“And they miss you.”
A realization crawled up Cassie’s spine, insinuated itself in the back of her mind, whispered to her.
“They’d like you to come home.”
It’s over, the voice whispered. Her own voice.
“Why did you run away?” Harrison asked, settling back in his chair a bit, giving her space. “Why did you leave the hospital?”
Cassie shook her head.
Harrison sighed. “Cassandra, if you won’t tell me, I can’t—”
“It doesn’t matter now anyways,” Cassandra muttered, loud enough for him to hear.
“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”
“You’re gonna send me back,” she said. She looked around the café, trying not to meet his eyes. “You’ve talked to my mom, you’re holding my stuff—you’re gonna send me back. It doesn’t matter why I ran away.”
“I’m not sending you back,” he said, lifting the bag across the table and handing it to her. “Here. I just wanted to know why you left.”
She took the backpack by the handle and held it, staring at him. “You’re not?”
He shook his head, and she slowly lowered the bag to the floor, tucking it between her own feet. She kept one hand wrapped around the handle. “But—” The voice in her head was silent, but she was afraid to breathe, in case she had misunderstood.
“I couldn’t, even if I wanted to,” he said, half-shrugging and lifting one hand in a gesture of helplessness. “You’re sixteen years old. Legally, you have the right to decide where you want to live.” He leaned forward, planting both elbows on the table. “Besides,” he said, his voice lowering, “if I were to put you on a bus, or deliver you myself, you’d just run away again, the first chance you got, right?”
She could feel her face flushing.
She nodded.
“So I want to know why you left.”
He left the words hanging in the air as he took another swallow from his coffee.
She tightened her grip around the handle of her bag. She didn’t have to tell him anything; she could just walk out. He might try to come after her, but he had already told her that there was nothing he could do. She could just leave.
But she didn’t.
“I had to,” she said, looking down at the grain of the table. “I had to go.”
“Why?”
She didn’t want to say too much. She couldn’t tell him everything, but she wanted to tell him something. He’d been looking out for her. He had found her and returned her bag. She had to tell him something.
“It wasn’t safe,” she said, pausing on each word. “I couldn’t stay there.”
“Did something happen?” he asked. “Did somebody hurt you?”
She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t anything like that. I just …” The words were bringing tears to her eyes, and she had no idea how to continue. “My father …”
Harrison laid both his hands palms-down on the table. “Cassandra,” he said firmly, but with undertones of understanding. “Cassandra, look at me.”
She lifted her head, willing herself not to cry.
“You didn’t kill your father.”
The crow alighted on one of the weathered, rusting tables along the front window of the café, next to the ashtray and its two cigarette butts.
It hopped across the table, onto the chair back closest to the window.
It craned its head forward.
It watched.
You didn’t kill your father.
The words echoed in her head, and she sobbed in a sharp burst.
She leaned forward, rested her forehead on the cool edge of the table and tried to be as quiet as she could. She breathed through her nose with a wet rasp, squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her lips tight.
She couldn’t stop, but she didn’t want to make a scene. She didn’t want anyone looking at her anymore.
“It’s okay.” Harrison’s voice was faint and indistinct against the roaring in her ears. “It’s all right.”
No, she argued silently. It’s not.
Everything about that night, everything that she had tried to push down, came rushing back.
It was like she was there again, right there: the cool of the basement, the way her steps creaked on the next-to-bottom stair, the softness of the rags as she piled them, the acrid smell of the turpentine as she poured it into the loose pile of cloth, the sulphur tang of the match as she struck it.
She had dropped it into the pile of rags, watched it pinwheel in slow motion. The air and the rags had seemed to pop, bursting into a hot blue flame that wavered and roared, licked up the bare wood beams …
“It’s all right,” Harrison said again.
“No,” she said, this time out loud. “No, it’s not. The fire—”
She lifted her head from the cool table and looked across at him. He was blurry through her tear-muddled eyes, but she saw enough to take the napkin he extended toward her.
He waited in silence while she dabbed her eyes and blew her nose, handed her another napkin without being asked.
“Cassandra,” he said. “I talked to your dad.”
The world roared in her ears. “You … My dad?”
He nodded. “That first morning, after we met you at the bookstore. I called your place.”
So dizzy, so suddenly, she felt like she was going to throw up.
“I know that … you were seeing a doctor. And what you wrote—”
Then it came to her, all in a rush.
“You read my journal,” she snapped. “You …” She reeled at the unexpected anger. “What gives you the right?”
He looked at her for a moment as if not understanding the question. “My badge?” he said measuredly.
Cassie snorted.
“Look,” he said, elbows on the table again, gesturing with his hands. “Your bag was abandoned property. No ID, no tags, no card saying, ‘If found, please call.’ Do you know how much stuff I had to go through this morning when we got back to the station? How do you think I knew the bag was yours? From your name inside your journal.”
“Oh,” she said, sagging.
“I’m a cop. I open a book and the first thing I see is ‘I killed my father today,’ damn right I’m going to read it. And I have zero issue with that.” His face was tight and hard. “Okay?”
Cassie nodded.
“Okay,” he said, and the mood started to lift. “And if it’s any comfort, I only read enough to make me want to start looking into things.” He smiled a strange smile, like the fact that he had read her diary and then started an investigation should be some sort of comfort.
“What do you mean, ‘looking into things’?” Her arms still folded over her chest.
“I made some calls. Talked to the RCMP there. That’s why I called your place again. I wanted to know if there was anything that wasn’t in the reports.”
“And?” She bit out the word.
“There wasn’t.” He shook his head. “It was just an accident.”
She wouldn’t argue with him. She knew the truth. She had watched the flames pour upward along the beams, she had had the smell of paint thinner on her hands: she knew what had happened that night.
“Is that why you ran away? Because you thought you had—”
She shook her head, blurted the word no before she could stop it, then sagged into her chair.
Harrison waited.
“Your mom,” he said, after a long silence, “mentioned a Dr. Livingston. Someone that you had been seeing.”
“Jesus.”
“Was he—”
“She.”
“Was she a counsellor?”
“She was a shrink.”
He nodded again, and she wondered how much he really knew. How much had her mom told him? Was he testing her, seeing how much she would admit to?
“That’s what your mom said.”
She exhaled loudly.
“She said you had problems with your sleep. She had a
name for it.”
“Night terrors. A parasomnia disorder.” She almost spat the words out.
“Right,” he said. “That was it. Night terrors. Did that start—”
She shook her head. She was done talking.
He waited a long moment in the silence.
“I want to help you, Cassie,” he started, carefully measuring each word. “But I don’t know how I can help you if you won’t talk to me.”
She stood up, lifting her backpack with her. “You can’t,” she said. “Nobody can.”
The wind blistered across her face as she opened the door.
“He doesn’t know,” she muttered to herself as she hurried down the sidewalk, head bowed against the wind.
He didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. No one did. Except her.
Nobody else had been there in the basement with her the night of the fire. Nobody else had dropped the match. Nobody else had the smell of kerosene on their hands.
“But you were in bed,” Dr. Livingston said, inside her head. “Your mom said when she smelled the smoke she had to wake you up to get you out of the house. Did you start the fire and then go back to bed and fall asleep?”
She didn’t have an answer for that: she didn’t remember going back to bed, but she must have.
“And you thought that you had spilled kerosene on your hands, that you could smell it.”
That had always been the way with Dr. Livingston—not letting anything stand. Challenging everything. Making her wrong.
“Yes.” Quietly.
“But no one else could smell it. Your mom, the police, the ambulance attendants. No one smelled kerosene.”
“They probably just didn’t notice.”
As she rounded the corner, Cassie let herself speed up. She wanted to put as much distance as she could between herself and the cop and his questions.
He was only trying to make things make sense. That was what the Dr. Livingston in her head was doing too, just trying to figure out the story.
But didn’t that mean they should actually listen to her story? Actually pay attention when she told them what had happened?
Wouldn’t she know what she had done?
She had started seeing Dr. Livingston when she was six or seven, when the dreams were so bad she would scream and curl into a ball in the corner rather than go anywhere near her bed.
Dr. Livingston had taken her in, had talked her through everything. Had shown her that everything she had experienced had been a dream. That there had been no one outside her door in the dark, calling her name, coming to her bed …
She had fought. She had tried to tell her that she was wrong, that the dreams were real.
But after a while, she had stopped fighting. Maybe there was nothing. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t real.
There had been no more of the waking dreams, the vivid nightmares.
At least there was that.
And then, without warning, she had woken screaming, the memory of a knife in her hand. She had rushed into her sister’s room, knowing what she would find: the sheets drenched with blood, her chest ripped open, her eyes wide and red, her mouth frozen in a soundless scream.
Instead, Heather had groaned in her sleep and rolled over, rustling the blankets, not even aware that Cassie was there.
Her sister was safe.
It happened night after night after night. Different, but the same.
Sometimes it was Heather, her chest ripped open, the knife in Cassie’s hand.
Sometimes it was her mother, her throat cut into a gaping, gushing smile.
And sometimes it was her father, the smell of kerosene, the sound of the wood crushing his skull.
Always different, always the same.
And then there was the night of the fire, the night her father died.
But her mother was alive. Heather was alive.
That’s what had really scared her.
They were safe, but Cassie knew that safety was an illusion. Heather and her mother would never be safe, not while Cassie was around.
So she had run.
She was the only one who knew what had happened, and she was the only one who could keep it from happening again.
So she had run.
And now it was happening again. Here.
The dreams. Sarah. The staircase. Her father …
Dr. Livingston didn’t believe her. Constable Harrison didn’t believe her. Nobody believed her.
It didn’t matter. She knew what she had done.
She had dropped the match. She had held the knife.
She had killed her father, burned him alive in the basement.
She had killed Sarah: cut her throat and pushed her into the fountain.
And Skylark.
Skylark.
She knew what she had to do: she had to go, to keep Skylark safe.
But she couldn’t leave without seeing for herself that she was okay, that it wasn’t already too late.
Pulling her coat tightly around herself, she disappeared into the shadows.
In the distance, she could still hear the screaming, the voice over the megaphone, the heavy crunch of boots. Her breath came ragged and sharp, her chest aching as she ran.
“Come on,” Skylark called out, somewhere in front of her.
Skylark!
She could almost see the girl in the distant red lights flashing over the buildings, down the deserted streets. Almost.
She followed the sound of her footfalls, echoing faintly in the dark.
“Come on,” she called again. “We’re nearly there!”
Nearly where? Where were they going?
She almost ran into Skylark.
Her friend had stopped sharply and partially collapsed, hunched over with her hands on her knees, her back shuddering with the exertion of the run as she tried to catch her breath.
Cassie stopped behind her, her chest burning, heaving as she struggled to take in a deep breath.
“We did it,” Skylark said, straightening slightly, still gasping. “We got away.”
Cassie nodded, unable to speak, and walked in a slow circle to keep from falling over. She didn’t recognize where they were—an alley maybe? There was a brick wall, a dumpster, not much of anything else.
“We did it,” Skylark repeated.
“We did,” Cassie said, stepping behind her.
Wrapping her arms around Skylark from behind, she held her close, buried her face in the nape of her neck. She could feel the kinetic fluttering of Skylark’s heart under her hand, the rise and fall of her chest.
“You said,” Skylark whispered, her voice almost inside Cassie’s head. “You said you’d never hurt me.”
The knife in Cassie’s right hand slid effortlessly blade skyward through the layers of Skylark’s clothes—her coat, her sweater, her shirt—and into the soft flesh of her belly.
“You said,” Skylark repeated, and it felt like a kiss.
The knife made a sound like a zipper as Cassie slid it upward through Skylark’s body, opening her to the snow and the sky.
“You said.”
Cassie found the camp two days later.
She had spent two nights under an overhang near the parking lot by the Inner Harbour. The walkway above her made the small space seem like a cave, and once it was late there was barely any sound of footsteps above her. She had tucked herself into the shadows in the corner, holding her backpack tight, curling herself around it.
She hadn’t expected to sleep; she hadn’t wanted to sleep, even, but it was inescapable, and she opened her eyes to a world grey and washed-out with the sunrise.
She had no idea where to go. She had the basics of a plan—find Skylark, get off the island—but no idea how to put that plan in motion. Skylark could be anywhere, and while it made sense to wait for her near the courthouse, the thought of the man across the street in the flannel jacket kept her away.
But she had a little money. She only needed a bit more. It would be eas
y, she had hoped.
It wasn’t.
So few people used the side streets that her hat had stayed resolutely empty. Every few hours, she ducked into the mall or the bookstore to get warm. She didn’t even try to sit down; if she kept moving, they were less likely to throw her out.
The headline in the newspaper the first morning read “Squatter Camp Uproar.” There was a large photograph of Brother Paul, and something about an interview, an appeal for help, but she didn’t read the article. She had to keep moving.
She used the bathrooms at Ship’s Point. She considered having a shower the first morning, but the idea of undressing, of doing all that work only to have to get dressed in the same dirty clothes again, brought on a wave of exhaustion. She settled for washing her face, and she let the water run as she scrubbed her skin, steam billowing around her.
Nobody took the slightest notice of her anyway.
And Skylark was nowhere to be found.
The camp was just around the corner from the Inner Harbour, partway between the museum and the courthouse.
Cassie didn’t really know what she was seeing as she came around the block: there was a small park on the corner, overhung by old trees and surrounded by a low chain-link fence.
The park was filled with tents and signs and smoke from several fires. People milled about, drifting between the rough tents, paying no attention to the people watching from the fenced-off safe distance of the sidewalk.
Cassie hunched her head down and scurried along the fence, trying to keep clear of the crowd. The buzzing tension in the air made her want to get away as quickly as she could.
She was almost past the park when she heard her name.
“Dorothy!”
The voice was like something out of a dream.
She jerked to a stop, looked up from the sidewalk. Skylark?
“Dorothy!” Louder this time, and the sound of running.
She turned, and Ian was there at the edge of the sidewalk at a gap in the fence, his smile broad and bright. He was wearing faded grey pants and a thick T-shirt, his eyes bright, his breath coming in fat grey puffs.
“I thought it was you!” He swept her into a hug that almost lifted her from the ground. “It’s so good to see you! Where did you go?”
Black Feathers Page 13
