The Women in the Walls Read online

  I scream again, sprinting to the window, looking out despite the dreadful knowledge that I will regret doing so.

  And I do. Instantly.

  Because after my cousin falls three stories, she lands directly on top of the spiked iron fence that runs along the perimeter of the garden. I watch as two black metal spikes explode through the back of her shoulder and head, the impact causing pieces of bone and brain matter to go in every direction. Her arms and legs flail weakly, like she’s a dying insect, and even from all the way up here I can hear the sound of her gurgling whimpers before the nerves die out and she finally goes limp. Blood pours from her body, runs down the fence, pools over the cobblestone, sinks into the grass.

  When my father and Vanessa climb up into the attic and pull me away from the gaping mouth in the wall, I’m still screaming Margaret’s name.

  IN MY FAVORITE photograph of Penelope, she is standing in the garden, just in front of the ivy-covered stone wall outside the house, her arm draped around a ten-year-old me. We’re both wearing sun hats and gardening gloves and ridiculous smiles. At our feet are baskets of freshly harvested tomatoes and squash and herbs, our summer bounty, surrounded by piles of long-stemmed flowers that we sorted according to color. My aunt’s free hand is frozen in midair, waving to whoever took the picture, my father, most likely. The ends of her dark, curly hair are pulled sideways from the breeze.

  Her face is scribbled out with black ink.

  It is in all the photos now. Margaret got to each and every one somehow, one of the many warning signs that should have prompted me to ensure her safety sooner than I did. The photographs, her reaction when we first discovered the cemetery, her claim that Penelope’s ghost was trapped inside the walls of the house.

  What was it my father said when I confronted him about Margaret in his study? The little girl just needs to suck it up and get a hold of herself. Of course. Because little girls never worry about anything important enough to require more than a second’s thought, apparently.

  I failed you, Margaret.

  We failed you.

  Now I’ll never get to see her again, never get to talk things out, or make them right. The knowledge that she loved me isn’t what I seek; I know she did, and she knew I loved her just as much. It’s the state of how things were between us that tortures me now, so many things unspoken in the wake of Penelope’s disappearance, so many lost chances to say something sooner and save her, somehow.

  In the entire length of our history together, never once despite her moodiness and sharp tongue did Margaret ever appear to fall completely out of touch with reality. At first I thought her recent bout of strange behavior spawned from the shock, or grief, or maybe even regret from how horrible things were between her and her mother. I thought it would pass.

  And now she’s dead.

  The ever-growing black hole of grief and loss that never had the chance to develop from my mother’s absence has erupted into existence overnight. I’ve gone from having my aunt and cousin to having neither in less than a month. For the first time in my life, I’m acutely aware that my own mother is gone. In fact, I can’t seem to forget it no matter how hard I try.

  How would things have gone if she never had the brain aneurysm? What kind of person would I be today? Different? Better? Would Margaret and Penelope have been better off living in their tiny apartment in town, bitter about being left out of the will, rather than changing their lives to revolve around me and my father and the club?

  Likely, yes. Running through all the potential possibilities is driving me mad, but it’s still better than focusing on what’s real in my life now: Margaret is gone forever.

  I’m a different person now, I realize as I get back into my bed, the satin sheets as cool as the air in the attic was. The fireplace in my bedroom glows red from the dying embers piled over the stone. I don’t even know who I am without my cousin.

  Is her body still out there? I wonder as I pull the covers up to my chin, my eyes open and staring, unblinking, up at the ceiling. I think about the sound her head made when the tip of the black iron fence exploded through the back of it. Would my father have taken her down from the fence while he waited for officials to arrive?

  What officials he called remains to be seen. Who do you call for something like this? A paramedic? An undertaker? I wonder if Vanessa is still awake, if she’s told her mother about Margaret yet, how Miranda took the news. My father insisted that I go back to bed while he took care of things. I hardly even remember climbing down out of the attic, or making my way back to my bedroom on the second floor. Somewhere in between I stopped to wash my face and hands with scalding water.

  I can practically feel the emptiness of Margaret’s bedroom behind the wall my bed is pushed up against. Tomorrow I should go through her things, take everything I could possibly want before my father hires someone to clear it away and donate it all. I wonder if he feels guilty for ignoring what I told him about Margaret. I hope so.

  After a few deep breaths, I finally gather the courage to close my eyes. I struggle to keep my brain from replaying the events of the night, and the events leading up to it, and the vision of Margaret becoming impaled on the fence with her blood pouring all over the cobblestone and the grass.

  Just a handful of hours ago we were in fancy dresses, eating roast chicken and listening to stupid Gregory Shaw lay into my father about his future with the estate. How did things take a turn so quickly?

  Margaret told me that Penelope had explained things to her about the cemetery in the forest, the same one she went to tonight before she killed herself. When she first saw the place, she freaked out, but this time she had gone all by herself in the middle of the night? It doesn’t make any sense. She must have already lost herself to whatever sickness had awakened in her mind.

  I remember hearing the sound of Margaret through the wall, crying in her room late at night before things went from bad to worse. And how she cried again when she tried to tell me what was going on with her. More clues I should have taken to heart: she never cried.

  I can almost hear the crying now. In fact, uncomfortably so.

  Impossible, I think to myself without opening my eyes. She’s dead. That’s not her crying you hear, it’s just your own messed-up mind remembering the memory too vividly...

  But I do hear it—the sound of Margaret crying in the other room. I must be asleep; there are no ghosts, no matter how much my cousin may have believed otherwise. She was so sure she could hear Penelope, or maybe she just needed to believe it.

  But then I remember something that’s been bothering me.

  That first time Margaret and I went to the woods—she walked through the forest as though she knew exactly where she was going. How had she known where to go like that? At the time I figured she must have been there before, but then I saw how she’d reacted when we reached the tomb. She clearly was not expecting those graves. Who had told her where to go?

  Certainly not a ghost, I think in an attempt to calm my nerves. There’s a valid explanation here, you just don’t know it.

  Just like there has to be a valid explanation for the crying you can hear now, right?

  I don’t open my eyes to see if I am dreaming or not. To do so would mean that I’m entertaining the idea that something unnatural is happening. I need to stop thinking, stop dreading tomorrow, stop dreading the rest of my life, however long that may be. I need the memory of Margaret running past me to get to the window, her hair flying behind her, still smelling of pine from the forest, to stop replaying in my head.

  I read once that scientists don’t really know why we physically require sleep besides the fact that we just get tired. I’m starting to believe that we simply wouldn’t be able to survive if we weren’t able to turn off for hours at a time, the screen black, our bodies nothing more than idling vehicles released from the weight of simply li
ving.

  I have the same dream all night, a nightmare in which I can hear Margaret’s voice chiding me in the dark of my bedroom. “How could you do this to me?” she weeps from under my bed, her cries muffled as though she’s somehow pressing her face against the bottom of the mattress. “How could you let me die even after I asked for help?”

  I SLEEP FOR nearly two full days, only leaving the warmth of the blankets when I have to get up and use the restroom. Nobody comes to bother me. I’m glad that my father knows to stay away. I haven’t heard any sounds to indicate that Margaret’s bedroom was being cleaned out, either.

  Eventually, the bed stops comforting me and starts suffocating me, with its sheets clinging to my clammy skin and tangling themselves around the bottoms of my ankles like hands. I try to kick them off, grunting in frustration when I only succeed in tangling them further.

  When I stand, I feel thick in the head. The aftermath of witnessing Margaret’s death has settled into my body like an especially wicked hangover. The temperature is near frigid, as I haven’t been keeping up with my fireplace. I walk in a big circle around my room, hugging myself as I carefully take in what everything looks like in this strange new world I live in, the world without Penelope or Margaret.

  Out the window, the sun is blocked by a thick array of dark gray clouds. I step up to the glass and glance sharply to the right, where I can see the black iron fence that surrounds the garden. My cousin’s body is gone. The cobblestone and fence have been cleaned of her blood, and the patch of grass that was puddled with it has been cut out, the dark soil striking against the green.

  I wonder where her body is, and when the funeral will be.

  I shiver as I turn away from the window and get myself dressed as quickly as possible. Afterward, I make my way through the empty dining room and into the kitchen to grab something from the bread shelf for breakfast. I don’t see any sign of Miranda or Vanessa anywhere and wonder briefly if it’s possible that they quit, or if Vanessa did, at least. The girl thought my cousin and I were fucked up before one of us babbled about a ghost and killed herself.

  The thought is only a dismal reminder that I have no idea why Margaret did what she did. The circumstances are too extreme to let them be swept under the rug, which I know is the direction my father will go as far as moving on from this. Something strange is happening and there has to be an answer, or at least part of one, somewhere. She was keeping a secret; maybe I can find out what it was. I can look through her bedroom, maybe even Penelope’s. I could put my mind to use instead of having it run in constant, violent circles.

  As I’m leaving the kitchen, I see papers spread out over the small table in the corner—more seating arrangements for an event that is supposedly a week away, according to the date scribbled in the corner. Margaret’s memorial, perhaps? I would have thought that over a week is a long time to wait for funeral and memorial services—too long—but maybe I’m mistaken.

  After some thought, I decide to go to Penelope’s room, which I’ve been avoiding for weeks. The idea of going into Margaret’s room first fills me with a cold, electric fear, a deeply threaded string of dread that feels as though it’s sewing my heart closed stitch by stitch. Penelope’s door is closed but not locked, which I half expected after my father discovered what Margaret had done to the pictures. I slip in and close the door behind me before taking in the sight of Penelope’s room.

  Her bed is made, and there are small piles of clothing scattered over the hardwood floor. A framed painting of a rabbit hangs crookedly over the swirling wallpaper. Scarves lie in piles over the dresser. Overcome, I lie facedown on her bed, inhaling the familiar scents of lavender and cigarette smoke.

  What happened to you, Penelope? And what did Margaret know about it?

  After I’ve taken a moment, I go to my aunt’s large wooden dresser that sits against the wall by the entrance to her bathroom. Margaret always used to remark how stupid it was that Penelope loaded her dresser drawers with pictures and trinkets and books as opposed to clothes, but I thought it was wonderful, having your most precious items all stored together somewhere that is organized and accessible.

  The bottom drawer is books: fiction, old Spanish cookbooks that belonged to her grandmother, hardcover notebooks filled with drawings she did of different parts of the house. I flip through the notebooks, aching with sentiment as I take in the lazy sketches of the entry room and the courtyard and the garden. Penelope was always so deeply in love with this house, with its historical architecture and wide-open spaces. She couldn’t get enough of it, even referred to the grounds as sacred from time to time.

  I am filled with relief to discover that Margaret didn’t wreck any of these notebooks, but the nostalgic half smile blooming on my face fades away when I look into the middle drawer, the one with all of Penelope’s photographs. Every single one is ruined, just as my father said they were, but seeing it with my own eyes just makes it more appalling.

  One photo shows Penelope at a country club summer picnic that took place in the courtyard, her head held high and proud as she stands in a yellow housedress among the rosebushes and the guests. The word BITCH is scrawled sloppily across the entire sky. Penelope’s face is covered in scribbles, as are her feet and the single rose that is being extended to her by a man in a blue suit, Gregory Shaw. The sight of it is eerie enough to make me feel ill.

  I go through the piles and piles of defiled photos, each one containing more scribbles and curse words than the last. I try to imagine Margaret coming in here, grim-faced and equipped with a black marker. No matter how hard I try, I can’t figure out what her intentions were at that moment; whom she was trying to hurt by ruining the photos. Her mother? My father?

  Me?

  The next photo was taken on my seventh birthday and shows Penelope setting a cake down before me, her mouth open in silent song. The flame of each candle has been crossed out, and long, jagged teeth have been drawn over my aunt’s mouth, monster-like. Instead of scribbles like she did every other time, Margaret had very carefully outlined and filled my face in with solid black ink.

  Clearly, my cousin’s jealousy about my relationship with Penelope wasn’t something I’d made up or even exaggerated in my head. But what was it that made her so especially angry with Penelope, enough to come in here and do something like this to all of her memories?

  You don’t know the first thing about my mother, Margaret said that night at dinner when my father first questioned her about the photos. Neither of you do, and that’s the problem.

  I drop the photos back into the dresser drawer in disgust, then slide it shut. I’ve seen enough. I give the rest of the room a quick look-over, and even though the sight of her purse and car keys hanging on the coatrack by the door hurts bad enough to make me cringe, I don’t find anything unusual or out of place. I take one last longing look around my aunt’s bedroom, wondering how she would have felt over what happened to Margaret, then open the door to step out.

  My father is standing in the hallway.

  His suit is impeccable as always, the cuff links silver today, his hair combed to the side with a swath of hair gel. The intensity of his stare is startling.

  “Hi,” I say, pulling the door shut behind me as I step into the hall. “I was just thinking of Penelope and I thought I’d—”

  “How are you feeling?” he cuts in, sliding his hands into his pockets. “You were pretty quiet for a few days there. I was beginning to get worried.”

  “Huh?” I ask, taken by surprise at the concern. “Yeah, I think I’ll be okay. It’s just...what happened with Margaret was...”

  I remember my father pulling me away from the attic window, screaming, and blush.

  He looks to the floor, frowning. “Yes. I am so sorry you had to witness that. It’s a shame that she took such drastic measures to make her statement. We’re all hurting, even more so now.”
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  Her statement? Any warmth his concern ignited in me a second ago goes cold. “She was suffering, Dad. She tried to ask for help, literally screamed for it—” I think of Margaret in the cemetery, when she saw the tomb. “And you wrote her off because you cared more about your own reputation than the wellness of a girl who might as well have been your own daughter.”

  It’s harsh, but I don’t care. He deserves every bit of it as far as I’m concerned.

  “Don’t tell me what I do and do not care about,” my father says, his face growing red. “Clearly, you have no real concept of the position I’m currently in, with this estate, now that Penelope is gone. Those vultures are going to be looking for any weak spots to pick at, Lucy, and I refuse to show them any. We must persevere.”

  Of course, he’s bringing up the country club yet again.

  “What does any of that have to do with Margaret?” I say, challenging him on the issue at last. “It’s not like those guys could actually have any significant impact on our lives. Just because the house has a history with a country club doesn’t mean there are any legal ties. It’s all about reputation. Margaret should have been more important.”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” my father insists, shaking his head angrily. “There are things that could be held against us. Circumstances...that give a few members of the club a certain amount of leverage with the estate. Serious leverage.”

  “Leverage?” I raise an eyebrow. How could a country club have leverage against us? “What do you mean? How much leverage, and what circumstances?”

  I think about Gregory Shaw and Kent Dickens and all the other men who bring their wives for dinners and galas. If the leverage has to do with the estate, that must mean it’s financial. But why would there be any financial ties between my family and the club? I have a sobering thought: Is my father being blackmailed? For what?