Page 65 of See How They Hide

It was Daddy Anton. She tried to kick, but she smelled something sickly sweet and suddenly was floating...and the world slipped away.

When Riley woke, she didn’t know what time it was. She felt sick to her stomach and could barely move her limbs. She heard crying downstairs.

Slowly, every step making her body ache, she went down the stairs to a roomful of people. Her mother had tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t crying. Daddy Anton had his arms around her shoulders as she spoke.

“Athena, my mother, passed peacefully in her sleep last night. She hasn’t been well since the virus she caught last winter. We will have the funeral on Saturday. Fear not, as Athena will be one with nature. As she was in life, she will be in death.”

Riley started to cry. “Grandma?”

“Oh, baby,” Calliope purred. “You shouldn’t be up. You’ve been so sick.”

Her daddy Anton caught her as she swayed on the stairs and would have fallen. “I’m sorry, Riley. We didn’t tell you because you were delirious with fever.”

“No, no—I don’t remember. Where’s Grandma?”

She sobbed in Anton’s arms. Her head was a jumble of dreams and nightmares, and she didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. This had to be a nightmare. Grandma wasn’t dead.

Two days later Riley was still so weak from whatever illness she had that her mother didn’t want her to go to the funeral. But Riley insisted, and Robert carried her the entire way to the church. They called it church, but it wasn’t like a traditional religion, as her grandmother had explained. It was the spiritual center of Havenwood where people could go to pray or think, dream or hope, think about their place in the world and how they could best serve Havenwood and their brothers and sisters who chose to give up all to live there.

Riley didn’t want to believe that her grandmother was dead, but her body was on display, in a casket that the carpenters had made specially for her, with flowers carved into the sides. Everyone walked up and spoke to her, in a moment of privacy, leaving behind something they thought she would like. Mostly flowers. A carved bird from Timmy. A quilted square from Jane.

Riley was the last to approach her grandmother. She shuffled, felt sick, and Robert picked her up and carried her.

She stared down at the person she loved above all others, even above her mother and all her fathers. Riley didn’t know what they’d done to her grandmother’s body, but she didn’t look herself. She wore her favorite dress, the color of the midday sky, with tiny yellow and white daisies. As silent tears fell, Riley reached into her pocket and pulled out the last drawing she’d made, of her grandmother among the wildflowers. She put it next to her grandma’s hand.

Robert stared at it. “Where did you draw that picture?”

She buried her face into his shoulder. “I promised Grandma I’d never tell.”

A few days later, Riley was feeling better, but her head was still fuzzy. She no longer remembered standing under her grandmother’s window and hearing Aunt Thalia and Grandma talk. She had odd dreams, and some nightmares, and she slept hours during the day and longer at night. One recurring nightmare had her waking in a sweat. It was about her fathers, all of them but Robert, holding her picture of grandma in the meadow.

“She knows.”

And then Riley would wake and cry and the nightmare would slip away.

She’d slept through most of three days after burying her grandmother, and awoke at dinner that third night feeling hungry for the first time in...how long? A week?

A commotion outside caught her attention. She opened her window—the fresh air felt amazing to her, and she breathed deeply.

Her bedroom looked down into one of their many gardens. Her mother was standing in the middle, hysterical. “She killed Robert. She killed him as certain as I stand here!”

Robert? Her father, dead? How could that be? Who had killed him?

“We’ll find Thalia, bring her back,” another of her fathers said. “Lock down Havenwood until we return.”

Four men and two women left and Riley felt ill again. She heard things...odd things...over the next few weeks. Her aunt Thalia had killed Robert and taken all the money that ran Havenwood. Riley didn’t want to believe it, but why would her mother lie?

It wasn’t until two months later, on Riley’s twelfth birthday, that Riley found a note hidden in her room and learned the truth.

Thalia and Robert had left together and didn’t take her with them.

Dearest Riley:

I’m sorry to leave you behind, but I was in danger. Robert found the meadow you drew; he knows the truth. He, too, is in danger because of it. Don’t say a word. He is alive and free. One day, I’ll return for you. When you find the red poppy, go to your grandmother’s grave at dawn the next morning. I will be there.

Thalia

Enclosed in the note was a dried red poppy.

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