“You’re not even going to say you’re sorry, are you?”
Now he paused, his back half turned to her. “Sorry for what?”
Her hand whipped up, and there was a flash of something sharp and bright rising behind the soldier boy. It came at him from the side. It sliced across his neck. There should’ve been blood, but Dahlia saw only sparks—that same electric fizzle and pop as if she’d been hit on the head, or as if lightning had struck right beside her.
Dahlia heard the knife clatter to the floor. She heard screaming, and she heard footsteps heavy on the stairs. She was sitting down, and she didn’t know when that had happened—when Abigail had let her fall.
She scrambled back from the trapdoor opening, kicking away in a feeble crawl, because her legs weren’t working quite right. That awful coldness poured through her limbs and she stopped moving, except to sit up, then stand up, and breathe. Her vision cleared and the young couple was gone, but there was a spray of blood all the way to the ceiling, and a puddle on the floor that must’ve held a gallon or more, and there was so much screaming, and the sound of heavy things falling, and being dragged.
This way.
Dahlia stepped down onto the stairs and began to descend. Her eyes were not her own, but in one corner she saw Buddy, young and alive. He’d found the knife, still slick with gore. He was carving a message. The scratch, scratch, scrape of the blade cut down into the naked subflooring.
I was wrong about that, Dahlia thought, since she could not speak. It was Buddy who left the message. He meant it for her.
Abigail guided Dahlia down the stairs, and back to the hall, where a rug had been folded around a long, lumpy shape that oozed a dark stain through the fabric, and onto the floor.
Judson Withrow was shouting and dragging one end of the bundle, while his wife screamed like she’d never stop, because there was nothing else left for her to do. Abigail crouched against Hazel’s closed door, her yellow dress splashed with blood. She wrapped her arms around her knees and glared at her father, who wasn’t having it.
“You get yourself up! You take the other end! You did this, Abigail. You did this, and God help me, but you’re going to lend a hand in fixing it!”
Her eyes radiated hatred. She shook her head. “I don’t care if you fix it!”
“You’ll care when they take you away for murder, when they lock you up or hang you for it!”
“I don’t care about that, either!”
Judson, tall and lean but very strong, dropped his end of the bundle and paused to slap his wife across the face. “You stop that! You stop it now!”
The openhanded blow surprised her enough that she swallowed the next round of wails.
“Thank you,” he said roughly. Then, because it was clear that his daughter wasn’t interested in lifting a finger, much less a hand, he wrangled the bundle onto his shoulder. It hung there awkwardly, and he balanced the weight on the top of the stair rail with one of his arms.
“Judson.” His wife coughed out his name.
He barked at her, “Do you want to help carry this?”
Shocked by the suggestion, her mouth drooped open.
“Then not another word from you! Not another sound, either! I’m going to fix this,” he said, changing his grip on the corpse wrapped in a rug. He pointed one accusing finger at Abigail, who refused to budge. “Not for you. But I’ll do it for them. I’ll do it for everyone else.”
He began a slow, measured stomp down the steps. Over his shoulder he said, “Come along behind me and clean up. Get Hazel to help you, if Abigail won’t.”
From behind the closed door, Dahlia heard a muffled, “No … please…”
Even then, Hazel had known to hide.
Judson trudged on down, the hem of the rug trailing behind him, leaving a spotty streak of blood in his wake. And somewhere above, at the very edge of her hearing, Dahlia heard the scrape, scrape, scratch of Buddy’s knife on the subfloors. How long would it take to leave that message? How many times would he cut it, again and again, for his father or his sisters to sand it away?
No.
Down the hall and past the stairs Dahlia stumbled, fighting just enough to throw off her pace—Abigail could work for control, if she wanted it so badly. Her vision swam, and that incessant knife-scratching noise grated in her ears. She felt herself falling forward, and her eyes cleared in time to see the bathroom door. She threw up her hands—or did Abigail throw up her hands?—and shoved the door away, then toppled inside.
This wasn’t the Mamie pink horror. There were no badly dated tiles, no fixtures left over from an awkward mid-century remodel. This was a washroom with a graceful cast-iron tub and a pedestal sink, with a toilet that was capped by a wooden seat and lid, with a pull chain to flush it. There was Abigail, lying on the floor, her shoulders pushed up against the far wall and her feet braced against the bathtub. It was heavy enough to stand against her as she pushed.
Dahlia wanted to retch, and she wanted to leave. There was so much blood—more blood than the young soldier had spilled. Gallons and gallons of it, far too much for one young woman to hold. Or maybe it only looked that way on the tile floor, which was slick with water and mucus and bits of tissue. Abigail wasn’t wearing the yellow dress, not now. She wore a robe that started out light green, and by now was so covered with gore that it looked brown and wet as it clung to her legs.
“Abigail, don’t,” Dahlia begged, only barely realizing that she was actually speaking. “Please, I don’t want to see your baby.”
Abigail stopped pushing and drew herself up to a seated position against the wall. Her hair was soaked with sweat, and it hung down stringy across her face. Blood collected beneath her, spilling out from between her legs to cover the floor in a creeping smudge; it threaded through the grout lines, swamping the tiles, and inching toward Dahlia—who made herself as small as possible between the sink and the tub.
The girl sighed. “It wasn’t a baby.” She pulled her knees up underneath herself, sitting cross-legged, while the blood still ran. “It came too early, by a couple of months. It came out dead. It was never alive.” She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.
Dahlia looked toward the door. It was open. The blood would flood her boots in another few seconds. It would pour out into the hallway, before long. Abigail wasn’t looking. Dahlia’s arms and legs were working. She could run.
Couldn’t she?
“If you wanted to,” Abigail answered without opening her eyes. “But I don’t know where you’d go, or why you’d go there.”
“Gabe’s hurt. He needs help.”
“Help’s coming. He’ll be all right.” She shifted and leaned forward, fixing Dahlia with a pair of enormous and lovely brown eyes with thick black lashes. “Not sure about you, though.”
“What? Why? Abigail…” She looked again at the door, but did not rise. “Abigail, what have you done?”
“I haven’t done anything. All I ever did was trust a boy.”
“And kill him.”
Abigail waved her hand, like this was true, but a trifle. “But you understand. You wanted to hurt yours. You still want to hurt him.” She nodded confidently.
Blood licked at the edge of Dahlia’s boots. “But I didn’t hurt Andy. I hardly even fought him. I let him have what he wanted, ’cause he was going to take it anyhow. His daddy has money, and mine has debt. I know how the world works.”
“You loved him, and you loved the house. He wouldn’t let you keep it.”
Slowly, Dahlia pushed against the wall, using the leverage of her own weight to rise. “How do you know about the house?”
“You loved that house, and he didn’t even care about it. It was just spiteful, what he did.”
“There were reasons,” Dahlia protested weakly. She was standing now. Shaky and uncertain, as if all the blood on the bathroom floor was hers—and not just the bit still dripping intermittently from her right nostril. But she was moving under her own power, and
that was something. “I couldn’t afford it, not by myself. Andy was stupid sometimes, but he wasn’t ever spiteful, I don’t think.”
“You knew him your whole life, almost, and he walked off like it didn’t mean a thing. He was done with you before you were done with him. He had someone waiting for him before the ink was dry. She’s living with him now, in a house he picked because you gave him a taste for old places. It’s a nice house. You’d like it.”
“She’s moved in? Already? Naw, I don’t think he’d…”
“Men don’t care. Even when they know what they’ve done, and what it means—they don’t care. They just leave us behind to clean up their messes … like they never had no part in making them.”
“Like they left you behind?” While Dahlia spoke, her right hand reached into her back pocket. Was she going for her phone? Was Abigail? “Everybody else is buried over the ridge, in the big cemetery. But not you.” She pulled out her cell. The screen had a brand-new crack from corner to corner, but the phone lit up when she pressed the button to activate it.
Abigail didn’t answer, and Dahlia was cold again, so very cold. The bathroom was filling up with a chilly fog that caught in her throat and left it raw.
She unlocked the screen. Andy’s contact listing was long since deleted, but she knew the number by heart—and she even had a voice mail from a couple of weeks ago, confirming that he’d gotten the last of the papers filed, and she’d hear from the lawyer soon. She pulled up her call history, selected that entry, and looked up.
She didn’t see Abigail anymore, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. The bathroom was an icebox, and the blood on the floor was freezing to an awful slush. It crunched and squished at the same time when Dahlia took a single step toward the door. The next step was more brittle, less juicy. She slipped on the third step, for it was as slick as ice.
The doorknob was so cold, it stuck to her skin.
She turned it anyway, holding the phone with her free hand, and looking down at the screen. Out in the hallway she left red boot prints on the runner, which wouldn’t be eaten by moths for another eighty years. Abigail was nowhere to be seen, but the frosted air drifted from the washroom like someone’d left a freezer open.
Dahlia paused and leaned against the wall, feeling the tickle of icy air lift the little hairs on her arms. She tapped the screen, telling the phone to return that call—but she didn’t hold the phone to her ear. She held it in her hand, and listened while it rang.
On the last ring, before Andy’s voice mail would’ve picked up, she heard a click, and a thunk as someone on the other end dropped the phone—then a scraping noise as something ran across the microphone. Then a woman spoke.
“Andy’s phone. Who’s this, and what do you want?”
Dahlia’s mouth went dry. If the woman who answered didn’t see her name on the incoming call display, then Andy had removed her from his contacts, too.
“Hello?”
She coughed, and said “Hello” softly in return. “Where’s Andy gotten off to?”
“Nowhere far. He’s in the shower. Who is this? Can I take a message?” When Dahlia didn’t say anything, she asked again, “Is there anything you’d like to tell him?”
Was there anything Dahlia wanted to say to Andy? What a ridiculous question. She had no answer for it, so she hung up. The phone fell from her hand, but she picked it up again, and put it back in her pocket.
15
DOWN THE HALL, someone was crying. The sobs came wet and heavy, and the girlish squeak between deep, sad breaths only made it sound all the more pitiful. Dahlia’s heart ached, or she thought it did.
Was that Abigail, crying in the master bedroom? Was it her, squeezing Dahlia’s chest until it hurt?
At the end of the hall, the window was broken again. Wind and rain came driving through the dark corridor—for it was dark again, too: not the half-dark of late afternoon, but the true dark that follows a sunset. Dahlia couldn’t remember the last place she’d left the lantern. There was lightning outside—and a roaring sound rising and falling, like a train coming hard and fast around the mountain. But this was no locomotive, she knew. There were trains in the vicinity, yes, but not so close. This was the wind. This was the sound of air moving so fast that it beats, cuts, and hammers everything in its path. No wonder the folks down the street called it a tornado.
The splintering crack of tree limbs rattled her ears, and when the branches fell, they scraped down the house like nails on a chalkboard. They echoed and scratched like a blade on the brittle, cheap wood of the attic’s subflooring—cutting letter after letter in an accusation that wouldn’t die.
She did not hear any sirens. She did not hear Gabe or Brad talking down below on the front porch. There was nothing but the rain, and the wind, and the widow-makers falling around the house in hard, heavy thumps.
And the crying.
It rose and fell. It trickled through the house, with a lilting quality that was almost musical. Almost real.
“Abigail?” Dahlia called softly.
She heard a hitch in the sobbing, but nothing else.
She knew the hallway, knew the doors. Hazel’s room was open because they’d removed the door, and now the spirit couldn’t shut it if she wanted to. So there, thought Dahlia. And thanks for nothing, anyway.
To the left was the open door to the bathroom, and inside it, a spirit shaped like a boy. He looked down into the bathtub, shook his head, then met Abigail’s eyes.
The boy wept like his heart was broken.
“Buddy?”
Whatever she told you, I was there. I saw her. She held it in the water, and the devil took them both.
She would’ve stopped, if she could. She would’ve hung back and questioned him about the baby, about the bathtub. About the water, because it all came back to the water, didn’t it? It tied it all together: the sanitarium, the rain, the plumbing. The bathtub and a baby, and the crying dead boy who’d lived for another thirty years.
But she glided, on a rail.
The third door on the right, as she headed toward the broken window at the end of the hall, that bedroom was hers. She’d dibbed it for her own, on that first morning they’d arrived. Their trucks had been empty. She had loved the house on sight. She’d apologized to it, and made it promises.
She’d had no idea.
The crying behind her faded as she left it, and Abigail’s cold hands drew her along, luring her back into that room. She stopped in the doorway, and clung to the frame. She didn’t want to go inside. She didn’t want the light to flash, or the fierce, weird memory of another time to show her a goddamned thing.
She looked anyway.
Water smashed against the glass of the big bay window, with its huge seat that had briefly worked for a bed. The broken pane let it all spray inside, but the shadow seated on the dusty old cushion didn’t care. It shuddered in time with that unearthly weeping. It didn’t look like a girl in a yellow dress. It looked like a dead thing that haunted bathrooms because the devil had taken it, and made it stay where it least wanted to be.
Dahlia breathed, “Abigail?”
I thought you might stay.
“I can’t stay. You know that as well as I do.”
You promised. When you first came, you said you’d never leave.
She frowned, trying to remember when on earth she might’ve said such a thing. “I think I said that I’d never forget.”
No.
“You heard what you wanted to hear. That doesn’t make it true.” She took a few small steps into the dark bedroom, entirely against her will. Each footfall echoed dully in the mostly empty space. Each raindrop on the glass sounded like a gunshot. She raised her voice, to make herself heard over the stormy riot outside. “Please, whatever you’re doing—stop it. I can help you. I can … I can call somebody about you … about your body. You’re buried in the little cemetery here, aren’t you? Beside Gregory, I bet. Under someone else’s stone. But … but … before we leav
e…” She was blubbering, and she couldn’t stop. “I’ll get you a real grave, a proper one—with the rest of the Withrows, where you belong. That boy wronged you, and what happened after wasn’t your fault. Not all your fault. I understand why you’re mad, but … but let me help, let me see if I can put you to rest. Reunite you with your family, better late than never.”
The shape on the window seat was blacker than the rest of the shadows in the desolate, cavernous room, so when it rose up and rushed at Dahlia, she could see it screaming toward her. She could feel it, that cold flash that was horribly familiar now. It whistled along with the wind and the rain.
I don’t want to be with them—they sent me away, and when I came back, they left me behind. I want to stay here without them. I want you to stay with me.
Dahlia fell back against the wall, but she didn’t crash there—she leaned there, and she wiped her aching, leaking nose with her sleeve. “I can’t stay. You have to let me go. You have to let us all go.”
When I came back, they didn’t want me. I should stay “out of sight and out of mind,” that’s how Daddy put it. They wanted to send me away again. I didn’t let them. I won’t let you send me away, either.
“Nobody’s trying to send you away.” The spirit was so close, so thick. Dahlia was breathing her in, and it hurt. It was liquid nitrogen pouring down her throat and up into her sinuses, powering through the stuffiness left behind by her bloody nose. “I was only trying to set you free. You can stay here forever, for all I care.”
Abigail breathed so softly, and it was January frost in Dahlia’s lungs. I did it in here, you know. Momma hid all the knives, so I broke the window and did all my cutting with a piece of glass. It worked faster and made a bigger mess. It felt good to lie down and stop. It felt good to stay here and watch them scream. And when it was over, Daddy wrapped me in a blanket from the hope chest and put me down there in the plot. Not beside Gregory, though. He didn’t want us touching ever again, even in death.
Dahlia couldn’t see anything through the thick, viscous form that hovered before her, around her, and maybe even threaded itself down inside her chest to coil in the pit of her stomach. When lightning flashed, she only sensed it like an aura in the room—bright and then gone. It showed her nothing, not anymore.