A Lesson in Vengeance(69)

A sharp sound bursts out of my chest, almost a laugh. “Ellis, they weren’t making fun of you. They were perfectly nice.”

“Oh, yes, that’s Quinn. Perfectly nice.”

She stalks back into the common room, and I follow, sitting next to her on the sofa and—after a moment—patting her knee.

“Well they aren’t staying in Godwin, at any rate, so you’ll have plenty of breaks,” I say.

She sighs and tips her head back against the upholstery. Her cheeks are still pink. Maybe it isn’t embarrassment; maybe she doesn’t have nearly the alcohol tolerance she leads us to believe. “Yes,” she says. “Even so, perhaps we should have gone down to Savannah instead. My parents’ house is massive—you could get lost in those halls. We’d have had all the privacy we desired.”

“We could have, yes.”

I don’t ask her what we’d need privacy for. I’m afraid the answer would be something horrifically mundane.

“I used to call the house Manderley,” she says. “We weren’t near enough to the sea for the comparison to be perfect, but it was close enough.”

“Is Rebecca one of your favorites, too?”

“Of all time.” Ellis tilts her face toward me again. “Although I always related more to the eponymous mistress than our dear narrator.”

“I can believe that,” I say, and she reaches out and slips a hand into my hair, her thumb skirting the curve of my ear. I do my best not to shiver.

Maybe the privacy she wanted in Savannah wasn’t so mundane, after all.

In the firelight, Ellis’s eyes glitter like polished pewter. “I’m glad you stayed with me,” she murmurs, her voice as low and soft as the velvet sofa beneath us. “I would have been lonely if you hadn’t.”

Her words stay with me even after I’ve gone upstairs to bed, repeating in my mind as I light my candles and tuck tourmaline under my pillow.

I’m glad you stayed with me.

I’m glad you stayed.



* * *



—

The next morning, Quinn arrives early and makes breakfast, which we eat together in the dining room; the formal mahogany table is incongruous with the casual breakfast, but Ellis insists. We eat toast dipped in soft-boiled eggs and a side of bacon. “All Quinn knows how to cook,” Ellis informs me in a conspiratorial whisper, which earns a flick on the temple from her sibling.

After breakfast Quinn has to drive into the city for some poker thing, leaving Ellis and me to spend the morning reading. We splay ourselves across her bed, Ellis’s hair pooling by my elbow and my toes curled under her thigh; my horror novels aren’t so scary when we’re like this.

But after lunch Ellis makes me leave her alone to write, and I’m left to wander through Godwin’s empty halls: Past Kajal’s room, the door left open so I can see her neatly made bed, her shoes lined up along the wall beside her desk. Past MacDonald’s locked office. Through the common room, the kitchen, then upstairs again, to lie on my back in the hallway and feel gravity trying to pull me sidelong, the tilted floor daring me to roll left and press my nose to the baseboard.

I close my eyes and press my palms to the hardwood, feeling the texture of the grain against my thumbs.

Is this what it feels like to be a ghost? To haunt the same halls over and over, waiting for someone to see you, to speak to you, to call for you or send you away again?



* * *



—

Quinn returns in the evening. I find them in the common room, drinking a martini garnished with lemon peel, flicking through the pages of one of Godwin’s books too quickly to actually read the words. I have no idea where they conjured up gin.

“Did Ellis abandon you?” Quinn says without looking up.

“Predictably.” I brace my hands against the back of the sofa. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing. I’m bored. Do you want a martini?”

Good lord, does anyone in this family do anything besides drink all the time?

But I can’t afford to be impolite. And besides, growing up with my mother, I can’t exactly pass judgment. “If you’re offering.”

Quinn lets the book fall shut and gives me that grin again—the sincere one, all teeth. It feels like a victory, winning that smile. “Follow me.”

We retreat to the kitchen, where Quinn produces liquor bottles from a plastic grocery bag on the counter; they must have run by the store on their way back from New York. Quinn mixes a fresh drink and drops the lemon peel in with a flourish. When I take a sip, it’s dryer than I’m used to, the taste of vermouth strong in the back of my throat.

“It’s good,” I say anyway, and Quinn snorts.

“If you don’t like it, we can do shots instead.”

It’s a joke, of course—and a good thing, too, because the martini Quinn made is strong, and the second one they mix is stronger. We both end up sprawled on the common room rug, the room spinning overhead and little waves of heat coursing through my stomach.

“This was a mistake,” I mumble.

“No such thing,” Quinn says, although the slurred way they say it suggests the contrary.

I don’t understand why my mother enjoys this so much. I’m afraid to move, for fear I might detach from the earth and spill unanchored into the sky, my tongue thick and heavy in my mouth.