The Firebird's Vengeance Read Free

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