Esther's lawn ornaments, she explained as she lit a white candle with a lighter, were talismans on which she had cast charms to protect her home. "The deer detect evil," she explained as she handed the lighter to Laura and from her accepted a long white feather. "Hold still," Esther commanded, and I straightened up my posture and tried to not move around too much while breathing. "When they sense it, they alert me. It's kind of a witchcraft version of a home security system, if you will."

I had a million questions to ask about those deer and where they'd run off to, but I didn't feel comfortable asking until after I'd been "cleansed." Esther used the feather to wave smoke from the flame atop the candle in my direction, starting above my head. She walked around me in a circle repeatedly in silence, the whole time still wafting smoke I could barely see toward my body. Trey made his um, okay skeptical face at me from where he stood a few feet away, and I tried to ignore him. He might not have been so humored by the situation if he'd been the one to turn cement lawn figurines into real, live animals. While I held still, Esther's gray dog attacked Trey with licks.

"That's Lester," Laura said, nodding at the dog. Lester had certainly taken a shine to Trey, who welcomed the dog's enthusiasm. Dogs always loved Trey; my old dog, Moxie, used to bark at him from our living room window whenever he stepped outside his house back before she died in the fall.

"Alright, that should just about do it," Esther said after waving smoke toward my ankles.

"What about the deer? Will they come back?" I asked.

Esther raised her hand to her forehead and peered toward the trees that separated her property from the neighbors, into which the deer had run. "I would imagine so. It's very sweet that you're worried about them, but they're not real deer. They won't starve to death or anything."

Despite Esther's reassurance I felt a little strange about stepping inside the house without catching another glimpse of the three fawns who'd just bounced away. As I passed through the threshold of the house, I wondered for a fleeting moment if Esther's beautiful gray dog was also some kind of fake animal, a mere charm, with some kind of magical duty to perform in the household. It seemed unlikely, however. The dog smelled like a real dog and never stopped drooling or wiggling around.

The interior of Esther's house featured interior design as sophisticated and rich as the Simmons' mansion. From the front hallway, we could see the parlor. A railing along the second floor overlooked the room, which featured an enormous cathedral ceiling. A plush rug covered the hardwood floor, and an intricately designed iron grate stood before the impressive fireplace. It looked like a parlor out of an architectural digest magazine; there was even a big Chinese porcelain vase from which dried eucalyptus branches splayed, filling the home's entryway with a sweet, clean odor.

We followed Esther down a long hallway, passing a bathroom, library, and carpeted stair case leading to the second floor. The kitchen we entered was sun-filled and overlooked a sprawling back yard, which I imagined probably would have been heavily gardened whenever it wasn't covered in a light dusting of snow. Esther put on a pot of tea and Laura pulled four white mugs out of a cabinet, which she set down on an antique oval wooden table where Trey and I took seats. Laura measured loose tea from a fancy canister into metal infusers, and dropped one into each of the mugs. Before sitting down herself, Laura gave me a quick smile of reassurance.

Lester the dog sat down right next to Trey, and Trey balanced one hand on his head. The dog kept looking up at Trey with delight in its eyes, and practically looked like he was smiling a doggie smile.

"So," Esther said as she approached the table while the water boiled. "In January when I returned from a conference in London, I immediately sensed a dramatic change in energy at the store. Laura had emailed me while I was away about the visit you'd made, but I never would have guessed just how disruptive the spirits you'd channeled have proven to be. They are quite unhappy with what's happened to them and they've been a bit of a handful to deal with."

I twiddled my thumbs, self-conscious about how much of a pain it sounded like Olivia and Candace were being even though I didn't have much control over what they chose to do at the occult bookstore (or anywhere else, for that matter). "Sorry," I apologized. "Olivia was always kind of serene and nice when she was alive, so it's kind of weird that she's turned out to be so angry in the afterlife."

Esther shrugged and replied, "Well, that happens. Especially when someone's life has ended under unfair circumstances. The quest for vengeance is the most common reason why a spirit refuses to cross to the other side."

"Is there anything you can do to break the curse that's on McKenna's friend?" Trey asked, wasting no time to get to the heart of what we were doing sitting in this woman's kitchen.

Creeping me out a little, Esther began to chuckle. "Eager to leave already?" I impulsively bit my lower lip because she'd hit the nail right on the head. I felt very uneasy in Esther's presence even though Laura seemed intent on making us feel comfortable. "Yes," she said, addressing Trey's question. "However, a clarification. Laura already helped you break the initial curse. It's changed, or shifted, hasn't it? That's why you're here. Spirits are very tricky. If you set out to break a curse you may inadvertently alter it and make things worse. Anyhow, I believe I can help you banish the curse. But first, I'd really like to get a better understanding of how McKenna's been able to gain such a strong foothold in the spirit world. Not just anyone can open a door inside a cleared space that refuses to close."

Laura interjected, "She means the white chalk. Remember? In the store before we cast the spell, I drew boundaries on the floor with chalk? That acts as a container for the magic we performed that day, and, I mean, thank god I didn't skip that step, because even though I cleansed the candles and mirrors we used that day, the spirits we contacted refuse to leave. Just last week, a customer walking through the back of the store checked her reflection in her compact and saw one of those blond girls in the mirror. It was awful. She screamed and dropped the thing and there was pressed powder all over the floor. It sucked to clean up."

The tea kettle began whistling, and Esther rose to retrieve it. When she returned to the table, she poured steaming water into each mug. "While my primary interest is in helping you break the curse so that the energy in my store returns to normal, I am very curious, McKenna, about how you've been able to tap into so much psychic power as an untrained novice. People study magic for years with intense focus without ever being able to open a gate to the spirit world as widely as you did."

I hesitantly looked over at Trey, not sure how to answer. I guessed that Jennie probably had something to do with my abilities, which actually didn't feel like abilities at all. But it sort of didn't seem like a good idea to tell this woman that I had a twin on the other side helping me out. There was something strangely predatory about her. "Um, I'm not sure. I think maybe it's because someone I was very close to died when I was a little girl. Maybe she has something to do with it."

Esther raised an eyebrow at Laura and a smile hinted at the corners of her mouth. "Ah. Any chance that someone was a twin sister?"

I blushed and looked to Laura for help, but she clapped her hands together as pride bloomed across her face. "I knew it!" she exclaimed.

"How..." I began, having no idea how Laura and Esther could have possibly guessed about Jennie.

"She's come across a few times in the mirror," Laura explained. "At first, I thought she was you, and naturally I totally thought that maybe the instructions I'd given you in January had majorly backfired and you'd died somehow, and were coming back to scare the shit out of me. I will admit, if that had actually happened to you, I would have totally deserved it, but then I got in touch with Henry and it sounded like you were fine."

Now she had my full attention. I hadn't heard directly from Jennie since Christmas Eve when we'd picked up Bloody Heather along the side of the highway and my twin had been able to communicate with us through her specter. There had been times when I'd thought, or hoped, that it was Jennie's spirit guiding a pendulum's response, but I'd never been able to confirm that it was her.  "What'd she tell you?" I asked eagerly.

Laura shrugged. "Nothing. Honestly. She always seems to be looking around, probably for you. The few times I've seen her she's looked right at me as if she can actually see me through the mirror and she loses interest pretty quickly."

An immediate need to connect with my sister overtook me. "Can we go to the store right now and contact her?" I blurted.  "Or can you summon her to come here?"

Trey placed his left hand on my knee under the table and said calmly, "I think we should probably focus on how Esther, here, proposes to banish the curse instead of bringing your sister into things."

Immediately, I got the sense that Trey was trying to subtly warn me, so I dropped the idea of contacting Jennie, even though I really, really wanted to find out if there was anything she wanted to tell me. So I smothered my insistence that we contact Jennie by taking a sip of tea. Normally I preferred coffee to tea, but this tea was amazing; it was richly sweet with bergamot.

"Right," Esther, said, setting her mug down on the table. "The curse. Well, it's actually quite simple. We need to destroy its origin."

"The trees," Laura cut in as if reading my mind, "are only part of it. They're the manifestation of the curse, not the origin."

I panicked. "But... the origin of the curse was Violet's grandmother. She's dead. How can we destroy the curse if it started with her?'