Deadly Little Voices (22 page)

I add texture to the skater’s skirt, definition to her calves, and more detail to her hands. I grab an X-Acto knife from my jar of tools, feeling confident that the skater’s nearly done. I’m just about to carve my initials into the base when I notice a smudge of red by the skater’s foot.

I check my sponge, in search of the source. It’s clean. The table’s clean, too. I start to wipe the smudge away when I notice more of the color. On my hands; all over my palms.

Deep red.

Like blood.

With
DM
written right through it.

I STARE AT MY TREMBLING PALMS, at the letters written through the redness, wondering what the initials mean.
Die much
?
Danica M-something
?

My pulse racing, I look around my pottery studio. Aside from my hands, everything appears normal. So, then, where did this redness come from? And who scribbled the letters across it?

A moment later, my cell phone rings in my pocket. I want to answer, but my brain is no longer in sync with my body.

It’s several seconds before I’m able to reach for the phone. Before I’m finally able to snap back to reality.

Before I see that my palms are no longer red. They probably never were.

“Hello,” I answer, hoping it’s Kimmie at last.

“Come upstairs,” a voice whispers from the receiver.

I pinch the gooseflesh on my arm to make sure this isn’t a dream. “Aunt Alexia?” I ask, wondering if she’s okay.

“Come see,” she says; her high-pitched voice is followed by a giggle. And then she hangs up.

I hang up, too. And hurry upstairs. Through the kitchen. The light over the sink illuminates the area just enough for me to find my way.

I stand at the end of the hallway. Her bedroom door faces me, makes me dizzy, and steals my breath.

I recheck my palms—still clean—and then I start down the hallway. The floorboards creak beneath my feet. A shadow moves on the floor and plays in the crack below her door.

She’s waiting for me.

Standing directly in front of her door now, I raise my fist to knock. But then a light flashes in my bedroom, just to the right of me. I take a step inside. My lamp is off, but a light shines in from the street. I move to the window over my bed and peer out from behind the drapes.

Someone’s out there, in a car, blocking the street. Headlights shine toward my window.

Bright, then dull, then bright again.

I double-check my window to make sure it’s locked. And draw the drapes. My first thought is that it’s Wes, just being his obnoxious self, especially since I called him earlier. But it quickly dawns on me that Wes would never be that insensitive. Nor would he ever risk the chance that my parents might catch him.

The headlights remain shining through the four-inch gap of my drapes, illuminating my entire room. I’m pretty sure it isn’t Adam either. I can normally hear the roar of his Bronco’s engine from at least a couple of streets away, even with the window closed. I sneak another peek, trying to tell if it might be the Ford Taurus that Wes and I followed. But before I can, the car’s lights move away from my window as the driver backs up, turns, and finally speeds off down the road.

With the headlights gone, the room is dark. I close my eyes, trying to remain calm.

Meanwhile, a gnawing sensation eats at my gut.

I open my eyes, able to sense something more.

And there it is: on my wall, directly in front of me. The letters
DM
glow in the darkness.

And send shivers down my spine.

THE INITIALS ARE LARGE, taking up half the wall in front of my bed. It looks like someone painted them quickly. You can see where drips of paint ran down the wall and bled into a puddle on the floor.

I click on my night-table light, and the letters disappear—just like that. Whoever painted them must have used glow-in-the-dark paint, intending the clue for my eyes only.

I look toward the wall that separates Aunt Alexia’s room from mine, wondering if she’s still waiting for me. Slowly, I move out into the hallway, knowing I should tell my parents about the car.

The house is quiet and dark, and the hum of the dishwasher is the only sound I hear.

Keeping my bedroom door open for light, I raise my hand to rap gently on their door.

But then I turn to look.

Aunt Alexia is there, standing in her doorway. Staring straight at me.

“What took you so long?” she asks.

I open my mouth, but I can’t find the words. Meanwhile, I feel dizzy again.

Aunt Alexia turns her back, leaving her door wide open, perhaps eager for me to follow.

And so I do.

I venture into her room. My eyes zoom in on her bed first. The blankets have been tossed to the floor. The sheets sit in a heap at the headboard, and the pillows are stacked up at the foot. I gaze around the rest of the room, suddenly realizing that I don’t see Aunt Alexia anywhere.

Is she hiding from me? Am I having another hallucination?

“Aunt Alexia?” I call, noticing a giant tarp covering the floor, protecting the wood.

Sketch pads, canvases, and tubes of acrylic paint sit in piles.

I look toward our shared wall, curious again about the scratching sounds. And that’s when I see it: a giant mural of a baby grand piano. Painted atop the piano is a vase of flowers—
red
flowers—which explains the red paint I’ve seen on Alexia’s hands.

There’s another tarp, half attached to the wall—what Aunt Alexia must’ve been using to protect the mural and keep it hidden. I take a step closer, noticing how several of the piano’s keys are depressed, as if someone’s playing music, and yet no one’s sitting on the bench.

My initial thought is that maybe she hasn’t finished the painting yet; maybe she still needs to add the image of a person. But the bench looks fully painted. There’s even a ray of light across the seat. And she’s already signed her name in the corner.

“Aunt Alexia?” I call again, about to leave the room. But then I finally spot her, crouched down against the far wall, sending chills all over my skin.

Wearing a paint-spattered dress and half-concealed by a canvas, she almost completely blends in with her surroundings.

“Alexia?”

Her eyes appear wide and alert, focused on the mural. She whispers something, but I can’t quite hear it.

“Excuse me?” I ask, moving closer.

“The piano plays by itself,” she says, just a wee bit louder.

“You mean it’s a player piano?”

Sitting hunched over with her knees drawn up to her chest and Miss Dream Baby clenched against her stomach, she remains looking off to the side, failing to answer my question.

“Aunt Alexia?” I scoot down in front of her.

“He’s following me,” she whispers.

“Who is?”

“He followed me here.”

“Is he someone you know?” I ask, assuming she’s talking about the car outside—the one that shined its headlights into my room. “Someone from Ledgewood, maybe?” I look back toward the mural for a clue, but I can’t see much detail from this angle.

“He’s someone
you
know,” she says, looking directly at me finally. Her eyelids are swollen and red.

“I don’t know anyone with a piano like that.”

“Well, he knows you,” she insists, still whispering. “And if you’re not careful, he’ll take you captive, too.”

“Meaning he’s going to take someone else captive?” My mind flashes to Danica.

“He’ll lock you both up and throw away the key.” She nibbles at the skin on her kneecap.

“Are his initials D.M.?” I venture.

Shaking her head, she digs her teeth in deeper.

“Did you paint those letters on my wall?”

“Don’t be fooled,” she says, avoiding the question. But still, she doesn’t deny it.

“Fooled by what?” I ask; my heart beats fast.

“There are two,” she reminds me. “But you’re only looking at one.”

“One, meaning Danica? Or meaning the person I think might be following her? Or the person who’s following you?”

Alexia extends her hand toward mine, wanting to touch palms. I focus a moment on the star-shaped scar on her wrist, reminded of her diary entry.

I reluctantly place my palm against hers, even though my hand is shaking.

“Just about the same size,” she says, marveling at how similar our hands are. “Like sisters.”

“That’s what Dad thinks. That we’re connected somehow. He told my mom that he thinks we’re kindred spirits.”

“Your dad’s a smart man.” She focuses harder on me. Her emerald green eyes, flecked with gold, are almost a mirror image of my own, nearly making me forget that we
aren’t
long-lost sisters. That she isn’t twenty years older than me. And that her stay here isn’t permanent.

“There’s a girl who might be in trouble,” I tell her, segueing back to the initials on my wall. “So, if you know what those letters stand for…”

She drops her hand, leaving a thick black smear of paint on my palm. “Those girls didn’t want her to skate. She was better than they were, and they knew it.”

“What girls?” I ask. “Who are you talking about?”

“When they played that trick, locked her up, it put her over the edge. She got taken out of public school and put in a private place.”

“Who?” I ask again.

She gives the doll a kiss. “You know, I was there the day you got this doll. It was around the time when I wasn’t doing so great, when the voices had started to seep into my dreams.” She straightens out the front of Miss Dream Baby’s dress and then makes the legs kick back and forth.

“For my birthday,” I say, remembering the star-themed party. Star streamers, star-shaped cake, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceilings and walls.

Was all of that a coincidence, too?

“I’d started to have dreams about painting,” she continues, “since I’d tried giving it up altogether. Those dreams haunted me, so much that I’d started setting my alarm clock to go off every half hour.
Anything
to avoid sinking into a deep and dreamful slumber.”

“And did it work?” I ask.

“What do
you
think?” She smirks. “That wasn’t the first time I’d tried giving up my art—like a bad habit that you keep going back to. But it
was
the first time that my dreams got hijacked. Anyway, you were so happy when you opened the box with the doll in it. I asked what you were going to name her.”

“Miss Dream Baby,” I say, watching as Alexia attempts to clean the doll’s face with a fingertip moistened with spit.

“Yes, but it was the
way
you named her. The way you looked at me, with wide eyes and a knowing grin—like you could see through me, into my soul—as if you knew about my power even back then. And as if you had it, too. That’s when you told me that her name was Miss Dream Baby, and that she’d help keep nightmares away.”

“I remember,” I say, feeling a smile form on my face.

“I thought that by giving her that name, it was your way of telling me I could keep her.”

“It was,” I say, not quite sure if that’s the truth.

“There are two,” she reminds me, switching gears again. “And now I’ve told you all I know.” She resumes biting the skin on her knee.

I try to push her with more questions, asking if the
D
stands for Danica, if the person she claims is following her might really be looking for me, and if she has any details about what this person looks like. But with each question, her teeth sink in deeper.

Until she draws a trickle of blood.

I hurry out of the room to get my parents. Both shoot out of bed, perhaps fearing the worst. Mom bandages the cut. Dad makes an emergency call to Alexia’s doctor.

Mom makes the bed.

Dad helps Alexia into it.

They both ask her if she’d like something to drink, a bite to eat, a warm compress for her flushed face.

Meanwhile, horrified at the idea that I’m the one who got Aunt Alexia so upset, I slip back into my room and try calling Kimmie a couple more times, desperate to hear her voice. But when for the umpteenth time she doesn’t pick up, I pull the covers over my head and cry myself to sleep.

Dear Jill,

I remember pulling onto the main road, wishing you’d known how much I’d sacrificed for you: all the time I’d spent watching, and learning, and planning.

But all you wanted was to leave me. To give up on us. I could hear the desperation in your voice as you lied and told me you’d accidentally left your cell phone behind.

Your face was sweaty, but I turned the heat up higher, hoping you’d finally be honest.

With suffering comes honesty, and you needed to tell me the truth if we were going to have trust.

“Please,” you just kept begging, like a disobedient dog who wants to be let out.

Meanwhile, I hummed a favorite tune, silently telling myself that in time you’d see that this was truly for the best.

…

Dear Jack:

I couldn’t find my cell phone. It wasn’t in my bag or in any of my pockets. And so I asked you to take me back to the coffee shop to see if I’d left it there, but instead you just kept singing your Jack and Jill song, making my skin crawl.

Still, I tried to tell myself that everything would be fine. Tried to picture you as a little boy swimming with your dad at the pond. Tried to imagine you showing your artwork at a gallery, or sitting in a college lecture hall discussing romanticism in literature.