A Murder at Alcott Manor

by Alyssa Richards

  “I never knew.” Mason sat as though something pulled him down from the inside. “I wish I had.”

  Layla lowered herself to the couch, her insides shaky. She told him how Brooke had taken pictures of her with her phone while Layla had been changing in the locker room.

  Mason swallowed visibly.

  She described to him how Brooke, Jordan, Carmen and Staci were all gathered around Brooke’s phone that night, looking at photos, making fat jokes and laughing. How they must have been looking at the photos of her, and how she thought Brooke would email the photos around. How she knew if she slept at all that night that she was going to sleepwalk or sleep eat and how that would have been humiliating. She told him she coped how she could, by crafting a lucid dream.

  Layla went on to tell him about the entire dream: how Brooke had admitted to taking the pictures and threatened to send them out. How they had pushed one another and how on the last hard shove, Layla was quite a bit taller than she was in her real world. And, finally, how Brooke had toppled backward and fell through the rotted hardwood to the cement floor below.

  A hardness solidified in his expression. “You’re the one who killed Brooke?”

  The anger in his eyes was more than she could bear and she looked away. When she finally found the courage to look at him again, she said, “Yes.”

  Something left her when she finally admitted to what she’d done—a heaviness, that rock of a secret that had been lodged inside of her for ten years. She inhaled deeply and exhaled more fully than she thought she ever had. But the condemning look in Mason’s eyes almost stopped her from breathing altogether.

  “I was following doctor’s orders on how to use the lucid dreaming and how to handle her bullying. I—didn’t want to be a victim anymore.”

  “This is why Jordan and Carmen kept saying that you were the one who killed Brooke. You said you never touched her. You lied to me?”

  “I didn’t—I mean, I didn’t physically touch her. At least not— It was a dream. You heard the detectives, she was three inches taller than me, there was no concrete floor outside, and as the detectives said, it couldn’t have happened the way Jordan and Staci and Carmen had said it did. Not in real life. Only in my lucid dream. So how would I have proven anything, even if I had admitted to it?”

  Mason paced around the room, his dark hair disheveled and lines deep across his forehead.

  “I would have said something to you, but at the time I wasn’t even sure what to tell you.”

  He stiffened into a hard wall of resistance and the soft memories of what she found with him, the bright hope she had dared to play with was disappearing fast.

  He focused on something on her arm. When he moved her sleeve, he revealed four fingerprint bruises on her skin. “What is this?”

  She exhaled hard. “Asher’s fingerprints. When he grabbed me in my dream last night.”

  His mouth was open and he was speechless.

  “I’m sorry, Mason. I’m more sorry than you’ll probably ever know. She just went on and on that day about you and her and sex and marriage and wasn’t I lucky not to have a boyfriend. I always had a crush on you, she knew that, and she was taunting me. And I—I thought—” She ran her hand across her forehead. “Look, please, just don’t go back to the manor. Not yet.”

  “I’m not screwing up this job. I’m restarting my life here and my company’s reputation is important.” He stepped away then turned toward her again, quickly. “I guess as long as you don’t dream anything else about me, I’ll be fine.”

  She felt his comments as a punch to the stomach and took a moment to catch her breath. “Mason, he wants me with him. If I don’t go willingly, he’s going to take you, as motivation for me. He’ll kill you.”

  He looked down. “I can’t do this. I can’t.” His words were definite, resolute, and final. She wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  A hard edge of betrayal flavored the way he looked at her. “Jordan was right all along. You’re the one who attacked her and killed Brooke.”

  “Yes,” she repeated. “Yes, I am.”

  She made her way to Mason’s bedroom where she picked up her bag that held her swimsuit and a few other items. She fought the heavy sense of sad satisfaction that she had been right.

  She made a quick call to a car service and headed to the front porch to wait for them to arrive.

  Mason stood near the front door, his eyes focused and fierce.

  She swallowed the nausea that rolled within her. “I’m sorry, Mason. I really am. I wish things were different for us. I wish Brooke and Jordan had never been hurt. And I wish—” She started to say that she wished she never dreamed. But she thought of the dreams she had shared with him and said, “I wish for a lot of things right now.”

  He shifted his stare and seemed to search for something to say. His mouth opened and closed, but nothing came out. When he looked at her again, he shrugged and shook his head. Their more recent memories floated between them, they were utterly real and yet completely unexplainable. She remembered his proposal and that mystical rock on her finger and decided that dreaming about the possibility of love was akin to playing with fire and she had gotten burned.

  She decided she should have stayed within the imaginary walls she had built around herself not that long ago. Because she had been right the first time, she wasn’t ready for a relationship. She wasn’t ready to trust. After all she had been through and all she had done, maybe she never would trust again.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he finally said.

  “That’s fine,” she said, even though nothing was. “But I’m not wrong about Asher or what he’s done to the ladders and the other equipment in the house. So please, be careful. Because you may not like what I’ve told you, but it’s the truth and you could get hurt. Or worse.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I called a car service.” She couldn’t bear to say her mother’s name or to say that she was going home.

  He nodded reluctantly.

  She shut the door behind her, knowing that was the final note to the song she and Mason had begun a long time ago. Half of her hoped that he would open the door and apologize, say that he understood everything now and he had made a crazy mistake. The other half of her just wanted to leave and be done with it. She had to start putting herself back together.

  She wouldn’t go back to the manor, not with Asher there. She would text Mason in the morning and let him know that she wouldn’t be able to fulfill the caretaker job.

  Nausea finally got the best of her while she waited for her car, and she threw up in the flower bed just outside Mason’s front door. When the nurse had gone over the nearly-endless aftercare instructions, she had said that nausea and vomiting were possible side effects.

  “Final parting gift,” she thought with a last cough. “I killed the girl you wanted to marry, then I lied to you about it, then I threw up in your front yard. Can’t wait to see what I do next.”

  Her car arrived, she climbed into the back seat and never looked back. She couldn’t bear the heartbreak.

  She dialed her mother and told her she was coming home.

  27

  Asher watched Mason storm through Alcott Manor in a quiet, lumbering rage. He picked up every ladder from the property and tossed them into a dumpster that was parked in the front drive. He also threw in any piece of equipment that had a motor or a screw.

  Though he hadn’t expected this, it seemed that Layla-pup must have let his cat out of her bag. She must have told Mason that the equipment had been sabotaged. Not before one of his workers died, though. Early this morning, Mr. Sandy Hernandez died from a fall. Seems that the scaffolding that Sandy worked from wasn’t as sturdy as he thought. Horribly bloody accident, because Sandy fell on a circular saw that had been left below the scaffolding. Asher decided that no one ever really thought about just how much blood was in the human body until it started to pour out.

  Pity it hadn’t been Mason who fel
l. He had worked from that same scaffolding for the better part of two days at the beginning of the week. It had taken Asher a long damn time to turn all those screws and to loosen the bolts. These days he had plenty of that, though. Nothing but time, really.

  He had spent a bunch of it waiting in the old nursery upstairs, rocking in the antique chair and listening for her call. A simple thought was all it would take for him to have an open door into her world. But her mind must be on other things right now. Troubling things, maybe. That trip down the stairs might have done some damage.

  Another ladder clanged when Mason tossed it into the dumpster and Asher felt a sense of pride. Not just because Mason was irritated that his equipment was destroyed, but more so because he looked like hell. Whatever was wrong with him, he had lost his GQ looks and appeared more like he had been on a three-day bender.

  The bloom must have fallen from the relationship vine. Asher patted his fingertips together in a tiny clap and cheered in a whisper. Mason didn’t like to be humiliated, that was his soft spot.

  Which gave Asher an idea. When he finally did kill him, he would do it slowly, with an audience and in such a way that cut Mason down to size.

  Before Tom died, Asher heard him telling Mason that they would throw a party to commemorate the end of their very long road of restoration and announce their plans for how and when they would open the manor for tours.

  Mason would be there, as would Layla and the rest the family. That would be the most perfect occasion for something violent.

  Layla curled onto her side in her old double bed and listened to the birds sing their morning songs. Just as she had done every morning for the last month, she had gotten her girls ready, drove them to school, then crawled back under the covers.

  She had worked out an arrangement with the hospital to take the three weeks of paid vacation she had accrued over the years, as well as a week of sick leave. HR accessed the ER reports and gave her time off to heal.

  Each morning her mother offered to make her scrambled eggs and Layla refused, saying she would make toast later. The smell was sickening and usually sent her running to the bathroom.

  “You need to see a doctor, honey,” her mother said from the other side of the bathroom door. “This just isn’t normal, it’s going on too long.”

  “I did. Yesterday. It’s just a virus, it will pass.”

  What Layla didn’t share was that she had known almost from the first sign. In the same way she had known twice before, because there was a subtle difference in this kind of nausea. The tide had a deeper roll to it, like a sense of ownership, a possession of her she would have to flow with for several months.

  She had taken a test. When that one came back positive, she went to a different store and bought two more tests, different brands. Because surely that one was wrong. When she took those, she decided all the tests must have been from a faulty batch and she went to her doctor.

  “That can’t be!” she said when her doctor presented her with the confirmation of her blood test results.

  “Apparently it can be. Because you’re pregnant. Congratulations.”

  Layla must have appeared shell-shocked because her doctor raised an eyebrow and said, “Let me guess. Y’all used a condom. Or he had a vasectomy. You were on the pill? I’ve heard it all. If you’re having sex, this can happen. As a mother of two I guess I don’t have to tell you that.” The doctor crossed her arms over her folder and raised her eyebrows.

  Layla chose not to tell her doctor that the only time she had had sex in the last several years was in her dreams with Mason. But she did schedule her first ultrasound and prenatal visit, then went home and cried.

  She thought of how she had gotten sick on the morning she left Mason’s house. That was exactly the way it went when she carried her two girls. She had been nauseated and vomiting from almost the moment of conception.

  She pressed her hand to her stomach.

  Mason’s baby.

  And he would never believe her.

  At least not until the baby was born and they could do blood tests that would prove this baby was his. Ultimately, though, wouldn’t a baby be just the thing that would push him away forever? Not that he wasn’t already gone. Since she left his house that day, he hadn’t called or texted or emailed. She had killed Brooke and kept that from him. He would never get over that.

  She turned her face to her pillow to hide the sobs that rose up and out. They poured day and night and she kept thinking that one day, at some point surely, she would be empty and they would stop.

  Today wasn't that day.

  He had never recovered from the way the community outed and ousted his family when he was a kid. Now he was the hometown-boy-makes-good, starting fresh, rebuilding his father’s business, starting a new career, and her dreams gave life to his old nightmares.

  She understood why he hadn’t called. She got it. She couldn’t blame him. He had probably spent ten years hating whoever had killed Brooke, and then he discovered that person was her.

  She pushed herself upright and headed to the bathroom. God, she hated morning sickness. Whichever mastermind learned to bottle it could use it as a war weapon and rule the world, because it would drop men to their knees.

  Her phone rang and she didn’t recognize the number on her Caller ID, but she answered, figuring it was someone from work. Probably someone from human resources who was checking on her. If she didn’t answer, they would just keep calling until they got her.

  After wavering for a moment between the phone and the bathroom, she decided she had another two to three minutes before she lost it. Fortunately, or unfortunately, her stomach gave early warnings.

  “Hello?” Her voice was scratchy from being sick and her throat was clogged from crying. At least she didn’t have to pretend to have a sick voice.

  “Hey, darlin’. It’s Dixie.”

  28

  Before Layla could get the car into park, Dixie was crossing her front porch and heading straight for her with her arms outstretched. When she’d invited her over, Layla thought she should decline. She knew Mason wouldn’t want the two of them to spend time together and she didn’t need another conflict.

  But aside from the debt, her crazy dreams, and the appearance of Asher, there was now the breakup with Mason and the pregnancy. She needed to talk with someone who understood her unique situation.

  Layla wouldn’t tell her about the baby, not before she had a chance to tell Mason. He was the father, he needed to be the first to know. She did want to talk with her about the breakup, though. Not because she expected advice on how to fix it, but it would just be helpful to get everything off her chest. There wasn’t anyone else who knew all the details the way she did.

  Dixie was about ten steps away from her when she stopped short and gasped. Layla quickly looked down at her body. Except for a slight straightening of her waistline, she knew she wasn’t showing yet. If anything, all the morning sickness had caused her to lose a few pounds. She had been upset to distraction lately and wondered if she had done something stupid, like left the house in her pajama bottoms.

  But no, she only saw her normal jeans. Her favorite skinny pair, in fact, and ones she wouldn’t be able to wear again for about a year.

  “What’s the matter?” Layla asked.

  Dixie’s softened focus trailed a few feet from Layla’s midsection and then it finally stopped. “Oh, my. Oh, honey.” She pressed her hand to her heart. “Do you know that you’re—I mean, are you aware that—”

  The tears came too fast for her to stop and she covered her face with her hand. She should have known she couldn’t possibly hide her secret from her child’s psychic grandmother. Dixie rushed to Layla and held her as tight and secure as any mother would hold a child. She hadn’t realized it until just then, but Layla had been drifting like a leaf on the wind.

  Layla relaxed into the burnt red fabric recliner that she remembered Mason’s daddy sat in when she had often visited in her youth. Tired fro
m a long day of work, he would hold a bottle of beer in one hand and the remote in the other. But he’d always get up when she came in, saying, “Lay-la-pop! Aren’t you the most beautiful girl I’ve seen today!”

  He always reminded her of a lumberjack, with his broad shoulders, straight dark hair, and affinity for darkly colored plaids.

  “When did you find out, darlin’?” Dixie asked from the kitchen.

  “Not long ago. Yesterday for sure from my doctor. It’s early yet.”

  Dixie served Layla chamomile tea in an antique cup and saucer covered in pink roses. A tiny hairline crack ran diagonally across the largest rose.

  “And I guess our boy Mason doesn’t know since I’ve not heard anything about this?” She curled into the matching recliner and rested her chin in her hand.

  “Oh. Dixie. No, he doesn’t know. And he wouldn’t have any reason to suspect either.”

  Dixie narrowed her focus, as if Layla had just given her a riddle. “What do you mean?”

  Layla drank a long sip of her tea. “We were taking it slow. My relationship with Asher had been, um, incredibly hard, and I wasn’t ready for another relationship.”

  “Wise choice—” Dixie nodded as only a mother could when referencing wisdom and hard won lessons: lips together, eyes closed, deep nod.

  “But then he showed up in my dreams, and—I didn’t think—” Layla put her face in her hands, partly from embarrassment and partly from disbelief. “I thought it was just a dream, and I—we—oh, gosh.”

  “It’s okay,” Dixie interrupted with a soft voice. “You don’t have to explain. I was young once, too. So no, of course he wouldn’t suspect. Oh, boy.”

  “Never in a million years did I think this would happen. Never. I mean, never.”

  “Well of course you wouldn’t. Why would you?” Dixie patted Layla’s knee.

  Layla exhaled hard. “Because events in my Alcott Manor-influenced dreams have left their mark before, though not always, and I certainly didn’t think pregnancy was a possibility.”