She eyed me curiously. “The mayor called me. She told me about what you had to go through today, and I'm terribly sorry they put you through all that for nothing. I told her it's obvious you weren't involved in the death of that poor girl. But I do wonder how she got hold of that necklace of yours.”
I stood and stared at her, unsure how I was expected to respond. I certainly had no idea how Tori got my necklace.
“Sit down, girl. Don't stand there staring at me like no one ever taught you any manners.”
I sat across from her in a burgundy leather chair. Its seat was cracked and worn, and the springs inside squeaked as I sat down. “Are you going to kick me out of Shadowford?” I asked.
“Did you do something wrong?” She narrowed her eyes at me.
“No. But I thought-”
“If you didn't break any rules, then I don't see a need to let you go,” she said. “Calm down, girl, and have some water. You look like you're about to pass out.”
She had an ivory teacup on the desk in front of her and filled it with water from an open water bottle in her desk. She pushed the cup toward me and nodded expectantly. With trembling hands, I took the cup and raised it to my lips. The water tasted sweet and smelled faintly like rose-petals. I took only a slight sip, then set the cup down.
“Thank you.”
“Fine, fine,” she said. “I'm sure you're exhausted after such a tough day. Why don't you go on upstairs and get ready for bed. We can talk about this in the morning. It's possible the authorities will want to talk to you again, but I feel confident that they have ruled you out as a suspect.”
Her words weren't comforting. There was an impersonal edge to her voice that made me feel uneasy.
I managed to avoid the other girls on the way up to my room. As soon as I was closed inside, I wedged my shoe under the door and went into the bathroom to wash my face. I let the water run in the sink until it was hot and steam poured into the room. I was so tired all of a sudden. My legs felt like jelly and the light was brighter than I remembered it. Shaking it off as best I could, I leaned down to splash water on my face. When I came up, the world went fuzzy.
I steadied myself against the sink and closed my eyes. I was just tired, that was all. It had been a long day. An emotional day. I just needed some sleep. But when I opened my eyes again, my vision was worse. I could barely make out my own image in the mirror. I reached over and rubbed at it with my hand, wiping away the steam, but I lost my balance and stumbled backward against the wall.
Panic seized me as my legs gave out. I fell to the floor. My face smacked against the cold, hard tile. My eyelids were so heavy. I fought it as hard as I could, but the darkness won out, pulling me into its arms and dragging me under.
I Must Be Dreaming
My entire body burned with fever. I curled into a little ball and begged for it to stop. My eyelids felt like they were glued shut and sweat slid down the back of my neck. Inside my head, my thoughts swam around in circles, never finding a clear focus. I couldn't tell if I was awake or asleep and every time I almost climbed up into consciousness, the darkness would pull me back down.
Where was I?
My eyes fluttered open slightly, then closed again. It was dark. The sound of water dripped in the distance, almost echoing in my head as though I were inside a cave. Or a dungeon.
I must be dreaming.
There was no sense of time. There was only the endless trembling of my body against a cold, hard surface.
The sound of chanting jarred me awake. A light rose up in the darkness. A single flame. Someone took my hand and it was so warm. I opened my mouth to ask them for a blanket, but I didn't have a voice. I tried to swallow but my mouth felt like a sea of sand.
I saw the glint of silver overhead, then felt a searing pain on my palm. I tried to jerk away. To sit up. To cry out. But I was powerless and weak. Warm blood trickled down my hand and onto my wrist and the chanting continued. In the dim light, a woman with flowing black hair stood over me. Her face was covered with a shiny black mask. Her eyes glowed a deep crimson.
“She is the one,” the woman said. “The Prima has finally come home.”
The chanting grew louder all around me. It took every ounce of my strength to open my eyes wider and lift my head. Dark shadows swirled around the room like bats and I cried out in fear.
The woman put her hand over my eyes and my world went black. A flash of events passed behind my darkened lids, pulled from within me. Mrs. Shadowford's rattling teacup. Screams in the middle of the night. Fainting near the statue. Losing my necklace.
Panic reached up to tear at my throat. I wanted it to stop, but had no control. Tori at the stadium that night. Being questioned at the station. Meeting Lark's mother. And Jackson. His kiss was warm on my lips, then gone in an instant. Each memory slipped through my brain like water through my fingertips.
Is this what it's like to die?
I felt the cool comfort of my sapphire pendant as it was placed around my neck. I lifted my hand to the stone, then surrendered to the shadows.
I Wasn't Supposed To Forget
Light streamed in through the open curtains, and I pulled the comforter over my head to block the pain of it.
“Harper? Are you awake?”
Reluctantly, I pushed aside the fabric and squinted up at the figure above my bed. “Agnes?”
“You're awake! How are you feeling?” Agnes didn't wait for an answer. Her footsteps clattered across the room toward the door. “Ella Mae? Harper's awake!”
More footsteps on the stairs. I closed my eyes. Simply opening them made me tired. The inside of my head felt dense and fuzzy, as if someone had stuffed a thousand cotton balls inside.
“Harper, honey, how are you feeling?” Ella Mae this time. Her worried face appeared as she sat down in a chair next to my bed. She placed a cool wet cloth on my forehead.
“That feels nice,” I said. My voice didn't sound like my own. It was scratchy and hoarse. What the hell happened to me? The last think I remembered...I couldn't even figure out what was real and what wasn't. Thinking about it too hard sent a stab of pain through my temple.
“We were so worried about you. You have no idea,” Agnes said. She sat at the foot of the bed and placed her hand on my covered feet.
“Here, drink some water.” Ella Mae propped me up on a bunch of pillows, then handed me a small glass of ice water.
The water was so cold on my throat it almost burned. “Thank you,” I said. Some of the raspy sound was already gone. I cleared my throat and drank some more.
“There is so much to tell you,” Agnes said. She bounced a little on the bed and the room went temporarily spinning.
I pressed my hands against the mattress, trying to make it stop.
“Agnes, stop bouncing. You're gonna make her sick,” Ella Mae said.
When I opened my eyes, I noticed Courtney had joined Agnes at the foot of the bed. She smiled shyly up at me, her blonde hair falling into her face. Mary Anne stood silently in the doorway. When I looked her way, she turned and left.
“What happened to me?” I asked.
“You've been sick with the flu,” Ella Mae said, replacing the warm cloth on my head with a fresh cool one. She put a thermometer in my mouth and told me to keep my mouth closed. “You've been in here running in and out of sleep for the past five days.”
“Five days,” I mumbled, talking around the thermometer. How could I have been sleeping for nearly an entire week? I suddenly felt very hot. Almost claustrophobic. Why couldn't I remember what happened? I threw the covers off my legs and tried to stand up.
“Calm down,” Ella Mae said. “You don't want to wear yourself out when you just woke up. Agnes, go down to the kitchen and get some juice and toast.”
The room spun violently and I fell back onto the pillows. Ella Mae lifted my legs onto the bed and covered them back up. I was so incredibly tired, but I knew it was important that I remember. But remember what? I closed my ey
es and tried to think. School. Something terrible happened. Tori Fairchild was dead. I remembered sitting in class when the news came about her death. But then what? Everything grew dim after that. I lifted my hand up to touch my mother's sapphire pendant.
For a moment, I was worried it wouldn't be there. But that was silly, right? I always wore her necklace. At the back of my mind, though, a memory tugged at me.
But the necklace was there where I expected it to be. I curled my fingers around it and ran the pendant back and forth along the silver chain.
Ella Mae took the thermometer from my mouth and shook her head. “You've still got a fever, but it's not as bad as it was before. I think you're still going to need a couple of days at home before you go back to school. I'll talk to Mrs. Shadowford about it. You just rest up, okay? Agnes'll bring you something to eat, and I want you to try and get something down. You need to start building your strength up again.”
I nodded and closed my eyes. Sleep threatened to suck me back down, but I knew there was something more to remember. Something important that I wasn't supposed to forget. But it wouldn't come to me.
Behind my eyelids, all I could see was the glowing light of a single candle. I heard voices chanting. A silver knife sliced into my hand. I gasped and sat up in bed, eyes wide open. The room was darker now that the sun had gone down. Agnes had left the juice and toast on the side table by my bed, but that must have been hours ago. Had I been dreaming?
I lifted my hand. A fresh bandage was taped around my palm. With my other hand, I pulled off the tape and unwrapped the gauze. There, in the middle of my palm, still throbbing slightly, was a diagonal cut that ran the length of my hand.
Claire
I spent the rest of the weekend in bed. On the following Monday, the other girls were at school during the day and Ella Mae had stuff to do around the house, so I stayed in my room or went downstairs to play games on the laptop. My body slowly recovered from the illness. With each day, I could feel my strength returning.
By day three, I was bored out of my mind. I started to roam around the mansion, looking at which books they had on the shelves and what paintings were on the walls. Since I had first come to Shadowford, I hadn't spent much time looking around and really paying attention to the house itself. It was by far the most beautiful place I had ever lived. And it was huge.
The first floor was pretty boring as far as exploration goes. Since I wasn't allowed into Mrs. Shadowford's suite of rooms, that left the same old rooms we all moved around in every day. I glanced up the narrow staircase leading to the third floor and bit my lip. Ella Mae had told me not to go up there, but she was all the way downstairs and no one was home.
I stepped gingerly onto the staircase and made my way up to the door. One of the stairs near the top creaked and I froze, waiting to see if Ella Mae would call out to me. When she didn't, I kept going. At the top, I pushed open the painted blue door and glanced inside. There was only a single room up there, and it was full of old boxes. Why would they care if anyone came up here? Not finding any big secret, I went back downstairs.
The second floor was more interesting. In addition to the four bedrooms us girls stayed in, there were four other empty bedrooms.
In the first empty room, I didn't find anything of interest. Dust. That was pretty much it. But the second room was a different story. At first, it seemed like the other. Dusty and ancient. The floral bedspread was perfectly made up. The windows were shut tight. But when I sat down on the bed, I felt the sudden urge to look under it. I got down on my hands and knees. When I lifted the bed-skirt, little dust bunnies fluttered through the air and I coughed.
“You okay Miss Harper?” Ella Mae called up. Man, how did she even hear me from down there?
“Yes ma'am,” I said back. It was still a struggle to raise my voice too much.
I lifted the bed-skirt again and peered under the bed. A sliver of light shone through from the other side and there, near the wall, I saw something. A small box, maybe?
In order to get to it, I had to practically crawl underneath the bed. If anyone had walked into the room, they would have only seen the bottom half of my body sticking out. I stretched my arm and reached forward, finally grasping the elusive object.
Not a box. A picture frame.
A small silver double frame with a hinge that let it open and close. I sat on the hard wood floor, covered in dust, and opened the frame. On one side, a young woman with long brown hair piled on top of her head in a complicated twist of knots and braids. It was an old picture. So old that the color had long faded into browns and tans. The woman looked vaguely familiar. But that was sort of impossible, wasn't it?
In the second frame was a much newer picture of a group of girls in cheerleading uniforms. The uniforms were different from the kind the cheerleaders wore now, but they were still the same blue and black Demon colors. I studied the faces of the girls, then gasped. The one in the middle – the tall girl with blonde wavy hair – was my mother.
I was sure of it.
My heartbeat raced. How was this possible? I couldn't wrap my mind around it. I stood and moved to the window, wanting to get a better look in the light.
“Harper?” Ella Mae's voice at the bottom of the stairs.
Shit. There was no clear and fast rule about coming into these deserted rooms, but intuition told me they wouldn't want me in here. Not if they knew this picture had been left behind.
I shoved the bulky frame into the waistband of my sweatpants and quickly made my way to the top of the stairs. “Yes?”
“Are you alright? I thought I heard you coughing. Do you need anything?”
I shook my head. “No, I'm fine. Just had an itch in my throat.”
“You look a little bit flushed,” she said. Her hand gripped the banister like she was about to come upstairs and check on me. But I didn't want her up here. I needed more time to look around. Plus, I didn't want her to find the picture frame.
“Really, I'm fine. I just heard you calling and ran out here too fast. I'll just go lay down for a bit.”
She hesitated, then looked back toward the kitchen. No doubt she still had a lot of work to do before the others got home from school. “Alright. But you call down if you need anything.”
“I will,” I said.
Back in my own room, I sat on my bed and took out the small frame. Carefully, I took it apart, separating the black velvet backing from the frame. The pictures were stuck to the glass inside, so I had to be very gentle with them. After a little bit of prodding, they both finally came loose.
On the back of the first picture, I could barely make out the hand-written words. Probably a name and date, but it was too smudged and faded to see. The picture of the cheerleaders was much more clear. In neat print, it read: Daneka, Julie, Claire, Mazie, and Audrey. The date was almost exactly twenty years ago.
I turned it over in my hand and studied the faces again. A young black girl with a wide, shining smile. Sheriff Hollingsworth? Next to her was an Asian girl that looked exactly like Lark Chen. Her mother maybe? That would put her at about the right age. The other three girls looked similar. White girls with blonde hair of varying lengths. But I knew the girl in the middle. Her smile beamed up at me from the photograph like a greeting from the grave.
Claire.
Knowing her name made my heart long for her.
But how was this possible? My mother had lived here in Peachville? Even if I believed in coincidence, this was way beyond that. What were the chances of me finding a picture of my mother here in a group home in Peachville, Georgia?
My gut told me it had nothing at all to do with chance.
Not Anymore
The following morning, Ella Mae pronounced me well enough to go back to school. To tell the truth, I was dreading it. Even though being at home had been kind of boring, I had no idea what to expect from the people at school. Agnes told me that no one believed I was responsible for what happened to Tori, which was a relief.
But at the same time, everyone knew I had been questioned. So far, Tori's killer was still out there, and some people were bound to suspect me just because I'd been brought in.
Something tugged at the back of mind. Why had they brought me in for questioning? There had to be something linking me to the crime, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what. When I asked Ella Mae about it, she said the fever must have caused some temporary memory loss. Apparently, the doctor told her it was a possible side effect. The trouble was – I didn't remember seeing any doctors.
I hated this feeling of constant forgetfulness. I had an idea about my life since I first came to Shadowford, but when I tried to recall conversations and specific events, everything got confusing.
“You coming?”
Agnes stood outside the Shadowford van and waved me out. The ride to school had seemed short. My mind must have been wandering again. I was doing that a lot lately.
I walked toward the school with Agnes, pausing only for a moment to look up at the large stone demon statue. I remembered passing out by the statue my first day of school, and there was more, wasn't there? Some other connection to this statue I couldn't quite place.
“Are you sure you're okay to be back already?” Agnes said. “You seem kinda out of it.”
I shook my head slightly. “I'm fine. Just having a hard time remembering stuff, you know?”
“Well, hopefully you'll remember all the stuff you learned before you were out sick. I think you've got a calculus test today.”
I groaned and followed Agnes into the building.
For the most part, people were more polite than I expected. Sure, there were the whispers and some extra long glances my direction, but no one yelled at me or called me a murderer or anything obvious. The part of the day I'd been dreading, however, was lunch. When the lunch bell rang, I felt a twist in my stomach.
The cheerleaders. I didn't want to face them. What if they all blamed me for what happened to Tori?
I went through the line, then took the empty seat next to Agnes. I barely listened to the conversation around me, keeping my eye on the center table. I knew when they'd arrived. Everyone at the table turned to look, their stares lingering for a moment longer than you'd expect. That was the way it was with everyone when the cheerleaders walked into a room. It was like you couldn't take your eyes off them.