Chapter 11

Little piggy.

The thought was in my head as soon as I woke up, as clear as my grandmother's whisper. Little piggy.

I groped for my phone. Seven thirty in the morning. God, what an unholy hour. I had arranged my whole postdoc life to try to avoid getting up before nine.

This room is a sty. Oink, oink, little piggy.

"Christ," I muttered. I went to the bathroom. There was a ladybug on the mirror again. No, wait, the ladybug was on my forehead. Dammit. I removed it, opened the window, and bent out the corner of the screen to release it.

Padding back into my bedroom, I realized that the remembered whisper wasn't wrong. I'd been living out of my suitcase and a couple of bags of clothes. I'd meant to unpack, but then there had been the whole ladybug thing, and now it looked like a tornado had gone through. Probably I should at least put the clothes in drawers instead of heaping them on the chair.

Little piggy.

I shoved the voice aside and put my clothes into the drawers. I really would have liked to have coffee first, but the sooner I had everything put away, the sooner the memory of Gran Mae would stop yelling at me.

It didn't take long. I extricated a few stray ladybugs from the folds of my clothes and put my suitcases into the closet. I drew the line at making the bed. I was just going to sleep in it again anyway.

I was coming down the stairs when I heard Mom talking fairly loudly. "Yes? This weekend? Saturday pickup from the hotel, you say?" She was clearly on the phone, so I halted halfway down the steps so as not to distract from what must be a business call.

"Oof. Clear to Southern Pines? Well, I've got my daughter visiting, so I don't know if I should…"

Do it,I urged her silently. Get out of the house and do normal things. I still didn't know if it was mourning or something more sinister, but if it was the former, a distraction was a good thing, and if it was the latter, being in a city around other people was undoubtedly a lot safer than a house in the country, even on Lammergeier Lane.

She fell silent while the person on the other end of the line talked. I could hear her pen scratching as she wrote herself a note.

I amused myself looking at the art on the staircase wall. It used to be a set of brightly colored paintings of sugar skulls that Mom had picked up on a visit to Arizona. Now it was framed photos of her family. Nice and normal, I thought grimly.

A wedding picture with my dad, a photo of Brad in his dress uniform. No Gran Mae. No Great-Grandad Rasputin, either, although I thought his sepia-tone glare would have made a hilarious contrast to all the carefully lit portraits. Maybe she could include him in a scrapbook. One of the ones where you put stickers with captions on things. FATHER SAYS: I WOULD NEVER HAVE ALLOWED GOSSIP. FATHER SAYS: I'M NOT ACTUALLY A WARLOCK, I JUST DRESS LIKE ONE. I stifled a giggle.

The best picture of me was a graduation photo taken in the backyard. I was grinning and brandishing my mortarboard, framed by roses. I stared at it. I looked so much younger then. Grad school with all its horrors was a distant cloud on the horizon. My gown was dark blue and I was wearing Doc Martens.

"Yes, I see that… two of them, huh? Have we worked with them before?"

Those had been good boots. I'd had them all through college and they'd seen me through multiple digs. I think they discontinued that style, which was a damn shame. I have wide feet and the newer ones pinch.

"I remember her but not him. Do you have a dossier?"

I was staring at Graduate Me's boots and eavesdropping shamelessly when I saw something odd in the roses.

What the hell is that?I bent forward, squinting. There was a shape in the shadow of the rosebush that I'd never noticed before. A very odd but very distinct shape.

It looked exactly like a human hand, and I mean exactly. Five pale fingers curving over the roots of the rosebush, the thumb dappled with a splash of light through the leaves. A long white wrist vanishing into shadow.

It had to be a trick of the light. Obviously there hadn't been a hand lying under the rosebush during my graduation photo. We'd have noticed something like that. Probably.

Actually we'd been a bit frantic as I recall, because the school had threatened death and doom and eternal suffering on any student who arrived even five minutes late. Everyone had to be in place fifteen minutes beforehand or we would not be allowed to get our diploma. I hadn't cared that much, but Mom had. But she'd also wanted to get a photo, presumably while the light was good, and I suddenly remembered her fluttering around the room, trying to find film for the camera, while I rolled my eyes.

Okay, maybe we wouldn't have noticed a hand. Possibly we wouldn't have noticed a live elephant. But it was still ridiculous. Trick of the light, definitely.

"I… well, yes, all right, all right, I can do that. And please tell Mark I hope he feels better soon." I cheered internally and abandoned Graduate Me and the optical illusion to continue down the stairs.

"Business?" I asked.

"Coworker's out sick and needs me to cover for him. I'm sorry, honey, I meant to spend this weekend here, but David's really been left in the lurch…"

"Go, go." I made shooing motions. "I'll be here for ages. You'll be sick of me in a week."

"I will not." She looked around the house with a worried air. "You're sure you'll be okay?"

"I survived the last time without being murdered in my bed."

"Yes, but then there were all those bugs…"

"If I'm murdered by ladybugs, I want you to tell everyone. Call my boss and tell her. She'll get a great paper out of it. ‘First Documented Case of Successful Human Predation By Harmonia axyridis.' I'll be famous."

Mom rolled her eyes and swatted at me with her planner. I ducked out of the way, grabbed a can of fizzy water, and went to the backyard to see if I could spot any more insects.

The roses were still in full, dramatic bloom. I cracked open my can, scanning for movement, but didn't see any. In the photo, I'd been standing in front of the big white rosebush, which meant the hand would be about… there.

No hand. Obviously.

There isn't a hand. You're just picking out a random pattern and assigning meaning to it.

I almost believed myself. A large part of my job is picking out patterns in photos. I'd spent hours on The Project, matching diagnostic characters. Probably that made me more susceptible.

Or it means you're more likely to notice them.

Don't be ridiculous. There can't actually be a hand in that photo. That's just not a thing that happens.

I went over to the rosebush and crouched down, looking for something that might have made that shape. A particular tangle of roots, say. A pale rock and an arrangement of leaves. Something.

All I saw was brown bark mulch. The trunk and the thick line of roots looked like they had in the photo, although granted they'd been shadowed and barely visible. Nothing that even remotely resembled a hand.

I went back into the house and up the stairs. Mom was still scribbling on her planner, and I would have felt silly carrying a framed photo of myself around, so I snapped a quick shot of the bottom of the photo with my phone and went back down.

"You okay?" asked Mom, glancing up.

"Forgot something," I lied.

I am a skeptic. If you observe something that is impossible, odds are good the fault is with the observer. I pulled up the photo and zoomed in until the hand filled the screen.

Dammit, it still looked like a hand. In fact, it looked even more like a hand. I could see the dimpled knuckles and the soft lines of the wrist.

The screen was too small, that was the problem. If I could get it onto my laptop, I could blow it up and then I'd see that it was just a stray plastic bag or a white rock. I asked my phone if it was connected to the internet and it told me that it had a very close relationship with the internet. I attempted to pull up a web page and it informed me that it was not that kind of relationship.

"Something wrong?" asked Mom.

"My damn phone," I muttered, not wanting to get into the issue of hands in the roses. "Look, I'm going to run to town and get coffee and phone signal for a bit. Do you need me to pick anything up?"

"More wine, and maybe one of those rotisserie chickens for tonight."

I was so distracted that I was halfway down the walkway before I noticed the vulture on the mailbox. "Sorry," I told him, skirting his perch. "Busy. Gotta… figure out this thing…"

At the coffee shop, armed with an extremely froofy drink with extra whipped cream, I finally managed to get the photos sent over to my computer. The barista didn't comment as I hunched over the keyboard, muttering to myself. (Well, she was a barista. Baristas, like bartenders, have Seen Things.)

All those police-procedural shows gave the world a completely unrealistic view of how much detail you can pull from a photo. I blew the image up until I was staring at individual pixels, then slowly backed out. I fiddled with the brightness, hoping that it would resolve into mulch and shadow.

It resolved all right. It resolved into fingers and thumb and wrist. A child's hand, based on the proportions.

I slumped back in my chair and stared at the screen. I drank my coffee and licked whipped cream off my upper lip and the entire time, a pale hand reached for my ankles from the far side of the roses, as crisp and perfect as it had been when I graduated from high school fifteen years earlier.