Someone behind me makes a little noise, and I turn to see a woman standing there. I don’t recognize her, so I peg her as a summer person. She seems impatient, so I turn back to Mrs. Burling and say, “Thanks. Clodine will be happy to hear that Livvie is still alive.”

  “Tell her I hope she’s feeling better,” Mrs. Burling says.

  I leave her to deal with the waiting woman, and head back outside. As I drive home, I think about Livvie Comstock sitting all alone in a room in an old-folks home for twenty years. I can’t help but think that the reason she doesn’t want to come back here is because of the memories of what happened that day almost ninety years ago. Has she been thinking about it all that time? Every day, for almost a century? If she has, no wonder the curse seems to have gotten stronger.

  Now the question is, can I get her to stop thinking about it and reverse the curse? I feel like I don’t have a lot of time left to find out. I need to do something now.

  When I get home, a quick internet search tells me that Edgesea, Maine, is a nine-hour drive from here. Another search locates the Kirkewood Home for the Aged. It’s actually a former hotel, a sprawling old building that looks as if it probably houses as many ghosts as it does living people.

  I input the address into an app on my phone, then look at my calendar for my work schedule. I work tonight and tomorrow, and won’t be done until around midnight. But I have Sunday and Monday off.

  Just enough time for a road trip.

  Thirty

  I pass the Welcome to Edgesea sign a little after ten o’clock on Sunday morning. I’ve been driving all night. It started raining about an hour outside of Portland, and the whup-whup, whup-whup, whup-whup of the windshield wipers has become background noise to my thoughts, which are all about Livvie Comstock and what I’m going to say to her.

  Fifteen minutes later, I’m sitting in the parking lot of the Kirkewood Home for the Aged. It’s even more imposing in person than it is in photographs, a hulking beast of a building crouched amid a cluster of tall pine trees, as if it’s waiting to pounce. There are only a handful of cars in the lot besides mine, and I don’t see anyone moving around behind the dozens of windows.

  I smoke a cigarette, which, combined with the half a dozen cups of gas station coffee I’ve consumed on the drive through New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and now Maine, makes me even more jittery. But it’s a good kind of energy, nervous and electric and raw, even if I do wish I could brush my teeth. I wait until the cigarette is smoked out, then pop a handful of wintergreen breath mints I bought at the last mini-mart. They click against my teeth and burn away the stale aftertaste of nicotine and caffeine.

  I get out of the truck and walk to the front doors, which I’m surprised to find aren’t locked to keep the residents inside. Pushing them open, I step into what was obviously once a grand lobby, but which now looks a little threadbare. The flower-patterned carpet is worn, the chandelier that hangs from the ceiling is riddled with burned-out bulbs like missing teeth, and the furniture scattered around looks like it came from an estate sale. There’s a faint smell of dust and something like mothballs.

  A big desk is situated to one side of the room, and behind it is seated a man wearing a blue suit. I walk over to him and say, “Excuse me. I’m here to see one of the residents. Can you tell me where I can find Livvie Comstock?”

  The man nods, grins, and says, “Good to see you again, Mr. Spatchcock! How’s the feed-and-grain business? Have your regular room all ready for you. I’ll have Winston bring your bags up lickety-split.” He looks around, then leans in and whispers, “If you’ll be needing company during your stay, there’s a new girl in the housekeeping department who I can send up with a bottle of gin.”

  “That’s enough of that, Gadwell,” says a voice behind me. I turn to see a man in green scrubs standing there. “Gadwell is one of our residents,” he tells me. “Used to be the concierge at a hotel. Thinks he still is. Did I hear you say that you’re looking for Livvie Comstock?”

  “Yes. Can I see her?”

  “No one’s been to see her in probably seven or eight years,” the man says, looking me up and down. “You related to her?”

  “Do I have to be?”

  The man shakes his head. “Just wondering. Always been curious about Livvie’s story.”

  “She and my great-great-great-grandmother were friends,” I tell him.

  “Huh. Hard to imagine Livvie with friends. Then again, she might have been a different kind of person a hundred years ago. Come on. I’ll show you to her room.”

  As we walk, I ask, “How is she?”

  The man snorts. “Same as always. She’s Livvie. Doesn’t talk much at all. Stays in her room. Like I said, no visitors.”

  “That’s sad,” I say.

  “It’s not unusual. People end up here because they have nowhere else to go. No one who really cares. Most of them only last a year or two. Livvie’s the exception. She’s our longest-staying resident by a mile. I don’t think she’ll ever die.”

  We reach a room with a closed door. The man raps on it, but doesn’t wait for an answer before opening it. He looks inside. “Livvie? There’s someone here wants to see you.” He turns to me. “Go on in. You need anything, you just yell real loud.” He laughs, then walks off down the hallway.

  I step inside Livvie’s room. It’s small and closed-up, and it feels like walking into an attic or a garage. Someplace where used-up, unwanted things are kept. There’s a bed and other assorted furniture, but at first I don’t see Livvie. Then I notice a chair in one corner. Not an armchair or a rocker. A wheelchair. Livvie is sitting in it, slumped, her hands folded in her lap.

  Livvie herself is short and thin. Her feet, which are encased in pink slippers, barely reach the footplates. She’s wearing a nightgown, which is also pink. I think the color is supposed to be cheery, but there are some stains down the front of the nightgown, as if she’s dribbled food and no one has bothered to wipe it away. Her pale skin is stretched over the bones of her face like tissue paper. Her white hair is cut short, as if nobody wants to be bothered to have to keep it looking nice.

  “Hello,” I say. “You don’t know me, obviously, but my name is Sam Weyward.”

  I wait for her to respond to hearing my name. She doesn’t. She continues to sit there, looking at me and saying nothing.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I continue. “I came to . . .” I stop. Although I’ve imagined this moment in my head a thousand times over the past two days, now that it’s here, I don’t know quite what to say.

  I take a deep breath. “I came to ask you to take the curse back.”

  This time, she does respond.

  “Curse?” she says in a voice that sounds like dust falling through a crack in a wall.

  “The curse you put on Viola Weyward,” I explain. “For marrying Otis Cattermole.”

  Livvie shakes her head very slowly, as if the muscles controlling it haven’t been used in a long time. “I don’t know any Viola.”

  “You do,” I insist. “Viola Weyward. She was your best friend. But then you put a curse on her. On our whole family.”

  Livvie seems to think about this for a moment. “No,” says. “I don’t think I did.”

  I can’t believe she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I go over and kneel down so that I’m looking into her face. “Viola,” I say slowly, like maybe she just didn’t hear me clearly. “Viola Weyward. Remember her?”

  Livvie looks at me. Her eyes barely move, and now I see that they’re clouded over, cataracts like clouds covering a blue sky. “Viola?” she says.

  “Viola,” I repeat. “Viola Weyward. Do you remember putting a curse on her?”

  For some reason, I’m starting to panic. I need Livvie to say that she remembers. That she can take back what she started all those years ago. Instead, she shakes her head again. She coughs.

  “No,” is all she says.

  I know she means she doesn’t remember, but it feels like she’s saying that she refuses to lift the curse.

  “Just take it back,” I say. “That’s all I want.”

  I see that her hands are shaking. She’s afraid. Of me.

  I stand up and step back. Livvie Comstock is afraid of me. And then it hits me. Livvie is just an old woman. She’s not a monster. She’s an old, dying woman who doesn’t even remember this story that is so important to me and to my family. And if she can’t even remember it, if it hasn’t been important enough to hang on to, maybe all these years there’s never really been anything to be afraid of. Maybe there never was a curse. Not a real one, anyway. Maybe it’s all just been a story that we tell each other to explain away things that are too hard to talk about in other ways.

  Livvie’s eyes are shut, as if she’s having a bad dream and hoping that when she opens them, it will all be over and she’ll be safe. As if I’m the one who’s the monster.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, then turn and leave her room.

  A minute later I’m back at my truck.

  I drive away from Kirkewood. I’d expected to leave having gotten Livvie to remove the curse she put on my family. Instead, I’m leaving with nothing except more questions.

  I drive back into Edgesea. I want to get out of there, but the thought of another nine hours on the road is exhausting. I decide to stop for something to eat first.

  I get out on the main street of town and walk. As I pass the stores that line the block, something about them feels familiar. I pause and look in the windows of a hardware store, then an antique store. It seems as if I’ve looked into these places before. Then again, Edgesea looks like any one of a thousand quaint New England towns I’ve seen pictures of.

  A few stores down, I come to a coffee shop that advertises breakfast. I decide it’s as good a place as any to eat, and I go inside. There are a couple of other people in there already, two old men sitting at the counter and a mother and her little boy at one of the tables.

  “Sit anywhere you like,” a woman’s voice says. “I’ll be with you in a sec.”

  I sit down at a table and look at the menu. A minute later, a waitress comes over. “What can I get for you?”

  I look up and see her name tag. Rhonda. Then I remember. My midsummer dream. I look down at the menu and see the name of the restaurant. The Perk Me Up.

  “You okay, hon?” Rhonda asks. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I look at her again. She’s in her sixties. Red hair going gray. Exactly as she was in my dream. I sit there staring at her, not saying anything.

  “Hon?” she says again. “You need more time?”

  I shake my head, then say the first word that pops into my head. “Pancakes.”

  “Regular, buttermilk, or blueberry?”

  “Blueberry.”

  “Bacon or sausage?”

  “Bacon.”

  “Biscuit or muffin?”

  “Muffin.”

  “Anything to drink?”

  “Coffee.”

  The exchange is completely ordinary. She probably has it a hundred times a day. But for me, it’s completely surreal. I’m sitting in a coffee shop I dreamed about, talking to a woman I’ve never met but who somehow turned up in my brain looking and sounding exactly as she does in real life.

  “Be right up,” Rhonda says. She takes the menu from me and walks away.

  Now I look at the other customers again. Just as they were in my dream, the old men are reading newspapers. The woman sitting a few tables away takes a bite of pie. One, two, three, I think to myself, and the little boy dips his spoon into the bowl of ice cream in front of him.

  This is where my dream ended, so I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next. What does happen is that Rhonda comes back ten minutes later with a plate of pancakes and bacon and sets it on the table, along with a little glass cup of syrup, another plate holding a muffin and a pat of butter, and a cup that she fills with coffee. I watch her do all of these things and don’t say a word, but inside I want to scream, “Who are you? Why did I dream about you when I stuck a bunch of flowers under my pillow?”

  “Can I get you anything else, hon?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I’m good,” I say. “Thanks.”

  She leaves to attend to a table of customers who have just walked in, and I eat. I don’t really taste anything, as I’m mostly watching her and hoping she doesn’t notice me watching her. Why am I here? Why is she important? I know the Grands’ magic well enough to know that this is no accident. I’m supposed to be here. But I don’t know why, and I don’t know how to figure it out.

  I take my time eating breakfast, but even after I’ve finished the last bit of bacon and the last crumb of muffin, I’m no closer to any answers. When Rhonda comes over to my table to clear it, I know this is my last chance.

  “Everything all right?” she asks as she picks up the plates.

  “Actually,” I say. “Not really.”

  She looks at me. “Didn’t like the pancakes? Blueberries are in season, so they should have been good.”

  “The food was fine. I’m just kind of in a weird place.” This sounds totally stupid, but I keep talking. “I came up here to see somebody and try to fix a situation, but it all went wrong, and now I don’t know what to do.”

  Rhonda nods. “It’ll be all right, hon,” she says. “You probably just need to sleep on it. Morning is wiser than the evening.”

  “What did you say?”

  She laughs. “Sorry. It’s something my mother always said, and I picked it up. Morning is wiser than the evening. It’s an old Russian saying.”

  “I have a friend who says that,” I tell her, thinking about Linda. “Her mother says it to her all the time.”

  “Her mother is a smart woman,” Rhonda jokes. “I used to say it to my daughter too.”

  A shadow crosses her face, a momentary sadness. Her use of the past tense registers, and I wonder if something happened to her daughter, or maybe between them. But she quickly recovers, and her smile returns. “Anyway, I’m sure things will work out,” she tells me. “They always do.”

  She turns to go, and I start to panic. I know that she has something more for me. There’s a reason I dreamed about her, a reason I’ve come to Edgesea. I thought it was to confront Livvie Comstock, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe Livvie was just the excuse I needed to get here, to find Rhonda. Now that I have, I can’t let her go.

  “Wait,” I call after her.

  She turns around.

  “I, um,” I stammer, my mind racing, searching for something to say.

  She comes closer and leans down. “Honey, are you in trouble?” she says quietly. “You need someone to talk to?”

  I nod.

  She smiles. “It’s all right,” she tells me. “Tell you what. I get off here in an hour. You come back, we’ll sit and talk. Okay?”

  I nod again, afraid that if I say anything, she’ll change her mind.

  “Okay, then,” Rhonda says. “I gotta get back to work now. But you be back here in an hour.”

  She carries the dishes away, passing through a door into the back of the restaurant. I pull out some bills, lay them on the table, and leave before she gets back. I walk back to my truck, get in, and sit there, listening to the rain tapping on the roof and wondering what I’m doing. I’m tempted to start the truck up and begin the drive home. What am I going to say to Rhonda? “Hey, you’re going to think this is totally weird, but you came to me in a dream”? She’s going to think I’m nuts.

  Several times I put the key in the ignition. Each time, I pull it out again before starting the engine. Finally, I stick it in my pocket, lean against the door, and close my eyes. I’m so tired from the drive, and from my meeting with Livvie. I tell myself I’ll just rest for a few minutes, but before I know it, I’m asleep.

  In my dream, I’m back inside the Perk Me Up. I’m looking at the menu when someone comes up beside me. Thinking it’s Rhonda, I look up to tell her why I’m here. But it’s not Rhonda. It’s Livvie Comstock. She’s glaring at me with those black-button eyes. She opens her mouth, revealing hundreds of tiny, pointed teeth. Then her mouth keeps opening, growing wider and wider.

  “The better to eat you with,” she says.

  I get up and run to the door of the coffee shop. I try to open it, but it’s locked. I fumble with the door, trying to get it open, but nothing happens. Meanwhile, Livvie is walking toward me, her gigantic mouth stretching out hugely.

  I bang on the glass of the door. “Let me out! Let me out!”

  Livvie is almost upon me when someone jerks the door open. I fall, sprawling onto the sidewalk. Rain is falling in my face, and someone is asking me if I’m okay.

  I open my eyes and look into Rhonda’s face. I’m no longer dreaming. I’m awake. The door to my truck is open, and she’s looking at me with a worried expression.

  “Sorry,” she said. “But you were screaming. Are you all right?”

  I rub my eyes. “Yeah,” I say. “Just a bad dream.”

  Rhonda walks around to the other side of the truck, opens the door, and gets in. “It must have been a doozy,” she says as she pulls the door shut. “I heard you halfway down the block.”

  “Where are we going?” I ask her as I shut my own door.

  “My house,” she says. “You can tell me about your dream and why you drove here all the way from New York.”

  “How did you—”

  “License plates,” she says.

  I start the truck and pull away from the curb. I still don’t know why the midsummer magic showed me Rhonda, but I think I’m about to find out.

  Thirty-One

  Rhonda’s house is small and run-down. Her car, an aging Plymouth Neon, sits in the driveway, looking like it’s waiting for someone to put it out of its misery.

  “Hasn’t run for a couple of months,” Rhonda tells me as I pull up behind it. “Can’t afford to fix it right now. I take the bus to work, but it only runs once an hour, so if I miss it, I end up hitching. Good thing everybody in Edgesea knows me.”

  “I can take a look at it for you,” I tell her as we get out and walk to the side door.