Page 33 of The Only One Left

Inside, the room glows red. An uneven, pulsing light coats the walls and makes the bedroom look nightmarish. With each flash of red comes an insistent buzzing sound.

Lenora’s call button.

She needs me.

I push into the room, my eyes stinging from the pulsing red light on the nightstand. I trip over the box of books sitting in the middle of the floor, sending it toppling. Paperbacks spill around my ankles as I keep moving.

To the adjoining door.

Into Lenora’s room.

To her bed, where she lies with her left hand clenched around the call button. Her eyes are open wide and wild.

“What’s wrong?” I say, too worried to think about the fact that she can’t answer me. Anything could be wrong. Another stroke. A heart attack. Seizure or sickness or impending death.

When she sees me, Lenora’s grip on the call button loosens. Shesighs, looking childlike and embarrassed, and I think I understand what happened.

“Did you have a nightmare?”

Lenora, still holding the call button, uses it to tap twice against the bedspread.

“Must have been a real humdinger,” I say, which is what my mother called especially nasty nightmares. The kind that linger after you wake. The kind that make you afraid to close your eyes again. “Do you want me to stay here until you fall back asleep?”

Two more taps.

When I was little and had a real humdinger of a nightmare, my mother would crawl into my bed and wrap her arms around me, which is what I do now with Lenora. She looks so rattled—still so utterly scared—that it feels wrong not to.

“Nightmares are just your brain thinking it’s Halloween,” I tell her. Something else my mother said. “All trick, no treat.”

Lenora’s left hand finds my right one and clasps my fingers. The gesture, despite being tender, almost desperate, leaves me reeling. Lenora Hope, my town’s version of the bogeyman and the woman whose guilt kids to this very day chant about, is holding my hand.

Part of me wants to recoil from her touch. Another part of me feels terrible about that. No matter what she did in the past—which, let’s be clear, was very,verybad—Lenora’s still a human being who deserves to be treated like one.

If she even did all the things she’s accused of. The same thought I had in the ballroom occurs to me now: Would a seventeen-year-old girl even be capable of killing three people like that? These were physical crimes. Slitting her father’s throat. Stabbing her mother. Tying a noose around her sister’s neck and hoisting her to her death. I wouldn’t be able to do it, which makes it hard for me to believe someone half my age could.

Maybe Jessie’s theory is right and it was Winston Hope or someone else. If so, Lenora has paid a terrible price. No, she never went to jail. But she’s been imprisoned for decades.

In her own home.

In her childhood bedroom.

In a body that refuses to function.

Then again, if what everyone has said is true, then it means I’m embracing a murderer. One whose care and well-being I’m responsible for. I’m not sure which scenario is worse. I’m also not sure I can continue to work here without knowing the truth. Maybe that’s what made Mary leave without warning. She could no longer take the not-knowing.

“Lenora,” I whisper. “Did you really do it?”

She releases my hand, and I hold my breath, preparing for the answer about to be tapped against the bedspread. To my surprise, Lenora doesn’t tap. Instead, I get a nod toward the typewriter on the other side of the room.

“You want totype?”

Lenora taps twice against my hand.

“Right now?”

Two more taps. More urgent this time.

Because it seems easier to bring the typewriter to Lenora instead of the other way around, I carry it across the room in an awkward waddle and plop it down on the edge of the mattress. Then I climb back into bed and prop up Lenora against me so she can easily access the keyboard. All that effort leaves me perspiring. This better be worth it.

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