Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
One particular image made my blood go frigid, my breath shallow.
Clara.
Her gaze was flat, her face round and pretty . . . and a softer version of Beatrice’s. The genetic legacy was far more potent than in the painting above the entranceway. Her eyes an endless paleness, her dress dark and stiff around her neck.
A collar, choking her.
Everything in the image spoke of containment.
Her body imprisoned by the buttons that marched down her throat and chest. Her face a master class in self-control. Or perhaps it had to do with the hand on her shoulder. The man who pressed down that hand, his thin fingers with their big knuckles curling into her soft flesh, was tall and gaunt, with hollows in his cheeks.
No children in the image, but it was clear this had been taken years into their marriage. Long enough for Blake Shepherd to lose not just a significant amount of flesh from his bones, but also his sanity. Madness blazed in the eyes that looked out from the photo.
What had Clara suffered in this house?
And though I hated what I was seeing, I lifted the camera to my eye and took a photograph of a photograph. My equipment was good; the copy would come out crystal clear. I didn’t know if I’d ever again examine it, but I felt a compulsion to make a record of it. Perhaps because half this house had already burned down.
A legacy of ruin.
Clara’s eyes followed me as I walked down the hallway, and I had to fight with myself not to look back over my shoulder. When I did turn, it was off to the right and out of the line of sight of Clara and Blake and their sole surviving child.
It niggled at me, that mirror of past and present.
Summer sunshine and peach blossoms.
I froze in place. And though I knew the whisper of Bea’s scent was a figment stirred into being by my thoughts of another devastated family, I felt my throat thicken, my eyes burn. “I miss you so much, Bee-bee,” I whispered under my breath, realizing now that it was the same scent I thought I’d smelled this morning in the bathroom.
My mind tumbling unbidden into the past.
Because Bea wouldn’t have hesitated to run into my bathroom if she’d heard me fall, would’ve comforted me after I came out of it. I wanted so desperately for her to be here that I was creating my own magical world where she’d never ended her own life, never left me.
Even knowing the harsh truth, it was tempting to turn, look for a beautiful laughing girl who’d never again smile at me while daring me to take a risk, take a chance.
Somehow, I made myself walk on.
I snapped countless photos of the details in the walls, of the shadows thrown by the diffuse light coming in through the windows, of the dust that floated in the air. Anything and everything, the lens through which I looked at the world a talisman to hold back the dark.
And all the while, I searched.
Looking for any hint of a ninth person on the estate. A ninth person who could never be Bea, no matter how much I wanted that to be true.
White.
I blinked, glanced back through the small window I’d just passed. I hadn’t imagined it. The rain had turned to snow.
“Fuck!”
This had happened a few years earlier, too, while Cable was down here for a game with his university team. A polar blast straight from Antarctica that had thrown the country back into a sudden and hard winter for three or four days. And in large parts of the South Island, that didn’t just mean a dip in temperature.
It meant snow.
Cable had sent me images of the playing turf covered in white, and of him and his teammates sledding down slopes that had gone from spring to winter in the space of a single night. The blast had killed lambs just born, destroyed crops when they were at their most vulnerable—and trapped people when roads became impassable without warning.
I kicked the wall, and then hopped around cursing myself for giving in to temper.
I hadn’t realized I’d been holding on to hope of getting out of here soon until I saw the snow. Because there was no way in hell we were escaping the estate anytime soon now. None of our vehicles had snow tires and I didn’t know about Darcie and Ash, but the rest of us weren’t used to driving in snow.
I hadn’t even driven for years! I took the Tube or the bus!
Gritting my teeth, I lifted my camera. If the kitchen was Aaron’s “zen,” as he’d once put it, being behind the lens was mine, and I desperately needed to find that zen. And say what you would, this estate was fascinating.