The Women in the Walls (9 page)

My father stops closing the door to the study for a moment and clears his throat uncomfortably. “We're going to hold a memorial dinner in Margaret's honor next Saturday. Miranda is already hard at work with the preparations. There isn't going to be an actual funeral service.”

The silence that follows his statement is cutting.

“What?” I say, not understanding. “What do you mean there isn't going to be a funeral?”

“Margaret has been cremated,” my father answers simply. “Soon we'll have the urn and will be able to keep it in the parlor. Penelope would have wanted her to rest at home, not be buried somewhere far away after a generic service. We will honor her life at a memorial dinner with the club.”

“Do me a favor,” I say, raising a hand to stop him. “Stop pretending you're doing this as some sort of sentimental favor to Penelope, instead of wanting to hide what happened to Margaret.”

Instead of answering me, my father closes the door to the study, and I am left, once again, in agonizing silence. No funeral for my cousin, all because my father sees her death as an embarrassing smudge on his precious reputation, another nagging complication in his plan to run the estate smoothly.

All my life I've been led to believe that the Acosta name was supposed to mean something special, but the older I get the more I realize how very projected that was; expectations by people with money who wanted to feel more important than they really were. And those expectations should not have any influence over how we deal with life and death.

I ignore the urgent whispers in my head to go back to my bedroom and succumb to the glittery box of sharp edges and release, my only remaining friend...how disgusting. I don't have much to fight for anymore. I might as well give in.

I go up the stairs to the second floor, the stillness of the hallway smothering. After a few seconds of hesitation, I walk past my bedroom door, triumphant in my decision to say
screw you
to the idea of the box. If I really am a true Acosta, I won't lie down like a dog and give in just because things have gotten messy inside. I will outstubborn this, solve the puzzle, figure out what's happening to my family and why.

Maybe I have a chance, after all. With my heart in my throat, I open Margaret's bedroom door and step inside.

THE LAYOUT OF
the bedroom is identical to mine; mirrored from the wall we share. Margaret's room is infinitely messier, though—she hadn't cleaned in a long time, by the looks of things.

I look around, every familiar object radiating a different degree of pain: the indoor tent we used so many times in both of our rooms for sleepovers, rolled up around the poles and leaning against the corner of her dresser; the composition notebooks we often passed back and forth, taking turns with a story that we were imagining on the spot. Chocolate wrappers lie scattered around a coffee cup of colored pencils on the corner of her desk.

I wonder if she kept a journal
, I think as I step toward the desk, my heart a hollow of hope at the idea of a single object that could tell me everything I need to know. I imagine pages filled with explanations, how she really felt about me, what she knew about Penelope.

The anticipation dies away as I dig through her desk to no avail, rapidly becoming desperation instead. I look in her nightstand, and underneath her pillow and mattress, and on the shelves surrounding her vanity, which is like mine but painted white. I look through the piles of notebooks for any I don't recognize. I look under her bed, which is mostly clogged with clothes and stuffed animals and crumpled-up drawings that Margaret apparently deemed unworthy but actually are pretty wonderful.

Once I've combed through the bedroom, I turn my attention to the closet, my final chance at finding anything. The white shutters on the closet doors are turned down, keeping everything inside hidden, and for some reason I am overcome with a wave of nervousness as I reach out to pull on the knob of the handle. The doors fold open in one swift movement, the wheels on the tracks squealing in strain. The only thing Margaret kept on hangers were her dresses for the club events, hung hastily in a row of lush fabrics in black and tones of jewel.

The floor beneath is littered with shoes, both sneakers and heels alike. I look on the shelf above the dresses, initially finding nothing except for spare blankets and old books from our childhood. But when I reach around the side of the blankets to see if anything's hidden inside, I discover that the shelf goes on farther than it appears to, an extended closet shelf that reaches inside the bedroom wall.

I drag Margaret's desk chair across the room and stand on it, moving the blankets out of the way to try to see if I can look down the hidden space. It's too dark to see anything, so I go back to the nightstand and grab a key chain I found while searching, a flat black disc that works like a flashlight when squeezed. Once back up on the chair, I can see the outline of something sitting on the shelf, closer to the end and out of reach.

It's got to be something
, I think excitedly.
It's too out of the way to not be deliberately placed.
I use my hands to check the stability of the shelf, then cautiously lift myself up onto it. When I swing over the edge, my feet hit the old books and send them flying to the bedroom floor below. I lie still for a few seconds, on my belly, my hands and face pressed against the dusty shelf as I wait to see if the shelf will collapse or not.

It holds strong. I wince as I reach back to my skirt pocket for the key chain, still afraid of breaking the shelf and falling the seven-foot distance to the floor. I hold the little black disc ahead of me and press down with my thumb, lighting the way just a few inches at a time. I wriggle forward, sneezing twice as dust particles cloud the air around my face.

After I've moved forward a foot or so, I'm able to see that the object in the back of the shelf is a picnic basket, the top closed, the long arch of the handle nearly grazing the ceiling. I've never seen it before. I flip the top up but don't reach inside, afraid there might be spiders. After a moment I decide to tip the basket on its side so I can look straight in; when I do so, something rolls out before coming to a halt against my wrist.

It's a jar of teeth.

I gasp at the sight of them, all piled on top of each other with their roots all curved and yellow. There are at least twenty in the jar. My own teeth suddenly feel like they're squirming in my mouth. Why on earth would Margaret have hidden a jar of teeth in her closet? How did she even
get
these? Suddenly I'm bombarded by an old memory that I'd completely forgotten about until now, something that had to do with Margaret and Penelope, something that had to do with teeth.

Something that started in the attic.

I tip the light into the basket to check if there's anything else, eager to get out of the tiny enclosed space. Resting inside are a folded cloth, a few white candlesticks and a small bundle of what appear to be bones, bound with a string of brown leather.

I nudge the nightmarish jar back into the picnic basket with shaking hands, disgusted, then push it upright again. But something behind the basket prevents it from sitting flat, like it was before. I reach my hand behind the curved wicker corner and pull out a long wallet of shining black leather. I'm almost afraid to open it.

When I do, I instantly wish I hadn't.

It isn't anything like teeth or bones or clumps of hair inside the black leather wallet. It's a stash of alcoholic wipes, and a scalpel, and tissues dotted with old blood. I lie there with it unfolded in my hands, like some sort of messed-up doctor's kit, wanting to die. Margaret was hurting herself, just like I do.

And I'm the one who taught her how.

I'm overcome with a wave of dizziness. It's difficult to breathe up here; I need to get out, but all I can manage is to rest the side of my face against the shelf and try not to pass out. The attic. The teeth. Penelope. Margaret.

Scriiiitch.
The sound is quiet, a little muffled and coming from right next to my head.
Scritch, scritch, scriiiiitch...

It sounds like fingernails being raked across the inside of the wall.

That's just rats
, I tell myself in my vertigo.
Put the wallet back and get the hell out of here, now.

I scramble to fold the awful black wallet back up, then slide it behind the picnic basket against the back wall.
You've lost your mind as much as Margaret did
, my mind screams at me as the scratches against the inside of the wall become more frenzied, desperate,
angry
. I'm reminded instantly of the scratches on the wall in the attic, when Margaret made me cover my eyes.

I knew then that I used to be afraid of the attic, but I couldn't remember why. It wasn't the boxes of my mother's things that scared me away. It was something else.

“Lucy,” I suddenly hear, a pleading, muffled voice coming from in the wall. “You won't believe how much it hurts to be dead.”

I let out a strangled moan, in disbelief at what I'm hearing.
No
, I think wildly, remembering Margaret tearing up as she told me about hearing the voice of Penelope.
No.

“Be quiet,” I say out loud without even meaning to, my voice frail. I scoot backward out of the tiny, terrible space, flinging myself down as soon as I possibly can, missing the chair completely and falling to the floor.

Once I'm up again, I don't bother to put back the blankets I took down from the shelf, or the books that I accidentally kicked. I leave Margaret's room without taking a single thing, no photos, no art, no reminders of a life that was once here and now isn't. I somehow manage not to run.

There was a voice in the closet.
And now all I want to do is cut myself into shreds.

I can't let myself be driven to madness, like Margaret was.

Once back in my own room, I lock the door, take the glittery cigar box from my vanity shelf and open it to remove the purple flick lighter from inside. Then I close the box and walk across my room, shoving it into the ashes of the fireplace. I arrange sticks around and over it like a little house, then use the lighter to set the sticks on fire.

I watch until it's gone, turned into molten bubbles of melted glitter and glue, smothering the glowing red-hot tools inside.
It's done now. No more.
When I'm satisfied it's been destroyed, I take off my clothes and climb into bed, rubbing my fingers over the lumps of scarring that web the skin of my hips and thighs and knees.

No more counting
, I promise myself, only allowing the tears to come once the covers are over my head and everything is black.
No more counting scars or you are going to lose your mind, if you haven't already.

But I'm sure that I already have. For the first time since I found the jar of teeth in Margaret's closet, I recall the memory of what happened all those years ago in the attic.

WHEN I WAS
ten years old, I hid in the attic while playing hide-and-seek with Margaret. The mostly unused room rested above the back end of the third floor, musty and dark and crowded with boxes that were filled with my dead mother's belongings. For that reason, I knew, it would be the last place Margaret expected me to hide. For once, the joke would be on her.

It doesn't bother me in the slightest
, I told myself as I found a flashlight and crawled around the rows of stacked cardboard boxes. I hardly remembered my mother at all. Why should it be scary for me to be near her things?

I made my way to the corner of the room, the one farthest away from the closed door on the attic floor. The flashlight illuminated the hardwood floor that reached ahead of me like a hallway between two walls of boxes.
Eva
, they all said on them, written in my father's hurried hand.

I suddenly wondered if I was doing this to prove something to Margaret, or to prove something to myself. I brought myself into a crouch behind some of the boxes, not wanting to go any deeper into the attic. If I could manage to stay without getting too freaked, I'd break Margaret's hiding record for sure.

I contemplated turning off the flashlight but decided in the end that I could leave it on until I heard my cousin coming. I pointed it toward the floor for good measure and was surprised to see that the thick layer of dust ahead was disturbed, as if someone had been there before me. I shone the light back to where I'd come from to confirm my own footsteps in the dust, then ahead again, to the area where I'd not yet tread.

Someone had been in the attic recently. Strange.

My curiosity got the best of me, and I lifted the beam to lighten the area beyond where I crouched, an open circular space made from all the
Eva
boxes. In the middle of the circle were a few things, but it was too hard to tell what they were without getting closer. I stood and stepped into the enclosed area, my breath held in my chest, my eyes wide at the sight of the items on the floor—a single candle, a sheet of paper and a knife with a short, curved blade. The paper looked like it'd been torn from a journal and burned around the edges. And on the wood beneath the knife, there was a cluster of dark droplets soaked into the wood.

Blood.

My heart in my throat, I got down on my knees and picked up the leaf-pressed paper, realizing almost immediately that it was a poem. It was written in my aunt Penelope's handwriting, a mix of print and cursive that scribbled over the page in two short, jagged stanzas of black ink:

The Mother sings a hungry song

of blood and cracking teeth.

She dances in the dark below,

wants to pull us underneath.

Her claws, they rise, they sway in dance

to the melody of screams.

Her lullaby will never end,

till the world comes apart at the seams.

As soon as I finished reading it, I dropped the poem back onto the floor with a little gasp and scrambled to make my way out of the room as quickly as I could. Screw sitting around in the dark alone after reading something like that. Why was that even up there? And where did the blood come from?

I wanted to tell Margaret, but finding the right way was impossible. I felt like no matter how I did it, my cousin would only freak out and find a way to turn it into one more thing to hold against her mom. What I had found in the attic scared me, but I still felt protective over Penelope. To imagine her upset or embarrassed because of me was awful.

So I held it in, at least for a week. I thought about it every time I talked to my aunt and started searching her face for any type of clue that might explain why she'd be sitting in the attic with a bloody knife writing poetry about that terrifying “Mother.”

An Acosta must always mind her own business.
The amount of times I had to repeat it to myself over the following days was beginning to become overwhelming. I'd sit in my room alone, gazing at my pretty box of razors, itching to grab it and bring it to the space between my bed and the wall, use the blades to let all that dread pour out of my body.

No
, I would scold myself.
Stop being weak. Save it for things that actually matter. Have some control over yourself, loser.

Soon I stopped fearing whatever it was that I'd found in the attic and started being more afraid of my impulses. When I'd first started, it was easy to control when I chose to do it; that was part of its supreme satisfaction, the important and liberating moment where I took it upon myself to carefully use drastic measures to create that perfect balance.

Now that urge was creeping up on me, uninvited, strong,
insistent
.

Later, Margaret interrupted my train of thought when she came into my bedroom without knocking, something that was always a pet peeve of mine.

“What?” I nearly yelled, causing her to raise an eyebrow over my irritation.

“I need to talk to you about something,” she snapped right back, crossing her arms over her ribs. “Or are you too busy sitting in silence and doing
nothing
at the moment?”

I sat up and straightened my shirt, folding my hands over my lap. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I was just thinking about something, is all.”

“My mom?” she asked seriously, which caught my attention enough to make me forget all about the box of razors. How did she know?

“What about her?” I asked, struggling to keep my composure.
I will not tell her about the attic!
I swore to myself again.

“I could have sworn you were acting weird around her lately,” Margaret said, pulling my chair with the green velvet cushion across the rug to rest in front of me. She sat in it and crossed one leg over the other. “Why is that?”

It's a test
was my first reaction, which brought a little relief.
She doesn't know anything, so she's trying to trick you into saying something...

“Nope,” I said with a straight face, not blinking. “What are you talking about?”

She studied me for a moment before accepting my answer. “This is a weird thing to say,” she said, clearing her throat and picking a thread from the knee of her leggings. “But, um...”

I waited for her to continue, my expression frozen.

“I'm pretty sure my mother is some sort of witch,” Margaret finally said.

Despite everything, I couldn't help but laugh. “A witch?” I said. “I'm sorry—did you see her fly around the courtyard on a broom or something?”

Then I remembered the candle and knife in the attic, and my smile faded.

“I walked in on her doing...something.” Margaret shifted her weight in her seat, keeping her eyes anywhere but on mine. “She had set up some sort of, I don't know, ritual-type area.”

“Ritual?” I asked. I tried to imagine my aunt chanting nonsense words, wearing a black pointed hat, but it just didn't gel.

“There were bones,” Margaret said. “And...teeth.”

The Mother sings a hungry song, of blood and cracking teeth...

“Stop,” I said, my heartbeat quickening at the memory of the poem. “So what would that even mean, then? If she really thought she was a witch?”

“You believe me?” Margaret asked, as if in disbelief. “I thought you'd be telling me to get lost if I told you about this, but I had to at least try. It's been...” She paused, bringing her hand up to her mouth for a moment. “It's been really bothering me, Lucy.”

Suddenly I felt terrible about how certain
I'd
been that I could never tell Margaret what I found while playing hide-and-seek. I never would have told her, yet Margaret was able to tell me. She always was the better friend.

“I saw something in the attic,” I admitted, and her eyebrows flicked up. “I think that's probably why I know you're telling the truth.”

“I knew you were lying!” She kicked my foot and crossed her arms, but her expression showed relief. “So what are we going to do about it? Like you said before, what does this even mean?”

I strained my mind for reasons why Penelope would do witchcraft. Did she think it really worked? She must have if she'd gone through enough measures to get
teeth
. Human or animal? I didn't want to know.

“I'm not sure,” I said honestly. “I guess the only thing we can do is keep a close eye on her. It's not like she'd ever hurt us.” In a chaotic mess of confusion, I knew this one thing to be true.

Margaret sighed but nodded. “Okay.” Her eyes darted away, and I realized there was still something bothering her.

“Hey, Marg...” I said gently, and her mouth pulled into a pained frown. “What was she doing with the teeth?”

My cousin didn't answer for a moment. She took a deep breath and stood, turning her back to me to head for the door.

“She was swallowing them.”