Our eyes met for a brief, horrifying instant and we both leaped out of bed as fast as we could. I was only in a long t-shirt but it didn’t matter. I had never heard my mother scream like that before and I prayed that we weren’t going to run down the stairs and find her dead on the floor.
We scampered down the stairs two at a time, with Ada cal ing “Mom!”
“Girls!” she yel ed back, sounding calmer, which relieved me. Her voice was coming from my father’s study.
We hustled our way over there. The door was open and my mother was standing in the middle of the room, a stack of papers at her feet, plumes of dust rising up from them and catching in the sunlight that was coming through the opened blinds.
Her back was to us, her limbs frozen in front of her, like she was stil holding onto the papers. Her attention was on the wal s so that’s where my attention went too.
I gasped. One hand flew to my mouth while Ada grasped the other.
My dad’s study had been destroyed. The wal s had huge tears in them like someone took an axe and just started hacking at it randomly. The edges of the tears were dripped with red and with the same color someone had painted pentagrams al over the wal s, even the ceiling.
Some were as smal as your hand, others were the size of a tire. The decorative crucifixes he had displayed were al upside down. That sight chil ed me more than anything else.
It chil ed me so bad that a violent shiver shuddered through me and I nearly lost my balance. I reached out for the edge of the door and hung on.
Ada and my mom took no notice of me. How could they with what they were looking at. Even al the paintings of popes and religious figures that my dad had framed as artwork were disfigured, their eyes carved out so they only had black, inhuman holes.
“Who would do this?” my mother asked in a half-whisper.
Ada shook her head softly.
Only I had an idea of who could have done it, but I wasn’t stupid enough to say it. My parents wouldn’t have believed it was Abby in a mil ion years. But they would believe I was nuts, somehow put the blame on me, and lock me away somewhere.
As if she heard me think that, Ada turned her head to look at me as I leaned against the door for support, trying to keep my hungover eyes focused.
She gave me a strange look, like she was trying to figure something out about me. Like something about me was making her think. I had a feeling I knew what it was too.
I raised my brow and twitched my head ever so slightly.
She frowned and then looked back at the room and at mom.
I know she was thinking that maybe I had done it in my sleep. Maybe I had forgone the nail polish last night and decided to raid Home Depot, picking up cans of red paint before going to town on al of my father’s religious stuff.