Thalia scooted past the table corner, sitting down and sliding along the gazebo’s built-in bench until she was directly across from Laurel. She smiled then, but it was her too-big, wolfy smile. Laurel could see all her teeth gleaming in the candlelight.
“Your husband is kind of an asshat,” Thalia said softly, and plopped one hand on the closest side of the planchette. “Grab the other half, and let’s get going.”
“What happened to bunny tails and being fluffy?” Laurel asked. She kept her hands tucked under the table, even though the energy she’d felt a moment ago was gone, eclipsed by Thalia’s crackling anger. “Please tell me you didn’t go down there and pick a fight.”
“I didn’t pick anything. He didn’t even notice I’d come down.” Thalia took her hand off the planchette, too, and stared down at it, as if she expected the intensity of her gaze alone to move it.
“If he had his headset on, he probably couldn’t hear you. He listens to music really loud, or he gets in this TeamSpeak thing where there are other people talking,” Laurel said in a propitiating tone. Thalia could stomach anything but being ignored.
“Can I ask you something?” Thalia said, but she didn’t wait for permission. “Hypothetically, what would it take for you to leave him?”
“Please don’t let’s have this conversation again.” The night outside the pale flickering ring of light was pressing in on them. Laurel could feel it, so warm and dense with moisture that it was like they were sitting inside the hot breath of something awful. “Not out here, Thalia.”
“But if he hit you, say,” Thalia insisted. “Or got addicted to heroin. Or cheated on you, or—”
“Those things won’t happen,” said Laurel.
“Hypothetically,” Thalia said, and ignored Laurel’s exasperated sigh. “What if he had some redheaded slutty thing down in your basement right now, making the beast with two backs. Say I told you, and you went down and saw it with your own eyes. Then would you leave him?”
Laurel felt a headache starting low at the base of her skull, a tingling as if the buzz of cicadas were gathering there. “I wouldn’t even go look. There is no redhead in our basement. There never will be,” she said. “Thalia, we’re happy.”
Thalia snorted and then said, “So this is what happy looks like. I’d always wondered.”
The buzzing at the back of Laurel’s head got louder. “I’m not happy today. Obviously,” she said. “This is the worst week of my life, and that’s another great reason to skip this conversation.”
“You don’t even know what happy means,” Thalia said. She scooted back, pressing her spine against the railing, and then drew her legs up, knees to chest, careful not to bang the table. She boosted herself up to rest her skinny bottom between two candles on the railing. All the light was below her, hollowing her eyes as she looked down at Laurel. Her voice was matter-of-fact, a cool thing in all the heat. “This is a low point, and you came to get me because you had no idea how to handle it. You don’t have lows, or highs, either. You sleepwalk straight through the middle of things, mucking around with secret pockets. You make art for rich, spoiled people who love to button their own ugly parts shut, and here’s a blanket they can put over their sofa to mirror their protected lives. You could be one hell of an artist, Laurel. The way you understand color and the shapes of things, and God knows, you’d have a lot to say if you let yourself. But instead, you play with lift-the-flaps and macaroni, safe and tidy. You stay in half a marriage with a human-robot hybrid who does not love you. With just the one kid, so you never have to look away and let her take a single unsupervised breath.”
Laurel squeezed her eyes shut, pressing the pads of her fingers tight against her lids, and said, “I’m not having this fight right now. You don’t have a real marriage, Thalia. You don’t have a kid. So don’t give me advice on mine.” She rubbed her hand along the base of her skull, opening her eyes so she could look up at her sister.
Thalia leaned forward, looming over her. “Because I chose theater. I chose it wholly and fully, and I’m happy in a way you’ll never be.”
“Highs and lows,” Laurel said.
Thalia nodded, a vigorous jerk of her head, up and then down.
“I get it,” Laurel said, and she did. Thalia churned up the waters around her; she’d walk into a potluck and know within ten minutes who was sleeping with whom and who was thinking about it, who was nursing secret grudges, where the female rivalries were. Laurel thought a potluck was good if someone brought twice-baked potatoes, but that was never enough for Thalia. She’d put a word here, a whisper there, and in minutes a friendly dinner was vicious chaos and civil war. Then she’d get a cocktail and a good seat and watch it all play out. “You don’t know how to have things that aren’t highs or lows. Anything regular and nice, you know you’ll never have it, so you have to wreck it.”
“This is not about me,” Thalia said. She sounded angry. She flung one leg over the railing, then the other, and dropped to the ground outside the gazebo, standing up on the edge of the ring of light.
Laurel actually laughed, feeling a small surge of ugly triumph. “It’s always about you, Thalia. You’re mad because I’m right, and you don’t like to be seen through.”
“You’re full of shit,” Thalia said. “This is about you, holing up with David and your pretty accident—which, okay, you made the right choice there. Shelby’s amazing, but you’re trying to squash her into your half-life, and she’s like me, Laurel. She’s not scared. Shelby wants to live big. You have her wrapped up tight, tucked away in that private school. You screen her friends and choose all her activities. She’s never seen DeLop, even though she’s begged to go, because you won’t put something that real in front of her. Why not go ahead and poke her eyes out? Blind her. Save yourself some trouble.”
Thalia was pacing around the gazebo where Laurel still sat, circling it like a predator, moving along the edge of the light. “Shelby wants to see ugly. She wants to see ugly and see truly, truly beautiful, both. You may be some flaccid version of happy in all this muffled gray, but your daughter wants bright colors and then midnight, and you want to know what I think? What I really think?”
“No,” said Laurel, but Thalia bulled forward, circling behind Laurel, becoming part of the buzz at the base of her skull.
“I’m checking in to Stan Webelow on the off chance he’s depraved. If he is, I’ll dearly enjoy flaying the skin right off him and showing the world his ugly insides. I’ll check Chuck ’n’ Bunny, too, in case they did something to send that girl running off into the night. But you know what I think happened? I think that Shelby and Molly were planning to run away—”
Laurel cut in, “That’s ridiculous.”
Thalia didn’t even pause, at last moving out from behind Laurel, coming around to face her again. “I think Shelby feels crushed and watched and stifled, so they were meeting up in the yard to hit the road. But Shelby fell asleep and didn’t show. Shelby’s blaming herself, because if she had come, she and Molly would be famous actresses or hookers in New York by now, or more likely, down at the bluffs in a tent, sharing a single stolen beer, because at their age, running away is a half-assed thing, a call for attention, a ‘Hey! Look, Mom! I can’t breathe under your big, fat thumb and—’”
“Shut up.”
Laurel almost screamed it, so loud that Thalia obeyed, her eyes widening in surprise. The closest crickets and frogs obeyed, too, and the night went still.
“I’m sorry, Bug,” Thalia said. Her voice had lost all its fierce intensity. She came back to the gazebo’s opening and slid herself in behind the table again. “But that’s what I think. You need to ask Shelby. Directly. You say she’s not talking, but you aren’t asking. You don’t really want to know that the most likely cause of Shelby’s silence is guilt. Because she meant to run away from you, with Molly, and it all went bad.”
“Shut up,” Laurel said again, but her voice was small and lost, and she heard no conviction in it.
“You know I could well be right,” Thalia said. “But I do apologize. I didn’t mean to slap your face with it in a middle of a fight about C-3PO down there.”
Laurel half laughed, an odd, sad little bark of a sound. “You meant to say these awful, awful things in a nice way. I get it.”
“I didn’t mean to say them at all. I thought I’d let you tell you,” Thalia said. She tilted her head down toward the board, then lined her fingers up on one side of the planchette. “With this.”
Laurel took one hand out of her lap and set her fingers up in a row of four on the other side. The planchette was dead plastic now. The only energy she felt coming through it was Thalia’s.
“You think you’re haunted, Laurel?” Thalia asked. “The only ghost in this yard is the ghost of my sister. I packed the board, hoping that it would let me talk to you. I thought you would move it and tell yourself these things. But David pissed me off, and I said them myself. Oops. It’s not too late. You should try it. Ask yourself the hard questions, not just about Shelby. Ask the board. Is Laurel happy?”
The planchette jerked, carrying Laurel’s hand with it, moving swiftly and decisively to the black “No” in the corner.
“That was you,” Laurel said, tired and scared and irked all at the same time.
“Maybe,” Thalia said. She tried out her most engaging smile on Laurel. “But maybe that was your spirit horse guide. Or maybe it was you, trying to tell yourself a truth you already know but can’t admit.”
“Every time I’ve seen that planchette move, it was you, Thalia,” Laurel said. “What really happened in my basement?”
“David was making the big sex with a redhead?” Thalia gave Laurel a long assessing gaze and then said, her voice quieter now, “Nothing happened. That’s just it. Nothing ever happens here. He didn’t say one word to me. Like you for the last two years. Don’t tell me that’s not because of him.”
“It couldn’t be because of you, right?” Laurel said. She wanted to say more, but the heat was leaking out of her. She didn’t have the time or energy to settle thirteen-year-old arguments, not when Shelby’s safety was at stake. “I’ll talk to Shel, okay? I will. But not tomorrow. Let’s check these other things. To be sure. Stan Webelow and Bunny. If they didn’t do anything, then I’ll ask Shelby, like you said.”
Thalia nodded, but Laurel wasn’t done yet. “You can’t see into my marriage, Thalia. It’s closed to you. Stop knocking, even.” They each still had a hand resting on the dead plastic of the planchette. “Are we done?”
Thalia pulled her hand away. “I am. I’m going to bed.”
She scooted out from behind the table and walked out of the small ring of candlelight. The dark yard swallowed her. Just over the fence, in Mindy Coe’s yard, Laurel heard a clatter and a muffled curse. It sounded like Mindy’s son, Jeffrey, had stumbled into a piece of lawn furniture. A few seconds later, she heard the splash as he dove into his pool. The sounds of normalcy were right next door, but the wooden fence between that life and her own felt miles thick and unfathomably high.
The crickets had started up again without Laurel noticing; the night buzz was back in full force. Gold light spilled from the house as Thalia slipped inside, then it vanished as she closed the door behind her. Thalia was gone, Jeffrey was underwater, and the rest of the neighborhood was sleeping, but Laurel sensed that she was not alone.
She could feel the beginnings of that tug of energy again. Her fingers still rested on the planchette, and it was drawing something from her.
She knew how the game worked. She had seen Thalia play it with her friends. She should ask a question. Back in high school, Thalia’s friends had asked which boys liked them and who was a slut and who was still a virgin. The spirits always knew because Thalia knew, and Thalia ran the board.
But Thalia wasn’t here now.
Laurel pulled the planchette back to the middle, resting it in the plain space under the curved alphabet. She took a deep breath, and then she set her other hand on the opposite side.
She felt the connection close, like something clicking shut. The planchette came alive under her hands, waiting, but she didn’t know what to ask. She was too tired to formulate a proper question.
Finally, she said quietly, “That night when you died, Molly— I hope to God this is you. Tell me what I need to know about that night. Tell me what I need to know to protect Shelby.”
The planchette was moving before she’d said the last word. She wasn’t moving it. Her fingers rested lightly on it, and the felted pads of its feet skated over the board so quickly that she had to hurry to keep her hands from slipping off.
Six times it moved, to six letters, and then Laurel jerked away her hands.
“That’s not true,” she said.
The board sat dumb, the planchette dead again. She scooted out from behind the table and stood, then picked up the planchette. She dropped it onto the gazebo’s single wooden step, and then she stamped on it. Four times she brought her foot down, until the base was in shards, the needle lost, and the lens had skittered off into the grass. She picked up the board and methodically snapped it in half over her knee. She threw the pieces in the yard and then walked around the gazebo once, blowing out the candles. The ring of light got smaller and smaller, until she was almost in total darkness. The last candle she kept, picking it up by the cool bottom of its pottery base. She used it to light her way back to the house.
She would believe what Thalia had said before she believed what the planchette had spelled. It wasn’t possible or true, and she would never think on it again.
Six letters. She would go upstairs and lie down and close her eyes, and sleep would wipe them from her mind. She would wake up tomorrow innocent of them, unknowing. She could do that. God knew she’d seen Mother do it often enough.
She had asked what she needed to know about that night, to protect Shelby. She meant from Stan Webelow, or from an ugly truth about Bunny, or from Thalia, or even from herself. But this was closer to what that hateful detective had been angling after, pestering at Shelby. It could not be.
Shelby had not been the moving shadow. Shelby had not been out in the night with Molly when she died. Laurel would not let it be so, and she would not ever again think on or remember those six small letters that the planchette had given her. What do I need to know to protect Shelby? she had asked.
The planchette had spelled two words for her:
She saw.
CHAPTER 11
Morning pressed against her closed eyelids, but even with her eyes shut, she could feel the absence of David. He must have already fled the Thalia-infested house for his office, but she wasn’t alone in her bed. A slight weight dented the mattress, and she smelled her sister’s gingery shampoo.
“Are you awake, Miss Possum?” Thalia asked.
“No,” Laurel answered, her voice grainy with sleep.
She cracked an eye and looked at the bedside clock. It was past ten-thirty. Not surprising. Last night she’d crept in beside David’s sleeping body and stared at the ceiling until the crickets had packed it in for the night. Still her eyes hadn’t closed, and after an airless silence, she’d heard the first cheerful twitters of the morning birds. She’d watched the way sunrise shifted the shadows in the room, trying to Cowslip the entire night away, but those two words lingered in her head like small obscenities.
She saw.
If they were true, if Shelby had seen, she would have yelled the house down. She would have waded in and pulled Molly out herself. How could Shelby see Molly in the pool, dead or dying, and slip back inside? Laurel could not fathom Shelby resetting the house alarm, cool as a reptile, then hiding herself in the long curtain or behind the low counter in the kitchen when Laurel had come screaming past. Not possible. So why couldn’t she forget those words?
“Where’s Shelby?” she asked.
“Off with Bet Clemmens,” Thalia said, sounding smug about it.
The depth of Laurel’s immediate relief sha
med her. She rolled to face her sister, turning in place because there wasn’t much bed left that Thalia hadn’t draped a long, skinny limb across.
“What do you mean, off with Bet? The park?”
“Bug, I’m a genius,” Thalia said. The smugness was growing. “An evil genius? Perhaps. But we can’t choose our gifts. Did someone have a lunch date with Mother today?”
“Oh, crap,” Laurel said, her hand automatically reaching up to smooth her hair. “I can’t manage it.”
“You don’t have to. I told her you were sleeping the sleep of the mentally deficient. Or maybe I said ‘the emotionally devastated.’ No matter. I asked her if she and Daddy wouldn’t be so sweet as to take the girls to the mall, maybe go to Wendy’s for one of those delightful Asian salads; perhaps they might even spend the night. She was all over it, so I pressed a warm credit card—one of yours, by the way—into her hand and packed them off. Now I can vivisect the Bunny at my leisure.”
“You are an evil genius,” Laurel said in shocked admiration.
She’d meant to aim Thalia back at Stan Webelow today; if Stan were to blame, they could leave Molly’s damaged family alone. But now she was willing to give Thalia her head and let her unleash any kind of hell she chose. Laurel would tear Bunny open herself, right down the middle, and go digging in her insides, if that was what it took. She had a day’s reprieve, one day, to find out where blame should fall. The Dufresnes or Stan Webelow, she didn’t care, as long as the truth they uncovered wiped away those little words. When Shelby came home in the morning, Laurel didn’t want to look at her girl the way Detective Moreno had, didn’t want to pry at her, seeking Thalia’s theoretical unhappiness, or worse, a monstrous coldness at her center.