Séance and Sensibility

I’ve attended seances in a restaurant, in a cemetery on the side of a mountain, and in places I’ve chosen to forget. I have never in my life attended one with a relish tray.

Thelma’s living room glowed. She’d vacuumed lines into the carpet, set out the good napkins fanned in a holder, and laid the coffee table with deviled eggs, pickled okra, cheese straws, and a pitcher of sweet tea sweating on a doily. Charlie’s recliner sat in its place of honor with his pillow set just so against the arm.

Thelma had put on the red blouse and her church wig, the modest brown one she saved for weddings and funerals. I understood without asking. Tonight wasn’t a Dolly night. Tonight she wanted Charlie to see her.

Del arrived carrying the casserole in one arm and the cross over her shoulder. It took her three tries to get both through the door. “Where do you want the Lord?” she asked.

“By the television,” Thelma said, like she’d been asked where to put an umbrella.

Olivia arrived with a grocery sack of candles, hugged everybody twice, and whispered to me, “How different is this going to be from the other ones? Scale of one to ten.”

“Honestly? I have no idea.” “That’s what I was afraid of.”

I’d brought Beanie. I want the record to show it was Thelma who insisted. “Charlie loved dogs,” she’d said on the phone, “and that one sees him better than anybody but you.”

Beanie completed her rounds of the living room, accepted a cheese straw from Thelma with the solemnity of communion, and then, without any direction from anyone, walked over and lay down next to the recliner with her chin on her paws, facing it.

Del watched her do it. “Why’s the dog lookin’ at the chair.”

“She’s just settling in.”

“Chantilly Adair, that dog picked a spot like she was saving somebody a seat, and I want to know for who.”

“Del, she’s a dog. That’s all.”

“You sure about that?”

I ignored that and continued with the set up.

We set the candles in a circle and drew the chairs in around the coffee table. Del sat as far from the recliner as the room allowed, positioned her casserole within reach like it was some form of witchery protection, kept the cross propped against her knee, and eyeballed every shadow in the place before she’d commit her full weight to the chair.

“Now,” I said. “This isn’t like the others. We’re not calling out into the dark. We’re inviting one man, by name, into his own home. Everybody holds hands, and I want you to think about Charlie. Whatever you’ve got. Memories, stories, the sound of his laugh. That’s what he needs from us. That’s the fuel.”

“Do we close our eyes?” Olivia asked.

“You can, but you don’t have to.”

“Mine are staying open,” Del announced. “Nothing good has ever happened to me with my eyes closed.”

We joined hands. Thelma’s was warm for once, and steady. She squeezed mine.

“Charlie Sayers,” I said. “It’s Chantilly. We’re all here. Your girl’s here, in the red blouse, and there are deviled eggs on the table you can’t have, which seems cruel now that I say it out loud. Come on home, Charlie. Take what you need from us. We’ve got plenty.”

I knew he would come because he’d shown himself to me often, and this was all about Thelma. But for a minute, nothing. The candles stood straight and the house ticked the way old houses do.

Then Beanie’s tail started thumping the carpet. Slow at first, then faster, her ears up, her whole back-end wagging at an empty chair.

Finally, the recliner rocked. It tipped back easy and settled forward again, the exact lazy way I assumed Charlie would sit. The pillow against the arm dented in like a hand had given it a pat.

Del’s grip on my hand surpassed bone-crushing. “The chair,” she whispered. “Chantilly. The chair. Tell me you see the chair.”

“I see it, Del. It’s fine. It’s just Charlie.”

“Just Charlie. JUST Charlie. There is a chair ROCKIN’ ITSELF—”

The television turned on by itself with the remote sitting untouched on the shelf. The screen lit up to the fishing program, the one Charlie had watched every Saturday of his mortal life, with two men in a bass boat talking soft over the water.

That did it. Del exploded up out of her chair like she’d been ejected, casserole clutched to her chest and wedged herself under the far end of the coffee table, which wasn’t built to accommodate her, so that the whole spread of deviled eggs and pickled okra flew two inches into the air and hovered there on her back while she hollered.

“IT’S IN THE ELECTRONICS! IT’S GOT INTO THE ELECTRONICS! OLIVIA, HAND ME THE LORD!”

“Del, honey, you’re wearing the table—”

“HAND! ME! THE LORD!”

Thelma didn’t move. She sat with her back straight and her hands folded, watching that recliner rock. The candlelight caught the tears sliding down her face. She was smiling wider than I’d seen her smile in three weeks.

“Hey, sugar,” she said softly. “You’re late for supper.”

The candle flames all leaned toward the recliner at once, gentle, like they were turning to look.

And Charlie Sayers, clear as a bell and solid as a Sunday, said, “Hey, Thelma Rae. Lord, I’ve missed this room and you, my darlin’.”

“No.” Del’s hands shook. Her head followed. “Del.” “No, ma’am. N-O. I’ve done my time with the two I’ve already done. In case you forgot, one was at the restaurant, and the other at the cemetery, which was the creepiest dagum thing I’ve ever done. I told you after that one, never again. I swear on all that’s holy, I meant it with my whole chest.” She was wiping down the counter after close, the same spot she’d been wiping since I said the word séance. The spot was clean enough for surgery. “This one’s different.” “They’re all different. That’s the problem. If they were the same, I’d know what to be scared of.” She pointed the rag at me. “And don’t you give me that look. The last time, I didn’t sleep for a week. I kept the hall light on like a five-year-old, and I’m not ashamed to say it.” “It’s at Thelma’s house.” The rag stopped. “In her living room. No cemetery, no dark, no strangers from the beyond. One spirit, invited, by name. Charlie Sayers, who you knew for forty years, who fixed your walk-in freezer twice and never charged you.” “Charlie.” Del set the rag down. “You’re calling Charlie.” “He’s trying to tell me what’s wrong with her, Del. He knows. He’s watched it happen. But he’s worn himself down to a whisper keeping watch over her, and he can’t get the words through. He needs us. All of us, together, so he’s got something to draw on.” I took a breath. “It’s for Thelma.” She stood there a long moment, arms crossed, jaw working, and I watched the fear and the love have it out on her face. It wasn’t a fair fight. It never had been, not where Thelma was concerned. “When?” “Tomorrow night. Seven.” “Fine.” She snatched the rag back up. “But I want it on the record that I object, and I’m bringin’ protection.” “Not the shotgun.” “Never say never, but not this time.” She disappeared into the back and came out hauling a wooden cross that I can only describe as architectural. It stood as tall as her leg and twice as wide as a boat oar. “Del. Where in the world—” “Vacation Bible School, 1998. They were throwin’ it out. I’ve kept it in the storeroom for emergencies, and if this don’t qualify, nothing does.” She leaned it against the counter and dusted her hands. “And I’m bringing a casserole.” “A casserole. To a seance.” “You don’t show up to somebody’s house empty-handed, Chantilly, I don’t care who’s comin’. And besides.” She lowered her voice like the spirits might already be listening. “Charlie’s always been food-motivated like Beanie. I’m not up for being scared out of my britches, and it can’t hurt to have options.” I decided not to examine the theology of bribing a ghost with green bean casserole, mostly because I couldn’t say for certain it wouldn’t work. And Charlie did love food. He’d told me that often.
By the time I left, Del had assembled a pile on the counter: the cross, a canister of salt, a bottle of holy water she claimed came from a priest in Dahlonega, a flashlight, extra batteries, and a whistle. “What’s the whistle for?” “Emergencies.” “What kind of emergency at a seance gets solved by a whistle?” “The kind where I need everybody to stop what they’re doin’ and listen to me, which in my experience is every emergency I’ve ever been in.” She swept the whole pile into a tote bag. “You laugh now, but you’ll be thanking me when the whistle saves your life.” Olivia took the news better, which is to say she went pale, sat down, and asked four questions, three of which I could answer. “But it’s Charlie,” she said finally, working it through. “It’s just Charlie. Charlie who used to keep butterscotch in his shirt pocket. I’m not scared of Charlie.” “That’s the spirit.” “Was that a pun?” “Unintentional.” “Because Del would’ve thrown something at you.” She hugged herself, then straightened and nodded once. “Okay. What do I bring?” “Yourself. And every memory of Charlie you’ve got. That’s the fuel.” “I’ve got the butterscotch one, and the time he danced with Thelma in the diner to no music at all. Del turned the radio off to close up, and he just kept on dancing her around between the tables like the music was still playing.” She teared up. “Is that enough?” Somewhere, I suspected, Charlie had just gotten a little stronger. “That’s plenty.” Thelma, when I called her, didn’t react the way a woman hosting a seance for her dead husband might be expected to react. She reacted like the church had asked her to host the deacons. “Tomorrow? Chantilly, that’s no notice at all. The house needs vacuuming, and I’ll have to do deviled eggs, and somebody needs to get the good napkins down from the—” “Thelma. You don’t need deviled eggs. It’s a seance.” “It’s an occasion,” she said. “My Charlie is coming to our house for the first time in six years. Now, I know he can’t eat a deviled egg, but he’s going to see a table that says somebody wanted him there. Now, should I wear the red blouse or the blue? He always favored the red.” I gave up. “The red.” “The red,” she agreed. “And Chantilly. Thank you, honey. Whatever comes of it.” Her voice wobbled on the edge of tears then steadied. “Six years I’ve been talking to that man pillow. Only a time or two has he talked back. He owes me one.” I hung up and sat with that for a while, and if I got a little misty in my own kitchen, that’s between me and Beanie, and Beanie doesn’t gossip.

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CHAPTER SIX

I stayed after lunch and washed dishes I didn’t need to wash, because the kitchen was where Charlie kept trying to point me and I wanted time in it alone to figure out why. Ghosts can be odd. They’ll tell you what they want you to know but leave out the details you need to know. It can be frustrating.

I searched that room like a crime scene. I checked the water from the tap, smelled it, ran it hot and cold. I opened the cabinets and read expiration dates on cans older than Olivia. I checked under the sink, where I found roach spray from two presidents ago but nothing leaking. I looked at the stove burners, the vents, the back porch.

Nothing. Or rather, everything, because when you don’t know what you’re looking for, a kitchen is nothing but suspects.

I was drying my hands when the temperature dropped and the hair on my arms stood up. Charlie flickered in by the refrigerator. The sight of him scared me worse than any haunting ever had. He’d gone thin. Not thin like losing weight but like a photograph left in the sun.

“Charlie. What is happening to you?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Even his voice had static in it. “Listen. Every morning she— and then at supper she— it’s twice, Chantilly, it’s the—”

“Twice. What’s twice? Charlie, slow down. What am I looking for?” He pointed. I’ll swear to that on anything you hand me. He raised his arm and pointed toward the table, toward that crowded lazy Susan or the coffee maker or the window above them, and then his arm dissolved from the fingers back, and the rest of him quickly disappeared with it. The next thing I knew, I was standing there in Thelma’s kitchen talking to a refrigerator.

I spun that lazy Susan again. Vita-Glow. Fish oil. Cinnamon. Calcium. The blood pressure pills. A sticky note in Thelma’s handwriting that said BUY STAMPS. I picked up bottles and set them down. Twice. Every morning and then at supper. Twice what?

I called Jack from the back porch, where Olivia and Thelma couldn’t hear me, and told him everything.

“Twice,” he said when I finished. “Morning and supper. That’s a routine. What does she do twice a day, every day?”

“Everything. She’s eighty-something and set in her ways. Coffee twice. The news twice. She feeds the birds twice. She takes her pills morning and night, regular as church. She calls Olivia. She waters that fern she’s currently killing.”

“Anything in that list new in the last three weeks?” “That’s the problem. None of it. It’s the same routine she’s run for years. I watched her do the whole morning round today, and it looked like every other morning of her life.”

“Then either the routine changed in a way she doesn’t count as a change,” Jack said, “or something inside the routine did. People don’t report what they don’t notice, Chantilly. You taught me that.”

“I hate it when you quote me.”

“You love it. Do you want me to run anything down on my end? I can make a call to the hospital, see if we can get the labs.”

“Not yet. We’d need her approval for that anyway. Let me try my way first.”

“Your way.” I could hear him deciding whether to say it. “This is the part where you tell me the plan and I pretend to be comfortable with it.”

“Tomorrow night we’re holding a seance in Thelma’s living room to boost her dead husband’s signal strength. Del’s going to hate me, but I’ll figure it out.”

There was a pause with a whole conversation inside it.

“Give Bean a kiss for me,” he said, and hung up, and I loved him for it.

Back inside, I sat down at Thelma’s table and had it out with myself.

Here was the truth: Charlie knew the answer. He’d watched it happen, whatever it was, morning and supper, for three weeks. The only person in this world or the next who had eyes on Thelma around the clock, and he couldn’t get a full sentence to me, because he was spending every ounce of energy he had standing guard over her, and there wasn’t enough left of him to carry his own words across.

I knew what came next.

I didn’t need a seance to talk to Charlie. I’d said that to the girls a dozen times, and it had always been true, but in his depleted state, it wasn’t anymore. He needed the boost. A circle of people who loved him and loved her, all that living attention gathered up in one room, giving him something to draw on so he could hold together long enough to finish a sentence.

Which meant candles, a circle, and asking Delphina Beauregard, a woman who had once threatened to shoot a ghost with a shotgun, to voluntarily attend her third seance.

I put my head down on Thelma’s table and groaned.

From somewhere far off, faint and crackling and unmistakably amused, I heard Charlie say, “Better you than me, darlin’.”

CHAPTER FIVE Saturday morning, I showed up at Thelma’s with a notebook, a pen, and a plan.

Olivia let me in, still in her pajamas, and her hair in a bun. She’d been up half the night listening for sounds from Thelma’s room. “She’s good this morning,” she whispered. “She ate a whole egg and half a biscuit, and she criticized my coffee, so I think we’re trending up.”

Thelma sat at the kitchen table in her housecoat and headscarf, and when she saw the notebook, her eyes narrowed. “What’s that for?”

“We’re going to work your case.”

“My case. I’m not a case. I’m a tired old woman.”

“Robert Hale was a case. The Dunwoody mirror was a case. You’re the most important case I’ve ever had, so humor me.” I sat down across from her and opened the notebook. “The dizzy spells. When did the first one happen? Exactly.”

She started to wave me off, then saw my face and thought better of it. “Three weeks ago. Maybe a hair more. It was a Tuesday, because I remember thinkin’ I’d better steady up before bingo.”

“Okay. Three weeks. So, what changed three weeks ago?”

“Nothing’s changed.”

“Something always changes. Close your eyes for me.” It was the same thing I’d asked of Elise Carrington, and of half a dozen witnesses before her. It worked on the living and the dead alike.

“Picture that week. Walk me through it.” She sighed, but she closed her eyes. “Monday, I had my hair done. The wigs, I mean. Wednesday was church supper. Thursday, Randy came and fixed the gutter over the carport. Friday, I got groceries and my prescriptions. Saturday, I made chow-chow. Sunday was church.” She opened her eyes. “See? Nothing.”

I wrote all of it down anyway. “New foods? Anything different at the store?”

“Same list I’ve bought for fifty years.”

“What about those vitamins?” Olivia pointed at the lazy Susan in the middle of the table, and Lord, it was a sight. A dozen bottles at least, arranged in a circle like they were channeling the ghosts of supplements past. “The big one’s new. I’ve seen the commercial,” Olivia said.

“Vita-Glow Silver,” Thelma said with dignity. “It has forty essential nutrients. The woman on the television is eighty-one and water-skis. I’ve always wanted to waterski.”

“She’s an actress, Thelma.”

“She’s an actress who water-skis.”

I picked up the Vita-Glow bottle and read the label, and then, because I was being thorough, I gave the whole lazy Susan a slow spin. Vitamins, fish oil, a jar of cinnamon capsules somebody at church had sworn by, calcium chews, her blood pressure pills lined up neat next to the coffee maker end of the circle, the whole pharmacy aisle of a woman who took her upkeep seriously. Part of me felt inadequate with my single multi-vitamin jar next to my coffee pot.

“When did the Vita-Glow start?”

“I think a month and a half ago, give or take a few days.”

Before the spells started. I wrote it down with a question mark and moved on. “What about the water? Randy was up on that carport. Any work done inside? Water heater, furnace, anything with a pilot light?”

“You think my house is poisoning me?”

“I think I’ll turn over every rock in Bramblett County if that’s what it takes.”

“Well, while you’re turning rocks, did I ever finish telling you about Eulene and the funeral casserole?”

“Thelma.”

“Because you cut me off the other day, and it’s been weighing on me.” She settled back in her chair.

I recognized the maneuver for exactly what it was, and I let her have it, because her color was better when she was telling a story than at any other time. “Please finish.”

“My cousin Eulene kept a chicken and rice casserole in her deep freeze for eleven years, waiting on Mr. Purdy to pass. He was ninety-four when she froze it. She said she wasn’t about to be caught flat-footed when the time came, because the first casserole to arrive at a grieving house gets remembered, and the fifth one gets fed to the dog.”

“That’s morbid,” Olivia said.

“That’s planning,” Thelma said. “Anyway, Mr. Purdy finally went at a hundred and five, outliving two of Eulene’s freezers, and she was so excited she drove that casserole to the church still frozen solid, and she dropped it in the parking lot. It fell out of the Tupperware in one rock of a piece and slid under Reverend Tillman’s Buick. It took three deacons and a snow shovel to get it out. Eulene told everybody it was a sign.”

“A sign of what?” I asked against my better judgment.

“She never said. Eulene got a lot of mileage out of signs she never explained.” Thelma reached over and patted my notebook. “Kind of like you and that thing.”

“Nice try. We’re not done.” I flipped back a page. “The chow-chow. You made it Saturday, spells started Tuesday. Anybody else eat it?”

“Half the church. I took six jars to the supper, and if my chow-chow was poison, you’d have heard the ambulances from your porch. Verna Whitlock alone ate a jar and a half, though that woman is too mean to sicken.”

I crossed off chow-chow.

Her face did something then. The starch disappeared, and the fear appeared, the same fear from the first day, and something else with it that I finally recognized. Shame. She was ashamed, like being sick was a thing she’d done wrong.

“Chantilly.” She sighed. “What if it’s just me winding down? What if there’s no rock, and no answer?

That it’s just coming close to me going home?”

Olivia gasped and turned toward the sink.

“Then I’ll be here for every minute of it,” I said. “But I don’t believe that, and I’ll tell you why. Because I know someone who watches over you around the clock, and he says the exact opposite, Thelma. It isn’t your time. And I can tell you this for certain. In all my years of talking to the other side, I have never once known him to be wrong about you.”

She knew who I meant. Her eyes watered. She studied the empty air over my shoulder, missing him by three feet, which was closer than most people ever got. “Well,” she said, when she could.

“Charlie always was a know-it-all.”

From the corner of the kitchen, faint as a radio station two towns over, I heard him laugh.

Never mind the ghosts or the clocks that move in slow motion, hospitals have a smell that gets into your clothes and doesn’t leave. Antiseptic, death, disease, all rolled into a combination that set my insides on fire.

I hated hospitals, but most psychic mediums weren’t fans. How could we be? Being in one was like being in retail in a mall, during the 80s at Christmas. So, so crowded.

I stood in the waiting room with my back to a group of spirits after telling them they had to wait. I had priorities and every one of them was connected to Thelma.

We had taken over a corner of that waiting room, me and Olivia and Del, with Jeffrey coming and going in his uniform, which got us information faster than we would have. Jack showed up within the hour, sat down beside me, and put his arm around me without asking any of the questions I couldn’t have answered, which is one of the several hundred reasons I love that man.

Beanie was in the truck with the windows down and Jack’s deputy checking on her every twenty minutes. She was handling the wait better than Del, who had responded to the crisis the only way she knew how. She’d gone to the diner, cooked, and come back. There were sausage biscuits for the nurses’ station, a pound cake for the desk clerk, and a foil pan of something for us that none of us touched, which she took personally.

“Eat,” she ordered Olivia.

“I can’t.”

“You can and you will. Fallin’ out from hunger won’t get her well any faster, and I’m not sittin’ in this waitin’ room with two of you down.”

It was nearly seven when Dr. Mercer walked out. I read his face before he said a word.

“She’s stable and comfortable. In fact, she’s currently telling my nurses a story about a mule. Her blood pressure’s lower than I’d like, and lower than her chart history. But her blood work’s unremarkable, her heart looks strong for her age, and her scan is clean. My best guess right now is dehydration which is often a factor of her age catching up with her. We’ll keep her overnight, get fluids in her, and see how she does. But I want her back in my office next week.”

“That’s it?” Del said. “Drink more water? I could’ve told her that, and I don’t charge.”

“Del,” Olivia whispered.

“Well.”

“If something else were going on, we’d expect to see it in the labs,” Dr. Mercer said. “Sometimes the body just needs rest. Would you like to see her?”

“Yes,” we all said together

He let us back two at a time. Thelma was propped up in bed in her headscarf, holding court, with a nurse laughing in the doorway. She looked small in that bed. I hated it.

She must have seen the hate on my face because she pointed a finger at me. “Don’t you look at me like that. I’m not dyin’. The doctor said so.”

“The doctor said drink water.”

“Then somebody get me a sweet tea and we’ll call it even.”

We brought her home the next morning. Olivia packed a bag and announced she was staying the weekend. Thelma fussed about it for exactly four seconds.

Then came the moment Del had been dreading. I watched her walk it like a woman headed to the gallows. She set a hatbox on Thelma’s kitchen table. “Now. Before you open that. I want you to know I did everything I could.”

Thelma looked at the box. “Del. What did you do?”

“I washed it.”

“You washed it?”

“I had to. There was cobbler in it! Peaches and crumble all down in the curls. I used the gentle cycle, and I put it in one of them mesh bags like they do delicates—”

Thelma opened the box.

I’ve seen things in my life I can’t explain. I’ve talked with the dead. I’ve watched a mirror behave in ways no mirror should. And I’m telling you that what was in that hatbox was worse.

Beyond worse. Tragic. No, that’s not even a strong enough word. I’m well-educated, and I can’t think of a strong enough word.

It had been the platinum wig, the ringlet wig, her favorite, the one she said she’d fight Dolly to keep. What sat in the box now had no ringlets, no shape and no hope, matted flat on one side and standing straight up on the other.

Nobody dared breathe. Del clasped her hand in front of her apron. Olivia’s hand covered her mouth.

Thelma stared at it with her eyes widened for a split second. I hoped Del didn’t catch it. She closed the box and patted the lid. “It’s just hair.”

And that was the worst thing that had happened all week. Worse than the faint, the ambulance, the hospital bed, not knowing if Thelma was okay. Because in the forty years those wigs had ridden around on Thelma’s head, she had never once, not one single time, called any of them just hair.

Del opened her mouth, but for the first time in living memory, nothing came out.

Nothing.

No one knew how to handle that.

I drove home that evening with Beanie’s head on my shoulder and a stone in my stomach. Something was wrong with my friend, something the labs hadn’t caught. I could feel it, I just couldn’t define it.

Charlie waited in my kitchen. He flickered like a bulb about to quit, in and out, and when he spoke, only some of the words made it through. “Chantilly. It’s the— you have to look at the—”

“The what? Charlie, I can’t hear you. Look at what?”

“—every morning, and then again at— she doesn’t know—”

“Charlie!”

He reached toward me, said something I couldn’t catch, and disappeared completely. Beanie whined at the empty space and looked up at me.

“I know, girl,” I said though my voice didn’t sound right. Robert Hale had stood in my kitchen not so long ago and told me to be careful, that someone I loved was in trouble.

Now I knew who.

What I didn’t know was what that trouble was exactly. But I know how to work a mystery, and I wasn’t about to lose Thelma to one.

Friday was two days out, and Thelma insisted on breakfast at Del’s on Wednesday like everything was fine, and she wasn’t having issues.

“If I sit home, I’ll fret,” she’d told me on the phone. “And frettin’ never fixed a thing except my grandmother’s nerves. And that was only temporary. Did I ever tell you about the time she—”

I stopped her. “Thelma. We need to make sure you’re okay.”

“I’m fine. Stop fussin’ about me, and don’t you go tellin’ Del a thing. She’ll worry, and that woman is cranky enough already.”

So, Wednesday morning we were all at our table. Thelma wore her favorite wig, the platinum one with the ringlets she said she would have fought Dolly herself to keep.

She was in the middle of a story about her uncle’s mule when it happened. “So the mule wouldn’t cross the bridge, and Uncle Ferd, being a stubborn man himself, decided he’d carry the—” She stopped.

“Carry the what?” Olivia asked.

Thelma didn’t answer. Her face had gone the color of biscuit dough, and her eyes weren’t fixed on anything in the room. “Oh my,” she said, and then she went down.

She didn’t crash. I’ll be grateful for that until my dying day. She folded sideways but slow enough that I had time to position my arm behind her head and stopped it from smacking the table.

Olivia yelped, then Del climbed over the counter faster than I’ve ever seen a woman her age move, still holding the peach cobbler she’d been carrying to the display stand.

And that’s when the wig came off.

It slid forward off Thelma’s head, hung in the air for one terrible second, and landed crown-first in the cobbler with a splat.

I won’t be grateful for hearing that or Del’s scream until my dying day.

“Thelma!” Del set the ruined cobbler on the table without a glance at it, which told you everything about how scared she was. “Thelma, don’t you dare.”

Jeffrey, Olivia’s significant other and a police officer, stood at the counter in his uniform picking up his to-go coffee, thank the Lord. He contacted dispatch on the radio before we all could take another breath. Beanie pressed against my chair and whined. Her nose worked the air.

Charlie was already there, hovering on his knees beside Thelma. The look on his face broke my heart clean in two. “Something’s been wrong for weeks,” he said to me. “Somebody find what this is. Find it.“

Thelma’s eyes fluttered open before the sirens sounded close. She looked up at the circle of faces hanging over her and frowned. “Did I faint?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“In public?”

I nodded. “At Del’s.”

“Well, that’s just embarrassing.” She tried to sit up, but four sets of hands stopped her. She touched her head and noticed her wig was missing immediately. “Where’s my wig?”

Nobody answered.

“Ladies, where is my wig?”

Del cleared her throat. “It’s, uh. It’s resting.”

Thelma turned her head, saw the cobbler, and closed her eyes. “Lord, take me now.”

“He’s not taking you anywhere,” Del snapped. Her voice cracked on it. “You hear me? Not yet, and not any time soon.”

The paramedics slammed through the door. Thelma argued with them about going to the hospital, lost, and was loaded onto the gurney wearing her headscarf from her purse.

Even flat on her back she had standards.

As they rolled her out, she crooked a finger at me.

I leaned down. “Yes?”

“Chantilly.”

“I’m right here.”

“Don’t let Del throw out that cobbler dish. It’s the good Pyrex.”

“I love you too.”

They loaded her into the ambulance. Jeffrey said he’d escort them. Olivia grabbed her keys, cried and apologizing for crying. “I’m going to follow the ambulance.”

Del stood in the middle of her diner holding a peach cobbler with a Dolly Parton wig sunk in it, and not one customer said a word.

They didn’t dare.

Charlie stood beside me at the window while the ambulance pulled away, lights going, no siren, which was a good sign.

“Go with her,” I told him.

“I never left,” he said, and vanished.

“She skipped bingo,” Olivia said. “She’s never skipped bingo.”

I stopped rearranging the hatpin display and looked at her. “Thelma skipped bingo?”

She nodded. “First time. Dot Simmons called me because Thelma always saves her a seat, and she never showed or called. And that’s not all.” Olivia lowered her voice, even though we were the only two living souls in the museum. “She canceled her wig appointment.”

“Her what?”

“She has a standing appointment the first Thursday of every month at that specialty salon up in Jasper. They wash and reset the wigs. She calls it sending the girls to the spa. She’s never missed one, Chantilly. Not once. Not even the month she had the shingles.”

I set down the hatpin I was holding before I stabbed myself with it. Thelma missing bingo was a weather event. Thelma neglecting her wigs was a category five.

“I’m going over there,” I said.

“Want me to come?”

“No. If we both show up, she’ll know we’re worried, and she’ll dig in like a tick.” I grabbed my purse and Beanie’s leash. “Cover for me?”

“Always.”

Thelma lived in the same little brick house on Persimmon Lane she’d shared with Charlie for forty-one years. Usually, the place looked ready for a magazine shoot, if the magazine covered garden gnomes and porch ferns. That afternoon, however, things were different. The fern nearest the door had gone brown at the edges, and the mailbox was stuffed so full the lid wouldn’t shut. There were two days of mail, maybe three piled on the porch under her door slot. The curtains were drawn in the middle of the day.

I knocked. Beanie sat beside me and stared at the door with her ears forward. She knew something wasn’t right. I knew it as well.

It took Thelma a long time to answer, long enough that my heart started doing things I didn’t appreciate.

When the door finally opened, she stood there in a housecoat and a silk headscarf, no wig, no lipstick, blinking at the daylight. “Chantilly. Sweetheart. I wasn’t expecting company.”

“I brought you Del’s lemon bars.” I held up the plate. “She said they came out too sweet, which means they’re perfect.”

She couldn’t turn down lemon bars and we both knew it. She stepped back and let me in.

The house was dim and too warm, but I knew older people liked it warm, so I let that pass. There was a glass of sweet tea on the side table with the ice long melted, sitting on a coaster like she’d poured it and forgotten it. A crocheted blanket lay in a heap on Charlie’s recliner, where the seat cushion still held the shape of her. She’d been sleeping in his chair in the middle of the afternoon.

I tried to let that pass as well.

Beanie didn’t do her usual tour of the house looking for dropped crumbs. She walked straight to the recliner, stared at the empty space beside it, and lay down.

Charlie was there. I felt him before I saw him, standing at the corner of the room where he could see her. He didn’t say a word. He just looked at me, and then at her.

“Sit down, honey,” Thelma said, lowering herself into the recliner by inches, both hands on the armrests. “Did I ever tell you about my cousin Eulene and the funeral casseroles?”

“Thelma.”

“Because Eulene kept a casserole in her deep freeze for eleven years waiting on Mr. Purdy to pass, and when he finally did, she was so excited she dropped it in the church parking lot, and the Tupperware—”

“Thelma.” I sat on the couch across from her and took her hand. It was cold again, and I could feel it trembling. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

She held out for about ten seconds. Then her shoulders came down, and the performance act ended. She looked every one of her years for the first time since I’d known her.

“I’ve been having spells,” she said quietly. “Dizzy spells. The room tilts on me, mostly mornings, sometimes after supper. And I’m tired, Chantilly. Tired down in my bones. I stood up too fast in the kitchen Monday and had to grab the counter. I stood there hanging on to it for I don’t know how long, thinking, well, Thelma, this is it, you’re going to die on this linoleum in your bad slippers.”

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?”

“Because I know what happens next.” Her chin came up, and her grip on my hand turned fierce. “First it’s the doctor. Then it’s somebody driving me everywhere.”

“We already do that, honey.”

“That’s true. I forgot.” She took a moment and added, “Then Olivia’s sweet as pie about it, and Del’s mean as a snake because that woman can’t show fear unless it’s a séance, and next thing you know I’m in Shady Grove eatin’ pudding with a rubber spoon and some woman named Charlene is telling me when I can watch my programs. I’ve seen it happen, Chantilly. I watched it happen to my sister. It starts with one dizzy spell.”

“It starts with not telling anybody,” I said. “That’s how it starts.”

She looked away.

“Here’s my offer. You see Dr. Mercer this week. I’ll drive you myself, and I won’t say a word to the girls until you’re ready. But if you won’t go, I’m telling Olivia and Del both, today, and you can take it up with the three of us.”

“That’s not an offer. That’s a stickup.”

“I learned from the best. You held the whole church hostage over a seating chart in 2019.”

Her mouth twitched. “That was a matter of principle.”

“So is this. Friday. I’ll pick you up at nine.”

She sighed. It turned into something long and thin, and she patted my hand. “Fine. Friday. But I’m wearing the tall wig, and if that doctor says one word about assisted living, I’m walking out.”

“Deal.”

I stayed another hour, made her drink a fresh glass of tea, and put the lemon bars where she could reach them. When I left, Charlie followed me onto the porch.

“How long?” I asked him. “How long has this been going on?”

“Weeks,” he said. “Three, maybe four. And it’s getting worse.” He looked back through the window at her, small in his big chair. “I’m with her all I can be, but I can’t catch her, Chantilly. Whatever comes, I can’t catch her.”

He faded before I could answer, and I drove home with the radio off and Robert’s warning riding shotgun the whole way.

Customers filed into Del’s diner in droves daily. They came for the gossip but stayed for the food. Plus, they loved the consistency of it, or at least I assumed they did because I did. The diner hadn’t changed since the day it opened unless you considered normal upkeep change.

It still smelled the same way it did every morning, too, of bacon and coffee and that lemon cleaner she bought in bulk and swore was hospital grade. Beanie trotted ahead of me to our regular table, gave the room her usual once-over, and settled underneath it with a groan that suggested she’d worked a double shift instead of sleeping fourteen hours on my bed.

It was hard being a dog. She’d made that perfectly clear.

“Well, look what the dog dragged in,” Del called from behind the counter. “Literally.” She already had the coffeepot in her hand. “Sit down before I sell your table to a payin’ customer.”

“I pay.”

“You tip. There’s a difference.”

Olivia walked through the door a minute later with Thelma on her arm, and the whole diner brightened the way it always did when Thelma made an entrance. That morning’s Dolly Parton wig was the honey-blond one with the curls stacked high enough to need its own building permit, and she’d paired it with a purple blouse covered in rhinestones and a scarf that didn’t match anything she owned, which I suspected was the point.

Only one other person wore a Dolly Parton wig better than Thelma, and that was Dolly. God rest her soul.

I stood and helped her into her chair. “Morning, sunshine.”

“Morning, darlin’.” She set her cane against the table and patted my hand. “Did y’all hear about the Watermelon Queen crown?”

Del poured our coffees. “Here we go again.”

“The what?” Olivia asked, which was her job at the table, encouraging Thelma to tell her stories because they always made us giggle, and she performed it beautifully.

“The 1971 Castleberry Watermelon Queen crown,” Thelma said. “It went missing the night of the pageant, right off the judges’ table, and this town has never recovered.”

“This town recovered fine,” Del said. “I was there.”

“You were runner-up,” Thelma said. “And I may not be good at math, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the same as recovered.”

Olivia choked on her coffee.

Del pointed the coffeepot at her. “I was robbed, and everybody knew it. Patsy Turnbull’s talent was baton twirling, and she dropped that baton twice.”

“Three times,” Thelma said. “But she cried pretty, and the judges were all men.” She stirred her coffee, tapped the spoon on the rim, and set it down. “Anyway. It was 1971, and the crown disappeared between the swimsuit portion and the crowning. Mrs. Hargrove said she saw the Wooten boy near the judges’ table, but the Wooten boy was in Vietnam at the time, so that theory had holes. My aunt Beryl said it was the Methodists, on account of the pageant being held at the Baptist pavilion that year, and feelings were raw. The Methodists and Baptists were always at war back then. They’re not now because Pastor Frank, from the early 80s, reminded them we all use the same Bible and pray to the same Jesus, who doesn’t like fighting amongst his people.

“You’re getting off track,” Del said.

“I am not. And Mr. Pittman, who ran the feed store, told anyone who’d stand still that a crow took it. He’d seen a program about crows on the television and never got over it.”

“A crow,” Olivia said.

“Crows love shiny things. That part’s true. The rest of what Mr. Pittman said, you had to take with a grain of salt, because he also believed the moon landing was filmed in Ellijay.”

“So who took it?” Olivia asked.

“Nobody knows to this day. Patsy Turnbull got crowned with a tiara from the five-and-dime, and she wore it to church for a month like it was the real thing.” Thelma stirred her coffee again. “It was 1971,” she said, “and the crown went missing right off the judges’ table.”

I glanced up. She’d already told us that part. Del caught my eye across the table, then looked away and busied herself with the sugar caddy.

“Well, I think Del would’ve made a lovely queen,” Olivia said.

“Don’t butter me up. It won’t get you extra whipped cream.”

Charlie, Thelma’s deceased husband, hovered behind Thelma’s chair. He was there most mornings, arms folded, wearing that easy grin he always wore when she got going on a story. Except that morning, he wasn’t grinning. He was watching her stir a cup of coffee she hadn’t taken one sip of, and his face was still in a way I knew wasn’t good.

Beanie noticed him too. Her ears perked up, and her tail thumped once against my foot, then stopped.

Del walked back around with the pie stand. “Fresh peach this morning. Thelma, I saved you the corner piece with the extra crumble, so don’t say I never did nothin’ for you.”

“Oh.” Thelma looked at the pie and something crossed her face too fast for me to name. “Not today, sugar. I’m not real hungry.”

We all lost our ability to speak. In all the years I’d known Thelma, through funerals and floods and one memorable stomach bug that she blamed on a gas station burrito, she had never once turned down Del’s peach pie.

“You feelin’ all right?” Del asked. For once there was no salt in it.

“Fit as a fiddle. I had a big supper is all.” She smiled and adjusted her wig, which had drifted a hair to the left. Olivia reached over and straightened it without being asked. “Thank you, honey.”

The conversation moved on. Olivia talked about the new exhibit cards for the museum, Del threatened to put something unspeakable in a customer’s gravy, and Thelma laughed in all the right places. But she held on to the table when she laughed, and when we got up to leave, she gripped my arm harder than she normal. Her hand was cold.

I walked her to Olivia’s car and buckled her in myself, which she allowed, and was its own bad sign.

Charlie hovered on the sidewalk as they pulled away. He didn’t shimmer off the way he usually did. He turned to me instead, and for the first time since I’d known his spirit, he looked scared.

“Keep an eye on my girl,” he said. Then he was gone.

I stood on that sidewalk in the morning sun with Robert Hale’s last words repeating in my mind and an unease crawling up the back of my neck.

Be careful. Someone you love is in trouble.