“Why?” I asked. This felt like dangerous territory. Less walking on eggshells and more dodging landmines. Elisa and Jane were besties—anything related to Jane’s suicide couldn’t be good.
“Because it’s locked up,” she said. She was staring out the large picture windows flanking the fireplace while she spoke, her voice quiet, almost entranced.
“I suppose that makes sense,” Chris ventured. “I mean, it’s still kind of a crime scene, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. I had no idea how things like this normally went down.
“I heard they don’t think it was suicide,” she said after a moment. This made everyone go still.
“What do you mean?” Oliver asked.
“I mean she didn’t leave a note. Just like Mandy. And like Mandy, she had no reason to kill herself. She was just . . . dead. Right before her thesis went up.”
“So, what, natural causes?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But none of it makes any sense. It doesn’t feel right.”
I didn’t want her words to creep down my spine, but they did. They lodged against my ribs and bored through my heart and made it impossible to breathe. It was one thing for me to think there was something strange going on. It was another for my best friend to voice it.
“Maybe it was a condition?” Chris asked quietly. “Like a heart problem. The rest could be coincidence.”
Elisa went back to eating, staring into the fire with a detached look to her, like she was staring far away, at something no one else could see.
“I think she was murdered,” Elisa said after a few moments of silence. “I think they both were.”
I woke up cold, and it didn’t take long to realize why. I’d kicked my sheets off some time in the night—not that it was morning by any stretch of the imagination. It was still pitch black outside, the light from the streetlamp making everything muted and dreamlike. Whatever dream was filtering in my mind vanished as my heart tilted. It felt like my bed was filled with sand. What the hell?
I pushed myself to sitting. Only then did I realize I was leaving dark stains in the trail of my fingerprints. Charcoal. I held my hands up to the filtered light.
“What . . . ?”
Then I leaned over the edge of my bed. The ice that ran through me at that moment made frostbite seem like a sunburn.
My sketchbook was open in a pool of lamplight, a new drawing facing me like a curse. I must have done it in my sleep; that was the only way to explain it. Jane lay sprawled on the stark white paper, her black-inked body face-up, staring at me. Her hands stretched above her head and her legs were straight out under her hips. And around her, in a thick line, was a black circle. Just like . . .
No no no.
Words were scrawled between her hands, in a handwriting that wasn’t mine: The Tree Will Burn
I wanted to scream.
She was coming back.
I couldn’t sleep after that. Of course I couldn’t. I sat there in bed and fought the two wolves inside of me—one that wanted to destroy the sketch, the other that wanted to preserve it. For what? Evidence? Proof that I was or was not crazy? I had drawn Jane in my sleep, had written words in someone else’s handwriting. How was that anything beyond insane? Especially since the circle . . .
But no. It was just stress. Stress and tragedy and not enough sleep and probably too much sugar. This had nothing to do with Brad. There was no way in hell they were related.
The painting studio is locked up, Elisa had said. There was something someone wanted to hide.
Which meant there was probably still some sort of evidence there, not that I was comfortable calling anything related to the death of my friend “evidence.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” I muttered. But I couldn’t help it. Every time I blinked I saw Brad’s eyes. Saw the feathers in the darkness. So I kept my eyes open. If you think of it, you give it power.
There were many reasons I sent myself to Islington. The distraction of constant work was definitely one of them. In this moment, however, I wished I wasn’t here. I wished I was anywhere else, really. Somewhere I could run around and force the memories from my head. I wanted to go out and run to the forest and scream the frustration away. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t call or talk to anyone and I couldn’t leave the fucking dorm room, which meant I was trapped with my thoughts and three hours to kill until sunrise.
Maybe I should delete any reference to death from my vocabulary, metaphorical or no.
I was going to drive myself insane, and if I did anything on the computer I’d wake Elisa up. I didn’t want to have to explain my insomnia to her—not because she’d pry, but because I knew she wouldn’t, and I wanted so badly for someone to root just a little deeper. I wanted to have to share these secrets. If I kept them all in, I was going to explode.
Don’t think about it. You’re stressed and it’s making you crack and that’s it. That’s it. This has nothing to do with you and nothing to do with Brad. Mandy and Jane were suicides. Brad was just an accident.