Her eyes filled with tears. She brought her hand up to her mouth. She looked like she wanted to keep the sobs from escaping from her throat. It worked, because none came. But she did manage to speak. “Not today, Tom. Please, not on a day like this.”
“Why won’t you say what I want to hear you say?”
Buster appeared on the stairs.
He reached the top, apparently having heard at least some of our conversation. The raised voices. My mother’s pleas. He looked angry, but rather than taking my side—which I’d thought he would’ve agreed with—he took Mom’s side against me.
“Tom,” he said, “this isn’t all about you and your hurt feelings. We’re all hurting here today. We don’t need you making this stuff up about Dad again.”
“I’m not making anything up. I just want her to admit it.”
Buster gritted his teeth. “Tom, you asshole.”
Mom looked at the floor, wiping at her tears.
I stared, waiting. The two of them formed a Maginot Line of denial. I couldn’t squeeze through. There wasn’t a place for me there. There never was. Never once were they on my side. Not against Paul, not against anything.
I brushed past them and left the house.
And I never saw my mother alive again.
Chapter Forty-three
I wasn’t sleeping. I knew that.
In the days since Liann’s visit, my nights were spent staring at the ceiling of the guest room, the noise of an occasional passing car my only company. Caitlin was in our house, and John Colter was in someone’s house too. Free on bail. Charged with arson, second degree, just as Liann had predicted.
Something tapped against my window.
I sat up quickly.
John Colter? Could he be there, trying to get into our house?
I crossed the room to the window and looked down. My palms were flat against the glass, feeling the cold from the outside.
Nothing.
The street, the yard were empty.
My imagination, nothing more.
But I couldn’t go back to sleep.
Instead, I went downstairs and made a circuit of the house, checking every door, every window, making sure they were locked and secure. They were. The heat was down for the night, and my feet were cold against the kitchen tile. I looked in the refrigerator. Finding nothing much, I picked up an apple but didn’t bite into it. I thought about the girl from the cemetery and the noise against the window upstairs.
Was she out there again?
It didn’t take me long to go back upstairs and dress. I paused on the landing and stuck my ear against the door to Abby and Caitlin’s room. I heard faint, steady breathing. They were still there, as safe as they could be, so I slipped out of the house like a burglar.
The streets were quiet and empty. It was nearly one-thirty, and when I reached the main road a few cars passed. But even out there it was quiet. The streetlight flashed yellow, and in its strange glow, I scanned the sidewalk in both directions. I didn’t see anybody, and certainly no sign of the girl. My hands were stuffed into the pockets of my jacket, but I still felt a chill that made me hunch my shoulders.
Even in the dark, the headstones were visible. Faint, stony outlines, solid and eternal. I crossed the main road, jogging slightly, cutting at an angle across the front of the park and toward the driveway that wound through the middle of the cemetery. A sign said the cemetery closed at dark, and on rare occasions a security car made a sweep through as the daylight faded. But mostly the security was lax.
Trees lined both sides of the main cemetery drive. The trunks and branches were thick and gnarled, and in many cases grew close to the graves and knocked long-planted headstones out of kilter, tilting them to the side like falling towers.
I slowed my pace the farther I moved away from the street. I felt a little exposed. If the girl was in the cemetery, she could be anywhere, hiding behind any of the monuments or mausoleums, watching me.
And if she didn’t come alone . . .
Even late in the season, with cool weather settling in, crickets still chirped in the grass. Above, through the breaks in the trees, the sky was clear, the stars bright. It was beautiful and peaceful. A wonderful place to spend eternity, if indeed we were granted an eternity to spend.
I reached the back where Caitlin’s headstone—cenotaph—stood. I looked around, still not seeing or hearing anything.
But then something rustled to my left.
It was a quick sound, a crunching of fallen leaves. It could have been a branch falling or the skittering of a raccoon. But as I stood there, listening and looking for more, the sense grew within me that I wasn’t alone, that more than just the legions of the sleeping dead were there in the night.
I waited, and the sound came again. It continued longer, a shuffling like footsteps through the carpet of leaves. And then I saw the girl.
She emerged from between two headstones, very close to Caitlin’s monument. My heart jumped when I saw the girl. I took a step toward her. She backed up a half step, as though she wanted to run.