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unfamiliar bed, covered in blankets.
“Can you hear me, sweetie?”
Was that Mama? Moira fell back asleep.
She woke briefly to the sound of her parents’ voices: incapacitated, therapy, recovery . The words were indecipherable to her. Again, she slept.
At some point she became aware of a thin tube along her arm. Her eyelids felt like anchors as she pulled them partway up. Darkness filled the room.
“Poppy?”
The word came from her raw throat as a rasp. Glass pressed against her lips. She sipped water, then sunk back into the void, still feeling the greedy surge of the sea in every breath.
Then it was day once more. Moira noticed white walls, a green curtain over a wide window, a machine with red lights. Maeve sat beside her, the pale skin beneath her eyes lined in shadow. Moira didn’t need to ask the question.
“I felt it somehow,” Maeve said, “even with the block. It was terrible, cold, the worst feeling ever. Mama said it was the sickness, but I knew it wasn’t, so I ran and found Daddy getting ready to leave, and he believed me and we found you.”
Moira learned more later—about Maeve pointing the way as unerringly as a wind vane through chowder-thick fog until they were found, floating in the sea like fishing buoys.
“Poppy had a heart attack in his brain. He’s going to live with us now,” Maeve said. “I think this is what I felt last year about him. What if I’m right about the baby, too, and—”
“Stop it!” Mama stood in the doorway, looking furious and wild, like a stranger. She rushed at Maeve and, for the first time, slapped her across the face. The sting of her assault spread through Moira’s flesh as well.
Daddy seemed to come from nowhere, and pressed his hand over Mama’s mouth. He pulled her away, his lips pale and flat. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he muttered, and Moira didn’t know to whom he spoke, since he looked at all of them in turn.
Mama never mentioned the incident after that. She all but lived at the hospital until Poppy’s release three weeks later, then made a place for her father in their home and spent most of her time caring for his needs.
“You saved my life,” Moira said one night, lying beside her twin. She didn’t mind about the droopy bed now.
“No,” Maeve insisted, “you saved your own. You’re like a goose on the water.”
“Goose brain.”
“Goose butt.”
They slept together after that like goslings—huddled for warmth and hoping the foxes stayed away.

CHAPTER THREE

CRIMSON STAIN

T he day after Thanksgiving, I finally made my way to Betheny’s biggest and best antiques shop, Time After Time. Like most retailers across the country, it would be a huge sale day for Garrick, so I arrived before the shop officially opened for business. Excitement hit as I pulled into the empty lot. I’d missed this sight. Three stories tall, perfectly white, with a peaked tower and twin chimneys, the old Victorian looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell Christmas village.
    I strode across the stone walk with the keris in hand, and was greeted with the rich scents of cinnamon and pine when I opened the heavy wooden door. As always, my eyes couldn’t pick a focus in this place that seemed like Oz to me, like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Every nook and cranny beckoned with some new treasure— come, look, touch, buy . There were Japanese woodblock prints, stained-glass lamps, ornately carved pieces of furniture, African masks and Indian headdresses my poppy would’ve loved. A huge blue spruce stood in the center of the room, bedecked with multicolored glass ornaments, miniature lamps, real tin tinsel, and a crystal star.
    Scads of fascinating old books lay everywhere, including one I’d been tempted to buy after a particularly bad run of nightmares: Old Gypsy Madge’s Fortune Teller and the Witches Key to Lucky Dreams . Inside were instructions for making talismans against love, enemies, war, and trouble in general. TO BE WORN AROUND THE NECK, it