“No.” She clutched at my arm as I crossed the threshold. “I need to do this.”
But should she? Walking into this house felt like a worse idea than not calling the cops last night. Despite my hesitation, I heard myself saying, “Best come in, then.”
The screen door closed behind her with a thud that made us both jump. Her grip tightened on my hand as we walked past the sink overflowing with empty beer bottles.
“Ugh.” Tess covered her nose and made a gagging sound. “That’s even worse than usual. Sorry.”
What the hell happened here? I hadn’t been over in a while, but Tess’s mom had always been a fanatic about keeping the place clean. I couldn’t count the number of times Tess and I had raced against the clock to clean the house before her Mom got home.
My shoes peeled free of the sticky tile floor with each step until I reached the dining room. Tile gave way to shag carpet that had probably been orange once, but now the color resembled regurgitated dog chow. Beside me, Tess took shallow breaths, still covering her nose.
We moved past the wooden table, occupied by unopened bills and a blackened, warped microwave meal tray, meal half-included, and into the living room.
“I don’t hear anything.” The quiet sounded unnatural. Absolute. No muted TV voices, no hum of appliances, nothing. It was as if the house held its breath.
We entered the dark, narrow hall. Dread filled my gut with each step because I knew, I just knew any second now, Mrs. D’Ovidio’s mutilated corpse would come into sight. But room after room turned up nothing, and while that should have made me feel better, all each empty room accomplished was ratcheting up the tension and certainty that this time, we’d find something. At last, we paused in front of Mrs. D’Ovidio’s closed door.
Tess gripped the knob. Turned. Pushed.
A blast of cold air escaped the dank room. The narrow shaft of light from the open doorway illuminated a bundle of blankets on the bed. Greasy, dark hair spilled over the pillow. Mrs. D’Ovidio lay still as death.
“Is she breathing?” I whispered.
“I don’t know.” Tess crept toward the bed, her hand tentatively extended toward her mother.
In my mind’s eye, she pulled her mother’s shoulder, rolling her over to reveal a slashed throat, eyes wide and unseeing as they glittered in the sunlight, a disturbing smile frozen on her face.
“Stop!” I whisper-yelled, stumbling forward just enough to grab Tess if I needed to.
“Derrick!” Tess yelped, turning, hand frozen above her mother’s shoulder. “You about gave me a heart attack!”
“Sorry. I—” I grasped uselessly for words that wouldn’t make me sound like a craven idiot. Maybe there was nothing to see, maybe everything was fine, but I didn’t want to know. “We shouldn’t do this. The door was open. There was blood. Let’s call my mom, and, and—”
Mrs. D’Ovidio’s covers slid away as she rose into a sitting position. Tess stumbled backward with a gasp, startled at the sudden movement, but the woman reached out and grabbed Tess by the wrist.
“Theresa,” she growled, the dark smears of makeup beneath her eyes emphasizing her wild gaze. “What the fuck are you doing?”
While I gaped like a water-deprived fish, Tess shrank back, collapsing in on herself, becoming smaller, someone I didn’t recognize. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just—”
“I work tonight.” Mrs. D’Ovidio’s voice rose with each word. “I’m never going to be able to get back to sleep now. Why the hell did you wake me up?”
“I’m sorry!”
“You’re sorry?” Spittle burst from her lips. Tess flinched, ducking her head behind her captive arm. “You’re sorry! I’ll show you sorry, you stupid bitch.” Mrs. D’Ovidio’s free hand closed around a hairbrush on the nightstand.
“Mom!”
I bolted forward to intercept Mrs. D’Ovidio’s arm as she swung the flat of the hairbrush toward Tess’s face. Her bony wrist struck my open palm hard enough to sting. “Whoa! Okay! Let’s just calm down.”
Mrs. D’Ovidio glanced between me and Tess, eyes wide with surprise. “Why the hell are you in my bedroom?”
I wrenched the brush free from her grasp and pushed Tess behind me. “My mom sent us,” I lied, hoping that invoking another adult would calm her down. “Your door was open, and she wanted us to check on you.”
“The door was—” She glanced at the alarm clock on her dresser. “Us?” She looked at Tess. “You stayed out all night?”
“Yes, but—”
“You didn’t notice?” I couldn’t help but ask.
Mrs. D’Ovidio glanced at me, then back at Tess. I saw the moment she noticed my shirt riding up Tess’s thighs. “Are you fucking my daughter?”
“Mom!”
“What? No!” I objected, spiraling down a whole new path of confusion. “I’m not—”
“I swear to God, Tess, if you get pregnant, I will throw you out of this house! You wanna whore around the neighborhood, fine, but you won’t get a drop of support from me, you—”
“Can we just back up for a second?” I begged.
“Oh, what a change that will be,” Tess snapped, voice thick with tears.
Mrs. D’Ovidio sucked in a deep breath. “Get out!” Her scream echoed around the room, and her hand jerked toward the door in a violent, pointing gesture. “Get out of my room! Get out of my house! Just get the fuck out!”
She reached for the lamp on the nightstand, and Tess grabbed my arm and scrambled out of the room, slamming the door just as the lamp thudded against it from the other side. Mrs. D’Ovidio’s enraged cursing filled the air as Tess pulled me into her room and locked her door.
I stared at her, mouth slack. “Tess.”
She burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m so sorry you had to see that, that you—”
“Are you kidding?” I drew her into a hug and tried not to notice how thin the fabric was between us. “You’re not apologizing for that.”
“I was scared, so scared she was dead.” Sobs wracked her narrow frame. “And I don’t know why I cared, you know? She’s so—”
“Of course, you cared. She’s your mother—”
“I was scared when I should have been hoping.” Her sobbing escalated.
I stood clueless because I’d known to hug her, but my knowledge ended there. Should I be stroking her hair, or would that be creepy? If I made shushing sounds, would that be condescending or comforting? God, I hated the way my head worked.
Normal people didn’t sit there overanalyzing while someone cried. They did something, then obsessed over whether or not it was the right thing later, if they thought about it at all. I lacked that ability.
“What’s—” Eh, this would need to be phrased carefully. “The way she just—” Yeah, no. Better than that. “Tess, was that normal?” I could hear them arguing from my house all the time, but the words were indistinguishable. I’d never thought—I mean, my mom and I fought too, but not like that.
She drew in a shuddering breath, her voice so small I could hardly understand her. “She’s just really bad at mornings. Once she gets some coffee, she’s nicer. I shouldn’t have woken her up.”
Nicer? I pulled away from Tess and grabbed her book bag off the floor.
“What are you doing?” she demanded when I pulled open her closet door.
“Packing.” I grabbed an empty duffle bag. “It’ll be faster if you help.” I turned toward her closet.
“Derrick!” She jumped in front of me, one hand going to my chest, the other pulling at the bag in my hand. “I can’t just leave!”
“Yes. You can.” I tugged the bag out of her hand. “You’re not staying here, Tess.”
For a second, she looked like she wanted to argue, though I couldn’t imagine why. Then some
thing banged against the wall of her mother’s room, and all the fight drained out of her. “Fine.” She grabbed a pair of jeans off a hanger. “Can you . . . ?” She made a turning motion with her hand.
I turned around and moved to her desk, packing her art supplies as carefully as I could while Tess got dressed.
In the end, everything Tess could pack fit into her backpack and duffle bag with room to spare. Did she really have so little? How had I never noticed her entire wardrobe could fit into a small bag?
Her room looked odd without clothes strewn across the floor or clutter packed atop her desk, but touches of Tess still remained in the sketches. She’d drawn on everything. Looking from wall to wall, I could see her skill evolve alongside her tastes as lighthearted princesses and flowers gave way to the unexpected beauty in shadows and thorns.
“Okay,” Tess said after a brief rustling of clothing.
I turned to find her eying the mirror as she combed through her dark hair. She’d changed into a pair of worn jeans and a hoodie so oversized, it seemed to swallow her whole.
“Is this everything?” I hefted the light bag.
“More or less.” Tess leaned on a wall beneath a drawing of a butterfly with shattered wings. “There’s more around the house, but we can come back for it when she’s gone. Assuming she doesn’t toss it all out in the trash.” Tess worried a lock of her dark hair, as though weighing the pros and cons of braving the hallway. Her mother’s cursing crescendoed, then dissolved into loud sobs. Tess shrugged. “I was out of makeup anyway.”
I stiffened as my tactless observation about how much makeup she’d been wearing yesterday took on a whole new level of meaning. Dozens of other tiny clues and changes clicked into place. Details. I’d always prided myself on noticing them, so how had I missed this? “You flinched. You flinched before she even reached for the brush.” That mark under her chin yesterday. I moved forward before I could stop myself, tilting her head up to find it. But there was no sign of it.
“Stop!” Tess jerked free of my hand. “All right? Let’s just go.”
I stared her down, and she sighed.
“She can’t help it.”
I let out a string of curses and moved toward her door.
“No, really.” Tess moved between me and the door, her hands rising to my shoulder. “I know that sounds like . . . like a bad afterschool special, but she really can’t help it, Derrick. She’s sick. And there’s not a lot they can do about it. Even if there was, we can’t afford—” She broke off, nails scraping against her scalp as she pushed her hair back. “She’s hurting, and between the pain and the meds, she’s just . . . different sometimes. Especially when she first wakes up.”
I felt like the floor dropped out from under me. Sick? Not a lot they could do? My mind reeled, shying away from the full implications of what Tess had just said, refusing to put myself in her situation, to imagine my mom dying. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you would run to your mom, and it would just be one more thing—” She took a shaky breath. “You know what, Derrick? One crisis at a time. I’m sorry I brought you into . . . whatever happened last night. I wouldn’t have if I’d been thinking clearly. But whatever happened last night, it wasn’t here.”
I had a thousand more questions, but she was right. They would have to wait. “Yeah. Fine. Let’s head to the bonfire.”
She slid past me and opened her window. I turned just in time to see her ducking through the frame with a practiced ease.
“Please!” Her mother wailed, sobs muffled by the walls between us. “I need to sleep. God, just let me sleep!”
Her last word was a bitter shriek that stuck with me long after I crawled out the window.
Chapter 7: Tess
Friday, September 9th
I WATCHED THE trees blur on the side of the road as Derrick’s car sped down Highway 5. It wasn’t easy to focus with my pulse pounding in . . . in something, damn it. Not rage, not embarrassment, not fear, not any emotion I could sum up in a single word, but a nasty concoction of all the above. Whatever my emotional state was, it translated physically to my chest burning, my gut twisting in knots, and my breath doing that annoying gasp-sob thing that always set in after a good cry.
Derrick kept shooting me worried looks laced with so much pity, I wanted to claw his face off. I dug my nails into my palms instead. After a few deep breaths, I caught myself offering him a reassuring smile lest he think my anger was directed at him.
But it is! I thought, and a burst of rage set my heart to an angry beat. Derrick always did this. He took over, and he tried to fix me and—
Stop. Just because Derrick was a safe target didn’t make him the right one. I was lucky to have a friend like him.
Lucky. I was sick to death of feeling “lucky.” Having to feel grateful all the time for every little thing was exhausting. Balancing what I could give with what I was given was soul-sucking. Especially when it came to Derrick. Between the rides and the “extra” lunch his mom always packed, the second-hand school supplies, and everything else, he constantly gave and gave and gave. I couldn’t make it up fast enough. No matter how hard I tried, I was always behind. That constant mental math felt wrong enough as his friend. If I let things move into romantic realm, it would feel like prostitution.
I hated having to think like that. The weight of my anger was changing me, shaping me, into some kind of bitter victim. And every iota of blame belonged to my monster of a mother.
I hate her!
No. Never that. Don’t think that. An image flashed in my brain of me standing in front of her coffin reliving every horrible word I’d said to her, every negative thought I’d allowed myself to have. You hate the cancer. You hate her pain. You can’t think you hate her. You can’t.
Hot tears pricked my eyes. I rubbed them away before they could escape, trying unsuccessfully to marshal my thoughts. To remember before. Before she’d sat me down and told me we had to make the next year or two the very best because it was all we’d get. But the time we’d been promised was a lie. That version of my mother didn’t have a year, maybe two, left. She’d had months before the pain set in and began to eat away at the best parts of her, leaving a monster in her place. As if killing her wasn’t enough, the pain had to taint my memory of her.
Ice cream Mondays, our celebration of surviving the worst day of the week, was the first to go. Instead of sitting across the table from me, digging into her chocolate sundae, gossiping about work, and grilling me about my day, she’d slouched, eyes dull as she sucked the ice cream from the spoon like the sweet goodness pained her. Then she’d all but attacked Sarah Henderson, the girl who brought out our ice cream, screaming she’d ordered vanilla, not chocolate. What part of that was too complicated for the stupid bitch to understand? We stopped going after that.
“You see anything?” Derrick asked as I craned my neck to look down the steep embankment on the side of the road.
“No.” I wasn’t sure why a wreck seemed like the better alternative than something terrible having happened at the bonfire, but we were both clinging to it. But with every mile Derrick’s car shuddered from his house, the less likely that outcome seemed.
“Are you sure you don’t remember anything?”
How many more times was he going to ask me that? “Do you really think I wouldn’t mention it if I did?”
“I’m just asking.”
“For the thousandth time, I’m trying, okay!” I could almost feel the hole in my recollection. Large and gaping with jagged edges, like something reached into my thoughts and tore my memories away. Focusing didn’t help.
“Sorry,” he muttered, his dark hair falling in his face.
“Me, too.” I shouldn’t have snapped at him. Not now. He looked exhausted. I brought him into this. Guilt flooded my chest as I realized all the stress and te
nsion radiating off his stiff shoulders was my fault.
We lapsed into silence as we plunged into Bankhead National Forest. By the time Derrick pulled onto a small dirt road, I was struggling so hard to keep my composure that I didn’t even notice when he parked the car.
“Tess.”
I started and jerked away from Derrick’s outstretched hand. If I let him touch me right now, I’d fall apart.
“I didn’t mean—” He reached for me again.
“Don’t,” I begged, pressing against his car door. “Please. I just—I need—” I choked on the lump in my throat and held back a sob.
“Okay.” He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender, but there was no ire in his tone. He hadn’t taken my outburst personally. “Come on. One crisis at a time, remember? We’re here.”
I glanced out the window. The trees thinned around the ruins of the haunted roadhouse. The site brought back memories. Haunted hayrides, me and Ainsley standing in front of my mirror shouting, “I don’t believe in Aunt Jenny,” three times fast as we spun around. Our shrieks when Derrick and Josh chose that moment to burst into the room with roars.
Jenny Johnston was Fairdealings’s version of the wailing woman that haunted bridges, roads, and forests all around the country. But since this was the South, her story got a gruesome Civil War twist.
After her husband and oldest son were killed, Jenny dedicated her life to hunting down and brutally murdering the soldiers responsible, but of course, one got away. According to the stories, she still haunts the woods around her cabin, searching for that last soldier, while doing all the traditional ghost stuff like scaring teenagers and popping up inside of passing cars.
Back when Derrick went through his ghost story phase, we’d spent hours combing these woods for Aunt Jenny Johnston’s ghost. But we never saw so much of a flicker of the haunting green lights the cabin was famous for.
Derrick unbuckled his seatbelt. “Does this jog your memory?”
So many memories, but none from last night.
“No.” I climbed out of the car, letting the door swing shut on its own, dimly aware of Derrick doing the same thing. “I don’t think we were actually at the cabin, just . . .” I grasped for a mental image of Josh parking the car last night before the rest of the night dimmed. “Nearby.”
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