Suzie leans closer and plays the footage over again, her heart in her mouth. When it is finished, she looks over at Cathy, raising her eyebrows. “What do you think? Enough to take it to the police?”
Cathy shrugs. Suzie is disappointed in her reaction. She feels like they’ve made a breakthrough here, a big one, but it’s as if Cathy can barely muster a response. Behind them, the bell chimes softly.More customers, Suzie thinks. She ushers both women back into the pharmacy and holds the door open for Mrs. Scott, who glances up at the sky as she leaves.
Her tote bag swings from the handles of her walker. “See that sky? Those are nimbostratus clouds. That’s a blizzard coming, you mark my words.”
Back inside, Suzie finds Cathy in the makeup aisle. She watches as Cathy picks up a lipstick and mascara from the rack and puts them straight into her handbag.
“You don’t think it’s the guy?” Suzie draws level with her, keeping her voice down.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t sayanything. What is it? What’s wrong?”
Cathy pushes her hair away from her face. “You know, I thought I recognized him too, the first time I watched it. He looked like the man driving the bus into Truro the other day. I could’ve sworn to it.ThenI thought he looked like that caretaker who came to fix Scout’s window, the one from Belle Vue.ThenI realized he looked almost identical to one of my ex-boyfriends who lives up on Deltham Avenue—”
“I don’t get your point.”
“What I mean is, he looks like ananybody. Dark hair, a bit scruffy. You can’t see his face properly, you can’t even hear his voice. It isn’t enough to go on.”
Cathy must see the disappointment on Suzie’s face because she shifts her tone, just slightly.
“Ah, look, ignore me. I’m just cranky after a weird morning. Save the footage, yeah? Maybe the police will want to see it.”
To Suzie’s profound amazement, Cathy leans forward and hugs her; a brief squeeze but tight enough to almost knock the air out ofher. As she pulls away, Suzie finds herself on the verge of tears. She watches Cathy leave, not caring that she slipped those items into her bag, deciding never to mention it.Teddy would be horrified, she thinks to herself, and is surprised to find that that thought doesn’t bother her too much either.
32
It’ll all be over soon.
I look up at the sound of her voice. It’s deeper and more sonorous than it has been the last few days. It has developed a resonance. Solidity. Outside, the snow has stopped but the wind is shrill and hostile, battering the sides of the house. I can hear the tortured shriek of the weather vane, turning restlessly.
They’ll find you in the spring thaw. Your bones will have grown a layer of moss.
White fingers curl around one of the pillars. Next, a head peers round, only it’s not a head, not really. It’s a bulge of mottled flesh, two sunken pits in which yellow eyes float like scum on water. Her skin has a flush of lividity, of cold, still blood.
“I am a rational w—”
I liked her, the psychologist that taught you that funny refrain. I followed her home and when she slept, I pulledher hair. She thought it was her cat at first. After a time, she screamed and made her husband turn on all the lights, but I had made myself small, watching through the gap in the curtains. She was hysterical. “I saw something!” She clawed at her face and I had to smother my laughter. She didn’t return to Belle Vue for three weeks. She’d grown afraid of you. She wasnota rational woman.
I stare out the window. My other sister is right about the psychologist. I saw her for six sessions, when I first arrived at Belle Vue. After that, I didn’t see her again. She’d been replaced by a skinny man with a prominent Adam’s apple and a gulpy, nervous way of talking. He hadn’t thought me a rational woman. He’d upped my dose of Leprazine and told me I might benefit from electroconvulsive therapy.
The sow savages her young in a state of high excitement, almost a frenzy. Often, the piglet will be consumed alive. It doesn’t matter to the mother. She doesn’t always know best.
The mattress tilts slightly, as if a weight has settled at the end of it. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the shape of her looming, dark and hunched with her long, long hair trailing across the floor. I stare out at the snow. It should be beautiful, but it terrifies me. It is entombing us here like mosquitoes in amber. It makes me think of Joseph Bray with his wife’s head on his lap. Sows with their snouts caked in gore. Diana, scratching her name into the glass.
You’ll end up killing that girl. If you do it now, at least it will be quick. A shove on the stairs and her skull will burst open like a split melon.
I’ve been wondering what Maria will think when she sees herself properly for the first time. Of course, she will have glimpsed her reflection before; warped in chrome taps or the backs of spoons. Perhaps she has seen herself reflected in her bathwater, indistinct and wavering, a nymph. She will have felt the contours of her face; the smooth, angular planes of her cheeks, the hollows of her eye sockets, ridged, thick brows. She will know herself. She will not know herself. But isn’t that true of all teenage girls?
These mushrooms would do it. You don’t need many. A handful. Little brown deaths.
I close my eyes. The mushrooms are growing everywhere now. They have turned soft and black, little death arrows pointing skyward, emerging through the cracks in the walls, along the sill. I don’t know what they are. They do not look like anything I have seen before, yet I know they would burn Maria’s insides like glowing embers.
She might not want to eat them, but there are ways of forcing them down. Oh, she would see such pretty things.
This is how it starts. Metal shavings buried in mashed potatoes, a lit match pressed to a crumpled newspaper, scissors in my hands. My other sister’s words are an invocation, sliding painlessly between the creases of my brain, where they lodge in the gray matter, glittering and lethal, like ground glass.
“Why her? Why not Andrew?”