“No,” Leslie said. “I know something about building, and this one is old. See the way the windows are uneven? It takes years for a house to settle that way.”
“Look at her lilacs,” Ellie said, nodding toward a ten-foot-tall hedge along the right side of the house.
Leslie turned to Ellie. “Don’t lilacs bloom in the spring? This is October.”
For a moment, the two women looked at each other with wide eyes.
“Are you two going to go into some sort of supernatural trance? They’re plants. Plants bloom at different times. So what? She has October-blooming purple flowers, and you two have May-blooming purple flowers. Snap out of it!”
When neither Leslie nor Ellie moved, Madison grabbed their arms and pulled them toward the perfect little white picket fence that surrounded the house. “Really, you two! You dragged me here, now you’re the ones chickening out.”
There was no answer from either Ellie or Leslie as Madiso
n pulled them onto the front porch. And when she dropped their arms, they just stood there looking about the place. Leslie was inspecting the ceiling of the porch, while Ellie was studying the swing. There wasn’t so much as a dead leaf on the porch. It was as neat and as perfectly tidy as the garden was.
“I don’t think her trees drop their leaves,” Ellie whispered.
“I have the feeling that it would be in bloom just like this even if this were January,” Leslie whispered back to her.
Madison threw up her hands in exasperation. “Right. Madame Zoya is Merlin’s first cousin, and she—Oh, no, wait, she’s his reincarnation, and—” When she saw that the other two weren’t listening to her, she stopped talking and put her finger on the doorbell.
The woman who answered the door could have been someone’s plump, pleasant grandmother, except that her hair had been dyed a flamboyant shade of orange. But then, Ellie thought, grandmothers today had introduced the world to LSD and other such questionable “enlightenments,” so maybe a grandmother would have orange hair.
“Won’t you come in,” she said graciously, opening the door wide. Inside, the house was furnished in a sort of country French style, with pretty, bright-patterned fabrics and big, overstuffed chairs and sofas.
The woman laughed at the look on Leslie’s face. “My late husband was the Victorian lover,” she said. She had a nice voice, soft and warm; it made you trust her. How could anyone with such a sweet-sounding voice be harmful? “But I never cared much about Victorian, so we compromised. The outside is Victorian, the inside is comfortable. No horsehair sofas for me!”
She smiled at the three of them, as though expecting them to laugh with her, but Leslie and Ellie were looking around at every corner of the house. Only Madison was looking at the woman.
“Are you Madame Zoya?” Madison asked, and a sneer was in her voice.
But the woman didn’t take offense. “My professional name. My real name is Bertie, short for Brutilda. It’s a family name. Now, what can I do for you young ladies?”
The “young” appellation made Ellie and Leslie smile, and for a moment, none of them spoke. To say why they had come would be to admit that there was a possibility that they believed that she could . . . Well, what exactly was she saying that she could do?
“We, uh, found your card,” Ellie said, then had to clear her throat. “You, uh, tell fortunes?”
“Oh, my, no,” Madame Zoya/ Bertie/Brutilda said. “I send people back in time to change their lives. I have no idea what a person’s future is. Or past, for that matter. I can only do the one thing.”
The four of them were still standing in the foyer of the lovely house. To the left, through an archway, was the living room, to the right the dining room. In front of them was the main staircase leading up to a hallway where a couple of pretty little tables flanked an open doorway. Inside they could see the corner of what looked to be a four-poster bed.
“Just the one thing?” Ellie asked, eyebrows raised.
“That’s it,” Madame Zoya said happily. “Now, if one or all of you are interested, we can step into the sunroom and, after we get the financial details out of the way, we can begin.”
“Ahhhhhh,” Madison said. “The financial details.”
Madame Zoya whipped her head around and froze Madison with a look that would have terrified any schoolchild. “Yes, dear,” she said firmly. “I have expenses just as you do, and so I charge for my services.”
With a weak smile, Madison took a step backward.
“I’d like to know more about what you do before I make a commitment,” Leslie said with a smile. “After all, I’ve never so much as heard of anyone who can do what you do.”
Madame Zoya’s pleasant smile returned as she looked at Leslie. She did not invite the women to sit down or even to go into her living room. “I do just what my card says I do, I help people rewrite their pasts.”
It was Ellie’s turn to step forward. “Okay, so shoot us for not understanding, but we have no idea what that means. Maybe you could start from the very beginning.”
For a moment Madame Zoya looked hard at Ellie, as though searching inside her for signs that she was actually telling the truth. Did she really and truly not know what it meant to rewrite the past?