“Yeah.”
“I figured. Fee was a good girl, but she and your mom were a package deal. Well, them and—”
She cut off so hard I might’ve thought the call had dropped, but I could still hear that ocean sound down the line. I edited my guess: it was the hiss of wind through trees. I pictured her standing at the rim of some lonely place.
“Them and who?”
“Them, Dana and Felicita. A matched set.”
She said it with a note of hard finality. I paused before I spoke again.
“The woman at Petals and Prose said my mom was one of your girls. ‘One of Sharon’s girls,’ she said. What does that mean?”
Sharon made a bitter sound. “Look, I don’t like the person I was back then. There are people I hurt, people who probably wish they’d never met me. But your mom wasn’t one of them. Not by a long shot. I wish—I wish and I fucking wish—that I had never met her.” Her voice gained fervency as she spoke. By the end it was venomous.
I swallowed, struggling to keep myself steady. “Why’s that?”
“Ah,” she said softly. “Now we get to the point. But if you have to ask, then I’ve got nothing else to say to you.”
The sky was lightening. Wherever Sharon was, it was still dark.
“Someone’s been hanging around our house,” I said. “Letting herself in, leaving my mom dead rabbits. So now I’m sitting here trying to figure out what the hell my mom did in her life to earn that kind of stalker.”
The silence stretched like a body on a rack. “Did you say rabbits?”
My head pulsed. “You know. You know what that means.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“The rabbits!”
“Um. Last few days. I’ve seen her, the person who did it. She’s blonde, young. I have no idea how my mom even knows her.”
“Blonde girl? Would you say—eighteenish?”
“I think so. Yeah.”
Sharon let loose a string of profanity, long and bright as a birthday streamer. “Was she … Oh, sweet lord.” Her voice bubbled with so many things. Horror and hope and a kind of raw wonder. “Did you get her name?”
“How would I get her name?”
“What did she look like?”
I rose on trembling legs, turning, running my eyes over the trees, the houses, the windows stained with reflected sky. “Pale. Never-sees-the-sun pale. Hair down her back, light-colored eyes.”
“Where’s your mom? Where’s Dana right now?”
My hand was at my throat, each word came shriller. “I don’t know. I can’t reach her.”
“You’re alone. She left you alone. Do you at least know how to protect yourself?”
“Like, self-defense?”
A stunned pause, then I think she put the phone down. I could make her out at a distance, muttering.
“Okay,” she said, putting her mouth back where I could hear it. “Felicita Guzman, your mom’s old friend. Can you get in touch with her?”
“Aunt Fee is with my mom right now.”
“Oh, that’s cute,” she said scornfully. “Here’s my advice, since your mom and Aunt Fee couldn’t be bothered: you lock yourself in, you sit tight till your mom gets home. Get some pepper spray if it makes you feel better, maybe a pocketknife. And you know what, stay away from mirrors. Better safe than sorry.” A beat. “Not to say you’ll be safe.”
“Who is she?” My voice was stained with hysteria. “Is she another—worker? Is she trying to hurt my mom? What’s happening?”
“I’m sorry, honey,” Sharon said. “I really am. But I’m not a good person, and I can barely help myself. Take care, if you can. I’ve gotta go check my property for dead rabbits.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The city
Back then
The occultist sits beside you on a green bench, beneath a stained-glass window shaped like a compass rose. In the glass is a girl, an apple in one palm and a knife in the other. Her smile is hungry.
The occultist is hungry, too. In life she loved the rare, pink-fleshed apples that grew in her garden, bone broth slippery with marrow, bloody sweetmeats, and eggs barely cooked. Food that slid and coated and crunched. In her half-death she longs for few things more.
This is what she whispers to you, in the dream.
The work is not yet done, she says. Why did you stop the working? Finish what you started and until you do I will speak to you at all hours, you will never not hear me, you will see my hand in all your workings and my face in your own face and my heartbeat nested in your heartbeat and my—