"Late. We have to hurry."
"I'd like to know the time."
He checked his watch. "Six-thirty."
"In the evening?"
"In the morning."
The exertion caused sweat to break out over her body, and the stone walls swam. "Mason-just a minute." She leaned her face against the clammy wall and closed her eyes, afraid she was going to pass out.
"Come on." He tugged at her arm. "My sister's waiting."
His sister. Gillian had momentarily forgotten about his sister. His sister. Her time in hell was almost over.
The knowledge of potential freedom gave her strength. She pulled in some deep breaths, then continued after him, hardly noticing when she smacked her toe into a step, tearing the nail at the root.
Upstairs, candles burned everywhere. The music was something classical. Through the doorway she could see the kitchen table, see the candles and cake and roses, the wineglasses shimmering. Sitting with her back to her was a small blond-haired woman wearing a dark dress.
Thank God. She was here. Finally here! Until that point, Gillian hadn't been sure she was real, afraid Mason was just making her up. Gillian felt close to tears as relief and gratitude rushed through her.
Rather than waiting for Mason to make introductions, she took the initiative. "Hi. I'm Gillian Cantrell," she said, moving forward into the room, swinging around to face the woman in the chair, her hand extended.
The floor shifted.
Behind her, the basement door slammed shut. A vacuum sucked the air from the room.
Sitting in front of her, hands folded demurely on her lap, eyes closed, face bearing undertaker's makeup, was a dead woman.
Denial, confusion, and disbelief fluttered in Gillian's brain.
A corpse.
No!
Her mind struggled with the presentation. NO! Not real. Not happening. A dream. A nightmare.
"This is my sister, Jo Von Bryant," Mason said, proudly striding in behind her, pulling out a chair so Gillian could take a seat at the table, across from Jo.
"Sit down," Mason commanded, a familiar irritation creeping into his voice.
With jerky movements, Gillian sat, her hands in her lap, her eyes focusing on the cake in the center of the table, welcome rtOME, jo.
Jo, the dead woman. Jo, the corpse.
Even though Gillian wasn't looking at her, she may as well have been. She could see her anyway. Such was the persistence of memory. She could see the way the shiny, transparent skin of her face stretched across the bridge of a narrow nose. Her mouth had been a round black pit, as if she'd died while crying out in pain.
Had Mason killed her?
Make this go away. Make this all go away.
Gillian unfolded her napkin and spread it on her lap. She cleared her throat. "H-how long have you been gone?" she asked.
"A year," Mason said, slicing a knife through the cake. "A year today."
Where had she been all of this time? In the house? In one of the rooms upstairs?
A smell emanated from her, not a rotten smell, but something Gillian associated with funeral parlors.
Embalming fluid.
As her mind raced and then screeched to a stop, Mason continued to cut and serve the cake. He hummed as he scooped ice cream onto three plates and finally took a seat between Gillian and his sister.
"Bon appetit."
With a shaking hand, Gillian lifted the heavy silver fork. She sliced into the cake.
It was white cake with white frosting because Mason had told her that was his sister's favorite.
She raised the fork to her mouth. The bite of cake quivered there, just beyond her lips. She inhaled. The scent of embalming fluid filled her nostrils.
She dropped her fork with a clatter of metal on china and pushed from the table, getting to her feet and spinning around, her back to Mason and his dead sister. She gripped the edge of the sink, wondering if she was going to throw up, wondering if she had anything to throw up.
Had he killed her?
The question was caught in a loop in her head.
Had he killed her and preserved her to bring her out on special occasions? Did he have other bodies around? Was the fucking house full of bodies?
As she stood there, her mind reached a saturation point. A removed, out-of-body feeling came over her.
So what if she's dead?
What is death anyway?
Was the body sitting there any different from a leaf that had fallen from a tree and blown into the house?
Any different from a dry, faded flower? Any different from her own body, except that her own body had blood pumping through it?
"Aren't you going to join us?" Mason asked.
She could tell he was angry, but didn't want to show it in front of his sister. Which meant his sister, dead though she was, might still prove Gillian's ally.
Gillian turned around, her hands clenched together. She forced herself to look at the woman.
Not that bad, she told herself now that the initial shock was over.
Her hair, her light blond hair, shimmered softly in the candlelight. Just an empty vessel that had once held life, she told herself. "Your sister is beautiful," she whispered to Mason.
He nodded. Without getting up, he reached for Gillian, taking her hand, leading her in a semicircle back to her chair, where she sat down, lifted her fork, and took a bite of cake.
Outside, in the distance, she heard the sound of car tires moving over gravel. Mason jumped to his feet and ran to a living room window. A second later he was flying around the kitchen, blowing out candles.
Chapter 32
The true story of Josephine Von Bryant's life was one Mason cherished every bit as much as his adored fiction. One of his favorite ways to pass the time was to listen to his sister's tales.
"Start when you were ten years old," he used to beg her, because that was when she really began the search for her true self.
At ten, Josephine decided she wanted to dedicate her life to God. Their parents found her devotion frightening, so obsessed was she with living a humble existence. At one point, she shaved her head and slept on the hard floor. She starved herself, and when she couldn't find any stores that carried the hair shirts she'd heard and read about in catechism class, she bought a wool sweater from the church's store for the poor and wore it against her bare skin through summer and winter until her mother stripped it from her and burned it.
Her obsession with faith worried her parents so much that they removed her from Catholic school and put her in a private, all-girls institution. At first the other students made fun of her, calling her a freak to her face, but then she began developing signs of stigmata. The first spot started out as a blister on her palm. A week later, on the opposite side of her hand, blood began to ooze. Her classmates were fascinated, and soon Josephine had a group of faithful followers who couldn't get enough of her biblical stories of lust, suffering, and devotion.
Even though she scratched herself until she bled and kept the wounds from healing by continually picking and stabbing at them, Josephine convinced herself they were real.
By the time Josephine hit puberty, she'd grown bored with religion. Her psychologist helped her to realize it wasn't religion that had brought about her obsession with living a cloistered life, but a fear of men. She had no childhood memories of suffering at the hands of any man, so she could only guess that her fear was genetic. She became a lesbian for a while, but grew tired of that even more quickly than religion.
When their parents died unexpectedly, leaving Mason in her care, she suddenly found a new calling.
Mason.
She adored him.
Nine-year-old Mason came into her charge at a vulnerable time. He would watch her as she moved about a room, never letting his eyes waver, afraid she might leave and not come back. He would follow her to the bathroom and wait outside the door, sometimes curling up on the floor while she bathed.
Jo got a job with a traveling acting troupe, but after two years decided it wasn't the life for Mason. When an uncle died, leaving them an estate in Minnesota, they moved into the farmhouse a week after the paperwork was finished.