Page 93 of What Lies in the Woods

I suppressed my disbelieving snort. I picked my way past the guest bedroom and discovered it was completely full, stacked five feet high in the back. He’d just been chucking things in for years, not bothering to leave a path, and even the doorway was blocked with a broken bookshelf canted on its side. I crushed a bright pink Easter basket underfoot and kept moving, dreading what I would find in my bedroom.

To my shock, it was almost as pristine as he’d implied. The bed itself had some random detritus stacked on it, but a closer inspection proved most of it was mine. Stuff I’d thrown out the last time I was here. He must have just brought it right back in the house. Old clothes, books, even stuffed animals from when I was a kid.

Everything was still here, untouched. Which meant—

I walked to the closet. It was packed. It took me a few minutes of pulling things out to get at the loose floorboard in the back of the closet. The shoebox, dust-coated and battered, was still inside.

Right at the top was a small cloth bag. I loosened the drawstring and turned it out onto my palm. The white knucklebone was cold against my skin. My good-luck charm. My talisman. My curse.

I’d left it here, like leaving it would mean she wouldn’t haunt me.

I set it on the carpet and took out the others. Liv’s bone in its earring case, tucked in my pocket. Cass’s, in the bag at the bottom of the box. I laid them carefully next to each other.Hecate, Artemis, Athena. The prayer, the flowers, the burial, the water. The blood and the fire. Six rituals, when there should have been seven. We’d never reached the end.

I turned to the box again. What else had been important enough to hide? A geode, a feather, a few photographs: of Liv, of Cass. An overwrought self-portrait, eleven-year-old me looking off to the side, her face unmarked by the tragedy that she had no idea was about to strike.And—God. A photo of Persephone herself. The bones, with lilies in the eye sockets and our trinkets arrayed around her. The photographic twin to the drawings in Liv’s sketchbook.

“You seem like you could use a drink,” my dad said. I jumped, scrambling around. My back hit the wall before I could claw back a semblance of conscious control. He laughed. “You’re such a jumpy little thing.”

“Fuck,” I said, rubbing the back of my head. Like I needed another head injury. “You know you’re not supposed to sneak up on me like that.”

“Didn’t think I was.” He stepped into the room and held out a beer. I leaned forward to take it, then settled back against the wall again. It tasted like stale cereal steeped in water, but it was cold. I drank deeply.

“You’re not having one?” I asked.

He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “Thought maybe I should cut back.”

“Yeah, right. Wait, you’re serious?”

He shrugged. “About time, don’t you think?”

“Past time.” I didn’t for an instant believe it was going to stick, but as far as I knew it was the first time he’d even bothered with the pretense of trying. “You know you can’t go cold turkey. The amount you drink, it could kill you.”

“I said cut back, not stop,” he said defensively. But he rubbed the back of his neck and looked away. “I know. I’ll be careful. I’ve done it before.”

“When?”

“When you got hurt,” he said. “I was drunk as a skunk while my girl was bleeding out. Couldn’t even be at the hospital while you were in surgery. So I quit. For a while. Didn’t last. But I did it.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You were a bit distracted by all the holes in you,” he said with a wry smile.

I gave a low, broken laugh. “Turns out there’s a lot of things I don’t remember from back then,” I said.

“That right?” he asked. There was an uncomfortable note to his voice.

“Dad, were you there when the police talked to me? When I identified Stahl?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“What was it like? What did I say?” I asked.

“They showed you some pictures. They asked you if you saw the man who attacked you, and you pointed him out. Simple enough.”

“But did they seem like they were pressuring me?” I asked. “Influencing me at all?”

He sighed. “Shit, Naomi. You were so drugged up that if they showed you a picture of a man in a red suit you would have said Santa Claus stabbed you.”

“Dad. Please. Tell me what happened.”

---