When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Enim ...”

  “Was it after my mother's accident, or was it before that?”

  “Enim, it was neither. We didn't – we never said that we would never get along again. We're just ...”

  “Not speaking. Not involved in each other's lives.”

  “Are you fighting with Jack?” he asked, ignoring my comment. “Are you two not getting along?”

  I bit the insides of my mouth to keep from responding immediately, wondering how things had changed so drastically when I had done everything in my power to remain the same. The methodically planned days, the piano music that drowned out the auditory hallucinations, the distance that I kept from anything and everything that had ever stirred up any feelings that I ought not to have had – they would all go to waste, it seemed, if it meant that I hadn't succeeded in making things the way that I had thought that they would be.

  “I don't get it,” I said. “We used to – he and I were always – we never had a problem before.”

  “You two have been apart for years, Enim,” Karl said. “Things are bound to be different.”

  “Why did you even let me visit him?” I asked, suddenly annoyed. “You never liked him, and you were always telling me to lose him – why didn't you tell me not to go?”

  “I … I don't know, Enim.”

  “But you're the one who's always telling me that things don't have to change,” I went on. “You always say that I don't need to be doing things differently, or upset my schedule, or go out or do things like the social workers want me to. So why would you tell me that it's fine to go up to Kipling and see Jack when you know that it'll do all of those things?”

  Karl sighed.

  “Because,” he said, his voice neither firm nor soft. “I – I don't think that you're happy here.”

  I blinked.

  “What?” I said. “No, I'm fine.”

  “Of course you are,” he said, the hint of a scoff catching against his voice. “You're always fine. But you were never happy – as far as I could tell – unless you were with Jack. And I thought … I thought that it was worth the risk if you could be that way again.”

  I waited for a long while, allowing the silence to spread its way out between us, and I couldn't think of whether or not I agreed with him. I wasn't even sure that I could tell the difference anymore between happiness and a mere lack of despair: they both seemed rather the same.

  “But things aren't … things aren't right between us anymore,” I said. “Not since ...”

  I couldn't say the actual reason, but Karl seemed to know what the words would have been, even so.

  “You can care about someone more than anything, Enim, and still know that they're not good for you,” he said quietly.

  When I declined his offer to come get me and hung up the phone, I waited for a long moment in the now-quiet of the house. Mea had curled up in the corner to take a nap, and a light flecking of snow had started from the sky that tapped against the windows. As I sat thinking over what he had said, a sense of sorrow came over me as I wondered if he was right; but I wasn't certain, I realized, if the statement had really been referring to how I felt about Jack or to how I felt about him.

  I left the apartment after clearing away any sign that Mea and I had been there and made my way slowly back to Kipling, wishing, for possibly the first time, that either my father or Karl had simply told me if I should have stayed or left. It was far too difficult to determine what I wanted myself, as though years of being ordered what to do had completely diminished my ability to make a decision on my own.

  I found Jack at work the following day. He was restocking the shelves with a box of tattered old books that seemed to be on their last limb, but stopped and gave an indifferent shrug upon seeing me. Muttering something about needing a cigarette break anyhow, he went to the backdoor and stepped outside. When I followed him, he had already lit one and was taking a long drag.

  “Forget something?” he asked, throwing me a cold look as he exhaled smoke into the small area.

  I crossed my arms to ward off the chill.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why I came here.”

  “And what reason would that be?” he said, his voice still harsh. His irritation was hardly unfounded, and I reminded myself of how poorly it had gone over for the other students at Bickerby to be his enemy.

  “My father's dying.”

  He stared at me for a long moment as though he couldn't quite register what I had said, but then his irritated expression dropped into a frown.

  “What? Your dad?” he said. “He's – what of?”

  “Cancer.”

  Jack looked momentarily down at the cigarette in his hand before warily dropping it down to the snow-covered ground to put it out.

  “Fuck. That's – that's a bad way to go.”

  “Probably.”

  We stood a foot or so apart, each of us taking an interest in opposite sides of the yard, before Jack gave another shrug.

  “Yeah, I probably wouldn't want to be there for that, either,” he said. “Especially … well, you saw enough with your mother, I figure.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  He was tapping his fingers against his leg as though both wishing to take another drag from the cigarette and thinking better of it, and he licked his lips anxiously in the cold.

  “You probably shouldn't quit cold-turkey,” I told him. “Or else we'll both be miserable.”

  He took the comment as an invitation to light another and retrieved the pack from his pocket.

  “Let's face it,” he said, flicking open his lighter and sucking his breath in so that the flame would catch, “I probably won't quit at all.”

  I watched him smoke for a while before turning my thoughts elsewhere. It was unreasonable to think that he would be immune to the effects of the toxins, and yet it didn't seem to be important even so. If anything, it felt as though schizophrenia was the real deadly disease that was creeping its way up on us, and that I was bound to die of it long before he died of anything else. And though I knew that it wasn't fatal, it was every bit as much of a death-sentence as my father's cancer was, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before it caught up with me the way that it had my mother, yet still I had no desire to try the medications and therapy sessions again in the hopes of having things be different. It was a waste to prolong it all – no better than the way my mother had been hooked up to machines and forced to breathe for fourteen months after losing all function of her body and mind – and I wanted to remain as much in control of things as possible until the time came instead of numbed and cleared away like the pills had made me feel.

  “I was thinking about Anna,” I said suddenly, “and how her sweaters were lined up in her room.”

  “You were thinking of her sweaters?”

  Jack raised his eyebrows at me; they disappeared behind his dark hair.

  “I don't know why,” I said, noting how the notion had come to me after Mea had pulled my mother's old sweater from its hiding place in the closet. “It just seemed important somehow. That she left them all out, that is.”

  “Nim, I'll give you credit: you've pieced together some weird things in the past. But her sweaters? I think we can safely say they're not going to help us.”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe. It just seemed weird that she had them all lying out – and you were the one who said that you thought it was weird that she didn't clean her room before she killed herself.”

  “Right, but I wasn't talking about her sweaters relaying a secret message,” he countered. “And not that I pretend to be an expert on teenage girls – in any way, shape, or form – but I'm fairly certain that it's just part of getting dressed for them to empty their closets and try everything on before deciding what to wear.”

  I frowned.

  “Maybe. I don't know. Like I said, it just seemed weird somehow.”

  “You know what else is weird?” he asked, finishing his cigarette and tossing it down to
the ground with the other one. “Mr. Perenna was in an accident this morning.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “What sort of accident?” I said. “Not grouse-hunting?”

  “No, Nim, not grouse-hunting – though with the way you carry on about it, I'm going to force you to take part in it next November. It was his car – skidded off the road and went into a ditch.”

  “Is he alright?”

  “He's fine – a little bruised, maybe, but nothing severe. But it's a bit coincidental, don't you think, that he just happens to get into an accident after his daughter's death?”

  “A bit. Not that the Perennas are known for their good fortune, though.”

  “No, just their monetary fortune,” Jack agreed.

  A bout of silence hummed between us.

  “What're you thinking?” Jack said after a moment.

  “Nothing. It's just weird.”

  “Yeah.” He shifted a bit beside me, turning to look out across the snow for a moment before facing back towards me. “But I meant, what're you thinking about the rest? Are you – I mean, do you think you'll stay up here? Or do you still not want to do this?”

  I glanced over at him.

  “I came back,” I said uncertainly.

  “I can see that, Nim.” He rolled his eyes, but his expression was still far from lightened. “But seeing as you were pretty adamant when you took off before, I didn't want to assume that you'd had a change of heart.”

  I scratched at the back of my neck.

  “Right. Don't blame you.”

  “So?”

  “So …?”

  “I'm pulling teeth here, Nim,” Jack said, rolling his eyes again. “So did you come back to look into this with me, or are you still out?”

  I pushed my hands into my pockets.

  “I don't know.”

  He sighed.

  “I'm not going to tell you,” he said straightforwardly, as though he had known that that was what I had been hoping for. “And I get it if you don't.”

  I chewed the insides of my mouth, wondering if that could be possible. He might have understood that I didn't want to get involved with another situation so close to the one that had occurred before, but he couldn't – as far as I knew – understand why.

  “I was seeing things before,” I said. “I was – you know – they were hallucinations.”

  He frowned.

  “You mean like … giant, pink rabbits or something?”

  “No, like … things that I thought were real.” When he continued to look confused, I went on. “In the graveyard the other night, when I thought someone had grabbed me? That wasn't – I wasn't right about that.”

  Jack frowned further.

  “But Nim,” he said, “I was there. There was definitely someone there.”

  “You didn't see him,” I reminded him. “I thought that someone was there and told you to run, and so you thought that there was, too.”

  “No, really, Nim – there was someone there,” he repeated. “I said that I didn't get a good look at him, but I definitely saw something over your shoulder – and I saw him again when you fell down, remember? He was right behind us – and he wasn't the groundskeeper.”

  I bit my lip; I knew that he simply thought that he had seen something because I had been so certain at the time, but in the adrenaline rushing through his system, it had more than likely been nothing more than one of the gravestones illuminated in the moonlight that had frightened him.

  “When I was in the church the other day,” I continued, “I thought someone had come after me. They – I thought that it held me down and tried to drown me in the holy water. But it wasn't – I'm certain that it wasn't real, Jack.”

  “But Father Taggart said that he heard something,” Jack countered, still trying to prove me otherwise. “He said he heard a commotion, and that Mea was barking like mad – and that you were drenched and shaken up.”

  “But it wasn't real. Or – or the thing that came after me wasn't real.”

  “But it must've been, Nim: he heard it, and Mea saw it –”

  “She saw me having a fit, more likely, and was trying to warn me that I was in trouble,” I said calmly. “And it's lucky that she did, or else ...”

  “But Nim, how're you so certain that what happened wasn't actually what happened?” Jack cut in. “Because from where I'm standing, it sounds a lot more likely that someone's onto what we're doing and came after us than it does to think that –”

  “The thing wasn't human, Jack,” I said firmly. “It wasn't – it was nothing like I've seen before. It was this – this demonic face that was completely warped and misshapen, and it definitely wasn't real.”

  I took a breath as I finished, feeling remarkably lighter after having said it than I had before. Jack was staring at me with an odd frown, but, after a moment or so, licked his lips and said in a more lighthearted voice, “Well, it could've been Old Mister Kikkert. He's not a real looker, if you know what I mean.”

  I gave him a look.

  “What? I'm just saying,” he said, giving a shrug. “He says he was injured in the war, but everyone knows he had an accident on his riding mower years back. You should be required to have a license to operate those things.”

  I raised my eyebrows just slightly.

  “Anyway,” I said. “It was a hallucination.”

  “The second one, maybe,” Jack said. “But I think we should question Kikkert all the same.”

  “You're ridiculous,” I said.

  He grinned widely.

  “Does that mean you're staying?”

  “That means that I don't think we have to worry that someone's after us anymore,” I said, and his eyes lit up further at the confirmation.

  Ch. 13

  We opted to stop by the baker's on our way back to the church, as Jack was hungry and I was greatly in need of a cup of coffee. Selecting the table in the far back corner, we both leaned in to continue the conversation about the Perennas in a low voice.

  “Okay, so let's just think about this reasonably,” Jack said. “Who would want the Perennas dead?”

  “From what you've told me about the town, quite a few people.”

  “Right, but that's Mr. Perenna. His kids were well-liked – except for Eliot, that is.”

  I subconsciously scrunched up my nose at the thought of the boy's paint-fumed room, and for a moment considered the idea that he had had some sort of free-isocyanate-induced delirium that had led him to go on a killing spree before reminding myself of the careful, inconspicuousness of the crimes and negating the thought.

  “Alright, so maybe the question isn't who would want them dead, then,” I said, “but who would benefit from them being dead.”

  “I'm pretty sure the list is fairly the same,” Jack said dryly. “Though this way we could probably stick the mortician on the top of the list: he's next in line to be the head of the town council. Not to mention, he gets more business.”

  “Wait, there's a mortician in town?”

  “Of course there is – we're not completely lacking in amenities up here. There're some volunteer fire-fighters, too.”

  I stared at him openly.

  “Jack,” I said, “if there's a mortician in town, why didn't we just ask him about Tommy's injury rather than sneaking into the family crypt?”

  Jack gave a thoughtful frown.

  “It didn't occur to me at the time,” he said, adding an innocent shrug when I continued to glare at him. “And anyway – it worked out better this way. No one knows that we're looking into the whole thing.”

  “How comforting,” I drawled.

  Jack grinned.

  “Ah, come on, Nim: how often do you get the chance to go sneaking around a – oh, thank you, Mrs. Coffey.”

  He halted mid-sentence as the baker came over to the table with our dinner. As she placed the coffee in front of me and then moved to put his food down in front of him, she leaned over and asked in a carrying whisper, “Does
this boy ever eat?”

  Jack glanced at me with a smirk.

  “Only on occasion.”

  “How about a piece of blueberry pie?” she said, turning to me with a smile. “I could even warm it up for you, if you'd like.”

  “No, that's alright –”

  “I'll get you one,” she said, deciding for me. “And some ice-cream. Dairy's good for your bones.”

  She gave me a look as though fearing that my skeleton was likely to disintegrate within my flesh at any given moment, and then hurried back to the counter before I could refuse again. Jack laughed through a mouthful of his dinner.

  “Ah, don't worry, Nim,” he said, unable to keep his expression straight. “I'll eat it for you.”

  “Thank God. I hate blueberries.”

  “Don't say that too loud – it's sacrilege around here,” he informed me. “And how can you hate blueberries? That's just not right.”

  “They're blue,” I said, thinking that that had to be reason enough. “If anything's not right, it's when food is the same color as cleaning products.”

  “Thank you for putting that image into my head – not that it'll derail my appetite, mind you.”

  “Nothing derails your appetite,” I countered. “Which brings me back to the Perennas' crypt. Do you think the mortician would talk to us about Anna's death?”

  Jack chewed a mouthful of rye bread as he considered it.

  “I don't know: he's not entirely friendly – though I suppose if you're use to dealing with dead people, lives ones can be a bit of a hassle. Why?”

  “Nothing. I just wondered if maybe there was something we could find out about how Anna died.”

  “You mean you think she didn't slit her wrists?” Jack made a face. “I don't think the family could cover that up, Nim. Not unless the three of them are in on it together, which seems about as likely as you actually eating the pie that Mrs. Coffey's bringing you.”