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.
But the blank-eyed gazes of those dolls staring out at me from the darkness, amid that sea of flower corpses, was something I knew was going to haunt me forever.
I dropped the flashlight in order to press a hand to my mouth, then staggered away from the playhouse.
Jesse was at my side in an instant.
“What is it?” he asked, putting his arms around me protectively. “The dolls?”
I shook my head. “The smell.” Rotting bougainvillea stinks, especially in great quantities.