“Number one, don’t you ever let me hear you’ve hurt another dog. And number two, you killed Hugh’s dog, didn’t you?”
A second of stillness, then a sullen nod.
“Did you bury him?”
A shake of the head, then a shrug.
“What the hell does that mean? You show me where that poor dog’s bones are, and you’d better fucking hope you know.”
Silas grinned blackly, and I could see he’d been missing several teeth in life. Maybe that fetid smell was the ghost of his gross breath. He floated down into the pit of his root cellar, then pointed to a shady corner where I could make out what looked like a patch of poison oak. It seemed like a lovely place for critters to hide, and I gave him a suspicious look.
“I’ve been fucked with by enough people in this town, Silas. Do not piss me off.”
He just shrugged and pointed again. Luckily, I had a couple rags in my backpack that I mostly used to wipe Wulf’s muddy feet. I wrapped them around my hands and hopped down into the pit, then pushed aside the leaves.
He hadn’t buried the dog. In fact, by the looks of it, Silas Underwood had kept him on display for all these years. His bones were lying there neatly, the skull poking out of its blanket of poison oak like a real head poking out of a real blanket. A lot of bones were missing and a couple were broken, but what was there was arranged in a more-or-less dog-like shape.
“Crikey, you Underwoods are sick. Wulf, watch him.”
Wulf did a good job of terrorizing Silas while I picked up the bones as gently as I could, and put them in my backpack.
Climbing back out of the pit was harder than jumping into it had been, and I only then realized just how deep it was. No wonder I hadn’t noticed that skull poking out the first time I’d been there, even though Wulf and I had looked around for a bit. It would have been completely engulfed by the shadow of the dirt wall above it.
I turned back to Silas. “I’m telling you for the last time. No. More. Dogs. Or anyone for that matter. Don’t hurt anybody.”
Silas gave me his baleful ghost stare. I remembered what Charlie said the day before.
“Indicate you understand me.”
Like I had, Silas nodded, once.
“Well, if you can’t hurt anybody, and you’re just out here by yourself, why don’t you just move on?” I took a step closer, which meant Wulf did, too. Silas took a step back. “What’s the matter, Silas? Afraid you’re going to hell? Well, you’re probably right on that score.”
On that note, I turned and walked away.
I wasn’t quite sure where I was going, though. I’d walked Wulf around the hotel grounds often enough, but I didn’t remember seeing an old well anywhere. We passed a few hikers, and a couple walking their dog. I asked them if they’d noticed a well, but none of them had. No matter. Surely Hugh would show me.
He took his time about it, but he turned up eventually, on the lawn near the patio, not far from where I’d first met him.
“There you are, Hugh.”
He’d been smiling at Wulf, but looked up at the sound of his name.
“Yes, I know your name now. I heard your story. And I think I can help you. Can you show me the well, Hugh?”
He looked alarmed.
“Please? I promise it will be okay. I found your dog.”
For a second Hugh just stared, crying again, but he gave me a wobbly smile, too. Then he turned and floated away. Wulf and I followed. I bent to pick up every stick, rock, or leaf I passed along the way.
There wasn’t much left of the well, which had long since been filled, it seemed. Just a rough circle of old stones mostly buried under the grass. I knelt down beside them and said, “I’m afraid I’ll get caught if I try to dig a hole here, Hugh, but…”
I took the bones out of my bag, one at a time, and laid them inside the circle. Wulf whined, sniffing toward the bones, but he made no move to try to take them. He seemed to understand that this was a solemn occasion. I buried the bones beneath my little pile of debris. Someone would find them, no doubt, and move them. But I hoped it wouldn’t matter by then, that Hugh would be long gone.
“Is that close enough to being laid to rest beside you, do you think?”
Hugh was staring down at the bones. He fell to his ghostly knees, then laid down, hugging the battered skull of his dog. Wulf licked at where his cheek would have been, had it been solid.
“Your dog is at rest,” I said, wishing I knew the dog’s name. “He’s way past anything that scared him or hurt him that night. He’s okay now, and he’s with you.”
Hugh reached out toward the bones, then looked up at me for just a second, before he faded away. It was long enough for me to see those Pierce dimples, deep in a smile that was no longer sad.
“Take that, Helen Turner,” I said.
My pocket had been vibrating while we walked to the well. I pulled out my phone and saw it was a text from Phineas, telling me to meet him at The Witch’s Brew. I put Wulf in the car, even though it was a close walk. The only way I wanted to see the Mount Phearson hotel, ever again, was in my rear view mirror.
Phineas was sitting at the counter, talking to Wendy in a low voice, when I came in. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday, but there were still a few customers hanging around.
“What can I get you?” Caleb asked.
“Um. Just coffee.”
“Really?”
“No, I’ll take a shortbread too.”
Caleb laughed. “I’ve seen you what, three times? And I already know better.”
I smiled. “Make it to go though, I left my dog in the car this time. He’s had a long day.”
I sat down next to Phineas and smiled at Wendy, who gave me a brief wave before turning back to him and saying, “I’ll definitely let you know.”
Then she looked back at me. “I was just telling him the devil is most definitely not gone.”
A woman came up to the counter just then. As Wendy turned to help her, I leaned toward Phineas and whispered, “Is she sure?”
Phineas shrugged. “She says business is still booming, there haven’t been any car accidents or anything. Nothing has changed.”
“But that doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “It’s only been what, like a week?”
“Yeah, but Madeline Underwood was smug,” said Phineas. “I threatened her, told her she couldn’t expect to be safe from us now that she wasn’t under Amias’s protection anymore. And she was smug. Like she was still under his protection. Wouldn’t tell me anything, needless to say.”
“But she can’t be,” I said. “Gemma was the last one. Otherwise none of this would have been necessary.”
Wendy came back over. “Well, like I said, we’ll keep an eye out for you. Let you know if we see or hear anything that might help.”
Ten minutes later we were driving back toward home. I handed Phineas half my shortbread and said, “This doesn’t make sense.”
“No,” Phineas agreed. “It’s completely baffling that you would ever share a cookie.”
“Ha, ha.”
We didn’t come up with any answers on the way home, nor for quite some time afterward. The trail from Bristol was cold. I went back with Phineas a couple of times, but as the weeks went on, he started involving me less and less. After all, with Gemma gone, my part seemed to be over. And I couldn’t spend every day in Bristol looking for a devil who was not, technically, my jurisdiction. I still had a life and a job and a barely-within-my-means mortgage to pay.
I still dreamed about Gemma, usually horrible dreams, and I’d wake up feeling a phantom pain in my missing finger, as if I’d bitten it off all over again.
So that was no fun. And I missed Phineas sometimes, and felt bad that he hadn’t caught his devil yet. But apart from that I was feeling pretty good about things. Max was safe, Hugh was at peace.
And all these months after it shattered, I thought the canteen was finally, forever, behind me. I felt the usual combination of excitement and terror at the p
rospect. But I’d done okay so far, whatever Helen had to say about it.
In other words, as far as I was concerned, this story was winding down.
Things were rocky with Charlie for a while, but as time passed with no further incidents, and with me fitting Warren with a big fake nose for his grand debut as Pinocchio, they settled down. When the play finally came around in May, Martha and Max came with me. They were getting along splendidly, and she’d done a lot to help him through his grief, although I knew from personal experience that losing a sibling you were close to wasn’t something you got over. Max was quiet, but he’d lost his pale, sickly look. He loved cats, as it turned out, so there was really no reason why he shouldn’t stay with Martha permanently. She was delighted with that arrangement.
Warren was great, of course, and his Pinocchio nose held on fine the whole time, so it was a triumph for me as well. All in all, I was in a pretty good mood when I went to the little after party in the school cafeteria. I felt myself smiling as the default expression, for the first time in what felt like a really long time.
Maybe it was that glow of happiness that inspired Evan Brent to ask me for my number. He was a single dad, his son an acquaintance of Warren’s. I’d known him for years, and we were friendly, but never in that way. He was there with his ex-wife, which made the whole thing kind of awkward, but it seemed she was encouraging him to start dating again.
It was out of the blue, and I was about to politely demur with my usual excuses about not having time to date. But something stopped me. He wasn’t what you’d call handsome, Evan Brent, but there was something attractive about his kind eyes and the set of his chin. Plus he seemed kind of boring. At that point in my life, boring was appealing.
Why not? I asked myself, and was surprised by the question. If filthy cheating no-good Kevin can move on and have a baby with some young tramp, surely you can. Move on that is. You still can’t have a baby. But does that mean you can’t have any kind of romantic life at all?
I had a point. I gave him my number and hoped for the best.
We went out a couple weeks later, at the beginning of June, which was great because it gave me an excuse to wear one of the cute summer dresses that never made it out of my closet anymore. It still fit, so that was nice. The movie was also nice, and the food. Evan was nice. It was all nice. And boring. I told him I’d love to see him again.
It was a while before I got the chance. It was mid-June when I answered my door, expecting to find a package and instead finding Zack Warner on my front porch, holding a baby carrier in one hand, the kind that detaches from the car seat, and carrying a diaper bag over his shoulder. Through the pink blanket that covered the carrier I could just make out a tiny hand.
Surprise made me abrupt. “What are you doing here?”
“What was she doing here?” Zack countered. No shouts this time. He sounded exhausted and broken.
I was a little abashed by my initial rudeness. The guy was a jerk, and the last time I’d seen him he hit me, but he’d lost his wife, was caring for an infant along with his other children, and was standing on my porch carrying a reasonably heavy load.
“Please, come in.” I stepped aside. “Can I get you some coffee?”
Zack started to wave away the offer, then stopped and shrugged. “Coffee would be great, actually.”
He was unshaven, his eyes sunken. Things you’d expect of a new dad, especially a grieving one. I assumed the visit was just him still obsessing over this wife’s last day alive. I settled him on the couch, the sleeping baby in her carrier beside him, while I went to make the coffee.
When I came back and handed him his mug I said, “Mr. Warner, I knew Suzanne from years back. We were old friends. She came to visit me and we went to the mall. And while we were there, something went wrong. I wish I could give you a better reason for what you’ve suffered, but I can’t.” All true, or at least sort of.
“I might believe you,” Zack said, “except for the way you hesitate just before you say Suzanne. Like you were about to call her something else.”
He was smart and observant, I had to give him that much. I didn’t say anything. I decided to wait it out and see if he would fill in his own theory. He did, and smart and observant were again the words that came to mind.
“That wasn’t my wife.”
I was still quiet, but this time because I didn’t know what to say. I finally settled on “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean, but you do,” Zack said. “You didn’t look the least bit surprised when I said that. You know she wasn’t my wife. You know more than you’ve told me. Now tell me everything.” He grimaced as he did it, but he added, “Please.”
There seemed no point in further pretense. “How did you know?”
“She was different,” Zack said with a shrug. “Harder in some ways, softer in others. I’d have just chalked that up to pregnancy, but…” He trailed off while he took a few sips of his coffee, looking around the room. When he looked back at me he said, “I’m a busy man. I travel a lot. Because of that, I’m not always the most attentive husband. Wasn’t always.” He sighed. “But even I know when my wife’s eye color has changed. They were blue. Then they were brown. They’re not even similar colors.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“She gave me some story about a surgery that changes your eye color. A new experimental thing. Sounded like bullshit, but it wasn’t like I had any alternative theories, right? None that were sane, anyway.”
I nodded.
“And those dimples.” He looked sickened as he said it. “That was not her smile.”
I nodded again. I was trying to figure out where to start, how I could explain this to him, when the baby let out a few gurgles, then a cry from underneath her blanket. Zack picked her up and produced a bottle from his bag. For a few minutes neither of us spoke while he fed her. I could only see her back, but she looked perfect. She seemed to have recovered from the circumstances of her birth just fine.
When he set the bottle down, Zack stood up and walked around my living room while he burped her. “I knew she wasn’t my wife. There was no rational way to explain it, so I dismissed it, but I still knew.” His eyes actually filled with tears as he nodded at the bundle in his arms. “I thought she was my baby, though.”
“She is!” Finally, something helpful and good I could tell him. “She is your baby, Mr. Warner. Yours and Suzanne’s. What happened… happened after your little girl was conceived.” Odd, he hadn’t told me the baby’s name.
“Oh?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?” He started toward me.
“Positive.”
Zack held out the baby, and I took her reflexively, settling her into my arms and pushing the blanket aside so I could look at her face.
“Then you’ll have to explain something,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“She smiled for the first time earlier this week.”
I’d been stroking her tiny neck. I stopped, my finger suddenly cold, but she was already reacting to my touch. Baby girl Warner opened her brown eyes—a rich, liquidy brown—and smiled up at me.
And there, where they had no business being in a small baby’s face, were Gemma Pierce’s dimples.
Well, that explained why Madeline Underwood was smug and Phineas still couldn’t find Amias. There was still a living Tanner in Bristol.
It took a couple of days for Wulf to find Phineas. They showed up at my back door together, Wulf looking proud and hungry, Phineas looking wary. When he heard the whole story, his first reaction was, “I would have dropped her.”
“I almost did,” I said. “Not on purpose, obviously. The shock though.”
“That’s what I meant,” Phineas said, although I wasn’t so sure. He looked pissed off enough to drop a baby on purpose.
He sat down beside me on the couch and stretched out his long legs, leaning his head against the back to look up at the ceiling
. “There could not have been a ritual done at that hospital,” he said. “And presumably Zack would have told us if he’d brought her to a moss-lined room in the basement of Kerr House.”
Wulf put his head in Phineas’s lap. Phineas scratched absently behind the dog’s ear and then said, “But one of them could have done it without him knowing. Gotten some hearts we didn’t hear about, paid off the nanny or whoever to let them have the baby for a few hours.”
“Diana,” I said. “That’s the baby’s name.”
Zack had told me, just before he left. After I’d told him a story that should have been unbelievable, especially to a man like that. He’d accepted it all, grimly but without question. Maybe everyone in Bristol just picked up on the supernatural, being around it so much. Even people like him who weren’t born there.
Phineas shrugged at this extraneous bit of information. “Was her name, you mean. Diana Warner is just as gone as Suzanne was. She’s dead.”
“I don’t think so.”
He raised his head to look at me, brow raised.
I had been thinking, while I waited for Phineas to come, about Megan’s charcoal scrawl in the Mosley garage. About birch ashes and wormwood and the kind of possession that was nearly impossible to break.
“I don’t think a ritual was done at all,” I said. “That nurse at the hospital. The one who kept glaring at us and finally told us to leave when Zack lost his shit. She had a paper cup in her hand, remember? With one of those cardboard sleeves around it, for holding something hot.”
Phineas shook his head, both confused and indifferent. “So?”
“So I thought it was tea she was carrying. You’d assume coffee in that kind of cup, but I distinctly remember thinking she had tea.”
“Point?”
“I thought it was tea because the cup smelled, or she smelled, or there was a smell around her. A nasty herby kind of smell, like incense.”
Phineas sat up straight. “Like wormwood?”
“I don’t know what wormwood smells like, but that’s what I’m thinking, yes. Can it still be a willing possession if the person doesn’t technically consent, but doesn’t technically refuse, either? Could a baby do either?”
Peak of the Devil (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 2) Page 20