She still couldn’t believe Rose was gone. It seemed inconceivable that after she’d just found Rose again, God had once again taken her away.
Callie had booked a few sessions with Zee; since Rose’s death she’d found herself crying at the oddest times. Her nightmares had changed, too: They were a jumble of trees, frozen darkness, and severed limbs harnessed and swinging. Over and over, each limb was cut away, until all that was left of the tree was the trunk itself. Beyond the severed limbs was a vast nothingness that stretched on forever.
But even worse were the memories that had begun to come back unbidden, from the night of the murders: Susan’s fall and the gash on her neck, bleeding into the earth below.
A maze of tangled trees, woven thick and impenetrable.
The blood glazing the dying grass.
The dark heart of the hedge bush where Rose had hidden her.
The pit and their blood grave below.
“How much did you grieve when it happened?” Zee wanted to know.
“There didn’t seem to be any time to grieve,” Callie said. “I was too scared of what might happen next.”
Zee nodded. “And the glimpses of memory you’re having now, how do they make you feel?”
“Sad and scared,” Callie said. “Very scared.” The images were more intense than her nightmares. She started crying again.
“The woman is dead, for Christ’s sake!”
Rafferty sat at his desk talking on the phone and lobbing darts at the exhumation order he’d tacked to his bulletin board as a makeshift target. The dart arced too high, looking as if it might miss the target altogether, then dove suddenly at the last minute, finding its mark dead center. “Can’t you people let her rest even now?”
He slammed down the phone.
There had been such a great amount of snow over the past few weeks that they hadn’t been able to bury anyone, let alone dig people up.
“I can’t believe they’re still going to open those graves,” Towner said later that evening.
Despite Rafferty’s protest to the ADA, his attitude about the exhumation was changing. The truth was, now that Rose was dead and could no longer be directly hurt by the results, he was curious about what the procedure might reveal. Increasingly, he wanted to solve this case. He made the mistake of confiding this feeling to Towner.
“I thought you were afraid the exhumation might implicate Rose.”
“Rose is dead.”
“So you don’t care anymore? What about Callie, for God’s sake? Didn’t you say her DNA is bound to be discovered as well?”
“No one believes a five-year-old girl was responsible.”
“They believe a lot of weird things in this town.”
“Look, I just need to solve this case, okay?”
Ever since the first snow, Rafferty’s tension level had been rising. He’d been reading the online posts, and now most of them were targeting him for the lack of closure to this case. But no one wanted closure more than he did.
“Let’s change the subject,” Towner said now, reading his expression and seeing where this was headed. “What else happened today?”
Rafferty had to rack his brain to come up with something. “So,” he said finally, “have I told you what some of our more industrious citizens have taken to doing to keep using their cars?”
“Do tell,” Towner answered.
“They are shoveling out spaces on the street and then ‘marking’ them: We’ve seen lawn chairs, buckets full of wood, trash barrels. In the McIntire District, someone set up a bistro table and chairs with two place settings, complete with wine bottles and candles.”
“That’s kind of funny.”
“It is, but God help the interloper who tries to steal a parking space. Last night, Jay-Jay hauled in a guy who’d been smashing windshields and deflating the tires of cars parked in ‘his’ space. The guy was wielding a sharpened screwdriver, swiping the air like a swashbuckler and bragging, ‘I flattened four tires in under a minute!’?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming,” Callie said to Zee, remembering Rose’s words on Christmas: Sometimes the only healing is death.
“You’ve got to let yourself off the hook,” Zee said. “I was Rose’s therapist, and I didn’t see it coming, either.”
Zee quickly returned Callie to the original reason she had booked the hour. There had been an incident the previous weekend. She’d dropped a coffee cup in the kitchen, breaking it cleanly in two. As she bent down to pick up the mess, she saw the blood, just a few drops of it at first, falling on the floor she’d just wiped. She opened her hands to find her left palm cut, a slice across one of the petals of the rose-shaped scar. Holding her palm under the faucet to wash the wound, she watched the water run red. She pulled her hand out and pressed a paper towel to her palm to stanch the bleeding, but it wouldn’t stop. She felt faint and called for Paul, who’d been sleeping upstairs.
“Let me see,” he said, taking her hand, which she’d clutched around the towel.
“How bad is it?” she asked, squeezing her eyes shut, unable to look for fear she might actually faint.
Paul was quiet for a long time. When she finally opened her eyes, he was still holding her hand, but he was looking at her with a worried expression. She looked down at her palm. There was no blood, no sign of any wound at all. The coffee from the broken cup still coated the floor, and he leaned down to clean it up. “I think you were dreaming,” he said. “Or maybe walking in your sleep.”
She nodded. But she hadn’t been sleeping, she’d been wide awake. And it wasn’t the first time this week that she’d had a vision. Earlier in the week, she’d thought she’d seen Rose, sitting out by the oak where she died. And then, on Monday, there was a far more serious incident by that same tree. She immediately booked an emergency appointment with Zee, fearing that if she didn’t get to the bottom of what it meant, her visions could start, like Rose’s, to take unhealthy control of her actions.
“Tell me more about these visions.”
“I’ve always had them,” Callie admitted. After Rose’s death, they’d become more invasive: moments of clarity so extreme that they magnified sights and sounds, rendering them indistinguishable from one another, making everything she perceived seem too loud and vibrant. Her heart pounded so hard she could feel her pulse in her hands, from the scar on her palm to the tips of her fingers. “But they’re getting worse. I’ve never acted on one so impulsively before, never been as out of control as I was that day they started cutting down the old oak.”
“Why was Finn cutting it down?” Zee asked.
“He claimed he didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened to Rose. And he said that Emily felt responsible. Which she wasn’t; I was the one who made Rose come for Christmas…”
Zee let the silence hang.
“What I did terrified them all.”