Where Darkness Blooms, page 15
Bennett’s eyes grew wide, just for a second, then his face relaxed into a grin. “Oh, you know, the wind told me.” He hooked his arm around her shoulder and laughed. “Come on, Lilah. I live right down the street. Saw the whole shop go down so we came to check on Evan.”
“We?”
He nodded toward the dilapidated taxidermy shop. Delilah followed his gaze. Caleb was standing in the spot where the lobby used to be, waving his hands as he talked animatedly to his uncle. William Harding stood next to the rubble, raking a hand through his hair.
He dropped his hand and glanced up at them.
Every nerve in Delilah’s body twinged as both William and Caleb turned to look at her, their expressions stony. Some deep-seated instinct clawed at her.
Bennett squeezed her shoulder just a little too tightly. “You’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.” He pressed his lips to her temple and whispered, “Why don’t you come back to my place and I’ll take care of you?”
Delilah let the words settle inside her like glitter in a snow globe. She could imagine lying on Bennett’s worn-in sofa, her body fitting into the grooves of the cushion beside his, wrapped in his mom’s old afghan. All she would have to do is sleep—not worry about making sure there were enough vegetables for Jude, that Whitney hadn’t given herself another tattoo, that Bo … well, that Bo hadn’t hurt anyone enough to land her in prison.
Plus, she could touch him.
She could actually touch him without pretending it didn’t hurt.
Tears of relief pricked the corners of her eyes. “Okay,” Delilah said, leaning into him. “Let’s go to your house.”
They were halfway to Bennett’s truck when she noticed Caleb behind them. She turned. “Are you coming back with us, too?”
Caleb’s eyes snapped to Bennett’s. There was something there, communicated between them, but Delilah’s head was too foggy to understand. “Yeah,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m gonna go with you.”
He walked beside them through the lot, which had already begun to clear. Bennett guided her to the passenger side of his truck, which was flush against a wall of sunflowers. They tickled the back of her neck as she reached for the door.
Run.
Delilah froze. The fog in her head cleared.
Run.
It wasn’t exactly that she heard the word; it was more like she felt the shape of it just at the edge of her consciousness. But it was there, the echo of a warning. Her entire body snapped on like a light switch.
Run.
“You getting in?”
Delilah turned. Caleb hovered over her, his jaw clenched, with one hand on the open door. The engine kicked on as Bennett started the truck from the driver’s side. She watched the silhouette of him waiting, one hand resting on top of the steering wheel.
“I don’t … I don’t think I can?” she said slowly. She only realized it was true once the words were out of her mouth.
Caleb’s eyebrows knitted together. “Why not?”
Delilah swallowed. She didn’t like how close he was, the way his body curved over hers, pressing her into the truck. She could smell sweat and mint gum on him, and the combination made her woozy. She needed air.
She needed out.
“I have to go.” She didn’t wait for Caleb to give her permission.
Delilah slipped out beneath his arm and started to run. Behind her, she heard them yell, “Hey! Hey, come back here!”
She ran straight into the sunflower fields, praying she’d come out on the other side alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Come home.
Those were the words Bo chanted in her head as she shoved open the cellar doors and grabbed the sunflower stem she had stuck into the metal clasp. It didn’t matter how fierce the wind was, or how hard the rain pelted her skin as she marched back to the house. She had to do something.
And she couldn’t sit in that cellar for one second longer.
Come home.
Bo chanted the words again, trying to calm the tightness in her stomach. The wind swept away the last petals still clinging to the sunflower in her hand. They twisted and writhed as they wafted into the sunflower field. She tossed the limp stem into the field after them.
“Bo!” Jude yelled.
She didn’t turn around. She had to find Delilah.
Bo couldn’t explain the clenching sensation in her gut—like something with sharp claws had started to squeeze. All she knew was it told her something wasn’t right. That Delilah wasn’t okay.
“BO!”
Jude jogged up beside her, the wind turning her cheeks raw and pink. “Come back to the cellar.”
Whitney marched up behind them. “Come on,” she gasped. “Don’t be stubborn.”
Bo gritted her teeth. “I’m not stubborn. I’m worried.” She glanced out at the oppressive sky, the sunflowers curled in on themselves. “She wouldn’t just leave us.”
Even before the words left her lips, Bo knew they were true. Just like she knew they were true every time she said them about her own mother. Cori Wagner would never leave them, not on purpose. And neither would Delilah Cortez.
Her stomach clenched tighter. “Something’s wrong.”
“Yeah, you’re out here in this storm,” Whitney said, frowning. She hooked her arm around Bo’s and pulled. “We’ve got to get back inside.”
“No.” Bo pulled her arm free. “I’m not going back in there.” And before Whitney could grab her again, or Jude could look at her with those sad, watery eyes, she started to run. Her sneakers sank into gray-brown puddles, kicking up muddy water behind her as she rounded the front of the house.
Bo slowed as the porch came into view. The old ash tree hung limp, its top branches poking through what was left of their roof. The east half of the porch was completely smashed, spiderweb cracks crawling across the cement slab. More pots—gem-colored things that Indigo had made and Cori had filled with spindly basil plants—lay in the rubble, potting soil oozing out of them like intestines.
She felt Whitney and Jude beside her before she saw them. Whitney let out a low breath. “Oh shit.”
“It’s worse than I thought,” Jude said softly. She turned to them. “What are we gonna do?”
Bo didn’t know. The house—their house—would have to be repaired. It probably wasn’t safe for them to go inside.
But where were they supposed to go?
They had no one here.
Bo closed her eyes. Delilah, where are you?
“I’m here.”
Bo spun around. Delilah stood in front of a row of sunflowers, petals clinging to her wet hair. Her fingers shook as she plucked a petal from her bottom lip and let it waft to the earth. It took everything in Bo not to burst into tears right there on the front lawn.
“Lilah,” she whispered. And then she threw herself toward her.
“Wait.” Delilah went rigid as Bo reached for her. When she pulled away, Delilah had placed her palm over her forehead. She winced as Bo gently peeled her fingers away.
There was a knot the size of an orange on Delilah’s forehead. It was an aggressive purple that throbbed, and the slash through the center hadn’t scabbed up yet. Fresh blood creased her eyelid when she tried to smile at Bo. “I’m fine, really.”
Bo swallowed the lump in her throat. “You’re not fine,” she whispered.
“Delilah.” Jude gasped. “We’ve got to get you to the doctor or—”
“No,” Delilah said firmly. “I can’t. We can’t. I…” She trailed off as the wind whipped her hair across her face. She carefully peeled it away from her wound and said, “We’ve got to get in the house.”
Jude frowned. “But you should—”
“Now. Right now. It won’t stop until we’re inside.”
She didn’t wait for the rest of the girls to follow. Delilah marched toward the dilapidated porch and climbed what was left of the steps. Bo only waited a second before following her into the house. Even though it looked like it was on the verge of collapse from the outside, the damage hadn’t seeped very far inside. A section of wallpaper in the kitchen had ripped at the seam from the impact, revealing the innards of the drywall and coating the tile with flecks of insulation foam. The rest of the place looked like it had when Bo had woken up. Except, when she flicked the switch, the lights didn’t turn on.
Whitney stumbled into the house, followed quickly by Jude. As soon as Jude closed the door behind her, the wind softened, until it sputtered out. Bo watched out the front window as the hunched-over sunflowers slowly began to lift their heads. They peeked under their halo of petals, then tentatively looked toward the calming sky.
“Delilah.” Bo turned to her. “What the hell is going on?”
“Where were you?” Whitney asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
“We were worried,” Jude added.
Delilah hobbled to the kitchen and pulled a bag of frozen carrots from the fridge. She winced as she pressed it to her forehead. “You first. What happened to the house?”
“The wind blew. The tree took out the porch. Now there’s a hole in the kitchen,” Bo said, matter-of-fact. “Your turn.”
“We’ll have to call someone—”
“Delilah,” Bo snapped.
“Okay, fine.” She leaned on the counter, still holding the bag to her forehead. “I don’t know how to explain this, but … I think William Harding can control the wind.” She squeezed her eyes shut.
But no one laughed.
The room grew silent as all four of them stilled. Jude picked at her nails. Whitney poked at the crack in the wall in the kitchen. And Bo could barely breathe. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“I went to Gordon’s Taxidermy this morning,” Delilah said, running her fingers along the cracked countertop. “Evan knew my mom, I guess. He’d been trying to tell her something before she disappeared. He thought that—I don’t know how to say this—that Bennett’s uncle actually talks to the wind. Like he saw him do it. And Evan said that every time he tries to talk about what he saw happen with the wind, or about the Hardings, the wind gets more violent until he stops or goes back home.”
“It’s like an enforcer,” Jude said slowly. “Like it’s trying to keep us from knowing something.”
“Keep us trapped in our houses,” Whitney said, joining Delilah at the counter.
“Evan told me all this, and then the windows shattered and the whole shop came down. I woke up, and Bennett, Caleb, and Mr. Harding were there, and I”—Delilah swallowed—“I didn’t want to be there. I don’t know. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I ran into the sunflower field, and then … I heard you.”
Delilah looked at Bo with glassy eyes. “I heard you calling for me.”
Whitney and Jude turned to her. She suddenly felt woozy.
Come home.
How many times had she chanted those words, pleading with Bishop to let Delilah come home? But they’d been in her head; Bo had never so much as whispered them into the wind.
The sunflower.
She’d been holding it in her fist while she ran and chanted, its petals wafting into the field. And Delilah had been waiting on the other side.
“The Hardings know something.” Bo started to pace. “When I was at the town hall earlier, I snuck into the mayor’s office—”
“Bo!” Delilah said.
But Bo just waved her hand. “I was looking for records. With so many women dead and missing, I knew there had to be some kind of record of that. But they weren’t where they should have been, so I went to look in the office and, here’s the thing: Mr. Harding caught me in there. And he knew about the hidden files.”
“What did the files say?” Whitney asked, gnawing on her lip.
Bo stopped moving. “A woman has died every six months for the past two years.”
Whitney’s face crumbled. “Eleanor.”
“Eleanor,” Bo confirmed. “According to those files, we’re right on schedule for someone else to bite it soon.”
“Come on, Bo,” Delilah said softly. “Do you have to say it like that? It’s not funny.”
“That’s the thing; it’s not funny,” Bo said, white-hot anger searing through her. “The Hardings are a part of this. I know it.”
The room grew quiet again. Bo glanced at Jude, whose face was wound into a complicated expression. “It might not be in their control, though. Maybe there’s a reason why they’re acting like this,” Jude added.
Bo felt her knees buckle as the entire world tilted on its axis. She stared at Jude. “Maybe there’s a reason they’re acting like this?”
Jude shook her head. “No, I didn’t mean—”
“Was there a good reason why Caleb raped me?”
The question hung over them all like a thunderstorm. Bo’s whole body began to shake. She’d finally said the word out loud. She’d finally told them—and herself—the truth.
Jude’s face blossomed pink. Delilah dropped the bag of carrots on the floor. Whitney marched into the living room and wrapped Bo in a fierce hug.
“There’s no reason for that,” Whitney whispered in her ear.
“Bo,” Delilah said, gently placing her hand on her shoulder. “I had no idea.”
Bo closed her eyes. “No one did.” She untethered herself from Whitney and began to pace again. There was so much anger inside her that it felt like it would burst through her veins at any second. She curled her hands into fists and squeezed. “We’re trapped in this town. How are we going to get out of here?”
Whitney cleared her throat. “I know someone who might have an idea.”
Bo turned to her. “Who?”
“Eleanor.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Whitney told them everything.
She told them about her visit with Susannah Craft. She showed them Eleanor’s notebook, watched their eyes scan the pages as they read through her notes and took in the photo of Robert Dingal taped inside. She told them about the gaping hole that had resided where her heart used to be since Eleanor had died, how sometimes she felt more like a black hole than a person. How she’d never stopped waiting for Eleanor to come back, to come home, even though she knew Eleanor was buried six feet underground.
She told them about the old weather vane in the clearing, and how she could hear the whisper of Eleanor’s voice when the wind blew past it, and how the echo of that word was the only thing Whitney had been clinging to for the past six months.
They all listened, carefully and quietly, even when Whitney explained that Eleanor seemed convinced Bishop was built on cursed land, and that its founder had somehow started it all. After a moment, Bo was the first to respond. “Edward Dingal,” she said slowly, as if trying out the sound of the syllables on her tongue. “I saw his name on a document in the town hall. Eleanor was right; he was the founder.”
Jude swallowed. “Edward Dingal died a long time ago, though. Maybe the curse died with him?”
Delilah let out a shaky breath. “No, remember the last line Eleanor wrote? His descendants must still live here? They’re … still here.”
They’re still here. The words burrowed into Whitney’s mind as she stood in the damaged kitchen with the other girls. The wind had destroyed their home. The wind that, apparently, William Harding could control. The records of dead and missing women stacked up in a desk drawer. Which William Harding was hiding.
And Eleanor’s death, which, Whitney was almost certain, now more than ever, wasn’t an accident.
“The Hardings. They’re the common denominator,” Whitney said, her voice breaking. She glanced up. “Eleanor’s notebook said the curse needed a sacrifice of some kind. What if women are the sacrifice? And the Hardings have a part in it?”
Delilah let out a long, low breath and walked into the kitchen, while Bo followed behind her with the thawing bag of carrots. Jude choked out a quiet sob. Whitney had pulled her sister into a hug, but the second she did, she understood that Jude’s tears weren’t only from shock. The way her sister folded in on herself when Whitney touched her told her that Jude was crying about something—or someone—else, too.
She felt herself stiffen as she held Jude. She wanted to believe her sister was crying over the revelation, or what had happened to Delilah, or maybe even her own guilt over not going into the hospital with Whitney, instead leaving her alone in a strange building with the Hardings. But something told her Jude wasn’t crying over any of that.
Whitney didn’t have a chance to talk to her sister about it then. Bo bustled into the room, her hands now empty of the bag of carrots. “We should go up to the weather vane,” she said. “We don’t know if that wind is really Eleanor or not, but that may be our only chance to ask her about what she found.”
Delilah appeared in the doorway. “Okay,” she agreed. “But we should go soon.”
Whitney’s stomach sank. The weather vane. It had to be Eleanor. Whitney had spent the past six months of her life curled up beside the rusted metal, hooking Eleanor’s bracelet to the dented rooster tail, crying until the earth softened beneath her cheek. It was the only direct connection to Eleanor she had left.
She’d get Eleanor to talk more. To talk to them all.
“Okay, let’s do it,” Whitney said. Jude nodded solemnly beside her. Before they could say anything else, Delilah was out the door, Bo trailing closely behind her. Whitney untangled herself from Jude, careful to avoid her injured shoulder, and together they followed.
The girls took the dirt path closest to the sunflower fields, even though they were mostly flooded. “Maybe this way it won’t notice we’re going to the clearing,” Delilah said, stumbling over a puddle. Whitney didn’t know if she meant the wind or Bishop, but either way, she was more than okay with the idea of staying out of sight.
She couldn’t help thinking about Alma as they snaked through the outskirts of town. What would she think if she saw Whitney, soaked to the bone and traipsing across town to talk to her dead girlfriend after she’d run out on Alma at the Nursing Care Center?
Why do I even care?
Her heartbeat hitched when she thought about the way the watery gray light from the windows highlighted the curve of Alma’s jaw, the small nick in her chin. Whitney wanted to know the story behind that scar. She wanted to plant a petal-soft kiss on it.
