Helen’s gray eyes searched Sarah’s. Sarah wondered if she did believe it. She wanted to.
“I keep baking,” Helen murmured. “It’s like after your daddy died. I couldn’t seem to sit still. I woke up at two a.m. this morning and started baking. Yesterday, I went downtown and dropped off platters of cookies at shops, the hospital, even a gas station on one-thirty-one.”
She laughed a dry, humorless croak and rubbed her face.
“I’m so tired, Sarah. I’m tired and I’m scared half to death. I’m scared for you, for my other half of Sammy and Sarah.”
“I’m okay, Mom. I am. My heart is broken, and none of us will ever be the same. But we will make it through this.”
“I didn’t like that house,” Helen muttered. “The first time I stepped through the door, I had a terrible feeling.”
“You did?” Sarah asked.
Sarah recalled her first morning visiting Kerry Manor. She pictured Sammy in the kitchen, his hair rumpled. ‘I had a death dream last night,’ he had announced.
Had Sammy dreamed of his own murder?
“I didn’t tell Sammy,” Helen continued. “I should have. I will live with that regret for the rest of my life.”
“Sammy wouldn’t have listened, Mom. He was so excited to rent the house for the winter. He would have said you were being paranoid.”
Helen stood back up and shuffled to the kitchen island, grabbing a handful of chocolate chips and dropping them in her mixing bowl.
“You’re probably right.” She stirred in the chocolate chips as the timer on the oven sounded behind her.
“Here, let me,” Sarah said, jumping up, but Helen shook her head.
“No, please. The busier the better for me right now.”
Helen put on a pink oven mitt decorated with dancing pigs and pulled out two cookie sheets covered in peanut butter cookies.
“Something came in the mail yesterday for Sammy,” she said, sliding the pans onto hot pads.
“Really?” Sarah walked to the table in the front hall where Helen stacked the mail.
A brown paper package addressed to Sammy sat on the bureau. The return address included the name Mystic Moon and a location in California.
Sarah carried the package back to the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” Helen asked as Sarah ripped open the package.
“I’m opening it.”
“Shouldn’t we give it to Corrie?”
Sarah didn’t stop.
“Corrie has enough to deal with. We can handle errant mail that comes to your house.”
“Yes, I wondered why he had it sent here.”
Sarah folded back the paper and stared at a book.
True Cases of Possession by C.M. Riley.
She glanced at her mother, still hammering the dough, and tried to keep her face impassive.
“What is it?” Helen asked not looking up.
“Just a book. I’ll take it to Corrie this afternoon.”
“Tell her I’ll keep Isis tonight. I’d like some company.”
CORRIE
“HOW LONG HAVE you been out here?” Sarah asked when she found me sitting along the hardened shoreline.
I had put on one of Sammy’s huge and hideous Christmas sweaters over a pair of flannel pajama pants. My hair was knotted, and I knew my face was haggard from crying and the cold.
Once upon a time, I would have cared. I remembered considering how well I handled grief. After my mother’s death, I missed only three days of work, and I never once broke down at the office. I showed up every day with my slacks ironed and my stupid happy face because God forbid I made anyone uncomfortable.
“Isis stayed with my mom,” Sarah told me, although I hadn’t asked.
Later, I would lie in bed and cry for Sammy and hate myself for how I was failing our daughter, but right now, with the frigid wind blowing in from the lake, and the words from The Summoning rolling through my mind like a hurricane, nothing mattered,
I’d been sitting on the beach for two hours. My backside was numb, and the horizon had taken on a dreamy quality I quite liked. Out here life seemed less sharp, less real.
Sarah sat next to me and picked up a flat stone. She threw it at an angle toward the water. It didn’t skip, but plopped with a little splash.
“Sammy was the stone skipper,” she said. “We counted six skips one time.”
“He wanted to teach Isis. He tried a few times when we first moved in here, but every time he threw a rock, she cried and demanded he retrieve it. I remember him wading in, water to his crotch, trying to get one of those stupid rocks.”
Sarah laughed and threw a second stone. It dropped with a loud plunk.
“He was a great dad.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, unable to accept the word ‘was,’ as if he‘d never be a great dad again.
“I want to help, Corrie. I feel like Sammy’s up there watching us right now, saying ‘Come on Sarah, take care of my wife, help her through this,’ and I’m down here twiddling my thumbs and rocking back and forth on my heels. I don’t know what to do.”
I looked at her sideways and shook my head.
“No one can help me, Sarah. Not even me.”
“That’s not true. I refuse to believe that. You’ve got everything to live for, Corrie. Isis is just a baby, you have her whole life ahead of you. The only way she can know Sammy, truly know him the way you did, is through you.”
I listened and nodded and understood that Sarah, and likely everyone else, feared I would kill myself.
“I’m not planning to commit suicide,” I told her.
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“But it’s what you’re thinking, right? I’m a mess and that means I’m a danger to myself. Who knows what I’ll do?”
“Is that how you feel?”
I laughed, but it sounded dry and humorless.
“Sure, sometimes. But I would never do that to Isis. My mom didn’t kill herself in the traditional sense, but she did it just the same. I would never leave Isis without either of her parents.”
Sarah scooted close and wrapped an arm around my back. I felt her heartbeat against my side. I had forgotten the sensation of being held. Sammy always held me. He was a man who loved to hug, spoon, cuddle. Until Sarah pressed close, I didn’t realize how empty my world had become since Sammy left it.
I rested my cheek against her hair and gazed at the stones.
CHAPTER 23
Now
Corrie
“M ommy, phone,” Isis announced, shaking my knee.
I had been gazing into the fire, lost in another reverie. “I hear it, baby.” I scooped her up and hurried into the kitchen, grabbing the phone.
She pulled it out of my hand before I could talk.
“Dada?” she asked.
I let out a little strangled gasp and jerked the phone away. I watched her face crumple, her brown eyes filling with tears. “Oh no, sweetie, I’m sorry. Don’t cry.” I kissed her tears.
“Gorey?” I heard his voice, Sammy’s voice, from the dangling receiver. I stared, transfixed, moving the phone slowly to my ear.
“Corey, are you there?” Sammy’s voice did not come through the phone. Instead it was a man’s voice I didn’t recognize.