Blood and Bone (Blood and Bone Series Book 1), page 13
I point behind me with my thumb. “Back there. He’s freaking out too. Mostly just freaking me out.” I look up into Rory’s dark-blue eyes and nod. “I need some answers from you—now. No holding back.”
“What do ya remember?”
“Not much.” I shake my head, not sure how to tell him what I do remember. But the crowded and noisy airport suddenly seems like the perfect place to blurt out something so horrid. If I’m lucky the words will get lost in the noise and crowds of this hectic place. I need to say it aloud to rid myself of the burden of being the only one who knows, and he suddenly seems like the right person to tell. Taking a large breath, I prepare myself for the sentence as I say it. “I think I might have kil—murdered my father and hidden it like it was an accident.”
He glances at me in a funny way, clearly disbelieving my statement. “We were in Germany when your dad died. I know, because I was with ya when you got the call.”
“I remember torturing him. I burned him and cut him and made him scream.”
“Well, not to sound like you’re insane and remembering shit that never happened, but if the cuckoo shoe fits, ya might have to wear it.” He lifts a cynical eyebrow, and the disbelief thickens in his tone. “You couldn’t be in the same room as your dad, no matter what. I also know this for a fact because I was with you once when he showed up at Pat’s house. You started shaking and lost all the color in your face. Pat screamed at him and called the cops. He was calling ya a liar and screaming crazy things. I didn’t even know who he was until afterward, but during his two-minute stay at the front door, you became a different person.”
I know we dated or something, so I ask a question he might know the answer to. “Did I have nightmares? Did I do horrible things at night? Wake with blood on me and such?”
Rory sighs. “No. What is this?”
“I don’t know.” And God help me, but I don’t. I don’t understand how any of this is possible. I have woken with blood on my hands. I recall horrible things even if they seem very unlikely. “What was I like?”
He leans on the back of a chair next to us. I don’t know if he’s contemplating telling me the truth or if he’s trying to find the words. Either way, I have to assume it’s bad. “Sarcastic and bitchy. Sort of a control freak. Ya never liked anyone to help ya with anything. You’d fuck something up six times and get it right on the seventh and still not take a hand from someone who knew how to do it. Ya drove me nuttier than squirrel shit. Ya slept with a night-light. That was odd and annoying to the people in the room who liked it dark.” His smile twists into a wry grin. “But ya were worth every second spent sleeping in a lit room.”
I sigh. “Can you try to be professional?”
“No, but I’ll be honest. Ya were a badass bitch who liked to do things her way and get fucked, hard. Ya didn’t like things soft or slow. Ya didn’t like men who were sweet, and ya didn’t cry, ever.”
I step back, sort of scared I might have actually been a man. “I never cried, not even with sad movies when animals were hurt or killed?” I don’t even want to touch on the sex.
His dark-blue eyes narrow. “I’m starting to think your memory isn’t back, Sam.”
I nod in agreement, completely lost on the things inside me.
He links his arm in mine, pulling me down the long corridor to the security checkpoint. “Let’s get out of here before ya go and start telling me how bad your period was last month.”
I glare at him. “I don’t get periods, ass.”
He pauses. “What? Ya were a right bitch every month—don’t tell me I don’t know ya.”
“I haven’t had a period since I can recall. Derek said I was injured in the car accident.”
He purses his lips. “We need to find out what the hell is going on.”
“I think we need to find out who Derek is. Or rather Benjamin or Dash or whatever his name is this week. Who he is will tell us more about what the hell happened to me.” I glance into Rory’s dark-blue eyes, saying the last thing I ever expected to say: “As soon as I see Pat and make sure she’s all right, I want to go to my father’s house.” The words even make me shudder.
He gives me a sideways look but doesn’t say a word. He leads me to the security desk, where Pat is sitting in a small room. When I get inside, she leaps at me, dragging the blonde wig off my head with her arm. “You’re okay!”
“I am. Look, Derek turned out to be a criminal, and apparently, I might have undergone the brain surgery by force. I don’t know what’s happened, but I am pretty determined to find out. Until he’s caught, we can’t let you run around for him to abduct in order to bribe me with. Can you stay with Antoine until I know what’s what?”
“Oh, uhm.” Her eyes fill with worry as she glances at Antoine. She looks worried, but he offers the nicest smile I’m sure he owns. “I don’t really know, my love. If he’s coming after you, maybe you should just stay here with me too.”
I smile, softening my face. “It’s okay, I swear. I’ll be safe. These guys aren’t going to let anything happen to me or you.”
“This isn’t the first time you done said that to me, my love.” Her eyes grow cold, made creepier by the different-colored anger in the different-colored eyes. She turns, directing all that freaky hate at Rory. “You better not let her get hurt or I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”
He swallows hard, looking nervous, but I suspect it’s more like he’s filtering the annoying responses he has for her threat. He nods, leaving it at that.
Antoine looks annoyed when I smile at him. “Take care of my aunt.” He sighs his answer to my request and offers her his arm. “Shall we?” His face is back to being sweet again.
“Stay safe.” She hugs me again before taking his arm and being led out the back doors.
Rory points after them at the doors. “We have a chopper out there. Let’s use that. I don’t feel like driving all the way back to Alabama.”
“Flying in a helicopter?” My fear of heights whispers through me, like wind echoing through a rocky tunnel.
He grabs my arm and drags me out the back door. “Ya used to fly them, for the love of Christ and all things holy.” His Irish accent thickens when he’s feisty.
When we get inside he pulls on a helmet and hands me one. My fingers ache with fear and hesitation as I take it, pulling it on. I feel like maybe we should have life jackets and better padding than regular clothing. He starts the engines, putting on sunglasses and grinning at me like an idiot.
As we lift off the ground I gag, closing my eyes and waiting for the tipping feeling from the lack of ground beneath me to subside. It doesn’t, so I don’t open my eyes.
“You’re missing everything. It’s beautiful up here.”
I lift a thumb into the air, not speaking or opening my eyes at all.
“Chickenshit.”
I switch to my middle finger, still with my eyes closed. He chuckles, and the sound tugs at my heartstrings.
I don’t know how long we fly. I honestly don’t even sneak a single peek, but I am bored out of my mind when we do finally land. He shuts it off, shoving me lightly. “Wakey wakey!”
I shake my head. “Not sleeping, just counting forward and backward from a hundred repeatedly.”
“You still do that?”
“Guess so.” I don’t open my eyes until I hear the spinny part on the top stop moving. I have a fear of having my head chopped off too.
He’s standing on the grass across the yard with his arms folded when I climb out slowly. My legs tremble with each step, threatening to buckle completely. When they do, I land on my knees, gripping the grass and heaving my breath.
“What the fuck did he do to you?”
I shake my head. “Look, heights combined with a flimsy little helicopter is a completely normal fear.” I gag a little bit, burping some of the bagel I had earlier as I pass gas out the back end. “I don’t think my stomach is so good. We should stay here.”
“No. Get up or I’ll leave you here.”
I wince, shudder, and fart again. At least they’re silent and he’s across the grass.
“Can we go? Today? Please?”
I drag myself up, wiping my hands across my face to clear the sweat. “I want to drive back.”
“Not a chance.” He turns and starts walking through the swampy woods. I contemplate staying, but the place makes me uncomfortable so I get up and stalk after him.
I don’t even know where we are until I see the small house in the distance. This is my backyard from when I was little. As we pass a shell of what used to be a house I pause, turning toward it. It pulls me to it, capturing me in its tractor beam of magnetism. Something about this house haunts my very soul. I stop just short of the overgrown grass, looking at the collapsing walls and sunken-in roof. An image trickles through my head in flashes and flares, but not a distinct picture. “Leona Larson lived in this house.” The words are mine and they aren’t. I don’t know how I remember it all, and yet still don’t remember much. This thought is just there, like something I know. Like a fact.
I hear Rory walking on the grass, crunching on the dead yard. It’s all around us. No one has cared for this house or yard in a long time. I don’t think he’s close, and yet I continue to speak to him. “He liked her better than me. He was nice to her. He gave her treats and made me play outside. She was supposed to babysit me, but I always had to go outside.” The words join the wind in a sinister whisper. “I hated her.”
“What are you doing? Do you see something?” He’s so loud and in the present, but I’m stuck in the past. It’s almost black-and-white—it’s so old and discolored in my brain.
“He liked her better than me.” My ’Bama accent is so thick I can hardly understand myself. “He gave her ice cream and told her she was real pretty.”
“The Larson family?”
I turn. “You know of them?”
He looks completely confused. “Of course I do. They’re the family whose eldest daughter went missing first in the area. Her family was interviewed during the whole your dad turned out to be a monster affair. Her father was a witness in the trial. Said he saw him beating the shit outta ya in the yard a few times and that he suspected your father in the case of his missing daughter. Nothing was ever proven.”
I shake my head. “I don’t remember that or what happened exactly, but I swear she was there. She was the one my father tortured.”
“I think you’re confused—the file says you were at school, telling one of the teachers why you didn’t get your homework done.” He says it like he’s desperately trying to recall it all. “Yeah, you told the teacher, in great detail, I might add, about what happened to you. About how your dad was making movies so you couldn’t do your homework. It was fucked up. Anyway, when your dad went to jail, the Larson family moved away. The house has been abandoned for a long time. Same as your house. No one wants some house where a pedo hurt little kids.”
I step back as her name brings a realization forward. “He never hurt me.”
He scoffs. “The whip marks on your back would disagree with you there. They may have faded, but they haven’t ever gone away completely.”
“There are no scars on my back, and he never touched me like that. It was Leona. It never was me.”
He sighs. “This is getting old, Sam. How do you not know your own back is scarred to shit? And your dad was a fucking weirdo pervert. Trust me, the story you told the police was thorough. You had many details.” He grabs me, lifting my shirt and running his hands down my back. “See, scars everywhere.”
I turn my head, shaking it. “I can’t see. I need a mirror.” My back burns as if the injuries I didn’t know about are fresh.
He points at the house. “Come on, we can get this over with and you can use the mirror in the bathroom. How the hell do you make someone not see the scars they once had? Dash is a master of something, that’s for sure—mostly bullshit, I think, though.” The whole conversation is coming out of our mouths too easily. We clearly have some ability to detach.
We walk in the long dried grass, next to each other. He still seems tense or angry at me for not remembering, and the closer to the house we get, the worse it is.
When my hand brushes against his, I pull it back. “I swear to you, my father hurt the other kids. I remember it, sort of.”
“It doesn’t matter. I hate coming here, and I hate talking about this. I had a chance to kill that filthy bastard, and I never took my chance. Still pisses me off. Coming here makes me want to burn this dump to the fucking ground so I don’t have to see that look on your face ever again.”
“What look?”
He takes my hand in his and squeezes. “The one where I think for half a second you think maybe you deserved to be tortured.”
His words burn inside me as we round the corner of the house to find the front door is still hanging funny since Derek kicked it in. We push our way in, stopping at the entryway. It smells the same and looks the same, but the pictures are gone from the floor. My heart hurts and my lungs don’t feel like they fill with enough air, like I am starved of essential things the moment we enter.
He walks to the kitchen, looking around, but as if I am attached to a string that a puppet master controls, I walk to the back of the house. Upon entering my bedroom again, I drop to my knees as though I am in a trance. I crawl along the floor to the wall at the very far end of the room and slide my hands along the edge of the wall, next to the baseboards. I catch the jagged piece of wooden floorboard I am looking for, sliding and lifting it, revealing a storage place in the floor.
I lean forward, a little scared of what’s in there, only to find simple things a child would have hidden. Inside the dusty, cobweb-ridden space is a small brown box coated in enough dust that I actually believe I am the first person to open this. Beneath the layer of dust and cobwebs, I see there’s a four-leaf clover pressed into the lid. I reach down, noting the way my hands shake. It feels so heavy in my hands, regardless of weighing almost nothing.
I lift it into my lap, sitting back on my butt and crossing my legs.
“What is it?”
“A box I made with my mom before she died. We pressed the four-leaf clover and pasted it onto the lid with a gluey hodgepodge. I cried for the clover. I said it was now trapped for life under the glue. It would never again feel the wind on its leaves or the sun on its stem.”
“Dramatic for a small kid. Ya have always seen the glass half empty, though. What did your mum say to that?” He drops onto the floor next to me with a thud. I jump from the sound, but my eyes won’t leave the box.
“She said I should be happy for the clover because now it won’t ever age and it won’t ever rot. We preserved it in the perfect condition, so it will be lucky and beautiful forever. Always bringing me luck.” Tears fill my eyes as I hear her voice with my own.
“What’s inside?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.” How I can recall some things and not others is driving me insane. Bravery fills me, forcing me to lift the lid. What’s inside is odd.
“A necklace Mom gave me when I was three. I took it off when she died and kept it in the box like it was a treasure.” I lift the small silver chain and place it on the floor. “A rubber ball Leona gave me that my father gave her. She said I could have it. He’d given her a pretty ring, and she liked that better. He had never given me anything. I wasn’t even allowed to see inside the bin of the pretty clothes.” It dawns on me then that my father never touched me except obviously in violence. I recall the meanness. But the bin of pretty clothes wasn’t for me. Leona wore them. So did Michelle, another girl who also babysat me. She was fourteen, like Leona, when I was nine. I gulp away the horror inside me as I grab the next item. “A fortune from a fortune cookie that says You will find a way inside of—. I got it when my friend Nicole’s family took me out for Chinese food. I’d never had it before. They said I should get a new one because it was unfinished, but I liked it the way it was. It left possibility.”
Maybe it’s the discomfort of being where we are or the silence of the still and haunted house. But he scoffs like we are joking about on the grass, not looking through an old box of trinkets from when I lived with my monster of a father.
When I lift the next item out, another tear drips down my cheek, leaving a streak. “A picture of me and my mom.”
He takes it, inspecting it. “Ya look like her.”
The very bottom of the box has a note. I lift it out, seeing instantly it’s my handwriting. Come and find me, peeping Sam!
“What’s that?”
I hand it to him, letting him try to decipher it. “I wrote that.”
He nods. “I can see that. Why would ya, though?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I lean forward, glancing into the hole again, certain there must be more.
“Well, that’s fucking mysterious. Why is everything with ya a fucking puzzle? Why didn’t ya just write everything down before he fucking erased your damned mind?”
“I think I must have known someone was watching me.” A scowl builds on my face. “And stop cussing so much. It makes me uncomfortable, how much you swear.”
His jaw drops. He shakes his head. “Well, now I’ve heard it all.”
Ignoring him and drumming my fingers along the wooden floor, I think about the sentence. “It could be an anagram. I mean, it’s sort of random to call me peeping Sam.” But saying the phrase brings with it a memory, exactly the way “plain Jane” did.
I close my eyes and suddenly it’s all there, filling my brain.
I’m small, very small, maybe eight at most. I chase a bunny under the house. Our house is on blocks like a trailer. Father’s been digging a basement. I creep under there, my fingers digging into the dank grass and weeds.
A noise fills the air. The sound of a whimper. I follow it to the front of the house where the steps are. There’s a hole in the floor, a notch out of the wood so small I haven’t seen it from the inside of the house. But here in the dark I can see light from inside the house shining down into the mucky dead grass. I lift my face, up into the floorboards, no longer interested in the bunny, and put my eye to the notch hole. Leona, my babysitter, is in there. I can’t see her face, but I know the sound of her voice. She’s making a funny sound, but whatever she’s doing, I can’t see it. Father’s back is to me. He’s got something in his hands. He mutters encouragements, repeating the word diddling like it means something. He sounds different with her, like he likes her.
