Come Little Children (15 page)

“Unbelievable.”

“Camilla…” Peter clasped his hands around her neck, trying to regain eye contact. “You’re worked up over what everyone else thinks. Just think about us. Do you love me?”

She met Peter’s gaze again. The sounds from outside were muted, leaving nothing but total silence.

“I’m happy with you,” she said. “Happier than I’ve been my whole life. I don’t see why anything has to change.”

“So it’s the marriage part?”

“It’s…it’s weddings,” she covered, breaking away from his grip and turning toward the window. “They’re so
showy
. What do all these crowds and cakes and chrysanthemums mean anyway, right?”

“Camilla—”

“And suddenly your life isn’t just you anymore, and all the problems and the…the
pressure
are literally twice as much. And then love is what’s supposed to make it work, but it
doesn’t
always work because it’s not like it’s electricity or gravity or anything. It’s…it’s…I don’t know…”
Fairy dust
, she wanted to say, but held the words back.

“Camilla. I want to be with you.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“If you felt the way I do—”

“What? Then I’d understand? Maybe that’s it. Maybe I don’t understand. If love is intimacy and commitment, then sure, I suppose I’m in love.”

“You suppose you’re in love?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Look,” Peter cut her off. He took the ring out of its box and dropped it in Camilla’s front dress pocket. “Keep this for now. If you decide to say yes, put it on and I’ll know when you’re ready.”

“What if I don’t?”

“It’s the only ring I plan on giving.”

Peter kissed her on the cheek and walked away. He went to the staircase and, halfway down, turned and gave one more closed-mouth smile before disappearing.

Camilla looked down at the wedding spread in the backyard, torn and enervated like one of the attic’s many tired assets.

There was too much Peter didn’t know about her. Her
preexisting conditions
; infertility being the big shebang, of course, but
far from the only tick on the list. Abandoned foster homes, five years of student loans, her mother—oh yes, she hadn’t even
begun
to explicate the saga of Diana Carleton’s many dissociative faces.

Camilla didn’t want to leave the attic but she didn’t want to stay either, so she just stared out the window and rocked back and forth between her choices like a yo-yo on a tangled thread. When the backyard was finally dressed for the wedding and the guests were filtering in, she blinked a few more times and made her way downstairs.

The wedding’s seating arrangement was extremely unbalanced. A string of guests had filed their way through the house and taken chairs on whichever of the bride or groom’s side they were there to support.

The groom’s side—the right—had twenty people scattered around. The bride’s side was completely empty.

Camilla heard the piano playing outside. She took her hand off the doorknob and turned around to see Laura entering the kitchen with her frilly wedding dress bunched around her ankles.

“So...I guess I’m the only outsider left after this. Unless you’re not taking his name?”

“You’re joking.” Laura laughed. “They’d cremate me alive.”

She joined Camilla at the door, and together they peeked through the window like two Pink Ladies waiting for Greased Lightning to roll up. Outside, the preceremony music was still playing as the crowd fanned themselves in the blistering midday heat with whatever paper they could scrounge up from the bottoms of their pockets and purses.

Suddenly, Laura leaned over and gave Camilla a hug.

“Thank you. So much. Even if you don’t say yes to Peter, I’m still here, all right?”

“Ugh,” she grunted. “Who else knows?”

“No one. When he asked if he could steal you this morning, I said not until he told me why. Since I don’t see a ring, I assume it’s not because it didn’t go with the outfit.”

“I haven’t decided yet. It came out of nowhere.”

“I
know
. A month in?” Laura shrugged. “Luke at least gave me two.”

“What is it with these Vincents?” Camilla let out a full-body sigh. “Aren’t men supposed to be commitment scaredy-cats? I mean, I’m glad he’s not a chauvinistic pig, but a romantic? I don’t know what’s worse.”

“If you think the proposal’s sudden, wait until they start talking kids. I swear, the day after the engagement the whole family was already asking names.”

Camilla forced a snicker. “You’re not pregnant?”

“Not yet, touch wood.”

“Or don’t.”

Laura started laughing and couldn’t stop. It was infectious, and Camilla—who hadn’t laughed in over a week—cracked a smile and started laughing too.

Outside, another piano tune was beginning. The guests rose to their feet.

“For what it’s worth,” Laura said, reining in her laughter as they looked out and watched Lucas and Peter take their places under the gazebo, “they’re good men. Any girl would be lucky to have them.”

Camilla watched Peter plant himself on his mark. He was squinting at the house, blinded by the sunlight that was hitting the altar at a direct angle from in front of the estate. From where he was positioned, it meant that she could see him but he
couldn’t see her. Still, he stared patiently into the painful rays, waiting for her to come to him.

“Well then,” she said, turning the handle, “let’s not keep them waiting.”

Outside was blistering hot, and as she stepped into the sunlight, Camilla thought she could actually hear her skin sizzling. She hoped she wouldn’t be a sweaty tomato by the time they reached the altar, but the rays were harsh and the minister seemed like a marathon away.

One step ahead of another, she did her best to find the beat of Jasper’s piano march while at the same time trying to remember to smile and hold her shoulders back and balance on the balls of her toes—in other words, walk like a lady—but it was surprisingly hard and made her hate the fact that models who couldn’t scrape two hundred on their SATs could do this a thousand times better than she could. True, she had once done a stint of modeling, but this was one of the numerous reasons she was told to stop: her legs never seemed to cooperate when they needed to most. It didn’t help that the seating arrangement made everything feel unbalanced, either; with absolutely no one on the left side of the congregation, she had to fight from veering to the right.

The closer she led the processional, the heavier the engagement ring felt in her pocket. She looked at Peter. He was watching her with a grin stuck on his face, and immediately she looked away and went back to focusing on guiding her stork legs down the aisle.

Left, right…left, right…left, right…

When they reached the gazebo, Camilla climbed the stairs and stood to the side while the minister brought Laura and
Lucas together. As he began his “Dearly beloved” introduction, Camilla tried scanning the audience, but it was no use. The sun was like a stage light that blocked out the people past the front row; unfortunately, the front row consisted only of Moira, Maddock, Brutus, and the Vincents’ cats, Prim and Proper, who were all sitting in freshly lacquered chairs with plush cushions padding their asses.

Moira was perfectly still, perched under a decorative sun hat as the matchmaker of all this, the one who had been pulling her sons’ strings. Had she actually wanted Peter and Camilla together, like Lucas and Laura? Or had Camilla angered her enough in the short time they’d known each other that the old woman no longer wanted anything to do with her?

Again she looked over at Peter, who was watching his brother take Laura’s hand. Then he looked up and their eyes met; he gave a smile and she forced one back.

Her doubts about marriage were clashing violently with not wanting to lose Peter. She felt sick to her stomach—the extreme temperature wasn’t helping—and she looked down for balance, peeking over the rail of the structure at the sparkling pond below.
If you have a heat stroke, faint into the water. You’ll ruin the ceremony anyway, so may as well go for the gusto
.

A shadow crossed Camilla’s beet-red face as the sun rose over the gazebo and blessed them with shade. She regained some of her posture. Lucas and Laura were starting their vows already, which either meant that the ceremony was zipping along at record speed or she must have zoned out again.
Snap out of it! You’re on stage, for Christ’s sake
.

She turned her attention back to the congregation, which was now visible without the harsh glare in her eyes.

There was an older couple sitting in the third row. She exchanged a smile with the elderly man, wanting to seem engaged, and looked past him at a small family on the opposite end. Behind them was a younger couple—the same ones she’d seen pushing a stroller three weeks ago—and a man with his teenage son.

Her eyes kept scanning the seats.

Another pair of couples, an old widow in a white slip, a single mom with a little boy—

Camilla’s knees buckled halfway to the floor. Her eyes bugged open, fixed on the sight of the little boy from her first night in Nolan. He was sitting with his mother near the edge of the yard, flanked by empty chairs.

She looked one row back and received another shockwave: there was the girl who went skipping away on the night of the hospital. The eight-year-old from Leonard Gall’s autopsy file.

Girl, boy. Boy, girl. Girl, boy.

They were
right there
, both of them sitting with their families in the back half of the congregation.

Laura and Lucas were now exchanging rings. The ceremony was almost over, and Camilla wished she could freeze everything in order to give herself more time to scan the situation with a new set of eyes.

Something’s not right. What’s. Not. Right
.

The seating arrangement was an obvious red flag—
Why is everyone so far back? They’re not family, but they’re here for the Vincents—
then she looked over and studied the empty section.
And what about Laura’s half? Why didn’t they come?

She stared at the children, unblinking, as her eyes flitted between them like a metronome bar at top speed. The boy looked bored out of his skull. He was kicking the white chair in
front of him, dazed, while the little girl chewed on a wad of gum and combed her fingers through her hair, caught up in a fantasy of her own future wedding, no doubt.

“And now, by the power vested in me, I present to you Mr. and Mrs. Lucas and Laura Vincent.”

Camilla looked back just in time to see Lucas and Laura kiss.

Suddenly there was a bright flash of light and someone in the congregation shouted, “Stop! Stop ‘im, quick! He’s running!”

It took less than a second for Camilla to recognize that it was Brutus who was shouting. He had hopped out of his chair and barreled down the center aisle after a figure who was scrambling toward the house.

She had never seen an obese man move that fast, and in a couple of seconds the fat funeral director pounced through the air and tackled his prey to the ground. Dust and gravel stirred up by the gift table, and suddenly someone’s leg lashed out and kicked the whole station over, sending all the presents crashing down on top of them.

The congregation went rushing to see if Brutus was OK, but Camilla’s head whipped in the opposite direction. The mysterious figure had torn for the flowerbed and slipped over the iron fence.

She had no idea who this stranger was. She didn’t know why Brutus had tried tackling him either, or whether or not it had anything to do with the mysterious children who were back in the Vincents’ courtyard. But she
did
know that someone—a trespasser—had taken a picture just moments before the chaos erupted, and that was a cliff-hanger she simply couldn’t ignore.

So while everyone else was busy helping Brutus to his feet, Camilla skirted around the white lacquer chairs and slipped back
into the funeral home. Barely ten seconds later, the front door of the house flew open and then banged shut behind her.

11

The Midnight Sun

C
amilla burst through the front door and saw—

Nothing.

Nothing was moving except the water trickling down the fountain in the center of the yard.

Suddenly a
swish
in the bushes. She spun and saw a shoe disappear through a thicket of hedges and out to the street.

Still in her stilettos, Camilla half sprinted, half hobbled down the driveway to the bars of the entrance gate. When she got there, she stuck her head through the iron rungs and saw the back of a man bolting down the middle of the road. There were no buildings on the long stretch of gravel, and no vehicles either. It was a wide-open footrace.

Camilla bit down and flew off like prairie fire.

Her heels tossed up rocks and chunks of mud as she raced through the heat waves that rippled in the air. The flashes of light spearing the tree branches were disorienting, and the sounds of the man’s shoes were getting more and more distant.
He’s too damn fast
.

Looking up, she saw the figure pulling away, curving to the left as the road bent south toward the tip of town square. She
pictured Nolan from the view of her bedroom window, envisioning the road hugging the town’s perimeter before side-winding onto Alpine Street and then Main.
There’s no chance of heading him off. Unless
…

Without so much as a second thought, Camilla hung an abrupt left and ran straight through the ditch, plunging between a gap in the tangled wall of trees ahead.

The smell of spruce and resin hollowed out her nasal passages in seconds. She could see a row of cottages in the distance and, again without thinking, dug her chin to her chest and charged headfirst through the crowded woods.

The roots on the forest floor popped up like video game obstacles; Camilla hopped and crunched and dodged every single one of them, hot blood burning down the backs of her heels as she forced her mind away from the pain and focused on the string of yards ahead.
I have to know what’s going on. I have to know what the Vincents are hiding
.