Page 74

74

Matt

“THAT CAN’T BE HER,” Matt told Ellie as he held the newspaper toward the single bulb in the basement and studied the photograph in the light.

“I know that. It’s impossible,” she replied, fishing out an old high school yearbook from the box and turning to a marked page. “I keep telling myself that every time I look at her. But I can’t explain this.” Her thumb landed on the girl; smiling at the camera, her head angled slightly. “You can’t tell me you didn’t notice that.”

Matt first saw the birthmark when he sat down with the girl in Ellie’s office. Brown, crescent-shaped, like a small moon on her neck. Identical to the girl in the yearbook, Emily Pridham. “That’s not possible.” He looked up at her. “Can birthmarks be hereditary?”

“Most, no. There are some. I’m no doctor, but the way I understand it, to be hereditary they need to pass down through genes. The only kind I know of like that are port-wine stains, something called Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome. I had a cousin growing up with one of those. Has something to do with too many capillaries near the surface of the skin. They’re red, though. This one is brown. And they usually appear on the face, not the neck.” She tapped the photograph. “The size and shape are all wrong, too. This is something else. This looks the same .”

Matt didn’t believe for a second the girl who died thirty-five years ago was somehow standing upstairs. This was some crazy coincidence. Most likely, Emily Pridham slipped while going to the bathroom and went over a cliff, just like Ellie said. There were a few near the Pickerton place. She slipped, maybe rolled, maybe dropped—none of those things made as much noise as people thought. It could easily happen with Buck standing twenty feet away and he wouldn’t hear it. She probably vanished somewhere below, and the animals finished her off before her body could be found. That was the hard truth of it. None of that explained who the girl upstairs really was or why she had no memory before this morning.

Matt cleared his throat. “So what do we do? Show her this stuff and see how she reacts? Figure it out from there?”

Ellie quickly shook her head and went to the large gun safe on the back wall. She began twisting the combination dial. “We don’t show her anything, don’t tell her anything, not until we talk to Buck. I know him. I don’t know her.”

She tugged up on the handle and swung open the heavy metal door. Reaching inside, she took out a KelTec KSG tactical shotgun along with two boxes of shells and handed it all to Matt. She loaded an identical shotgun for herself. “I’m taking her up the mountain to his place. I want you to stay here and keep these people safe. I’ve got extra blankets and pillows in the hall closet. There’s plenty of food in the pantry. Help yourself. Get everyone comfortable. They all need rest, and after everything that happened, they’re bound to crash. Keep trying the phone. Try to get help in here. This is going to get worse long before it gets better.”

“What about you? You need to rest, too.” He pointed at the cut on her cheek. “We still need to clean that up.”

She pumped the shotgun and chambered a round. “Never do today what can be put off until tomorrow.”

“I don’t think that’s how the saying goes.”

“No? I’m pretty sure that’s how my grams had it embroidered on her favorite pillow.” She reached back into the cabinet, retrieved several shells from an open box, and filled her pocket. “That reminds me, the other saying you asked me about— Hope not ever to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to the other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice —that’s from Dante’s Inferno . I’ve got a copy upstairs somewhere. I’m guessing you never read it?”

Matt’s face flushed. “I’m more of a comic book guy.”

Ellie groaned. “I suppose if they had comics in the fourteenth century, Dante might have fit the bill. Inferno is part of an epic poem called The Divine Comedy . There were three parts— Inferno , Purgatory , and Paradise . Inferno describes Dante’s journey through Hell, guided by a Roman poet. He was sorta like the ghosts in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. You’ve read that, right?”

“I saw the movie with Bill Murray.”

“Christ, your generation is hopeless. Educated by video games and the backs of cereal boxes,” Ellie muttered. “Dante describes Hell as nine circles. They get progressively worse as you near the middle—Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery.” As she ticked these off on her fingers, she looked up at him. “Before you bring up that movie with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, yes, this is where the seven deadly sins came from. Religious folk lifted them from Dante. Contrary to what most people think, they’re not listed in the Bible, at least not in this kind of detail. Dante described the ninth circle as a lake. The worse your crime, the deeper you got to spend eternity.”

“A lake of fire,” Matt said, matter-of-factly.

Ellie shook her head. “No. In Dante, Hell’s not all fire and brimstone. The lake is frozen.” Her eyes narrowed. “Where exactly did you hear that phrase again?”

“The girl.”

Ellie’s battered face twisted in confusion. “I thought you said she hasn’t spoken?”

“She hasn’t. Don’t ask me to explain it. You’ll think I’m—”

“Crazy? Aren’t we all just a little today?” Ellie threw the newspaper and other material back in the box. “You tell me when you’re ready. In the meantime, I’m taking her to Buck’s. I wanna see his face when he sees her. You lock this place down and try to get us some help in here. I don’t care if you have to send smoke signals to the folks in Boston.”

She was halfway up the steps when Matt called out, “Hey, watch out for Stu Peterson.”

Ellie paused, cradling the shotgun. “Do I want to know why?”

Matt told her about his run-in with Jimmy Newcomb and what happened when they had to evacuate the sheriff’s office.

Ellie considered all this for a long moment, then continued up the stairs shaking her head. “Fucking Peterson.”