Page 18 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow

Fourteen

I run through the woods, blinded by tears. This is a nightmare. A terrible dream where the one person who still sees me—really sees me—could accuse me of something so horrible.

I’ve had so few people in my life I can trust. There’d been many at one point. Back when I was a child and believed everyone around me loved and cherished and understood me.

Then the person who’d loved me best murdered a boy and killed himself, and something inside me—some capacity for trust—shattered.

I’d seen my grandfather for who he really was, self-centered and cruel.

My grandmother for who she was, kind but ineffectual.

Even Gail had retreated, nursing her own pain, but at the time, it felt like rejection.

All I had was my mother, who was always—even before the disease took hold—only half there, and I felt as if she’d betrayed me, too.

I came to trust my mother again, and then lost that part of her. I also came to trust Gail again, and that’s who I clung to. No matter what others thought of me, how badly my extended family treated me, Gail knew me.

And now she thinks I would carve up animals and scare the shit out of her because I’m too proud to just admit I want to leave. That I would frighten her, file false police reports, disrupt everyone’s life … just so I can escape while saving face.

When I reach the porch, I stumble. My knee cracks down hard on the step. Hands grab me and I spin, fighting them off, but she grips my arm tighter. Something whines in the distance, and I look up sharply, but it’s just the wind picking up.

“Sam,” Gail says. “Please. I don’t blame you—”

“You think I wasn’t sufficiently freaked out by those animals?” I say, wiping my free hand over my tears. I meet her gaze. “What you saw was what I wanted you to see. To look calm while I was melting down because it’s not the first time this has happened.”

She blinks. “Not the first time … what?”

“Someone has done that. Left me chopped-up animals as a warning.”

“Someone has been doing that to you at home?”

“No. Here. Someone did that to me here.” I lock my gaze with hers. “Until my father killed him.”

I wrench from her grip. I get onto the porch, and she grabs for me. I dodge, only to smack into the railing, and when she tries to steady me, I rip out of her grasp. She lets go too fast, and I fall to the porch as the wind whips past, sand blowing everywhere.

“I am so sorry,” Gail whispers. “I didn’t mean—”

I scuttle backward when she steps toward me.

“Sam—”

“Just leave me alone.” Tears blind me. “Please. Leave me alone.”

I use one hand to pull myself up, the other outstretched to ward her off.

“If you think I mutilated those animals, then you don’t know me at all,” I whisper.

“I do know you, Sam. The trauma—”

“Trauma makes me cry myself to sleep. Trauma made me melt down when I saw those dead animals. Trauma did not make me chop them up. The obvious conclusion is that someone left that hatchet and gloves for one of us to find and blame the other. If I’d been the one to find them, I would never, for one second, have thought you did it.

” Tears stream down my face, and she blurs behind them. “Because I know you.”

“Sam…”

She reaches for me again, and all I see through my tears is the blur of her as I stumble back, smacking into the wall hard. I wrench from her grip, stagger into the cottage, and slam the door behind me.

Once inside the cottage, I go straight to my room and stay there. When Gail tries opening the door, I wedge a chair under it. When she tries talking to me, I put on my headphones. I tell her to go away. Just go away and leave me alone. Eventually she does.

It takes forever for me to fall asleep. I’m hungry, having missed dinner.

I need to pee. And I know I’m being immature hiding in my room, but I can’t face her.

The thought of it makes me break out in a literal cold sweat.

Even when I start to drift off, I’m tormented by memories of Austin Vandergriff, of the things he’d done that last summer.

It started with carving my death scenes and leaving dismembered animals in all my secret spots. Austin never pretended he didn’t do it. That was the point—for me to know. Then came that final carving, the one I still shake thinking about.

A carving of me, lying in pieces, like the squirrels and rabbits he’d left.

Finally, it seems late enough to slip out. I’m turning my doorknob when I see the light shining under the door. I tense in a near spasm, every cell in my body preparing for flight, my brain screaming that I can’t face her, can’t risk the damage to my paper-thin sense of self-worth.

Gail questioned how I could hide my reaction to those animals so well. But I’ve had practice, so much practice. I’ve perfected the art of seeming perfectly calm while inside, I’m this cowering, terrified child.

When I say my mother was always half there, I don’t mean she was vague and absent-minded.

She was just always partly someplace else, unknowable to me as a child.

High walls, I realize now. Maybe some trauma in her own past. But after my father died, she maintained that stiff upper lip for my sake, and I mistook it as a sign that she needed me to do the same.

To stuff my grief and confusion into a deep hole and present the face that others—including her—seemed to want.

I know better now. I understand how deeply she’d been hurt and how much she wanted to be strong for me, and how she never needed—much less wanted—me to tamp down my trauma until it exploded in the battles of my teen years.

But now, through Gail, I also see how others could misinterpret my stoicism as a disturbing lack of emotion.

The point is that I do feel, and I am that terrified child again, afraid of leaving this room no matter how much my stomach grumbles or my bladder screams. I ease the door open just enough to peek out, hoping Gail just left a light for me.

Instead, I see her on the sofa, knees up, reading on her phone.

I close the door and retreat.

It’s past midnight. She has to go to bed soon.

I’m lying there, awake and waiting, when I hear her moving. I hold my breath. I just need her to get into her room. From living with her as a teen, I know my aunt’s routine. She’ll hit the washroom first to scrub her face and brush her teeth. Once she’s in her room, she’ll stay there.

Footsteps creak across the living room. I tense, worrying they’ll come my way.

Go to bed. Please. It’s late.

When they grow softer, I exhale under my breath. Moments pass. Did she go to bed? I don’t think so—the bathroom is right beside my bed. I’d hear her in there.

“Sam?”

I jump and stiffen.

Footsteps patter to my door. “Sam? Are you up? I see your lights on the lake.”

I stop breathing as my heart clenches, and something in me shrivels. She’s placating me. Treating me as if I’m still a small child.

Oh, you heard hoofbeats in the forest? Let’s go investigate! Wait, is that a print on the ground?

“Sam?”

I don’t answer. I don’t even breathe. After a few moments, her footsteps recede, and I yank the covers over my head … and fall asleep.

I wake the next morning to a banging at the front door. With my brain still foggy—why do I need to pee so badly?—I stumble from my room and then stand there, blinking.

The front door is open.

The sound I heard wasn’t a knocking—it was the screen door banging in a strong lake breeze.

I back up as I stare at that open door, remembering that I saw someone in the shed. Because I know I saw someone in the shed.

That sends everything else tumbling back. Yesterday afternoon. Me looking for the hatchet. Gail—

Even as my chest seizes, I back up toward her door, because no matter how hurt—how fucking devastated—I am by her betrayal, I am not going to race out and leave her with an intruder.

The cottage is silent except for that screen door slapping. I back into her bedroom door, twist the knob, and retreat inside. Only as I do that do I realize I may have just stepped into the room with the intruder. But if he’s anywhere near my aunt, I’m sure as hell not running.

The room is dark, blind drawn. But it’s silent and still. I ease the door shut and move backward toward her bed.

Then I pause.

Gail already thinks I’m losing my mind. Now I’m showing up at her bedside to protect her from my “imaginary” trespasser?

I don’t care. The front door is wide open, and I am not taking any chances.

I reach her bed and turn slowly, keeping part of my attention on the closed bedroom door. My mouth opens to say her name. Then I realize the bed is empty.

I check the bed, as if those wrinkles in the covers could be my aunt. They are not. I look around, but there’s no place else for her to be in here.

I run from the room, forgetting that there could be an intruder. No, not caring about an intruder, because the front door is open at six in the morning, and my aunt is gone.

As I race for the front door, every horrible thought whipping through my head, I notice something. Or rather, I notice something missing.

Gail’s flip-flops.

They’d been by the front door, on the mat where she leaves them. I know they were there yesterday, because I’d noted them when she went out barefoot.

Gail’s shoes are gone. A kidnapper is not going to stop to let her put on footwear.

She wasn’t dragged out by a stranger. She left.

My heart jams into my throat, and I want to curl in on myself.

My aunt has finally had enough of me.

She’s gone.

My breathing picks up as I fight to control the rising dread and pain, the voice that screams I’ve finally done it. I’m too damaged. Too needy. The last adult in my life has left. The last friend has left.

I clench my fists.

Get a grip.

It’s dawn. She probably went for a walk on the beach, and my doom spiral only proves she’s right and I’m not doing nearly as well as I pretend. But I know that, don’t I? I’m more fragile right now than I’ve been in years.

I step onto the porch. “Gail?”

No answer. It’s light out, but just barely. Do I really think my aunt—who never rises a minute before her alarm—has decided to go for a dawn beach walk? That’s my kind of thing, not hers.

Maybe she’s really gone.

Without her car? It’s parked right outside, and when I back up, I can see her keys where she left them, on the kitchen counter.

“Gail?” I call inside. Then I step out and try louder. “Gail?”

The only answer is the slapping of the screen door behind me.