by Victoria Lee
Clara’s body. God. I’m going to be sick.
Only I can’t show Ellis that kind of vulnerability. She’ll tear open my underbelly the moment it’s exposed.
I must look as awful as I feel, because Ellis offers me a rueful smile and catches my wrist, her fingertips pressing in over my pulse point. “Why do you think I chose you for this?” she says. “It wasn’t to ruin your life. I wanted to help you. Don’t you feel better now? You’re standing here arguing with me because you know you didn’t kill Clara Kennedy. And you didn’t kill Alex, either. Not with magic, at least.”
“It doesn’t matter if you turn me in,” I say. My voice sounds as if it’s coming from somewhere distant, echoing across the expanse of time and space to reach my ears. “You said it yourself: they’ll think it was me anyway. They’ll have me on the cameras at the rental spot. My cell phone…in Kingston. The moment they realize the grave has been disturbed…”
Ellis shakes her head. “Why would anyone even think to check a graveyard miles away? Clara could be anywhere.”
Only she isn’t anywhere. She’s in that coffin. If they do find her body, it will look like I murdered her in cold blood. Or in a psychotic rage.
Sickness lurches up the back of my throat, and I pull out of Ellis’s grasp, hunching over one of my potted plants with a hand clasped to my mouth. But nothing comes up. I’m gasping by the time Ellis helps me straighten upright, my tongue coated in a metallic taste.
“God,” I say. “If they suspect me, if they find even a shred of evidence…”
“You could have been in Kingston for any number of reasons. Besides, cell phone records require a subpoena—they’d have to have other reasons to suspect you in order to even look into that. As long as you play along, they won’t have those reasons.”
“Get out.”
“Felicity, I promise you won’t—”
“Get out!” I shove at her with both hands, knocking her a stumbled half step back.
Ellis moves out of reach, dragging her fingers through her already-tousled hair. “All right. All right, I’ll go….Be careful, Felicity. Remember what I said.”
I’m not likely to forget.
She leaves, taking her manuscript, and I’m alone again. I don’t want her to come back. I wish I had never met Ellis Haley.
But in her absence the walls close in on me. I’m left alone with nothing but the watch ticking on my wrist and the inescapable knowledge that sooner or later, my time will run out.
I have a huge and savage conscience that won’t let me get away with things.
—Octavia Butler
Beware, for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Two and a half weeks ago—one week before Thanksgiving break, two weeks and approximately two days before Clara’s death—Ellis and I were in the library, ostensibly finishing our Art History project but really just procrastinating. The rare books section was too quiet at night: the kind of quiet that didn’t suggest the absence of voices so much as their silence, watchful eyes and wordless mouths. I’d had Ellis commandeer several books from the occult collection, the pair of us shut away in the mustiest part of the stacks, breathing the smell of dust and old paper.
“Give me your hand,” I’d demanded.
Ellis glanced up from the text she’d been reading. “Did you know some people claim they can read the future in animals’ entrails? It’s called extispicy.”
“Yes. Give me your hand.”
She obeyed. I turned her wrist so her arm rested palm-up across my lap.
“What are you doing?” Ellis said, leaning in and peering over my shoulder at the book I had laid open by my knee.
“I want to read your palm.”
Ellis’s lips quirked up. “All right, but…why?”
“Because I’m curious. Because I want to know more about you. Do I need a reason?”
She was still looking at me like I was a particularly interesting science project, which I took as tacit permission.
“You’re left-handed, right?” I’d watched her practice forgery often enough to know, and we lefties have a bit of a radar for one another.
Ellis was still giving me that odd look, but she nodded.
I turned her hand to glance at it from all angles, cross-checking with my book whenever I wasn’t sure about an interpretation. “This is your dominant hand,” I told her. “All the readings here represent what you come into later in life. The other hand would be your innate characteristics. So this hand is more important, as you might imagine.”
I trailed a finger along the length of her heart line, and Ellis didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. I wanted to believe she was too still, like she was trying very hard not to appear unsettled.
“What does my palm say?” Ellis asked at last.
“You’ll have a long life. Healthy. And—you might have guessed this—you’re a creative person. These branches here suggest ambition and achieving impossible goals.”
Ellis grinned. “That’s me.”
I flipped to the next page and examined Ellis’s hand again. Her palm was smooth, rosy, her fingertips callused by the keys of her typewriter. A fleck of ink stained the inside of her index finger. If I were one of those charlatans who owns a shop in the seedier part of town, thick with incense smoke and draped in gauzy veils, I might have told her, You’re a writer, aren’t you?—and that would have been how I seized her trust and suspended her disbelief.
“But…you should be careful about the friends you let into your life,” I continued. “You shouldn’t trust anyone. A mysterious older figure will spell destruction and a fall from grace.”
A quick and sharp grin cut across Ellis’s face. “I knew Wyatt had it in for me.”
“Better run,” I advised very seriously. “Change your name, change your identity, flee the country—”
“—burn this place in my wake—”
“—salt the earth so nothing grows again.”
We both laughed, Ellis harder than me, hard enough that her cheeks went pink and she tipped forward to press her brow against my knee. Her long fingers curled around my ankle and stayed there. As if I would ever move when she touched me like this.
Of course, when Ellis read my palm in turn, she didn’t even reference the book. She just told me that I would live forever, become very famous and very wealthy, and share all my money with her.
Nothing in Ellis’s fortune gave any sign of what she really was. I should have paid better attention. I should have marked the smaller crosses and stars on her skin, should have found the truth written in her flesh.
I should have known she was a killer.
* * *
—
The police arrive on campus first thing Thursday morning, twenty-four hours after Clara fails to return to classes after her trip. I locked myself in my room after Ellis left and haven’t emerged since, so I don’t know what took them so long. I don’t know if the Godwin girls didn’t want to snitch on Clara if she was on a bender somewhere, or if Ellis had convinced them to wait.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
From the reading nook at the hall window, I watch the police cruisers roll up to the bottom of the hill, watch them tramp up the drive in their blue uniforms and murmur inaudible things into their radios.
The last thing I need is for someone to tell them I’ve been hiding in my room since Clara’s disappearance. So I change out of my pajamas and into real clothes, brush my hair and pull it into a low chignon, apply a hint of pink lipstick—enough to look like Felicity Morrow, a good girl, of the Boston Morrows—and I go downstairs.
Ellis is already in the kitchen, sitting perched at the window, gazing out toward the woods. Her charcoal sweater is too big for her, swallowing up her torso. She has a coffee in hand. She doesn’t look a
t me, and I don’t speak to her.
What else is there to say?
The police interview us all separately.
“When did you notice Clara was missing?” Officer Ashby asks, once I’m settled alone with her and her partner, Officer Liu, in Housemistress MacDonald’s office.
“She didn’t come back from her camping trip on Tuesday.”
“How long did it take for you to realize something was off?”
I have both hands in my lap. I refuse to twist my fingers together, knot them up in my skirt. I don’t want to seem nervous. “I don’t know. Last night, I suppose. We all assumed she was at one of her clubs….”
“Didn’t you call her?”
“Clara doesn’t have a cell phone,” I say.
Ashby’s brows flick up. “You’re telling me a high school girl doesn’t have a mobile phone?”
Officer Liu snorts. But when I look at Liu, she doesn’t say anything, just shakes her head and holds up both hands, a derisive smile settling on her lips.
“We prefer to focus on our work,” I say.
“I’m sure,” Ashby says, leaning forward like she wants to come across as reassuring. “Felicity, is Clara Kennedy the type of person who would run off like this? Did she give you any reason to believe she didn’t want to come back to school?”
I shake my head.
“Has she been acting strangely lately?”
Another no.
Liu taps short nails against her ceramic coffee mug. “I have to ask the question: Did Clara have any enemies? Anyone who might want to hurt her?”
The back of my throat has gone bone-dry. I lick my lips and swallow, but it doesn’t help.
“No. Of course not. Everyone loved Clara.”
Loves. I should have used the present tense. The way Liu and Ashby exchange glances suggests I’m not so lucky that they haven’t noticed.
“You were here last year, weren’t you?” Liu says. “When that girl died?”
“Alex Haywood.” I can’t help myself. Alex wasn’t that girl.
“Alex Haywood,” Liu repeats. “A strange case. I looked it up. A girl falls from a cliff…drowns in the Dalloway lake…then disappears. Never found.”
I feel as if my brain has been clipped free from my body, floating far overhead. I barely feel human at all.
“Yes.”
“You were there. You saw her fall.”
My throat has gone tight; I want to clear it, but I don’t dare make any noise that could seem like discomfort. Or like remorse.
“I was there,” I say. “Alex was my best friend. She fell. It was an accident.”
“An accident.”
“She was drunk.”
“Yes. So you told the police.”
Ashby’s lapel has a tiny mustard stain on it, small enough that I hadn’t noticed at first. Now I want nothing more than to rub at it with a wet dishcloth and wipe it away. I stare until the mark goes blurry.
“Here,” Ashby says, relenting and passing me her handkerchief; I squeeze my eyes shut and dab away the tears. I retain enough presence of mind to be faintly disgusted with myself: these tears are what will buy my safety. No matter what I say, neither Ashby nor Liu will suspect I killed anyone. When they look at me they see my mother’s money and white skin. They don’t see a murderer.
But that’s exactly what I am.
“I don’t know what happened to her,” I whisper. “Maybe she…She could have tried to crawl away for help….Into the woods. And then…”
And then the wooden handle of the shovel was against my palms, splinters catching under skin. I’d stolen the shovel from the janitor’s shed. I couldn’t dig six feet deep—only three, but it was enough.
Her body had looked pale and broken on the dirt when I dragged her out of the lake, less than human, waterlogged and cold. I had been relieved to cover it up—first with soil and then with stones.
I remember thinking it was a sign, that she had died as Cordelia Darling died. That I’d buried her as Margery Lemont had been buried—in the crawl space under Godwin House, built into its stone foundations, where she belonged. I had thought maybe this would be enough to sate Margery’s appetite.
Only Margery Lemont had never existed. Not as a spirit haunting me, anyway. She had just been a too-clever girl living in a time when being clever made you dangerous. And she’d paid for that with her life.
The two officers let me retreat back to my room, clearly considering themselves married to a schedule. I leave my door open and sit on the floor, curled up close enough to overhear the echo of voices up the stairs while remaining hidden from passersby by the angle of the door itself. Ashby invites Ellis into MacDonald’s office next. I can make out the click of the door shutting, but no matter how hard I strain my ears, their voices are silent to me.
I give up on this plan and creep down the stairs on sock feet to the second floor. Ellis’s room is locked, but I can pick the lock; at least there was one skill I’d taught myself during our murder plots that Ellis didn’t know about. And the Godwin House latches are ancient, unfussy; they pop open without a fight.
Ellis said she had a document, a file, collating all the evidence against me. A letter to Clara written in my handwriting. I can’t be sure when I’ll have another chance to search her room.
Ellis has made her bed, folding in the sheets and draping a chunky knitted throw blanket along the foot. A book lies open atop the pillow: Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Her typewriter sits on her desk, closed under a case now that she’s finished her book. I open it, but there’s no letter hidden against the keys.
Ellis’s bookshelves are crammed full of an eclectic mix of titles, everything from mystery to classics to texts in the original Latin. There’s even an odd copy of a Nancy Drew book, dog-eared and with a broken spine. There are no photographs. Not of herself, not of her moms or Quinn or childhood friends—just a framed portrait of Margaret Atwood tilted against the full set of Atwood’s books.
Ellis’s épée hangs from a hook on the wall. Her fencing gear is folded in the dresser. I dig through her sock drawer, shoving aside underwear and a collection of broken fountain pens to find…nothing.
Wherever Ellis has hidden that letter, the one allegedly written in my own hand, it isn’t here.
Downstairs, the office door creaks open. I’ve run out of time.
I flee back to the third floor and shut my door, turn the latch. My heart pounds as I crouch there on the floor, ear pressed to the wall—I’d left Ellis’s bedroom unlocked. But no footsteps ascend. She doesn’t come knocking.
She doesn’t care.
I won’t let Ellis Haley set the terms of my downfall. One way or another, I need to get ahead of her.
At my desk, I take out a sheet of writing paper and uncap a pen I stole from Ellis’s room. I write a letter, painstakingly slow, copying Ellis’s handwriting from the Night Migrations notes as best I can.
Dear Clara…
The calligraphy is a poor imitation. The content of the note itself doesn’t read like it’s in Ellis’s voice. I rip it up and start over—two times, three, before I decide it’s good enough. Not a perfect match, but then again, no one knows Ellis like I do. No one else would be able to look at these words and tell they’d never fall from Ellis’s mouth.
There’s a chance I’ll never need to use this letter anyway, I tell myself. Missing isn’t dead. No one has any good reason to suspect me.
Not yet.
Most missing persons are found within the first seventy-two hours, or so I’ve heard.
I’m not sure why that is—if it’s because the evidence trail is easier to follow closer to the actual moment a crime was committed or because most missing persons cases don’t involve any kind of violence at all. Maybe most missing people come home eventually, a lit
tle smudged perhaps, a little blurry-minded or tattered around the edges, but safe.
The police discover Clara’s car abandoned on the side of the road; her prints were the only ones on the wheel. “Maybe she left it there herself,” Leonie says, picking the polish off her bitten-down nails. But the suggestion only brings the other possibility into sharper relief: Or maybe the killer wore gloves.
Ivory gloves, purchased from a local antiques shop and still smelling like lavender.
Clara’s parents arrive, elegant people who speak very little and blow through Godwin House as if they find its existence unsavory. Perhaps they should. The sinking, uneven floors and faded rugs look shabby and dangerous juxtaposed with anyone from the outside. Our visitors seem out of place and out of time. I find myself wondering briefly if we at Dalloway have clipped ourselves out of the usual dimension and found a new one. If we exist on a separate metaphysical plane from all the rest, and these interlopers are mere trespassers. If Dalloway will reject them like a host rejecting its parasite.
I should tell someone. Kajal, perhaps, I think as we sit alone together at the breakfast table, Kajal pushing her eggs around the plate and eating none of them. Only Kajal is pieced together as fragilely as I am these days. If I apply the slightest pressure, she might crack.
I could tell Hannah Stratford, who has latched onto me in the wake of Clara’s disappearance. Hannah appears at my side every time I venture out to class or the library, or make an appearance in the main dining hall, always with her face stitched in a perfect expression of concern.
“What does Ellis think?” Hannah asks me one day as she’s accompanying me across the quad—because I so clearly need a chaperone. “Does Ellis think Clara was”—her voice drops to a stage whisper—“murdered?”
No. I’m not telling Hannah Stratford.
MacDonald, then. I could sit in her office, like I’m doing now, and open my mouth and confess it: Ellis Haley killed Clara Kennedy. Her body is buried in Alex Haywood’s grave. I saw it myself. It sounds unbelievable even to my own ears. No matter what pulp novels would have one think, high school students are not known for their malevolent cunning. Ellis has no reason to kill Clara. She certainly has no reason to frame me.