed to have some crazy show on in the background when we were at her house, things like Jerry Springer or Maury. It drove my parents nuts, which was probably why our visits there had been few and far between. “Eva carried the gift?”

“I think so,” Hazel replied, now looking thoughtful. “I’m fairly sure at least one of my sisters did. Eva’s the one who always seemed the most likely, which is very funny when you consider she was the silliest woman I ever knew.” She stopped there to adjust the ring on her finger, and I wondered if she was thinking about the man who’d given it to her nearly forty years earlier. “Some of your cousins are almost certainly carrying it, although none of them have manifested, at least as far as I’m aware. But accidents can happen.”

Something I knew all too well. My father’s side of the family was scattered across most of the Southwest, with quite a few cousins and second cousins living all over Arizona and also in New Mexico and even Texas. I didn’t know any of them very well, although some of them had come to my parents’ funeral, and a few others to Hazel’s funeral as well.

Her attorney had made an offhand comment about some of them wanting to see copies of her will, and I’d only shrugged. It had seemed clear-cut enough to me. She didn’t have any children of her own, although her third husband had children from his previous marriage, and my father, as the oldest of her nieces and nephews, would have inherited the estate. With him gone, though, everything had come to me.

Some of those people might be carrying the same crazy gift that I was.

I paused and looked down at the journal. “I think I’m going to need to read the whole thing,” I said.

“Take your time,” Hazel replied. A knowing glint came into her eyes. “If I were you, I’d start toward the back. The later entries are more useful. The early ones are mostly me being nineteen and dramatic.”

I supposed I’d have to take her word for it, so I flipped to the back of the journal. The final entry was dated three weeks before Hazel’s death. The handwriting was shakier but still unmistakably Hazel’s.

Something is different. I don’t know what. I’m going to stop here for now and pick this up when I have more to say.

I read those sentences twice. Then I looked over at Hazel, who’d moved to the kitchen sink while we were talking and was now looking out the window at the garden with an expression I couldn’t quite decipher.

“Hazel,” I said carefully. “What was different?”

“I don’t remember.” She didn’t turn away from the window as she continued. “I don’t remember much of those last few weeks, really. And I definitely don’t remember dying. Ghosts don’t, as a rule. It’s one of the rules I’ll get to in a minute.”