A Flicker in the Dark(69)

“Do you think you could spell it?” I had stuttered, staring into her wide, watery eyes. Tears were stuck to her eyelashes like beads of dew on grass, quivering. I looked down at her fingers, convulsing against mine. “Give me one second.”

I walked back into the hallway, poking my head into the waiting room. Daniel and Cooper were sitting with a few chairs between them, silent and stiff, their backs facing my direction. Then I shuffled across the hall, toward the living area, riffling through the table filled with old books that smelled like mothballs, pages stained brown. I grabbed a random assortment of DVDs, the donated rejects that nobody wanted to watch, and pushed them aside until I reached the board games. Then I hurried back to my mother’s room, pulling a small, velvet bag from my pocket. Scrabble tiles.

“Okay,” I said, feeling self-conscious as I dumped them onto her comforter and started flipping them over, one by one, until we had a full alphabet, each letter facing up. I couldn’t imagine this possibly working, but I had to try. “I’m going to point to a letter. We’ll start simple: Y means yes, N means no. Tap when I hit the one you want.”

I looked down at the rows of letters on her bed, the prospect of having an actual conversation with my mother for the first time in twenty years both exhilarating and mind-numbing. I took a deep breath, and then I started to talk.

“Do you understand how this is going to work?”

I pointed to the N—nothing. Then I pointed to the Y.

Tap.

I exhaled, my heart beating faster. All these years, my mother knew. She understood. She was hearing me talk. I just never took the time to let her talk back.

“Do you know something about these murdered girls?”

N—nothing. Y—tap.

“Are these murders somehow related to Breaux Bridge?”

N—nothing. Y—tap.

I stopped, thinking hard about my next question. I knew we didn’t have a lot of time; soon, Cooper or Daniel or Doctor Glenn would walk back in, and I didn’t want them to catch me like this. I looked back down at the tiles, then I asked my final question.

“How do I prove it?”

I had started with the A, my finger pointing to the tile in the top left corner—nothing. I moved on to B, then C. Finally, when I pointed at D, her fingers moved.

“D?”

Tap.

“Okay, first letter, D.”

Then I started back at the beginning—A.

Tap.

My heart lurched in my chest.

“D-A?”

Tap.

She was spelling Daniel. I blew the air through my pursed lips, slowly, trying to stay calm. I lifted my fingers and pointed to the N, my eyes drilling into her fingers … until a noise from the hallway jolted me into action.

“Chloe?” I could hear Cooper getting closer, feet from the open door. “Chloe, you doing okay?”

I swept my arm across the bedspread and collected the tiles, grabbing them all into my palm and turning around just as Cooper appeared in the doorway.

“I just wanted to check on you,” he said, his eyes moving from me to my mother. A gentle smile cracked across his lips as he moved toward us, sitting on the edge of the bed. “You got her eyes to open.”

“Yeah,” I said, the sweat from my palm making the tiles greasy, slipping against each other in my grip. “Yeah, I did.”

Daniel flips on his blinker now, and we pull into a gravel driveway, the sound of kicked-up pebbles flicking off the windshield forcing him to close the windows. I lift my head slowly, shaking myself from my memory, and realize that I no longer recognize our surroundings.

“Where are we?” I ask. We’re winding down dusty side roads now; I don’t know how long we’ve been driving, but I do know this is not the route back home.

“We’re almost there,” Daniel says, smiling at me.

“Where is there?”

“You’ll see.”

Suddenly, it feels claustrophobic in here. I reach for the air-conditioning and push the knob all the way to the right, leaning into the blast of cold air.

“Daniel, I need to go home.”

“No,” he says. “No, Chloe, I am not letting you wallow in self-pity at home right now. I told you I had plans for us today, and we’re going to do them.”

I inhale deeply, turning to face my window, watching the trees fly past as we inch deeper into the woods. I think about my mother, spelling out Daniel’s name. How could she possibly know? How could she know who he is if they’ve never met? The uneasiness I felt this morning is quickly returning. I look down at my phone, at the single bar of service, appearing and disappearing as it struggles to find a signal. Here I am—miles from home, trapped in a car with a man in possession of a dead girl’s necklace, no way to call for help. Maybe he saw me holding it last night; maybe I didn’t stash it back into the closet as quickly as I thought I did. My feet graze my purse and I think about my pepper spray, dutifully tucked into the bottom. At least I have that.

Don’t be ridiculous, Chloe. He won’t hurt you. He won’t.

A shock wave jolts through my body, and I realize that I sound just like my mother. I am my mother. I am my mother sitting in Sheriff Dooley’s office, making rationalizations about my father despite the growing mountain of evidence stacking up against him. My eyes sting as a pool of tears wells up inside, threatening to break free. I lift my hand and wipe at them quickly, careful not to let Daniel see.