Just Like Home(80)

She didn’t bother flipping the lightswitch. She could make out the furniture in the room by what little light came through the windows—she wasn’t sure if it was moonlight yet, or if it was still the last legs of daylight lingering before giving way to full night. Either way, she could see just enough to move across the room.

The bed was still propped up on the dresser drawer, the one that Duvall had emptied when he took the letters from Francis to use in his … she didn’t know what to call it. Art seemed like the wrong word now. It was more like a sick kind of embalming, she thought, or taxidermy. Preserving something that had never really been.

That morning, the bed had terrified her. It had seemed like an insurmountable, impossible thing to be avoided at all costs. Now, she crawled into it, heedless of the lack of a pillow, wanting nothing more than to be swallowed by the blankets like a pebble disappearing into a closed fist. She curled herself into a knot in the center of the mattress, shoved her face into the sheets, and sobbed.

She knew that she should be frightened. She knew that she should be afraid of whatever had moved the bed in the night, whatever had taken her quilt away, whatever had rattled that old brass bedframe on her first night here and climbed into her dreams with cold fingers and a sweet whisper. She knew that she should try to find out what it was, or run from it, or kill it.

She knew it was probably there in the dark, waiting for her to fall asleep.

But in that moment, as she hid in the safest part of the safest room of the safest place she’d ever known, trying to understand how it had all gone so wrong, she wasn’t afraid. She was too alone to be afraid.

“Please,” she sobbed breathlessly, not knowing what she was asking for. “Please.”

The word fell out of her like blood from an open wound, over and over, more than Vera knew she had in her. More than she knew she could survive.

She fell asleep before she could hear the answer.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


The morning rolled over Vera like a heavy fog. She woke soggy with fatigue, a weight in her bones that she didn’t bother trying to shake. Too much was happening all at once—Duvall sliding steadily from flirtatious to dangerous, the revelation and immediate destruction of her father’s letters, the way Daphne kept dying and dying and dying but would never, it seemed, be dead.

She let herself indulge in the smothering velvet of exhaustion. She’d never been hungover, but this was what she imagined it must be like. Suffocation, but easy.

“Vera?” Daphne called from the next room, her voice clearer than usual. Vera suppressed a groan, sliding out of her crooked bed. She wasn’t startled to realize that she’d slept through the night without incident, wasn’t surprised to find that the foot of the bed was still resting on that pulled-out dresser drawer. She was too tired to be surprised.

When she walked into the dining room, Daphne’s eyes caught her with their bright, alert regard. She looked almost like a woman who wasn’t supposed to die at any moment. That should have been a relief. A good daughter, Vera thought, would be relieved. She so badly wanted to be relieved, but her weariness stood solid as a bouncer between her and that feeling, all crossed arms and slowly shaking head.

“You’re up early,” Vera said mildly, passing through into the kitchen with a mind toward coffee. The pot was hot and half-empty: Duvall had been through already. “How did you sleep?”

A long, low scrape came from the next room. Daphne’s breathing was getting worse. “There’s no time. We need to talk. We need to talk while it’s just us.”

“All right,” Vera muttered, pulling a mug out of the dishwasher and filling it with burnt-smelling coffee. “We’ll just skip the good-mornings, then.”

Daphne either didn’t hear her or didn’t care. “You need to start preparing yourself. And the house.”

Vera bit back a pissy what do you think I’ve been doing this whole time. “I’m almost finished with the upstairs, except for Dad’s office,” she said instead. “And down here, I’ve really only got this room to finish up, and the mudroom. A little of the kitchen. Do you want breakfast?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Daphne said, her voice low and urgent. “You can’t stay here. You need to get the house ready before you leave. You’ll have to make some repairs, patch some things up. And James will want you to round up someone new for the shed once his work is done, and you have to make sure it’s the right kind of person.”

“I wanted to talk to you about that, actually,” Vera said, returning to the dining room with her mug in her hands. “James said something yesterday about the deed to the house—” Vera asked.

“Find a writer,” Daphne went on, as though Vera hadn’t spoken. She drew another long, grinding breath. “Please. Artists pay better than writers, but they take things they shouldn’t. They take advantage.”

Vera thought of the long gouges under her bed, the discarded blue gloves in the basement, the stickiness of the front steps in the hottest part of the day. She thought of the hole between her bedroom and the basement, the pipes anchored into the ceiling, the faulty wiring in the upstairs hall. She thought of the long boards in the garden shed, grooved and plastered and painted, all of it stolen.

“You also ought to start preparing yourself for the reporters,” Daphne continued. “It might be best—” Her voice caught, and she looked away from Vera, her chin buckling. “It might be best for you to have a plan, for when you leave. A way to keep yourself out of the papers.”