by Lisa Jackson
“You’re sure?” Dern asked again.
“Yes!” No, oh, God, no!
“Fuck!” Jacob, the sharp beam of his iPhone light still trained on the box, backed up slowly. His face had washed of all color, the hand holding the phone shaking madly. “I . . . I don’t know what the hell this is, but I don’t like it.”
“Open it,” Ava said again, a dull roar resounding in her ears as the storm gathered force.
Dern bent down near the box, trying to force off the lid. “It’s locked. I’ll need to get a knife or a crowbar.”
“I don’t think so.” With cold certainty, she pulled the key from her jeans, crouched beside the small coffin, and, throat as dry as sand, slid the key into the lock.
A perfect fit.
Oh, God. Oh, dear God . . .
“Jesus Christ,” Jacob whispered, the beam off his cell phone wavering, “you’re not going to—”
Click.
The lock sprang.
“Ava.” Dern’s hand clasped over hers. Strong. Calloused.
Using all her strength, Ava yanked the lid open. Jacob’s light played upon the interior.
There, lying faceup, eyes open wide, the pale light shivering over it, was a small, lifeless body.
CHAPTER 28
“Holy shit!” Jacob dropped his phone and scrambled backward, startling the dog. Already nervous, Rover let out a worried growl.
Horrified, Ava bit back a scream and stared at the lifeless form in the makeshift casket. The tiny body was dressed in Noah’s red sweatshirt, his tiny faded jeans, his . . .
Bile shot up her throat as nausea overwhelmed her. Reflexively, she leaned over and lost the contents of her stomach even as her mind screamed that the body in the casket wasn’t her son. The thing inside the “casket” wasn’t even really a cadaver; something was off about it. She knew that at a gut level, but she was still freaked.
“It’s a doll.” Dern’s voice was surprisingly calm, underscored with an anger that showed the tension of his jaw. His gaze centered on Jacob. “Bring that light over here.”
Too late. Ava was already scooping up the iPhone and training its little beam into the coffin, where, lying on a folded blanket, there lay a large, ancient, porcelain-faced rag doll. Its once-perfect complexion was now destroyed by chips and cracks. An ear had broken off, and one eye stared fixedly upward, while the second eye’s lid was at half-mast. The doll’s hair had been chopped off and stuck up in sharp little ragged tufts, only slightly visible near the edge of the sweatshirt’s hood.
Clearly, the doll had been altered to resemble Noah, a sick prank.
Her heart squeezed painfully and she trembled inside. Thank God the body was not that of her son, that there was still hope Noah was alive, that she’d see him again. But this—Who would do this awful thing? Who hated her so much as to go to so much trouble to cruelly torment her? She bit her lip to keep from crying.
“Ever seen this before?” Dern asked.
Ava shook her head. “No.” She had to force her voice to work. “But . . . but the clothes. They belong to my son.”
Dern stared at the effigy.
“The sweatshirt,” she whispered. “I recognize it.”
“Dude, this is so fucked up!” Jacob stumbled even farther backward, as if he were afraid the rag doll might spring to life.
For once Ava agreed with her cousin.
“You think someone dressed a doll like your boy, then buried it here,” Dern said carefully.
“Yes. Absolutely. It’s a girl doll, at least it was originally, and then someone cut the hair to make it look like a boy, like my son.” Ava felt a chill in the deepest part of her soul. “Then they left the key for the casket where I could find it, to toy with me and taunt me, testing me to see how long it would take me to figure out where the lock was.” Slowly, her despair was giving way to anger. Who would do such a thing? Who? “Someone hates me so much they want me to suffer the worst kind of pain a mother can endure.”
“But you might never have found this box, never figured out that you had to dig it up.” Rain was coming down harder now, and Dern wiped the drops from his face with his sleeve.
“They would make sure I’d find it. I’m sure if I hadn’t wondered about it tonight, whoever buried this casket,” she said, kicking at the metal box, “would just leave me more and more clues, getting off on my frustration, thinking I was stupid and all the while luring me in the right direction.”
“Who?” Jacob asked on a gulp.
Anyone in my family. Again her stomach roiled as she considered the long list of her relatives. A lot of them might resent her, even talk behind her back or feel some sort of satisfaction that she was mentally unstable, that she was no longer the take-charge, my-way-or-the-highway woman she’d once been. But this intense vitriolic loathing . . . this was something else altogether.
Turning, trying to get hold of her nerves, Ava looked back at the huge house looming above them on the hill. Dark for the most part, her gaze was drawn to the windows where lights were blazing, glowing squares of illumination. The kitchen and dining area were visible, and on the second floor, an eerie bluish light trembled in Jewel-Anne’s suite of rooms where she was watching television or staring at a computer monitor in the dark.
The curtain over Jewel-Anne’s window moved slightly.
As if someone were watching and had ducked backward, like a turtle’s head retreating into its shell. “Jewel-Anne,” Ava whispered, because in that split second, her suspect list was quickly honed to one, twisted individual, the woman who refused to grow up, who was determined to ever play the victim, the cousin who blamed her for Kelvin’s death and her own injuries. “Bitch,” Ava muttered under her breath as, with new conviction, she hauled the horrid doll out of its box and started marching up the hill.
“Where’re you going?” Dern demanded.
“The house,” she snapped, and increased her pace. Jewel-Anne. It has to be Jewel-Anne with her damned dolls. Who else? Racing through the rain, her fingers tight around the doll’s soft shoulder, Ava ran to the house. The altered rag doll was the size of a six-month-old baby, not a toddler, and the clothes it was dressed in were too large, but the point had been made. It was a twisted representation of Noah.
By Jewel-Anne!
Behind her, Dern was closing fast, his footsteps slapping the soft ground, but she didn’t slow, didn’t so much as glance over her shoulder. Now she was of singular purpose. Up the porch steps she flew and through the kitchen, her shoes resounding on the tile floor, Virginia’s black cat, Mr. T, frantically scrambling out of the way.
At the main staircase, Dern was right on her heels. “You don’t know that Jewel-Anne is behind this.”
“Like hell!” Fury burned through her as she hurried up the runner. She knew who the culprit was but didn’t understand why her cousin would resort to such emotional cruelty. “Let me handle this!” she said as she made her way along the upper gallery to the wing of Jewel-Anne’s suite. Ava didn’t bother knocking, just burst through the unlocked door.
“Hey!” Jewel-Anne said. “Wha—” Earbuds plugged in, sitting at her computer, she glanced up sharply. “What do you think you’re do—Oh, dear God, what is that?” Her myopic gaze was fastened to the doll dangling from Ava’s hand.
“What do you think?” Ava tossed the wet rag doll at Jewel-Anne.
Recoiling in horror, Jewel-Anne let out a howl as the dirty thing slid to the floor. “Ava! Oh, God!” Jewel-Anne cried, cringing away.
“You really don’t know?”
“What are you talking about?!” She was shaking her head violently.
Ava grabbed the thin wire and ripped the tiny headphones from Jewel-Anne’s ears. “You know!”
“What’re you doing?” Jewel-Anne gasped.
“Getting your full attention!”
“Ava,” Dern warned from the doorway, but her hand shot up, palm out to silence him as she glared down at Jewel-Anne.
Her cousin’s revu
lsion was nearly palpable. “Where the hell did you get that?” Jewel-Anne demanded, one finger jabbing the air in the direction of the limp doll.
“Buried in a coffin in the garden! Right under the stone with Noah’s name etched on it. Where you meant for me to find it!”
Jewel-Anne stared at Ava, her skin white as chalk, her eyes round behind her glasses. “A coffin? Buried? What? Are you out of your mind?”
“You tell me! Who else would do it? Plant a doll under the stone with Noah’s name. You’re always wheeling yourself out there, visiting the spot. I always wondered what your fascination was. Now I know.”
“No . . . no, I was just paying my respects.”
“Like hell!”
“Ava, listen to you. You’re raving, out of your frickin’ mind! I’ve never seen that”—again she pointed toward the doll that had slithered to the floor and now was twisted, its head lolling to one side at the foot of Jewel-Anne’s cast-iron bed, one of its legs hidden under the frilly, little-girl bed skirt—“thing before in my life!”
“Take a closer look,” Ava suggested, dragging the doll from the floor to hold it in front of her cousin’s face, so that its chipped porcelain nose was nearly touching Jewel-Anne’s. “Its hair has been chopped off to make it look like a boy.”
“You’re freaking me out!” If possible, Jewel-Anne shrank even farther into her wheelchair.
“Good! You need to be!”
“Stop.” Dern, no longer content to stand in the doorway, strode into the room.
“She did this!” Ava glared at him.
“How?” Jewel-Anne asked. “How in God’s name could I dig a hole and stuff a . . . what did you call it? A coffin, that’s what you said, right? A coffin? How the hell could I stuff a coffin into a hole in the ground, then cover it up so that no one noticed, so that it looked perfect? I can’t even move the stone!”
She appeared so childlike, so self-righteous, so certain that Ava was making it all up, that Ava felt a shiver of doubt.
But it had to have been Jewel-Anne. Had to have! Who else? Footsteps sounded in the hallway a few seconds before Demetria appeared. “What’s going on here?” she demanded.
“Jewel-Anne’s been gaslighting me.” Ava held the doll up for the nurse to see. “With this.”
“Gaslighting?” Demetria repeated.
“She thinks I’m doing things to make her think she’s crazy. Manipulating her somehow,” Jewel-Anne clarified. She’d regained some of her composure, and twin, red spots of anger flushed her cheeks.
Dern gazed at them, his face a mask, taking it all in but not offering judgment.
“Let’s start with Noah’s wet shoes,” Ava said. “Then there was the key left in my pocket that just so happened to open the casket. And a doll—this doll.” She shook the rag doll so hard its head rolled back and forth.
Jewel-Anne’s mouth was quivering. “Don’t blame your stupid paranoia on me. You’re the one who’s insane, Ava. You probably did this all yourself! That’s probably why you tried to kill yourself! It’s . . . it’s your guilt coming to the surface.”
“Don’t turn this around on me.”
“It’s what everyone thinks, including the police! You’re the reason Kelvin took the boat out, the reason he died and I’m in this damned wheelchair. You were the last one to see Noah alive. And now you’re the last person to visit Cheryl Reynolds before she was murdered. It’s a pattern. This . . . this ‘discovery’ of yours is probably a setup. How convenient that you found Noah’s shoes in his room when everyone else saw them in your closet. And as for that stupid key”—she flapped a hand to dismiss it—“you could have planted it in your pocket and maybe even forgot you did. And if I was trying to trick you, why would I use a doll that isn’t mine? I’ve never seen that monstrosity before in my life, but of course the doll would be a big red arrow pointed right at me. Why would I do that?”
“Because you thought you could trick me,” Ava answered, but already some of Jewel-Anne’s logic was starting to take hold.
“You’re just tricking yourself!”
“That’s—”
“Insane! I know. But there’s a chance you don’t even know what you’re doing, Ava. You probably believe all this . . . this stuff you’re saying because you don’t remember. Like those people with split personalities . . . What’s it called now? Not schizophrenia, but . . .” She glanced up at Demetria. “Help me out here.”
“Dissociative identity disorder,” the nurse supplied.
Ava stared at Demetria, then back at Jewel-Anne. “I did not do this!”
“No?” Jewel-Anne demanded, and sat up straighter, even wheeling her chair a little closer as she turned her accusative gaze up at her. “How would you know?”
The doll fell from Ava’s hand. It slumped into an ugly pool, the half-open eye seeming to stare up at Ava in accusation. She could almost hear it talking: You did this, you fruit cake. You did it to yourself. And then the hideous laugh, as if the doll and everyone in the suite were in on a cruel, terrifying joke. It was all Ava could do not to clap her hands over her ears and run out of this wing that spanned one side of the house. To where? No place was safe. To whom? She could trust no one. She glanced over at Dern, whose expression was hard and set.
As if taking a cue from Ava, he said, “I think we should all dial this back. No accusations.”
Ava said, “Someone dressed that doll up like my son, stuffed it into a box that looks like a coffin, and then waited, teasing me, pushing me, urging me to find it.”
“Why?” Demetria asked.
“To push me over the edge,” she said with conviction.
Jewel-Anne, her face contorted in disgust, said, “I don’t think you need any help in that department!”
“Okay, that’s enough!” Dern picked up the doll with one hand and grabbed Ava’s arm with the other. Jewel-Anne’s eyes narrowed on her with fury and something else. Wasn’t there just the tiniest trace of satisfaction, of an unspoken victory, in her cousin’s gaze, too?
“Are you all right?” Demetria was asking of her charge as Dern shepherded Ava out of Jewel-Anne’s suite.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, trying to shake him off once they were in the hall.
“Saving your hide.”
“From what?”
He propelled her down the hallway to the corner where her room was situated, the door ajar, a light glowing from her bedside lamp.
“I don’t know what the hell’s going on here,” he said as he stepped across the threshold, dragging her with him and kicking the door shut behind them, “but I’m damned sure whatever it is, you have to remain cool.”
Emotions raw and bleeding, Ava yanked the doll from his hands and shook it in front of his face. “How can I remain cool when this, whatever the hell it is, is happening?”
“I don’t know.” He lifted a hand, showing his own frustration. “But if you really think someone is trying to get you committed again, you have to stop acting crazy.”
“I’m not acting anything!”
“What do you think would happen if Dr. McPherson or someone else saw you and some other psychiatrist was called in to evaluate you?”
“I’m not crazy, Dern!” she said, inching her face up to his, staring him down eyeball-to-eyeball. “You were there. You saw the damned coffin.”
“I didn’t see who put it in the ground, but I’d be hard pressed to believe it was someone confined to a wheelchair,” he shot back. “So, if not her, then who’s the accomplice? Her brother? Jacob acts like an ass, but from his reaction, I think he was as freaked out as anyone. So, who else? Who are you going to finger? Who else would care?”
“Any of them,” she said, and he let that sink in, as if he, too, were running through a list of suspects, all of them being related to her.
“I know it’s disturbing—”
“Disturbing?”
He gave a short nod, his mouth tight. “Until we figure out what’s really going o
n here, who’s doing this to you and why, you’re going to have to somehow maintain control.”
“Control,” she repeated through her teeth.
The fingers surrounding her upper arm tightened. “Control.” His eyes, already dark brown, seemed to deepen. “I’m serious, Ava.”
She let out her breath slowly and mentally counted to ten as she tried to gather her frayed emotions. At least he was on her side.
How do you know? He could be playing you, too. Taking advantage of your crippled mental state. In cahoots with someone else. He does just seem to show up whenever you’re in a crisis, doesn’t he? Why is that? Is he a hero? Or an opportunist? Or worse? You just don’t know, Ava. You cannot trust him!
Despite the arguments burning through her brain, she felt compelled to have faith in him. There was no one else she could even remotely trust, not even her husband. “Do you believe that someone’s trying to get me committed again?” she finally asked.
“Something’s off. I don’t know what.” Then, almost to himself, he asked, “Why would anyone want to put you in a mental hospital?”
“I don’t know.”
Lines etched across his forehead as he gave it thought. “Then that’s what you need to figure out. I’ll help you.” He offered her the ghost of a smile, and the hand on her arm seemed less like a shackle and more like a connection to another human being, and dear God she needed that.
Though she knew she was being foolish, she leaned against him for support. Closing her eyes, she nearly sighed with relief. How long had it been since she’d really let down her guard, trusted someone else? Beneath his shirt, she heard the beating of his heart, steady and strong, just like she needed to be. Distantly, she was vaguely aware of the sound of a boat’s engine, faint but growing louder.
Dropping the doll, Dern folded her into his arms. “We’ll figure this out,” he promised, and ridiculously she felt a new spate of tears burn the back of her eyes.
“God, I hope.”
Outside, the dog gave up a gruff bark, and the wind rushed through the bare branches of the trees.