The Family Plot (37 page)

“Abigail,
don't,
” Dahlia begged, only barely realizing that she was actually speaking. “Please, I don't want to see your baby.”

Abigail stopped pushing and drew herself up to a seated position against the wall. Her hair was soaked with sweat, and it hung down stringy across her face. Blood collected beneath her, spilling out from between her legs to cover the floor in a creeping smudge; it threaded through the grout lines, swamping the tiles, and inching toward Dahlia—who made herself as small as possible between the sink and the tub.

The girl sighed. “It wasn't a baby.” She pulled her knees up underneath herself, sitting cross-legged, while the blood still ran. “It came too early, by a couple of months. It came out dead. It was never alive.” She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.

Dahlia looked toward the door. It was open. The blood would flood her boots in another few seconds. It would pour out into the hallway, before long. Abigail wasn't looking. Dahlia's arms and legs were working. She could run.

Couldn't she?

“If you wanted to,” Abigail answered without opening her eyes. “But I don't know where you'd go, or why you'd go there.”

“Gabe's hurt. He needs help.”

“Help's coming. He'll be all right.” She shifted and leaned forward, fixing Dahlia with a pair of enormous and lovely brown eyes with thick black lashes. “Not sure about you, though.”

“What? Why? Abigail…” She looked again at the door, but did not rise. “Abigail, what have you done?”

“I haven't done anything. All I ever did was trust a boy.”

“And kill him.”

Abigail waved her hand, like this was true, but a trifle. “But you understand. You wanted to hurt yours. You
still
want to hurt him.” She nodded confidently.

Blood licked at the edge of Dahlia's boots. “But I
didn't
hurt Andy. I hardly even fought him. I let him have what he wanted, 'cause he was going to take it anyhow. His daddy has money, and mine has debt. I know how the world works.”

“You loved him, and you loved the house. He wouldn't let you keep it.”

Slowly, Dahlia pushed against the wall, using the leverage of her own weight to rise. “How do you know about the house?”

“You loved that house, and he didn't even care about it. It was just spiteful, what he did.”

“There were reasons,” Dahlia protested weakly. She was standing now. Shaky and uncertain, as if all the blood on the bathroom floor was hers—and not just the bit still dripping intermittently from her right nostril. But she was moving under her own power, and that was something. “I couldn't afford it, not by myself. Andy was stupid sometimes, but he wasn't ever spiteful, I don't think.”

“You knew him your whole life, almost, and he walked off like it didn't mean a thing. He was done with you before you were done with him. He had someone waiting for him before the ink was dry. She's living with him now, in a house he picked because you gave him a taste for old places. It's a nice house. You'd like it.”

“She's moved in? Already? Naw, I don't think he'd…”

“Men don't care. Even when they know what they've done, and what it means—they don't care. They just leave us behind to clean up their messes … like they never had no part in making them.”

“Like
they
left you behind?” While Dahlia spoke, her right hand reached into her back pocket. Was she going for her phone? Was Abigail? “Everybody else is buried over the ridge, in the big cemetery. But not you.” She pulled out her cell. The screen had a brand-new crack from corner to corner, but the phone lit up when she pressed the button to activate it.

Abigail didn't answer, and Dahlia was cold again, so very cold. The bathroom was filling up with a chilly fog that caught in her throat and left it raw.

She unlocked the screen. Andy's contact listing was long since deleted, but she knew the number by heart—and she even had a voice mail from a couple of weeks ago, confirming that he'd gotten the last of the papers filed, and she'd hear from the lawyer soon. She pulled up her call history, selected that entry, and looked up.

She didn't see Abigail anymore, but that didn't mean she wasn't there. The bathroom was an icebox, and the blood on the floor was freezing to an awful slush. It crunched and squished at the same time when Dahlia took a single step toward the door. The next step was more brittle, less juicy. She slipped on the third step, for it was as slick as ice.

The doorknob was so cold, it stuck to her skin.

She turned it anyway, holding the phone with her free hand, and looking down at the screen. Out in the hallway she left red boot prints on the runner, which wouldn't be eaten by moths for another eighty years. Abigail was nowhere to be seen, but the frosted air drifted from the washroom like someone'd left a freezer open.

Dahlia paused and leaned against the wall, feeling the tickle of icy air lift the little hairs on her arms. She tapped the screen, telling the phone to return that call—but she didn't hold the phone to her ear. She held it in her hand, and listened while it rang.

On the last ring, before Andy's voice mail would've picked up, she heard a click, and a thunk as someone on the other end dropped the phone—then a scraping noise as something ran across the microphone. Then a woman spoke.

“Andy's phone. Who's this, and what do you want?”

Dahlia's mouth went dry. If the woman who answered didn't see her name on the incoming call display, then Andy had removed her from his contacts, too.

“Hello?”

She coughed, and said “Hello” softly in return. “Where's Andy gotten off to?”

“Nowhere far. He's in the shower. Who is this? Can I take a message?” When Dahlia didn't say anything, she asked again, “Is there anything you'd like to tell him?”

Was there anything Dahlia wanted to say to Andy? What a ridiculous question. She had no answer for it, so she hung up. The phone fell from her hand, but she picked it up again, and put it back in her pocket.

 

15

D
OWN THE HALL,
someone was crying. The sobs came wet and heavy, and the girlish squeak between deep, sad breaths only made it sound all the more pitiful. Dahlia's heart ached, or she thought it did.

Was that Abigail, crying in the master bedroom? Was it her, squeezing Dahlia's chest until it hurt?

At the end of the hall, the window was broken again. Wind and rain came driving through the dark corridor—for it was dark again, too: not the half-dark of late afternoon, but the true dark that follows a sunset. Dahlia couldn't remember the last place she'd left the lantern. There was lightning outside—and a roaring sound rising and falling, like a train coming hard and fast around the mountain. But this was no locomotive, she knew. There were trains in the vicinity, yes, but not so close. This was the wind. This was the sound of air moving so fast that it beats, cuts, and hammers everything in its path. No wonder the folks down the street called it a tornado.

The splintering crack of tree limbs rattled her ears, and when the branches fell, they scraped down the house like nails on a chalkboard. They echoed and scratched like a blade on the brittle, cheap wood of the attic's subflooring—cutting letter after letter in an accusation that wouldn't die.

She did not hear any sirens. She did not hear Gabe or Brad talking down below on the front porch. There was nothing but the rain, and the wind, and the widow-makers falling around the house in hard, heavy thumps.

And the crying.

It rose and fell. It trickled through the house, with a lilting quality that was almost musical. Almost real.

“Abigail?” Dahlia called softly.

She heard a hitch in the sobbing, but nothing else.

She knew the hallway, knew the doors. Hazel's room was open because they'd removed the door, and now the spirit couldn't shut it if she wanted to.
So there,
thought Dahlia.
And thanks for nothing, anyway.

To the left was the open door to the bathroom, and inside it, a spirit shaped like a boy. He looked down into the bathtub, shook his head, then met Abigail's eyes.

The boy wept like his heart was broken.

“Buddy?”

Whatever she told you, I was there. I saw her. She held it in the water, and the devil took them both.

She would've stopped, if she could. She would've hung back and questioned him about the baby, about the bathtub. About the water, because it all came back to the water, didn't it? It tied it all together: the sanitarium, the rain, the plumbing. The bathtub and a baby, and the crying dead boy who'd lived for another thirty years.

But she glided, on a rail.

The third door on the right, as she headed toward the broken window at the end of the hall, that bedroom was hers. She'd dibbed it for her own, on that first morning they'd arrived. Their trucks had been empty. She had loved the house on sight. She'd apologized to it, and made it promises.

She'd had no idea.

The crying behind her faded as she left it, and Abigail's cold hands drew her along, luring her back into that room. She stopped in the doorway, and clung to the frame. She didn't want to go inside. She didn't want the light to flash, or the fierce, weird memory of another time to show her a goddamned thing.

She looked anyway.

Water smashed against the glass of the big bay window, with its huge seat that had briefly worked for a bed. The broken pane let it all spray inside, but the shadow seated on the dusty old cushion didn't care. It shuddered in time with that unearthly weeping. It didn't look like a girl in a yellow dress. It looked like a dead thing that haunted bathrooms because the devil had taken it, and made it stay where it least wanted to be.

Dahlia breathed, “Abigail?”

I thought you might stay.

“I can't stay. You know that as well as I do.”

You promised. When you first came, you said you'd never leave.

She frowned, trying to remember when on earth she might've said such a thing. “I think I said that I'd never forget.”

No.

“You heard what you wanted to hear. That doesn't make it true.” She took a few small steps into the dark bedroom, entirely against her will. Each footfall echoed dully in the mostly empty space. Each raindrop on the glass sounded like a gunshot. She raised her voice, to make herself heard over the stormy riot outside. “Please, whatever you're doing—stop it. I can help you. I can … I can call somebody about you … about your body. You're buried in the little cemetery here, aren't you? Beside Gregory, I bet. Under someone else's stone. But … but … before we leave…” She was blubbering, and she couldn't stop. “I'll get you a real grave, a proper one—with the rest of the Withrows, where you belong. That boy wronged you, and what happened after wasn't your fault. Not all your fault. I understand why you're mad, but … but let me help, let me see if I can put you to rest. Reunite you with your family, better late than never.”

The shape on the window seat was blacker than the rest of the shadows in the desolate, cavernous room, so when it rose up and rushed at Dahlia, she could see it screaming toward her. She could feel it, that cold flash that was horribly familiar now. It whistled along with the wind and the rain.

I don't
want
to be with them—they sent me away, and when I came back, they left me behind. I want to stay here without them. I want you to stay with me.

Dahlia fell back against the wall, but she didn't crash there—she leaned there, and she wiped her aching, leaking nose with her sleeve. “I can't stay. You have to let me go. You have to let us
all
go.”

When I came back, they didn't want me. I should stay “out of sight and out of mind,” that's how Daddy put it. They wanted to send me away again. I didn't let them. I won't let you send me away, either.

“Nobody's trying to send you away.” The spirit was so close, so thick. Dahlia was breathing her in, and it hurt. It was liquid nitrogen pouring down her throat and up into her sinuses, powering through the stuffiness left behind by her bloody nose. “I was only trying to set you
free
. You can stay here forever, for all I care.”

Abigail breathed so softly, and it was January frost in Dahlia's lungs.
I did it in here, you know. Momma hid all the knives, so I broke the window and did all my cutting with a piece of glass. It worked faster and made a bigger mess. It felt good to lie down and stop. It felt good to stay here and watch them scream. And when it was over, Daddy wrapped me in a blanket from the hope chest and put me down there in the plot. Not beside Gregory, though. He didn't want us touching ever again, even in death.

Dahlia couldn't see anything through the thick, viscous form that hovered before her, around her, and maybe even threaded itself down inside her chest to coil in the pit of her stomach. When lightning flashed, she only sensed it like an aura in the room—bright and then gone. It showed her nothing, not anymore.

Then she was moving forward again, foot over foot, dragging and falling and rising. She tried to protest, but Abigail had taken her voice again. Blind and afraid. Step by step toward the window and the soaked, dirty cushion she'd used for a mattress.

She put out her hand, or Abigail did. She needed to catch herself, to feel her way across the floor, but her knees knocked against the window seat and she toppled forward—hand extended—and hit the window hard enough to push panels of glass out into the night, falling to the ground in pieces.

She gasped—even Abigail couldn't keep her from gasping—and leaned back hard, but the shadow pushed again, and now she was flailing, both hands raised and both hands crashing into the frame.