Page 87 of Half the Summer's Night
Sunset is around eight o’clock this time of year. When it arrives, I sit on top of the dais in the viewing room so I can watch the yard slowly draping itself in shadow. Eventually, the streetlights come on, all at once, like someone flicked a switch. Hatch Street is empty.
“Are you out there?” I whisper, sliding off the dais so I can press my hands against the window and peer outside. It doesn’t help. I don’t see much of anything.
My chest twists around. It’s true that I don’t necessarily see him every night, but after last night?—
He has to come. Doesn’t he?
My breath fogs the glass. The wind moves through the yard, but all it does is push the shadows around. And I think about the last two times I saw him, including last night. He didn’t just announce himself. I went out on the front porch, and then he made himself known.
Of course, tonight is not last night, and the idea of going outside makes me feel dizzy and sick.
Uncle Vic’s gun, I think.
I peel away from the window and go upstairs, my breath tight and shallow. The gun case is still resting on the bed where I left it, and my hands shake as I flip the latch. The gun looks like a toy. Mostly because I’ve never seen a real gun before.
I take it out, and it’s heavier than I expect. There’s a box of bullets, but I leave those. I don’t know how to load the thing. I just want to hold it, like armor.
Then I carry it back downstairs, cradling it awkwardly against my chest. My footsteps creak on the stairs, on the floorboards in the entranceway, and I turn the lights on as I go from room to room, flooding the house with light. As if light can protect me.
I check the video feed from my doorbell camera before I unlock the door. Nothing. Just darkness. Then I turn the deadbolt and nudge the door open and step out onto the porch.
The wind is up, damp and salty, and I can taste the sea in the back of my throat.
“Hello?” I step cautiously out onto the porch. The wind answers, blowing low and mournful across the cemetery. “Are you there?”
I don’t get an answer, and my body tightens with anxiety. I clutch the gun a little closer to my chest.
“I need to talk to you,” I call out, louder this time. The last time I called out to Nameless in the dark, he showed up. And then he destroyed me.
But no one steps out of the shadows tonight. The wind lifts and makes the trees rattle around, and I swallow back that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
He’s not here.
I’m sure of it. If he were here, he would make himself known. I would hear his footsteps, soft and rustling through the grass. But all I hear is the wind.
“Please?” I add, but it comes out as little more than a whisper.
Something bangs around in the back of the house, as loud as a gunshot. I jump and whirl around, holding my own gun out awkwardly. “Nameless?” I say, then immediately feel stupid. I doubt he remembers me calling him that the night in the viewing room.
Silence.
I can’t stand being out here. The night feels like it’s closing in on me, thick and constricting. I duck back inside and slam the door shut and lock it. Then I breathe, still holding the gun, staring at my pale reflection in the door’s new window.
God, how stupid am I to think a murderer actually wants to protect me? How stupid am I to think I can trust him at all? Just because he was with me when Olivia and Heather died doesn’t mean he isn’t involved. Every dark, beautiful word he said to me could have been a lie.
Maybe he killed the first attacker to throw me off the trail.
Maybe that’s why he won’t show me his face, because if I see it, I’ll recognize him. One of Blake’s friends, maybe. A man I used to know as a boy.
My face is hot. My eyes burn with unfallen tears. I squeeze the gun close to my chest and try to decide what to do, now that the one person I thought would be here for me didn’t show up.
Penelope was right. I should get out of town. Go stay with Chloe. Maybe this nightmare won’t follow me that far north, and I can come to terms with what I let happen. I can shove my darkness back down inside me where it belongs.
Another bang echoes in the back of the house.
I whip around, gun up, staring into the darkened hallway leading toward the back of the funeral parlor. Back toward the examination room.
Nameless? It’s a weak, fluttering sense of hope, but the examination room was the first place I ever saw him. The first place he kissed me, pushing his mask up so his lips would brush chastely over mine.
