“Mm hmm.” Marigold folded it over her arm. “It was one hundred percent my mom in the Peaksoy ad. I showed her the Gary Stein book and she went whiter than toothpaste. Didn’t want to talk about it. I pretended to go upstairs and she chucked the whole book in the garbage.” Marigold smoothed out a wrinkle on the dress. “I’m rescuing this before she decides to burn it.”
“Maybe Peaksoy didn’t pay her enough.” Kenji set down his pencil. “Imagine if Kentucky Fried Chicken only paid ColonelSanders a couple drumsticks—there’d definitely be bad blood between them.”
“Colonel Sanders owned the brand,” said Marigold, scooting her chair next to Kenji. “Anyhow, I don’t think it has to do with money.”
“Then?”
She hesitated, then confessed. “My mom’s got skeletons in her closet.”
“And you want to go chasing them out?”
Marigold remembered watching Helen stumble toward the stove, her skin waxy and nearly transparent, until the fire made her whole again. The panicked look on her face, Marigold’s own fear that her mother had been one breath away from disappearing—maybe forever.
“I have to,” Marigold replied softly. She passed him her old notebook from the attic. “Will you help me?”
He flipped to the first blank page. “Psychic’s sketch artist, standing by.”
Marigold took off her gloves. The last time she’d gone through her mom’s things, she’d been a child, too overwhelmed by her strange ability to glean much from her touch. For better or for worse, she wasn’t afraid anymore.
She started with Helen’s dress, moving her hands across the fabric, over the flat black buttons and wrinkled collar. There were memories buried within the frayed threads, so faded and deep that they were difficult to draw out. But Marigold was stubborn—and desperate.
Any clue would do, she thought as she sifted through the emotions Helen had experienced in this dress. Joy and fear, nervousness, pain. Invisible sparks charged Marigold’s fingertips as she dug deeper, closing her eyes to concentrate.
Then a shot of nausea rose to her throat, and the walls of Kenji’s dorm room dissolved away. When she blinked, Marigoldcould feel Hong Kong’s heat clinging to her skin. Mosquitoes danced about the languid air, the whirring breeze of a mechanical fan grazing her elbows.
Helen was young, younger than Marigold. She was singing in front of a shuttering camera, holding up a bottle of Peaksoy as if it were a microphone. A boy in a school uniform stood nearby, smiling encouragingly. Whenever Helen looked at him, she beamed.
Marigold felt her mother’s joy. It was intoxicating and radiant, making Helen glow in a way that Marigold had never seen. Marigold wished she could freeze this moment to savor it longer, but her vision caught, skipping forward like a phonograph needle stuttering on a dust mote. The languid morning melted into a still, black night, and Marigold was inside a white house with a terra-cotta roof. Helen was cornered against a bookshelf, her heart thundering with fear.
Out of the shadows came a blow to her head. She folded over in pain, clutching her ear.
Marigold wanted to call out to her. She watched Helen stagger back against the wall, sucking in a breath to tamp down the pain. She was about to disappear.
Marigold let go. With a gasp, she jolted back into herself.
“Mari!” Kenji took her into his arms. “You screamed.”
“I’m okay,” she said, catching her breath. Her lungs were tense with pressure, and she gulped in air until it eased. “I saw... I saw someone hit my mom. I think it’s how she injured her ear.” Marigold touched her own ear, which throbbed with a ghostly ache that wasn’t hers.
“You’re safe,” Kenji said. “It was just a memory.”
“I know.” The pain was fading. She exhaled. “I saw two memories, actually. Before that, my mom was posing for Peaksoy. She was singing and smiling. She was beautiful.”
Kenji kissed her cheek. “You’rebeautiful.”
She delivered a light punch to his shoulder. The boy knew how to cheer her up. “I need to keep searching.”
“Slow down, Sherlock. Maybe you should take a—”
“One more,” Marigold interrupted, brushing her hands across the leather case. The sparks gathering in her fingertips surged to a searing heat, and she fell into the past.
She was in the same white house, behind an iron gate with pineapple finials. Inside, on the second floor, two young people were conspiring in whispers. One was Marigold’s mother, a teenager with a brown suitcase on her lap, and the other a bespectacled little girl with pigtails.
“That was two and a half minutes!” The little girl swung Helen’s hand with delight. “You’re amazing, Gah Jeh. Not even Prince Cannonball saw us.”
The black cat on the bed growled, which made Helen chuckle. “Two minutes is short for me. I can go up to five when I’m invisible by myself. Two should be enough, though, for Saturday.”
“I wish we could run away today. Right now!”
