Hailey’s hands were numb, and she shoved them under her arms as she knelt on top of the mud that covered her big sister. Someone had left a single rose toweather the storm with her. Hailey didn’t care that she was filthy. She didn’t care that the wind sliced through her thin shirt. She just didn’t care…
Very gradually, she felt tired, and she smiled, shivering as she laid herself down to sleep, hopefully forever with her sister. It was cold and colder, but then it was warm. In a little while she’d feel much warmer, and then it wouldn’t be long. It was her time to go, she decided, and she rolled her face into the mud.
Death felt an awful lot like a dream, like being lifted and carried, wrapped in a warm cloak. Snuggling against its softness, Hailey moaned a great exhale and let herself go.
Holly’s voice vibrated in tune with a fiddle playing in the distance. When Hailey tried to open her eyes, they slammed shut, gritty and burning something awful.
Somebody was playing a fiddle. Inside the townhouse.
And Hailey was in her bed, crusted with mud, wrapped in a dark wool blanket, and waking up to a muffled Rakish Paddy. The bed was filthy with flecks of dirt and clay stains on the pillow. A plug of solid Earth stoppered her right ear.
Swinging her feet onto the floor, she untied her sloshy sneakers. Her water-logged feet were grateful when she released them from their prison. As she peeled off her socks and wiggled her toes, she noticed, on her bedside table, a single red rose with a piece of parchment folded like a tent over it. She reached for the note.
Hailey read it several times. The last stanza pulled on her heart, but the rest seemed a bit cryptic. Poetry wasn’t really her thing. It always felt like more of a riddle than anything, and this was no exception.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she set the note next to the rose and rubbed her face. She hated riddles.
Hope’s greatest fool? A weeping cesspool?
None of it made sense. And who could have put a note on her bedside anyway?
Just as she decided to read it again, both the note and the rose began to fade.
No, no, no!
She made a grab for them, but all she came up with was a fistful of air, and when she looked again, they were gone. Vanished.
She stared wide-eyed at her nightstand for several seconds. Then she sank into her bed and pressed her hands against her heart, wondering if she was losing her mind and hoping she hadn’t just imagined that maddeningly cryptic poem-puzzle. It was the closest thing to a love letter she’d ever seen.
Chapter twelve
The Silver Envelope
“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn." - Benjamin Franklin
Hailey stepped into the shower fully clothed, peeling her garments off one piece at a time as she rinsed them free of graveyard dirt. Twenty minutes later, she was finally down to her skivvies and able to hear out of both ears again. By the time she turned the water off, there was enough clay at the bottom of the tub to make a pot.
As she wiped a swath across the mirror, it instantly re-fogged and there, written in neat letters through the steam was the word, “Tomas.”
“Tomas?” she said thoughtfully. “Is that your name, you little trouble-maker?” she said into the mirror, but he didn’t answer.
Gathering her wet clothes inside her towel, Hailey peeked into the empty mirror one last time before opening the bathroom door and scurrying across the hall.
Very nervously, very hesitantly, Hailey joined her uncles for breakfast, not at all looking forward to the stern lecture, the tsk-tsk-tsk’ings and expressions of utter disappointment, which surely awaited her for sneaking out in the dead of night.
Her uncles stood and nodded their good mornings as she slid into her seat at the table, and then they went back to their coffees and papers and morningbanter, behaving as if the world were still spinning normally. Nobody looked very seriously at her at all or even hinted at her late-night jaunt to the graveyard.
Could it be they hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary during the night? Hailey slowly relaxed into a more innocent posture and munched on some bacon.
She shouldn’t be surprised. After all, they hadn’t noticed a toothbrush sticking out of her head—why should they notice that she ran away to die or that someone or something had chucked her back into her bedroom, soaking wet and caked in cemetery dirt?
Absently, she flipped through a stack of mail on the table, stopping suddenly at a silver envelope.
“To Holly and Hailey Hartley,” it read in shaky lettering, and the return address was printed in two lines:
Bear Towne University
The Middle of Nowhere, Alaska
