Sarah wondered why she’d never thought to ask him. They’d had a thousand conversations, why not one of the most important of all?
Corrie hadn’t known either, but then again, Corrie could barely take a sip of water without dropping the cup since Sammy’s death. For three days, she’d wandered in a fog of grief so heavy her mere presence in a room made it hard to breathe.
It didn’t seem real, or possible, that Sammy had died.
“Sammy,” she whispered and saw again his face, eyes pressed closed, his lashes long and dark as if they’d put mascara on them. Drained his body and pumped it full of chemicals, plastered on powder to hide what they were seeing - not Sammy, but a dead body that no longer contained Sammy at all.
Beneath his suit, Corrie had provided a Werewolf in Paris t-shirt. Beneath that, his flesh was likely a mass of stab wounds. Did they bandage those?
“Hi, Sarah.”
Sarah jerked up at the sound of her name.
Lisa Priss or Prim or something-or-other jogged by in neon purple leggings and a black all-weather jacket, her blonde curls piled on her head and her face heavily made up.
Sarah gave a little wave and cut down a path that led into the trees. She didn’t want to chat with a woman from high school she barely remembered. Most of all, she didn’t want to explain all the cars in her mother’s driveway, all the long faces.
Their freshman year of high school, Lisa had developed a crush on Sammy. She walked her yipping Chihuahua by their house at every opportunity. She wore ridiculous outfits like miniskirts and teeny-tiny jean shorts. Sarah and Sammy would dive to the floor when they saw her coming.
“Blonde vampire passing in three-two-one,” Sammy would whisper, and then they’d crawl to the window and peek out as she glanced back at the house forty or fifty times, hoping for a glimpse of a boy who would never reciprocate her feelings.
Lisa had bought her childhood home and now had a husband who did some kind of boring finance thing, and two kids or two dogs.
“Tragically typical,” Sammy would have called her.
“Will I ever stop hearing your voice in my head?” Sarah whispered, picking up speed as the forest trail sloped down toward a weedy pond.
CHAPTER 5
Then
Corrie
“C offee?” Sammy smiled and held out the chipped Everything Tastes Better with Cat Hair mug he offered me every morning. I took it, grateful, and slumped into the armchair facing the hard surface of the lake beyond. We had claimed the great room in Kerry Manor for the panoramic window the designer had installed. It wasn’t in line with the home’s original architecture, but he told Sammy he had to take a handful of allowances. How could you blot out the sweeping views of Lake Michigan?
Other than the window, the room lived up to its Gothic beginnings. The vaulted ceiling comprised an intricacy of deep grooved wood rising to a ribbed pattern, ending at a dangling, tiered chandelier. Upholstered furniture in dark colors clustered around the room. Thick, burgundy curtains butted arched windows, which faced the courtyard.
I had grown to love the hand-carved fireplace and the pagan figurehead in its center, which we referred to as Loki. Sammy had lined up several horror movie action figures across its ledge, including the Michigan Wolf Man, Freddy Krueger and something that resembled a half-man-half spider.
I looked out the window and sipped my coffee, marveling at the changing landscape.
October signaled the shift. In some divine orchestration, the whole earthly realm seemed to agree it was time to remodel the house. Green leaves melted into reds and gold. Orange wood lilies and opal trillium receded into the forest floor and took with them the vibrant green ferns and grass. Pumpkins appeared, stacked at the end of dirt driveways, and Indian corn lay in bushels on people’s doorsteps.
Sammy loved October, and before the first leaves fell, he fantasized about Halloween costumes and rum-laced apple cider. He watched horror movies and insisted we add pumpkin pie spice to everything from chili to pancakes.
Sarah once told me that Sammy was an October baby, though he was born in July. Since birth, Sammy had loved the full harvest moon, and the gold-flecked painter’s brush that turned down the world of color.
As a boy, he painted the walls of his bedroom Halloween orange and began a collection of monster-face masks that would put a Halloween store to shame.
At the age of ten, he nearly sent his mother to an early grave when he jumped from the attic one October morning wearing a devil’s mask. Poor Helen fell flat on her back, and Sammy’s dad whipped him with a belt for the first and only time in his young life. Sammy’s mother had told me the story half a dozen times, and claimed still to this day she didn’t like to open the attic door.
In our house, Halloween trumped Christmas. We didn’t merely carve pumpkins, we carved a dozen, at least. Sammy took hours scouring pumpkin patches for the perfect ones - the bigger, the better. Halloween night involved a massive celebration. Last year, we road-tripped with Sarah to Salem, Massachusetts, and spent the evening attending a witch’s ball at a huge old church transformed into a dance club.
This year, we would host a Halloween party at Kerry Manor.
“Okay, we’re out of here, sweet cheeks,” Sammy told me, kissing my temple.
I leaned down to hug Isis. She licked the side of my face and grinned.
“Icky, Isis,” I said, wiping her slobber from my cheek.
“See you in a few hours,” I told them.
Sammy wrote comic books for a living, which left him ample time to lean over my shoulder and attempt to read my lines before I finished writing them. Fortunately, most days he packed up Isis and went into town to give me a reprieve. He rented a small office comprised of two rooms attached to the back of a boutique clothing store. In one room, Sammy covered the floor with craft paper. Isis could sit in a rainbow explosion of crayons and draw to her heart’s content. At two-years-old, she didn’t draw so much as scribble and occasionally eat a crayon. Toys and a small mounted television occupied her time when the coloring grew boring.
I had abandoned my own office, a therapy practice I shared with a colleague, for what I termed a writing sabbatical. My clients had been recommended to other therapists, and I was fulfilling a lifelong dream of writing a novel.
“Now, if only I could actually write it,” I muttered, deleting my last line and starting again.
“One for sorrow, two for mirth…”
The child’s rhyme, sung in a high, girlish voice, drifted through the house.
I paused, blinking at the handful of words I’d just typed.
I glanced toward the hall. Had Sammy and Isis returned? Certainly not. It took more than a half-hour to drive into Traverse City.
I strained, listening, but the sound didn’t come again. Sammy’s mother loved to buy Isis toys that sang and talked. The previous Christmas, she gave her a cow that cackled madly when you pressed its foot. Apparently, she’d also given her one that sang creepy nursery rhymes - great.
I returned my focus to the screen. My protagonist had just discovered her mother was dead. Writing the scene felt impossible. I thought of my own mother, her gaunt face against the white of the hospital pillow, her hair thinly arranged in a dark halo around her head.
She needed a liver transplant, but alcoholics didn’t get liver transplants. They died instead.
“Three for a funeral, four for a birth.” This time, a burst of laughter followed the song.