Chapter 43
Look Up
Maryanne
Maryanne let the sobs come. She didn’t even try to stop them. Not this time.
Today, she would let those tears fall and fall and fall. Right here beneath the sunlit Madonna on the attic floor.
She should be in school. She had been in school at least briefly. But she’d left about fifteen minutes into first period, telling Mr. McKenzie that she wasn’t feeling well and was going home for the day. He must have seen it in Maryanne’s eyes that she was ready to burst out crying. Or burst out with something else—like how he’d drunkenly come on to her. Because all at once his sneer vanished, and he released her from class.
Maryanne had started walking toward the hospital as she left the school. It was Alex’s last day in Mansbridge. As C. W. Stanley had said, they were transferring her to a hospital in Halifax, closer to her family. Alex’s mother had already left Mansbridge, since her daughter would be transported the next day by ambulance. Mrs. Robbins had stopped into Harvell House to say good-bye to Maryanne, Brooke and Mrs. Betts before she caught the bus out of town.
Maryanne had to see Alex one more time. If only one more time. And going to that hospital had been her full intention as she’d walked down the school steps.
Yet her feet had started to drag before she’d gotten too far. God, she was a wreck! She couldn’t visit Alex like this. She had to cry it out first. With tears burning in her eyes, she’d raced back to Harvell House.
She’d snuck back in the front door while Betts was in the kitchen, and John Smith was who-knows-where, and then up the stairs to the attic.
It was a major operation these days to get up to the attic. She and Brooke each still had their keys, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Harvell House had become a very strict place now. Mrs. Betts saw each of the girls out the door to school in the mornings with a check list in hand. Cell phones were to be left on—no exceptions. Betts had been a wreck this last week, but in some ways, a surprisingly strong one. She’d arranged counseling for the girls who wanted it, and she’d called every parent herself.
Clearly, Mrs. Betts blamed herself. Anyone could see that, even if Maryanne hadn’t overhead her tell John Smith as much. She’d had a bad feeling about C. W., and she should have listened to it. John Smith had consoled her to the best of his ability.
Maryanne felt so bad for her.
Patricia Betts had sworn she’d never let it happen again, and the watch she kept on the girls now was positively stifling. Though, oddly, a little comforting.
Maryanne and Brooke had dared to cast out only once in the last week since Connie’s body had been unearthed and C. W. had been killed. While most of the police officers left the house at night, one officer sat up with his coffee in the kitchen and another played solitaire in the parlor, just to make sure no one went down to the basement and compromised the crime scene. But on one of those nights, Brooke woke Maryanne from her fitful sleep. “Come up to the attic. We’ll cast out for a bit.”
It had been risky. It had been wonderful.
They’d gone to the old oak tree by the river, put on the copper bracelets, and just soared a little ways along the dark river, which had not yet frozen.
Maryanne had caught Brooke watching her as they soared together.
“Better?” Brooke asked.
“Yeah,” she had answered. She’d needed that cast out. That reprieve from it all.
It had been an awful few days. There was police everywhere, and questioning everyone—especially Maryanne and Brooke. Both girls stuck to their stories. It didn’t hurt that both of their mothers had arranged for lawyers to be present at all but the initial questioning. Though neither Maryanne nor Brooke had really been suspected of anything. And the forensic evidence backed up their story; the bones in the basement had been there for at least half a century. C. W. Stanley was Billy Stanley, who’d left Mansbridge about five decades ago. He had been Connie Harvell’s stepbrother. The police had eventually found a baby’s skeletal remains wrapped up in a tarp. Just as damning, the bite mark on Alex’s shoulder was forensically matched to Billy. And once word of that got out, four other girls had come forward. All former residents of Harvell House. They too had been attacked at the house. Drugged. Three of them bitten. All of them left half-naked, alone on the attic floor.
“Alex was lucky she wasn’t raped,” Brooke had said to Maryanne one night. It was about ten minutes after lights out when her comment broke the silence.
Maryanne recognized a leading statement when she heard one, but she’d wet her lips in the dark and answered, “Yeah, she sure was.”
From what C. W. had said before Brooke and Connie arrived, Maryanne knew C. W. had sexually assaulted Alex, way back in September. But that was Alex’s secret to tell. She’d tell it when she was ready. If she was ready.
Thankfully, Brooke had seemed satisfied.
Maryanne swiped her tear-wet face, then pulled a tissue out and blew her nose.
Her dad had flown down to Fredericton, rented a car and driven to Mansbridge. He’d spent two evenings at a pricey hotel and two days practically begging Maryanne to come home again, but she’d refused, telling him point-blank that she couldn’t bear to go home. It had broken Maryanne’s heart to hurt her father like that, but she really wasn’t ready to go back to Ontario. Nor was she ready to leave what she’d found here. She regretted being so harsh with her father, but if she hadn’t done it, he’d still be here, cajoling her. She’d tried to soften it by telling him she just needed to be with her friends now, but that she’d be ready to come home soon.
Friends, she’d told her father. Except after today, that would be friend, singular, when Alex’s parents took her home. Maryanne desperately wanted to pound something at the thought, but that would only bring Mrs. Betts.
Poor Alex.
She might never come out of her coma.
Maryanne eased herself down onto the attic’s floor, letting the tears roll down the sides of her temples. She pulled a wad of tissues from the front pocket of her jeans and blew her nose. Then she lay for a few minutes with her swollen eyes closed, one hand flung above her head, the other flat on her belly. She tried to steady her breaths.
“Snap out of it, Hemlock,” she muttered. “You’re going to stop crying. Then you’re going to step up to the plate and go see Alex one last time. You’re going to go and say good-bye to your friend, and pray it isn’t a final one.”
She opened her eyes, but didn’t immediately jump up. Instead, she looked up into the dust that danced around in the light coming through the stained glassed window. She looked way up through the haze of it. Way up to the rafters.
“What the heck?”
Maryanne wiped her eyes. She blinked a good half dozen times. There was something up there. It looked like yellowed edges of paper—a book! Connie’s diary! It was Connie’s diary, and it was tucked into what looked like a carved-out notch in the wooden beam. She never would have seen it had she not been lying on the floor.
She had to work quietly. She carried the old rocking chair over to the spot just below the book. Then, bit by bit, she ‘walked’ the heavy dresser over beside it—lifting one side, then the other, and setting it down carefully each time on its sturdy legs. When she had it in place, Maryanne climbed up on the rocker, then onto the dresser. She reached up and dug Connie’s diary free.
Carefully, soundlessly, she stepped down. Maryanne sat crossed-legged on the attic floor and began flipping through the yellowed pages of Connie’s handwriting, those heartbreaking words. Some familiar, others not. But then as she flipped through further and further, the handwriting changed.
“This is Alex’s writing!” she realized. Pages and pages of it dating back from early September, before Maryanne had even arrived. From when she’d first woken up in the attic, a victim on the floor looking up to find the diary.
She closed her swollen eyes a moment, biting down on her bottom lip. “I know I shouldn
’t do this. But... what if... what if something in here can help Alex?”
For once, she didn’t ignore the niggling feeling.
She began to read.