CHAPTER NINE
“Wake up, sleepy head,” Ada’s chipper voice cut into my dreams. My dreams where I was fal ing and fal ing through a red inferno, giant wood bugs crawling up the side of my mind.
I groaned and tried not to move as the events from last night snapped into place. I knew I was hungover as shit and if I opened my eyes and moved a muscle, I was going to pay for it dearly.
“Go away,” I slurred, unable to say anything more.
“It’s a beautiful day outside,” she responded, ignoring me. I could hear her walking over to the window and opening it. “Ahhh, smel that air. Spring is on its way.”
Why was she so chipper? Usual y Ada was a goddess of grump in the mornings.
I felt her sit down on the bed and I bobbed up and down on the mattress. I moaned again and threw my arm over my face. The air coming in did smel cool and inviting but it wasn’t enough to clear the cobwebs.
“What did you do last night? You stink.”
I ignored her and attempted to go back to sleep, feeling my brain getting sucked into the dark weightlessness.
Before I could, she grabbed my arm and lifted it up, forcing the light into my face. I winced.
“I said go away,” I repeated, dragging out the words into a whine.
“Do you have to work today?”
Pause.
“F*ck.” I total y forgot about that.
I opened my eyes careful y as the stabs of light entered.
It real y was a beautiful day out, but all I could see at that moment was blankness, like I was standing in the middle of the sun.
Then I saw Ada on my bed, holding my phone out, like she knew exactly what was going on. She was wearing a kel y green dress and her hair was tied into a knot at the very top of her head. She looked like a clear-eyed forest nymph. I felt a pang of envy.
I took the phone, muttering “thanks,” and dialed the shop’s number. I didn’t have enough time to get scared or nervous because Shay snapped it up on the first ring.
“Don’t worry about it, Perry,” she explained to me after I apologized profusely for not being there. “We’ve just taken you off the schedule until you get better. You just rest up and sort yourself out.”
I hung up the phone feeling worse rather than better. I hadn’t been let go or fired but this was all too familiar. This was how I almost lost my last job (before, you know, I screwed myself over on purpose). My employers had been worrying about me because I was seeing Old Roddy in my bedroom. Now it was different ghost, same problem. Was this doomed to repeat itself throughout my whole life? Was I never, ever going to escape the dead? I wished I knew what they real y wanted with me.
“It’s because you’re one of them,” Ada said.
I jumped at her voice, forgetting not only that she was in the same room as me but sitting next to me, a foot away.
“Pardon me?” I asked her as my heart quickened.
She rolled her eyes. “I said you’re one of them. I asked why your slacker coffee shop was so understanding and I answered it’s because you’re one of them. You’re a slacker. They need your kind there. I’m just talking to myself real y, since you don’t ever seem to hear a word I’m saying.
Ever.”
That wasn’t true. Not entirely.
“How was last night?” I asked, gingerly sitting up in my bed. I rubbed at my temples as the room spun. I think someone had replaced my mattress with a water bed.
“Do you actual y care to know?” she asked snidely.
I peered at her with one eye. It hurt less than with two.
“Yes, don’t be so emo.”
I could tel she was going to come up with a retort about me being emo, but she swal owed it. It was always a matter of who cal ed the other one that first.
“OK, if you care to know, we broke up.”
I managed to open the other eye so I could study her face better. Her chin was lifted defiantly. She looked confident. “Are you OK?”
She nodded. “Never felt better.”
“So you know you did the right thing, then. How did he take it?”
She giggled, then broke into a huge grin. “He had the nerve to throw it in my face of how long he had waited and now he wasn’t ever going to get any.”
“What a f*cking douchecanoe,” I said, wanting to punch Layton’s lights out.
“Total f*cking douchecanoe,” she reinstated. “That’s how I total y knew I made the right choice. He was so angry, his face went all , like, red and he was babbling crap and tel ing me I’l never be anything...”
I let out an angry laugh. “That’s rich, coming from some dil hole whose biggest accomplishment wil be to get his head crushed in by some lame col ege footbal team.”
“If he’s lucky,” she said, tracing her finger along the pattern on my quilt. “But then I told him it must burn to be dumped by someone like me then. And then I left. well , I gave him the finger. And then I left.”
Even though it hurt my head to do so, I leaned forward and gave Ada a quick hug.
“I’m proud of you,” I blurted out, feeling strangely emotional.
She snorted. “That’s cuz you’re lame.” But I could tel it made her happy, as lame as I was.
“Hey, listen - ”
I was interrupted by a piercing, terrible scream from downstairs.
Our mother’s scream.
Our eyes met for a brief, horrifying instant and we both leaped out of bed as fast as we could. I was only in a long t- shirt but it didn’t matter. I had never heard my mother scream like that before and I prayed that we weren’t going to run down the stairs and find her dead on the floor.
We scampered down the stairs two at a time, with Ada cal ing “Mom!”
“Girls!” she yel ed back, sounding calmer, which relieved me. Her voice was coming from my father’s study.
We hustled our way over there. The door was open and my mother was standing in the middle of the room, a stack of papers at her feet, plumes of dust rising up from them and catching in the sunlight that was coming through the opened blinds.
Her back was to us, her limbs frozen in front of her, like she was stil holding onto the papers. Her attention was on the wal s so that’s where my attention went too.
I gasped. One hand flew to my mouth while Ada grasped the other.
My dad’s study had been destroyed. The wal s had huge tears in them like someone took an axe and just started hacking at it randomly. The edges of the tears were dripped with red and with the same color someone had painted pentagrams all over the wal s, even the ceiling.
Some were as small as your hand, others were the size of a tire. The decorative crucifixes he had displayed were all upside down. That sight chil ed me more than anything else.
It chil ed me so bad that a violent shiver shuddered through me and I nearly lost my balance. I reached out for the edge of the door and hung on.
Ada and my mom took no notice of me. How could they with what they were looking at. Even all the paintings of popes and religious figures that my dad had framed as artwork were disfigured, their eyes carved out so they only had black, inhuman holes.
“Who would do this?” my mother asked in a half- whisper.
Ada shook her head softly.
Only I had an idea of who could have done it, but I wasn’t stupid enough to say it. My parents wouldn’t have believed it was Abby in a mil ion years. But they would believe I was nuts, somehow put the blame on me, and lock me away somewhere.
As if she heard me think that, Ada turned her head to look at me as I leaned against the door for support, trying to keep my hungover eyes focused.
She gave me a strange look, like she was trying to figure something out about me. Like something about me was making her think. I had a feeling I knew what it was too.
I raised my brow and twitched my head ever so slightly.
She frowned and then looked back at the room and at mom.
I know she was thinking that maybe I had done it in my sleep. Maybe I had forgone the nail polish last night and decided to raid Home Depot, picking up cans of red paint before going to town on all of my father’s religious stuff.
I looked down at my hands. There were no signs of paint on them. There weren’t any on my feet or anywhere else either. I doubt I would have been able to clean myself up so well . The thought made me feel better. What stores would even be open at three in the morning? Walgreens didn’t have paint. I wondered if setting up my own security camera there would be a good idea, though, just so I could stop being a scapegoat.
“We should cal the police,” I said, my voice sounding thick.
My mom nodded slowly. It was obvious she was in shock. We all were.
“Where’s dad?” I asked.
“Church,” Ada said, as if she didn’t quite believe her answer.
I straightened up and walked into the room. Hangover or not, someone needed to take charge of this situation and my mother and Ada were too stupefied to do anything.
“Listen, I think we need to cal the cops now. Then when they’re done we can clean it. I don’t want dad coming home to see any of this.”
“But who would do such a thing?” my mom repeated.
Her accent got thicker when she was upset and in that instance she sounded an awful lot like Creepy Clown Lady.
A weird, blurry feeling settled over my brain, as if thinking was suddenly hard, like I had layers to get through.
“You cal them,” Ada said, snapping me out of it and gesturing to the phone in the study. She grabbed my mom by the arm and began to lead her out of the room.
I blinked hard to wake myself up, then picked up the phone and cal ed it in.
After I was done, with the police promising they’d send their nearest squad car over, and placed the phone back in the receiver, two shrieks resonated from the kitchen.
What now? I thought as I raced around the desk and ran down the hal , my bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor.
My mother and Ada were on the other side of the island, staring at the sink. I quickly made my way over to them and froze in my tracks when I realized what they were really looking at. >
The wide cupboards beneath the industrial-sized sink were shut and leaking red fluid out of the bottoms and corners. It seeped out in sickly rivulets until it congealed in a crimson puddle on the floor.
I hoped there were a couple of cans of open paint back there and they had spil ed. But as I sniffed the air, it wasn’t the scent of turpentine that fil ed them, but that terrible raw meat smel that plagued me many times before. I don’t know why I had been so na?ve to think that someone painted my dad’s wal s with actual paint. It wasn’t paint at all .
It was blood.
“I’m going to open it,” Ada said, and made a move for it, bending down.
“Are you crazy?” I hissed and grabbed her roughly. I pul ed her back. “You don’t know what’s in there.”
“Whatever it is, it’s messing up my kitchen,” my mother said blankly. And before I could let go of Ada and go after her, my mother put both her hands on the cupboard knobs and swung the doors open.
The body of a headless pig burst out of the cupboard and onto the kitchen floor with a sick thud, its coat already more red than pink. It had been split up the middle and its gooey, slimy organs and entrails spil ed out like an unraveling rope, splashing the three of us with drops of acidic liquid as they spread across the bloody puddle.
What I remember next was screaming. all of us were screaming and running out of the house and onto the driveway. Ada went to go vomit in the bushes while my mother flapped her hands like a flightless bird and I chewed on the col ar of my t-shirt while simultaneously trying to pul it down to cover my exposed legs as the morning air nipped at them.
It was disgusting, is what it was. Disgusting and disturbing. Where exactly was that pig’s head? I shuddered. But I wasn’t taking it as hard as Ada and my mother were. I guess I had a lot more experience with this stuff than they did. Not that it was a good thing.
“Guys, it’s OK,” I said coming over to them, the rough bricks cold against my feet. I grabbed my mom’s hand and squeezed it hard, stopping her useless waving. “Mom, it’s fine. The police are coming. They’l find out...” I almost said what, “who did this.”
She nodded, the whites of her eyes shining spookily as she surveyed the neighborhood. I know she was thinking it could have been anyone, that there was someone out there plotting against her, plotting against her family. It could have been true. I didn’t know for a fact it was Abby. In fact, since my dad was a theology professor, it could have been a number of disgruntled students. Maybe someone he failed.
They would know exactly how to get back at him, how to disturb him.
That said, it didn’t explain how it could have happened without anyone hearing anything. And I knew, deep down, where the dreaded feeling stayed, that it had something to do with me. This was about me and this was retribution from a dead girl.
I never thought I could hate a ghost so much.
When Ada was done upchucking (I real y had seen way too much vomit in the past few weeks), she got a hold of herself and helped me convince our mom that everything was going to be fine. Sure, someone came and destroyed dad’s study and painted pentagrams everywhere with blood, and there’s a gutted, headless pig in the kitchen and speaking of that, let’s see where the head turns up, but I’m sure the police see this kind of stuff all the time. It’s Portland, man. It’s weird!
At least her arm flapping and psycho eye-rol ing had stopped before the police car pul ed up. Officers Hartley and Monroe were the first on the scene. Hartley was young with a Channing Tatum vibe, dumb-looking but personable, while Monroe was in her mid-30s, black, pretty and obviously the brains of the operation.
I only had to talk to them for five minutes before we entered the house and I ran to my room to put on a bra and a pair of pants. By the time I joined them back downstairs, Channing was talking to my mom and Ada in the living room while Monroe was investigating the house room by room. She was coming out of the kitchen when she saw me and cal ed me over to her.
I approached her cautiously, not wanting to get close to the carcass, which I could smel too clearly.
“Perry, right?” she asked in a concise voice.
I nodded.
“Your mother mentioned that the neighbor’s dog tried to attack you the other day.”
My jaw tried to drop, but I held it shut against its wil .
“It did,” I said, lowering my voice. “His name is Cheerio.
He’s normal y the friendliest dog around, so I don’t know what happened. But he went for me like he was going to kil me.”
Monroe looked over my shoulder toward the living room and nodded as if she understood. We walked away from the kitchen, stopping by the front door.
“Do you know why your mother might have told me that?”
I sucked on my lip while I sussed her out.
“No…why?”
“Is it true that this same neighbor who owns Cheerio, owns a few pigs?” she asked with a tilt of her head.
I nodded as everything started coming together in a most horrible way.
“This was her pig, wasn’t it?” I asked. Suddenly I felt extremely bad. Yes, her dog went psycho, but the neighbor bungled her knee and now one of her pigs was dead and headless in our house.
“We’re going to go check on that,” she said matter-of- factly. “I just wanted to make sure you didn’t hold any grudges.”
“Grudges?”
She didn’t say anything. She let out a sigh from the corner of her mouth and kept her eyes focused on mine, waiting for me to figure it out.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You think I went and murdered my neighbor’s pig. Her huge honking pig? Dragged it over here, diced it open, chopped off its head and stuck it under my sink? Because her dog tried to attack me?”
“Stranger things have happened, Miss Palomino.”
I was nearly speechless. I put my hand to my chest and tried to smother the rage.
“I’m sorry, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree here. This has nothing to do with teaching her a lesson, this is about teaching my family a lesson. Teaching me a lesson.”
The officer frowned at me. “Who said anything about teaching someone a lesson?”
I paused.
Her eyes squinted at me. “Where were you last night?
Were you out?”
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t believe the way this was going. Why did my mom even bring that whole thing up about the dog? What did that have to do with anything?
“Yes, I was out.”
“With who?”
“A friend.”
“When did you get home?”
“3 a.m.,” I replied warily. “I’m sorry, but am I under investigation now?”
Monroe sighed and brought out her note pad. She scribbled something down as she talked, but I was too far away to see what it was. “I’m just doing my job and trying to piece together a timeline for when this could have happened. Obviously, no one in your family saw anything, but we won’t know for sure until your father gets back.”
My father. That was not going to be pretty.