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And I didn’t like it one bit.
Lenora slapped my hand then, yanking me from my thoughts while also indicating that I needed to press the shift key. I did and said, “Do you feel that? Like someone else is here?”
She tapped no and resumed typing as I continued to feel the gaze of unseen eyes watching us and the creeping chill that got stronger and stronger until that final word was embedded onto the page.
Ricky.
The room gets warmer the moment Lenora types it. The chill I’d felt vanishes in an instant, as does the feeling that someone else is here, hiding and watching. Now the only person watching is Lenora, who continues to stare at me, asking without words if what she’s just typed is enough.
“For now, yes,” I say as I return the typewriter to the desk, the page in the carriage flapping as I go.
I still don’t know half of what happened before, during, or after her parents’ murders, but Lenora doesn’t need to type it all out tonight. What she did write was breathless enough for me to infer several key facts.
For instance, I now think I know why Lenora got rid of the murder weapon. It’s the same reason she told the police so little about that night.
She was trying to protect someone.
Why she did it also seems clear.
Eight months before the murders, Lenora had fallen in love with Ricardo Mayhew.
SIXTEEN
I wake with a scream caught in my throat. Swallowing hard, I gulp it down before it can be released into the darkened bedroom. Then I sit up and do a little shimmy, trying to shake off another humdinger of a nightmare that prompted the near scream.
My mother again.
Standing over my sleeping form.
Stuffing pills into my mouth until I begin to choke.
The nightmare was so vivid that I shove an index finger into my mouth, feeling for pills that couldn’t possibly be there.
That’s when I hear it.
A creak.
The same kind I heard last night, coming from the same location.
Lenora’s room.
The sound of a second creak pulls me out of bed. All thoughts of the nightmare I’d just had evaporate as I tiptoe to the door between our rooms. Now I’m only concerned about one thing: discovering what the hell is making those noises.
Standing at the door, I look down at my feet. The thin strip of moonlight coming from under the door runs across the floor, an inch from my toes.
A shadow joins it.
Eclipsing the moonlight as it passes the other side of the door.
I gasp, twist the doorknob, and throw open the door.
There’s no one else in Lenora’s room. Just her, flat-backed and fast asleep in her bed.
I think of the gray blur I saw at her window earlier, momentarily forgotten in the events that followed. Me almost tumbling over the terrace railing. The long talk with Carter. An even longer typing session with Lenora. But I’m certain someone was moving around inside this room, then and now.
I approach the bed and kneel by Lenora’s side, checking to see if she really is asleep and not just pretending like I suspect she was when I burst into the room hours earlier. I wave my hand in front of her face, eliciting no reaction. Definitely no flinch signaling she’s aware I’m doing it. I then touch her left wrist to check her pulse. It’s slow, steady.
“Lenora?” I whisper anyway. “Was that you?”