Where Darkness Blooms, page 10
“Take a left at the staircase, sweetheart,” the woman at the front desk told her with a toothy grin. “The public records are in the cabinet by the window.”
Bo bared her teeth in what she hoped was a decent enough attempt at amiability and scurried down the hallway to the left. It was almost impossible to get lost in here; there was literally only one hallway she could go down. But Bo figured the more polite she was, the more likely it was that the woman at the front desk would allow her to dig through records before getting suspicious.
She wasn’t lying about looking up Bishop’s property records. She just didn’t mention what else she was looking up.
She pushed open the wood-paneled door to the records room and instantly sneezed. It was so dry and dusty inside that she felt like she’d inhaled a mouthful of sand as soon as she stepped over the threshold. She wiped her mouth, half expecting to find specks of dust lingering on her lips.
There was exactly one file cabinet in the records room, and it was just to the side of the open window. The rest of the place was stuffed with extra chairs, dented-up tables, and what looked like a box of deranged Santas for the annual Christmas display in the lobby. She kicked the box out of the way. Somewhere inside, a warped version of “Jingle Bells” started to play.
“Gross,” Bo whispered, heading to the cabinet. She would make this part quick.
She yanked open the top drawer and thumbed through the records. Water main line, property taxes, event committee. Nope, nope, no. She shut the drawer and opened the next.
The first file in the second drawer read Bishop property ownership.
Yes.
Bo slid the folder out and flipped it open. There was a single document inside. She held it up to the sunlight and read:
The Town of Bishop
Property Deed
The four square miles of the town of Bishop is unto itself, owned by itself. There will be no proper owner of any land within this square footage, and all homes, ranches, and farmland are considered to be “rented” from the land itself. All land used for the public is, and will continue to be, owned by the town itself. The 8,332-square-foot clearing at the west end and the 597-square-foot clearing at the east end MUST remain clear at all times. No home may be built upon them at any point.
Bo flipped to the second and final page, but there was only a map of Bishop. It was old and whisper-thin, and the pencil lines around the perimeters were so light that she had to step closer to the window to really see them. She tilted the paper.
A burst of wind rushed through the window, blowing her bangs across her face. Bo swept them back and blinked. She blinked again.
A sunflower bent in through the window. It stared at her with its endless, shadowy face, buttery petals fluttering in the wind.
“How did—”
The wind blew again, harder this time. She swore she heard a single word, or the echo of a word, float in on the breeze.
Look.
Bo stumbled back. The sunflower lurched, just an inch, but it was enough to make her blood run cold. She balled her hand into a fist at her side.
But before she could swing, the flower moved. Almost as if it could sense Bo’s rage, or maybe even an underlayer of fear, and it slowly retreated out the open window, a light breeze massaging its petals as it stared at her innocently.
Bo shook her head. “No.” She closed the window so hard the glass panes rattled. “No. Nope.”
She dragged in a breath through her nose and released it from her mouth in one long stream, just like she had learned to do when her heart rate got too high on a run. She squinted out the window.
The sunflowers were so close to the building that their petals made a shh, shh sound against the brick. They bobbed in the breeze as if they were swaying to a song no one else could hear. Maybe they were listening to something she couldn’t hear.
Bo felt the chill of the almost-word the flower had whispered. Look.
She shook it off, sliding the document back into its folder. The clearing. Nothing was supposed to be built on it, ever, according to these documents.
So why did they insist on erecting the statues there?
Look. Bo wasn’t sure if she heard the word in her own mind or if it had somehow seeped through the closed window. Her eyes settled on a signature at the very bottom of the second page.
Edward J. Dingal.
“Edward Dingal,” Bo said slowly. She tried to make out the date beside the name. 1861.
Bo chewed on the inside of her cheek. There was something about the name that itched at the back of her brain, something she could feel but didn’t quite understand. She closed the folder and slipped it back into the drawer.
She yanked open the rest of the cabinet drawers, one by one, thumbing through manila folders and stacks of old flyers for memorials and ice-cream socials. But she couldn’t find anything on Edward Dingal, and nothing on the other thing she had come here to look for.
“They have to be here,” she mumbled to herself, clicking the last drawer shut. She half-heartedly combed through the box of deranged Santas, but she knew the records she was looking for weren’t in there.
They had to be somewhere else in this building.
Bo poked her head out the door. The woman she’d met at the front was still clacking away at her keyboard. Other than that, the rest of the building was silent.
She tiptoed toward the room at the end of the hall. It was technically the mayor’s office, but honestly, Mr. Harding didn’t have a lot of duties in a place like Bishop. He was rarely behind the old oak desk, signing papers or talking on the ancient office phone. No one was there now.
Bo crept into the dust-laden office, careful to avoid the window where the sunflowers silently watched. She sidled beside the desk.
The phone rang. Bo jumped. She held her breath as the little red light on the handle blinked.
“Hello, Bishop Town Hall,” the woman from the front desk said. Her voice echoed from down the hall. Bo exhaled.
And then she went to work.
She pulled open all the drawers, quickly scanning the contents. There were pastel sticky notes and pens with bite marks on the caps, rusty paper clips and packets of gum that looked about a hundred years old.
And in the bottom drawer, dozens of empty manila folders. Bo shoved her hands inside and flipped through the folders, just to be sure that there was nothing of importance. Her fingers snagged on what felt like a stack of papers near the bottom. She tugged. Several pieces of cream-colored paper jutted out from the pile, but Bo could see there were plenty more still tucked into the last manila folder in the stack.
Her hands shook as she pulled it free. Before she even opened it, somehow, she knew. This was exactly what she’d been looking for.
No one kept a file in a separate place unless they didn’t want anyone to find it.
Bo held her breath as she flipped through the documents. Death certificates, or at least photocopies of them. One after another death in Bishop, nothing left of these women but faded ink.
Bo’s eyes blurred as she scanned through the names. Olivia Alvarez. Helen Worchesky. Ashley Goddard.
Mary and Elizabeth and Tasha and Lillian and Sarah. The corners of Bo’s eyes stung as she flipped through them all. It seemed like anyone who identified as a woman was as good as dead in this dusty, barren hellscape.
She stopped near the top of the pile. She squinted at one of the names. Harriet Jones. She had lived down the street from Bo and her mother at one point, before her daughter had died in a farming accident. At least, that was what Belinda Jones’s death certificate had said. Harriet had died, alone, in Bishop’s only nursing home two years ago.
She turned the page. Jasmine Wright. Died of a “cardiac event” eighteen months ago. Jasmine had been in the grade below Bo. She’d been a distance runner, faster than Bo out of the gate but more likely to lose steam in the last mile.
The next one was Cara Carter. Another cardiac arrest, almost exactly a year ago. She was only thirty years old.
And then there was the last paper at the very top of the pile. The ink hadn’t had a chance to fade yet.
Eleanor Craft, “natural causes.” Six months ago.
As Bo stared at Eleanor’s name, the edges of the paper began to go fuzzy. She swallowed the sick feeling climbing up her throat. The dates.
When she’d combed through the older certificates, the time between deaths had been years. Sometimes Bishop would go as long as half a decade before another incident. But as Bo had turned the pages, the heart attacks and accidents and unknown causes had started to bleed together. The years between them began to shrink.
The last four: Two years ago. Eighteen months ago. One year ago.
Six months ago.
“Can I help you?” a voice cut through Bo’s thoughts. She dropped the folder on the desk as if it had burned her fingertips.
The woman from the front desk narrowed her eyes. “Why are you here? I told you the public records—”
“Gloria, it’s no problem.” Another voice wafted into the stuffy room, followed by William Harding. He broke into an easy smile when he saw Bo. “Oh, Bo! Good to see you again.”
Bo swallowed. “So, I didn’t know—”
Mr. Harding waved his hand as he slid behind the desk. “Really, it’s no big deal. I’ll just put this back.” He reached for the bottom drawer and dropped the file inside. As the drawer clicked shut, he clapped his hands together. “Was there something you were looking for that I can help you with?”
She shook her head. “No, no. I’m good. I just got mixed up.” She pressed her mouth into a smile and looked at Gloria like she had when she’d first arrived. This time Gloria didn’t smile back. “Okay. So, I’m gonna go. Thanks for your help.”
Bo wove through the room, careful not to make eye contact with Gloria. As she reached the door, Mr. Harding cleared his throat. “Hey, Bo?”
She froze. “Yes?”
“Make sure you’re careful out there, okay? It’s going to be getting dark soon. Don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I’ll be careful,” she said slowly.
Bo pretended that everything was fine as she walked down the narrow hallway back to the lobby. But inside, her heart rocketed in her chest. She had to curl her fingers into her palms to stop them from shaking.
It wasn’t Mr. Harding’s words that scared her.
It was that he knew exactly where to put the folder back in the drawer.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Whitney’s shoulder throbbed as she climbed the crumbling steps to the Bishop Nursing Care Center, but it was Jude she was still thinking about. The way she had stared at her fingernails when Whitney had asked her about the hospital. How she’d softly answered, I didn’t even get a good look at it, really. Bennett asked me to wait in the truck.
Whitney tried to calm the hurt that curdled in her stomach. It was fine. It was probably for the best that Jude didn’t end up going into the hospital, anyway. She had always been sensitive about that sort of thing.
Something in Whitney softened as she watched Jude reach for the front door. In a lot of ways, Jude was more like an exposed nerve than a human. She’d never been able to watch an animal in pain, and whenever Bo came home, scraped up and bloody yet again, Jude always pretended to pick at the skin on her palm. If there really was such a thing as kryptonite, Jude’s was someone else’s pain.
And while Whitney had never spent more than a couple hours inside the Bishop Nursing Care Center when she’d volunteered last summer for Cross-Stitch Day, she’d spent long enough in the dank recreation room to know this was the kind of place that would rub Jude’s soft heart raw. Now that Whitney thought about it, it was probably one of the reasons why she’d taught Mary Porter to stitch a curlicue I’m a fucking delight onto her Aida cloth. She was a fucking delight, even in a place that didn’t have room for that kind of joy.
But if Jude didn’t want to be there with her, she never let on. Together, they entered the front lobby, which was painted the color of cement and smelled faintly of dish soap. A gray countertop jutted out from the wall, and behind that, a girl sat with her earbuds in. She glanced up when she saw them come in. “Hi, can I help you?” she said, pulling out her earbuds.
“Hi. Um, I’m here to see someone.” Whitney smiled, trying to force the shakiness from her voice.
She hadn’t been nervous until right this second, until she’d placed her hands on the Formica countertop and peeked over the edge at the girl sitting behind the clunky old computer. Whitney recognized her from Bishop High, although she was pretty sure she was a couple years older than Delilah. Her long black hair was woven into tight braids that flowed down her back, leaving only her bare shoulders exposed under the dim lights.
The girl leaned on her forearms. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” Whitney said slowly. There was a scar, still fresh, on the girl’s right arm, the puckered mark disrupting her deep brown skin. The rest of her arms, and her hands, looked as soft as linen. Whitney imagined running her finger from her scar to the crook of her elbow in one long sweep.
Something poked her side. Whitney blinked and found Jude’s fingers jabbing her stomach. She swatted them away and turned her attention back to the girl. “Susannah Craft. We’d like to visit with her.”
The girl lifted an eyebrow. “Susannah? She doesn’t get many … well, any visitors.”
Whitney watched the way the girl’s wine-colored lips formed around Susannah’s name. Slowly, deliberately. She was still watching her mouth move when Jude’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“We’re friends of the family,” Jude said quickly. She pulled her mouth into a nervous smile. “Can we see her?”
“Sure,” the girl responded. But she was still looking at Whitney. “She’s in the rec room. Just grab a couple of visitor badges before you go back.”
Jude plucked two orange badges from the wicker basket on the counter. “Thanks,” she said, and she rounded the corner toward the hallway.
“Thanks,” Whitney repeated. She lifted her hand in an awkward wave before following her sister.
“Hey—wait a sec,” the girl called. “Your name is Whitney, right?”
She paused. “Yeah…?”
“I remember you,” the girl said. “From when you volunteered here last summer.”
Something in Whitney’s stomach hitched. Before she could catch her breath, the girl added, “I’m Alma.”
“Alma.” Whitney rolled her name around her mouth like a hard candy. She liked the way it melted on her tongue. Alma.
Whitney tried to remember if she’d met her before, but she drew a blank. She was pretty sure she would have remembered Alma if she’d met her.
“Whit?” Jude’s voice wafted from down the hallway.
“Hi, Alma,” Whitney said slowly, her mouth breaking into a grin. “Bye, Alma.” And she followed the sound of her sister’s voice.
As soon as she disappeared into the hallway, the smile dropped from her lips. Her stomach lurched. What was that? Whitney hadn’t been that nervous around someone since …
Eleanor.
By the time she got to the rec room, Jude’s face was fixed in a smirk. “Did you make a new friend, Whit?”
Heat crept up Whitney’s neck. “What are you talking about?” She said, a little sharper than she’d intended. “Sure, I guess?”
Jude looked at her for a long, horribly uncomfortable minute. “Okay then. I think the rec room is right across the hall.”
She followed Jude into the room that had been the epicenter of Cross-Stitch Day, only now each table was covered in a riot of neon paints instead of rainbow embroidery floss. Three massive windows covered almost all of the back wall, washing the already graying residents in even more gray light.
Whitney tried to slow her heartbeat as she scanned the room, looking for Eleanor’s grandmother. That was all that this was supposed to be. They’d find Eleanor’s last family member still in Bishop, ask her some questions about Eleanor’s death, and then maybe she’d finally have the answers to the questions that had been gnawing at her for months.
Not this.
But what was this? Alma’s soft face and purple lips appeared without invitation in Whitney’s mind. She blinked the image away. This was nothing.
She was here for Eleanor.
“There,” Jude whispered. She nodded toward a lone woman in the back corner. “I think that’s her.”
As soon as Whitney caught a glimpse of the woman, she knew it was Eleanor’s grandmother. Even from this angle, Susannah looked like the kind of woman Eleanor would grow into as she aged. Her wispy white-blond hair was piled on top of her head like a soufflé, just like Eleanor used to do when she was concentrating. The sleeves of her pristine white shirt had been rolled up to the crook of her elbow, and flecks of paint made neon constellations on the backs of her hands.
It made Whitney ache in a way that she hadn’t since the day they’d found Eleanor’s body on the lawn.
“Ms. Craft?” Jude said softly as she approached the table.
“Who’d like to know?” she answered, not lifting her eyes from the cream-colored canvas in front of her. It was a smear of pinks and greens, like what a field of spring tulips looked like if you were driving by it too fast. It was strange and beautiful.
Whitney sank into the seat across from her. “Hi, Susannah.”
At the sound of Whitney’s voice, the woman’s head snapped up. Her expression softened like melting ice cream. “Oh, Whitney.”
Whitney had only met Susannah Craft once, and she almost wished she hadn’t. It had been pouring outside when school let out, and Eleanor had suggested that Whitney come back to her place down the street instead of making the long trek to Old Fairview Lane. Whitney could have asked Delilah to take her home in the old sedan after her Spanish club meeting, but the look in Eleanor’s eyes made something in her flutter.
They had barely crossed the threshold from the mudroom into the kitchen before Eleanor’s lips were on hers. She let out a breathy, feral laugh as she threaded her fingers through Whitney’s wet hair, raindrops cascading down her wrist and pooling in the crook of her elbow. They tripped over the laundry basket on their way to Eleanor’s room, towels spilling down the stairs like lavender-scented ghosts. As Whitney fumbled for the doorknob, her fingers brushed against something soft and warm.
