Burden Falls

by Kat Ellis

  Dial Books

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Kat Ellis

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9781984814579

  Cover art and design © 2021 by Elaine C. Damasco • Design by Mina Chung • Adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  For Ian, as always, but also in memory of Pilot—a most excellent cat and constant writing companion. I miss you, my boy.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  A year after I (almost) died

  The manor echoes as I walk along its hallways. It sounds like a tomb—and I would know.

  I stop at every room, checking to make sure I haven’t left anything behind. Not the furniture or the paintings; not the grand piano I never had the patience to learn to play. All those things are long gone, either sold or dragged out of here by the movers. No, what I’m doing is cataloging, mapping every corner of every room in the place I grew up. Fixing it all in my memory like I’m sealing it in wax. Thorn Manor, the home of my parents, and all the Thorns who came before.

  Here is my parents’ room, with the wallpaper covered in songbirds, and the big bay window where Mom used to spend Sundays reading because she said it had the best light.

  Here is Dad’s office, which was always officially off-limits, though he kept a box of my favorite candies in the top drawer of his big walnut desk for whenever I snuck in to see him. The room is an empty box now, with only faint impressions on the blue walls where Dad’s nineties grunge posters used to hang.

  Here is Grandpa’s study, where his green wingback chair sat next to that dark oak fireplace. The scent of pipe smoke and apples still clings to this room, like he’s become a part of it. Mom would’ve said it’s his ghost, “And there’s always room for one more in Thorn Manor.”

  Uncle Ty and Carolyn’s room still has a few boxes left inside—the last items they’ll be bringing to the new cottage. It’s almost time for the three of us to leave. We’re the last in a long line of Thorns to live in this house, and after today I’ll never set foot inside it again. Which sucks balls, actually.

  I move on, more quickly now. There are moments when I think I hear another set of footsteps following at my heels, see a second shadow stretching out next to mine in the corner of my eye. But it’s only the creaking floorboards. Only the slant of the late-afternoon light.

  “Are you sure?” I can almost see Mom’s smile, teasing but not, and shake my head. There are no ghosts here, even if I sometimes wish there were.

  The west wing was mostly shut up after Grandpa passed, so I don’t linger there. I go down the galleried staircase and into the lounge, the sunroom, the library. The breakfast room (where nobody has ever eaten breakfast, as far as I can remember) leading out to the orangery Uncle Ty uses—used—as his art studio. The floor still carries faint smears of paint, too long embedded to be removed by simple cleaning. Shit for the new owners to deal with, I guess.

  I finish with the kitchen. I’m about to pass through and head back up to my room when my eyes land on the cellar door. I know I should go down there too, to complete my final tour of this place. It’s the only room that’ll still be full—the racks of Thorn’s Blood Apple Sour were sold by special arrangement along with the house.

  But it’s the one room in the manor I hate. Always have.

  I turn and head back upstairs.

  There’s only one box left in my room, sitting like a little lost boat in the middle of the window seat. It holds all my art supplies and sketchbooks. I go to pick it up, glancing out of the window as I do. My room looks out over the blood-apple orchard—the source of Thorn’s Blood Apple Sour, and all the money it took to build this place. In the center of it stands the peaked roof of the old pavilion, and seeing it reminds me that I still have one last important task to do before I leave.

  Beyond the orchard, I can see the flowing form of the river as it rushes to meet Burden Bridge, which sits right at the point where the river tumbles into a sixty-foot waterfall.

  There’s someone on the bridge.

  Burden Bridge is on our land—ours for the next few hours, at least—so it’s not some dog walker admiring the view. My skin prickles in warning like it always does when I think I see someone out there.

  Is it . . . ?

  My breath catches, and I lean closer to the window. But it’s not who I think it is, only Uncle Ty. He’s leaning against the waist-high guardrail that’s attached to the low stone wall of the bridge, just staring out into the rising mist.

  Propping the box on my hip, I give a stoic nod to my room, then head downstairs and outside to where Bessie waits. Bessie is my old-as-dirt Nissan, once green but now a faded color I can only call “sludge.” The back seat is already packed to the ceiling, so I put this last box on the front passenger seat, then crunch my way down the gravel path to the orchard.

  * * *

  * * *

  I stan
d on a stepladder in the pavilion, paint roller in hand. I’ve taken off my ever-present black gloves for this—hard to paint with them on—and the last throes of winter stealing in through the windows make the scars on my palms ache. I flex them out, one hand, then the other. The pink crisscross lines brighten to red as I do, but there’s no chance of them tearing open now. A year is plenty long enough for a body to knit itself whole.

  The wall facing me is covered in painted images, all bleeding together like a sleeve of tattoos. They are the bad memories, of the crash that changed everything, and what came after. The ones Dr. Ehrenfeld suggested I write in a journal, as if that would scratch them out of my head somehow. But I’ve never been much of a writer. I take after Uncle Ty that way. Art is our thing. So I painted my memories on the walls inside the pavilion, because who the hell would ever see it but me? Except now some rando has bought my home, and I don’t want a stranger stumbling across this little slice of my heart-matter.

  I carried a can of black paint down here yesterday, meaning to cover over the mural. But I still wasn’t ready to let go. Now I have no choice.

  For a second, I think I hear something. A voice? I peer through the window, even though it’s pointless. The orchard is dense, dense, dense—grown wild as it raged against the disease that took hold last year. I still smell the blood apples, even though the branches are black and bare-knuckled now. The blight hit at the same time as a freak cold snap last May, leaving the trees covered in perfect ghost apples, the little icy cases showing where the fruit had once been.

  A shout rings out from somewhere nearby—sharp and curse-shaped, though I can’t make out the words. It’s Uncle Ty. And I remember where I last saw him: leaning against the low wall of the bridge.

  Shit.

  My paint roller falls to the floor. I jump down from the ladder and run. The tangle of low-hanging branches claws at me as I force my way through. Finally, I clear the orchard. As I sprint for the bridge, I hear Uncle Ty again, fogging the air around him with curses.

  I skid to a stop. He’s fine. Drunk, I think, but fine.

  One summer, when Uncle Ty was seventeen, he had some friends from school over to the manor. I remember sneaking around watching them, these teenagers who seemed so grown-up to seven-year-old me. They took a couple bottles from Grandpa’s collection in the cellar and went outside to get wasted where Grandpa wouldn’t see. I watched from an upstairs window for a while, too shy to go outside and be told to get lost, but I quickly got bored. They were just boys. But Uncle Ty came running in a while later, yelling that one of his friends, Jerome, had fallen from the bridge, and could Grandpa come quickly . . .

  It didn’t matter how quickly Grandpa came. Even then, I knew there was no way for someone to survive a fall from Burden Bridge.

  The guardrail was added to the low stone wall of the bridge the next day, and Uncle Ty never brought anyone back to the manor after that. Not until Carolyn, his wife. But I do see him down here sometimes, talking to the mist, and I wonder if he’s whispering his burdens so the water will take them, like the old legend says, or if he’s really talking to Jerome.

  I cross the bridge to where Uncle Ty still leans against the guardrail. Burden Bridge hums under my feet, rattled by the power of the waterfall beneath it.

  The dark mop of Uncle Ty’s hair hangs forward as he hunches into the cold. Dad used to tease him that he looked like a surly teenager when he did that, and I can kind of see it. Uncle Ty is twenty-seven—almost ten years older than me—but he looks barely out of his teens. Maybe it’s because he’s short and slender, like he still has some growing left to do. But everyone in our family fits that mold. People around here don’t call us “Bloody” Thorns because we’re brawlers. We’re just not the kind of people you want to piss off. At least my parents weren’t, nor Grandpa before that.

  “Uncle Ty?” I say it loudly to be heard over the waterfall, but not loud enough to startle him. I don’t want to be the reason he falls.

  He startles anyway, but his clear eyes tell me he isn’t as drunk as I thought. “Ava? Oh, I dropped my . . . dropped something over the waterfall.” He gestures vaguely.

  I’m pretty sure I know what that something is. He’s been drinking a lot the last few days, even for him. And I know from personal experience that the water vapor on the bridge makes a bottle get slippery real quick.

  “Hoping the water’ll wash away your burdens?” I say, only half joking. He shrugs.

  I doubt ditching a liquor bottle off the bridge is going to fix anything for Uncle Ty. I lean against the rail next to him.

  “Remember when you brought me here and taught me how to spit?” I demonstrate, making it arc so it doesn’t get swallowed by the waterfall until it hits the basin below.

  “You’ve been practicing.” Uncle Ty sounds mildly impressed. He never could hold on to a bad mood for long. “Anyway, I was only passing on the lesson your dad gave me.”

  “That was right before you left for college, wasn’t it?” I say, a smile inching onto my face. “The next time you came home, you had artistic sideburns and a Boston accent, and insisted everyone call you Tyler.”

  He groans. “Don’t remind me.”

  “Tyler was too good to spit with his favorite niece. Tyler wore Oxfords. Tyler thought he was capable of growing a mustache.”

  Uncle Ty laughs. Good. “Dad told me he’d seen more hair on a side of bacon. He actually followed me up to the bathroom to make sure I shaved it off.”

  Grandpa was never shy with his opinions.

  “You done staring into the abyss now?” I push away from the rail and cross my arms faux-impatiently. Uncle Ty stands up, salutes me for some goddamn reason, and turns to head back toward the manor. But as he passes me, liquor-breath trailing behind him, I spot something moving between the trees at the far side of the bridge.

  “Ava? I thought you came to corral me back inside?”

  “Yeah, I’m coming . . .” I scan the shadows a moment longer, but there’s nothing there.

  TWO

  It’s an hour later, the daylight already fading, when we’re finally ready to drive away from the manor for the last time. Carolyn and Uncle Ty rumble away down the driveway in his sports car. Bessie waits patiently for me, stacked to the roof.

  The manor’s windows are all dark and hollow, its stately architecture lost in the twilight like a memory already grown hazy. It feels so wrong to be leaving like this. I’m not ready. But there’s no choice—I know that. After Mom and Dad died, it turned out the family distillery was in really bad financial shape. Uncle Ty and Carolyn tried their best to save it, but we ended up having to sell the manor.

  The old mill cottage Carolyn rented for us isn’t far, though. If you look south from Burden Bridge, you can see the rounded wall of the mill butting up against the riverbank a half mile or so downstream.

  Carolyn gives a cheerful toot of the horn as they reach the iron gates at the end of the driveway. Even without seeing her, I know she’s wearing a determined smile as she steers the car out onto the lane leading up to Red Road. She won’t look back. It’s not her style. Uncle Ty probably won’t, either, but that’ll be because he can’t face it.

  I climb into Bessie and give the usual murmured hail Lucifer when she fires up on the first try. As I pass through the iron gates onto the lane, I stop. The new owners will drive through these same gates when they move in tomorrow. I try to picture it—picture them—but I can’t.

  A light blinks on and off in one of the cottages facing me across the lane. It flashes on-off again three more times in quick succession. Then I see it: Hanging from the window is a homemade banner bearing the words BYE, BITCH! And grinning above it is my best friend—best guy friend, at least—Ford. I shake my head and open the car window.

  “You’re an asshole!” I yell up at him. I get an elaborate bow in reply before he disappears from view. But Ford’s jackass
ery works its magic, like always. I’m smiling as I close the car window, shutting out the cold, and follow Carolyn and Uncle Ty to our new home.

  * * *

  * * *

  There’s a sign on Red Road marking the western town limits of Burden Falls. It tells you it has a population of 9,504, and shows a dark-haired girl with her back turned, gazing at the majestic waterfall. There’s no reason to think the girl is dead, but everyone here knows it. She’s like the unofficial town mascot.

  I turn the other way, toward the center of town. If you picture Burden Falls as a face viewed from above, the manor forms the left eye, with Red Road arcing just above it like an eyebrow. It connects onto River Road running south (the nose, if you will) and I follow it down and turn off past the gas station where I work some evenings and most weekends, and into the grin of tiny cottages beneath it. The one farthest left is the old mill cottage—now ours.

  Carolyn and Uncle Ty have already gone inside by the time I park out front. I’ve seen the cottage before, but only from the outside. I think some part of me was still clinging to the idea that if I ignored it, the move from the manor might not happen. La-la-la, etc.

  The cottage is vaguely square, but then there’s the round tower of the old mill at the riverbank, and at some point the two buildings were joined together to create a garage in between. But the cottage is cute, with its poky little windows already blazing with warm light. I grab my box of art supplies and head inside.

  The front door is rounded at the top, as if hobbits live here.

  “Hello?”

  There’s no answer, but I can hear muffled voices drifting down the narrow stairs, so I head up. Three doors lead off the landing, two of them open. One is a bathroom. The other is a large closet, I assume, because there’s no bed, just a stack of boxes labeled as Carolyn’s clothes.

  “There you are!” I turn to find Carolyn standing behind me in the doorway of the third room. “I was starting to think you’d gotten lost,” she teases.

  Beyond her, Uncle Ty is making up the bed in there.