by Norah Wilson
Not so much.
Connie rushed up to the window, hammered a hand down on it, and roared, “In!”
Just like that, Brooke found herself alone. She put on a press of speed to reach the window maybe twenty seconds behind Connie. Cursing, she tore off her copper bracelet and dropped it to the ground. Then she rapped on the glass and uttered the words that were second nature now. “I want in!”
Then she found herself back in her body and shooting across the room with more force than ever before. Covering her head with both hands and curling up, she managed to present her back to the far wall before impact. If it hurt, she barely felt it. She was flying too high on the adrenaline her body had been pumping out in her absence.
She leapt to her feet and began scanning the attic frantically. Where was Connie?
Duh. The only place she could be. The only place a cast could go on tapping back in. Connie must have gone back into what was left of her body.
If it worked.
And if it didn’t? What would happen then? Could her caster-self survive the attempt? And if so, could she get out of the house again? Shit, what if she couldn’t? What if she were trapped in this house of her horrors forever? Oh, Jesus, what had they done?
She tore down the steps, heading for the basement. It was only when she heard raised voices—C. W.’s and Maryanne’s—that she remembered Connie’s panic.
C. W.—Charles William. Billy. In the basement with Maryanne.
Brooke paused in the kitchen long enough to grab a knife, which she promptly dropped once she spied the meat cleaver. Much better.
Cleaver concealed behind her back, she glided to the basement door and started down the steps.
Her attempt at stealth was wasted, however. She knew this because Maryanne cried out, “Brooke! Don’t come down! He’s got a gun.”
Brooke froze, taking in the tableau before her. C. W. held Maryanne by the hair—none too gently, from the look on her face—and held a small pistol to her head.
“Oh, do come down, Miss Saunders. I’m so glad you could join us. It saves me the inconvenience of searching for you.”
Brooke’s heart thundered in terror, and the adrenaline in her system screamed for her to run. Of course, he’d just shoot her with that pistol if she tried. Besides which, she wasn’t leaving Maryanne to this monster. Together, maybe they could take him. On that thought, she slid the cleaver blade into the back pocket of her jeans and let her hands fall to her sides.
“Come down here,” he ordered. “Now!”
“No, don’t!” Maryanne shouted. “He’s the one who attacked Alex!”
Oh, God! This old geezer cracked Alex’s skull? Bit her? The bastard!
At Brooke’s hesitation, C. W. gave Maryanne’s hair a vicious tug, making her gasp.
“Disobedience is so unflattering in a lady,” C. W. clipped. “And you don’t want me to take my... displeasure... out on your friend here, do you?”
“Whoa! Chill. I’ll come down.” Brooke lifted her hands, palms out, to show she bore no weapons. “But I feel it’s only fair to warn you that I’m no lady.”
“No, you’re a whore, just like your friend, Alex. Like the rest of the little whores in this house.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Brooke said, trying to keep her voice from quavering. “Maybe we can find some middle ground.”
“Get your smart mouth down here!” he shouted, driving the barrel of the pistol into Maryanne’s temple.
Well, okay then.
Praying the cleaver wouldn’t fall out of her shallow pocket and clatter down the steps—damn her low-rise jeans—she started down the stairs. Then stopped dead on the last step.
Holy shit!
A bony hand appeared at the edge of Connie’s grave. As Brooke watched, another hand mashed flat onto the dirt floor beside it. Then Connie’s body—her mummified, largely skeletonised body—rose from the grave. But, oh God in heaven, it was more than a mere body now! It was a vehicle for Connie’s cast. The empty eye sockets that had so freaked Brooke out on first glimpse were no longer empty. They glowed now with a fierce, angry white light.
As Connie crawled from the pit that had held her all those years, Brooke’s mouth fell open.
“Miss Saunders?”
When she failed to reply, C. W. turned to see what could possibly have a stronger claim on her attention than his threats. The old man’s whole body jerked with a reaction that would have been comical in other circumstances. “No,” he whispered. The gun dropped from his hand, landing on the earthen floor with a soft thud.
Maryanne broke free from his suddenly lax grip and scuttled over to join Brooke at the base of the stairs, but C. W. hardly seemed to notice the loss of his hostage. He couldn’t tear his eyes off the vision of bone and sinew standing there with those glowing, rage-filled eye sockets.
“No!” This time, it was a cry not a whisper. As Connie’s corpse advanced on him, he clutched one hand to his chest and backed up, extending the other in front of him as though to ward Connie off.
“You’re dead!” he said.
Connie grabbed the shovel.
“We killed you!” C. W. took another stumbling step backward, not seeming to realize that he’d put himself in a corner. Connie kept advancing.
Maryanne clung harder to Brooke, and Brooke hugged her right back.
“This isn’t happening! It can’t be happening. Father killed you. I saw him do it. I helped him bury you.”
“Alive!” Impossibly, a croaking, terrible voice rattled out of Connie’s body. “You buried me alive!”
Unable to move back any further, he shrank before her horrible fury. “I’m sorry... we didn’t know. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t.”
“You killed my baby! My little Lily Michelle!”
“That was Father’s doing, not mine,” he cried. “Not me.”
Connie just kept advancing remorselessly.
Cornered, C. W. fell to his knees. “Connie, please don’t do this,” he begged. “It was bad, what I did. It was such a long time ago. I... I was just a boy myself.”
“Alex wasn’t a long time ago. You weren’t a boy when you hurt my friend.”
“But—”
He didn’t get a chance to rationalize his actions.
Connie grabbed him, then opened her skeletal jaw impossibly wide.
“Get ready,” Maryanne whispered to Brooke. She knew what was coming, and she and Brooke held each other tightly. They braced themselves. Braced their minds.
And Connie shrieked. Long and loud and mind-rending as the rapist crumbled before her. She shredded C. W.’s sanity. Broke him, mind, body, and soul. He dropped to the floor, and curled up in a shaking fetal position, urine darkening his trousers and soaking the soil around him.
Then—oh God!—Connie swung the shovel in a wicked downward arc, striking C. W.—Billy—squarely in the head. Connie stopped her shrieking just in time to hear the sickening yet glorious thunk as the shovel bashed his skull.
After a few stunned seconds, the girls pulled themselves apart.
Brooke rushed to pick up the gun. C. W. didn’t look like he was about to get up again, but she’d watched too many horror movies. The bad guy always had one last gasp in him.
After a minute, Maryanne was at his side, her fingers searching for a pulse, first on his wrist, then on his scrawny, old-man neck.
Brooke held her breath.
Maryanne looked up, first at Connie, then at Brooke.
“He’s dead,” she said.
Chapter 42
Beholding Eyes
Maryanne
“I saw her when she came for her body,” Maryanne whispered to Brooke, who now knelt beside C. W.’s body with her. “I saw just the dark whoosh of it, down through the ceiling, into the grave. C. W.’s back was to her, but I saw. And I knew... ” Maryanne’s eyes were wide as she stared at Brooke, then went wider as Connie shuffled closer.
“Did I... scare you?” Connie asked.
Brooke stood too.
“He’s dead? Billy’s dead?” Almost disbelievingly, Connie’s words rattled forth, so slurred and sluggish now that Maryanne could barely understand her.
“He is,” Maryanne reassured her.
“Good,” Connie said. There was no remorse in her tone. Maryanne wouldn’t have expected it. “He won’t hurt anyone again. He won’t hurt me. He won’t hurt any of you. You three are my friends.”
Steeling herself, Maryanne went to her. Connie was growing weaker, not just in her voice, but in her skeletal remains. They trembled. The light in her eyes was dimming, but that was to be expected. That was to be hoped for. That Connie would find her rest.
“I’m... so, so tired,” she said. Maryanne caught Connie as she stumbled. Holding onto one bare arm bone, she didn’t flinch. Wouldn’t flinch as she supported the corpse, wrapping her hands around the cold bone. She looked into the skeletal face of Connie, into those fading eyes. And Connie looked back.
“Then rest, Connie,” Brooke said. Without hesitation, she too took one of Connie’s arms to support her. “You deserve to rest.”
“Do I?” she asked. “Do I really?”
“You saved me,” Maryanne said. Her eyes filled with tears and she just let them spill down her cheeks. “You saved me, and who knows how many other girls you saved from C. W.—Billy.”
Connie nodded. “And there... there was a little boy once, years and years ago. He almost drowned in that pond. But... but I saved him too. I pulled him out. My life... my existence. It was... ”
“It was right. It was just,” Brooke said. “Not just because you saved others. But because you saved yourself. You survived what you had to survive.”
Through crying eyes Maryanne looked at Brooke, and she could almost swear she saw tears brimming in Brooke’s eyes too. “You’re a strong one, Connie Harvell,” Maryanne said. “You always were.”
“Now,” Brooke said softly, “it’s time for you to rest.”
Connie lowered her head. “Yes. I’m ready. Say goodbye to Alex for me.” Maryanne had to lean her head closer to hear Connie now. “Tell her I love her. Love all my soaring sisters. So much.”
Maryanne watched as the light dimmed completely from Connie’s eyes. Her frame went limp and the two girls eased her to the floor. Then Maryanne and Brooke carefully lowered her back into the ground. They scrambled back up and sat beside the open grave looking down at the silent bones.
“Is she at peace?” Brooke asked. Somehow even she’d come to respect Maryanne’s feelings.
Maybe, Maryanne thought, she should respect them more herself.
Maryanne closed her eyes, let the pulse of the room pour into her. She let herself accept the intuitive feeling around her. She didn’t grab for it, but she didn’t run from it. She felt it in every last cell. And Maryanne absolutely did not dismiss it. She knew.
“Yes. She’s at peace. She did it. Connie made it back it to her body.” Maryanne blinked back tears. “And the anger and bitterness I felt before, concentrated so powerfully in her bones? It’s all dissipated now. Gone. She’s at rest.”
A full five minutes later, it was Brooke who broke the silence, articulating for both of them the next step. Another dreaded step. “We have to call the police.”
She stood, pulling her cell phone from the pocket of her jeans as she walked to the steps. She sat and she flipped the phone open. But she waited before she punched in the numbers. “I killed C. W. Stanley,” she said. “That’s what we tell the cops. We both found Connie’s body. I went upstairs... to the bedroom to grab my phone. It took me a few minutes to find it. When I came back down, C. W. was holding a gun on you and saying he was going to kill you. That’s our story, Maryanne. Our unshakable story.”
Maryanne slowly nodded. There could be no other way—the truth would be kept between them—she and the other casters, forever.
Holding Brooke’s steadfast stare, Maryanne picked up where Brooke left off as if they were talking to the police already. “Billy... I mean, C. W.—came down the stairs and found me by Connie’s grave. While Brooke was up looking for her phone, he confessed to having attacked Alex the other night. And that this was his step-sister’s grave. He killed Connie Harvell long ago—he and his father. Thank goodness Brooke came back when she did. She snuck up on C. W. and clocked him with the shovel. He had a gun. He would have killed me if she hadn’t done it.”
Brooke chewed her lip a moment. “But how... how did we know to dig for a body?”
“We found an old diary.”
“Who found an old diary?”
“You and me. Only you and me.”
“Where?” Brooke asked. “Not the attic. The less people snoop around up there, the better.”
Maryanne lowered her head into her hand for a moment, then looked up with the sudden answer. “Buried in an old tin can, out by the old oak by the river, way back in September. The ground is frozen over now. We read, and found out that the diary belonged to Connie Harvell. Connie wrote that she knew they were coming to murder her—Billy and her stepfather. We just thought they may have buried her in the basement since they killed her in the depths of winter. We decided to see if we were right. And we just... just found the body.”
“The first place we dug?”
“Yeah,” she gulped. “Lucky us.”
Brooke wet her lips, but she nodded her approval.
Maryanne didn’t know how she could do it—remain so calm. So... Brooke-like!
“Where’s the diary now?” Brooke asked, continuing the practice cross-examination.
“C. W. found it,” Maryanne said. “He told me he found it. We... you and I... hid it in our room and he found it there a week ago. He used those keys to search the rooms.” She pointed to the key box on the wall. “But he told me he burned the diary to get rid of all the evidence of Connie’s confinement and torture at his hands.”
Brooke had one final question. “And if the police don’t believe us?”
“They will,” Maryanne answered shakily. “They’ll have to believe us when we tell them about Connie’s baby. Lily Michelle must be buried here too. They’ll dig up the whole damn basement—find that skeleton too. And C. W.’s prints will be on the gun.”
“Yeah, along with mine.” Brooke grimaced.
“Well of course you picked up the gun! Before we knew he was actually dead. But his prints will be on there too.”
“And he bit Alex,” Brooke said. “The police will be able to match that bite, and whatever other forensic evidence the bastard left behind.”
“Right,” Maryanne said. “So... so we’ve got this covered?” Oh, God, she wanted desperately to cast out. Just for a few minutes, just to fortify herself against what was about to happen. Just one quick cast! But there was no time. John Smith could be here any minute. And any more delay would look suspicious.
“We’ve got it covered.” Brooke drew a shaky breath, forced a smile. She looked down at her phone. “We’ll be okay, Maryanne. We just... we just have to get through this. Stick to the story, no matter what, and just get through it.”
“I know.” Maryanne bit out one last question. One she simply had to ask and simply had to ask now. “What about you, Brooke?”
She looked up. “What do you mean?”
“Everyone in Mansbridge will know that you killed Mr. Stanley. Even if it was to save me, you’ll have his blood on your hands. You know how everyone around here will look at you. How everyone will talk about you. Stories take on a life of their own in Mansbridge—you know that as well as I do. As far as this town is concerned, Brooke, you’ll be the girl who killed a man. Who bashed his brains in with a shovel. You’ll be—”
“I’ll be a legend in this town.” Brooke’s eyes shone with the promise. “Yeah, I’ll be a damned legend! In every way imaginable. And I’m quite all right with that.”
Maryanne stared at B
rooke as she dialed.
“Come quickly,” Brooke sobbed into the phone. “Something horrible’s happened at Harvell House!” With that she snapped the phone shut, and smiled at Maryanne. Within a minute they heard the sirens.
“It’s going to be okay,” Brooke reassured again as the doors to the house flew open. She ran to Maryanne and held her close, as if they’d been consoling each other. “It’ll be over soon.”
In one way it would be over soon. But Maryanne knew, bone deep, that the soaring sister who held her now, would be a legend in this Mansbridge town. In every way imaginable, and then some.
It had only just begun.
“Down here!” Brooke called.
The basement door burst open, and a police officer, gun drawn, came cautiously down.
Chapter 43
Look Up
Maryanne
Maryanne let the sobs come. She didn’t even try to stop them. Not this time.
Today, she would let those tears fall and fall and fall. Right here beneath the sunlit Madonna on the attic floor.
She should be in school. She had been in school at least briefly. But she’d left about fifteen minutes into first period, telling Mr. McKenzie that she wasn’t feeling well and was going home for the day. He must have seen it in Maryanne’s eyes that she was ready to burst out crying. Or burst out with something else—like how he’d drunkenly come on to her. Because all at once his sneer vanished, and he released her from class.
Maryanne had started walking toward the hospital as she left the school. It was Alex’s last day in Mansbridge. As C. W. Stanley had said, they were transferring her to a hospital in Halifax, closer to her family. Alex’s mother had already left Mansbridge, since her daughter would be transported the next day by ambulance. Mrs. Robbins had stopped into Harvell House to say good-bye to Maryanne, Brooke and Mrs. Betts before she caught the bus out of town.
Maryanne had to see Alex one more time. If only one more time. And going to that hospital had been her full intention as she’d walked down the school steps.