Page 43 of The Girl from Widow Hills
CHAPTER 13
Sunday, 6:30 a.m.
THE PROBLEM WITH SLEEPINGall day, I learned, was that I would be up all night. The events of the last few days and nights had recalibrated my circadian rhythm, and it was doing something to my head.
The first thing I’d done after Bennett left yesterday was check my mother’s things. I’d gone to the closet to find the box that I’d left on a shelf in the upper corner, bringing the stepstool from the kitchen to reach. But the box was on the floor—in a back corner, on the bare wooden floor.
Everything else was as I’d left it inside: the sweater, the canvas tote bag, the phone. Even the plastic bag that had contained the bracelet.
No box cutter, though.
The bracelet sat on my bedside table, and I brushed it into the drawer below—a compulsion to keep it close and hidden at the same time.
The rest of the house seemed both strange and familiar. Signs of Bennett’s organizing or Elyse’s curiosity. Things that had been used or moved, but not by me. The further I searched, the more I wondered: Had someone been through my desk drawers? My bedroom closet? For what purpose? But on second glance, I couldn’t be sure. Couldn’t tell whether everything was exactly the same as I’d left it, after all. If I was remembering some other time.
It could get like this at the hospital, too, with the same daily routines, the same visitors in the gift shop and faces in the cafeteria. Until a month had passed and a new group had cycled through, but I couldn’t tell when the shift had happened.
I’d thought about taking one of the remaining few pills in that vial from Dr. Britton to reset my internal clock, but I didn’t like the thought of being in such a deep state when I was alone over here. Not now. Not when someone had been watching and I hadn’t realized it. Not when Rick had a past I hadn’t understood. Not when someone had ended up dead.
As the sun was rising, things appeared to be getting back to normal outside. The police had finished processing the scene, and the cars had left sometime in the night. All that remained from the scene of the crime was a flutter of yellow tape in the distance.
My kitchen still smelled like yesterday’s dinner, and I took the trash bag to the outside bin, tucked against the side of the house, facing away from Rick’s place. It was the first time I’d stepped outside that I hadn’t felt like I was being watched.
Outside, I tipped the large bin to the side so I could swing the bag over the edge, but something clattered at the bottom first. I stood on my toes, peering in—and saw the remnants of a glass light bulb.
Bennett? I was pretty sure he’d brought it in yesterday wrapped inside a bag, dropped it in the kitchen trash.
The only place missing a bulb was upstairs, in the attic space.
A chill ran up my spine, across my neck, down my arms. That opened window, that sliver of glass between my toes—
I dumped the trash and headed back inside, down the hall, behind the door that looked like a coat closet. I was glad for the daylight when I climbed the stairs. The attic space felt too warm, too enclosed, but the light slanted through the beveled glass windows, casting shadows across the exposed hardwood.
Standing in the spot beneath the empty bulb socket, I bent down, looking closer at the hardwood. The sunlight caught on a tiny piece of glass between the floorboards. My eyes scanned the surrounding area: another piece to the right, catching the light—both so small they had become wedged between the wood beams.
Behind me, closer to the steps: a droplet of blood that I hadn’t noticed in the dark.
I looked up at the empty socket, realizing what must’ve happened. Somehow, before Rick found me outside that first night, I’d been up here. I’d broken a light bulb. I’d stepped in it. I’d cleaned it up.
The disorientation felt nauseating. Or maybe it was being in this room—the inability to take a deep breath, to imagine the open air, a way out.
I backed to the stairwell, unable to imagine what had drawn me up here in the first place.
Had I opened the window that night?
At least now I knew why I’d been outside that evening. I’d cleaned up the broken glass, brought it outside, dumped it in the bin. Maybe I’d tried to get back inside before realizing I’d locked myself out.
The details were slippery, impossible to get a firm grip on. I felt like I was creating a story from scratch. It was a story that made sense, based on the pieces left behind.
But Thursday night felt like an entirely different lifetime.
It was getting harder and harder to pull the events surrounding Friday night into focus, even. Like, as with twenty years ago, something too large to process had happened, and the connection in my memory had snapped and twisted, and nothing looked the same anymore.
I was living clearly in the after, now. After Sean’s body had been found at the edge of my property. After the past had found me again.
These were the facts: Bennett had bought enough food for two but left abruptly the previous afternoon; and Elyse had never stopped at my house on her way in to work, like she’d told Bennett she would.
This was how it started.
