The Hollow Inside

by Brooke Lauren Davis

  Ellis leans against the wall. His eyes are red but dry. His hands are unsteady. The tremor in his voice might be grief, but if my money were on it, I’d say it’s got more to do with fear.

  “I—David called and told me to come—”

  It takes a few attempts for him to get the words out. But once he does, there’s no mistaking them. And no going back.

  “Jameson is dead.”

  Chapter 31

  THIS TIME, ELLIS CAN’T talk Jill out of calling the police.

  She sends us to our rooms to get dressed while we wait—it’s half past midnight, and we’re in our pajamas. I take my time, going to the bathroom to splash water over my face, trying to get a grip like Mom told me to.

  When I come back out, Ellis and Jill are nowhere to be found, probably up in their room arguing. I debate eavesdropping when I see Neil and Melody are sitting next to each other at the kitchen table, their backs to me. And I hear Melody whisper to her brother, “Phoenix might have been the last person to see Jameson alive.”

  Of course Melody was the one to make that connection. She doesn’t miss much.

  I pause, then press my back against the wall beside the kitchen, out of sight.

  “You think she had something to do with it?”

  Melody is quiet for a moment. But then she says, “No. Jameson was drunk. Really drunk. It was probably his own damn fault. An accident, like Dad said. But—”

  “What?”

  “I mean, she shows up here out of nowhere and all of this bad stuff starts happening. It would be naive to ignore that, right?”

  Right.

  “You really think she’d want to hurt us?”

  She sighs. “Look, I don’t want to believe it either.” After a long pause, she adds, “Unless you think it’s—”

  “No,” Neil says. “No.”

  Whatever she was about to say, it upsets him. He starts crying, quietly.

  “I’m sorry, Neily, I just—”

  “I can’t listen to this right now,” he says. “Uncle Jameson is dead, and you want to start throwing around accusations? Now?”

  She shifts her chair closer to him, putting her arm around his wide shoulders.

  “I can’t believe this is even happening,” he says. “This kind of stuff shouldn’t happen.”

  “I know,” she says.

  -

  Two policemen show up at the house a little while later—Officer Perkins and Officer McCormick.

  They don’t bother to question us separately. They sit beside each other on the living room couch while the rest of us pull in chairs from the kitchen. Officer Perkins tilts his head toward the broken window. “What happened there?”

  Ellis waves his hand dismissively. “We think Jameson did it this morning. He was really upset with me, you see. I saw him last night, and he was drunk out of his mind. Probably kept drinking through the night, came here, and on his way home he—he must have crashed.”

  The officers nod along, like it all makes perfect sense. Nobody would ever accuse Jameson of having good judgment, Perkins and McCormick included—they went to high school with him.

  “Sounds about right,” Perkins says. “We figured he was hammered and got himself into an accident. We sent some guys over to look at the car, and they found glass from Budweiser bottles.”

  “We’ll still have to do a full investigation, either way,” McCormick cuts in. “Gotta cross our t’s and dot our i’s, you know.”

  Ellis nods, putting his arm around his wife and pulling her closer. “You do what you have to do. Just make it quick. For my family’s sake.”

  Ellis handles most of the talking, giving the officers a rundown of what happened that night—we went to dinner, Jameson showed up drunk and angry, and I drove him home.

  That’s when Officer McCormick turns to me.

  “What happened when you took him home?”

  I shrug. “He was quiet most of the way. He walked himself inside. I went in for a minute and watched him collapse on the couch. I thought he was asleep, so I went outside to wait for the Bowmans to pick me up.”

  “Why did you wait outside? Did you feel threatened by Jameson?”

  “Not exactly,” I say. “It’s not the most welcoming place.” I give a little shiver, playing into their image of Jameson. Not the boy who kept the sunflower drawing but the man who took advantage of the preacher’s daughter and has been an angry, brute drunk ever since.

  “Did you notice any glass on the stairs by the front door when you walked outside?”

  Glass. From the shattered picture frame.

  I don’t miss a beat. “I did. I didn’t know why it was there at the time. But if Jameson is the one who smashed the picture frame through the window, maybe he broke it on his way out of the house.”

  Ellis is quick to pick up the thread, nodding vigorously. “Makes sense.”

  “Picture frame?” Perkins says. “You didn’t mention that before. Can we see it?”

  After just a moment’s hesitation, Ellis goes to his office, where he stashed it. But when he brings it back out, it’s empty—no sunflower drawing or Tell the truth note.

  “Not sure what the significance was to him,” Ellis says. “Maybe he just grabbed the first thing he could find.”

  Perkins and McCormick look it over with narrowed eyes, nodding.

  For a moment, I think I’m off the hook, but then McCormick asks, “What did you say your last name was?”

  I clear my throat. “Mallory.”

  “How long have you been staying here with the Bowmans?”

  “A month or so.”

  “And how did you come to live with them?”

  I give them the same sad story I offered the Bowmans—dead parents and dead granny. Sniffles and eye rubbing and lip biting.

  “What was your grandmother’s name?”

  “Gloria Mallory.”

  Actually, that’s the name of an old woman in Indiana who died about a month ago. The night I borrowed Jill’s laptop, I took the time to search through some old obituaries for a name I could give to back up the story I’d made up, in case anyone asked. Gloria had a granddaughter named Julie, so if Perkins and McCormick dig that deep, I can tell them that Phoenix is just my nickname.

  If they dig deeper than that, I’m screwed.

  “We’ve loved having her,” Jill cuts it, like she feels the need to defend me.

  “Truly,” Ellis says. “She’s really finding her place here.”

  I feel my face heat.

  “They’ve done so much more for me than I ever expected,” I tell the officers. “They’ve treated me as a member of their family when I needed one most, and if there’s anything I can do to help the investigation, please, let me know.”

  Chapter 32

  THE FUNERAL HAPPENS THREE days later, in the church at the top of Clara Mountain.

  The body was mangled beyond recognition, so Jameson’s casket stays firmly closed at the front of the sanctuary. But his face is everywhere—hanging on the walls, propped on tables in velvet frames, and printed on programs that get passed around. A big projector screen behind the casket runs a slideshow.

  Every inhabitant of Jasper Hollow steps foot in the church at least once throughout the day, probably less because they’ll miss Jameson and more because he was Ellis’s brother. There’s a strange note of relief to the whole thing, like everyone knew Jameson was born to self-destruct and they can breathe easier now that the other shoe has finally dropped.

  “At least he didn’t take anybody else down with him,” I hear Jeffery, the owner of the Dusty Rose Inn, say. People nod, eyeing the closed casket like they think the corpse will pop out at any moment, bones splintered through rotting skin, rictus smile spread over knocked-in teeth, broken fingers reaching out to drag them all to hell.

  “Glad he never married,” Annie from the market says. “No kids to leave behind.”

  “Well, there was the one,” Jeffery says.

  She shakes her hea
d, mouth pinched tight. “No, don’t bring that up. I don’t want to think of it, poor thing.”

  There’s one person who is noticeably absent—Pastor Holland. He claimed he wasn’t feeling well and left officiating duties to Matthew. There are whispers about that, too.

  “Probably can’t wait to dance on his grave,” Tim from the bakery says. “But can you blame the man?”

  Ellis insists that I stand next to the casket with the rest of the family to accept condolences. I shake hands with strangers and let God knows how many of them hug me. I have trouble figuring out how sad I’m supposed to look, because on the one hand Jameson was part of the family I’ve been inducted into, but on the other, I only met him twice.

  Not to mention, I’m the one who got him killed.

  Melody stands beside me, and she seems to enjoy the whole thing even less than I do. She hugs people with her arms stiff and her back rigid. Her body doesn’t seem to fit quite right with anyone else’s.

  Neil, of course, is another story. He knows everyone by name and embraces every last one of them like he’s never been so happy to see anybody in all his life. He cries a lot, but a few people manage to make him laugh, too.

  Throughout the day, I hear Ellis deliver hundreds of prepackaged quotes about grief—giving in to it, moving past it, learning from it, growing through it. “I smell another book,” Melody scoffs quietly at one point so only I can hear. She looks guilty immediately, but when I laugh, she offers a small smile in return.

  I watch the slideshow of pictures to pass the time. Most of them are of Ellis and Jameson, fishing and riding bikes and graduating from high school. Their father is in a few of them, too, always in a stained white shirt tucked into muddy jeans. The man who gave Ellis his blond hair and Jameson his good looks.

  When I glance over at Ellis again, he’s telling an old woman, “My brother has been struggling with depression for quite some time. The alcohol didn’t help any.”

  “You think he did this on purpose?” the woman asks.

  Ellis shrugs, a thoughtful sadness weighing on his face. “Mrs. Johnson, I’m sure that question will haunt me for the rest of my days.”

  He inhabits a lie like a second skin.

  Melody catches me staring at her father, and our eyes lock for a moment—until someone stumbles into her, accidentally splashing the front of her dress with punch.

  The woman who spilled it, a pretty redhead, dabs frantically at Melody’s chest with a folded napkin. “I’m so sorry, Melody, I—”

  Melody steps back, covering her chest with her hands. “No, I—it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

  The woman frowns at Melody as though she doesn’t like her tone. But Melody isn’t looking at her anymore. Her eyes flick to a group of girls nearby, and I recognize some of them—the ones making fun of her at the restaurant.

  I clear my throat and meet their gazes with a glare, and they all turn away.

  “Really, it’s fine,” Melody says again to the redhead, then brushes past her, head down and cheeks flaming, toward the bathroom.

  But she needs to be up onstage in just a few minutes to say the opening prayer before her father gives the eulogy, so I grab her elbow and pull her the other way.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Bathroom line is too long. We need to switch dresses.” I’m wearing one of hers anyway.

  We duck down one deserted hallway and then another. I pull a door open at random, and we slip inside. It’s a Sunday school classroom. The walls are bright orange and covered in pages ripped from coloring books. On the back of the door, there’s a massive poster of Jesus sitting under a tree, barefooted children clamoring to get close to him. The caption reads, The kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.

  I pull my hair over my shoulder and turn my back to her. “Unzip me.”

  When nothing happens, I glance back at her. She’s biting her lip. “Someone could come in.”

  “So?”

  She widens her eyes at me.

  I sigh. “Keep your back to the door, and they won’t see anything good. Now hurry up.”

  After another pause, I feel her grab my zipper and yank it down along the column of my spine. I do the same for her, and we both slip quickly out of our dresses and trade.

  When I’m done, I start to ask her to zip me back up, but she’s still trying to pull her dress on. I watch her sharp shoulder blades move under her honey-gold skin, skin that I know is warm to the touch. The top of her sheer underwear rests just above the dimples on her lower back, a pattern of lace roses—the same shade of red as the wine she got drunk on a few nights ago.

  When the dress finally slides down over her body, she smooths her hands over the skirt and turns in time to catch me watching her.

  Before I can avert my eyes, she steps close to me and circles her fingers around my wrists.

  “Phoenix?” Her eyes are intent on mine.

  I stare back, like I’ve got no other choice.

  “Do you care about me?” she whispers. “Even a little bit?”

  My laugh is unsteady. I try again, and it comes out too harsh. So I settle for swallowing before I give her a nod.

  “I care about you, too,” she says. “And if you really care about me, you’ll tell me if you had anything to do with the bad things that have been happening.”

  I hesitate. Mom would throttle me if she could see the way I hesitate. I’ve been lying without a problem for weeks, but for some reason, the next words that come out of my mouth are the thinnest, most unconvincing words to ever pass my lips.

  “I had nothing to do with it.”

  But that’s all it takes. Melody’s eyes soften, and then she puts her arms around my neck and pulls me to her. Her body isn’t stiff, the way it was when she hugged everyone else in the sanctuary. It relaxes into mine. When I hug her back, she breathes in deep and rests her forehead against my shoulder.

  She believes me. And I know it’s not because she’s gullible or naive.

  She believes me because she wants to.

  Nina woke up the morning after she spoke to Ellis feeling better than she had in a long while.

  He was going to tell her father the truth. She was going home.

  She lay in bed and looked up at the ceiling of her uncle and aunt’s house, and she breathed easy. The window was open—she didn’t remember leaving it open, but she was glad she had, because it let the spring air filter through. She decided there was nothing better in the world than a mouthful of Ohio air. It felt like healing. Like she’d had little punctures all over her body for months, and just letting the coolness coat her insides was everything she needed to knit them back together.

  Then she glanced at the clock and saw that it was nine, and her heart shot into her throat. She sat up so fast, her vision blurred and she had to bunch her hands in the sheets to steady herself.

  Since Bailey was born, he’d never let her sleep past six in the morning. Like clockwork, he always roused her with a wail that let her know it was time to roll out of bed, pluck him from his crib, and sit in the old rocker by the window to feed him.

  When the dizziness finally lost its grip on her, she hurried to her son’s crib and peered inside.

  She almost screamed.

  But maybe she’d slept through his crying and her aunt or uncle had taken him out of the room to calm him. She ran to the kitchen, where they were both sitting down to breakfast and reading the paper. Bailey wasn’t with them.

  She checked their bedroom. She checked the living room, the dining room, the bathrooms, and under all the beds, tables, and blankets. She ran out the front door and circled the whole house, even though he couldn’t have gotten out there on his own—he was hardly strong enough to hold up his own head. The more places she looked, the harder it became to breathe. When she got to her bedroom window, she stopped breathing altogether.

  On the ledge, there was a dark smear of blood.

  Bailey wasn’t lost. He was gone.

  Gone
, gone, gone, gone.

  And Nina knew who took him.

  Chapter 33

  “I ONLY NEED ONE thing from you,” Mom whispers to me through my bedroom window.

  Just a few hours ago, I watched Jameson’s body lowered into the earth while Neily sobbed into my shoulder because he couldn’t face it. Melody held her mother’s hand, and Ellis had his arm over his wife’s shoulders, squeezing her close.

  It’s dark now, crickets chirping like this is any other night. But Ellis has been locked in his office all evening, muttering to himself or into a phone.

  “I hope you’re being careful,” I say to Mom.

  She raises an eyebrow. “I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

  “He wouldn’t kill you. Would he?”

  She shrugs. “He’d have to. If he turns me in to the police, they might start digging in places he doesn’t want them to.”

  A new fear tightens its fingers around my throat.

  “It’s what I’d do, in his shoes,” she says. “Nobody notices when somebody like me disappears.”

  “I would notice,” I say, the hurt raw in my voice.

  She waves the words away like they’re nothing but smoke.

  “Tomorrow,” she says, “I need you to unlock Ellis’s office window.”

  I frown. “That’s all?”

  “Close his curtains over it so he won’t notice. If he locks it again, it won’t work.”

  “What happens if he locks it? Can’t we just wait another day?”

  “This is . . . time sensitive.”

  Her heart is so full of twists and turns, it’s a maze that I think even she doesn’t know the way through. I want to grab her and shake her until she tells me what she’s planning. I want to tell her that she can trust me.

  But then Melody’s face flashes in my mind. Do you care about me?

  I shake my head clear.

  “What time does Ellis start working in the mornings?” she asks.

  “Seven. Sharp.”

  She nods. Then she squeezes my hand. “It’s almost over,” she says. Those blue-black eyes searching mine. Like she glimpsed something in me that worries her. “Okay?”

  I squeeze her hand back and nod.