Just Like Home(55)

She wasn’t like that.

Not anymore.

The deep dark womb of sleep began to wrap itself around her. She laid her hands gently on top of the covers, folding them across her solar plexus, and in the moments before the world drifted away from her, peaceful and unthinking, her fingers gently closed into fists.

She had two handfuls of quilt. She wasn’t gripping them very tightly, but it was enough. Enough to hold some small corner of her attention. Enough that, just as she truly eased into the deep dark absence of unconsciousness, the movement of the quilt snapped her awake again.

She told herself that it was only her subconscious, like her nearly-sleeping brain startling with the phantom sensation of falling. But now she was awake, heart-poundingly awake, and she couldn’t tell herself that she was imagining the sensation of the quilt stretching taut.

She tightened her grip on it, and the pull on the fabric grew stronger.

The pull was coming from the side of the bed.

Stitches snapped beneath her palm, pop pop pop. Vera’s hands reflexively flew open at the sensation, and the quilt was dragged off her, vanishing over the edge of the mattress. She listened to the hush of fabric against floorboard as it slithered beneath the bed.

She grabbed at the topsheet, her entire body rigid with terror, her eyes open so wide that they ached. She stayed like that, waiting for a tug on the sheet that would start gentle and get stronger and stronger until it was irresistible. Waiting to find out if that brush of warmth would find her skin again. Waiting for a voice to tell her that everything was going to be okay.

Waiting for dawn.





CHAPTER NINETEEN


The basement door had a pulse in Vera’s memory. She thought of it as swollen, thrumming, coriaceous. There was no reason for the door to be a warm and vital thing. It was identical in every regard to her bedroom door, with the exception of the lock and the slant at the top. But when she stood in front of the two doors, holding the plastic sorting bins in her hands and listening to the steady wet noise of her mother’s breathing in the next room, Vera felt sure: if she grasped the knob of the basement door, the muscle of it would give beneath her fingers.

She had planned to save the work of emptying out the basement for last. She had planned to wait until after Daphne was gone, until after James Duvall was gone, until after the rest of the house was empty and ready to sell. But that trip to the bar, the encounter with Brandon after all those years, the taste of lemonade in the air and the popping seams on her quilt—all of it had uncapped a well inside her.

Hunger stirred in the depths, sending echoing ripples up her spine. She couldn’t make herself wait. Not anymore. She needed it now.

She needed to see what was down there, beneath the place where she slept.

Trembling with want, Vera put the plastic bins down in front of the door to her bedroom. Her palms were damp with anticipation. She wiped her hands on her jeans. She tugged at the chain around her neck, pulled until the full length of it slipped out from beneath her shirt.

At this point, touching the key was as familiar as touching her own skin. It was smooth and brassy from years of wear. The chain wasn’t long enough for her to fit it into the doorknob without stooping—she’d grown too much for that—so she lifted it over her head instead.

The doorknob was as cool as a dead thing against her palm. It shouldn’t have been a shock, but she still felt a sharp flash of disgust at the lifeless chill of the metal. She opened the door just a crack before returning the necklace to its place. The familiar tug of the key dropping into her collar was a relief; the strength of the chain, an unexpected comfort.

She couldn’t lose that key. Not ever—but especially not once she was inside.

The moment she saw the stairs, Vera forgot about the plastic bins. She forgot that she was supposed to sort through whatever might be left at the bottom of those stairs. She looked down into the impenetrable darkness and felt an answering call to the scrabbling at the bottom of the lidless well inside her.

She drew a slow breath and held it. She held it as she reached for the lightswitch on the wall beside the door, held it as she stroked her index finger over the off-white nub of plastic, held it as she pressed her thumb to the underside of the switch and pushed gently, persistently up.

The lights flickered on, bright white and humming. Vera let the held breath out in a rush, tempering the stale air of the basement with the damp warmth of her own lungs. This place had been alone for so long.

Bare fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling, suspended by thin chains. The reflected light of the fluorescents gleamed off the vast expanse of plexiglass that covered the floor. Under that layer of plexiglass, the polished cement floor glowed, but the light was marred in places by the matte stripes of bootprints.

Shoes in the house—Vera frowned at the gall of it, remembering the sight of polished black shoes crossing the threshold of the Crowder House, one pair after the other, bringing the outside in.

Vera had thought that her mother hadn’t come down here, not ever, not even once. Not after the investigation was closed and the police were finished turning the house inside-out. Daphne had no respect for the heart of the house, so it made sense that she would avoid it. In fairness, Vera hadn’t gone in either, not after everything that happened. She had never dared to sneak out of her room in the night with her key, even though she probably could have gotten away with it. The risk was too high. She’d been too terrified of the consequences of her mother catching her in there again.