by Ania Ahlborn
“No, she was there,” Vee whispered to herself. She was there, just as clear as the boy in the orchard, as unmistakable as the scream Vee had heard in the trees.
The third bathroom was across the living room from her dad’s writing den, and while she was positive he was upstairs in bed, she poked her head inside the room anyway. The mess of it took her by surprise. He had spent the whole day in there, but it looked like he had yet to organize a thing. It was the most crowded room in the house, the entire far wall crammed with boxes filled with books. His giant desk sat in the middle of the room, glowing in the moonlight.
Pivoting where she stood, she crossed the length of the living room toward the half bath. Her right arm pistoned out and slapped the wall just inside the door. The overhead light flickered on, revealing a sunshine-yellow toilet and sink. At least there was no tub in here, no place for someone to hide behind a shower curtain. As long as she avoided looking in the mirror, everything would be okay.
Vee had never tried evoking the spirit of Bloody Mary herself, but she knew the story: stare into the mirror, chant Mary’s name three times, and she’d appear right behind you, ready to slash your throat. Both Heidi and Laurie had tried it a few summers ago—at least that’s what they had told her—and they both swore they saw a woman standing against Heidi’s bathroom wall. But Vee hadn’t believed them. If that had really happened, they wouldn’t have been giggling at the story. If they had really seen her, they would have been pale as sheets. Possibly having gone crazy with the experience, locked up in rubber rooms. And that’s exactly why she wasn’t going to tell her dad a damn thing.
Squaring her shoulders, she stepped inside but left the door open behind her. She tugged down her pj pants, sat, and didn’t dare look away from the door. That was when a strange seed of an idea turned over inside her head, fed by the imaginary brain bleed that throbbed red and angry beneath her skull. What if some stupid kid who had lived here before had called out the girl Vee had seen? Like, if Heidi and Laurie really did call on Bloody Mary the way they said they had, they’d done it without any precaution. What would they have done if Bloody Mary had actually shown up? What would any kid do if one of their harebrained incantations worked? Vee had an entire box of ghost books upstairs, waiting to be unpacked. She’d spent countless hours reading paranormal websites, spent even more time watching grainy video footage of ghosts on YouTube. And while she’d never tried opening a portal between the worlds of the living and the dead, she was sure it was possible. It seemed that people who didn’t know what they were doing did it all the time. But closing the doorway afterward? Far more difficult. If a door was opened, it would remain that way for a long, long time.
Her heart flipped at the revelation. If that’s what happened to the girl in the bathroom, if she was stuck, what if Vee could help the girl cross back to the other side? Imagine the story that would make. And if Vee could help the dead find peace, maybe it meant that, if she tried hard enough, she had a shot at figuring out how to bring peace to her family, too.
She finished in the bathroom and slapped the light switch. As she crossed into the living room, her excitement momentarily blurred her fear of the dark. But the sudden barrage of thoughts tumbled to a stuttering stop when she noticed something off. The carpet felt weird beneath her feet. She didn’t remember it being this fluffy before. Peering at it through the faint glow of moonlight, she couldn’t quite make out what was different. And while she wanted to ignore it and get back to her room, she squatted midstep to draw her fingers across the ground.
It felt as though thousands of inch-long strands of yarn made up the rug. It reminded her of the vintage Rainbow Brite doll her dad had gotten her for one of her birthdays years earlier. Spurred on by her father’s love for all things eighties, she had been on a retro cartoon kick. Thick yellow string had made up Rainbow’s head of hair, but the carpet beneath her feet was supposed to be a low-pile beige.
She tried to remember where she and her dad had dropped the few rugs they had brought from home, tried to remember if they even had a rug that felt the way the carpet felt now. Maybe it was one of the things her dad had scored on sale? But before she could figure it out, she noticed something out of the corner of her eye. There, in the faint iridescence of night, their overstuffed leather couch was gone. So was the old armchair her mother had surrendered to “the cause,” and the glass-top coffee table her dad had bought off of a neighbor was missing too. Even the entertainment center and their flat-screen TV—the one thing her dad had refused to budge on when it came to material possessions. All of it was replaced by stuff she’d never seen before.
An ugly couch with a blanket thrown over the back of it stood where the leather sofa should have been, its orange-and-brown plaid pattern marking it as not their own. A worse-for-wear beanbag chair sat next to it, and a kind of TV she’d never seen before stood against the wall. It looked like it was stuck in some sort of stubby-legged wooden cabinet with dials on the side. A woven tapestry hung on the wall above it. It, like the carpet, looked as though it was made of yarn. The knotted strings displayed a meticulously constructed bouquet of flowers. Little wooden beads hung from the ends of the weird artwork, tapping against the wall, pushed by a fan that didn’t exist.
Vee blinked a few times, but the weird furniture refused to go away. She shot a look across the living room toward the kitchen. She couldn’t see it from where she was standing, but she was almost positive that it would be just as foreign to her as the stuff that had taken over the living room.
Shaking her head, she decided that this had to be one of those strange waking dreams her dad had a book about—something about feeling completely awake despite being in a totally different state of mind. Vee hadn’t understood a word of what she had read, but she now realized that this must have been what “lucid” meant. A sense of parallel reality, where you know where you are, but aren’t where you should be. It’s just a dream, she thought. Just your imagination. Just the headache twisting up your thoughts. But the steady tap-tap-tapping of wooden beads promised that she was awake.
And then there was the shadow figure in the corner, still as marble and dark as midnight. The curve of a shoulder. The delicate line of an arm.
It wasn’t real. She had to be hallucinating. But her mind screamed, It’s the girl!
She fell into a run. Grabbing the stair banister, she bolted up the steps, winded by the time she reached the landing. The upstairs hallway looked different too. The photos she had hung along the wall were gone, replaced with cheap painted landscapes in wooden frames.
“Dad!” The word left her throat in a sudden burst. She nearly tripped over her feet as she ran for his door and burst into the room. Her father bolted upright in bed. He fumbled with a bedside lamp, his eyes wide when it finally illuminated his face. “Dad, I . . .” I think all our stuff is gone, replaced by other stuff. And there’s a person . . . It was stupid. Ridiculous. Crazy and she knew it.
“What?” Her dad looked as freaked out as she felt. His hair was wild with sleep. His face pulled tight with alarm.
“My head.” It was the first thing that came to mind. “It still hurts.”
He rubbed a hand across his face.
“What if I have a brain aneurysm?” she asked, predicting his reaction before it came.
He leveled his gaze on her, his worry melting into a knowing sort of stare. “Oh, Jeanie. Are you going on that website again?”
She didn’t reply.
“Jeanie . . . I promise, you don’t have a brain aneurysm.”
Except maybe she did. Maybe that was why she’d been experiencing everything since what she saw in the bathroom. It was one thing to think that she’d seen a ghost, but altogether another to see an entire room rearranged. Perhaps her brain was misfiring. The knock she’d taken had jostled something loose.
“Here,” he said, pulling open the bedside table drawer. He lifted out a bottl
e of Tylenol and shook it at her like a rattle. She dragged her feet along the rug as she approached, held out her hand as he dropped two tablets into her palm.
“But what if you’re wrong?” she asked, staring at the pills. “What if I die in my sleep?”
He watched her for a long while before tossing aside his sheets. “Okay,” he said. “Get dressed.”
“What? Why?” She took a few steps away from his bed.
“Because you’re right,” he said. “I should have taken you to the hospital right off the bat.”
“No.” She shook her head. “No, forget it. I’m fine.”
“Except you’re worried about dying? Work with me here, kid—what is it that you want me to do?”
“Just forget it,” she said again. “Really, Dad. It went away earlier. If it was an aneurysm, it wouldn’t have gone away with pills, but it did, which means I’m okay. I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s just a headache, that’s all.”
He frowned at her.
“Sorry for waking you up,” she murmured, closing her fingers around the medicine in her hand. She turned toward his door, and for a split second she hoped he’d tell her to sleep in his room, just in case. But he didn’t. And while she reasoned that he hadn’t offered because she was too old for that sort of babying, she couldn’t help but feel a flash of resentment as she sulked out of the room.
She wandered down the hall that was now devoid of the cheap landscapes she had seen hanging only minutes before. And while she clearly remembered leaving her bedroom door open, it was closed again. She hesitated, forcing herself to step inside despite what may have awaited her.
The room was just the way she left it. Nothing out of the ordinary. And while she should have felt comforted by its familiarity, all she wanted to do was cry.
Because she wasn’t crazy.
The girl in the mirror had been there. That shadow downstairs had probably been her. The house beyond her bedroom door had been all wrong. If there was nothing off with her head, what she’d seen had been real.
14
* * *
SELMA ARRIVED AT the house bright and early the next day, a giant purse hanging off one shoulder and a shopping bag full of leftovers heavy in her right hand. “Hey. Figured you guys would want food,” she told Lucas when he opened the door. “I made way too much for just me and Mark. And I brought over a bunch of Blu-rays. I wasn’t sure if you guys got around to unpacking your stuff yet, so . . .” She smiled, handed him the bag, and brushed her dark Zooey Deschanel bangs away from her eyes.
“Thanks.” Lucas stepped aside to let her in. “Sorry about last night. Jeanie ended up with a pretty wicked headache. I nearly took her to the ER.”
“Is she okay?”
“I think so. Though, if she still has a headache today I’m taking her to the clinic whether she wants to go or not.”
“Mark told me about what happened,” Selma said. “She got lucky. It could have been a lot worse.” She offered him a look of consolation, then glanced around her surroundings. “Wow, Mark wasn’t kidding when he said this place is dated.”
“Yeah, it’s a bit Partridge Family.”
“But it’s charming,” she countered, giving him a red-lipped smile. “I like it. It’s got this cool fifties Americana thing going on, and if anyone loves the fifties . . .” She posed for half a second, letting him get an eyeful of her typical rockabilly style.
Lucas chuckled and led her into the kitchen. She let her eyes sweep the place before she shrugged off her purse—which looked like a small version of a black-and-white bowling bag—and set it on the island.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said. “I really appreciate it.”
“Don’t mention it.” She waved away his gratitude.
“No, I want to mention it. It’s a long drive, and we stood you up last night. I feel bad about it.”
An easy shrug rolled off Selma’s shoulders. “Not on purpose. Besides, this gives me an excuse to get out onto the coast. It’ll be nice to spend a day out of the city.”
“And like I said,” Lucas continued. “If you want to stay here every now and again, we’ve got the room. I’ve got an air mattress. You can sleep in the master, I’ll sleep on that.”
She lifted a hand as if to tell him not to consider it. “If I do stay, the blow-up would be fine. I’m no princess. I just like Mark to think that I’m one.” She winked. “Anyway, you should get going. Isn’t it, like, a two-hour drive?”
Lucas glanced at his watch and nodded. “In-processing is between eleven thirty and noon, so I should be fine.” He patted down his pockets, making sure he had his wallet and phone. “You’ll call me if you need anything . . .”
“I still think it’s crazy, you interacting with this guy,” Selma said. “Doesn’t it freak you out?”
“Why would it freak me out? He’s locked up.”
“Yeah, but . . .” She scrunched up her nose at a thought. “He’s just, you know . . .”
“I know. But that’s why people read this stuff. You get all the details from the safety of your own home.” He grabbed his keys off the counter only to stare at the plastic U-Haul emblem attached to them. Oh, shit! The Maxima was sitting somewhere in Seattle. He had meant to pick it up last night while returning the rental truck, but then the thing happened with Jeanie. And then he ended up on the phone with the prison and spent the rest of the day frantically putting together interview questions. The car had completely slipped his mind. “I am such a fucking idiot,” he muttered to himself. An extra day with the truck would cost him. An extra few hundred miles on the odometer would cost him even more.
Selma held her keys aloft, dangling them from a well-manicured set of nails.
“No.” Lucas shook his head. It was his oversight. He’d pay the extra fee if he had to. But Selma made a face at him, the kind Caroline used to show when he was turning something small into a big deal. “Just go. It’s rude to be late, even if your date is sitting in a supermax.”
He hesitated, still considering a refusal. But if he didn’t make it to Lambert on time, he’d miss his appointment, and that would be a hell of a lot worse than a few rental truck fees. He grimaced, squinted, and finally grabbed the keys from her hand.
“I’ll fill her up,” he promised.
“You better,” she said with a grin. “Have fun in prison.”
Lucas flashed her a goofy smile and bounded out of the house.
15
* * *
THE SUPERMAX PRISON was tucked into the far corner of a town called Lambert, a small place with a main drag, a handful of stoplights, and—Lucas guessed—a population that was either employed by Walmart, McDonald’s, or Washington State’s Department of Corrections. He sat in Selma’s Camry with the window rolled down, her double-cherry air freshener having spurred on a mild headache just behind his eyes. Studying the notes and questions he’d scribbled onto a yellow legal pad, he felt more nervous than he thought possible. Might have to visit the bathroom before the interview, he thought. Or puke up my breakfast to be able to think straight.
He had felt the same way when Jeff Halcomb’s letter had arrived in his mailbox, forwarded by his former publisher to his home address. He hadn’t heard from St. Martin’s Press in years. When he spotted their emblem on the corner of an envelope among a pile of bills, he had done a double take. His mind reeled at the possibility; did they want him back? Had they realized, after so many years of separation, that they had made a mistake by letting him go? Wouldn’t they have called if that were the case? He’d shoved the rest of the mail back in the box before tearing into the envelope, but rather than his old editor apologizing for not renewing Lucas’s contract, there was a smaller envelope inside marked “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL” in block letters. This one sported a prison mailroom return address.
Receiving a handwritten letter from Jeffrey Halco
mb had been one of the most surreal experiences of Lucas’s life. He had read it, then read it again, then ran inside to show Caroline only to stop short of the front door. It was the demand that Lucas move into the house on Montlake Road that made him hesitate. If Caroline was privy to that particular ultimatum, the project would be over before it ever had a chance to begin. Moving into the Montlake house was both a weird command and a crazy idea. But just holding that letter in his hands gave him such a pang of inspired hope for the future that it seemed just as insane to refuse Halcomb’s request as it did to oblige it.
Now drawing that letter out from his bag, Lucas pulled in a breath as he reread the correspondence he had put to memory weeks before. I just don’t know, John had said. In all my years in the business, I haven’t ever had a client receive an offer like this. It feels off, Lou. It feels strange. Bullshit, it felt lucky. It felt like Lucas Graham had just won the true-crime lottery. All he needed to do was collect.
He shoved his legal pad into his messenger bag, closed his eyes, and took a moment to steady his nerves. Coming off as anxious or unsure around a master manipulator wasn’t the best idea. He needed to control the situation, and insecurity wouldn’t cut it. “You are Lucas Graham,” he murmured. “You can do anything.” But it rang hollow, as if it was a hard sell.
Halcomb had already convinced Lucas to move to Pier Pointe. It had taken no effort. If Lucas said no, Halcomb would go somewhere else. It didn’t matter if he claimed to be a fan of Lucas’s work. If Lucas didn’t want the gig, a thousand other writers would clamor at the opportunity. Lucas could already see it, walking by the display window of a Barnes & Noble, some other writer’s book about the Halcomb case stacked halfway up to the ceiling. Cardboard displays toting it as the most incredible read since some guy had discovered the Zodiac Killer had been his biological dad. And that’s where Lucas would stay—outside the book store—exiled first by his wife, then by his daughter, and finally by his choice to not take a chance. Doomed by his decision to play it safe.