Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.
Furniture is overturned. Throw pillows and lamps are tossed across the floor, books and papers scattered. There’s not a space to be seen that hasn’t been defaced by some sign of violence.
An echo of screams dances through Graye’s memory, raising the hair on her arms.
Did she sleep through this destruction, just yards away, safe in her bed? It doesn’t seem possible, regardless of how tired she was.
This must have happened as she was drowning her sorrows on the beach with a group of strangers.
“Help me,” a woman cries in her head. “Oh Jesus. Help me.”
Laura?
Graye shakes the plea from her mind. She’s imagining things. She would have woken if Laura had come to her for help. She’s sure she would have.
A short hallway to the left leads to David’s office. Graye has never been inside and has no desire to now.
She needs to find Laura.
Gingerly, she steps into the room, pushing a broken picture frame away with her foot. Glass crunches beneath her shoe.
The silence that was a comfort just moments before is heavy with unanswered questions. The anger that must have raged, fueling this disaster, still hangs in the air, and Graye can’t shake the sense she’s being watched.
As quietly as she can manage, she heads toward the hallway that leads to Laura’s office, then to her bedroom at the end.
Nothing stirs.
Nothing and no one.
Graye’s heart is beating heavily in her chest, worry growing by the second, when her foot slides out from underneath her.
Her hands whirl, grasping for something, anything, to catch herself, but it’s too late. She’s falling.
With a sharp intake of breath, Graye lands on her butt. Her jaw clamps down over her tongue and the sudden shock of pain brings tears to her eyes.
Graye squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head, fighting a wave of nausea, then wipes a hand across her lips.
One glance at herself, though, and the throbbing pain in Graye’s mouth fades into the background.
Blood.
It’s on her hands, on her clothes. It’s smeared across her pant leg.
An image of Walt comes to her, with a fake plastic knife protruding from his belly, colored corn syrup spraying from his mouth.
But this isn’t corn syrup, dyed to a bright, candy-apple red.
There’s no mistaking the dark, brownish scarlet that marks Graye’s skin and clothes.
If she had any doubts, the sickeningly familiar smell fills her nostrils. Graye’s stomach and throat constrict at once, a gag reflex she has no control over.
Nothing smells the same as blood.
It’s a scent she’ll never forget.
Screams again fill her head, and Graye fights back the panic threatening to engulf her. She can’t distinguish where the memory is coming from. In the grip of terror, one scream sounds much like another.
Through the growing cloud of anxiety, a single thought cuts past the fog.
Laura.
Graye is panting in fear as she pulls herself from the ground. She almost loses her footing again in her haste, but manages to stay upright as she runs down the hallway, uncaring now about the sounds of her footsteps echoing through the century-old home.
Laura’s bedroom door is hanging ajar, and Graye skids to a halt just inside.
Upheaval is evident everywhere. The bedcovers are thrown from the bed and drawers are pulled out, their contents emptied across the floor.
A suitcase lies open where it’s fallen, a man’s shirt balled up in one corner.
Graye swings her gaze around to look back down the hallway, but stops short.
Just inches above where her hand is gripping the open bedroom door, there are three dark brownish-red streaks.
Slowly, she raises her hand, still marred with blood from her fall, and lines up her shaking fingertips with the spot where the streaks begin. They fit perfectly.
The sound of short, sharp gasps reaches Graye’s ears and it takes a moment to realize the sound is emanating from her.
Someone, someone with a small, feminine hand, has left a bloody handprint smeared across the door of Laura’s bedroom.
Her empty bedroom.
Laura is gone.
Her gasps turn to whimpers, trapped behind lips incapable of opening.
The taste of blood is still fresh in her mouth when Graye turns and runs.
36
GRAYE
The voices are back. People long gone fill Graye’s head as she struggles to navigate the minefield she’s stumbled into.
Alex is laughing. Her mother is screaming. And the blood, so much blood.
Graye slams open the door of the guesthouse. It bounces off the wall and swings wide behind her as she runs straight for the shower, cranking the water as hot as it will go. She doesn’t wait for it to warm but steps in even as she strips the stained clothing from her body. Her T-shirt and jeans end up in a sodden heap on the floor of the tub as the water goes from cold to hot, scalding her skin. Red swirls circle and reach for the drain.
She’s crying, silently, behind a jaw so tightly locked it may never open again. Her body struggles to pull enough air into her lungs through her nose, but in the grip of panic, she begins to grow dizzy.
“I said you’d never amount to anything. What have you done, Gracie?”
“Nothing!” she cries, her jaw finally loosening. Oxygen rushes to her brain. There’s no one to hear her. She’s alone in the room with only a reflection disappearing in the mirror as steam pours from the blindingly hot shower.
Her hands shake as she tries to hold on to the bar of soap. It slides from her grip, like everything else does.
Graye wraps her arms around her middle and bends at the waist.
The smell of blood won’t leave her, and she has no idea how much is real and how much is a memory that’s come to life like a child’s monster in the closet, ready to eat her alive.
“No, no, no,” she whimpers. “This wasn’t the plan. It wasn’t supposed to be this way!”
“She’s the monster, Grace,” a voice whispers in her ear. “She deserves it.”
“No!” Graye’s hands flail outward in front of her face, warding off the invisible, untouchable forces that batter her defenses.
“They’re going to find you, Gracie. It’s all going to come out. The truth about who you are, and all your lies. You can’t hide this time.”
Graye’s eyes fly open.
The full implication of those words rains down upon her.
The past she’s tried to hide like a weighted-down corpse is rising to the surface. The fiction of Graye Templeton will be exposed to the world.
She’ll be forced back into the skin of Gracie Thacker from the wrong side of the tracks, who watched her mother get murdered and lived to tell the tale. That can’t happen. Not yet.
Graye stumbles out of the shower, not bothering with a towel.
I have to get out of here.
Now.
On wet feet, she skids across the floor in her rush to get out of the bathroom.
There’s no time. No time to think, no time to prepare. Everything is spinning out of her control.
Throwing open a drawer, Graye pulls out the first piece of clothing she puts her hands on and slides it on over her wet, dripping skin.
It’s Laura’s silk blouse, the coffee stain still evident on the front.
The irony brings a choked sob to her throat, but she’ll mourn Laura later. Later, when she’s safe and gone from this place that builds up dreams only to push them from a cliff.
With the buttons of the blouse only partially fastened, she pulls on a pair of jeans and glances quickly around, wet stringy hair slapping her cheeks as she does. Her eyes land on her bag.
The only way off this island is by ferry. She could ride to the mainland as a passenger, but that won’t get her far enough, fast enough.
There’s no way around it. She’ll have to take Laura’s car. God knows, Laura doesn’t need it anymore, and Graye knows where she hangs the keys. There’s enough cash in her own wallet to pay the fare. Nothing else matters. Everything in the guesthouse is baggage, easily replaced.
Each one of Graye’s senses balks at the idea of walking back into the bloodstained carriage house, but she can’t see any other way.
Graye grabs her bag and slings the strap across her shoulder, then runs back out the door, quickly, before her fear has time to catch up with her.
In her haste, she’s forgotten shoes. The gravel of the driveway digs into the soles of her feet, but she won’t turn back.
She must keep moving forward. Anything else would be a terrible mistake, and Graye can’t afford mistakes. Her existence depends on it.
The kitchen door to the West home is hanging open, as she must have left it when she ran out. Graye doesn’t pause.
Through the tidy kitchen, the sun now streaming through the windows, Graye moves toward the living room. She keeps her eyes focused upward, avoiding the blood, avoiding the destruction. Her only goal is the little wooden plaque with four hooks hanging by the front door where the Wests keep the keys to their vehicles.
It swims into focus and Graye moves toward it as a drowning man to a life raft.
She cries out as a piece of broken glass slices the bottom of her bare foot.
“Don’t be such a crybaby!”
Graye doesn’t slow down until she grasps the keys of Laura’s car and pulls them from the hook.
Finally, finally, she can breathe.
Back toward the kitchen she heads, limping on her bleeding foot. The keys are gripped so tightly in her palm that her knuckles turn white. On the other side of the kitchen door, she’ll step into Laura’s car and drive away from this place forever.
It’s unfortunate, but things in Port Mary haven’t worked out as she’d hoped.
She’s halfway across the kitchen when Graye freezes.
There’s one more thing. One thing she can’t leave behind.
It’s the only thing that matters anymore. The only thing that ever mattered, and she can’t walk out that door and leave it for whoever is left to clean up the mess the Wests have made of their lives.
Her manuscript.
It was still in Laura’s possession. Graye doesn’t write on a computer, doesn’t have a file saved on a cloud somewhere. It’s an old-fashioned affectation she now regrets.
The open doorway and the car waiting for her just feet away call out, begging her to go. Go now, while she still has time, but Graye can’t walk away.
That manuscript is everything. Without it, Graye Templeton is nothing at all.
Laura may not have been willing to champion it, but that’s a hurdle she can overcome. Graye will find someone else, someone with a sharper eye, who can see the potential in her story. She will.
But not if she leaves it behind. Left behind, it’s nothing but trash to be thrown out. Just like little Gracie was.
Her heart races as she turns and runs back into the living room, crossing it without thought to the broken things she’s walking over.
She steps around the pool of blood, prepared for it this time. All her senses are focused in the direction of Laura’s office. She’s already seen the bedroom. If there had been typed pages scattered across the floor, she would have noticed.
Laura must have put it back in her office.
At least, she hopes so. If not, Graye doesn’t know if she can face the seemingly insurmountable task of an anxious search through the house while the clock ticks away, marking the miles she should be putting between herself and this hated island. Miles between herself and the wounds the Wests have inflicted, both on her and on each other.
Her eyes skim past the streaks of blood on the bedroom door. She can’t help Laura now.
The door to the office is closed and Graye grasps the knob and twists, breathing a sigh of relief when she sees that this room, at least, is untouched by whatever took place between the couple the night before.
Her eyes fall on it straightaway, tied with an oversized rubber band that holds it together.
The Orphan’s Ashes, a novel by Fiona Boyd.
Graye rushes across the room to pick it up and hug it against her chest. The weight of it in her arms grounds her, and strangely, her panic recedes.
This is all she needs.
With a satisfied smile she’d be surprised to realize is on her face, Graye hurries back down the hallway.
Halfway across the destroyed living room, joy begins to sing again in her heart. Faintly, it’s true, but it’s there.
Everything is going to be all right. Maybe not for Laura, but she can’t do anything about that. For Graye, at least, things are going to be fine.
There’s no warning before the police burst through the door, guns drawn.
“Get down!” they shout into Graye’s stunned face.
She doesn’t move.
“Put your hands in the air and get down on the ground!”
Slowly, Graye raises her hands, the manuscript still gripped in one.
Pages slip from between the rubber band and begin to fall fast and thick on the ground at Graye’s feet.
More shouting from the men in black uniforms, but their voices become static in her ears, like a radio station between signals.
Her gaze settles on a single white sheet of paper, filled painstakingly with her words, as the breeze from the open door catches it and it whirls lazily through the air before sliding to the floor with the others.
Her eyes are still on it when a black boot steps on the page as the boot’s owner rushes in her direction.
Graye’s eyes fill with tears as the men converge on her. One of them pulls her hands behind her back to slip handcuffs around her wrists. It hurts, but she doesn’t cry from the pain of being confined.
Black marks in the shape of a foot mar her words. The utter disregard for everything she is, everything she’s worked so hard to be, is everything she always knew it would be.
Tears cloud her eyes, but they remain locked on that boot print until she’s pulled away toward a future meant for a little girl with a different name. A future she never wanted and can’t escape. She stares at that boot print until she can’t look any longer.
37
GRAYE
She’s been sitting in this room alone for what feels like days, though it can’t have been more than a few hours. There’s a clock on the wall behind her. She can hear it ticking but doesn’t turn to see. Time makes no difference now anyway.
Graye lays her forehead on the cool, scuffed surface of the table, then turns her cheek against it and stares at the wall. She picks at a jagged scratch in the surface with her fingernail.
Her hair has dried into stringy clumps.
The officers didn’t allow her to go back to the guesthouse for shoes, but they did loan her a pair of oversized men’s rubber boots.
She slipped them off an hour ago when the cut on the bottom of her foot had begun to throb. She should ask for some antiseptic and a bandage when they come back.
If they come back.
There’s a window that looks out on the rest of the police station, but she lost interest in the activities taking place on the other side a while ago. If her head is turned, she won’t have to see the way people cut their eyes to peer in as they walk past.
Two plainclothes officers escorted her into the room when she first arrived at the station. Port Mary has no official police force of its own, she’s learned, only a rotation of patrols from Rockaway.
To her surprise, they brought her across the bay in a police boat rather than a car that would need to use the ferry to get back to the mainland.
The boat ride might have been interesting, under different circumstances, but Graye couldn’t find any joy in the experience.
A stone-faced uniformed officer had unfastened her handcuffs before helping her into the craf
t, which was a small comfort. But with one officer positioned on either side of her, she was squeezed between them. Graye wasn’t going anywhere, not even over the side of the boat into the bay, had she been so inclined.
Not that she hadn’t considered it.
How long would it be before they discovered who she really was? Is that what they were doing now, as she waited in this cold, institutional room?
Reporters had lost the trail of Grace Thacker many years ago, but the deceit surely couldn’t be maintained when it was hammered from the opposite direction. Not by police who had more effective resources at their disposal than journalists.
The two who brought her in here—a woman who looked only a bit older than her, and a balding middle-aged man—had been politely professional. She couldn’t remember their names, but the man offered her something to drink while she waited.
She declined, but her parched throat was beginning to regret the easy dismissal of an unwarranted kindness.
“Am I under arrest?” she asked.
“Should you be?” the older man replied, sounding almost as if he were teasing a niece or nephew.
Graye wasn’t used to teasing, in any form. She had no idea if that meant they knew she’d done nothing wrong, or if it was simply a calculated tactic to lull her into letting her guard down.
Graye had only shaken her head. The less she said, the better off she’d be, a lesson she’d been taught early and often.
And so she waits, alone, in silence, once again tucked away from those with more power who will decide her fate.
The door opens and Graye straightens in her chair.
“Miss Templeton, I’m sorry about the wait.”
The same officers who escorted her into the room are back at last, but they’re too relaxed. Too casual, given the circumstances.
The older man places a bottle of water and something wrapped in foil onto the table and slides it over to Graye. It gives off a scent of bacon and she struggles not to gag.
The woman takes a seat and places a notepad and pen in front of her. They both take their time settling into the chairs positioned across the table from her. The female officer meets her eyes and gives her a small smile.
The Shadow Writer Page 18