In For the Kill (McClouds & Friends #11)(119)

She dug her fingernails into the space around the tile and pulled. It was heavy, awkward. The cavity beneath was a well of utter darkness.

She laid the tile down, wincing at the rasping clank it made, and reached down blindly into the darkness.

Deeper . . . deeper. She leaned forward, braced herself on the other side, reaching . . . and oh, God, no. Water.

Her touch released a whiff of festering plant matter. She groped around, in slime and muck, and found what felt like a plastic sleeve, the kind one put in a spiral binder. It was brittle, stiff.

She felt delicately around for the edges and grasped it between her thumb and forefinger. She lifted it out.

It was stiff, misshapen, stinking. It dripped.

She laid it gently on the ground and leaned forward again, teeth and belly both clenched, careful not to inhale. She quartered the watery space and felt again. Every last centimeter of that slimy cavity. Small things wriggled and squirmed away at her touch. She kept at it, hoping for a sealed item, something plastic, vacuum-wrapped. Something that might be somehow protected from six years of mold and seep.

There was nothing. When she drew her hands out, they were fouled with muck. She set the tile in place, smearing it as she did so.

But there was nothing to hide, or to gain from all this stealth. Her hope had flatlined to steely calm. Whatever was in that plastic sleeve was too light to be anything but paper, and nothing paper could survive proximity to water for any period of time. Let alone six years.

She got up, holding the plastic between thumb and forefinger. Renato or Hazlett could pop out like a horror movie cliché, with lurching zombie hordes along with them, and she would not blink. She had no secrets to defend. They had died and decomposed along with Mama.

Fuck. Them. All.

She went upstairs, not bothering to tiptoe. She did not allow herself to look at the envelope as she marched down the breezeway.

She laid the thing on the desk and trained the lamp on it.

It was stiff, deformed. The plastic was too clouded to see the contents. She tried to tease the contents from inside the sleeve, but it was adhered to the plastic. She took scissors and cut it open. The paper had slid down to the bottom of the envelope in a shapeless wad.

Just in case, she examined it thoroughly, fiber by fiber. Nothing.

She’d gone to these crazy lengths and paid this unspeakable price for a lump of discolored, shredded wood pulp.

She stared at it, hot-eyed. What brainless cow stuck a piece of paper into a hole in the ground under the open sky and then died before she could tell anyone where to find it? Her mother had been an intelligent woman. Where in the f*ck had she put her brains?

To be fair. Mama had never meant for it to be a long-term hiding place. Nor had she ever intended to get murdered.

She’d been so desperate for some storybook closure, but such a thing didn’t exist. It was a cheap trick her mind had played on her, to escape from the cruel stupidity of reality. And now, the cruelest one.

She had traded her future with Sam . . . for this.

She went into the bathroom. Yesterday’s scrapes and bruises stood out in stark relief on her pale face. Scratches, from the thorns. The lump on her head was still sore. She wondered if it was getting infected but couldn’t summon up the energy to care. All she could focus on right now was how stupid she was.

Stupid, and very alone.

Moping. Becca lectured her about that, but it wasn’t like she didn’t fight the despair. She tried hard to channel her energy in a positive direction, to turn her back on the pit of despair. But the pit of f*cking despair had her name all over it. There was a magnet at the bottom, pulling on her.

She’d thought she was fighting back. The grand, definitive fight, but it had all come to nothing. How would she fight now?

She didn’t even know where to begin. What muscles to flex.

After the tenth time she’d washed her hands and could still smell the festering slime, she concluded that the clinging stench was all in her head, like a whole lot of other highly undesirable things. She dried them on the fluffy white hand towel and walked back into the room.

In the dimness, her mother smiled from the screen, a ghostly apparition. Sveti gasped, jumping, and then laughed without mirth. Jumping at nothing. She’d put that slideshow up with her own hands.

Mama’s smile mocked her. How could she smile, after cheating her daughter out of her best chance at happiness? It was the JPEG of the photo in her bedside frame. On the printed copy, she’d trimmed off the side with the tumbled rock and hillside and most of the numbers, too, in order to center Mama’s face and fit the frame. It seemed odd, to see the image without “The Sword of Cain” and the numbers over Mama’s head.

The image faded, transformed. Now it was a gnarled olive tree against a sunset-tinted sky. Then the ruins of a Roman bath carved directly out of the rocky seaside, lapped by the waves. That faded and was replaced by a crumbling tower on a peninsula, the lurid colors of the graffiti on its walls bright against the vivid blue-green of the sea.

Sveti walked closer, hypnotized by the stream of images. She hadn’t been able to bear looking at them since Mama’s death. Now, each photograph felt like a message she almost understood. It stirred in her brain. Teasing, beckoning. She had to pin down that ticklish flash, translate it into something concrete. Something she could use.

She stopped the slideshow and got into the folder of JPEGs, clicking around until she found Mama’s portrait. It filled the screen.