“I was defending myself. We did the kiss, it didn’t work, and I guess he didn’t like it, because he decided to stick his tongue down my throat. So I…did something about it.”
“I think you’d better leave,” Alison said grimly.
Griffin glanced from her to Tom to Kirby, who was looking angrier than I thought I’d ever seen him. Actually, before that moment I wasn’t even sure Kirby could get angry.
“Fine,” Griffin said. “Like I want to be part of this freak show anyway. She’s not even good-looking.”
After delivering that parting shot, he stalked out of the room and into the foyer. The front door banged a few seconds later.
The three bodyguards just stared at me. I hesitated, then went over to the footstool and righted it, putting it back in its proper position. “I’m going upstairs,” I told them, and walked with as much dignity as I could muster to the staircase in the foyer. I went upstairs, closed my bedroom door behind me, and threw myself down on my bed, where I wept stormily and wished this would all be over.
11
A Wind From the North
On Thanksgiving most of us converged on Spook Hall for a huge, rowdy McAllister feast. They’d been doing this ever since I could remember; Aunt Rachel had once told me it was Great-Aunt Ruby’s idea, that after spending Thanksgiving going from house to house so she could try to see everyone, she put her foot down and said we should all gather in one place and save her some work. So we shopped like we were buying food for a soup kitchen or something, making the run to Prescott so we could go to Costco and the Trader Joe’s there, and then set up the long tables in the hall with warm russet tablecloths and centerpieces of autumn flowers.
The kitchen was large, but even so we did a good deal of tripping over one another. My aunt supervised, more or less, since she was an amazing cook. Some turkeys went in the oven, and others were smoked in the smokers across the street at the English Kitchen restaurant. My specialty was homemade spiced cranberry sauce, so I handled that and tried to stay out of the way as best I could.
We really hadn’t discussed my disastrous encounter with Griffin Dutton, but I noticed that she hadn’t sent any more candidates my way after that. Thanksgiving was late this year, so there were only three weeks until my birthday at that point. Both she and I — and the entire clan — were aware of the rapidly approaching deadline. We couldn’t not be. But either she’d decided to let the universe handle it from here on out, or she thought she might as well leave it alone until after Thanksgiving. I wasn’t going to question her actions, mostly because I was just relieved to not have another candidate shoved down my throat. Literally.
It was mainly women in the kitchen, but that didn’t mean the men got off scot-free. From the hall came scraping sounds as they brought out the long racks of chairs and started setting them up. There was another group congregating across the street, ostensibly in order to keep watch on the turkeys in the smoker, but I had a feeling there was more beer drinking than turkey-watching going on there.
All around me was the chatter of cheerful voices and the warm, rich smells of turkey roasting and pies baking. Everyone looked happy, glad to be surrounded by family, glad of the opportunity to share in the world’s bounty. I knew I should be feeling the same way, but I didn’t.
Suddenly the kitchen felt stifling. My cranberry sauce had more or less gelled by then, so I turned off the gas and moved the pot to the back burner. “I need to get some air,” I told Aunt Rachel, and then hurried out of the kitchen and threaded my way through the tables to the front door.
It was one of those beautiful late autumn days, the air cold but the sun warm, the sky deep sapphire punctuated by downy white clouds. I took in a deep breath, raising my face to the sun and the wind, and headed down the side street in an attempt to get away from the hustle and bustle.
“That’s quite the shindig you’re putting together in there,” came Maisie’s voice from a few feet away.
She hadn’t been there a second earlier, but that was sort of how she did things. Just appeared out of nowhere. Once I’d tried to ask her where she was when she wasn’t here. She’d shaken her head and said vaguely, “Around.” Which of course wasn’t illuminating in the slightest.
Right now she sounded more wistful than anything else. “Didn’t you have big Thanksgiving dinners?” I asked.
“Maybe when I was really little, before Papa died.” Her expression hardened. “But that no-good dog my mother married afterward didn’t hold with Thanksgiving. Said turkey was too expensive and it was silly to go to all that fuss.”