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.
CHAPTER TWO
"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.
CHAPTER ONE
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.
