Rivulet

  My head started to spin. I really did feel like I was in a dream.

  A knock at the door halted me from telling her that I was in love with the boy lost in my past, of asking her how she knew that before she ever led me there so long ago.

  Chapter Five

  Standing on the threshold was a man I’d never seen before. He was younger and looked a lot like the images I’d seen of my grandfather, the one and only love Gran ever had.

  “I have to go now,” Gran said as she squeezed my arm once more.

  “Where are you going? The weather is horrible, you need your rest.”

  “There are a lot of things I want to see once again, a fresh snow is one of them.”

  “Who is that?” I whispered, nodding to the door.

  “A welcome sight.” She cupped her hand on my cheek. “I’ll see you soon, dear, but make sure it’s not too soon. Stay safe.” She kissed my cheek, then walked past me at a speed that I’d never seen her use.

  I told myself to turn around, to follow her, at least to go along with her, but I couldn’t move. Her touch had ignited visions all around me, visions of my mother telling Gran about how she found me in the snow, visions of her and my mother mulling over endless legends that surrounded those stars my birth mother pointed out. They even had mythologists from all over the world flown here to teach them about the beliefs and lore, always finding conflicting information. One man told my parents very bluntly that I was the only one that would ever know what my birth mother meant, that I would feel it in my soul.

  All I felt in my soul was coldness, the cold that I was born into, the cold that was my curse. With that thought, the room I was standing in felt empty, vacant, lifeless.

  Finally, I snapped out of the spell I was under and turned, but Gran was long gone. I rushed to the hallway, looking in both directions, not seeing her or her companion anywhere in sight.

  I went back to my room to find my phone so I could call Ben. I was mad that he didn’t tell me Gran was better, that supposedly I’d won the case against Mrs. Rasure, that my inheritance was free and clear mine—that I could kick Rasure out.

  It took me three tries to get the call out because the phone kept freezing in my hand. Skylynn better pop in soon. I couldn’t control this much longer. All I got was Ben’s voicemail, and it said for personal reasons he was taking time off and directed his calls to his partner. My message was short and sweet. “Um, personal? What’s more personal than family? I’m a bit ticked at you. Why didn’t you tell me Gran was okay? Where are we with the case?” The call ended then because the phone had turned into a block of ice. I grunted in frustration. I never realized how dependent I was on that scarf, how much it shielded this curse.

  Cadence walked in our room at that moment, holding a steaming cup of coffee. “Looks like you need this more than I do.”

  “Thanks for noticing,” I muttered, balling my fist. “Did you know Gran was all better?” I asked, looking up at her.

  She looked at me like I was insane. “Did you hit your head when you climbed the walls last night?”

  “Looks like you did. What did you do to your head?” I asked, noticing the gash on the side of her forehead. It caused a panic to rush through me, and the room turned to ice for an instant; that was the same place I saw her bleeding from in my dream.

  “I slid on the ice, hit it on the side of the car door when I was getting out.”

  “Looks like you need stitches,” I said with wide eyes as I moved closer to her.

  “No, it’s not deep. I have that invisible Band-Aid stuff on it, but you’re starting to make me self-conscious,” she said, taking down her ponytail.

  I frowned as I noticed how easily the wound was covered when she did that.

  “What about Gran? Are you serious?”

  “Serious. I just saw her. She’s never looked better. The nurses are even gone.”

  “You’re joking,” she said as she turned to go and see for herself.

  “She left, went out with an old friend,” I said to stop her.

  “Indie,” she said before she turned to look at me. “You’re seriously freaking me out.”

  “Fine, go look for yourself,” I said as I sucked in a deep breath and stood to go to my darkroom.

  “Hiding in the dungeon again? Maybe you should head to the North Wing. You’re always in a better mood when you leave there.”

  I was so not going there with her.

  “Gran told me to develop the film.”

  “The film.”

  “Yup.”

  “Are you going to?”

  I smirked. “It felt so good to hear her voice again. This was basically her only wish. Who am I to deny it?”

  “Do you want me to call the bar and tell them we can’t come in, that is, if they opened today? This storm is wicked.”

  “No, I want to get out. This won’t take long.”

  “Give me a second to check on Gran. I’ll be your hands.”

  I was close to telling her no, that I’d call Mason over to help, but I didn’t feel like fighting with her about it.

  I’d been staring at this camera for almost fifteen minutes before Cadence showed up. I’d already had everything else ready to go. I just needed her hands.

  “Told you so,” I said absentmindedly as she came to my side.

  “You don’t think this is weird?” she asked with eyes wide.

  “Developing my dead mother’s film? Yes, that is weird.”

  “Not that. Ben told me yesterday that he was going to start to make the calls, tell everyone to say their goodbyes, and today she is out of her bed, out on a date or something?”

  “What is it with Ben lately? He didn’t tell me that either,” I seethed.

  “Either? What else did he not tell you?”

  “That I’d won against Rasure.”

  “You won?” Cadence said with absolute disbelief.

  “I’ll believe it when I hear it myself. That is what Gran said.” I peered to the side at her. “She also told me to get that woman out of our house.”

  “I bet she did. Gavin told me last night that the doctor that oversaw Gran after her stroke was put in jail last week, for malpractice.”

  “How did he know that?”

  “Read it online. I guess you were right to have Ben fire him. Gavin thought you’d seen it online or something and that was why you were all frazzled. Apparently, that doctor was paid more than a few times to end a life and make it look natural.”

  “The doctor Rasure insisted should look over Gran? Are you telling me she paid someone to kill Gran?” I fumed as the room around us turned to ice.

  “I’d tell you to chill out, but that statement is apparently overrated. It doesn’t matter anyway. Gran survived her, and we will, too.”

  With a soothing sigh, I managed to make the ice vanish once again.

  “There are more facets to that woman than just a gold-digger. I can feel it.”

  “She’ll get hers. One way or another.”

  I nodded for her to go to the camera. Slowly, step-by-step I told her what to do, what chemicals to pour, and what temperature the water needed to be, and she carefully listened to every direction I gave. Before long, we were watching images come to life before us.

  “Nothing…” Cadence said with a sigh as we stared at the dripping film.

  “Just wait,” I said as the first one began to come to life. At first I thought it was me, but that was impossible. The figure looked like I did today, a young blonde with a scarf tied around her head. I assumed it was her, my birth mother.

  “Whoa,” Cadence whispered. “You could be twins.”

  I understood her awe. She had no idea what her birth mom looked like. She was raised by a reckless aunt that authorities had to rescue her from at age seven, then she bounced around in the system until she was thirteen, when our parents found her. Cadence never got her closure. I don’t really think she wanted it in the first place. She had a lot of buried hate for her bir
th family that no one would blame her for not facing.

  The next three images were whitewashed, only shadows across them.

  The fourth image made my skin boil and the room freeze again. Cadence gripped my arm, telling me to get a grip. She didn’t want me to damage the last stages of development.

  The image showed Rasure, standing with all of her dominance. It was an image of an image, meaning someone took a picture of an old newspaper, a newspaper that was dated May 12, 1901. She was standing with a man that had obvious wealth, about to board a ship.

  “That has to be an ancestor or something, right?” Cadence said with a gasp.

  “Then they must all look alike,” I teemed as the next image came to life. It was of a painting dated with the year 1810. Rasure was there again, with another man, shrouded with wealth.

  “I don’t know what I’m more freaked out about, the fact that Rasure looks just like her ancestors or the fact that your birth mom knew that.”

  A beat later, I came to my senses, went to my desk, and wrote down everything I could about those images, those articles that were photographed. I knew Gavin could uncover what they meant, the story behind them. Research was his passion. I didn’t want to wait for the film to finish developing before he started.

  At a second glance, I noticed the shadows on the three blank images, when pinned across the strings side by side, looked like a key; a really old key.

  I turned back for the camera and started to feel around in the place behind where the film had rested for countless years. I did feel something, but my insane emotions were causing the camera to freeze. In frustration, I grunted and handed it to Cadence.

  “There’s a key in there. It’s taped down or something.”

  Questioning my sanity, and still unraveled by what we’d seen, she took the camera and gently dug around. She pulled a piece of tape out, then a skeleton key.

  “The mystery deepens,” she mumbled, looking closely at it. “It says ‘Falcon M’ on it.”

  “‘Falcon M?’” I repeated as I took it from her. How or why would my birth mother have this?

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think your mom had every intention of having the Falcons raise you. The question is, was she for or against Rasure, and how did she know Rasure would surface years later?”

  I let out a sigh, almost wishing I hadn’t listened to Gran and opened this Pandora’s Box. “It doesn’t matter either way. I’m a Falcon. And I’m against Rasure. When Gran gets back, I’ll ask her if she knows what this key might unlock.”

  I stuffed the paper with the info on it along with the key in my back pocket, glanced at my image that was hanging before me, then walked up the stairs with Cadence trailing behind.

  My favorite eternity scarf was on the edge of my bed. I almost didn’t put it on. I kept seeing that dream, me wrapping it around Mason so I could pull him out of the water. I put it on anyway so I would at least look like I was acknowledging the frigid weather.

  Cadence had to layer on the jackets, though. She was perpetually cold, even in a room that was set at eighty degrees.

  On habit and on purpose, we locked our room, eight bolts in all. We only locked three, hoping it would drive anyone who tried to break in mad, simply because they would always be locking five as they worked their way through picking the locks. We even had a pattern, a different one for each day. That alone was a testament to just how little we trusted anyone in the employment of Rasure.

  Just before we reached the stairs, we both heard music coming from a room that should be vacant. We also heard girls singing, Bye bye, Miss American pie, I drove my Chevy to the levy...

  We froze in place. That was our sisters’ favorite song; a song they sang on purpose each time Dad took us out on one of his boats. The song they sang all night long the day before they died.

  I gripped Cadence’s arm and stormed forward. I wasn’t an idiot. Mrs. Rasure was trying to prove I was still ‘paralyzed by grief,’ as she put it. This was the lowest thing she ever could have done. These rooms were sealed, left exactly how our sisters had left them seven years ago. I had no idea where she could have found a recording of their voices, though I doubted it was hard to do; Mom filmed almost every moment of us growing up. She called them her caterpillar films because she wanted us to remember our transformation into butterflies under the Falcon name.

  “Indie, NO,” Cadence said with a gasp. “I don’t want to see what sick game she is playing with us.”

  “I just want to turn the music off, whatever tape recorder she has on,” I argued as she forced me to stop in the hallway.

  “For all you know, she has a camera in those rooms filming your reaction. Let’s just walk away. Don’t let her do this to you—us,” Cadence pleaded.

  I stared down the long hall, the one I had not walked down in years. “All right,” I said, nudging her to go down the stairs. As I went to follow her, I thought I saw someone cross the hall, then two others run out another door. I heard, “Abby, you stole my brush, give it back,” followed by, “Then give me my shirt back—fair is fair.”

  I swallowed nervously, remembering that argument. Seven girls under one roof, we were always borrowing, stealing each other’s things…I missed them so much.

  The banister I was holding turned to ice.

  “Indie,” Cadence said, reaching back for me to come.

  I followed her and said the word ‘fire’ over and over in my mind. I was going to kill Skylynn for taking my crutch. If she wanted it back, she should have found a way to wean me off it. I was mad at her for the first time ever.

  “Looks like we have guests,” Cadence said with disdain as we passed the great room on the first floor. It was full of people, all dressed to the nines. I thought I recognized a few people that worked with Ben and one of my sister’s husbands, but on second glance the resemblances weren’t there. None of them even bothered to look at us, which wasn’t odd. Rasure had managed to create a disdain for us among her friends. She told them she was trying to teach us to be proper ladies and that if we were not dressed that way not to address us.

  This must have been one of her fake charity luncheons. I say fake because last summer Mason and I figured out that the charity she was claiming to help didn’t exist. I was sure she was living off the donations. At that point, my brother Ben had frozen all of my assets, meaning that even though my uncle had power of attorney, he could not spend my money. That wasn’t hard to do when Ben told the judge I was twenty million dollars poorer. I still have no idea what she spent that ungodly amount of money on. I found a real charity that served the cause she was mocking and donated ten paintings that were valued at well over what money she’d claimed to have raised for the fake one. Of course, all the paintings came from her wing, which caused the next lawsuit, the one that says she stays on her side and I stay on mine, only sharing common rooms.

  When we entered the kitchen, we had to dodge around the frantic wait staff that feared Rasure far more than they should have.

  We’d almost made a clean escape, but low and behold there she was, lingering near the back door with Mrs. Cambridge.

  “Ladies,” Mrs. Cambridge said to us with a slight bow.

  “Why must you dress that way, Genevieve? At least pick one decade—either a pattern or a solid,” Rasure said to me.

  Which made me smirk. “Did you not say the exact same thing to me yesterday?” I responded coolly.

  “Obviously not clearly enough,” she seethed.

  That made me smile.

  “Oh, Celia, let the girl be. She looks absolutely exhausted,” Mrs. Cambridge said in her own condescending way.

  “Yes, that is the side effect of having young men come in and out of your room all night,” Rasure replied, as if I weren’t standing in front of her.

  “In and out…all night.” I glanced at Cadence. “It was just two, right? And if I recall, they left only a few hours ago.”

  It took everything Cadence had not to laugh at the t
one of my voice, which was mocking the ‘I’m too stuck up to be bothered with’ tone Rasure and her friends always used. I was on stage at that moment and if I do say so myself, I was playing my part beautifully.

  “Mrs. Cambridge,” I continued with the same tone. “I assume you received the donations from Falcon Manor for your auction.”

  “You are correct,” she replied with an all-too-polite smile. “I must say, Celia, I was surprised that you would part with such precious heirlooms. You, too, Genevieve,” she said, glancing to the three watches on my wrist. “Seems keeping time is a passion of yours.”

  Watching Rasure’s complexion turn as red as her hair was pure bliss for me. I had Mason and Gavin take three grandfather clocks to the auction, along with a few smaller versions. None of them worked. Hadn’t since they’d been here, but they belonged to Rasure and I was all too eager to get those eerie pieces of time out of my house.

  “Clocks never work for me. Even watches, see,” I said, raising my wrist to show her that each watch on my wrist had stopped. Gavin, Mason, and Wilder had all given me one. They joked that it was their glass slipper, that if their watches worked it would outweigh my two-heartbeat rule; they weren’t serious when they said that. It just blew their mind that the watches would work when anyone else wore them.

  “Very intriguing. Then why three?” Mrs. Cambridge asked.

  “They were gifts. I do hope the clocks raise the money you need. If not, I will send over something else, a painting or two perhaps.”

  “I’m sure they’ll raise more than enough. The generosity of the Falcon family never ceases to amaze me.”

  “Have a great luncheon, ladies,” I said with a bow.

  “Don’t forget your guards,” Rasure said with disdain, nodding to two men in black suits that had come to attention the second we walked in the kitchen.

  “Shame I need such things. Have you spoken with Ben?” I asked her.

  “What would I have to say to Benjamin?” she responded with a fake smile.

  I knew then that Gran was right: this had been resolved. My nightmare was over. First chance I had, she was going to be out in the cold. Literally.