To her credit, Ellis doesn’t laugh.
“I believe that ghosts are a culturally universal phenomenon,” Ellis says. “Whether I personally believe in them is neither here nor there; plenty of people do, and perhaps they know something I don’t.”
I almost want to laugh. It’s just that the response is so characteristic, so terribly Ellis, that I might have predicted it.
For all that I’ve been hiding from Ellis, she’s hid nothing from me. She’s an open book.
“How academic of you.”
“That’s me,” she says. “An intellectual.”
Ellis’s gaze is wary still, but the fear has relaxed its grip on my shoulders, and they slump now, my hands going limp at last. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m imagining things.”
Ellis says nothing. She waits in silence, and I keep talking to fill it.
“But…ever since I came back here, to Godwin House…I feel like she…Alex…like she might be…” God. I need to stop prevaricating. I need to put words to this phenomenon. I need to call it what it is, name the thing and steal its power. “I think she’s haunting me.”
Ellis’s gaze flicks down to the teacup, its muddled leaves with their messages of death and betrayal. My betrayal, of course, of Alex.
“And why shouldn’t she?” I go on, voice dropped to a whisper now. “Ghosts are restless spirits. And she died because I…I’d want vengeance, too.”
“You think she believes you murdered her,” Ellis says.
I shrug. “I don’t know what Alex thinks.”
But I know what everyone else does. I see it written in the surreptitious glances, the whispers behind cupped hands. I remember Clara’s fingers miming scissors at the Boleyn party. Before, in my muddled mind, I’d thought they’d blamed me for cutting the rope. Now I know they don’t believe my story of what happened at all.
For several long moments Ellis just looks at me, eyes narrowed and her mouth set in a flat line. I almost expect her to renege on what she said yesterday, to tell me You’re right—you’re a killer, to launch into a typically Ellis inquisition about why I did it and how it felt. How convenient for her to have a real-life murderer right here, prepared to color in the white areas of her fictional psychopath.
But then—
“All right,” Ellis says. “Enough of this. You’re going to help me with my project.”
“What project?”
“My research for my novel,” she says. “I need to somehow reconstruct the experience of the Dalloway murders, so I was thinking I would plan them. If I take their deaths as inspiration, if I design a modern version of the murders as I think they could have happened—if I take all the steps but the last—then I can write it. And”—she arches one brow—“you can help me.”
This time I really do laugh, the sound barking out of me like a dying person’s cough. “Why?” I say. “Because you think I know something about murdering people?”
I did lie to her, after all. I lied, and the memory of it still hangs like smoke in the air between us, poisoning our lungs. There’s too much I managed to forget about that night with Alex, and Ellis knows it now.
What else does she think she knows about me?
What else does she suspect?
“No.” Ellis pushes the cup and saucer aside and leans over the table again, her elbows planted on the wood and her chin resting atop a shelf of both hands. “Because you know everything there is to know about the Dalloway Five. Because you’ve researched them—you’ve clearly done your homework. Not to sound too utilitarian, but I’d like to capitalize on that.”
“There’s a whole occult library at this school,” I inform her. “You could just go there.”
“It’s not only that. You didn’t kill anyone, Felicity, not maliciously, and you aren’t being haunted. There are no ghosts, there’s no magic, and you didn’t kill Alex. I’ll prove it to you. Besides,” she adds, “if you help me with this, maybe you can go back to your old thesis. You know so much about the Dalloway witches; that knowledge shouldn’t go to waste. It’s all those horror novels making you believe in ghosts. Reality is reality. It’s pretty clear you’ve strayed far from that in recent weeks. Don’t you think it would be grounding, to look history in the eye and name it what it is?”
“I haven’t lost my grip on reality,” I argue, but it’s a moot point. I have. I demonstrated that just yesterday. I want to argue that plenty of people manage to believe in ghosts and witches without others questioning their sanity, but I suspect Ellis would find some way to twist my words.