Page 91 of The Manor of Dreams

Ada had never thought about what it would be like to leave. To be unmoored from Lucille, from Rennie, from her parents. She had oncebeen scared at even the thought of going to college. But now a terrifying new clarity flooded through her. Looking around her childhood bedroom in the darkness, she didn’t know if she would ever come back.

Ada heaved her bag up and stepped into the hallway. She tiptoed down the stairs. On the first floor she headed for the library, where she knew her mother kept extra cash for emergencies. To think she had imagined she’d known all the secrets in this house. She unlocked the top drawer of the desk and wrote a note. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Her handbag sat on the desk. Ada reached in and plucked out her wallet. She swiped a credit card. They would get found out for sure, but this would buy them time.

She entered the hallway of the left wing right as Sophie closed the door to her room. Sophie held up her right hand, and Ada could see the glint of car keys. Of course Sophie was driving. All this time and Ada still didn’t have her license because she was too scared. She’d always been so scared of everything. It was time for that to end.

“Ready?” Ada whispered. Sophie nodded.

They slipped out the door and crept to the car, each of them wincing as they opened and closed the doors as softly as they could. They threw their bags in the back seat and sat in the car for a moment, breathing. Then Sophie reached over and gave Ada’s hand a squeeze.

Behind them, the foyer light switched on.

“Shit,” Sophie said. She jammed the keys in the ignition. The engine revved and the car jerked into motion.

“Go!” Ada shouted, looking back. The front door opened. Ma ran out. “Go!”

They hurtled out of the driveway and onto the road. Ada trained her gaze on the yellow lane markers in front of them. The mist pressed against the windows, as if to offer them some kind of protection. Terror burned away into pure, insane adrenaline. They were speeding, away from the estate, away from her mother, away from the horrible things that her family had done.

They were free. They were seventeen and they could go anywhere.

“You think she’s gonna call the cops on us?”

Ada shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know my ma anymore.”As soon as she said it, she knew it was true. “She might come chase us herself.”

Sophie’s light smile was long gone. Instead, she gritted her teeth with grim determination. Her hand tightened on the steering wheel. The other clenched around Ada’s fingers.

“I’m sorry for what my ma did to you,” Ada said.

“I’m going to hell,” Sophie said. They lurched through one light, and then another. “I know it.”

“It’s not your fault.”

There was a long silence.

“I need to tell you something.” Sophie’s fingers tightened. The car jerked and sped onto the ramp to the highway. Sophie was driving erratically, and Ada started to get scared. “I—” Sophie’s words were cut off as she doubled over the wheel and groaned in pain.

“The poison… I think I’m—I think she—”

Sophie jerked back into her seat with a sharp cough and blood spurted out of her mouth, splattering onto her lap and the steering wheel.

“Sophie!” Ada heard herself shouting. They swerved into the opposite lane. “Pull over!” She grabbed for the wheel. She didn’t know how to drive. She didn’t know how anything worked.

Too late.

Sophie let go and Ada jerked the wheel to right, but the car swung out too far. They spun toward traffic, the oncoming lights flooding the inside of the car as Ada screamed.

thirty-four

AUGUST 1990

RENNIEwatched the house shutter itself. No one visited. No one was permitted in.

Wreckage had been recovered from the highway. Both Ada and Sophie dead upon impact. For two weeks the two families mourned. No news reporters were allowed in. Security surrounded the premises. The lawyers Richard Lowell’s mother hired stopped coming to the door, and his family stopped the investigation. No one spoke of why they ran away.

Two separate, quiet funerals were held. Sophie’s older sister, Elaine, came back for her funeral. Whereas Edith and Josiah were bereft and lost in their grief, Elaine seemed angry. She comforted her parents as they became two hunched figures and asked them over and over again why Sophie and Ada had been in that car together, with their bags, so late at night. No one could answer her.

Rennie herself didn’t know why. She could only think of her last conversation with Ada. In the hallway she would pass Lucille standing wordlessly in the doorway of her twin’s room. Rennie wanted to talk to her, but her older sister refused to speak. So did their mother.

Rennie just sat on her bed for days. At night, she could hear Edith’s hoarse cries downstairs. She watched Josiah scatter his daughter’s ashes in the garden as gently as he had tended the flowers. She sat across from him at the dinner table while he cried into his hands and said, blankly, to no one, that he’d named Sophie for the roses.

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