A Lesson in Vengeance(34)

It’s her. I knew it. She won’t leave me alone. Not now, not ever. It’s her, it’s her—

Those words are stuck on a loop in my head now, trembling in my mind. Ellis pushes the saucer aside and tilts in closer, her eyes as wide and gray as cold pond water.

“Felicity,” she starts, reaching for me; I flinch away.

“It’s her,” I gasp. I want to press a hand to my face, but I don’t dare close my eyes. Even here, even with Ellis, Alex won’t leave me alone. “She won’t ever…She…”

“Talk to me, Felicity.”

I suck in a shallow, sharp breath and force myself to look away from the plant. It must have been freshly watered; dark liquid seeps along the floor, staining the fringe of the nearest rug.

“What’s going on?” Ellis demands.

I sit, but I’m shaking badly enough that Ellis must feel it when I brace an elbow against the table. “Nothing,” I say, trying to calm myself.

But Ellis has scented blood, my soft underbelly exposed, and in this context—as in all contexts—she is nothing if not a shark. “Tell me.”

I twist my hands together in my lap, hidden under the coffee table. An exhale heats the nape of my neck; I wonder if Ellis can see Alex behind me, her skeleton fingers closing around my throat.

“You’re going to think I’m stupid.”

The look Ellis fixes me with then is tight and disapproving. “I would never think you were stupid.”

You’ve done it now, a voice scolds in the back of my head. Because it’s too late. I’ve gone and made this an enigma for Ellis to unravel. I have to say something, or else she’ll never stop picking at the knots—and if I unspool at Ellis’s hands for a second time, I’m not sure I’ll ever manage to stitch myself back together again.

I grimace. “It’s…” Spit it out. No evasion, nowhere to hide. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I ask. “Real ones.”

To her credit, Ellis doesn’t laugh.

“I believe that ghosts are a culturally universal phenomenon,” Ellis says. “Whether I personally believe in them is neither here nor there; plenty of people do, and perhaps they know something I don’t.”

I almost want to laugh. It’s just that the response is so characteristic, so terribly Ellis, that I might have predicted it.

For all that I’ve been hiding from Ellis, she’s hid nothing from me. She’s an open book.

“How academic of you.”

“That’s me,” she says. “An intellectual.”

Ellis’s gaze is wary still, but the fear has relaxed its grip on my shoulders, and they slump now, my hands going limp at last. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m imagining things.”

Ellis says nothing. She waits in silence, and I keep talking to fill it.

“But…ever since I came back here, to Godwin House…I feel like she…Alex…like she might be…” God. I need to stop prevaricating. I need to put words to this phenomenon. I need to call it what it is, name the thing and steal its power. “I think she’s haunting me.”

Ellis’s gaze flicks down to the teacup, its muddled leaves with their messages of death and betrayal. My betrayal, of course, of Alex.

“And why shouldn’t she?” I go on, voice dropped to a whisper now. “Ghosts are restless spirits. And she died because I…I’d want vengeance, too.”

“You think she believes you murdered her,” Ellis says.

I shrug. “I don’t know what Alex thinks.”

But I know what everyone else does. I see it written in the surreptitious glances, the whispers behind cupped hands. I remember Clara’s fingers miming scissors at the Boleyn party. Before, in my muddled mind, I’d thought they’d blamed me for cutting the rope. Now I know they don’t believe my story of what happened at all.

For several long moments Ellis just looks at me, eyes narrowed and her mouth set in a flat line. I almost expect her to renege on what she said yesterday, to tell me You’re right—you’re a killer, to launch into a typically Ellis inquisition about why I did it and how it felt. How convenient for her to have a real-life murderer right here, prepared to color in the white areas of her fictional psychopath.

But then—

“All right,” Ellis says. “Enough of this. You’re going to help me with my project.”

“What project?”

“My research for my novel,” she says. “I need to somehow reconstruct the experience of the Dalloway murders, so I was thinking I would plan them. If I take their deaths as inspiration, if I design a modern version of the murders as I think they could have happened—if I take all the steps but the last—then I can write it. And”—she arches one brow—“you can help me.”

This time I really do laugh, the sound barking out of me like a dying person’s cough. “Why?” I say. “Because you think I know something about murdering people?”

I did lie to her, after all. I lied, and the memory of it still hangs like smoke in the air between us, poisoning our lungs. There’s too much I managed to forget about that night with Alex, and Ellis knows it now.

What else does she think she knows about me?

What else does she suspect?