I looked down at my hands. There were no signs of paint on them. There weren’t any on my feet or anywhere else either. I doubt I would have been able to clean myself up so wel . The thought made me feel better. What stores would even be open at three in the morning? Walgreens didn’t have paint. I wondered if setting up my own security camera there would be a good idea, though, just so I could stop being a scapegoat.
“We should cal the police,” I said, my voice sounding thick.
My mom nodded slowly. It was obvious she was in shock. We al were.
“Where’s dad?” I asked.
“Church,” Ada said, as if she didn’t quite believe her answer.
I straightened up and walked into the room. Hangover or not, someone needed to take charge of this situation and my mother and Ada were too stupefied to do anything.
“Listen, I think we need to cal the cops now. Then when they’re done we can clean it. I don’t want dad coming home to see any of this.”
“But who would do such a thing?” my mom repeated.
Her accent got thicker when she was upset and in that instance she sounded an awful lot like Creepy Clown Lady.
A weird, blurry feeling settled over my brain, as if thinking was suddenly hard, like I had layers to get through.
“You cal them,” Ada said, snapping me out of it and gesturing to the phone in the study. She grabbed my mom by the arm and began to lead her out of the room.
I blinked hard to wake myself up, then picked up the phone and cal ed it in.
After I was done, with the police promising they’d send their nearest squad car over, and placed the phone back in the receiver, two shrieks resonated from the kitchen.
What now? I thought as I raced around the desk and ran down the hal , my bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor.
My mother and Ada were on the other side of the island, staring at the sink. I quickly made my way over to them and froze in my tracks when I realized what they were really looking at.
The wide cupboards beneath the industrial-sized sink were shut and leaking red fluid out of the bottoms and corners. It seeped out in sickly rivulets until it congealed in a crimson puddle on the floor.
I hoped there were a couple of cans of open paint back there and they had spil ed. But as I sniffed the air, it wasn’t the scent of turpentine that fil ed them, but that terrible raw meat smel that plagued me many times before. I don’t know why I had been so na?ve to think that someone painted my dad’s wal s with actual paint. It wasn’t paint at al .
It was blood.
“I’m going to open it,” Ada said, and made a move for it, bending down.
“Are you crazy?” I hissed and grabbed her roughly. I pul ed her back. “You don’t know what’s in there.”
“Whatever it is, it’s messing up my kitchen,” my mother said blankly. And before I could let go of Ada and go after her, my mother put both her hands on the cupboard knobs and swung the doors open.
The body of a headless pig burst out of the cupboard and onto the kitchen floor with a sick thud, its coat already more red than pink. It had been split up the middle and its gooey, slimy organs and entrails spil ed out like an unraveling rope, splashing the three of us with drops of acidic liquid as they spread across the bloody puddle.
What I remember next was screaming. Al of us were screaming and running out of the house and onto the driveway. Ada went to go vomit in the bushes while my mother flapped her hands like a flightless bird and I chewed on the col ar of my t-shirt while simultaneously trying to pul it down to cover my exposed legs as the morning air nipped at them.
It was disgusting, is what it was. Disgusting and disturbing. Where exactly was that pig’s head? I shuddered. But I wasn’t taking it as hard as Ada and my mother were. I guess I had a lot more experience with this stuff than they did. Not that it was a good thing.
“Guys, it’s OK,” I said coming over to them, the rough bricks cold against my feet. I grabbed my mom’s hand and squeezed it hard, stopping her useless waving. “Mom, it’s fine. The police are coming. They’l find out...” I almost said what, “who did this.”
She nodded, the whites of her eyes shining spookily as she surveyed the neighborhood. I know she was thinking it could have been anyone, that there was someone out there plotting against her, plotting against her family. It could have been true. I didn’t know for a fact it was Abby. In fact, since my dad was a theology professor, it could have been a number of disgruntled students. Maybe someone he failed.
They would know exactly how to get back at him, how to disturb him.
That said, it didn’t explain how it could have happened without anyone hearing anything. And I knew, deep down, where the dreaded feeling stayed, that it had something to do with me. This was about me and this was retribution from a dead girl.
I never thought I could hate a ghost so much.
When Ada was done upchucking (I real y had seen way too much vomit in the past few weeks), she got a hold of herself and helped me convince our mom that everything was going to be fine. Sure, someone came and destroyed dad’s study and painted pentagrams everywhere with blood, and there’s a gutted, headless pig in the kitchen and speaking of that, let’s see where the head turns up, but I’m sure the police see this kind of stuff al the time. It’s Portland, man. It’s weird!
At least her arm flapping and psycho eye-rol ing had stopped before the police car pul ed up. Officers Hartley and Monroe were the first on the scene. Hartley was young with a Channing Tatum vibe, dumb-looking but personable, while Monroe was in her mid-30s, black, pretty and obviously the brains of the operation.
I only had to talk to them for five minutes before we entered the house and I ran to my room to put on a bra and a pair of pants. By the time I joined them back downstairs, Channing was talking to my mom and Ada in the living room while Monroe was investigating the house room by room. She was coming out of the kitchen when she saw me and cal ed me over to her.
I approached her cautiously, not wanting to get close to the carcass, which I could smel too clearly.
“Perry, right?” she asked in a concise voice.
I nodded.
“Your mother mentioned that the neighbor’s dog tried to attack you the other day.”
My jaw tried to drop, but I held it shut against its wil .
“It did,” I said, lowering my voice. “His name is Cheerio.
He’s normal y the friendliest dog around, so I don’t know what happened. But he went for me like he was going to kil me.”
Monroe looked over my shoulder toward the living room and nodded as if she understood. We walked away from the kitchen, stopping by the front door.
“Do you know why your mother might have told me that?”
I sucked on my lip while I sussed her out.
“No…why?”