“What now?”
“Mountain Town Construction has put in for the chestnut!”
“I thought Graystone Building was taking it…?”
Chuck vibrated with glee. “They made an offer. It was a good offer. But I wondered if Mountain Town wanted to make a better one.”
“You’re a greedy old man,” she said with love. She got to her feet, wadded up her lunch trash, and tossed it into the can beside his desk. “And I’m a busy girl, so I’d better get back to it.”
“Back to what? You’re not overexerting, are you? You aren’t supposed to overexert. I thought we made that clear. If you’re going to overexert, you can just go home.”
“I’m doing inventory, and stop saying ‘overexert.’ I’m just counting up and measuring the windows that Bobby sorted in the back, and I’ve got my handy-dandy screen here to do all the hard stuff for me, I promise.”
“All right then. Hop to it.”
She returned to the inventory corner and called out, “Hey, Bobby? You back from lunch yet?”
“In body, or spirit?”
“Whichever one is more likely to move those doors for me, because we’re almost done with the windows—at long last, praise Jesus—and the doors are next.”
He finished a bottle of beer with one long, drawn-out swallow and belched to punctuate the end. “Then my spirit is fucking useless, and my body will have to do. Gabe says it’s not worth much—but he’s one to talk right now.”
“Is he here? I thought he wasn’t coming back until tomorrow.”
Bobby cocked his head toward the retail end of the warehouse. “He’s manning the register, and playing Mr. Customer Service. So … mostly he’s talking to girls and showing off his crutches. You should hear him.” He chuckled around another burp, and reached for the last of the windows. Paint flaked away under his gloves, dusting the floor as he moved them to the far wall. “Making up stories about how it happened. To hear him tell it, he’s practically Indiana Jones.”
She grinned, and booted up the inventory program. “Yeah, I bet.”
They finished up the first round of doors, sorting the interior six-panels from the eight-panels and the four-panels, and measuring up the exterior doors, except for the big front jobbie with the sidelights. The rose transom hadn’t been original to the set, so she didn’t mind splitting it up.
When all the door management was done, Bobby declared yet another beer break. Dahlia thought about arguing, but she was tired. It turned out that when you lose a lot of blood, it doesn’t all just magically come back. Sure, they give you some in the hospital, but beyond a certain point, your body is expected to pitch in and help.
She needed a little rest, but she didn’t want to admit it. “Fine, take your beer—and I’ll take a bathroom break. I could stand to disinfect anyway, after handling all that old shit.”
“I was the one doing most of the handling.”
“You know what I meant.”
“Whatever. See you in ten.”
* * *
Chuck Dutton pawed through one of the Withrow boxes, wondering where its contents ought to go. It looked like a bunch of vintage women’s wear, and God knew he had no clue how to price it or where to sell it. Perhaps Dahlia had planned to list it all online. More likely she wanted to keep it for herself. His daughter had a vintage clothing collection that grew by the year, though she almost never wore a stitch of it. He didn’t judge. He collected ridiculous shit of his own. It ran in the family.
“Bobby?” he called out. His nephew was on the other side of a shelving unit full of windows, doors, and stray panes of glass.
“Uncle Chuck?” came the reply.
“Where’s Dolly at?”
“Bathroom, I think. Greasing up her stitches.”
“All right.” So he’d ask her about it when she got out.
While he waited, he shoved his fingers through the hats, feathers, and gloves, picking up a beaded bag and putting it down again. There was another one in there, more like a clutch. It was black and green, and the beads were good-quality glass—even a manly fashion know-nothing like him could see that at a glance, and feel it by the fabric’s weight.
Something was inside it. Something stiff and crinkly.
He unfastened the clasp and found paper, folded over until it fit into the small hand purse. The paper was old … probably older than Chuck. It was brown at the edges, and along the seams.
“The hell is this?” he asked quietly, unfolding it with gentle fingers.
It was a set of sheet music, missing the cover. There were only three pages, printed front and back.
Chuck couldn’t read music, but he knew a murder ballad when he saw one.
“THE FAMILY PLOT”
B. D. WITHROW
(1934)
Come all you wicked women,
And listen to this tale,
It’s of a dreadful murder,
The truth I will reveal,
Near Lookout Mount in Tennessee,
A shocking deed I know,
It happened one September night
Not many years ago.
There was a young man, Greg’ry M.,
A soldier brisk and gay,
Likewise one Abby W.,
Fair as the rose of May.
This fighting lad and his fair maid,
Did close together dwell,
And soon in lust with this bright girl
Unwary Greg’ry fell.
It was the young man’s folly,
He toyed with a heart so wild,
And soon, to her misfortune,
He got her quick with child.
Tongues wagged and people whispered,
Wondering if they ought to marry,
So she told her Greg’ry darling,
“They will soon know what I carry!”
It was one early autumn night,
When he to her did say,
“I like you true but love you not,
And soon, I’m on my way.”
But at the bottom of the mountain
She did ask to say good-bye,
He told her he would meet her once,
If she promised not to cry.
Then in an attic room they met,
Where many an hour they’d passed,
But little did poor Greg’ry think,
That night would be his last.
Abby drew forth a jagged knife,
It was both long and sharp.
She seized his neck and plunged it
So deep into his heart.
Loud she heard her mother cry,
And then her father said,
“Oh God, my girl, look what you’ve done!
You’ve killed the young man dead!
We’ll bury him in uniform,
Within our family plot,
We’ll stash his bloody body
In the safest place we’ve got.”
Father took the corpse outside
And wrapped it in a rug.
He found a place ’neath no man’s stone
And there he dug and dug.
He buried him in uniform
Within the family plot.
He stashed the bloody body
In the safest place they’d got.
Though New Year came around and went,
No baby e’er was seen.
Abby birthed and drowned it on
The eve of Halloween.
Now the baby’s buried too,
Within the family plot,
The little body’s hidden
In the safest place she’d got.
Years went by and Abby snared
Another young man’s eye,
They made a plan to marry
On the fourth of next July.
But when they met to celebrate
The secret was revealed!
When her brother told the guests
About the infant she had killed.
“Every word of that’s a lie!”
Did Abby say out loud,
She swore an oath of innocence
Before the gathered crowd.
“There’s never been a newborn child,
No murder did I do,
You should go and ask the Devil,
He can take me if it’s true.”
The Devil heard her offer,
He listened to her lies,
And up from hell he did appear
To seize his pretty prize.
Now Abby’s buried right there, too,
Within the family plot.
Her mortal coil rests inside
The safest place he’s got.
So if you are a young man
With a bonny maid to woo,
Be careful with the vows you make
And who you make them to.
For wicked girls will weave a web.
Be sure you don’t get caught,
Lest you find yourself one day
Beneath a family plot.
EPILOGUE
DAHLIA TOOK HER bag into the bathroom, because she’d been toting around all the things she needed to care for her injuries. The special antiseptic, the antibiotic, the anti-whatever-else, and so forth, and so on. She hated changing the bandages, but she was getting to where she could clean things up fairly quickly and fairly neatly all by herself.
Bobby’d said ten minutes, but they both knew it’d be more like fifteen or twenty. It’d take her most of that time to sort her arms out anyway, which was the other reason she didn’t complain about him taking advantage of their post-Withrow detente.
She closed the bathroom door and flipped on the light—a retro number scavenged from some old factory someplace that was just barely too new to call vintage, and entirely too ugly to charge money for, which is what it was doing in the employee bathroom. Outside, someone was running a forklift, moving those long chestnut boards into secured storage. When it rumbled up close to the bathroom wall, the fixture vibrated, and the yellow incandescent glow wobbled around the little room.
The bathroom was a single seater, which was fine when you only had half a dozen people on hand at any given time. It wasn’t a big room, but it had a toilet and a sink, and a broken-down hutch that held cleaning supplies and toilet paper. Dahlia dropped her bag on top of it and pulled out the necessities. She lined them up on the hutch’s lid, and glanced down into her bag.
And there was Brad’s digital camera, in its black casing with its gray lanyard.
She still hadn’t played whatever footage it’d captured, and now wasn’t a good time to get curious. Twenty minutes at most, that’s all she had—and she needed to spend it all cringing and dabbing at pink, puffy skin around black stitches. Besides, the battery was surely dead by now.
It wasn’t even hers. She should give it back to Brad.
She would have given it back to him, but he’d quit the day she came home from the hospital. He just … handed in the keys to the truck, thanked her dad for the opportunity, and vanished back to grad school, or wherever that kind of guy goes when he’s lost track of himself. She wished him well … and she halfway wished he’d taken his camera, so it wouldn’t hang around tempting her like this.
The bathroom was cold, and her hands were cold—despite the bandages, and the sock-like covering she wore beneath her sleeves. The warehouse was always drafty, and this chill was ordinary and familiar. It wasn’t fingers. It wasn’t a shadow without any eyes.
She turned on the water. The pipe rattled, and the faucet handle shook.
While she waited for the cold stuff to turn warm, she pressed the camera’s power button. She wasn’t sure why.
The display lit up. The low-battery light flickered, but there was still enough juice to run it.
She shouldn’t do this. She should turn it off and drop it into the waste bin beside the toilet. That would be the smart thing to do. It’d be the easy thing to do, for her fingers were stiff with healing, and with the washroom chill. It was always cold in there, wasn’t it? Yes, but was it always this cold?
She pressed the back arrows to view the most recent file. It was forty minutes long, but the time and date stamp showed that yes, the video had been captured on that night. But Brad hadn’t been wearing the camera, had he? He must’ve set it down someplace, or dropped it.
Dahlia pressed play.
She didn’t plan to watch the whole thing. She wasn’t going to sit through forty minutes of listening to herself scream. She only wanted to know where the camera had been—what room it had been watching. No way in hell she was going to torment herself with the rest.
With her mummy-wrapped left hand, she shielded the screen from the glare of the bulb overhead. She turned up the volume.
Mostly, she saw darkness. Mostly, she heard the rain and thunder, and the hiss of digital static from the speaker. But as she squinted at the display, broad strokes appeared: a straight line that turned out to be a windowsill, and the back of a chair. Brad had either dropped the camera or left it in the dining room.
She held it up to her ear, and heard the storm rage. She checked the screen. Still nothing but darkness, brightened for a second at a time when the lightning flashed it away.
She pushed the fast-forward button and saw nothing, until her own shadow came bursting in, looking for that bourbon. She recognized herself mostly by her posture and her gait, for the image was so dim it was heavily pixelated. Whatever camera model this was, its low-light recording was positively awful.
Dahlia knew what came next. She already knew there would be screaming, and blood, and her own ungainly slither down the stairs. Suddenly, she wondered what her dad had done with all the bloody wood. He must’ve left it behind. She hadn’t seen any of it in the batches so far.
He must’ve seen the blood. He must’ve known it was hers. The thought made her queasy.
She leaned back against the hutch and rested her weight beside her bag. The thought of her dad walking into that house and finding what looked like a murder scene … it must’ve been awful. No wonder he was so happy to avoid any discussion of what had happened there.
She fast-forwarded until she saw herself lying in a dark lump near the edge of the foyer. She knew it was her—that dying thing on the bare floor. The recording was low on details, and that was a mercy. She didn’t really want to watch it, and when Bobby came yelling into the picture with a lantern, the screen went almost white before it adjusted.
And then it flashed, and the camera’s green light went red. The screen went dark again, and it stayed that way.
Dahlia exhaled a quivery breath. She popped out the memory card, threw it into the toilet, and flushed, then chucked the camera itself into the waste bin beside the sink.
The “hot” water had finally kicked in, but the sink drained slowly, so it was a third full with steaming water, with more pouring in.
“Enough of that. Arms, me and you need a few minutes of quality time with some antiseptic.” Her voice shook, and she didn’t like that. She was only cold, and only recovering from something that almost killed her. She planted her hands on the sink, but didn’t lean down. “And when we’re done, we’re talking to Daddy about throwing a space heater in here, I swear.”
There was a flicker behind her, half-spotted in the mirror. A hint of movement, from something very close to her in that too-small space.
Dahlia smelled autumn leaves and rain. She heard wind, and tasted blood, and she glimpsed a figure in the mirror. It stood behind her, barely an impression of a young woman, a spill of dark hair, a yellow dress.
The lightbulb burst, and the room went white.
And the room went dark.
TOR BOOKS BY CHERIE PRIEST
THE EDEN MOORE BOOKS
Four and Twenty Blackbirds
Wings to the Kingdom
Not Flesh Nor Feathers
Fathom
THE CLOCKWORK CENTURY NOVELS
Boneshaker
Dreadnought
Ganymede
The I
nexplicables
Fiddlehead
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cherie Priest is the author of nineteen books, including the award-winning Clockwork Century series, which began with the Hugo and Nebula Award–nominated Boneshaker. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Visit her on the Web at www.cheriepriest.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
Tor Books by Cherie Priest
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE FAMILY PLOT
Copyright © 2016 by Cherie Priest
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-7824-8 (hardcover)
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eISBN 9781466860650
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