(Blood and Bone, #1) Blood and Bone (18 page)

“There are no scars on my back, and he never touched me like that. It was Leona. It never was me.”

He sighs. “This is getting old, Sam. How do you not know your own back is scarred to shit? And your dad was a fucking weirdo pervert. Trust me, the story you told the police was thorough. You had many details.” He grabs me, lifting my shirt and running his hands down my back. “See, scars everywhere.”

I turn my head, shaking it. “I can’t see. I need a mirror.” My back burns as if the injuries I didn’t know about are fresh.

He points at the house. “Come on, we can get this over with and you can use the mirror in the bathroom. How the hell do you make someone not see the scars they once had? Dash is a master of something, that’s for sure—mostly bullshit, I think, though.” The whole conversation is coming out of our mouths too easily. We clearly have some ability to detach.

We walk in the long dried grass, next to each other. He still seems tense or angry at me for not remembering, and the closer to the house we get, the worse it is.

When my hand brushes against his, I pull it back. “I swear to you, my father hurt the other kids. I remember it, sort of.”

“It doesn’t matter. I hate coming here, and I hate talking about this. I had a chance to kill that filthy bastard, and I never took my chance. Still pisses me off. Coming here makes me want to burn this dump to the fucking ground so I don’t have to see that look on your face ever again.”

“What look?”

He takes my hand in his and squeezes. “The one where I think for half a second you think maybe you deserved to be tortured.”

His words burn inside me as we round the corner of the house to find the front door is still hanging funny since Derek kicked it in. We push our way in, stopping at the entryway. It smells the same and looks the same, but the pictures are gone from the floor. My heart hurts and my lungs don’t feel like they fill with enough air, like I am starved of essential things the moment we enter.

He walks to the kitchen, looking around, but as if I am attached to a string that a puppet master controls, I walk to the back of the house. Upon entering my bedroom again, I drop to my knees as though I am in a trance. I crawl along the floor to the wall at the very far end of the room and slide my hands along the edge of the wall, next to the baseboards. I catch the jagged piece of wooden floorboard I am looking for, sliding and lifting it, revealing a storage place in the floor.

I lean forward, a little scared of what’s in there, only to find simple things a child would have hidden. Inside the dusty, cobweb-ridden space is a small brown box coated in enough dust that I actually believe I am the first person to open this. Beneath the layer of dust and cobwebs, I see there’s a four-leaf clover pressed into the lid. I reach down, noting the way my hands shake. It feels so heavy in my hands, regardless of weighing almost nothing.

I lift it into my lap, sitting back on my butt and crossing my legs.

“What is it?”

“A box I made with my mom before she died. We pressed the four-leaf clover and pasted it onto the lid with a gluey hodgepodge. I cried for the clover. I said it was now trapped for life under the glue. It would never again feel the wind on its leaves or the sun on its stem.”

“Dramatic for a small kid. Ya have always seen the glass half empty, though. What did your mum say to that?” He drops onto the floor next to me with a thud. I jump from the sound, but my eyes won’t leave the box.

“She said I should be happy for the clover because now it won’t ever age and it won’t ever rot. We preserved it in the perfect condition, so it will be lucky and beautiful forever. Always bringing me luck.” Tears fill my eyes as I hear her voice with my own.

“What’s inside?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.” How I can recall some things and not others is driving me insane. Bravery fills me, forcing me to lift the lid. What’s inside is odd.

“A necklace Mom gave me when I was three. I took it off when she died and kept it in the box like it was a treasure.” I lift the small silver chain and place it on the floor. “A rubber ball Leona gave me that my father gave her. She said I could have it. He’d given her a pretty ring, and she liked that better. He had never given me anything. I wasn’t even allowed to see inside the bin of the pretty clothes.” It dawns on me then that my father never touched me except obviously in violence. I recall the meanness. But the bin of pretty clothes wasn’t for me. Leona wore them. So did Michelle, another girl who also babysat me. She was fourteen, like Leona, when I was nine. I gulp away the horror inside me as I grab the next item. “A fortune from a fortune cookie that says
You will find a way inside of—.
I got it when my friend Nicole’s family took me out for Chinese food. I’d never had it before. They said I should get a new one because it was unfinished, but I liked it the way it was. It left possibility.”

Maybe it’s the discomfort of being where we are or the silence of the still and haunted house. But he scoffs like we are joking about on the grass, not looking through an old box of trinkets from when I lived with my monster of a father.

When I lift the next item out, another tear drips down my cheek, leaving a streak. “A picture of me and my mom.”

He takes it, inspecting it. “Ya look like her.”

The very bottom of the box has a note. I lift it out, seeing instantly it’s my handwriting.
Come and find me, peeping Sam!

“What’s that?”

I hand it to him, letting him try to decipher it. “I wrote that.”

He nods. “I can see that. Why would ya, though?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I lean forward, glancing into the hole again, certain there must be more.

“Well, that’s fucking mysterious. Why is everything with ya a
fucking puzzle? Why didn’t ya just write everything down before he fucking erased your damned mind?”

“I think I must have known someone was watching me.” A scowl builds on my face. “And stop cussing so much. It makes me uncomfortable, how much you swear.”

His jaw drops. He shakes his head. “Well, now I’ve heard it all.”

Ignoring him and drumming my fingers along the wooden floor, I think about the sentence. “It could be an anagram. I mean, it’s sort of random to call me peeping Sam.” But saying the phrase brings with it a memory, exactly the way “plain Jane” did.

I close my eyes and suddenly it’s all there, filling my brain.

I’m small, very small, maybe eight at most. I chase a bunny under the house. Our house is on blocks like a trailer. Father’s been digging a basement. I creep under there, my fingers digging into the dank grass and weeds.

A noise fills the air. The sound of a whimper. I follow it to the front of the house where the steps are. There’s a hole in the floor, a notch out of the wood so small I haven’t seen it from the inside of the house. But here in the dark I can see light from inside the house shining down into the mucky dead grass. I lift my face, up into the floorboards, no longer interested in the bunny, and put my eye to the notch hole. Leona, my babysitter, is in there. I can’t see her face, but I know the sound of her voice. She’s making a funny sound, but whatever she’s doing, I can’t see it. Father’s back is to me. He’s got something in his hands. He mutters encouragements, repeating the word
diddling
like it means something. He sounds different with her, like he likes her.

I gag, trying desperately to snap out of the memory, but this one has me and it’s not letting go.

I watch my father’s back, completely confused about what is happening. They make sounds and do things I don’t see. Clothes ruffle
and bodies shuffle, and the dark and light mix in the shadows and angles I can’t catch with my prying eyes. She gets up and walks to my bedroom. It’s then I catch a glimpse of the pretty clothes she has on. They’re from the bin I’m not allowed to touch.

Hurrying back to the backyard, I catch a glimpse of her changing in my bedroom from where I’m running through the field. He likes her better than me. It’s then I realize it.

From then on, when she or Michelle came over to babysit and I was sent outside to play, I would hurry under the house. There in the dark I would wait at the notch to watch the things they did for the camera. It was like a train wreck; I couldn’t look away. It made me feel funny. I knew it was wrong, all of it.

The memory fades into the fog and mud in my head as I blink tears from my eyes. “I lied about my father.”

He wraps himself around me, hugging me tightly to him. “No you didn’t. He was a monster.”

I nod. “He was, but he never molested me. He molested the girls who babysat me.” I am ashamed of myself. My body curls into his, desperate to hide from the truth, but I know that’s where the secrets are hidden. They’re buried in the places I am most ashamed to talk about or share. When I told myself to go back, this is the place I meant. I take his hand, pulling him to the living room where the notch in the floor still sits in the corner. “He did it all here, in this living room. He paid them to babysit, but he always stayed home. He paid them heaps of money to star in the shows.” My cheeks are bright red and my eyes are burning. “I watched through this hole from under the house. I never told anyone for a year. He did it all the time. The pictures and movies didn’t show faces clearly. No one could tell who the kid in the picture was, just that it was a kid.” I turn, looking at the fireplace. My feet move, even though my brain is screaming for them to stop. I reach for the brick I know will move, revealing the hiding place. When I pull it back, the papers from the
floor are stuffed in there. The papers Derek showed me before. They have always been here. They never were in the folder or found by the police. One picture grabs at me from the stack. It’s a girl’s mouth with a cherry in it. A bitter smile owns my face as I recall Michelle teaching me to do it when she babysat me. I want to judge myself for the fact I’m ever so slightly excited that I didn’t learn the trick in a brothel somewhere.

Rory gets up and walks to the fireplace. He reaches into the hole, pulling out the papers. He gags slightly, turning his face away from the sickening images. From the look on his face I have to assume this might be more than he can handle, but then he shakes his head. “This isn’t your fault.”

I hate that he is seeing this side of me. “It is. I never told anyone what he was doing until he caught me doing it, touching myself in the living room. I was just about ten. He beat me, so I told the teacher everything he had done to Michelle and Leona, but I made it sound like he did it to me. I told them every tiny detail, but it wasn’t ever done to me.”

I hate myself.

I hate this house.

I hate Derek because I know he knows this and has used it all to play with my head.

Rory sits with the knowledge inside himself. I can see him processing and contemplating it all. “I have to burn this house to the ground. We have to leave now.”

I shake my head. “There’s one place I need to go first.” I turn and walk out the front door to the hatch at the side of the house. The basement was built when my father got out of prison. I lift up the doors, letting them fall away to the sides. Rory is next to me when I take the stairs into the darkness. He pulls out his cell phone, making it a flashlight. The cellar is so creepy, but there is one place I have to see. I turn to the right, walking to the front where I used to be able to
see under the stairs. I look up, seeing the notch hole in the floor like it always was. But there in the dusty darkness I see something that was never there before—a VHS taped to the underside of the wood.

It’s the only secret I have ever kept with myself. The only secret I have kept from Derek.

I pry the tape loose, dragging it from the wood. Dust and particles drop from it, but I finally get it free, handing it to Rory as I close my eyes and try to step away from the dust.

Something hits me in the back of the head, making everything black.

13. THE VIEW FROM BELOW

S
moke wakes me. My head is throbbing, and as far as I can see in the dark, the air is filled with dust. I squint, trying to see where I am. It takes several seconds of replaying the last few images I have in my head before I realize where I am.

I am on the dirty floor of the cellar, and the house above is on fire. Looking up I see light in the notch hole. Something moves up there in the smoke, making the light vanish and then come again. My head is pounding and my heart is racing but I get up, dragging myself to the notch. I sway from the trauma done to my head, grabbing quickly onto a joist to stabilize myself. I lean forward, peeking through the notch hole like I did all the time as a child, and once again I see something I don’t expect—a gray eye looking back at me.

I jump, still staring at it. It moves like he has narrowed his gaze. “I missed you all day, baby.”

I shake my head as tears start to trickle down my cheeks. “Why are you doing this to me? Where’s Rory?”

He laughs. “You still believe he’s on your side? He hits you in the head and he’s still the good guy? Jesus, Jane. What do I have to do to prove I love you?”

My eyes narrow, matching the look on his face, I’m sure. “Give me back my video.”