Where Darkness Blooms, page 17
She started to run.
“Wait, where are you going?” Bo yelled.
Delilah hopped off the steps, past the cop cars, and back toward downtown. Despite the throbbing in her head, she ran as if standing there at the Harding house for one more second would crack her open from the inside out.
Tears blurred her vision as she crossed downtown and circled back to Old Fairview Lane. The wind blew after her, but it only pushed her forward, away from the center of town and toward her house, slamming the front door behind her.
She climbed the creaky old stairs to her bedroom. When she pushed open the door, her heart sank. Bennett was everywhere in here: faded photographs stuck onto corkboard, one of his heather-gray hoodies hanging from her headboard. The air even smelled like the echo of him, all sun-kissed skin and bonfire smoke.
She shut the door and sank to the floor on the landing.
Delilah hadn’t lain in this spot since the night after she’d reported her mom as a missing person. On that night, she’d curled into a tight ball, her cheek flush with the floor, and stared into Indigo’s empty studio. Her mother’s last words echoed through her mind.
Go have a good time, Indigo had said with a smile, pressing her cool hand to her daughter’s cheek. Nothing here is permanent.
But what had Delilah done? She had shown up at that party and fallen head over heels in love by the time the sun had crested the horizon the next morning. Once she’d seen Bennett Harding cross the clearing toward her, it was all over.
But there had been that moment before.
That night at the party. That second where she’d looked through the smoke of the bonfire and seen Evan. His dark eyes sparkled in the firelight, hair pulled back tight, with one loose curl cupping his cheek. Something in her chest fluttered as his gaze connected with hers.
The moment was interrupted by Bennett sidling up to her, teeth glinting, eyes intense. Delilah fell under a new kind of spell, and this one, she was realizing, felt like less of a choice.
There had always been something about Bennett that kept her bound, in a way. That had infected her heart like a virus, made her feel a little less like, well, herself. And like she was all Bennett’s.
It might have been different. Delilah could have crossed to the other side of the fire, looked into Evan’s sparkling eyes, and said hi. But she hadn’t gotten the chance. Bennett had shown up and soaked her to the bone with his unwavering attention, and that had been it. Delilah had barely talked to Evan again until a few hours ago.
And now he was gone forever.
Delilah curled her knees into her chest and looked into her mom’s studio. She hadn’t been in there since she’d found the receipt and the balm for Bo’s scraped-up knee. Scrapes she’d gotten from fighting with Evan. When her mom first disappeared, Delilah spent almost every day in the studio, tracing her fingers over Indigo’s unfinished papier mâché pieces, wondering what they would have looked like wearing lemony yellow and forest green hues. But as time passed, and the pieces never got finished, Delilah couldn’t stand to spend more than a few minutes in there. Time pressed on, and Indigo’s art remained stagnant and covered in dust.
Evan had known that side of her mom, a side that Delilah would never get to know. And it was a side of Evan that Delilah would never get to explore, either. It was too much to bear.
She pulled herself to her feet and tiptoed into the studio, even though no one else was home. When she pushed open the door, dust fluttered through the air. Everything was the same as the day she’d found the paints from Rose and Rain. Even the desk drawer was slightly ajar, as she’d left it. This time, though, Delilah didn’t dig through the desk. She headed toward the unfinished papier mâché.
They were propped up in a row, some rounder than others, but all four of Indigo’s creations looked like unfinished mannequin heads. Delilah could see where her mother had started to shape noses and lips and eye sockets, where earlobes and chins protruded. She pulled up her mother’s old desk chair and sat down so she was at eye level with them all.
She tried to imagine Indigo in her studio, paisley skirt swirling at her ankles as she smoothed the silky paper over Styrofoam. The soft, dulcet tones of her singing voice as she dipped long strips of paper in glue over and over again. Indigo had still been working on these pieces the day before she vanished, and by the paint that Delilah had found, she’d planned on finishing them. Even still, there was no urgency here. No curdled glue or lumpy slivers of paper; the work hadn’t been rushed. Her mother couldn’t have known what was about to happen to her.
Delilah stood and examined the last piece. There was a spiderweb crack just below the right earlobe. She poked it, and a bit of papier mâché crumbled, opening the hole wider.
There was something inside.
Her pulse picked up as she pushed on the mannequin’s neck and the hole widened. She jabbed her entire fist inside, tearing open Indigo’s carefully placed paper strips. Her fingers brushed against something feather-light and brittle.
Delilah pulled the slip of paper from the hole and held it in her palm.
It was an obituary.
But this wasn’t something Indigo had cut out of the Bishop Bugle. It was written on a slip of lined paper in black ink. Her mother’s curlicue handwriting flitted across the page.
Mary Beth Jacobson, Indigo had written at the top. Taken too soon. Cursed by gender. Murdered without consequence.
Delilah gasped. The paper fluttered out of her hand and onto the rug at her feet.
She leaned closer to the art piece and peeked in the hole. There was nothing else inside besides the makeshift wire frame that Indigo had assembled to prop up the Styrofoam head. She glanced down at the paper staring up at her from the floor.
Cursed by gender.
Murdered without consequence.
She had known Mary Beth. Even though she’d been a grade below Delilah, they’d still ended up in one of Mr. Harding’s history classes together. Delilah had taken History of Midwestern America as an elective to help shore up her transcripts for college, but Mary Beth had taken it to get her history requirements out of the way. They’d sat next to each other in the front row, and although Delilah had liked her, there had always been an unspoken competition between the two of them to impress Mr. Harding the most.
Two months later, Mary Beth had dropped dead walking home from soccer practice.
A heart attack, the official obituary in the Bugle had said. But Mary Beth had been captain of the track team. She was the kind of person who woke up before the sun just to feel her heart pumping through her veins while she ran around the perimeter of town.
Delilah bent down to scoop up the paper. She’d always thought the circumstances were weird, but she hadn’t thought much of it at the time. Just another Bishop tragedy.
Indigo, though, had thought a lot about it.
Delilah ran her fingers over what was left of the papier mâché bust. She could almost imagine her mother’s delicate hands as she painted the lips ballet pink. Maybe those painted-on lips had belonged to Mary Beth Jacobson.
Maybe all of these unfinished pieces were really unfinished women.
One by one, Delilah placed the pieces on the old rug. She pulled open her mother’s desk drawer and pulled out a razor blade. She poked and cut and tore at the remaining three busts until she reached the secrets her mother had stored inside. More paper. More self-made obituaries.
Natalie Hart
Tatiana Sellers
Vivian Cho
Cursed by gender.
Murdered without consequence.
In two of the busts, her mother had included cut-out pictures of the dead women. One looked as if it had been snipped from the Bugle. A blurry version of Tatiana smiled brilliantly from the sepia-toned paper. Beneath it, a few sentences from the article were still visible.
Tatiana Sellers (left) with the chess club she coached at Bishop Middle School. Sellers was found dead several hundred yards outside Bishop, in the sunflower fields, on Sunday.
Delilah held the picture next to her mother’s handwriting. Like all the others, it read Cursed by gender. But Delilah had known Tati—she’d taken a few chess lessons from her when she was in middle school. Tati’s sex had been labeled “male” at birth, but she had been a woman for most of her life. It seemed that whoever—or whatever—Delilah’s mother thought was killing these people only cared that they were women.
Delilah picked up the image of Vivian Cho. Vivian’s luminous face grinned up at her from the photograph. A small child with dark, wavy hair stood beside her, and next to each of them was a finished canvas painting propped up on an easel.
The girl was her mother.
She flipped the photo over. Mrs. Cho and Indigo at the art fair, the note on the back read.
Something clawed up Delilah’s throat as she sat in the middle of the studio, staring at the graveyard of art and paper splayed out around her. At first it felt like a knot, as though if she opened her mouth too quickly she’d burst into tears. But instead she wanted to scream.
Her mother had known. She’d known there was something dangerous about this town, something wrong about all these lost and missing women.
Eleanor’s loopy handwriting appeared in Delilah’s mind.
Did he kill people to obtain the land? A sacrifice of some kind?
All of these women. Murdered without consequence.
Indigo Cortez had known all of this, and she hadn’t told Delilah any of it.
She’d left her here to defend herself.
Heat roared through her veins. There was one thing her mother had gotten wrong, though. These women weren’t “cursed by gender.” Their gender was never the curse.
The land—and the men who tended to it—were the real curse.
Delilah stumbled to her feet and clomped down the stairs, then searched the piles of misfit items stored in the breezeway. She pawed through broken mesh screens and table lamps that never stood upright until she found what she was looking for.
A baseball bat.
Bo had played baseball for only one season, but she’d never gotten rid of the bat. Now Delilah swung it over her shoulder and carried it back into Indigo’s studio with gritted teeth. She flung open the door and stood before the mess she’d made on her mother’s latch-hook rug.
She loved Indigo, probably more than she’d ever love anyone in her entire life. But this? It was too much. Indigo had betrayed them all.
Delilah wondered how much of her life could have been different if her mother had told her about her suspicions. If, instead of touching her cheek and telling her to have fun on that last day, she’d told her to stay.
Stay home.
Stay with me.
Delilah wouldn’t hurt so much when she should be in love. Evan might even still be alive.
Delilah lifted the bat over her head. She swung hard and fast.
It made a thwuck sound as it smashed into the first bust. A cloud of dried glue exploded into the air, speckling Delilah’s skin with plaster snow. She swung again. And again.
Delilah swung until her muscles ached, but her heart hurt less.
She didn’t hear the door downstairs open. Footsteps padded up the stairs, light and urgent.
It wasn’t until the studio door opened that Delilah realized she wasn’t alone in the house on Old Fairview Lane.
As soon as she saw Bo, she dropped the bat at her side. Bo ran to her and without a word, pulled Delilah to her chest.
Indigo’s last words to her were Nothing here is permanent. But maybe she had been wrong.
Maybe the things that mattered most were.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“You’re gonna be okay,” Bo said as Delilah melted into her arms. I’ll make sure of it.
Delilah untangled herself from Bo’s arms and wiped her eyes. “I made a huge mess.”
Bo kicked her sneaker through the aftermath of Delilah’s rage, unearthing a riot of papers and photos. Delilah had smashed Indigo’s art with such force that the plaster had ground down into the old rug. When Bo pushed her shoe across the wool, little clouds of dust puffed in the air.
She knelt and sorted through the cryptic messages. They were strange at best, but that was kind of how Indigo rolled. She was an artiste, as her mom had said with an eye roll more than once. She liked to push boundaries.
Bo paused on one of the images. She lifted the clip of Tatiana Sellers closer to her face to inspect it. She hadn’t known Tati, except for what Delilah had said about her, but she recognized her smiling face from this same newspaper article. Bo had read it over a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios the day after it was published.
Tati’s newly formed chess club had been featured in the Bugle. The image showed her in the front lobby of town hall with two gangly preteens next to her. But there was a plaque hanging directly over her head that Bo hadn’t paid any attention to years ago.
There was an image pasted onto the plaque that looked vaguely familiar. Bo leaned in so close that the tip of her nose almost grazed the paper. It was blurry, but she could just make out a photograph of an older white man with a baby in one arm and a toddler standing beside him.
“Those are Edward Dingal’s descendants,” she said, her stomach sinking. “Behind Tatiana, on that plaque.”
Bo closed her eyes trying to remember the layout of the lobby. Oatmeal-colored walls, dusty carpet, a hulking wooden desk front and center. Other than a faded Kansas state flag hanging in the corner, Bo was almost certain the walls had been bare. The plaque was no longer there.
Delilah sank down onto the carpet beside Bo. “Yeah, I guess that does look like the photo from Eleanor’s notebook.”
Bo set down the paper and looked at Delilah. “I swear, that plaque isn’t hanging up in town hall anymore, but that’s Dingal’s son in the photo. Why have we never heard of him?”
“And his kids,” Delilah said, frowning. “What happened to the kids in the photo?”
It was a good question, one Bo hadn’t considered before. If Edward Dingal had died in 1901 like Bo had read in the town records, then his grandkids could even still be around, technically. They’d be old, but it was possible.
“I don’t know,” Bo said slowly. She glanced at Delilah out of the corner of her eye. “Do you think your mom knew?”
Delilah sat for a long moment. “I’m not sure, but I think … I think she was trying to figure it out.” As soon as the words left her mouth her bottom lip quivered. “I just wish she’d told us about it.”
Bo looked out the dingy window. Even from here she could see the storm hovering on the horizon, just past the sunflower fields and the rows of ripe corn baking in the summer heat. She felt as though she had been looking up at the purple underbellies of clouds her entire life, that there was always the threat of gale-force winds pushing up against the town’s boundaries. And then there were the sunflowers, a butter-colored army always standing at attention. Always watching.
But what are they waiting for?
“Maybe it wasn’t safe,” Bo said slowly.
“What?” Delilah said, blinking back tears.
“Maybe your mom was, I don’t know, scared. Like, she hid these pictures of dead women inside those busts. Maybe it wasn’t really about making some kind of statement. Maybe she was hiding information until she could figure out what to do about it.”
Delilah’s eyebrows knitted together. “That doesn’t…” But she didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, she hopped off the rug and marched over to the old desk in the corner. She yanked open the drawer and unearthed the wooden crescent moon from inside.
Bo joined her at the desk. Delilah’s fingers shook as she turned the moon over in her hands. “My mom was acting really strange those last couple of days,” she said. “I saw this piece and she got weird about it. Told me to leave her alone.” She swallowed. “But maybe she was just trying to hide something here, too.”
Bo saw the tiny catch before Delilah did. Carefully, she guided Delilah’s fingers to it, and together they slid the lid off the top. There wasn’t much space inside, and there was only a single, tightly folded piece of paper inside.
“I don’t know if I can do it.” Delilah looked at Bo, her face crumpling.
“I’ll do it,” Bo said softly. She pulled the paper from inside the wooden crevice and gently unfolded it. Her eyes quickly scanned the blocky handwriting.
It was a letter.
Indigo,
Please, we need to talk. I promise, what you saw wasn’t what you think. Meet me in the clearing after dusk this evening and I’ll explain.
All my love,
William
Bo’s mouth dropped open. She handed the letter to Delilah, who scanned it. By the time she finished, her face was as pale as a winter morning. “My mom … and William Harding?”
Bo’s stomach clenched. “But how? How did anyone not know about this?”
The door downstairs groaned.
There was a solemn click as the door closed. Heavy footsteps paced through the living room.
Delilah’s eyes snapped to Bo’s. “What do we do?” she whispered.
Bo swallowed as she soaked in the terror streaking across Delilah’s face. She didn’t know what to do.
No. She knew what she had to do. Some part of her had always known. It was the same part of her that had nudged her toward the knife in the clearing, that had told her to bring it home. It was the part of her that had urged her to find the pepper spray, to grab a weapon. Any weapon.
Bo scanned the room. Her eyes landed on the baseball bat laying on the floor. She grabbed it and swung it over her shoulder.
She only got to the landing before she came face-to-face with the man standing on the stairs.
William Harding stood in front of her, his face twisted with rage. He lunged.
Bo swung.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Whitney started to go after Delilah, but Bo held up her hand. “I’ll go,” she said with the kind of tone that meant it wasn’t up for debate, before leaping off the porch and running back toward the house.
