“Clarice and her acting coaches. Once the group got together, they really got down to business. They order all their food up from the restaurant. They practice the role all the time, and sometimes Clarice screams like...” Rune shook her head. “But usually at night.”

Two tourists stepped through the door, hands on their chests and laughing in nervous spurts. The guy said, “That scream was something else. We both jumped about a foot. When you people do a psychic festival, you really know how to raise the bar.”

“That’s what we do best,” Rune said. “Can we help you?”

51

THE NEXT MORNING, Adam turned onto the road to Angelica Lindholm’s home. As they drove through the gate, he told Elle, “That is never open unless there’s a reason. Angelica reveres her Queen of the Mountain solitude.”

“I’ll bet. Why does she allow the festival to set up on her lawn?”

“This area is all hilly, and the land around the Tower is terraced. Flat. You’ll see.”

“Yes, but even so, why would Angelica—”

“Without the festival’s concentrated influx of income, especially with State Route 1 closed, most of the shops would go out of business, and Gothic would be a ghost town.”

“She doesn’t need the income from the building rentals.”

“Certainly not. But whatever else you can say about Angelica, she has a proprietor’s pride in her inheritance. She won’t let the town disappear on her watch.”

Yes, Elle could believe that about her.

They drove up and around a corner lined with crepe myrtles now leafing out, and as they rounded the last curve, Elle exclaimed in amazement.

Adam stopped at the fork in the road to allow her to take in the sight: the Tower, a romantic ruin, the attached English manor house and the gardens in front of the building with vast sweeping lawns and beds of flowers preparing to burst into bloom.

Even though Elle had viewed the Tower from Gothic, this was so much more, with cherished touches of wildness, suggestions of the early twentieth century, and Angelica Lindholm’s own vastly civilizing influence. “Spectacular.”

“I know. I was told that when Angelica inherited the Tower and the mansion and the land, the whole of it was in bad shape. Somehow she managed to hold herself back from her obsessive tidying and simply enhance what she was given.” Cynically he added, “Probably because to get a building permit, she had to retain the structure’s historical parts.”

A sign read Festival Parking This Way with an arrow that led away from the Tower and toward a lower tier of lawns, and from there Elle heard a cacophony of hammers, drills and shouts. “Doesn’t the festival leave the place a wreck?”