A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  For Ellis.

  I don’t want to think about it—about what Ellis did. But now…here, with Clara’s pale face rising like an unseen island to the surface of my mind…I can’t evade it. Ellis did this. Ellis killed Clara. Buried her in Alex’s grave, then…then…

  All of it makes sense now. I don’t want to believe it; Ellis had seen how upset I was. She had comforted me, had—

  She’d manipulated me this whole time.

  There’s no better explanation for the book in my room, or for the grave dirt that fell from its pages. Even the inscription in The Secret Garden was a forgery; all those hours we’d spent copying each other’s handwriting. Ellis had brought the book there. She’d brought it there to mess with me, to make me think I was crazy. She—

  Ellis killed Clara. I tell myself those words, try them out on my tongue. “Ellis killed Clara.” Ellis tried to convince me that I was haunted, or crazy, or both. She used magic to get to me. She told me magic was destroying me and then manipulated me into using it anyway. Then she killed Clara and lured me here to make sure I knew.

  I don’t want to believe it. But not wanting to believe the truth doesn’t make it not the truth.

  My hands are still numb when I shut myself in the rental car, but I can’t afford to linger. I press my wrists against the steering wheel and manage to guide the car like that, down the steep hill and out onto the open road. I pull over a mile out, crank up the heat, and sit there with my fingers held up to the vents until they finally start to thaw. The lights from passing cars cut through the silver dawn light; I flinch every time one drives by.

  The radio is on. The newscaster lectures us about some store closing in town: A pillar of the community. And why would they close that store? It’s been there for fifty years. It’s a family-owned business. Sign of the times, the newscaster says, and I agree. I’ve never in my life cared as much about village politics as I do right now, sitting in this car with dirt under my nails and sweat frozen at the nape of my neck, cheeks tear-streaked and hands shaking.

  What will that family do next? Will they open another store? How can they show their faces in public once everyone knows their failure?

  Maybe they’ll move. Far away. Somewhere no one who knew them will ever be able to find them again. They could change their names and cut their hair. Get a little cottage in the woods and become recluse. Eventually everyone will forget.

  At last, once feeling and color has returned to my fingertips, I reach onto the passenger seat and grab my cell phone. I swipe up the screen and stare at the keypad.

  I should…call someone. The police, perhaps. That’s what a normal girl would do. Call the police, the ambulance, the fire department, the goddamn National Guard—anyone and everyone.

  Clara’s death is a heavy stone. I want to pass it to someone else.

  My phone is still in my hand when it rings.

  I startle, badly enough that I drop the phone into the footwell and have to retrieve it, my cold fingers scrabbling down between my legs. The number is one I don’t recognize, but my phone tells me it’s from a Georgia area code.

  All at once I’m transported back to the Dalloway main library: Me and Ellis sitting on the floor in the stacks, leaning against opposite shelves with our knees bumping together. We were in the true crime section. We’d read about a murder case, solved because the culprit made a phone call at the scene of the crime. The cell signal pinged off the nearest tower, and that easily, the murderer’s alibi became worthless.

  I turn off my phone. It feels like it takes years for the screen to go dark, that infernal unknown number mocking me the whole time.

  Is that enough? I didn’t pick up; maybe I’m safe.

  Only I already know that’s not true.

  If the police find out about Clara’s body—if I become a suspect—they’ll know I was here.

  They’ll think I killed her.

  The return to school passes in a watercolor haze. I pull over at a gas station to vacuum out the rental car, suddenly terrified that a grain of grave dirt will be all it takes to identify me. I wash myself off in the grimy bathroom with paper towels and industrial soap as best I can, black water swirling down the drain. I vomit in the smelly public toilet. I drop off the rental car and ride Kajal’s bike to campus. I can barely keep balance. I almost run myself into a ditch at least twice.

  But I make it.

  It’s barely past nine when I trudge into the house, exhausted and sick. My heart feels like a bird fluttering in my chest, weak and breakable. I don’t think about the mud I’m tracking across the rug until I’m already in my bedroom, and by then I can’t care anymore. The prospect of getting down on my hands and knees and scrubbing dirt out of the carpet feels like an insurmountable challenge.

  I didn’t even glance down the second-floor hall as I passed the landing. Maybe Ellis is in the room below me right now. Maybe she’s waiting for me to find her.

  I don’t want to find her. I can’t even look at her.

  Instead I turn on the shower and crouch down on the tile floor as hot water pounds against my scalp. It sluices off the evidence of crime—grave dirt disappearing down the drain. It rinses me clean, the same way it did a year ago.

  That shower is just what I need to crack open the shell I’ve built around myself; finally, the world sinks back in.

  Clara is dead. (Murdered. Ellis killed her.) It’s Tuesday; she’s supposed to return tonight from her camping trip. That means a few short hours before people start to wonder what happened to her. If I’m lucky—if I’m very lucky—the cemetery caretaker doesn’t come in on Tuesdays. Maybe it will snow again overnight, a layer of ice all I need to conceal any sign that Alex’s grave was desecrated.

  And what is the evidence that ties me to the graveyard?

  Alex’s connection to me, of course. That’s one.

  The grave dirt in the rental car. I vacuumed it out, but I hadn’t exactly been in the best state of mind; it’s possible I missed some. But how easy is it, really, for a forensic team to link dirt to a specific location? Surely all the dirt in the Catskills is essentially the same.

  The phone call. That’s what will get me. That’s my weakness.

  But even that is circumstantial—I can come up with a good reason to have been all the way out in Kingston early Tuesday morning. They’ll need more evidence than my proximity to Alex’s grave to prove I killed Clara.

  This is just another one of Ellis’s mind games, isn’t it? She wants me to feel responsible, the way I was responsible for Alex.

  I need to talk to her.

  The thought makes me want to start running and never stop. Ellis killed Clara. What reason do I have to think she wouldn’t kill me as well?

  Only if she wanted me dead, she could have killed me a dozen times already.

  This is about something else. Ellis must have had a reason. She made me go all the way out there to that grave, tricked me into digging Clara up…And why? Was this another part of her game? Margery Lemont was buried alive, after all.

  But Clara wasn’t.

  And I wasn’t.

  I shudder, wrapping my arms around my middle and hugging tight. God, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that Ellis would have sent me out there to die. After all, she had me dig Clara up. She could have been lurking in the shadows, waiting until I had the lid off the casket. And then she could have shoved me forward and nailed me in.

  She could have killed me just like Margery was killed, and I would have walked right into her trap.

  But she didn’t, and that in itself opens a new question: Why would she expose herself like this to me? I could turn her in. I could tell the police precisely why I was in Kingston.

  Maybe I should. I don’t know why I haven’t, in fact. This isn’t a matter of petty theft or trespassing. Ellis killed someone. She killed our fri
end.

  Somehow, though, betraying Ellis to the police never feels like a real option. I should feel more than I do. I should grieve Clara. I should cry and scream and beat my hands against the walls.

  Instead I pace from one end of my room to the other, wet hair dripping cold down my bare back. I try to remember Clara in the sunlight, Clara’s skirt catching the wind as she crosses the quad toward the library, Clara with a stack of books and her pen stuck in her mouth, Clara during the Night Migrations, a dryad amid the trees.

  Is that how Ellis caught her? A note slid under the door the night before Clara’s camping trip, a set of coordinates signed with Ellis’s name?

  I imagine myself explaining the story in a cold police station room, confessing that I drove all the way to Kingston, I stole a shovel, I dug up Alex’s grave and found Clara’s body. I could insist that Ellis killed her.

  But—no—but…what if she didn’t? What if I did?

  What if I killed Clara, then forgot about it, the same way I forgot I’d pushed Alex until Ellis made me remember?

  What if this is the curse playing itself out again and again, an endless string of deaths to satisfy an insatiable bloodthirst? If this is the curse, the evidence will only point to me.

  Checkmate, Margery Lemont murmurs from the darkness.

  I tug an extra-long sweater over my head and don’t bother with the rest of my clothes. I dart down the hall in my underwear, faltering when a floorboard creaks, terrified Kajal will emerge from her room and ask where I’ve been.

  I avoid looking at Clara’s door altogether.

  On the second floor Leonie’s room is open and empty. Ellis’s door, though, is shut. I can’t tell if her light’s on or not.

  I knock anyway. No one answers, of course. I don’t know what else I was expecting. If she’s in there, she won’t answer for me.

  My pulse is beating fast—so fast. I read once that a hummingbird’s heart beats over a thousand times per minute. I feel like that now, like my heart is just a quivering lump of meat inside my chest. Am I afraid? Or just…angry.

  I shouldn’t even be here. It’s foolish, reckless—a good way to get myself killed.

  Even so, I call Ellis’s name, pounding louder. No response. I grab the knob, but the door is locked from the inside.

  “I know you’re in there,” I accuse. “Open the door.”

  Silence, still. Just like that time after the party: Ellis’s insistence that she’d been writing, too busy to see me. It’s not even ten in the morning, and with all the times I’ve found Ellis up fully dressed and working well past four a.m., I refuse to believe she’s out of bed with her nose to the grindstone.

  I press my brow against the wood and strain to hear something, anything: the click of typewriter keys, or the soft strains of classical music played on vinyl, even the soft susurration of Ellis’s breath. But there is nothing behind that door. It might as well open up into the void of space, an inevitable tumble into the crushing heart of a black hole.

  I stalk back up the stairs and into my room, kick the door shut behind me. I lie down on my bed, press my face into my pillow, and scream.

  * * *

  —

  By the next evening, Clara has been missing for a whole day. Too long to be extracurricular. Too long to be innocent. I skip class and stay in bed as the sun tracks its course across the sky, but after dusk falls, there’s a knock at my door.

  I consider staying in bed and pretending I’m not home. But sooner or later someone’s going to come looking for Clara. And when they do, I can’t afford to seem suspicious.

  I crawl out from beneath the sheets and shuffle across the rug and open the door.

  Ellis blows past me with her arms full of typewritten pages and a feverish glow in her cheeks.

  “I did it,” she says, clutching the book to her chest and staring at me like she doesn’t really see me at all. “I finished the book, Felicity. I finally finished it.”

  I stand there in the doorway, wishing I had something to hold in my hands. A weapon, maybe.

  “Clara’s dead.”

  Ellis shoots me a sharp glance, something almost disapproving to the set of her mouth as she shuts my bedroom door. “I know. You don’t have to say it so loudly.”

  She watches me like she’s expecting a specific kind of response to that. I have a feeling it isn’t the response that creeps up the back of my throat, bilious and sick:

  “You killed her. You…You…”

  Ellis sighs, and at last she moves to set the stack of pages down on the corner of my desk. “Okay. I suppose if we must have this conversation…yes. I killed her. And it worked, Felicity. It worked! I’d spent months trying to push through this scene. You don’t even know how many sleepless nights I wasted trying to eke out just one more word, to find the perfect phrase or image.”

  The knot in my chest loosens slightly. It was her. It was Ellis. Not the curse, not the witches, not my fault.

  It wasn’t my fault.

  She draws closer, and I cannot move, not even to pull out of reach. Her hands curl around my wrists, drawing my arms up to press my fists against her chest. She’s near enough that I can smell the cigarette smoke that clings to her hair. I can see new shades layered in her eyes: pale-gray water over black stones, lurking below the surface.

  Ellis smiles.

  “It’s done now. I did it. Thanks to you. I can’t even tell you how much I…This book. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. You understand, don’t you?”

  I don’t know how to reply to that. What is there to say? I can still see Clara’s cold body in the back of my mind. The blood on her stomach. Her blank gaze.

  “You killed her,” I say again.

  Ellis drops my wrists. Her arms fold over her chest, and she shifts onto her back foot, her attention suddenly gone clinical. “Yes. I shot her, in fact. Twice, in the gut. And then I slit her throat.”

  If that admission is intended to make me feel sick, it works. I shake my head as if I can shake that knowledge out of my mind.

  “I used Quinn’s hunting rifle,” Ellis goes on. “The same gun you used to shoot that coyote. It has your prints all over it.”

  The air in the room goes still.

  I don’t know how I’d imagined it happened. But now all I can see is Ellis with that gun, Ellis’s hands wrapped in gloves, Ellis pulling the trigger.

  “Why?” I croak. “You…Why?”

  “Because I had to be sure,” Ellis says evenly. “It’s the same reason I had you go to Kingston and dig up her grave: to place you at the scene of the crime. I can’t have you running off to the police and telling them what I did, can I? I’m sorry, Felicity. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. I don’t want to betray you. Please don’t make me.”

  I pace toward the window and look out. Ellis says something behind me, but I don’t hear her. Static roars in my ears, my lungs gone breathless. I press a hand against the frigid glass. Not that it helps.

  Never mind the dirt in the rental car. Never mind the dug-up grave, or my cell signal pinging off the tower in Kingston, or Clara’s body in Alex’s coffin. Ellis doesn’t play by half measures. Whatever she’s done, she will have left no weakness in her plan.

  I sense her coming up behind me; it’s all I can do not to whip around to keep her in my line of sight. Ellis grasps my shoulder, squeezing very slightly.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  Her hand falls away. I hear the soft shifting sound of her breath. The hair on the back of my neck prickles.

  “I want to make sure you have the full picture,” Ellis says, “so listen carefully.”

  I don’t need the full picture. I don’t want to know how thoroughly Ellis has shackled me. But I can’t stop her from talking, either, so she goes on:

  “Think how it comes across. Clara and A
lex…they could be twins. Or sisters, perhaps. It’s not just the red hair—they have remarkably similar features. After that hospitalization, your mental instability is established. Everyone in this house has seen it—your obsession with those old dead girls, thinking you’re cursed. Of course, the police won’t need to make such inferential leaps. I wrote a letter to Clara in your handwriting. It’s a very…well. Let’s just say it wouldn’t look good for you if that letter were found in Clara’s room, among her things. It would be easy to slip the letter into a notebook or under her pillow.”

  I turn around. Ellis has taken a step back, thumbs tucked into the pockets of her pin-striped trousers. Her words reverberate through my head, playing and replaying until they lose all meaning.

  “A letter,” I echo.

  “Yes. And the fingerprints on the gun, naturally—mine are on file from my arrest a few years ago, you know, so I’m accounted for. Clara’s body will be found in Alex’s grave—the grave of your own ex-girlfriend, the girl everyone thinks you killed. Not to mention your cell phone places you at the scene of the crime. My phone, on the other hand, was in my room the whole time.”

  “You don’t have a cell phone,” I croak.

  “Don’t I?”

  She slips a hand into her pocket and draws out a slim device. Not the newest model, but it doesn’t need to be new. It just needs to work.

  Ellis’s mouth quirks in half a smile. “I did warn you about the dangers of technology.”

  And now that I think back, I realize Ellis never told me explicitly that she didn’t own a phone. I’d just assumed from the way all the Godwin girls eschewed computers and social media and texting; I’d figured they were taking a leaf from Ellis’s book. I had thought she started that trend.

  Perhaps she did. Perhaps she’d planned this far earlier than I realize.

  “But you don’t need to worry about any of this, as long as you do the right thing,” Ellis says. “Don’t go to the police, and I won’t plant that note. I won’t tell the cops where to find the gun. Or Clara’s body.”