Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(55)

“I’m sure it’s only a raccoon,” I said, not believing for an instant that it was only a raccoon.

Jesse confirmed this suspicion when he said, “Max has never growled like that at a raccoon.” He’d reached into the pocket of his coat and extracted a small shiny object that he pointed in the direction of the playhouse.

My heart skipped a beat. I don’t know if I was more frightened or impressed. “Is that a gun?”

“Of course it’s not a gun, Susannah. It’s a cordless lamp.” Jesse noticed I hadn’t obeyed his command to stay where I was and was creeping along behind him. “What are you doing? Get back to the house.”

“Don’t be stupid. What’s a cordless lamp? Oh, you mean a flashlight. Oh, Jesus.”

Jesse had switched on his flashlight and trained the bright blue beam at the playhouse. As soon as he did, it seemed to startle whatever was inside.

What happened next came in quick succession. Max snarled, then lunged at what came bursting through one of the playhouse’s windows.

At first, because it made a flapping sound, I assumed it was a bird.

But since it was also very large and glowing with the intensity of a pair of car headlights, right into my eyes, and let out a scream as piercing and shrill as a kettle left too long on a hot burner, I knew it was no bird. It was something otherworldly.

And it was very unhappy to have been disturbed.





diecisiete


I threw my hands over my head, unable to stifle a shriek of my own. I heard Jesse shout beside me, and Max barking as he turned into a vicious guard dog from a prison movie.

When the shrill banshee shriek finally faded from my ears, I lowered my arms and opened my eyes to find that the light had gone. The yard was once again in darkness, except for the light cast by the thin sliver of moon that had just begun to rise, the warm red glow from the fire pit, and the yellow patches of light cast from the windows of Brad and Debbie’s house. In their reflection I could see Max running around the yard, sniffing frantically to locate the quarry he’d flushed from the playhouse.

On either side of Brad and Debbie’s house, I saw neighbors parting the curtains and looking through their own windows, wondering what could possibly be going on next door. Nothing at all happened inside Brad and Debbie’s, which was odd. How could they not have heard something that had roused the rest of the block?

“What,” I whispered to Jesse, knowing we were being watched, “was that?”

The beam from Jesse’s cordless lamp was still trained against what now looked like a perfectly ordinary pink and white fairy castle . . . with one exception.

“I think we both know.” He’d sunk down to one knee in front of the three-foot door to the fairy castle. He pointed to something in the grass. “She left something behind.”

“What is it?” My ears were still ringing from the shrillness of the scream. I wasn’t sure if it was Lucia’s or my own. “It better not be a bloody horse head, or I will lose my shit.”

Jesse prodded it. “A horse head? Oh, you mean The Godfather.” This was one of the many movies I’d made Jesse watch in order catch up with modern American culture. “No. It’s quite small. I think it’s a flower.”

“A flower?” I knelt down in the grass beside him. “Are you sure? That sounds awfully tame for Lucia.”

“Yes.” He lifted a small purple thing from the grass. It was no larger than a tube of my lip gloss. “A flower. Bougainvillea, I think.”

Bougainvillea? Why did that seem familiar?

An uneasy feeling—I’d been having way too many of those lately—came over me. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Give me the cordless lamp. I want to see something.”

He passed me the flashlight, and I leaned over to shine the beam inside the playhouse.

Then I froze, my blood suddenly going as cool as the evening air around us. “Crap.”

“What is it?” Jesse joined me in peering inside the fairy castle, but when he saw what I’d seen, his curse was in Spanish, not English, so it sounded a little classier.

Flowers. That was all. No bloody body parts, no Satanic symbols scrawled on the wall, no bizarre ritualistic runes made of sticks. Only flowers. Not just a few, either, scattered across the floor the way the triplets had been practicing for when they were in our wedding, but hundreds of dead flowers dumped as if someone had been getting rid of their yard waste, using the girls’ fairy castle as a trash receptacle.

Except that I knew who that someone was, and the yard waste had been carefully selected. It was all bougainvillea, all pink and purple flowers, like the ones that had been growing on the vines on the gazebo outside the hospital, beneath which Jesse and I had sat talking earlier that evening about Lucia Martinez’s murder.

As if that wasn’t creepy enough, four dolls sat around the table inside the playhouse (the very table at which I’d had pretend tea with the girls last week), their eyes staring unblinkingly at us through the dead bougainvillea blossoms that had been poured over their heads. The dolls were dressed in what I knew to be their “fanciest” outfits—because I’d been the one badgered into buying them—gowns that were now stained brown and yellow by the decomposing flowers.

I’d seen some pretty upsetting stuff done by the souls of the dead in the past, and even worse done by the living.