Chapter 12

All right. I had seen a very strange thing. I had to think about this logically.

The most logical explanation, of course, was that I was hallucinating. The world continued to be the ordinary world, and the strangeness was all happening in the pink meat behind my eyeballs. Combined with my unsettling sleep paralysis the night before, there was definitely a possibility that things were going loopy in my brain. Before I did any other testing, I had to rule that out.

I was on a couple of medications—who isn't?—for acid reflux and birth control and my less-than-stellar thyroid, and I had a bottle of anxiety meds to be taken "as needed," which wasn't often because they put me to sleep. I hadn't taken any of those for months, and my prescriptions for the others hadn't changed in years. You can always develop new side effects, of course, so I couldn't rule that out completely.

I went to the internet, skipped past the first page of clickbait articles, and managed to pull up some literature. Hmm. Apparently psychosis and visual hallucinations did sometimes occur with unmanaged hypothyroidism.

"Oh goody," I muttered out loud. "It wasn't enough being fat and tired."

Still, there was usually a progression, wasn't there? You didn't just wake up one morning imagining hands in the bushes. Unless you had a psychotic break, and I'd expect to notice if I had one, right? (Come to think of it, what even is a psychotic break? We throw the phrase around but damned if I have any idea what it really means.)

Of course, I'd had that sleep paralysis, but that was just a thing that happened sometimes. Perfectly normal people got sleep paralysis. Really. Nice and normal people, even.

Ideally it would have been nice to go to the doctor and get it checked out, but my doctor was back in Arizona, and so I would have had to find a new doctor here. Which, let's face it, meant paying an exorbitant amount of money to be told that the problem was that I was fat and if I just dieted and exercised more, I wouldn't be seeing strange things in the backyard. Half the doctors on earth wouldn't even bother looking at my chart, they'd just see a fat person and conclude that any and all medical maladies were my own fault for being lazy and overeating. Never mind that I could probably out-hike most of them and my blood pressure is exquisite. I could hop into an ER carrying my severed leg and squirting blood from the stump and the doctor would congratulate me on having dropped all that leg weight and tell me to keep up the good work.

So, if you can't go to a doctor and you're probably not a reliable witness, what do you do then?

Obviously the only solution was to see if other people saw it too. Science hinges on repeatability. It's not enough that I observed something, you have to be able to observe it too, under the same conditions, before we can be sure it's a quantifiable phenomenon.

Right. I closed the laptop. I had seen something inexplicable. Now I just had to replicate the phenomenon and hopefully prove that I wasn't crazy.

"Phil," I said, "I need you to look at something."

Phil was trying to work the ice maker on the fridge, which was feeling finicky and making horrible noises. "Eh?" he called over the grinding. "What?" He frowned. "Is it your car? I can't do much with cars. They aren't anything like plants."

I reassured him that my car was in perfect health. "It's about this photo." Mom had gone out, so I felt better about taking down the graduation photo.

He took the photo and looked at it closely. "Hybrid teas," he said after a moment. "Don't ask me to identify the varieties. There's too many."

"No, not that. Look right down here. By my feet."

"I don't see…"

"Keep looking."

Phil looked from the picture to me, then back again, but he kept looking. I could tell the moment he saw it. He started, then gave me a very suspicious look. "What the hell? Is that a hand?"

Oh thank god, he sees it too.

Oh shit, he sees it too.

"That's what it looks like." I set my laptop on the counter. "Here, I took a photo and blew it up. Take a look."

Phil leaned over my shoulder, looking at the laptop. He smelled like cut grass. He scowled at the screen. "Is this some kind of Photoshop thing?"

"It's not. I spotted it this morning."

Another long look. "Are you messing with me?"

"I'm not. I swear I'm not." I could tell he didn't quite believe me.

He handed the photo back. "Look, if you're not messing with me…"

"I'm really not."

"Then somebody's messing with you."

Phil's words stuck with me, because they couldn't possibly be true.

Yes, all right, it was theoretically possible that someone had snuck into the house, scanned my graduation photo, digitally altered it to put a child's hand in the background, printed it out, snuck back in, and hung it up. But it didn't make sense. Why do it at all? You'd be relying on either me or Mom—okay, most likely Mom—noticing a very subtle change in the background of a photo, and that's an awful lot of effort to gaslight somebody when you could just mess with the hot-water heater or play creepy music through the wall.

Or… well, all right, fine, it was slightly more theoretically possible that Mom had done so, for some obscure reason of her own.

Yes, I could have asked her. But if I did, she would definitely say no, because obviously it was ridiculous, and then it would give her something else to worry about. So I didn't. Possibly this wasn't the right decision, but I didn't want to pile anything else on her. (And all right, fine, maybe I wanted to keep that as an option because otherwise I would rapidly run out of rational explanations.)

I rubbed my forehead. Did the fact that I didn't believe someone would go to all this trouble to mess with me or my mother mean that I wasn't paranoid? Paranoia is a symptom of something, isn't it? (Oh god, not another list of symptoms to look up. I still wasn't recovered from the Alzheimer's lists, or rose picker's disease.)

What was a better explanation—that someone was sneaking into the house to mess with my mother, or that there had been a hand under the bushes?

Could we really not have noticed the hand in the photo all these years?

How often do you actually look at these photos, though? Almost never. Everybody's got them and nobody notices them. And if anybody actually looks at the photo, they look at the face, not a shadow to the right of the boots.

First, however, it occurred to me that there was something else I could check. I'd seen the photo twice in recent days, and once it had been in the attic, in the stack of framed photos. Even if we accepted the completely bizarre idea that someone had snuck into the house to replace a photo in an effort to do… something… odds were they wouldn't even know about the photos in the attic. So if I was going to verify that the photo on the staircase wall was genuinely from my graduation, I could check it against the photo in the attic.

It was also a much larger photo, and I could get a better look at the supposed hand.

Right. Okay. Very logical. I jumped up and went to the attic stairs. There was some grumbling and stubbing of toes as I made my way to the pictures by phone-light, but I managed to locate the stack of pictures and began flipping through it.

I was halfway through the stack when I heard the front door open. Oh shit. Mom was home, and how was I going to explain this? "Sorry, Mom, I'm just afraid I've lost my damn mind, or that you have a really weird stalker…" No, that wasn't going to go over well. I flipped faster. Great, trying to hide the evidence just as your parents come home. If you revert to childhood any faster, you'll be watching Saturday morning cartoons in footie pajamas.

"Sam? Are you in the attic?"

"Yeah, hang on," I called back, since there was no point in denying it. I found my graduation photo just as I heard Mom starting up the steps.

By now I'd stared at that photo for so long that I could have recognized the hand in my sleep. It took a single glance to realize that yes, there it was, same position, same fingers, same shadow and light over the thumb. Well, that told me… something. I don't know what. I took a photo, hoping that the flash wasn't washing it out too much.

Mom poked her head over the level of the floor. "What are you doing?"

"I, uh…" I flipped another picture and hit my great-grandfather's photo. Good enough. "I was looking for this guy. I wanted to look him up online, but I couldn't remember how to spell his name."

"Oh," said Mom. "Elgar Mills."

"That's him." I made a show of turning the photo around to read the name. "Yup. All I could think was Rasputin." Mom snorted. "Is it okay if I bring this down?"

"Sure, honey." She sounded a trifle doubtful, probably afraid that I'd try to hang it up next to the hellgrammite.

"I'll put it back when I'm done, I promise." I came down, carrying Elgar, and set him on the chair in my room. His eyes seemed to follow me as I changed out of my by-now dusty clothes and I left the room, mostly to get away from his expression.

I sat down on the couch and pulled up the photo I'd just taken on my phone.

A cold chill went through me. I didn't need the bigger screen. It was a hand, most definitely a hand. It couldn't be anything but a hand. I could see the shadows of nails, and the darker half-moons of dirt beneath them.

I would almost have preferred a stalker.

Maybe one of the neighbor kids snuck into the backyard and was lying under the rosebush. No, the angle doesn't work at all, the kid would have to have a broken arm or be… buried… under the roses…

Oh god.

"Finding anything?" asked Mom.

I gave a guilty start. Elgar. Right. Him.

Could I tell my mother that I thought there might have been a small child buried under the roses in my graduation photo? I tried to shape the words on my tongue and discovered that no, no I could not. I swallowed. Elgar Mills. Yes. Think about him. Don't think about the other thing. There's got to be a logical explanation. "Sorry, got distracted again. Let's see what we can find…"

I opened my laptop and punched in his name. The results began to scroll up on my screen, and that's when I got my second shock of the day.

MAD SORCEROR OF BOONE ARRESTED!trumpeted the headline of the Siler Independent.SO-CALLED "WIZARD OF BOONE" CHARGED WITH INDECENCY said the rather more sedate Charlotte Observer, who relegated it to the second page.

"I think he's from Boone," I said weakly.

"Really?" Mom looked up from her planner, interested. "I never knew that. Mother always said her family was from Gastonia. Maybe that was her mother."

"Mmm." Boone is a perfectly nice little college town in the Blue Ridge. I went to a concert there once. It is not really the sort of place that you expect to produce mad wizards, but that could be said of most places. (Okay, maybe not Florida.) "He, uh… you know how you said he was a bit of a character?"

"Yes?"

"A little more than a bit, I think." I turned the laptop screen to face her.

Mom's eyes went very wide. "Oh my."

"It appears he was into some very weird shit," I said.

"Language," said Mom. I let it go. She'd never minded my swearing before, but that was the least of my worries these days.

"Sorry. Very weird stuff." I cleared my throat and read aloud. "‘While the eyes of the nation turn to Tennessee and the trial of schoolteacher Scopes for the teaching of godless materials, a drama unfolds closer to home. Elgar Mills, 47, known among the more credulous as the Mad Wizard of Boone, was charged in court today with public indecency for acts befitting no good Christian. A crime carrying penalties up to a hundred dollar fine or thirty days in jail.

"‘Far more than merely teaching the works of Darwin, the Mad Wizard has made claims better fitting to a lunatic than one who claims to have been educated among the finest universities, and went so far as to tell the assembled court that they would pay for their arrogance in thinking to bring their betters to task in such a craven fashion—'"

The hellgrammite print fell off the wall with a crash.

I let out a yelp like a small dog being stepped on and threw my computer mouse halfway across the room.

"I'm sure none of it was true," said my mother in careful, measured tones. "You know what these little local newspapers are like. No better than gossip rags."

This was a remarkably calm statement given that all the glass in the picture frame had shattered and the frame itself had turned into a rhombus. I clutched my chest. "I nearly jumped out of my skin!"

"Yes," said Mom, still sounding very calm. "Let me get the dustpan. Watch your feet."

I climbed over the back of the couch and went in pursuit of my mouse. My heart was still pounding. Jesus. And Mom hadn't reacted to the picture falling at all. What the hell?

I shoved my feet into my sandals by the door and came back to help clean up. Mom vanished outside with the glass and the broken frame.

The hellgrammite print had a scratch in it, which I found irrationally infuriating, but at least it was just over the riverbed, not anything important. "I'll get this reframed for you," I promised.

"You don't have to do that."

"No, I will. It's probably my fault for hanging it wrong or something. Can you drop it off at a frame shop when you're out this weekend? I'll give them my credit card."

She frowned. "Maybe I shouldn't take the job this weekend after all."

"You absolutely should," I said. "A picture fell, that's all. The house isn't about to come down."

Her gaze lingered on me for a moment, then she forced a smile. "Yes, of course. It's just that I have to stay at the hotel tonight, if I'm meeting them at the airport at six. Are you sure you don't want to come with me?"

"No, no." I waved my hands. "I'll watch TV and work. It'll be very boring."

"All right. I'll be back the day after tomorrow." She frowned. "Call Phil if anything happens, all right?"

"Sure," I agreed. It wasn't until she'd backed out of the driveway that I looked down at my phone, which barely had service anyway, and realized I didn't have Phil's phone number.

The silence in the house was suddenly very loud. I cleared my throat, just to have some kind of noise, and it was so small and feeble a sound that it only made the silence stronger.

I poured wine and sat down to think. My brain was full of hands under the shrubbery, the Mad Grandad of Boone, and Mom not even flinching at the picture falling. I took a few deep breaths to try to settle my thoughts, but the silence was still pressing down on me like a physical weight. I found a music playlist on my phone and turned it up to full volume. The speakers made it sound small and tinny, but it made a little clear space that wasn't smothered under the ecru-painted silence.

I couldn't do anything about the Mad Wizard. That was in the past. A weird past that I hadn't quite wrapped my head around, but it could certainly wait. And I couldn't do much about Mom right at the moment, unless I wanted to make myself nuts reading more lists of symptoms.

That left the hand in the rose garden.

All right. Now that I had a single target for my anxiety, I could turn all my analytic prowess to it. Let's suppose, worst-case scenario, that someone had buried a kid in the backyard, badly enough that an arm stuck out. Whoever this was would have had to come back and move the body in short order, or it would have started to smell, obviously. But this would have left a large hole, and they'd have to refill it. Was I a good enough archaeologist to tell the difference between fill dirt and native clay after fifteen years? You never knew unless you tried. And at least I'd know there wasn't anything buried behind the roses right now.

Which there definitely wouldn't be.

Well, probably wouldn't be.

… fuck.

It was still light out. I grabbed a trowel from the shed, got down on my belly, and wiggled under the roses. I felt ridiculous, but my only audience was the pair—no, it was a trio now—of black vultures on the neighboring roof.

"Don't judge me," I muttered to the birds. "This is perfectly normal. Ish." They watched me with interest, possibly hoping that I was about to die and leave a tasty carcass for them to eat.

There was almost no clearance between the ground and the rosebush. Thorns tangled in my hair and yanked at my scalp. There was also the not-so-small problem of my boobs, which were not made for lying facedown on any surface, let alone compacted ground and roots. I do not sleep on my stomach for a reason.

I stabbed the trowel into the ground, got about a quarter of an inch worth of dirt before I hit a tangle of roots, and cursed. I tried again, a little farther from the rosebush, and got the trowel almost an inch into the ground before I scraped the concrete foundation of the fence post. My left nipple encountered a piece of gravel and lodged a vociferous complaint.

"This is batshit," I said out loud. "This is ridiculous. I'm being ridiculous. There's got to be an explanation." I could feel the despair starting to pupate and erupt into anger. Goddammit. There wasn't a hand under here. Nobody's buried here. You couldn't possibly bury someone back here. You couldn't even get behind the rosebush to start digging. If you were going to bury a body, you wouldn't put one here, you'd go on the other side of the fence where the woods start and drop it there. No witnesses.

And who would bury a body inyour yard anyway? Do you think your mother was killing children and shoving them under the roses?

No, obviously I didn't. Mom was the most unlikely serial killer in existence. Hell, even if she'd had the desire, she wouldn't have had the energy. She was still working two jobs then and she'd come home and fall asleep on the couch most days.

Now Gran Mae… okay, if it came to light that Gran Mae murdered someone and buried them at the base of her roses, I would be horrified, but maybe not completely shocked. I could see a certain someone, who kept a garden with "weeds everywhere, and no class at all," making Gran Mae's hit list. Still, small children? Not her speed. (What would Father have said?) Anyway, Gran Mae had been dead for years by the time the photo was taken.

I lay there covered in dirt—usually my happy place—and felt defeated. Was I obsessing over this because it was somehow better to think that there might have been a severed hand in the backyard than to think that something was wrong with Mom that I couldn't fix?

Yes. Yes, I was. I didn't need a school counselor to tell me that.

I started to wiggle back out, trying not to lose any more hair to the roses. The thorns yanked at my scalp like Gran Mae brushing my hair when I was little. I'd always shrieked and wiggled, and she'd huffed angrily. I'm just brushing your hair so it isn't a rat's nest. You brush Barbie's hair, don't you? (I did not in fact brush Barbie's hair. I did once attempt to mummify her, though. Mom convinced me that I did not actually have to remove Barbie's brains with a hook through her nose, but did allow me to wrap her in toilet paper and bury her in the sandbox. In retrospect, it's pretty obvious why I turned out the way I did.)

Doll parts,I thought suddenly. What if it was doll parts?

Relief flooded me. There. That was a logical explanation. There had been a severed doll arm under the roses. Granted, I'd never liked dolls myself—I had always been a stuffed animal person—but Gran Mae had had a couple creepy dolls in period costumes from the Franklin Mint. They were probably in the attic now. Maybe one had gotten damaged and thrown in the trash, then a raccoon had gotten into it and dragged a severed doll arm under the bushes.

Part of me knew that this was a terribly flimsy explanation, but it was the only one I had. Otherwise I'd have to worry about serial killers on Lammergeier Lane, and that really would be ridiculous. Serial killers didn't live in housing developments with white walls and builder-beige carpet and white picket fences and pictures of roses on the walls and…

Okay, now that I thought about it, they probably did live in houses like that. Stepford-style developments had to be a breeding ground for the darker side of humanity. But Lammergeier Lane wasn't Stepford. It wasn't neat enough. We didn't have an HOA. There were vultures on the roof and tangles of woodland pressing against the back fences. Our neighbors weren't painfully, terrifyingly nice; they were paranoid old men, like Mr. Pressley, or genuinely nice people with badly trained beagles, like the Goldbergs. Normal people.

Nice and normal.

And Stepford definitely didn't have a wild garden at the end of the road run by a woman who rehabilitated vultures. That wasn't normal at all. It was that lack of normalcy that must have stuck in Gran Mae's craw. She had wanted the fifties family so badly, my grandad coming home from his job at the office while she spent the day vacuuming the house in pearls and high heels, like June Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver.

Of course, by that measure we'd all failed. Grandad had done well enough, I think—at least, Gran Mae had seemed to think so—but there was no room in Gran Mae's perfect world for a fat granddaughter and a grandson who listened to heavy metal at top volume in his bedroom.

I dusted off my knees. My shirt was covered in mulch and there were dead leaves in my hair. The vultures on the roof next door croaked to one another solemnly. It sounded like commentary.

"Sorry to disappoint you, boys," I said. "I'm not dead yet."

Another croak came from across the yard. I looked over at the house opposite and saw that two more had settled on the roof there. They exchanged pleasantries over the top of our house, but none of them landed on our roof.

They like to keep an eye on that house,Gail had said, though she never said why.

Maybe someone was feeding them severed limbs and they're hoping it'll start up again.

Stop that, dammit. It was a doll arm.

Doll arms don't have dirt under their fingernails.

I took a deep breath and shoved the thought firmly out of my head and went inside to clean up.

To top off an already rough day, I went to the bathroom to clean up my scratches and discovered that I'd started my period. (I know, I should have seen it coming, but I've had a few things on my mind, okay?) I groaned. Just what I needed. Did I have any tampons? No, of course I didn't. Great. Lovely.

I checked under the sink and located some scrubbing powder for the bathtub and an elderly loofah, neither of which would make an acceptable substitute. Did Mom have any?

Normally I wouldn't just wander into my mother's bedroom without permission, but this was an emergency and I knew Mom wouldn't mind. I kept my eyes down as I went through. (I didn't expect to see anything terribly illicit, mind you, but everybody's entitled to some amount of privacy, and if she happened to keep a vibrator out on the nightstand or something, I did not want to know about it.)

The master bathroom fixtures were all seafoam green, which I had thought was ridiculously cool at fourteen and still kinda do. Giant seafoam-green bathtub! What's not to love? The bathroom mirror was spangled with notes in my mother's handwriting. I checked under the sink, praying that menopause had not yet visited this house, and was rewarded with a familiar box. Thank you, Jesus.

I straightened, tampons in hand. I hadn't read the notes on the mirror—they were almost certainly all just reminders to refill the toilet paper or call the mechanic—but my own name jumped out at me from one at eye level.

she loves sam

she won't hurt her

I blinked. Underneath, in slightly larger letters, with three frantic exclamation points, was another note reading:

it will be okay!!!

"… um," I said. And as I slowly read the other notes on the mirror, my heart sank. "Oh, Mom…" I said, leaning on the sink. "Oh, Mom. Oh hell."