“Okay,” he nodded, writing in his notebook. “Let me also ask you this. Why were Sammy and Corrie living in this house? I admit it surprised me when the call came in.”
“A man named Dane Lucas renovated it. He does restorations, and stumbled upon this house during a summer vacation. Two years ago, he started restoring it. He knows Sammy through some Gothic house group online. The man offered to let Sammy rent it for the winter. He was traveling out of the country and needed someone he trusted to move in and make sure everything functioned. Sammy jumped at the chance.”
Detective Collins frowned, an expression that added ten years to his boyish face.
“And Sammy was aware a family had died in this house a century ago?”
“Yes, unfortunately, Sammy loved creepy stuff. He wrote horror comics for a living.” Sarah paused, putting a hand on her chest. Each time she spoke of Sammy, it was in the past tense. How could that be?
“Are you okay, Miss Flynn?”
Sarah nodded, and then shook her head.
“I have to call my mom,” she started. “No, I have to go to her house. She’s watching Isis. I need to take Corrie with me.”
“Who’s Isis?”
“Corrie and Sammy’s two-year-old.”
The detective looked sad for a moment, and then nodded.
“Write down your cell phone number and expect to hear from me.”
CORRIE
I KNEW he wasn’t gone. I knew it even as I watched the sheen slide from his eyes and vanish into the shadows beneath the great oak tree. I knew it before he first whispered into my ear, only hours after his death as I sat trembling in the claw-footed bathtub at his mother’s house staring at the pink and black water swirling around me, and the gleam from the iridescent bath bubbles scented with vanilla caramel.
“Gorey.”
I jerked my head so hard, I strained a muscle in my neck. It was a sick pet name. At least, Sarah called it sick, but I liked the nickname. Sammy was a horror buff. It made sense that he called me Gorey and Morticia and even Carrie White, but he saved that last one for my especially difficult PMS weeks. He made sure to remind me to “plug it up” during those emotional meltdowns, which always got a laugh and a much-needed decompression for me. Sammy had a gift. No matter how angry I became, he knew how to bring me back to sanity. He joked a lot, but never out of cruelty. He seemed to tap into a cosmic timeline that pinged him at the exact moment a little humor might deflate the monster within me.
So, when I heard Sammy whisper “Gorey” into my ear in his sweet, lilting way, I didn’t cry out in fear. I closed my eyes, leaned my head back against the hard lip of the bathtub, and smiled.
“I knew you wouldn’t leave,” I told him.
How could I remember the final look in his eyes, you might ask? His last breath? And to that, I am silent. Because I don’t know. How can I have no memory of the night after I fell asleep and simultaneously have that memory, that single image captured as if by a photo and printed on my brain, so I must look at it again and again and worse, I must question what it means. How could I have been there if someone else killed him?
CHAPTER 4
Now
Corrie
I stood near the back of the room. The temperature, cool when I walked in, had grown stifling. My black dress clung to my skin, growing sticky with sweat, the neckline too tight. A line of people in dark suits and dark dresses blocked the shining coffin, but I sensed it hunched in the front of the funeral parlor. A void seemed to exist there, a black hole of indescribable emptiness. Sammy, larger than life, could never occupy such a space.
Three days that encapsulated a lifetime had transpired since Halloween night. Moments drifted in and out of my thoughts. The anguished cry of Sammy’s mother when Sarah broke the news. The sound of Isis’s laughter, foreign and heartbreaking in the silent house of my dead husband’s mom. Sarah trying to force-feed me oatmeal as I lay in bed with my teeth clamped shut. I had become like a child, worse than a child. My own daughter would open her damn mouth and eat. I refused even basic life-giving necessities and forced my sister-in-law to set aside her own grief and care for me.
The guilt lay heavy, and yet I could not shrug off my anguish.
A dreamlike quality descended over the scene. I watched people lose shape and merge into a single stream of black, pricked through with sallow skin and dark eyes.
“Corrie?” The whisper stole through the cottony barrier that filled my ears. I turned and saw my sister, Amy, her hand outstretched, a series of rings glittering from her slender fingers.
People stared. Their eyes devoured me.
Sarah appeared on my other side. Amy’s and Sarah’s hands held me. I waited for them to grip hard, pull me toward the coffin, force me to gaze at the empty shell he used to live in. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t.
I twisted away and pushed through the door, smacked into a hard man wearing a brown coat and black slacks. I slammed onto my butt.
“Mrs. Flynn?” Detective Collins bent low, offered me his hand, and I took it if only to get up faster and escape.
I didn’t look into his eyes, just brushed him aside and clicked toward the door, my stupid heels sounding vain and dramatic in the marble foyer. I burst through the doors and gulped the cold air, grasping the iron rail as my legs wobbled beneath me.
People moved through the parking lot. Their eyes followed me. Someone broke from the group, but I turned quickly away, slipping behind the funeral home. I kicked off my shoes and crept into the garden, empty of flowers in November. A white swing hung in a gazebo and I sat down, and then curled onto my side, pulling my knees to my chest and weeping into my hands.
“Shh… it’s okay.” I heard his voice and felt his hand on my back rubbing.
Sammy gave the best back rubs.
I didn’t dare look at him, nor lean into the sensation, because the moment I did, he would vanish.
Sarah
SARAH SAT on the couch next to her mother, watching her tea grow cold. The guests had left, Corrie slept in a room upstairs, likely sedated, and Isis had gone to the hotel with Corrie’s sister.
Archie, Sarah’s West Highland white terrier, lay in a little dog bed sleeping with one eye open as Corrie and Sammy’s cat, Dracula, stalked him from the hallway.
A clock ticked from the kitchen, the cuckoo clock that Sarah and Sammy had loved as children. They would race to the kitchen every hour to watch the little Danish man and woman slide out in their wooden shoes for a kiss. If the clock chimed now, Sarah might scream or cry or cease exiting. She hoped it was one-fifteen or some middle hour that wouldn’t result in an overreaction to the damn clock.
Her mother leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her face looked ruddy, mascara streaked beneath her eyes, the pink lipstick long ago rubbed from her lips by kissing friends and family, hands and cheeks and lips.
“I’ve got to take a walk, Mom,” she murmured and stood. She’d abandoned her signature white t-shirt and jeans for proper funeral clothes. Her black slacks were wrinkled, her matching black sweater too warm in the once-cozy, now claustrophobic house.
She passed houses, trees, a little girl diving from her porch into a pile of multi-colored leaves, but she saw only one thing: Sammy, his face powdered and strange, staring up from a bed of dark satin.
Had Sammy wanted a funeral? A burial? A polished mahogany casket and a trail of people looking into his dead face?