The Family Plot (36 page)

Nothing happened, so she took another one.

The big pendulum overhead twitched and rocked.

Dahlia didn't wait around for anything to flash, shiver, or fall. She took a leap forward and ran toward the door. She'd left it open—that's right. It beckoned and whistled as the air slipped around the cutout where the rose transom used to be.

She could make it in a dozen long, fast steps, if she sprinted fast enough. She could make it in a few seconds.

No, you have to stay.

The front door jiggled. With a swipe like an angry slap across a face, it slammed shut before Dahlia reached the foyer.

She drew up to a halt, skidding on the damp wood floor and nearly falling—flinging the lantern up so it shined against the ceiling. It fell back on her wrist to dangle by its wire handle. It knocked against her elbow and her forearm, sending fractured shards of light and shadow wildly through the room.

She steadied the light. She held it up and out, and listened for tornadoes, or ghosts, or anything else that shouldn't be hanging about the Withrow estate.

An electric pop smacked across the house. It wasn't lightning, not quite; it was more like the thrilling punch of a transformer frying a squirrel. There was light, and there was a crack too loud to be thunder. There was a ringing in Dahlia's ears. There was static in front of her eyes.

When it cleared, all the lights were on. The house was bright as day, but somehow, that wasn't any better than when it was nighttime dark and illuminated only by the LED lantern swinging from Dahlia's left arm. Somehow, this was worse.

She looked back to the front door. Still shut.

Gabe and Brad were on the other side—waiting on the porch for an ambulance to bring a stretcher, and for her to bring the bourbon. She still hadn't found it, and now she'd completely given up looking for it. Did they know what had happened? Were they knocking? Would she hear them, if they did?

The leaded glass transom with the Victorian roses glinted in the lamplight.

But that wasn't right. It couldn't glint. It couldn't do anything. It wasn't there anymore. The pendant lamp dripped with crystals; but that wasn't right either. It didn't have crystals—it was an ugly mid-century thing. But the ugly lamp was gone, and above her head there was a bigger, grander model—strung with glittering teardrops of glass. Dahlia wondered when it'd been removed. She wondered what had happened to it, since it must have been gone for years before she arrived.

“Abigail? Abigail, what are you doing?” she breathed. The lantern was useless to her, but she couldn't stand to drop it. She clung to it, in case it was a lifeline back to her real, terrible life, where Gabe was hurt and the mountain was scarred with falling trees, and tornadoes scraped along the ridge like a knife across a wrist.

She heard, almost in answer, but not quite:
Abigail, Abigail, what have you done?

The words fell in a singsong tone, coming from somewhere upstairs.

The stairs were intact again, and polished recently. The chestnut and fir looked warm and rich and clean. And the mantel, with two marble ladies, but no cracks between them. And the floor, gleaming and newly swept, accented with rugs that were freshly beaten and free of dust.

She climbed up the staircase—where Gabe had just fallen, hadn't he? The spindles were all in place, not a single one chipped, splintered, or broken. The rail was sturdy and thick, and it didn't wobble when she held it as she rose. From the landing, she could see the whole first floor, alight and sparkling; and she could see the second-floor hallway, with doors open, and tinny music coming from the master bedroom.

The doors were open.

All of them. Even Aunt Hazel's.

She stumbled up the last few stairs and onto the carpet runner, untouched by moths or sun fading. Two doors down on the left. The door with the classic hardware, now undulled by rust or tarnish. She ran for it, and the door crashed shut, nearly knocking out her teeth. It only struck her nose, but it struck her hard. In a moment, she felt blood falling hot and wet, pooling and spilling down over her lip.

“Hazel!” she called. She beat hard on the door. “Hazel, let me in, please! Hazel!”

Through the solid oak came a whisper, soft and sad:
I'm sorry dear, but I can't. She's got you already.

“What do you mean, she's…” Dahlia slowed.

Everything slowed.

A cold drowsiness overcame her, and she almost closed her eyes—almost buckled at the knees. She leaned forward, and a warm, wet drool of blood rolled out of her nose, but she remained upright, one hand pressed against the door to Hazel's room, still praying for help from the other side.

“Hazel,” she tried one last time. The word was mud in her mouth, thicker than peanut butter.

She took a step back and lowered her hand. She looked toward the hallway's end, where the window wasn't broken anymore, and there was no flapping bit of plastic to fly loose and menace the crew. The window was whole, and original—the panes were a tidy six over one, with a wood frame on a pulley system.

The little details anchored her. She cataloged them.

No. I can show you.

She turned on her heel, but not on purpose. She strolled down the long hallway, past the other doors: all open, all solid wood, some six-panels and some four-panels, with brass knobs and hardware. It all looked new.

No.

“Stop it,” Dahlia tried to command, but it didn't come out. Her tongue was fat and slow. A soft hiss was all she could manage. She kept walking, entirely against her will—an unwilling pilot in a crippled plane. The radio was out. None of the controls were working. She struggled to stop. She strained to fall to the ground.

But Abigail said,
No.

So Dahlia kept walking, on feet that didn't feel like her own, at a pace that wasn't familiar, and with a gait that felt unbalanced. She reached the stairs to the attic and tried again to stop herself—catch herself on the wall and hold fast, rather than go up there and see whatever Abigail wanted her to see. Her hands didn't work any better than her feet. They stayed at her sides, and with all her strength, all her effort, she could do little more than flutter her fingers.

She would've cried, but her eyes didn't belong to her either. The time for crying had passed, years ago. Decades ago. Longer ago than that.

Stair by stair she climbed, past the sconces that hummed and hissed, because they worked just fine and weren't the rusted-out or missing hunks of metal she'd seen before. Nook by nook, the gas lit them up, and the corridor was brighter than Dahlia had ever seen it, and the wallpaper was pristine—not yet faded or stained, discolored or ripped. It was a light shade of blue that was nearly green, with silver vines and peach-colored flowers running in vertical rows from floor to ceiling.

No. To hell with the house.

The attic trapdoor had a metal handle screwed into place. She grasped it, turned it, and pushed when the small latch clicked. The hinges squeaked. The door lifted away, and she let herself inside the vaulted, skeletal space beneath the roof.

Abigail was there, living and breathing, standing beside the window in a yellow dress. She had one hand on the rough sill, and a worried look on her face. She was very young, and so was the man who stood beside her—the soldier, wearing his khaki uniform with squared-off shoulders and a narrow waist.

“Did you mean what you said?” Abigail asked him.

He did not look at her. He was staring out over the yard, toward the garage and the graveyard that wasn't yet a real graveyard. “Yes, I did. Now you've got to stop this,” he told her firmly.

“That's not what you told me before. That's not what you told me, when you said you loved me and we ought to get married.”

“You're awful young for that.”

“Too young for what?” Surely she wasn't more than fifteen or sixteen. Still a child.

Gregory didn't look much older. He must be eighteen, at least, if he was wearing the uniform, but he might have been as old as twenty. “You're too young to understand, I made a mistake—that's all.”

“You made a promise.”

“It was a dumb promise, and I shouldn't have done it. Now, listen, Abby. I came back one last time, like you asked—because you said you had to tell me something. But I think it was all for show, and you don't have anything new to say at all. So now I'm leaving, and I won't come around again. Or, if I ever do, it won't matter any. I liked you just fine, but I'm not looking for a wife.”

She swallowed and nodded like she understood. There was something resting on the windowsill, or on the exposed beams that made up the frame. She picked it up and held it low, by her thigh. Her fingers flexed, tightening and adjusting her grip.

“You're not even going to say you're sorry, are you?”

Now he paused, his back half turned to her. “Sorry for what?”

Her hand whipped up, and there was a flash of something sharp and bright rising behind the soldier boy. It came at him from the side. It sliced across his neck. There should've been blood, but Dahlia saw only sparks—that same electric fizzle and pop as if she'd been hit on the head, or as if lightning had struck right beside her.

Dahlia heard the knife clatter to the floor. She heard screaming, and she heard footsteps heavy on the stairs. She was sitting down, and she didn't know when that had happened—when Abigail had let her fall.

She scrambled back from the trapdoor opening, kicking away in a feeble crawl, because her legs weren't working quite right. That awful coldness poured through her limbs and she stopped moving, except to sit up, then stand up, and breathe. Her vision cleared and the young couple was gone, but there was a spray of blood all the way to the ceiling, and a puddle on the floor that must've held a gallon or more, and there was so much screaming, and the sound of heavy things falling, and being dragged.

This way.

Dahlia stepped down onto the stairs and began to descend. Her eyes were not her own, but in one corner she saw Buddy, young and alive. He'd found the knife, still slick with gore. He was carving a message. The scratch, scratch, scrape of the blade cut down into the naked subflooring.

I was wrong about that
, Dahlia thought, since she could not speak.
It was Buddy who left the message. He meant it for her.

Abigail guided Dahlia down the stairs, and back to the hall, where a rug had been folded around a long, lumpy shape that oozed a dark stain through the fabric, and onto the floor.

Judson Withrow was shouting and dragging one end of the bundle, while his wife screamed like she'd never stop, because there was nothing else left for her to do. Abigail crouched against Hazel's closed door, her yellow dress splashed with blood. She wrapped her arms around her knees and glared at her father, who wasn't having it.

“You get yourself up! You take the other end!
You
did this, Abigail. You did this, and God help me, but you're going to lend a hand in fixing it!”

Her eyes radiated hatred. She shook her head. “I don't
care
if you fix it!”

“You'll care when they take you away for murder, when they lock you up or hang you for it!”

“I don't care about that, either!”

Judson, tall and lean but very strong, dropped his end of the bundle and paused to slap his wife across the face. “You stop that! You stop it now!”

The openhanded blow surprised her enough that she swallowed the next round of wails.

“Thank you,” he said roughly. Then, because it was clear that his daughter wasn't interested in lifting a finger, much less a hand, he wrangled the bundle onto his shoulder. It hung there awkwardly, and he balanced the weight on the top of the stair rail with one of his arms.

“Judson.” His wife coughed out his name.

He barked at her, “Do you want to help carry this?”

Shocked by the suggestion, her mouth drooped open.

“Then not another word from you! Not another sound, either! I'm going to fix this,” he said, changing his grip on the corpse wrapped in a rug. He pointed one accusing finger at Abigail, who refused to budge. “Not for you. But I'll do it for them. I'll do it for everyone else.”

He began a slow, measured stomp down the steps. Over his shoulder he said, “Come along behind me and clean up. Get Hazel to help you, if Abigail won't.”

From behind the closed door, Dahlia heard a muffled, “No … please…”

Even then, Hazel had known to hide.

Judson trudged on down, the hem of the rug trailing behind him, leaving a spotty streak of blood in his wake. And somewhere above, at the very edge of her hearing, Dahlia heard the scrape, scrape, scratch of Buddy's knife on the subfloors. How long would it take to leave that message? How many times would he cut it, again and again, for his father or his sisters to sand it away?

No.

Down the hall and past the stairs Dahlia stumbled, fighting just enough to throw off her pace—Abigail could work for control, if she wanted it so badly. Her vision swam, and that incessant knife-scratching noise grated in her ears. She felt herself falling forward, and her eyes cleared in time to see the bathroom door. She threw up her hands—or did Abigail throw up her hands?—and shoved the door away, then toppled inside.

This wasn't the Mamie pink horror. There were no badly dated tiles, no fixtures left over from an awkward mid-century remodel. This was a washroom with a graceful cast-iron tub and a pedestal sink, with a toilet that was capped by a wooden seat and lid, with a pull chain to flush it. There was Abigail, lying on the floor, her shoulders pushed up against the far wall and her feet braced against the bathtub. It was heavy enough to stand against her as she pushed.

Dahlia wanted to retch, and she wanted to leave. There was so much blood—more blood than the young soldier had spilled. Gallons and gallons of it, far too much for one young woman to hold. Or maybe it only looked that way on the tile floor, which was slick with water and mucus and bits of tissue. Abigail wasn't wearing the yellow dress, not now. She wore a robe that started out light green, and by now was so covered with gore that it looked brown and wet as it clung to her legs.