Twenty-Nine

TWENTY-NINE

I consider, and then I back into the kitchen and grab a steak knife. I don't want to bump into Brodie Kilmer high on something and hiding in our basement.

With the knife in hand, I quietly descend the stairs. At the bottom, I take a moment to listen at that closed door. I'm definitely hearing a person moving about inside.

I ease the door open a crack. Then I peer in to find myself looking at Cirillo's back as he bends to examine something.

Why the hell is Cirillo down here with the door shut and the stairway light off?

I remember last night, what happened to me down here, the voices I heard.

I'd wondered whether it could have been Cirillo and then brushed it off as paranoia.

Before I can back out and think this through, Cirillo turns, as if sensing the open door. He gives a start. I push it open and walk through.

"What are you doing down here?" I say.

He starts to casually push his hands into his pockets, and then realizes he's holding his phone, and settles for leaning against the wall.

"I heard something last night," he says.

"Last night?" And you came down at almost noon to check it out?

As if hearing the unspoken part, he says, "I'd forgotten all about it. I woke around four hearing something, but I was so tired that I fell back to sleep. I was getting a coffee when I passed the basement door and came down to investigate."

Shutting the door behind you. Turning off the light at the bottom of the stairs. Shutting the next door behind you, too.

"Well, if it was four in the morning, that was me. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, thought I heard something, and investigated. Turned out to be a mouse."

"Ah."

"While I have you, though," I say, "I've been trying to speak to you about something. One thing that kept me up last night was that talk about using my story for your grant."

He exhales in a slow hiss through his teeth.

NL is not an easy woman to work with.

"It will be anonymous," he says. "You have my word on that."

"I know, but I've decided I need more. I'm having an agreement drawn up."

He stiffens. "An agreement?"

I give a dismissive wave. "It's nothing, really. Just protecting both of us. It says that if my story is used for funding, all names and locations will be changed."

He relaxes. "Of course. I can do that."

"Great. My lawyer is working on it now."

"Yes, of course. Whatever makes you feel more comfortable, Nicola."

I turn back toward the door and then stop. "Oh, and she's putting in something about limiting the use of my story to research and associated funding. Not my idea. She's just covering all the bases. Making sure you don't do something like sell book or film rights." I laugh. "I told her that was silly, but you know lawyers. We pay them to be thorough."

Call me a petty bitch, but I bask in the frozen horror that seeps into Cirillo's face.

"Davos? Are you okay?"

"Y-yes. I…" He gathers his professorial dignity and lifts his chin. "I just realized that I am going to need to place a call myself. You are correct about lawyers and their thoroughness, and mine will insist on seeing that agreement before I sign it."

"That's fair."

He lifts his phone and begins to tap. "I'll let him know, but I warn you that he is much too busy to get it done on such short notice."

"Really? Shit. Well…" I gnaw my lower lip. "Maybe you can make it a priority? We can't hold our last séance until it's signed."

"What?"

I give a rueful scrunch of my nose. "Yeah, my lawyer is a real hard-ass. She's furious with me for even starting this without a proper agreement. She's warned that if I proceed without a signed contract, she's dropping me as a client because she can't be held responsible for what happens if I proceed against her advice."

Thank God my lawyer is my former university roommate, who really will be able to squeeze in this agreement today… and won't give me shit for putting words in her mouth.

I relish the look on Cirillo's face and then, because I truly am the most petty bitch ever, I add, "Maybe skipping the séance is for the best. I'm starting to think this isn't safe for me. I've heard from Anton. I know he's fine. That's what I wanted."

"B-but you can't leave it like this," he says. "You've unleashed something here—"

"Pretty sure I'm not the one who summoned it. When I say I can't proceed, I don't mean you can't finish up. I just can't be here. I'm—"

He turns sharply, and my brows shoot up as he directs his glare into the room at large.

"Did you hear that?" he says.

I resist the urge to cross my arms at the obvious distraction.

"A dripping sound," he says. "I heard it just before you came down."

Okay, that gets my attention.

"I heard it last night," I say. "I can't find it, though. I thought it was the hot-water heater."

"It's not. The sound is too sporadic for me to get a fix on it."

Part of me wants to brush this off, so I can go place that call to my lawyer. Yet another part can't help but be drawn into this most minor of mysteries. Sure, a random drip is the least of our concerns, but it pokes at me, and if we can solve it together, I can keep Cirillo from knowing I'm pissed off… until I want him to know it.

I look around. "I investigated the water heater and the furnace. Neither seems to be dripping. Same with the pipes."

"And I looked for any moisture on the floor. There's nothing. We aren't below the main-floor bathroom, so that isn't the answer. I can't—"

He stops. "There, did you hear it?"

I only lift a finger for quiet. It was a single drip, one that seemed to come from my right. I'm starting to move in that direction when another drip sounds, this one loud enough for me to pinpoint.

"The old furnace," I say. "I didn't think to check that."

Cirillo frowns. "Because it clearly hasn't been used in decades. What would be dripping in that?"

I shrug. "Furnace oil? Condensation?"

I move closer for a better look. It really is a monster of a machine.

"There's a service door there," Cirillo says as he points at a metal hatch on the side.

I shake my head. "That's for wood."

"It's a wood-burning furnace?"

"Combination oil and wood. Anton told me about it. After his grandfather died, it was his and his brother's job to chop wood when they were here. His brother paid him to do it for both of them."

I walk over and take hold of the lever. "You open this and put in the wood." I turn it, surprised to find that it moves easily. When I yank open the metal door, something drops inside. I fall back with a yelp and then give a short laugh.

"Yep, I'm a little jumpy," I say.

Cirillo doesn't answer. I frown over to see him staring through the wood-loading door. I follow his gaze in and see what looks like a shoe inside the furnace.

I reach to pull it out… only to go still. It's not a discarded shoe. It's hanging… down. Hanging off what looks like a leg.

I stagger back, hands flying to my mouth.

Cirillo whirls on me. "You just happened to know how to open that, Nicola?"

"W-what?"

I drag my gaze away from that hanging foot and stare at Cirillo, his ice-cold gaze fixed on me. I take a slow step backward, and my hand moves toward the steak knife in my rear pocket.

There is a foot in the furnace. A leg hanging down from somewhere in the dark depths, and Cirillo is glaring. At me.

"W-what's going on?" I say, resisting the urge to back up again.

"That would be my question." His gaze locks on mine. "Do you want to know the real reason I came down here, Nicola? Yes, I heard something last night. But I suspected it was you. I've begun to suspect you've been doing many things. Last night, you were the only one who didn't run into the living room when we heard Anton's voice… and you should have been the first. You lured us out so you could knock over your chair and pretend it was a ghost."

I can't form a response. His words don't make sense. There is a foot—a foot —dangling inside the furnace, and he's accusing me of pretending a ghost knocked over my chair.

"You're the only one experiencing the physical manifestations," he says. "We've heard Anton's voice, but those could be recordings. The rest is all you."

I wave toward the foot because it's all I can think of to do.

"Do you really expect me to fall for that?" he says. "No, silly question. You do expect it. You swing open that furnace door and down falls a mannequin leg, and I'm supposed to run screaming from the basement, giving you time to hide it and then claim it was a ghostly manifestation."

Footsteps pound on the stairs, and Shania comes running in.

"What's going on?" she says. "I heard—"

She sees the open furnace door and frowns, and I dart forward to shut it, but it's too late. She backs up, hands clapping to her mouth.

"It's fake," Cirillo snaps. "Are you happy now, Nicola? Doubled your audience? Too bad your brother-in-law isn't here to see it. No, wait. That's intentional. You waited until Jin was gone. He's an intelligent man who knows you well enough to see through your tricks." Cirillo advances on me. "Those mediums you visited, they didn't set you up, did they? You set yourself up."

I open my mouth, but I can't form even a strangled protest as my brain struggles to make sense of what he's saying.

He continues, "When you contacted me, you expressed your discomfort with all the attention your situation brought. But that was a lie. You enjoyed it. And if one of those mediums managed to contact Anton, it would be over. So you had to keep making them look like charlatans. The poor grieving and sick widow, taken advantage of, over and over again."

I start to hear what he's saying. What he's accusing me of. Anger sparks… and then I remember I have those speakers in my pockets, and I have to resist the urge to slap my hands over them, like a child trying to hide the evidence.

"I'm not sick," I say with as much calm as I can muster. "I have a chronic illness. I am a grieving widow, and maybe I've made mistakes, but no one who knows me would ever suspect I set this up to draw attention to myself."

My gaze goes to Shania, looking for confirmation, but she's frozen with such uncertainty on her face that my stomach twists.

"Shania?" I say.

She can't meet my gaze. "You used to fake these, Nic."

"What?"

"When I went to that first medium with you, I was shocked by how quickly you saw through the tricks. You told me you used to set them up."

"When I was a child. At sleepover séances in middle school, I faked things because that's what the other girls wanted. It was a game."

I look from Shania to Cirillo. "I did not fake this. Any of this." My gaze locks on Cirillo. "You said I lured everyone out upstairs to pretend a ghost toppled my chair over. But I never said that."

"You didn't need to," he says. "That's part of the act. You're the first to insist it could all be your imagination, so no one can think you're jumping to conclusions… let alone staging it yourself. Are those even your husband's ashes in that box, Nicola?"

The anger ignites. " Excuse me?"

"Something is wrong with this summoning. We keep hearing Anton, but he's just throwing out random sound bites. No matter how hard I focus on him, something is wrong. Whose ashes are in that box?"

My vision clouds red with rage. He is accusing me of tampering with my husband's mortal remains to keep milking… What am I milking? What would be the point of all this?

My rage freezes.

What would be the point indeed.

He's accusing me of something so heinous, I'll forget everything else.

That is the point.

My jaw clenches, and I need to force myself to get words out. "There is a foot in that furnace, Dr. Cirillo. You stand here accusing me of staging it, but you haven't made a move to prove that."

If Cirillo hasn't been eager to prove the foot is fake, does that mean he planted it?

I start to step toward the furnace. Then I stop.

"I need something to hold it," I say. "If it is fake, I'm not leaving fingerprints."

"For fuck's sake." Cirillo strides toward the open door, reaches in, and grabs the shoe. He yanks it, hard, and it comes off in his hand, and he staggers back.

"Nice try," I say. "Let me guess. The fake foot is stuck, and you need me to run upstairs and get something to help pull it out. No, now you'll need both me and Shania to go upstairs, though I'm not sure how you'll convince us of that."

The look he shoots at me is so full of hate that my insides stutter. My first thought is: What have I done to him? My second thought? I know what I've done.

By insisting on a legal agreement, I've called his bluff, and that's where his focus is. On the bitch who is trying to ruin his shot at a book deal.

There's a foot hanging out of that furnace, and he's decided I put it there because he's too incensed to realize that makes no fucking sense.

And now I'm doing the same thing. There is a foot hanging in that furnace, but I'm ignoring the implication because I've bought into his narrative. Someone must have put a fake foot in there. Anything else is…

"Davos?" I say, my voice breathy as he turns back to the furnace. "I… I don't think—"

He's already at the door, leaning in to grab that foot and show me that he's right and I'm wrong, and I probably did this whole thing for attention because that's what people like me do. Tragic widows. The chronically ill. We get a taste of attention, and we want more.

He grabs the foot, and then staggers back with a strangled shriek, and with that noise, I know what has happened. He grabbed the foot, expecting plastic, and touched flesh. Cold flesh.

Jin.

I shove past Cirillo, clawing and scrabbling to get to that furnace.

Keith said Jin hasn't shown up and I can't get ahold of him, and when he left this morning, he was wearing running shoes and—

There is a sound in the furnace. A slow, sliding sound. Before I can get to the furnace, something falls from its depths.

The first thing I see is blood. Clothing and skin bathed in blood, and I'm slammed back twenty-two years, turning over Heather and seeing what had been done to her.

The images crash together into a single picture, a body splayed with the chest sliced open from throat to sternum, intestines spilling out.

I squeeze my eyes shut for a split second before I hear Shania screaming and realize she's been screaming all along.

I force my eyes open. I see a hand. I see a knife clutched in the hand, and I see Patrice lying on the forest floor, reaching for a bloody knife—

Stop! Stop!

I let out a snarl of frustration and shake away the memory, but when I open my eyes, that is what I do see. A hand clutching a knife. A pale white hand that is not Jin's.

I drag my gaze along that arm and…

And I was not imagining things. I was not letting the past shape the present. I am looking at a chest sliced open, intestines spilling, and a bloodied hunting knife clutched in the corpse's hand as if…

As if what? They sliced themself open and crawled into the fucking furnace?

That's when I finally look at the face. It's a young man, and Mrs. Kilmer's words come back.

He's five foot ten and a hundred and sixty pounds. Short light brown hair and blue eyes.

"Brodie," I whisper.

We've found Brodie Kilmer.