A Lesson in Vengeance(84)

The phone call. That’s what will get me. That’s my weakness.

But even that is circumstantial—I can come up with a good reason to have been all the way out in Kingston early Tuesday morning. They’ll need more evidence than my proximity to Alex’s grave to prove I killed Clara.

This is just another one of Ellis’s mind games, isn’t it? She wants me to feel responsible, the way I was responsible for Alex.

I need to talk to her.

The thought makes me want to start running and never stop. Ellis killed Clara. What reason do I have to think she wouldn’t kill me as well?

Only if she wanted me dead, she could have killed me a dozen times already.

This is about something else. Ellis must have had a reason. She made me go all the way out there to that grave, tricked me into digging Clara up…And why? Was this another part of her game? Margery Lemont was buried alive, after all.

But Clara wasn’t.

And I wasn’t.

I shudder, wrapping my arms around my middle and hugging tight. God, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that Ellis would have sent me out there to die. After all, she had me dig Clara up. She could have been lurking in the shadows, waiting until I had the lid off the casket. And then she could have shoved me forward and nailed me in.

She could have killed me just like Margery was killed, and I would have walked right into her trap.

But she didn’t, and that in itself opens a new question: Why would she expose herself like this to me? I could turn her in. I could tell the police precisely why I was in Kingston.

Maybe I should. I don’t know why I haven’t, in fact. This isn’t a matter of petty theft or trespassing. Ellis killed someone. She killed our friend.

Somehow, though, betraying Ellis to the police never feels like a real option. I should feel more than I do. I should grieve Clara. I should cry and scream and beat my hands against the walls.

Instead I pace from one end of my room to the other, wet hair dripping cold down my bare back. I try to remember Clara in the sunlight, Clara’s skirt catching the wind as she crosses the quad toward the library, Clara with a stack of books and her pen stuck in her mouth, Clara during the Night Migrations, a dryad amid the trees.

Is that how Ellis caught her? A note slid under the door the night before Clara’s camping trip, a set of coordinates signed with Ellis’s name?

I imagine myself explaining the story in a cold police station room, confessing that I drove all the way to Kingston, I stole a shovel, I dug up Alex’s grave and found Clara’s body. I could insist that Ellis killed her.

But—no—but…what if she didn’t? What if I did?

What if I killed Clara, then forgot about it, the same way I forgot I’d pushed Alex until Ellis made me remember?

What if this is the curse playing itself out again and again, an endless string of deaths to satisfy an insatiable bloodthirst? If this is the curse, the evidence will only point to me.

Checkmate, Margery Lemont murmurs from the darkness.

I tug an extra-long sweater over my head and don’t bother with the rest of my clothes. I dart down the hall in my underwear, faltering when a floorboard creaks, terrified Kajal will emerge from her room and ask where I’ve been.

I avoid looking at Clara’s door altogether.

On the second floor Leonie’s room is open and empty. Ellis’s door, though, is shut. I can’t tell if her light’s on or not.

I knock anyway. No one answers, of course. I don’t know what else I was expecting. If she’s in there, she won’t answer for me.

My pulse is beating fast—so fast. I read once that a hummingbird’s heart beats over a thousand times per minute. I feel like that now, like my heart is just a quivering lump of meat inside my chest. Am I afraid? Or just…angry.

I shouldn’t even be here. It’s foolish, reckless—a good way to get myself killed.

Even so, I call Ellis’s name, pounding louder. No response. I grab the knob, but the door is locked from the inside.

“I know you’re in there,” I accuse. “Open the door.”

Silence, still. Just like that time after the party: Ellis’s insistence that she’d been writing, too busy to see me. It’s not even ten in the morning, and with all the times I’ve found Ellis up fully dressed and working well past four a.m., I refuse to believe she’s out of bed with her nose to the grindstone.

I press my brow against the wood and strain to hear something, anything: the click of typewriter keys, or the soft strains of classical music played on vinyl, even the soft susurration of Ellis’s breath. But there is nothing behind that door. It might as well open up into the void of space, an inevitable tumble into the crushing heart of a black hole.

I stalk back up the stairs and into my room, kick the door shut behind me. I lie down on my bed, press my face into my pillow, and scream.



* * *



—

By the next evening, Clara has been missing for a whole day. Too long to be extracurricular. Too long to be innocent. I skip class and stay in bed as the sun tracks its course across the sky, but after dusk falls, there’s a knock at my door.

I consider staying in bed and pretending I’m not home. But sooner or later someone’s going to come looking for Clara. And when they do, I can’t afford to seem suspicious.

I crawl out from beneath the sheets and shuffle across the rug and open the door.