But I make it.
It’s barely past nine when I trudge into the house, exhausted and sick. My heart feels like a bird fluttering in my chest, weak and breakable. I don’t think about the mud I’m tracking across the rug until I’m already in my bedroom, and by then I can’t care anymore. The prospect of getting down on my hands and knees and scrubbing dirt out of the carpet feels like an insurmountable challenge.
I didn’t even glance down the second-floor hall as I passed the landing. Maybe Ellis is in the room below me right now. Maybe she’s waiting for me to find her.
I don’t want to find her. I can’t even look at her.
Instead I turn on the shower and crouch down on the tile floor as hot water pounds against my scalp. It sluices off the evidence of crime—grave dirt disappearing down the drain. It rinses me clean, the same way it did a year ago.
That shower is just what I need to crack open the shell I’ve built around myself; finally, the world sinks back in.
Clara is dead. （Murdered. Ellis killed her.） It’s Tuesday; she’s supposed to return tonight from her camping trip. That means a few short hours before people start to wonder what happened to her. If I’m lucky—if I’m very lucky—the cemetery caretaker doesn’t come in on Tuesdays. Maybe it will snow again overnight, a layer of ice all I need to conceal any sign that Alex’s grave was desecrated.
And what is the evidence that ties me to the graveyard?
Alex’s connection to me, of course. That’s one.
The grave dirt in the rental car. I vacuumed it out, but I hadn’t exactly been in the best state of mind; it’s possible I missed some. But how easy is it, really, for a forensic team to link dirt to a specific location? Surely all the dirt in the Catskills is essentially the same.
The phone call. That’s what will get me. That’s my weakness.
But even that is circumstantial—I can come up with a good reason to have been all the way out in Kingston early Tuesday morning. They’ll need more evidence than my proximity to Alex’s grave to prove I killed Clara.
This is just another one of Ellis’s mind games, isn’t it? She wants me to feel responsible, the way I was responsible for Alex.
I need to talk to her.
The thought makes me want to start running and never stop. Ellis killed Clara. What reason do I have to think she wouldn’t kill me as well?
Only if she wanted me dead, she could have killed me a dozen times already.
This is about something else. Ellis must have had a reason. She made me go all the way out there to that grave, tricked me into digging Clara up…And why? Was this another part of her game? Margery Lemont was buried alive, after all.
But Clara wasn’t.
And I wasn’t.
I shudder, wrapping my arms around my middle and hugging tight. God, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that Ellis would have sent me out there to die. After all, she had me dig Clara up. She could have been lurking in the shadows, waiting until I had the lid off the casket. And then she could have shoved me forward and nailed me in.
She could have killed me just like Margery was killed, and I would have walked right into her trap.
But she didn’t, and that in itself opens a new question: Why would she expose herself like this to me? I could turn her in. I could tell the police precisely why I was in Kingston.
Maybe I should. I don’t know why I haven’t, in fact. This isn’t a matter of petty theft or trespassing. Ellis killed someone. She killed our friend.
Somehow, though, betraying Ellis to the police never feels like a real option. I should feel more than I do. I should grieve Clara. I should cry and scream and beat my hands against the walls.
Instead I pace from one end of my room to the other, wet hair dripping cold down my bare back. I try to remember Clara in the sunlight, Clara’s skirt catching the wind as she crosses the quad toward the library, Clara with a stack of books and her pen stuck in her mouth, Clara during the Night Migrations, a dryad amid the trees.
Is that how Ellis caught her? A note slid under the door the night before Clara’s camping trip, a set of coordinates signed with Ellis’s name?
I imagine myself explaining the story in a cold police station room, confessing that I drove all the way to Kingston, I stole a shovel, I dug up Alex’s grave and found Clara’s body. I could insist that Ellis killed her.
But—no—but…what if she didn’t? What if I did?
What if I killed Clara, then forgot about it, the same way I forgot I’d pushed Alex until Ellis made me remember?