by Lyla Payne
Then it’s all gone.
“Holy shit. This is awful.”
“It’s pretty fucking bad, noob, not gonna lie.” Daria seemed fine after what she heard downstairs but now she looks shaken. Her fingers tremble as she runs them through her hair. “Let’s finish up.”
We walk the remaining bedroom without incident, along with the attic, though Daria’s jumpy up there as if she hears or sees something I don’t. My shoulder blades prickle, so maybe it’s the older man again, but no words drop into my ears or emotions into my blood.
The sense of relief when we step outside is nothing compared to how good it’s going to feel to get the hell out of here altogether, but Daria wants to debrief. I decide doing it quickly out here and escaping to the relatively ghost-free bedroom at my grandparents’ house is better than having to slog back to her office first, and we lean against the side of her car, putting a ton or so of steel in between us and the house of creep.
“Tell me what you saw,” she says. “In the bedroom.”
I don’t want to. I don’t want to think about it or talk about it but we’re here because there are real, living children being harmed in that house. My fingernails dig into that and hold on. “The younger girl—she and her sister were getting beaten by the man downstairs—killed the older girl. She’s the one who was sick and wasn’t getting any help. I think she asked her little sister to do it.”
She placed her hands on the pillow and pushed, but it doesn’t mean she didn’t have regrets at the last minute and tried to move, to breathe, only to find she couldn’t.
I gulp air, pushing the thoughts out of my mind. Wondering how much of this I’ll be forced to relive if Nan shows me what really happened to her.
“She did. I didn’t see anything but I heard her begging. Desperate to end her suffering. Her name was Lizzy. The little one was Claire.” She sucks in her own deep breath but appears far steadier than I am. Then again, she’s got practice. This is only my first time seeing ghost children get beaten and then die. Getting used to it, though, feels like a pipe dream. “It’s the little one that’s hurting the kids in the house. She snapped after that. It’s not even her in the house now. Just pieces of her. The worst ones.”
“The deranged ones,” I guess. My chest hurts. “That poor kid.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.” I glance toward my car, wanting to get out of here, to pretend I don’t know the horror that lives inside that house. “What now?”
“First, we need to ground. Then, you can go home and I’ll do some research, figure out who these people are, then come back and try to talk them into leaving.”
“And if they won’t go?”
“I suspect Claire won’t, at least not by choice. I’ll have to get a priest to force her. She’ll be better off.”
“What do I have to do before I can leave?” It feels as though someone has leeched all the energy straight from my blood. As though walking might be more than a small challenge and driving home in this kind of fog would be a mistake.
“It’s called grounding. Every time you open those doors, you need to make sure to close them. Got it?” She waits for my nod, then gives me a quick explanation of how to disconnect from and thank my spirit guide, then close myself off from unwanted visits.
Daria might come off as flaky sometimes, with the clothes and the hair and the general mystery, but she’s serious about what she does. After tonight, after she heard what I saw, there’s no question in my mind that she’s for real.
And so am I.
Chapter Eleven
I’m feeling a bit better by the time I get back to Heron Creek. The opposite of the expected exhaustion since jittery, overtired energy stutters through me instead of pure, undiluted fatigue. The closing or grounding thing Daria forced me through helped, but it would have been nice to be able to get home and crash. With the way my mind races a mile a minute, there’s no way that’s happening.
Beau will be asleep. Guilt over ignoring his call earlier, not returning it, and not telling him my plans to go out ghost-walking with Daria gnaws at my conscience, but there’s nothing to be done about it now. Amelia’s asleep when I stick my head in her purple-and-cream room, her chest rising and falling softly while I watch. Her face is slack, peaceful, and the sight gives me such a sense of total relief that I linger for several minutes before starting to feel like a huge creeper. Edward Cullen ain’t got nothing on me.
Back in my room—a replica of the one Amelia’s claimed except it’s decorated in blues and creams—Henry Woodward waits. His expression seems put out, but that’s nothing new. He could be upset with me for being away so much, since he’s not keen on following me the way Anne and Dr. Ladd—and to some extent Glinda—were, or he could somehow know I’ve been out cheating on him with psychotic six-year-olds.
I’m also starting to entertain the possibility that his face just looks like that.
“Hey, Henry. How’s it hanging? To the left?” He frowns at my halfhearted attempt to laugh at my own joke, shaking his head in disgust. “Sorry. I guess back in your time ladies didn’t make such crude jokes. But I mean, you hung out with Native American ladies. Surely they weren’t so prim and proper.”
He doesn’t answer, but if his reproachful stare is any indication, he doesn’t appreciate the direction of the conversation. I’m feeling more than a little annoyed that, after everything useful that Daria showed me, I still can’t hear my ghosts.
“Well, if you would contribute more to the conversation, then you could steer it in whatever direction you’d like. Unless you want to be racist, because nobody’s got time for that noise.”
He makes another face. I’m not even sure if he would understand the term racist, though Anne and Dr. Ladd both seemed to be aware of the many advancements and changes that have taken place in the world since they mostly left it behind.
When I’m feeling more like myself—and once my brain and body have at least tried to process what happened tonight—it will be interesting to try the whole opening the door thing with Henry and the others. Although, if I can’t figure out how to hear what’s happening or pick up on vibes and nuance like Daria can, it will be kind of hard to determine what he wants. It seems as though the scenes from the past that replay for me tend to be über violent and/or lead to death and I know, more or less, how Henry died. I need to know what he wants.
Nan, though… Seeing her death could answer all my questions.
My eyes stray to my messenger bag, tossed haphazardly onto the foot of the bed. The file that Officer Dunleavy so thoughtfully handed over peeks out from inside, calling me over.
No. Clean yourself up first, because once you sit down, there’s no getting up.
Man, I am so freaking bossy.
My bathroom routine takes longer than usual because the cool water feels so good on my face. The practiced, familiar movement of spreading and rinsing soap, massaging in old-lady eye cream and moisturizer, calms me further, and though sleep still doesn’t tempt me, my whole countenance has settled by the time my legs are snug under the covers.
A breeze that’s actually cool and refreshing drifts through the open window. The thin file intimidates me a little as it lies on my lap, but only because of the complications it could bring to my shitshow of a life. One deep breath later I’ve got it open, and two minutes after that I’m so engrossed in the damn thing I’ve basically forgotten every worry in my tiny little brain.
The front of the file is pretty straightforward. A description of the scene, statements from the Drayton Hall staff who cut her down and called the police—I need to check if any of them are still employed there—and preliminary notes from the detective.
“No shit,” I mutter to no one, since Henry absconded while I was in the bathroom. Amelia would have my head, but the detective who worked Nan Robbins’s case is none other than Officer Walt, the cop who bailed out Crazy Brian’s drunk father. It shouldn’t surprise me. He has Good Ole Boy written all
over him, and if it came down to protecting the Drayton family from scrutiny or finding out the truth about what happened to a girl who appears to be almost an orphan, it’s not hard to guess which he’d pick.
The information about her family is more in-depth in the file than in the newspaper article. Nan’s mother died of cancer shortly after her first birthday, and her father, an Army man, died in the line of duty in Iraq. No grandparents, no aunts or uncles. They talked to the half sister that was mentioned in the obituary. Her name is Reynolds Young, so she must have been the mother’s daughter. She’s older by ten years, and in the police interview, she said that she’d been given up for adoption and had only known Nan since her father had died. The state had tracked down old records and asked Reynolds if she’d be willing to take Nan in so she wouldn’t have to go into foster care. She’d said yes, even though she’d been so young it couldn’t have been easy.
My heart kind of hurts for both of them. Reynolds had turned eighteen the month before Nanette’s father was killed. She was putting herself through community college and working two jobs. Her answers made it seem as though her adoptive parents hadn’t turned out to be the greatest.
Nan lost her father and thought she was alone in the world after that, only to find out she wasn’t. She had a sister, a total stranger willing to take her in based on their shared genetics. In my mind, I see her sitting on the edge of the desk in my office at Drayton, feet swinging, that damn noose trailing onto her lap.
Maybe Reynolds hadn’t been enough. Maybe she’d been abusive, as the children of abusers often are, or maybe after being mostly alone her entire life Nan had simply had enough.
Or maybe someone killed her. I keep reminding myself of Nan’s claim to not have done it herself, regardless of what the evidence in the file suggests.
I shake off the chill grabbing my spine and keep reading. Nan had been a scholarship student at the same swanky, private school all the Draytons attended, at least until they decided whether or not to embrace the boarding school life. While her father would go away on missions or for training, Nan stayed with another military family on the base, but they hadn’t been willing to step in legally once her father died.
Somehow, a poor orphan on a scholarship landed at the top of her class at a school full of people who would never accept her. It’s a setup that would make anyone question their desire to keep on keeping on every day, but a fourteen-year-old girl? I’ve known several, including myself, who would have offed themselves for less.
My eyes feel gritty. The clock on my phone tells me why—it’s after one in the morning—but I’m just getting to the part of the file that talks about why it might not have been a suicide.
There was rope found under her fingernails and claw marks on her neck, as if she tried to rip it off while she was hanging there. Whoever tied the knot hadn’t done it properly for it to snap her neck, so Nan had suffocated to death, probably over several minutes.
I swallow bile that foams up into my mouth, trying and failing to dislodge the awful image of her hanging there, desperately trying to tear that noose from around her neck but finding that it’s too tight. Had she accepted it then, or had she fought until the end?
There were two sets of footprints on the scene, one much larger than the other, but no way to prove for certain that they had been made at the same time. Someone could have left the bigger prints there earlier in the day, then Nan mixed in her own when she arrived that night, plus there was the early morning staff to consider. She didn’t leave a suicide note, though they did find search histories on the computers assigned to her at the school that pointed to her thinking about it. The best ways to kill yourself, the fastest ways, the least painful ways…but that’s not proof.
Her sister, Reynolds, didn’t believe she would kill herself. Said they’d been talking about college and how high school sucks, sure, but things get better. They talked about the future a lot, according to her, and Nan knew that she wouldn’t have to face any of it alone.
Probably the most damning evidence was that Nan had no car. Drayton Hall isn’t within walking distance of the apartment she shared with her sister—or anywhere, really—and the police couldn’t track down a bus driver or cab driver who had seen her that night. Buses didn’t run close to there, but there had been tire tracks in the mud. The cops had traced the make and model—a Lincoln Town Car—but there aren’t any shortage of those near Charleston or anywhere else in the country, either.
The case file does note that Brand Drayton, Beau’s father, owned a Town Car. He’d been out of town, along with Cordelia. They’d flown to London to spend the holiday with Beau at boarding school and hadn’t yet returned at the time of Nan’s death. It’s strange to think of parents abandoning their other two children for Christmas, but knowing Cordelia, it’s equally as strange to think of her crossing an ocean to visit Beau.
Brick and Birdie had been home, along with the brother I’ve yet to meet, Bennett.
Chalk that up to one of many things my boyfriend appears to be keen on keeping from me. Not that I’ve told him about Nanette. Or these files or chasing ghosts with Daria. Hypocrite.
I lie back on the pillows, leaving the file contents scattered around me. So much has happened in the last two days and it rushes at me at once. My limbs feel heavy, as though there will be an imprint of my body on the mattress even after I roll off it—which, I mean, there probably is anyway since I spend so much time sleeping in it. The snake, the curse, my father showing up, the ghosts out at that awful house tonight, Nan’s file…it’s all too much to deal with, a truth that works in my favor when my mind stays blank instead of trying. It’s not long until I feel the world slipping away in the most blissful way possible.
I sleep so hard that I miss out on a couple of important occurrences in my safe haven of a bedroom. One, the sunrise, which heats the space almost unbearably with the curtains flung wide the way they were last night. And two, Beau seems to have arrived at some point. I blink, then do it again, clearing the gunk from the corners of my eyes while trying to determine whether my boyfriend is actually sitting in Anne’s chair, staring out at the river, or if he’s a dream.
I mean, he is a dream, but in this context, I think he’s physically here, too.
Panic grabs me at the sharp, stabbing thought that he could be a ghost, and I sit up, breathing hard. “Beau?”
He turns toward me. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”
I’m so busy being relieved that he’s talking and not a ghost that it takes a moment to register that he’s not smiling, and his tone isn’t his typical one.
He sounds detached. A little edgy.
I hug my knees to my chest. “What are you doing here?”
“You never called me back or texted last night and I got worried. I thought I’d stop by on my way into the office and check on you.” He glances down at his expensive watch. “You’re going to be late, by the way.”
“Crap on a cracker!” I shout, rolling out of bed and grabbing for my phone. It’s dead, since it didn’t make it onto the charger last night. “What time is it? Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I haven’t been here long.”
The answer falls between us like a rock, smashing any good feeling that might have tried to come out to play. He’s not even looking at me, but sort of through me.
“What’s going on?” I ask, wanting to know more than I want to pretend everything’s fine. I think I might be done with that philosophy all together.
It’s only then that my gaze falls, following his down to his hands, and I see that he’s holding Nanette’s file. The moisture leeches from my mouth, leaving behind dust bunnies and cotton balls even after two or three swallows. Our eyes meet and his are careful, too careful. As though he’s a lawyer and I’m on the stand, and he’s about to pretend he’s not angry with me until the exact right moment.
“Where did you get this?”
I would rather answer the question Why do you have this? since I sor
t of promised Officer Dunleavy to keep his help under wraps. “I requested it from the police department.”
Not a lie, but he presses his lips together as though he suspects it’s not the whole truth. I hadn’t considered this particular downside of dating a lawyer. Beau looks like he can sniff out an untruth or half-truth easily, and experience promises he can hear what goes unsaid, as well.
“Why?”
No time like the present to come clean. It may have been a good idea to keep my investigation or whatever from Beau and his family at the beginning, but it’s too late now.
“I saw her my first day at Drayton—Nan.”
“Nanette Robbins.” He rolls her name around in his mouth as if it tastes bad, as if he wants to spit it out. “Troubled girl.”
“You knew her?”
“No. I was away at school when she died.”
“But Brick knew her.”
“Brick went to school with her,” he corrects. “The two of them had a friendly relationship.” He levels me with a no-nonsense look. “You saw her ghost? What do you think she wants?”
I pause, feeling as though there are only certain safe spots to step and the rest of the responses will suck me under like quicksand. The truth is, I don’t have any idea what Nan wants; I only know what she’s told me.
“I don’t know yet. When I saw her, she had a noose around her neck so she was pretty easy to find on the Internet. I asked for the file to, I don’t know, try to figure it out. It’s kind of what I do now.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
That’s the issue here. The real question underneath all the others, ready to erupt and cover us both in lava and ash.