by Megan Hart
This time, a dead mouse hit her in the face.
She knew what it was at once, the desiccated corpse with its remnants of fur and dried worm of a tail. She was already crying out in revulsion, not fear, as it bounced off her mouth—oh God, her mouth!—and hit the floor without a noise. Ginny flailed and clutched first at the shelf for support, but the section she grabbed shifted and moved, tipping under the sudden weight of her fist. Something deeper toward the back moved and shifted too, but she lost sight of it as the section slid off its supports and cracked against the light fixture, first blotting the light into shadow and then distinguishing it entirely when the filaments in the bulb broke.
She fell.
Ginny braced herself for the pain of hitting the floor with her ass but managed to save herself, just a little, by stepping backwards and landing on one foot. Her ankle twisted, and she’d have gone all the way down except that the closet was too narrow to allow her the space. She hit the wall with her shoulder instead and left a small dent in the plaster.
With another shuddering cry of disgust, Ginny pushed backwards out of the closet. Panting, she spat the taste, real or imagined, of dead mouse and didn’t dare lick her lips or scrub at her mouth with her bare hands. She got to her feet and went to the hall bathroom, where she washed her hands several times under the hottest water she could stand, then scrubbed her mouth.
Mouth dripping, face still twisted from the gross-out, Ginny caught sight of her reflection. Her throat worked—she wasn’t sure if she meant to cry again until a deep, low and grinding clutch of laughter pushed past her lips.
Oh God. Oh gross.
Now she was even more happy Barb hadn’t come over to help, because if she’d come across a dead mouse in any form, especially one that had touched her face, she’d have gone catatonic and had to be sedated. As it was, Ginny half thought she might puke, but a few sips of water settled her. So did some breathing.
It wasn’t the mouse itself, since it was harmless and sad, a caricature of a rodent that had been squashed flat by some chasing tomcat’s mallet. It must’ve died in the closet and dehydrated or mummified. No, it was the fact it had landed on her mouth, her lips… Ginny shuddered and washed her face again.
Of all the gross things that had ever happened to her, including the dead squirrel, she thought this might be the worst. And as far as unexpected contact with deceased rodents went, Ginny’d had her lifetime allotment. Still, the trauma was fading by the time she finished in the bathroom and went back to the baby’s room to gather up the poor thing and dispose of it along with all the dirty paper towels.
That task finished, it would’ve been easy enough for her to abandon the rest of the closet cleaning for another day. Her ankle hurt, though it didn’t seem to be swelling, and her heart was still beating a little too fast. Her head felt a little spinny. But if she didn’t finish now, she wasn’t sure who would.
Plus…something had moved when the shelf shifted. A box, she thought. Or a suitcase. Something solid, definitely not any kind of dead thing. At least she hoped not.
The light bulb in the fixture hadn’t shattered, thank God, so she didn’t have to clean up or explain broken glass. But she had no idea where to get another one in the mess of boxes downstairs. She’d have to take one from another fixture, though they too were burned out, she discovered when she pulled the chain in the other two bedroom closets, wondering what might be lurking on their shelves. Finally, she took the one from her bedroom closet, mentally adding light bulbs to the list that never seemed to get any shorter.
Finally, light bulb replaced, stool settled firmly on the floor so it wouldn’t tip, Ginny climbed up again to look at what was on the shelf. It was a suitcase, what her gran had called a “train case.” Her mom had used one as a makeup case when Ginny was small. Hers had a mirror inside and a removable shelf to separate the top from the bottom. It was blue and bore the initials of some dead aunt.
This case was of a similar size. Olive green, though the dust on it meant the color might indeed be brighter. Ginny pulled it gingerly toward her, careful not to tip this section of shelf in case it was as unsecured as its neighbor had been. The bulb she’d replaced was brighter than its predecessor, bright enough to chase away all the shadows even in the farthest depths of the closet. Even so, she was so focused on the case that she didn’t notice the bones until she’d taken it by the handle and was half-turned to step down from the stool.
Tiny piles of bones, at least three, with some random bones scattered in between. Tiny skulls with long teeth. Beside the piles, tucked a little farther back on the shelf and on the opposite side of where she’d found the mouse, the light glinted off several plastic sandwich bags with misshapen forms inside them. Fur, bones, the spread of what must’ve once been the goo of blood and other fluids but which time had dried.
The smell, she thought, must’ve been atrocious.
Carefully, she got down to set the case in the middle of the bedroom. Then, armed with the garbage bag and paper towels, the bottle of cleanser close by, she scraped the first pile of bones toward her. She had to stand on her tiptoes to get to the last set. Again, she wished for rubber gloves when her fingertips touched the plastic, and she half expected it to stick to the shelf, but the bags slid without resistance. Hamsters, she thought with a glance inside. Orange and white fur.
She put everything in the garbage bag and went back to the bathroom to scrub her hands. Then she took the garbage bag outside and stuffed it in the can. Back upstairs, she finished cleaning the shelf until the entire length of it, every section, gleamed with the cleanser and the closet smelled of nothing but vinegar.
Chapter Ten
Ginny told Sean about the case, though not about the bones or the dead mouse, or falling off the step stool. She did tell him about the light bulb, since he was sure to notice the one missing in their closet, though all she said was that it had burned out, not that it had broken. She tempered her disclosure over a full dinner of roast beef she’d done in the Crock-Pot with some onion-soup mix and a little red wine, baked potatoes, a nice salad decorated with dried cranberries and almonds and a sprinkling of bleu cheese. Plus, she waited until his mouth was full before she told him she’d found something while cleaning, so by the time he’d chewed and swallowed she could focus the conversation on the discovery and not her actions during it.
“It was there for a long time,” she told him, picking at her own salad. It had seemed like a good idea to make it with all the extras, but she’d become so sensitive to smells and flavors that everything was jumbling together in a sensory overload. “It’s a girl’s case, though. So I don’t think it belonged to the owner or his son.”
“How do you know it belonged to a girl?” Sean speared another fork of meat. He sighed as he chewed, closing his eyes briefly in an almost-sexual expression of delight.
It amused her, that expression. She knew him so well, after all this time, it felt almost unfair to be so manipulative at keeping his attention directed on something else. But only almost.
“Because,” she said with a point of her fork toward him, “it just is. Boys don’t use train cases. The kind with a liner and a mirror and stuff inside.”
He drank slowly from his glass of wine, savoring it with another of those sighs. Despite an occasional craving, Ginny wasn’t a big wine drinker, but he made it seem so delicious her mouth watered in envy. Of course that was her way, wanting what she couldn’t have, even though she knew she wouldn’t like it if she got it.
“They could,” he said.
She laughed a little, though it faded quickly when she thought of the tiny skeletons, corpses that had been kept in baggies. That seemed more like a boy thing, if you were going to go by stereotypes. Puppy-dog tails and all that. “I guess so. But I doubt it. It’s a girl’s case, I know it.”
“What’s in it?”
“I don’t know.”
Sean paused with a crescent roll halfway to his mouth. Both brows lifted. “Why not? You find this grand, secret treasure and you don’t open it?”
“I don’t know; it didn’t seem right.” Ginny shrugged and reached for the bread basket. The crescent rolls, at least, seemed appealing, which made sense since of all the food she’d made, they were the only thing she hadn’t made from scratch. Full of preservatives, she thought and buttered one anyway, before tucking it into her mouth. Just as she’d thought, delicious.
“After dinner.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I told you, it doesn’t seem right. It’s not ours.”
“Everything in this house is ours. Bought and paid for.” Sean gestured with his fork, looking around the dining room, where Ginny had set up a card table with a fancy cloth and the good dishes, since she’d finally found them in an unmarked box.
She studied him around the wedding-gift candelabra. They’d never used it in their townhouse and here they were, using it again. “Yeah, even the things we didn’t want.”
He laughed and drank more wine. He wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin that had also been a wedding gift. All these things they’d never really used before, yet seemed so right now. Wine made Sean horny, she remembered that now. She poured him another glass.
“C’mon. It’s not that many. The telephone table, that throw rug. The case. That’s not so much, when you think about how much stuff was in here when we looked at it, remember?”
She did. The house had been fully furnished, top to bottom, though just the one old man lived in it. He’d had some nice pieces she sort of wished she’d thought to ask for, now that she knew how accommodating the son had been about unloading everything, but at the time her mind had still been awash with modern lines and small rooms. She hadn’t been able to think ahead to what it would be like to actually live here and fill all the spaces that cried out for an ornate hand.
“Well. Who knows what else we might find?” she pointed out, meaning that the cleaning service had done a woeful job.
As wasn’t uncommon, her husband wasn’t on the same track. He woo-wooed with his fingers and made the accompanying sound. “Yessss, we might find something scarrrrry…like bonesssss…”
“What?” Startled, Ginny’s fingers twitched and knocked her fork off the table. “Why would you say that?”
Sean gave her a curious glance. “Like in that movie you and Billy are always quoting.”
“There weren’t any bones in that movie. He killed people and buried them in the backyard.”
“But they found bones.”
Ginny had to remind herself that Sean had never seen the movie; he knew of it only from what she and Billy said. Still, she hated the way he talked about it like he knew it and she didn’t, like she was wrong and he was right. “No. I don’t think so.” Dammit, now she couldn’t really remember if there’d been bones in the movie. Maybe from the dog… Shit, she couldn’t remember.
“Anyway,” Sean said dismissively, “you knew what I meant. So if we have Gary Sinise living in our attic…”
“Jesus, Sean,” she snapped, irrationally annoyed now. He’d listened to her and Billy talk about the movie for years. “Gary Busey. It’s Gary fucking Busey.”
Silence fell between them as she bit back her anger. He gave her that look she also hated. The one that said she was being an irrational bitch, but he forgave her. He always forgave her.
“Sorry.” She sipped from her glass of lemonade, the taste sour enough to pucker her lips but still not as bad as the taste of her anger.
At first he said nothing, but then he shrugged. “If you’re not going to open it, what are you going to do with it?”
“Throw it away.”
He looked shocked. “You can’t just throw it away! What if there’s something important in it?”
“Like what? Money?”
“There could be. That would be awesome.” Sean grinned.
Ginny’s mouth pursed, not quite an answering smile but easing toward one. “A treasure map?”
“Yeah!”
“A winning lottery ticket, never cashed in. Keys to a safe deposit box in Switzerland? Oh, I know.” She snapped her fingers. “The Hope Diamond.”
“That’s in a museum somewhere, and, besides, it’s supposed to be cursed.”
“Okay, just some other big-ass diamond, then.”
He laughed again. “That would be good, huh? C’mon, babe, you can’t just throw it away. At the very least, if you’re not going to see what’s inside, you should see if the son wants it.”
He was right, she couldn’t pretend otherwise.
But they were both wrong about what was inside the case. No money, no jewels, no map leading to a trove of buried treasure. There was a key, though, the tiny kind that was meant to fit into a diary. Ginny’d had one of those as a kid, the cover powder blue and fake leather. Her brother had broken the lock with one sharp tug, and she’d never written in it after that.
The diary itself was tucked beneath a sheaf of photos, most of them Polaroids yellowed with age. Some had scrawled descriptions in the white space along the bottom, but most were unidentified. There were a few more of those carved wooden figures, a whole set. There were also a number of childish drawings of typical things: a girl with a pony, a princess, a family, a tree, a rainbow. None of them were signed.
“Hey, look.” Sean pulled the diary out and tugged the cover, but the lock held. “Give me the key.”
Ginny snatched it up before he could get it. “No! You can’t… Jesus, Sean. You can’t read it. This belonged to someone.”
His puppy eyes did nothing for her. “I told you, it’s ours now.”
“You obviously never kept a diary.” She scowled and curled her fingers tight around the key.
“No. Did you?” He paused, gave her a head tilt, an up-and-down glance. “Do you?”
“I don’t now.”
He gave up on the diary and sifted through more of the stuff. “Nothing in here looks very interesting.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.” The key warmed in her palm, and Ginny put it in her pocket, thinking she would have to remind herself to take it out or it would end up getting caught in the washing machine filter. “You know if it really had been money, we’d have felt compelled to give it back to the rightful owner.”
Sean reached to tug her onto his lap. He nuzzled her neck, and she let him. “And I told you, babe, we are the rightful owners.”
“Pffft.” His hands on her hips felt good. So did the brush of his slightly scratchy beard on her throat. She arched into his touch.
“Look. If something happens with the roof or the heating system…” his brows lifted when she pulled away to look at him, “…yeah, I know, don’t jinx it. But if something does happen, if that tree out there falls in the yard, we have to cut it up, right? That’s our responsibility now.”
“Well…”
He settled his mouth back against her, teeth pressing gently as he spoke, “So, I say, whatever we find is ours to keep. If we take the bad, we have to take the good too.”
“Isn’t it usually the other way around?” She’d said it lightly, meaning nothing, but Sean was silent for a few seconds too long.
Then he said, “Yeah. Usually.”
His hands drifted up her back. Pulled her a little closer. He kissed her throat and her slightly exposed collarbones. His breath was warm but made her shiver. When he shifted against her, the bulge of his erection pressing her hip, a flare of unexpectedly strong desire made her draw in a breath.
Ginny looked down at him, her hands caught in his hair as she tipped his face to hers. She kissed him long and slow, before pulling away a little. “Come upstairs with me.”
His gaze flickered, the corners of his mouth dipping low. Once more she was both a little sad and a little annoyed that
after all this time and all these years, she knew him so well he hardly had to say a word, but he barely knew her at all, even when she was spelling it out.
“I will. Later. I have some homework I need to finish up.”
She looked at the clock. “Now?”
“Yeah.” He nuzzled against her throat again, but Ginny pulled away.
She got off his lap and started clearing the table. Sean got up and went into the living room. She watched him from the dining room as he rummaged in his bag. He pulled out the leather-bound notebook she’d bought for his birthday the year he started his coursework, and a handful of pens. She watched him tuck his phone into his pocket. When he straightened he threw her a smile she had to force herself to return.
“Hey, beautiful,” her husband said.
Ginny cleared the table by herself again.
Chapter Eleven
Ginny didn’t tell Sean about the bones in the closet, but that didn’t mean she’d forgotten them. For the first week after her discovery, as she puttered around the house and barely managed to accomplish anything, since her husband still insisted she wait for him to “help” her, Ginny kept imagining opening another closet, a drawer, a cupboard, and finding another pile of dead-rodent remains. As she worked slowly, cleaning each cupboard with wet cloths and the baking soda and vinegar mixture that never seemed to clean as well as bleach, she never let her fingers trace the deep places, full of shadow, without thoroughly checking them first with a flashlight.
She hadn’t forgotten the case or the diary within. Long ago, before she met Sean, Ginny’d had a college boyfriend. They’d met at a party in the first few months of their sophomore year, and it had been instant love. Well, lust. With the maturity of time behind her, she was willing to amend it to that. At any rate, she’d fallen hard and deep, her feelings for Joseph an abyss with walls so high she could barely see the sky. And with this love came the ever-present knowledge that she loved him more than he loved her. That she wanted him more than he wanted her. That somewhere, someday there would be something that would take him from her, whether it was a sports game, a drunken night out with his buddies…a girl.
