Free Haunt Me Still by Jennifer Lee Carrell

luck did not have its origins in the demise of Hal Berridge.”
    It was a strange prank, I thought as I spoke. Not in good taste, for starters—mean-spirited, really. But obscure as well. So obscure that it failed the first test of a good joke: that its audience should get it without reference to footnotes. The jester had surely been counting on someone to explain the joke, but in which direction? Effie’s superstition or my skepticism?
    The small enameled bird trembled in Sybilla’s hand. She was not yet ready to give up her grand scene.
    Ben walked over and plucked the card from the raven’s beak. Pulling a pen from his pocket, he turned it over, scrawled HM the Scottish Queen across the back, and tucked it back into the bird’s mouth. “Your Majesty,” he said to Sybilla with a little bow, holding out his arm.
    Thank you, I mouthed.
    She gave him a smile of such radiance that I winced. And then she reached up and ran a hand down the side of his face. “Thank you, darling,” she said in a voice purring with satisfaction and promise.
    Darling?
    Small details of the past few days floated loose from their moorings and fell back down to earth in a new arrangement. I heard Lady Nairn’s voice, as if in an echo chamber: She’s the one who’s already got someone new on the line . And Ben—he’d tried to talk to me, but I’d refused to listen and then ducked behind Lily.
    Bit Tristan and Isolde, she’d said, peering at the tableau of the two of us separated by the knife. Had she known? Had everyone known but me?
    I felt myself flush and looked down. If I could have, I would have fled to upper Siberia, to cool off in the permafrost. But I was hemmed in by the ritual of a formal dinner. If I left, I’d only make the scene worse, and my part in it more pathetic.
    “So what happened to Charlton Heston’s tights?” asked Lily from the far end of the table.
    “Somebody doused them with kerosene,” I heard myself say, as if from far away. “He was in an outdoor production that involved riding a horse. It can’t have been very far, but the combination of friction and horse sweat heated up the tights to the point that Heston had to dash offstage crying, ‘Get them off me, get them off…. ’ Not very nice for Heston, I suppose, but it makes for a mental picture that sticks.”
    There was some laughter, and blessedly the focus drifted elsewhere. Normally, the nervous chatter about strange happenings during Macbeth productions would have fascinated me, but tonight the various Macbeths who’d accidentally stabbed Macduffs, and vice versa, the Lady Macbeths who’d taken tumbles during the sleepwalking scene—even the patron who’d committed suicide by diving headfirst from the balcony of the Met during a performance of Verdi’s Scottish Opera—it all sounded dull as dust. At one point, Jason—not the world’s most sensitive man—leaned over and asked whether I felt all right.
    I could not look at Ben, but I couldn’t keep myself from stealing the occasional glance at Sybilla. She had eyes only for Ben, whom she proceeded to monopolize all the way through dinner, without once acknowledging Jason’s existence.
    Or mine, for that matter.
     
    I excused myself at the first possible moment, stumbling blindly down the corridor, finding myself in the deserted drawing room. I stood there for I don’t know how long, numb and hollow, the very air scraping my skin raw. After a while, I heard voices approaching. Footsteps and laughter. The company coming back in for after-dinner coffee, no doubt.
    I wanted neither coffee nor company. A small door near the front of the room led to a steep spiral staircase. I took it. It wound up and up through what I supposed must be one of the corner towers to a cramped landing and from there into a circular room. I stopped just inside. The whole room seemed to be singing. Directly across, a large window perfectly framed the hill. To the right, another window was open to the night, hung