“What do you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you go swimming?”
“I don’t know,” I repeat, closing my eyes.
“Why can’t you just sleep normal?”
“I don’t know, Margaret.”
She plops down next to me, her bare legs coppery and smooth. I watch as she pushes a few strands of sweaty hair off of her forehead before she turns to me again, all those questions swirling in her eyes.
“Is it because of what happened?”
It comes to me in flashes, like something out of a nightmare: me, creeping down the hallway, careful not to get caught. Dad, pacing the halls, white knuckles around a bottle of brown liquid while my mother lay splayed out on a mattress, white sheets staining red.
“We’re not supposed to talk about that,” I say.
“This house is a little creepy sometimes.”
I glance back to the house, standing tall at the top of that giant hill. I’ve lived my entire life in this house; aged from a newborn baby cradled in my mother’s arms to now a very independent eight. And as I’ve aged, things have changed. I’ve changed. We all have, really. We’ve all turned into something different, almost unrecognizable, mutating with time like the wood itself.
“Yeah,” I agree. “It’s so big, so old. Lots of noises.”
“You ever feel like we’re not alone in it?”
I think about the plaque bolted out front and all the other people who have called this place home. The statues that seem to have minds of their own and the soldiers who died here, their bodies probably scattered around the property, piles of bones buried beneath the floorboards
“It’s just me. Walking around,” I say, because I can’t bring myself to tell her that I feel it, too: the company of something otherworldly that I can’t quite name. The ever-present aura of something, or someone, trying to warn us, scare us. I can’t even bring myself to kill bugs here. Whenever I watch my dad slap at a beetle with a rolled-up newspaper or pop a tick between his fingers, I instinctively flinch and say a little prayer, knowing that each one is just adding to the body count. Tipping the scales of this place even further in the direction of death.
I twist back toward Margaret, but she isn’t facing me anymore. She’s facing the water, and I can see her spine protrude from the back of her neck, a skinny little centipede slithering beneath the skin.
“Try not to worry about it,” I say at last.
Margaret nods, her eyes still trained on something in the distance, and I follow her gaze to the giant oak tree on the edge of our property, its mangled limbs hanging directly over the water and the Spanish moss twisted into its bark like knotted hair. It’s low tide now, the water slowly retreating, and I can hear the clicking of tiny fiddler crabs as they climb over one another, their movement making it seem as though the ground is alive, breathing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NOW
I tried to get some rest yesterday. To prepare.
I took a couple of sleeping pills at noon and sunk into my couch, letting my lids grow heavy. Then I felt my eyeballs roll back, a redness dripping over my vision as I stared at the inside of my own skin, my veins. As I let my mind wander for a while, getting lost in a feverish kind of dream—an open window, that prehistoric stench of the marsh—but still on the brink of consciousness.
Somewhere in between, like purgatory.
I glance at the clock before making my way over to my laptop and skimming a few emails—some true crime fans who managed to find my address; a couple of interview requests, mostly trash—and click back over to the TrueCrimeCon article I was reading on Monday. I refresh, scrolling back down to the comments to see if there’s anything new.
So we’re just going to ignore this woman’s history, then? Her past?
Leave her alone! She’s a grieving mother.
That poor child. Let’s not forget he’s the real victim here.
He’s in a better place.
I feel a catch in my throat, my mouse hovering over the last one. He’s in a better place. It was left yesterday, one year from the day of Mason’s disappearance. My eyes scan the username. It’s generic, a mess of random numbers and letters with a default gray silhouette as the profile picture. I try to click on it, but it takes me nowhere.
I wonder what that means: He’s in a better place. I stare at it, my eyes drilling into the screen until the letters start to blur and double. I get lost there for a second, staring, until I shake my head and copy the URL, composing a new email to Detective Dozier and dropping it into the body.