Brittany doesn’t see Tal until she’s standing right in front of him. She stops, looks around.
“What are you doing here?” she says accusingly.
He stares at her. “You asked me to come.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I got your note.”
He fumbles through his bag while Brittany glances around, probably looking for me. He hands it to her, and she reads it. By the time she finishes, Brittany starts to laugh.
“She did it,” she mumbles.
“Who?”
She waves Tal away. “Someone who wants us to be alone.”
His skin glistens with sweat. It’s really pouring from him now. It’s cute, his nervousness. “Alone?” His voice cracks when he says it.
I bite my hand not to giggle.
Brittany takes a deep breath and sweeps her arm over the bluff. “Ever been here before?”
He shakes his head.
“Well sit down. Let’s enjoy the view.”
God, they talk for so long. My legs start to cramp as they’re discussing music and Tal is giving Brittany a hard time for liking Sarah McLachlan and her song “Angel.”
They switch from that topic to the mall and seeing a movie, maybe the next weekend. I’m relieved. My legs hurt so bad, and now I have to pee. Pressure builds up in my groin, and if they talk much longer, I’ll have to piss my pants.
Finally Brittany rises and tells Tal that she has to go. Her mom needs her at the pharmacy. Thank God.
Now, Tal. Do what I brought you here to do.
It takes him a minute. Worry flashes across his face before he just decides to kiss her. Brittany’s backpack falls from her hand onto the stone ground.
They kiss and then hug, and I smile, knowing that I’ve done a good deed.
If only it could make up for all the bad.
Chapter 14
I dream of my sister. She infiltrates my mind like smoke. Her face is a streaking line of mist that floats before me. I reach for her, wanting to touch her dewy skin and inhale her flowery scent.
As my fingers reach, her face changes. Her freshly scrubbed skin, pink cheeks, and bright eyes dissolve. Red lines like blood sprout from her forehead and rain down to her chin, dripping into the bleak infinity below.
“Promise me,” she whispers.
“Of course.”
She reaches for a hug, but her hands tighten around my neck and squeeze, clamping down. I scrape at my throat but can’t dislodge her fingers as they harden.
Suddenly I’m gasping for air, sitting up, my hands circled around my neck. It’s dark, still nighttime. My thoughts are jumbled, and it takes a moment to realize where I am.
The cabin in the woods—Paige’s cabin.
I exhale and run my fingers over my face. Sweat soaks my hairline, and my armpits are damp. They stink of onions.
I rake my fingers through my hair. A shaky exhale escapes me. Rain patters against the rooftop, its rhythm comforting. My gaze slowly adjusts to the dim light flowing in from outside. A mound of clothing that I discarded on a chair looks like a small person hunched over, their back to me.
I exhale again.
It was only a dream, I tell myself. The shadows here do not bite.
No, but the nightmares do.
I close my eyes, willing myself to sleep. The floor creaks outside the room—footsteps. At least they sound like footsteps. It could be the house settling.
Then I hear the distinct groan of a board bending under weight. Someone is up, or someone new has arrived.
I bolt up. Did we lock all the doors? Shut the garage?
My heart knocks against my ribs. I’m not sure if it’s because of the dream or the steps. It’s probably from both, the intersection of imagination and reality colliding, creating momentary fear.
I throw the comforter off and pad quietly to the door. I slowly turn the knob and pull. The door comes easily, but at the halfway point it makes a slight shriek. There’s enough space to slip out, so I do.
What if there is an intruder? I remember what Paige told me—no one could hear me scream, not for miles.
That dream has me all screwed up and wound tight. It was only a dream. It wasn’t real. My sister was not trying to strangle me.
It’s in the middle of the staircase that I take stock of the cabin.
An outside spotlight illuminates rain dripping from the eaves. The glow is so bright that it shines on the animal heads. Their eyes point at me, silently blaming me for their fates.
I shudder but forge on.
The blue light on the satellite box shows that it’s two a.m.
The footsteps have stopped. Perhaps the rain had been the noise I heard.
A quick check of the lock on the front door reveals that it’s sealed tight. So is the door that leads to the back deck.
My fluttering heart slows. It was nothing, nothing at all. What I heard was the house settling.
I glance up at a large-horned deer as I pad back toward the stairs. “You could have told me, you know,” I murmur, “that it was only my imagination and nothing else.”
Behind me, a door creaks. My heart thunders, and I inhale slowly.
There is a logical explanation. Don’t get worked up.
It came from the hallway. I slip down the dark path as a shadowy figure approaches. White fabric like a sheet billows behind the person.
“What are you doing up, Court?”
My heart skids to a stop. “Blanche. Jesus, you scared the hell out of me. What are you doing?”
The outside lamps highlight her cheekbones and make her dark eyes look like black ovals sunk into her face. “I’m smoking. What’re you doing?”
“I heard something,” I said accusingly. “I thought maybe someone had broken in. You’re smoking?”
She nods. “It’s raining outside, but there’s a screened-in window in the study. I’m hoping it clears by tomorrow.”
“I don’t even smell it,” I say.
That’s a lie. A faint acrid scent drifts in the air, but I’m sure she’s right. By the morning it might be gone.
“I blew out the window.” She rubs her arms and glances outside. “I don’t think Faith has to worry about the snow. Doesn’t look like we’ll be getting anything more than rain.”
Blanche sounds fine, but her mouth is drawn tight and her eyes are narrowed. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“There’s something to say to me,” I argue quietly. “You could have told me something was going on before we arrived.”
And I could have done the same thing, right? I could have mentioned the letter. But how can I reveal truths that need to stay buried?
She yawns and moves back toward the study. She stops, turns around. “Well? You coming?”
“I’m coming.”
Inside the dark room the stench is stronger. “It’s going to stink in here tomorrow for sure.”
Blanche scoffs and opens a window. Cold wind smacks me in the face. “There. Let’s see if that helps.”
She snaps on a lamp, and I flinch, shutting my eyes from the glare.
“Sorry, I’ll turn it off.” She does and we sit, letting the darkness work its way around us. It’s like we’re in a confessional. For some reason that makes the moment purer, easier to deal with.
I settle down on the rug. “Do you want to start, or should I ask questions?”
I hear her swallow and the sound of fabric swishing as if she’s rubbing her arms, trying to work out exactly how to explain it.
“There are things that you don’t know.”
Obviously.
“Things that I’m not ready to talk about.”
“Why did you bring me in here if you aren’t going to talk?”
“Because there’s stuff you need to know.”
“About what?”
She pauses. I can’t read her face and see if it’s worry sketched onto her features or anger.
; Blanche sighs. “God, I would really love a smoke.”
“Well, this room smells like a humidor vomited on itself, so maybe don’t.”
She laughs. “Okay. What I can say is that I’ve made mistakes, Court. I don’t want to go into details, but I’ve made mistakes.”
“And Paige knows about them.” When she doesn’t answer, I continue. “You can keep as much or as little from me as you want. I’m not Faith. It doesn’t hurt me if I’m not included. We’re best friends. All I’m saying is, I’m here for you.”
She sniffles. “I know. It was stupid of me not to tell you.” She exhales a deep, cleansing breath. “But anyway, that’s neither here nor there. The point is, what I’m trying to say is that I shouldn’t have come here, to this cabin, not after what I know.”
The top of my head tingles, and the feeling works its way behind my ears. “What do you mean, after what you know?”
Blanche faces me, and the outside light catches her eyes. Hurt burns in them. “You need to be careful about who your friends are. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
I laugh bitterly. “That’s awfully cryptic.”
“I’m not trying to make decisions for you. I don’t want to influence how you feel about anyone here.”
“You mean Paige.”
She turns away, which puts her in silhouette. It’s like watching a black-and-white movie. Blanche is all slices of light and dark, gray and pale. And that’s how I feel about this conversation. There is no depth, no deeper level. We’re skating on an icy surface, afraid to plunge into the truth beneath us.
“Paige is not your friend,” she whispers.
“She acts like it.”
Blanche shakes her head. “She does a good job acting, and I believed that she was my friend. For a long time I believed it. But she’s not. What she did to me…I won’t burden you with it. But if you’re smart, you’ll come with me tomorrow morning and get as far away from Paige Varnell as you can.”
The tingle in my head works its way to my shoulders. It is like a harbinger of doom—the feeling, worming down my body.
I rise and reach for Blanche. “You can’t be serious. What could Paige have do—”
The door creaks open and Blanche jumps. I gasp, my heart raging again. Is it Paige? Have we been discovered talking about her?
When no one enters, I cross to the door, swinging it wide.
No one is there. I can see the hallway well enough. My eyes have adjusted, and there’s enough light to make out slabs of furniture.
“Who is it?” Blanche whispers.
“No one. Must’ve just been the air pressure from the heater pushing the door in.”
“Didn’t you shut it all the way?” she says in an accusing voice.
“Yes.”
I thought I did, but did the tongue actually latch into the slot? I can’t remember.
It doesn’t matter. There’s no one in the hallway. If it had been Paige or Faith, they would’ve had to sprint not to be seen. That, we would have heard.
But the shadows loom, and there are hiding spots in shadows.
Blanche brushes past me, done with our conversation. But before she strides completely down the hallway and out of sight, she stops, turns.
“If you decide to stay, be sure to watch your back.”
With that, Blanche disappears up the stairs, leaving me standing alone in the study.
But I don’t feel like I am alone. The tingle has returned, and it feels like a thousand eyes are all pointing at me, watching and waiting.
But Paige and Faith are in bed, aren’t they?
Deciding I don’t feel like investigating farther, I close the window and shut the door behind me. Then I walk briskly down the hall and take the stairs two at a time. When I reach my room, I shut the door, pushing and turning the knob to lock it.
Like Blanche said, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Chapter 15
I sleep fitfully the rest of the night. By the time I wake up and look at the clock, it’s eight.
I don’t remember the last time that I slept in so late. Blanche must’ve slept late, too, because she isn’t at my door asking for the keys to leave.
Maybe she’s changed her mind and is downstairs eating breakfast.
A bubble of laughter bursts in my throat. There’s no way in hell that Blanche is downstairs heating up Pop-Tarts and snuggling on the couch.
She wanted the hell out of this house.
I peel crust from my eyes and sit up, blinking at the window. The color jutting into the room is off. It’s not the yellow sun shining inside. The light is gray, a smoky color.
I stretch and feel a twinge of ache in my back. Groaning, I halve at the waist and curl into a fetal position, stretching the vertebrae.
Sometimes the ache lasts a few hours. Sometimes it goes away quickly. I never really know how the day will be—whether I’ll be achy for hours or minutes. But either way, I live with it, refusing to take painkillers. Ibuprofen will eat at my kidneys and Tylenol will eat at my liver, so I prefer to just deal if I can.
Back in the old days of the pharmacy, my mom kept expired bottles of narcotics around forever. Sometimes she’d send them off to be disposed of. Other times she’d keep them.
When someone came in dying of pain (and this was before there were so many rules and regulations on hydrocodone-based narcotics) and they couldn’t get to their doctor for a few days to deal with it, Mama would give them a small vial and drop a few of the expired drugs inside.
“I’m here to help people,” she would explain to me later. “The pharmacist’s role is to serve the community. That’s what I’m doing—serving them.”
Was it wrong to give them painkillers? Where is the line between helping and hurting someone?
The folks Mama slipped the drugs to—they always had a prescription on file for pain meds but couldn’t get an appointment with their doctor for several more days, and the doctor wouldn’t refill anything until the patient was seen.
Some of these were folks on fixed incomes. They couldn’t drop everything and go to the emergency room for a new Rx. They couldn’t afford it.
Folks in the community need help. They don’t need suspicion; that’s what my mother would say.
Those were the days when Mama would buy the painkillers in big thousand-count tubs. She’d buy twenty of them at a time to keep her going for months.
That was also when she realized the pills were disappearing. We were going through them too fast, she commented, dispensing too much.
Mama wasn’t the best at inventory. She never really kept track, though she tried.
But even though she wasn’t great at it, she realized that the pills were vanishing at an alarming rate, and as much as she hated to face it, someone in-house was doing the stealing.
I don’t know why I’m thinking of this as I rise from my bed and shuffle over to the window. I peer through the slats in the blinds and blink. And blink again.
White pelts the glass. Below, everything is covered in a thick mound of the stuff.
Snow. I suck in my cheeks. That’s why Blanche hasn’t come up to get the keys. She can’t.
Have I mentioned that no one in the South drives in snow? We don’t know how. We might have four-wheel drives, but that doesn’t mean Billy Bob has a clue about snow.
As soon as even a hint of snow comes our way, everything closes. The world shuts down. We hole up in our homes and wait for it to melt.
But this—this is a blessing. This could heal the tension that Blanche is feeling. All we have to do is go outside, throw some snowballs, and remember why we’re all friends to begin with.
Too naive?
Probably, but I am not going to sit around and let some girl tension ruin anything else. I pull on jeans and tug on my sneakers, realizing that I made a bad decision in not bringing boots. But then again, the only boots I have are for show. They lack any real tread, something that could keep me balanced on a slick surface.
Well then, my trip outside will be short. Fine with me.
After I’m dressed, I head downstairs and find Faith eating a bowl of oatmeal and Blanche standing at the window, staring outside.
I try to sound as pleasant as possible when I say, “I don’t know about y’all, but I’m going to head outside and build myself a snowman.”
Blanche turns when she hears me and shakes her head. “Do you really think that I would’ve let a little snow stop me from leaving?”
“Yes, I do.”
Faith glances up from her bowl. “Go ahead and tell her, Blanche.”
My gaze swivels from Faith to Blanche. “Tell me what?”
“Come here,” Blanche says.
She opens the door.
The cold slams into me. I notice that first and then realize that it’s not simply cold. A storm of tiny white spears jab and pierce my flesh. Wind screams and knives of ice attack the world.
The wind whirls and howls. And beyond it, I see crystal chunks layering every surface.
This is not powder. Upstairs, my eyes must’ve wanted to see snow. This is harder, thicker.
I stare at it. “Ice.”
Blanche clicks her tongue. “Ice. That’s exactly what this is. Hell, I would’ve attempted snow, but this…I can’t drive in this shit.” She gestures at it. “Look at the trees.”
They are encased in glass. Every branch, even the trunks sit like a relic of the past, like a petrified forest of the Arctic. Balls of ice form at the ends of the branches, looking almost like clear berries. I want to knock them together and listen to their chimes.
“We’re stuck here, at least until it melts,” Blanche says spitefully. “Which will hopefully be in the afternoon.”
A sea of clouds hovers overhead. They’re the color of laundry lint and look just as dense. “I don’t know,” I say warily. “This storm is bad. Have y’all put on the news?”
“Good idea.” Faith glances around. “Now where’s the remote?”
We step back into the house and shut the door.
“Gosh, it’s cold,” Faith said. “I thought y’all would never close that.”
“Can we put the weather on?” I ask.
Faith finds the remote under a magazine and flips the channel to a local station.
Don't Trust Her Page 9