Grim and Darling

Chapter Nine

“I’m going to Seattle tomorrow.” Dad keeps looking at his spaghetti when he says this, like he’s embarrassed to admit it or something. I knew it was coming. He’s been staying late after work, and that always means he thinks he’s found a lead. That guy he told me about… That guy must be more than just a lead for him to pick up and go investigate him.

“That guy?” I ask, spinning my own spaghetti.

“Yeah. I think I’m on to something.” He shoves a giant forkful in his mouth, almost as if it will keep him from having to say any more. He gets sauce in his mustache.

“Who is he?” I stab my spaghetti a little harder.

“Works the shipyards.” Dad shrugs and gulps and spins more spaghetti around his fork. Spins and spins and spins.

“That’s it?” I stare at him, waiting for him to quit it with the endless spinning and just tell me something substantial already. I wish I could tell him about all my investigations, the locals that I trailed. Part of me wants to think that maybe he would take me seriously and start including me in his searches, but I know that he’ll just tell me to leave that job to the professionals and pay attention in school instead.

Dad shrugs. “He was seen in Port Angeles the day before the… ” His eyes dart toward the living room, and he clears his throat. “Anyway, will you be ok for a night?”

He wants me to stay here.

Alone.

“Sure,” I mutter and stab, stab, stab with a shaky hand and tears in my eyes.  

---

I’m at the park that afternoon keeping an eye on Stephanie Felice when I see Edward again.

Stephanie is a senior at my school. She plays varsity volleyball and varsity basketball and runs first string track and sits second flute in band. She volunteers to tutor middle school kids in math every Saturday and works one day a week at the nursing home pushing old ladies around the gardens in their wheelchairs, pretending to be their granddaughter. She walks her little brother home from school every day and picks up trash along the highway with her youth group every summer. She has curly blonde hair and big blue eyes and long, long legs and could probably be Barbie’s little sister.

Basically, she’s perfect.

I hate her.

I’m pretty sure that she murdered my sister. I have absolutely no evidence, no reason to even suspect her really, but I’m almost convinced. People that good, people that perfect? Their demons are bigger and darker and hidden even deeper. I’ve been trailing her around for weeks now, and I know, I just know, that at any moment she’s gonna crack, and I’ll finally get some proof.

What that proof will be, I have no idea.

It’s when I’m darting behind another tree to get a little closer that I see Edward. I gasp and stumble and go down to my hands and knees in the grass, scraping my skin and bruising my pride, and Stephanie looks over at me with her pretty, perfect face full of concern, that bitch.

“Are you ok?” she asks, and I grumble and huff and mutter to myself as I stand and brush the dirt off my legs. Both of my knees are bleeding. Don’t even ask about my pride.

“Yeah. I’m fine,” I hiss, then glare over at Edward. He’s standing beneath a tree on the far side of the park with his hands in the pockets of that same limp suit, and he looks no better than the last time I saw him. Still pale. Still shadowed. Still slumped. He’s shaking his head at me like he disapproves, and I stomp over to him, ignoring the screaming kids running between us.

“Leave me alone.”

“I’m not bothering you,” he says, still shaking his head, but his mouth is almost smiling.

“Yes. Yes, you are. You’re following me.”

“Like you’re following that girl?” He looks over at Stephanie just as she brushes the sand off her brother and kisses his cheek and then they’re off, holding hands like they always do, headed home like a goddamn Lifetime movie, and did I mention how much I hate that girl?

“She murdered Alice,” I tell him, completely convinced of it.

“No. She didn’t.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “You know that how?”

“I just do.” He shrugs and doesn’t meet my glare, and I resist the urge to kick him in the shin.

“You are the most frustrating person I know.”

“Probably not,” he says, staring down at me. “You’re alone tonight?”

I narrow my eyes at him. “How did you know that?”

He ignores my question. “Will you be ok?”

“I’m not a child.”

One, just one, of his eyebrows rises high into his forehead. He says nothing.  

“Ok, fine, I’m legally still a child, but I can sleep alone.”

“That’s not what I asked. I asked if you would be ok.”

“I’ll be fine,” I mutter, even though just the thought of a night alone in that house has my heart fluttering like a hummingbird on speed and my blood pumping fast enough to make my vision go fuzzy. My palms are clammy. My knees are weak. I can’t even feel the earth beneath me, and I have to swallow a few times to wet my mouth because I’ve dried up like a desert.

“I’ll come by to check on you,” he says.

“Don’t bother.”

Next

AN:

Two for one tonight. Because I'm nice like that.

Hop over to Facebook and tell Hadley Hemingway she's the shit. That girl deserves parades and diamonds, none of which I can afford.

Grim and Darling

Chapter Eight

Edward lets me keep the knife.

It’s stupid, bringing it home, but there’s a riptide of morbid curiosity barreling through me. Now that I know that I stabbed someone with it, I can’t let it go. I really want to ask him if I could see the scar, but I’m way too embarrassed to actually do such a thing. Instead, I just trudge along behind him back through the forest. We sit on the porch in the dark, and I spin that knife in my hands while he glares off across the yard.

“Sorry for stabbing you,” I say.

Edward just shrugs like it was no big deal, like people stabbed strangers every day. Like it was normal or something.

“You couldn’t hurt me even if you tried,” he wheezes.

“Why did I do it?”

“I scared you. It was an accident.”

I peek at him out the corner of my eye, trying to imagine what it was like, sinking the blade into him. I wonder if I hit a bone or an intestine. Maybe I’d managed sheer stupid luck and slid it into the slim centimeter of space where nothing important was in the way, just like that girl on the highway a few years back. A big iron pole from a construction vehicle burst through her windshield and pinned her to the seat when it went through her chest. It missed her heart by millimeters. Missed her lung by even less. She was a miracle.

Maybe he was too.

“Where did you come from?”

“A different century,” he sighs and drops his chin to his chest. I can’t tell if he’s making a joke or just being sarcastic. He must hear me huff because he shakes his head and says, “Alaska.”

“So, you’re on vacation?”

“No, I live here.”

“I’ve never seen you.” I rack my brain for him but come up empty, which is weird. Small towns like this make strangers impossible to miss. How this guy with his sick face and his wheeze and that assassin suit could go unnoticed, I don’t understand.

“I own a house here,” he says.

“Where?”

“Out of town. Down the 101, on Hollow Road. ”

There’s only one house out that way, and it’s haunted. At least that’s the rumor. I haven’t seen the actual house, but I know the driveway is barely a driveway, overgrown and shadowed and not much more than a hole in the dense forest that borders the highway. Half the town would tell you that an entire family was murdered there. The other half claims that the family murdered each other.

“I thought that house was haunted,” I mumble.

Edward laughs. A hard, rough laugh that catches in his throat.

“You have no idea.”

Next

AN:

I am a mess, but Hadley Hemingway fixes me up. I cannot thank her enough.

Thank you for reading.

bzzzzzzzz

Grim and Darling

Chapter Seven

I’m home alone when the doorbell rings.

The panic is immediate. There are too many exits. Too many entrances. Too many people who might be too curious, too drunk, or too angry, and they could come knocking with the taste of too much vengeance on their tongues. The backwoods raving lunatics determined to right a wrong, home-brewed moonshine in their bellies and the rage of a thousand scared townsfolk singing through their veins. The suburban helmet heads in their minivans and their herringbone, their baby monitors in their back pockets, and the numbers to their security systems programmed into their cell phones.

The teachers who should have seen me coming.

The classmates who knew it all along.

It could be anyone.

I tiptoe through the house and slink up to the peephole, but it’s not a backwoods anarchist, or a suburban housewife, or even a concerned citizen. It’s not Mr. Welburn with his fuzzy grey hair and that wrinkle between his eyes, on the hunt for blood. It’s not Stephanie Walsh with her nose in the air and her cheerleading skirt rolled up two extra inches, searching for rumors. It’s not old Mrs. Franklin with her ugly toy poodle and her gout, looking for gossip.

It’s a guy in a suit who looks likes he’s prepared to sell me a vacuum. Or god.

“I’m not home!” I yell through the door and watch him startle through my fisheye view. He looks hard right at the peep hole, and I swear he can see me through it.

“Yes. Yes, you are,” he says simply.

He looks sick. Like terminal sick. Like his blood cells stopped working, and he’s been surviving on air and not much else. Like he caught some weird disease that snatches away the color in his eyes and leaves him hunched over, pale as snow. His hands are shaky, and his cheeks are hollow, and his eyes are empty and dark. He’s dressed in a suit that looks limp and heavy, hanging off his shoulders. Tie loose. Buttons undone. Shirt wrinkled.

Young and half-dead and beautiful.

“Let me in, Bella Swan.”

When he says it, my name, my heart grinds to a stuttering halt. My blood freezes. My skin goes creepy-crawly cold. I don’t even have time to wonder how he knows it before I’m flinging the door open, trying to look bigger than I am. I straighten my spine and throw my chin up and stick my chest out like I don’t actually weigh just a hundred odd pounds. Like I’m a thousand pounds of gravity. A million pounds of concrete. A zillion tons of earth. The unbearable weight of the universe, not some girl with bird bones or paper skin or a heart like a helium balloon.

His nostrils flare.

“What do you want?”

“Let me in,” he says, his voice as rough and worn and as tired as his face.

“I don’t even know your name. I’m not stupid,” I hiss.

“Edward.”

I wait for it, but he doesn’t offer up anything more.

“That’s it? Just, Edward?”

He nods, only once, and he still hasn’t blinked.

“Well, just Edward, I don’t need a vacuum. Thanks, anyway.” I step back and start to shut the door, but then his hand is splayed across the wood next to my face, and the door is stationary, and all I can think is that his skin smells like the very middle of the forest where the oldest trees grow.

“I’m not selling anything.”

“I don’t need Jesus either,” I say.

“Come with me.”

Before I can turn to run, flee, scramble away, he has a hand around my wrist and has dragged me clear out of the house. I’m off the porch, into the grass, my bare feet fumbling along behind him in an effort to keep up. He is fast, despite looking so sick, but his hand is freezing cold, and he’s breathing hard with a wheezing sound in his throat that cannot be healthy. He marches up to the edge of the forest where the elderberry and the sumac stand shoulder to shoulder, like the front line of an army defending something that you think is big and grand but is really only small and meek, and maybe not even worth defending. It’s not raining, but the fog is so thick you could slice through it. Even from a few feet away, standing staring off into the trees, he looks like a shadow.

“I’m not going in there with you.” I halt, wrenching myself out of his grip, my hands shaking. I’m sure, really sure, that he’s going to take me into that dark forest and pull some self-righteous revenge-killing on me. He doesn’t look like a housewife, or a backwoods hillbilly. In that suit, he looks like a goddamn assassin.

“Is that so?” He’d probably deny it, but I swear to god he’s laughing at me.

“No fucking way. You’re gonna take me in there and beat me to death and then bury me under a tree. They’ll never even find me.”

“I have no intention of doing that.” He licks his lips, the inside of his mouth red against his sickly skin, eyes all over my face. He takes a step closer, a hand floating shaky out toward me. “You’re giving up too easily,” he says.

“What?” I stammer. He’s too close, too stern, and too strong. It’s making my head spin funny. All I see is the flash of his hand near my face, and then he’s pulling me through the forest faster than my feet can keep up with. A blind stumble through the trees with my hand held tight in his, and there is no warmth coming up through his bones. There is no give to his skin, no take from his muscles. No flush or thump or breath. He skids to a halt, dropping me into the leaves beneath a gnarled tree before I even have time to wonder what all that means.

Edward looks up at the sky for a moment, breathing steady and slow, until he’s no longer wheezing. Even still, his chest doesn’t move, and his eyes don’t blink, and he’s not even flushed from running through the woods like that. I turn red just walking up my stairs.

“Dig.” He turns to point at the ground between my knees, tone oddly bland like he didn’t just run me out into the middle of the woods to kill me.

“Are you serious?” My mouth drops open.

“Deadly.” He isn’t even looking at me, and I’m not even remotely gonna do that.

“No.”

Edward scowls at me. “It’s about Alice.”

I gulp and shove my hands into the loam. My fingers push through the wet and damp and cold, and I try to ignore the rotten egg smell that drifts up from between my knees with each handful I push aside. Try to ignore the skittering feet of insects and the wet slime of worms. Blindly digging and digging and digging until he tells me to stop by pushing me aside. I scramble to my feet, my legs covered in dirt and my hands caked in mud, to watch him finish the job. Edward pulls something from the hole and brushes off the mud, the dull glint of metal in the moonlight.

“What is it?” I ask, peering around his shoulder. He holds it up, a sharp blade with a wooden handle that looks oddly familiar. I feel the sink in my stomach before he even tells me what it is.

“This is the knife you stabbed me with. I buried it here.”

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AN:As ever, Hadley waves her wand over this and then I usually fuck it all up again tweaking things at the last minute. 

Any and all mistakes are mine.

Thank you for reading.<3