No wonder my dreams were haunted.
Now I let Cam hold me, breathing in his familiar scent, reminding myself that he’s here and he’s real and that cold-eyed man in my nightmare was just a figment of my imagination.
We sit there for a long time, arms around each other, the mountain waking up around us. I can hear birdsong as the light in the room goes from gray to orange, the sunrise lighting up all that red, making it garish.
It reminds me of the blood dripping from Ruby’s portrait, and I shiver, closing my eyes.
Cam is stroking my hair, rocking me slightly, and I think I could almost fall back asleep right there, exhausted as I am, when he suddenly goes still.
I can feel tension tightening his muscles, and I look up, frowning, to see him staring at the window.
There’s another sound now, tires on gravel, and Cam lets go of me, slowly rising from the bed and going over to that window, the one that faces the front of the house.
Confused, I follow him, stepping on Ruby’s dress where I left it last night, crumpled on the floor. The beading bites into the sole of my foot, but I ignore the slight sting, going to stand next to Cam.
A police car sits in the drive. There are no sirens, no flashing lights, and for some reason, that makes it feel much more ominous. And then another car appears, a sleek dark blue BMW, parking just behind the cruiser.
Cam is watching as the cops get out of the cars, followed by the man in the BMW, his hair snow white, belly hanging over the belt of his khaki slacks. Then we see Ben, still in his pajamas, coming out to meet them, pointing back at the house.
A muscle ticks in Cam’s jaw, and when he turns away from the window, I follow him out into the hallway.
Ben is coming up the stairs, the policemen trailing him, and when he looks up at us, I see that his face looks slack, his eyes bloodshot. He looks awful, and after last night’s bullshit, that should be satisfying. But right now, I’m more concerned with those men behind him, their solemn expressions, the guns on their waists.
“What’s going on?” Cam asks, and Ben pauses, running a shaking hand over his jaw.
“It’s Nana Nelle,” he says, and then he and the police make their way past us, the two in plain clothes giving us tight nods.
“Nelle?” Cam asks. “What about her?”
Ben turns at the top of the stairs, his face flushing red. “She’s dead, that’s what.”
The words are flat, but his voice cracks just the littlest bit on that last word before he makes his way to the second staircase, the one that leads to the third floor where Nelle’s bedroom is.
“Lordy lordy,” the man with white hair says, huffing as he holds on to the banister. “I told her she needed to move to the ground floor years ago, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Said her room had the best views in the whole place.”
When we follow them into Nelle’s bedroom, I see immediately that she was right. The large windows behind the bed frame the forest outside, the mountain below, and other peaks in the distance, soft gray smudges against the sky.
I want to keep my eyes on that view because otherwise, I’ll have to look at the small, shrunken figure in the bed.
They look like they’re sleeping.
That’s what I’ve heard about dead people. That’s what I’ve seen in movies––someone walking into a bedroom, calling cheerfully for the person in the bed to wake up, only to be concerned when they don’t move, that concern slowly turning to panic as they realize the person is never waking up again.
Maybe that’s true in some cases, but Nelle is unquestionably dead. Her skin is a waxy yellow, her eyes open and cloudy, mouth agape.
Next to her on the sheets is a doll, an old one if the flaking paint and yellowing lace dress are anything to go by. One of its eyes is half-shut, making it look as dead as the woman in the bed, and a shudder runs through me, making me chafe my arms as a bitter taste floods my mouth.
“I found her just before I called you,” Ben says, and I think he’s talking to the police, but it’s the white-haired man who nods, his wrinkled face creased with sympathy.
“Hell of a thing, Benji, hell of a thing. But her heart had been bad since … what, ’fifteen? ’sixteen?”
“Sometime around there,” Ben says with a sigh.
One of the police officers is holding Nelle’s thin wrist in his hand, but that’s clearly a formality, and he nods at his partner, who steps out of the room, pressing the radio on his shoulder as he goes, the static crackle loud in the quiet room.
“At least she got to pass here at Ashby,” the white-haired man says, clapping Ben on the shoulder. “It’s what she wanted.”