Burden Falls

by Kat Ellis

  By the time we reach the manor gate, the sky above is a heavy slate gray, loaded for an even heavier snowfall tonight. Lying weather forecast.

  “Okay, so . . .”

  I wait for Dominic to get out of the car, but instead he pulls the gate remote from his bag and the manor gates swing open. They still bear my family’s name. I guess Madoc hasn’t had time to have new ones made yet. Ugh, will he actually rename it Miller Manor?

  When Dominic still doesn’t move, I realize I’m going to have to break the silence again.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to drive you all the way in,” I say. “Your parents will freak, right?”

  “They’re out of town,” he says, and I think his voice sounds a little stronger now. His skin is still a nasty shade of gray, though. “Freya too. There’s no one home.”

  I guess that explains why none of them came looking for him.

  Slowly, I turn into the driveway. My tires crunch hesitantly up the gravel path.

  The urge to turn the car around and floor it hits me like a brick. I don’t belong here anymore. It’s like finding a favorite sweater at the back of the closet, only to discover it no longer fits.

  It doesn’t help that the Millers have painted the manor what I can only describe as a muted pistachio.

  “Seriously?” I mutter.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Hey, how come you didn’t have your car at school?” I ask, more to distract myself than because I really want to know.

  “Freya borrowed it. She’s got a catalog modeling job in . . .” Dominic’s voice trails off. At first, I think the vile green of the manor has caused his migraine to flare up again, but he’s frowning at something up ahead. Then I see it too—Dominic’s shiny black Porsche, sitting in front of the manor like it belongs there. “I guess she made other travel plans.”

  Maybe with the secret boyfriend you don’t know about, I think. Wasn’t it for today she arranged her sketchy hookup with whoever was on the other end of that call?

  But that’s none of my business, and I don’t want to explain how I know about it.

  I eye the manor warily, half expecting to see Freya’s nasty face scowling down at me from one of the windows, but the house is dark. It doesn’t look like anyone’s home.

  “Are you gonna be okay?”

  Dominic nods briskly and opens the door. A blast of freezing air rushes in.

  “The worst is over. I just need to sleep it off. Thanks, Thorn.” Dominic gets out, but doesn’t close the door. “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I couldn’t meet you at the library after school. I meant to text, then realized I don’t have your number. That might be useful if we’re going to be working on this graphic novel together. And on my Sadie research, of course.”

  “I never said yes to any of that,” I point out, but he just smirks.

  “When I was at the library the other day, I found a bunch of articles about Sadie, and I guess two of your ancestors . . . Would you like to see?”

  I sigh. “Yes.”

  “Here. Put your number in.” He passes me his phone. For the briefest second, I wonder if it holds the video of me acting like a turd last night on the bridge—I’m tempted to check, see if he’s shared it with anyone else. But I don’t. I just input my number and hand it to him. He snorts. “Hello, Pomona.”

  “It’s my middle name. Avalon Pomona.” Both names basically mean “apple.” My parents agreed on wanting an “apple” name because of the whole Thorn’s Blood Apple Sour thing, but couldn’t choose between the two. So I got both. (Cue my dad making “fruit of my loins” jokes for the next almost-seventeen years.) “I figured you wouldn’t want anyone to see my name flashing up on your screen.”

  “My folks might find it a little weird, but they’d hardly be mad about it.” He frowns, seeing my highly dubious expression. “After everything that’s happened, they just want to move on. Freya, though . . .” Dominic snorts, and I don’t need him to finish that thought.

  But I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about his parents’ reaction—after all, if Madoc wanted to bury the hatchet, he’s had a whole goddamn year to reach out to me and Uncle Ty.

  Dominic WhatsApps me a bunch of images of what look like old newspaper articles. “Now you have my number too. I don’t have a middle name, though. What will you save mine as?”

  “I’m sure I can come up with something suitable.”

  I wait while Dominic heads inside the manor. My windows are fogged again, so I have to hang around while they slowly—soooo slowly—clear.

  My eyes wander in the direction of the orchard. The vague, blurry shapes of the trees stand out darkly against the snow-heavy sky.

  Dominic said he painted over the mural, and I guess I believe him. But it wouldn’t hurt to just check, would it?

  I’m striding along the gravel path before I can talk myself out of it.

  Even though the blood-apple trees are dead, and would normally barely be in bud now anyway, it seems as though the bare branches have laced together like twisted fingers, braced to keep me out of the orchard now that I have no claim on it. Jaw set, I force my way through them toward the pavilion. There are faint red stains on the earth in some spots—lingering traces from where old windfalls have bled to death. I smell them, like rotting corpses.

  I check the time on my phone, then pocket it. I’ll be home late, but only a little. As long as I go straight back to the cottage after this, Uncle Ty and Carolyn won’t ask any questions, and we can all just head out to the cemetery as planned.

  Something skitters in the branches above me, setting my heart racing. I scan the trees, searching for a bird, or maybe a squirrel. I don’t see one.

  I can feel something, though. It’s like there’s someone standing just behind the next tree, watching from the shadows. That presence I sometimes used to imagine feeling at the manor but magnified, as if it—she—knows I’m an outsider now.

  No. I’m being ridiculous.

  I’m still a Bloody Thorn. And there’s no goddamn ghost watching me.

  I move slowly, as quietly as I can, checking in all directions in spite of myself. I don’t see anyone. There’s nobody here but me. I keep telling myself that, hoping it’ll start to feel true.

  As I get within reach of the pavilion, a bird lets out a shrill sound, and I trip on a tree root and land hard on all fours in the open doorway. My gloved right hand is buried in a pile of leaves that must’ve blown in. As I shake them off, I see my phone lying on the stone floor, a web of cracks across the screen.

  “Stupid fucking bird!” I yell up at it, though I have a feeling it’s probably gone by now.

  I have no idea what a new screen will cost. However much it is, I can’t afford it. I shove the phone angrily in my coat pocket and get up, dusting dirt off my knees. Then I glance across the pavilion.

  Sitting on the stone bench against the black-painted wall facing me is Freya, wearing her freaky Dead-Eyed Sadie contacts again. I scream, clutching at my chest like some damsel from a black-and-white movie. “Jesus, Freya! What is wrong with you?”

  She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move. Just sits there, staring at me with her dead eyes, her pale hands in her lap like she’s waiting for something.

  Her dead . . .

  “Freya?” I croak. Because she isn’t moving at all. As my vision adjusts to the dimness of the pavilion, I notice her eyes don’t actually look like contacts.

  Her eyes don’t look like eyes.

  They’re gaping holes.

  I scream.

  FOURTEEN

  There are moments when you lose the ability to process time. It happened during the crash that killed my parents, so I know what I’m talking about. It’s happening again now.

  I mean, I see her. Sitting there on the stone bench, with bloody gouges where her eyes ought to be. Hands tucked in
her lap. Body slumped slightly to one side against the wall of the pavilion. The wall Dominic painted black for me. It makes Freya’s red hair all the more dazzling, though there are bloody tangles in it.

  I reach out slowly, hand shaking as it nears her face. She doesn’t look like herself anymore. The inhumanity of what’s been done to her plants explanations in my back-brain—it’s probably just a mannequin, a prop from one of their shows. She’s playing another trick on me, hahahahahaha.

  As my hand hovers next to her, I notice red marks on the bench. Smears on the rough stone. Handprints, I think. Some are big, but if I hold my hand just so, it pretty much covers one of them exactly. I slide off my glove. Yes, an almost perfect match.

  I brush my fingertips across her blood-soaked cheek. I’ve never felt anything so cold.

  “Ava? Are you all right? I heard screaming—”

  Time snaps back, capturing Dominic in its wicked recoil. He looks past me. Rushes to his sister. I can only watch as he searches for a pulse, finds none. Talks to her, sharp and frantic. Starts CPR. I want to tell him to stop because I can see it’s too late. I don’t, though. He wouldn’t want to hear it, and I don’t want to be the one to shatter that hope.

  “Dominic,” I murmur. I don’t think he’s heard me until he lifts his head. His face is smeared with blood now too. He thrusts his phone at me.

  “Get an ambulance!”

  I nod, but he’s already gone back to work on his sister’s corpse.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Miss Thorn? Ava?”

  I blink up at the cops sitting across the table from me. The one asking the questions—Detective Holden, I think he said—is a wiry white guy in his mid-fifties. He’s wearing a wrinkled gray suit with his tie hanging loose. I guess this was supposed to be the end of his workday. The other cop, Officer Cordell, is a younger Black woman in uniform. She hasn’t said much, but she nods at me whenever she catches me looking her way. I’m not sure if it’s meant to be reassuring, or just letting me know she’s watching me.

  “Sorry, what was the question?”

  I’ve been here a while now . . . an hour? Two? It’s a square, windowless room painted a shade of gray that acts like a sponge to both light and a person’s will to live.

  They took my fingerprints when I got here. Swabbed under my nails. Removed my shoes and put them in plastic bags “just to rule them out.” So I’m sitting in an old pair of Uncle Ty’s sneakers he had in his trunk, hugging myself, because I can’t seem to stop shaking, even though it’s warm in the police station.

  I’m surprised he didn’t just ask Carolyn to step in, but maybe he felt like he needed to come. Either way, I’m so glad he’s here.

  Uncle Ty sits beside me, looking washed out and sweaty from his fever. He was still in bed when the cops called him to come meet me at the station.

  “I’m sorry to keep having to go over this,” Holden says. “We just need to make sure we get all the details while they’re fresh in your mind, you understand. So, can you tell me why you went to the pavilion?”

  I glance at Uncle Ty, but he’s staring at the far wall like a zombie. In the harsh lighting, he actually looks a little green.

  “When I lived at the manor, I painted the inside of the pavilion—they were like comic panels, but they told our family history. It was supposed to be a kind of memorial after my parents died. I meant to paint over it before we moved, but I didn’t get the chance.”

  Detective Holden nods. “So that’s why you went there?”

  “Um, no. Not exactly.” I throw another glance at Uncle Ty. “Dominic told me he’d already done it, and I . . . just wanted to make sure.”

  “So, after you found Miss Miller’s body, what happened then? Did you move her? Touch anything else inside the pavilion?”

  I frown, trying to think. But the images come spiraling back on their own anyway. Me screaming for what felt like eons. Freya’s empty eye sockets seeming to scream back at me. Then Dominic . . . I remember him appearing in the doorway, asking what was wrong. Looking past me.

  His sister sitting against the cold black wall.

  “I . . . no. I touched her face because I wasn’t sure . . .” That’s a lie. I knew she was dead, but it didn’t seem possible. “Dominic came in then.”

  “So, between the time you arrived at the house with Dominic and when you found the body, how long would you say that was?”

  I shrug. “Not long. Less than five minutes, I think.”

  Officer Cordell makes a note, but I can’t see what it says. Maybe to check whether I was actually out there on my own long enough to murder Freya and carve out her eyes.

  “What happened then?” Detective Holden says gently.

  “Dominic tried to resuscitate her, but I could tell she was gone.”

  The detective taps the end of his pen against his chin. “How could you tell?”

  She was too cold, I want to tell him. Too pale, her lips grayish blue beneath the streaks of red.

  “I was with my parents when they died,” I say instead. “I know what dead looks like.”

  A hand grips my arm. Uncle Ty’s still facing the detective. It probably looks like a comforting gesture, but there’s a tightness around his mouth I instinctively know means I should shut up.

  “Are Mr. and Mrs. Miller back in town yet?” I ask. I don’t care that they’re the Millers right now; I just hate the idea that Dominic is alone. If Uncle Ty and Carolyn hadn’t been there for me last year, I know I’d have fallen apart completely. I don’t want that for Dominic. Or anyone.

  “Should be arriving any time now,” Detective Holden says with a nod. “You know them—Mr. and Mrs. Miller?”

  I don’t need a grip on my arm to tell me to tread carefully here. “Not well,” I say. “But, you know, they bought the manor . . .” I shrug, like that explains the entirety of our family’s connection with theirs.

  “But you knew Freya from school, right?”

  “We’re in art class together.”

  “Not friends, though?” the detective presses.

  “It’s getting late,” Uncle Ty says, his voice gruff. “I think it’s time I got my niece home.”

  But Holden says, “Just one last question, if you don’t mind, Ava.” He continues without waiting for Uncle Ty’s go-ahead, or mine. “Can you think of anyone who might’ve wanted to hurt Freya?”

  A hard, cold lump forms in my chest.

  Apart from me?

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “How about anyone she fell out with recently? A friend, boyfriend, girlfriend . . . ?” Holden splays his hands, inviting me to fill them with leads.

  I’m about to say I can’t think of anyone, but then I remember the night after we moved out of the manor—unintentionally eavesdropping on her call.

  “She had a . . . well, a boyfriend, I think. I heard her talking to him on the phone Sunday night. I have no idea if they fell out or anything, but I don’t think it’s common knowledge that Freya is . . . was . . . even seeing anyone.”

  In my peripheral vision, I see Officer Cordell write something else in her notebook, but it’s Holden who asks, “Where were you when you overheard her?”

  “At the manor. Or around the property, anyway. I’d gone to . . . look for my friend, Ford.”

  He pauses, then says, “Can you remember what time this call was?”

  “Around eight thirty?” I can’t actually remember, but I left the cottage right after dinner, so this seems like it’s in the right ballpark. “I think she was arranging to meet him today.”

  “Did you catch a name?”

  “I’m sure Ava would’ve mentioned that, Detective,” Uncle Ty says wearily. “And that was a lot more than just one question.”

  Holden smiles, but it’s a put-upon smile. “Of course. But we may have som
e follow-up questions for Ava as our investigation progresses. You aren’t planning any trips out of town in the next few weeks, are you, Mr. Thorn?”

  “No, Detective,” Uncle Ty says. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  * * *

  * * *

  It’s late by the time we get back from the police station. The cottage windows are all dark.

  Like dead eyes . . .

  Uncle Ty’s about to get out of the car when I stop him.

  “Do you think Freya’s death has something to do with that girl who washed up the other day?” I ask.

  “I dunno. I guess the cops’ll figure out if it was connected, right?”

  “But that girl drowned—it was an accident. What happened to Freya was no accident. So they can’t really be connected, can they?”

  He exhales slowly through his nose before answering. “It kinda makes you wonder, though . . .”

  “What?”

  “If maybe there’s something to those stories about Dead-Eyed Sadie. Maybe she wants her eyes back.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  I expect him to break into a grin, despite the fact that now is not the time for joking around. But he just stares back at me for a long moment, then shrugs and turns away.

  It’s not that I’ve somehow missed the connection up until now—gouged eyes are hard to miss. But Uncle Ty doesn’t believe in Sadie. I think back to when I was little and he used to tease me with stories about the ghost-witch who was out to get me—it was obvious then that he didn’t think she was real.

  Wasn’t it?

  I mean, unless all his dicking around was to hide the fact that he was scared . . .

  But, even if some tiny part of it’s true, the stories my mom told me growing up painted Sadie as nothing but a warning: Take care, something bad’s coming. She was never the “something bad.” At least, I didn’t think so.

  “Are you okay, kiddo?” Uncle Ty says.

  I nod slowly. “Are you? You look awful. Sorry for having to drag you out when you’re so sick—”