“But you don’t have choice, do you?” She’s quiet for a second, and I feel her in my head, checking out the terrain.
Her brows crease with suspicion. “You have done . . . rearranying.” I don’t recognize the word as rearranging until she taps the side of her head. Her hand is still encased in a black leather glove. The effect of her pale skin against the single black glove is like Michael Jackson in reverse.
Dacia definitely picked that thought up. I get the sense it’s not the first time someone has made that comparison, and she doesn’t like it.
“Molly left,” I tell her. “Those memories are still being unpacked. You remember Molly, don’t you?”
She flinches the tiniest bit and I keep going. “That’s what you want to know, right? What I remember about Molly? I remember that she was trying to comfort you that very same night you woke up screaming, and now here you are, working with the man who beat her to death.” That catches her attention, and she cocks her head slightly to the side.
“Or do you want to know what I remember about you? That you’re from Romania, a little town on the Danube. That they came through your hometown, promised you a good job, working with a family. Watching their children. But you did well enough on their little card tests or whatever that they injected you with something. It didn’t take at first, and you wound up with Graham Cregg. But lucky for you, the magic potion eventually kicked in and now you’re out of that basement, out of the nightmare. Only Molly didn’t get out. Do you want to know about the other people I’ve hosted? How they died? Thank God they were all luckier than Molly. No one murdered them.”
“Shut up!” Dacia digs her nails into my skin. “You do not do the talking. I do not need you to tell me about your other phantom . . .” She waves her hands, like she can’t find the word. “The dead-in-your-head people.”
The phrase catches me off guard and I laugh. She can read my thoughts enough to know that I’m not making fun of her frustration—I actually think the description has a certain ring to it—but my tiny smidgen of approval seems to anger her even more. She’s combing through the files marked Abner now. The sensation is sort of like someone running their fingernail very lightly across your skin . . . it almost tickles and I want to brush it away. Except it’s inside my head.
I’m not even sure why she’d bother with Abner except to prove that she can do whatever the hell she wants. She races through the farm chores and swimming holes and other images from his childhood in 1940s Indiana. Next are the plumbing tips, how to wire an electrical outlet, and other odds and ends from his work, some of which he learned in the Navy, and the majority of which he couldn’t even use by the time he retired because he didn’t have a special license in those areas.
Mostly, however, Dacia is getting information about his dogs. Abner never married. Never had a family. His dogs were his life. The last one was a beagle mix named Bumper. She’s the reason Abner couldn’t move on. He had to be sure someone took care of Bumper. Only Abner had been dead for fifteen years when I picked him up on the park bench. I finally found an elderly neighbor who remembered him. Remembered that a family two blocks over had adopted Bumper after the police found Abner’s body in his backyard garden. She saw the kids taking her for walks for a few years, but then the dog either died or they moved away. The woman couldn’t remember which.
And that was the last time I heard Abner’s voice. His memories, the ones that Dacia is tearing through now, gradually accrued and I filed them away, but he was able to let go once he knew that Bumper hadn’t starved to death after his stroke. That someone had taken her in and cared for her.
Dacia’s probe shifts to Emily, but she’s only in that folder for a few minutes. Apparently she’s not a history buff. She glances at the others, but skips them and goes to Molly’s file, which is disordered and definitely not chronologically arranged like Abner’s memories.
A woman—Molly’s mother—laughing as she helps a younger Molly build a snowman.
Molly crying as Cregg forces her to cut her own leg in the main room of the cabin.
“Holes,” Dacia says. “There are holes here. Molly’s is not like the others.”
“Her memories are still unpacking. It’s . . . um . . . think of it as a zip file. The memories are there, but they aren’t extracted yet. There’s no . . . file structure.”
It’s not a bad analogy for what’s going on. But it doesn’t seem to satisfy Dacia.
She mumbles something. The only words I pick up are “what is this zip files,” then she starts rummaging again.
Playing a song from the Harry Potter movies on the piano at Porter’s house.
Molly falling off the swing and breaking her wrist.
Holding up her arm to ward off the blow as Cregg swings the base of the metal pipe toward her.