“Is Mrs. Perenna changing things?” I asked.
“She's doing her best to. Wants to make the town a bit bigger – add more shops, expand the school, get a clinic here – the works.”
“That might not be so bad,” I said with a shrug, vaguely thinking that a clinic was hardly something to complain about given what had happened to Tommy.
“She's making it a tourist spot,” Mrs. Coffey snapped. “Thinks the woods are great for snowmobiles and's been trying to make Kipling a sort of pre-stop before they all head up to Sugarloaf. Well, I say let them carry onto Sugarloaf – we don't need any tourists around here, looking for trinkets and taking pictures of the leaves changing in Fall. They change the same everywhere in New England.”
“Right,” I said. I glanced around her small shop, taking in the few remaining customers eating at the tables, and then added, “I bet you could sell a lot more if tourists came up here, though. They'd probably buy anything with Maine blueberries and those other ones – choke-berries.”
“Chokecherries,” she corrected. “And I don't need to be selling to them. I've been cooking for the same people for forty years – I know the families, and they're like my family. I don't need to be making anything for out-of-staters.”
“Right.” I nodded and tugged at my collar. “Don't blame you.”
“I'm not talking about you, mind you,” she said. “I like Jack – he's a nice boy. But ten years ago you wouldn't of even found Kipling on a map, and no one would've strolled in here looking for a place to call home, and now we're getting them moseying through a bit too often, if you know what I mean, and if Isadora keeps it up, it'll only get worse.”
She waved her hands at me and rearranged the pies lining the top shelf of the display case in order to fit them all on one platter, then gave a long sigh.
“Maybe I shouldn't complain,” she said. “The woman just lost another child, after all, and I feel sorry for her in that regard. But she doesn't like it here, and if you don't want to live here, then I say 'leave' – don't go messing with the way things are.”
“Maybe she does like it here,” I said. “She's been here for a while, right?”
“Over twenty years, now,” Mrs. Coffey said. “Tommy'd be twenty-one come springtime. That's something to think about for all of us, I'd say. Strange how time passes.”
My brow furrowed over my eyes.
“Maybe that's why she's stayed, then,” I said, thinking of how his room was still preserved at the Perennas' house. My father had wasted no time in clearing out my mother's belongings even before she had actually died, and had sold the house before taking the opportunity to move as far away as work would allow. “There's probably a lot of … memories here for her.”
Mrs. Coffey clicked her tongue.
“You seem like a nice boy,” she said. “Sensitive, even. But when you've lived as long as I have, you get a bit more cynical. That woman might've loved her children as much as any mother does, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't of been up and out of here in a heartbeat if she thought she'd get anything from the divorce.”
“So there's a pre-nup, then?” I said, thinking that Jack's assumption had been right.
“You bet there is. And I'm not just talking money – she wouldn't get custody of her children, either. Not that that matters now, mind you, seeing as only Eliot's left.”
I nodded and looked down at the counter, thinking of how disappointed the Perennas must have been to have their only remaining child not be the talented, well-loved, normal boy that Tommy had been, and for a moment I actually felt rather sorry for him. He certainly wasn't the type of person that seemed fit to be the heir to his father's estate and establishments, and I vaguely wondered if Mr. Perenna would simply find a replacement for the son that he had lost the way that my father had done with me. As I considered it, my throat tightened slightly in the dry air as I imagined my name being written over in his will with that of Oliver, Emily and Ava's – and even though I hardly cared about the money that I might have received upon his death, there was something in the principal of it all that disturbed me, and despite feeling like an insolent child, I had no desire to share my father even though I didn't particularly want him, either.
“I've drained you,” Mrs. Coffey said suddenly, pulling me from my thoughts. I shook my head in an attempt to pretend that I was simply tired, but she was giving me a look of utter sympathy as though she knew what I had been thinking. “How about a slice of cobbler and a cup of coffee? It's on the house.”
I shook my head again, but then rubbed at the bridge of my nose and changed my mind.
“Coffee would be great.”
She gave me both, and I wrapped my hands around the large mug and nodded to myself in content at the familiar smell that had been missing for the past few days. As she put the cobbler in front of me, I consented to pick up the fork to be polite.
“Is this chokecherry, again?”
“Elderberry,” she said. “It's preserves again, but if you're around in June, I'll have a whole slew of fresh ones – it makes a difference in the flavor like you wouldn't believe.”
I gave her a tight smile and took a bite of the food, then another sip of coffee in order to swallow it. I was beginning to doubt that I would be around next week the way I had planned to be, never mind in the summertime.
When I returned to the church late that evening after mindlessly strolling around the town, Jack was giving Mea her dinner and coaxing her to eat it. Putting the box of pastries down on the table, I pulled off my jacket and took a seat in the chair in an attempt not to distract her from doing so.
“I heard something went on downstairs today,” Jack said, looking up from where he was kneeling. “Father Taggart said you were hurt or something – but he didn't know how or by who.”
“Yeah.”
“You alright?” he said, his hand still outstretched towards Mea where she was munching kibble from it.
“Fine,” I said, my voice bitter at his lack of regard for what he had stirred up in my head again. “I nearly died – but I'm fine.”
“But this is good,” Jack replied, his tone too excited for what the occasion called for. “This means we're really onto something – do you think it was the same guy from the cemetery?”
I paused with my teeth clenched down on either of my cheeks, chewing them as I thought of how to respond. It had occurred to me that what had happened in the cemetery the night before might have been different than what I had initially thought, and just as Father Taggart hadn't seen the demon-like figure that I had assumed had tried to drown me, Jack had never seen the one whom I had claimed had grabbed my arm. It was all unreal everywhere but inside my own head, and any bit of evidence that I seemed to have collected or theories that he had urged me to form were nothing more than anything else I had ever drawn up to fill in the silence of my own mind; and unlike the music that I had grown accustomed to listening to back in the safety of the apartment in Connecticut, the lies would not be benign.
“Could've been,” I said shortly.
“Must have been, you mean,” he said, dumping the rest of the kibble onto the floor for Mea to finish before standing up. “It's the only thing that makes sense. Someone's onto us – which means that we're onto someone.”
I sighed and turned my head to the window, wishing for another cup of coffee or one of his cigarettes, but knowing that I wouldn't get either any time soon.
“What?” he said, noting my lackluster response.
“Nothing, I'm just not as pleased as you are to've nearly died twice in the three days that I've been here.”
“Ah, come on Nim,” he said with a grin. “No one's trying to kill you – they're just trying to frighten you into thinking as much.”
“Well, it's working,” I said, unable to tell him what I really thought about both incidents. His understanding had only ever extended so far, and while I couldn't blame him for knowing nothing of how the illness affected me, it didn't stop me from be
ing irritated with him even so. My mind was tricking me into killing myself, and I knew exactly why: the guilt that I had felt over everything that I had caused was coming back to me with full-force, and this time, at last, no amount of coping mechanisms or promises to be a better person could persuade it that I was in any way deserving to continue on.
“Well, then we'll just have to figure out who's doing it and stop them,” he said unconcernedly. “Luckily there aren't a lot of people in the town to begin with, so if you can give me a better description of what you saw –”
“No, I don't think I can,” I said. The image of the demonic figure flashed back in front of my eyes, and it lingered in an outline against his form even though I tried to blink it away. “It was dark, and the second time he came up behind me.”
“Alright, but you said he was tall and thin, right? And he was able to chase us through the snow, so that means he's got to be pretty fit. Say, it wasn't Mr. Perenna, was it? Or the son? They're both pretty tall –”
“That doesn't even make sense,” I snapped. “Why would Mr. Perenna kill his own children, or Eliot kill his siblings? They're fucked up, but not to that extent.”
“You never know: we've seen better people do worse things.”
I shook my head, no longer willing to partake in the conversation. I was uncertain if he was referring to what Albertson had done to Miss Mercier and the girls on Bardom Island or if he was taking a dig at what I had done to Beringer, but either way it caused fury to seep through my ribcage.
“I don't want to talk about this anymore, Jack,” I said, finally making up my mind. “I think I'm – I think I'm done with this.”
“What're you talking about? Done with looking into Anna's death? We've only just started – and we're already close to something big!”
“Yeah, something that we shouldn't be close to in the first place,” I said angrily. “This is stupid: we shouldn't be involved in this – it has nothing to do with us.”
“It has to do with everyone!” he countered. “Come on, Nim – we're the only ones who see what this is, and we're the only shot at finding out what really happened –”
“But it doesn't matter! This doesn't matter! It never did, and it never will – she's dead, and so is her brother, and dredging it all up isn't going to do anyone any good –”
“It'll do plenty of good if we stop some lunatic from running around killing people!”
“This isn't Bardom Island!” I shouted, slamming my hand against the table in frustration. “This isn't Miss Mercier and those missing girls, and figuring this out won't change the fact that we were too late for them and too late for the Perennas – and none of this is worth it!”
His face had taken on a shocked expression at my outburst, but I knew that it would only last momentarily. He had been convincing me to do things for too long, and the only reason that I had ever come in the first place was to escape what I had thought would be a worse situation, and now that I could see that that wasn't so, I had no desire to cater to his schemes anymore. The reason that I had done so well in the past few years had little to do with Karl's care, or my seclusion of the world, or the coping mechanisms that I had established to keep myself in a state of sanity: it had to do with the fact that, for once in the last ten years, I had had nothing to do with him.
“This is fucked!” I said. “We're fucked! And this – this is just going to turn into a series of endless riddles for you, and you're going to go chasing every unsolved murder hoping that one of them will make you feel any better about what happened to Miss Mercier, and none of them ever will!”
“Speak for yourself,” he said, his voice low and slicing. “I'm not the one who's obsessed with things that don't matter – that's you. I'm trying to do something right with my life –”
“Something right?” I spat. “You moved up to a town in the middle of nowhere, as close as you could possibly find to one like Bardom Island, and you've just been waiting around for something like this to happen –”
“You think I've been waiting for someone to get murdered?” he said. He stared at me with a dumbfounded expression that melted into one of resentment. “You really think that, Nim? Or is this one of your delusions?”
“Fuck you, Jack. I'm not the one who's deluded this time,” I said, standing back up and snatching my jacket as it slipped from the back of the chair. “You're living in the past being here and thinking that we can still do things like this, and we can't! It's not our job to chase down murderers – it's time you did something with your life besides for living in your stupid ideas of adventure!”
“Me? You're the one who's doing nothing with your life!” he shot back. “You're the one who can't move on, who's living off of your dead mother's inheritance and taking advantage of Karl's loneliness!”
“I'm doing the best that I can to deal with something that I have no control over! You have no excuse – and I wouldn't even be here if I could just fucking detach from you without you making me believe that things can ever be like they were before all of this!”
Jack scoffed.
“It's not me you can't detach from,” he said lowly, “it's Karl. You're just too afraid of being on your own and not having someone there to tell you what to do and who to be – and you were always like that, way before your mind snapped into two.”
I ran my tongue over my teeth and scowled; the jaggedness broke the skin and a hint of blood trickled down the back of my throat.
“I'm just trying to make things right again – or for once,” I said, forcing my voice to be somewhat calm again. “I don't want to end up … a way that I don't have to be.”
I pulled my coat on and looked over to find Mea, but she was whimpering and cowering beneath the bed in fright from our raised voices and I knew that I wouldn't be able to coax her out again. Turning from Jack, I stepped towards the door alone. I would come back and collect her later; if Jack couldn't understand what he was doing, then there was nothing that could make me stay there with him for a moment longer.
I reached the door and pulled it open, but paused when he spoke again.
“So that's it, then?” he said. “You're leaving?”
“I can't stay, Jack,” I said, half angry and half numb. “This isn't – I can't do this with you.”
He shook his head and gave me a cold look.
“Fine.” His voice was flat, but somehow angrier than I ever remembered it being. “But just think, Nim – who's ever going to give a fuck about you other than me?”
I slammed the door behind me and hurried down the stairs. In the silence, the sound of it reverberated against the wood in a hollow echo that seemed to press against my back as it pushed me to the door. And I wouldn't be sorry to leave him there, and I wouldn't be sorry for anything that I had said, but a part of me had finally realized that there was nothing that could be done to ever pull us back together again, and it struck me with a rise of sorrow to know that I would miss him far longer than he would me.
Ch. 11
I exited the church into the yard and took a seat on the ice-covered steps, pulling my jacket further about me as I tried to decide what to do. From where I sat, I had a clear view of the cemetery and the gravestones shined in glistening shapes beneath the moonlight in the distance, and the world outside seemed empty but for the dead.
I had to go back home, I knew. Back to the dull, lifeless apartment that I shared with Karl where I could be alone with the music that no one else heard, thinking of the monotony with fondness only because I knew that it kept my mind so still. And it would be better that way – that much I had known all along – because I wasn't meant for the world the way that other people were, and I didn't belong out amongst them where I could seep poison onto their skin. The only reason that I permitted myself to stay with Karl instead of completely alone was because he needed me there to have a point to his life and a role that he could still fill, and allowing him to do so was the last bit of goodness that I had bottled up and saved for th
e world even when the rest of my life had been found to be entirely meaningless.
And Jack had been right to think that no one would care about me outside of the space that so tightly wound its way around me, because I knew that Karl simply needed someone to take care of to fill the void that had overtaken his life after my mother had left it, and not because he felt anything for the hollow, brittle thing that sat inside of my clothes. But I also knew that Jack didn't really care about me the way that he had thrown at me that he had. He needed me in the same sense that Karl did: someone to walk alongside when the rest of the world had retreated from his path, and someone to listen to the words he was speaking even though they weren't heard in the way that he wanted them to be. He was hoping that I was someone different, just as Karl was hoping that I was someone different, and though I was fragmented, I wasn't a piece of who either of them were hoping that I would be.
I pulled my sleeves down to cover my hands, but they were raw and throbbing in the cold. I wanted to return to Connecticut so that I could go back to living the way that I had so successfully been doing for the past few years, but there was still the question of my father's health to keep me from doing so. I could neither tell Karl nor not tell him, and it was impossible to decide where to go once I crossed through the churchyard and cemetery into the main part of town. I couldn't stay there now, and I couldn't leave, either, and deciding where to go was every bit as difficult as deciding who to be.
“You'll catch a draft out here, I think,” said a voice from the door.
Father Taggart had come out onto the steps. He had donned a coat and thick gloves that nearly made him look like any other stranger passing through the town streets, but the white collar was still visible around his neck to tell me otherwise. I pulled my shoulders up and gave him a shrug.
“I'm fine,” I said, though the chill felt as though it was slicing into my skin.
When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3) Page 14