Siren (12 page)

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pink mixing bowl. "You can try talking to her," she said over the whirring. "But don't expect her to be happy about it."

"I never do." Paige whirled around. She grabbed me gently by the sleeve when she reached the doorway and pulled me with her out of the kitchen.

"Pleased to meet you, Vanessa," Raina called after us, sounding indifferent at best.

"See?" Paige said once we crossed the living room and entered a narrow stairwell. "I'd love it if my biggest issue with my mother was that she bought me a dress I didn't want to wear to go to a party I didn't want to go to."

"Is that why you call her by her first name?" I asked, ignoring the thudding in my chest. "Because she's not as warm and fuzzy as other mothers?"

"That--and because she wanted us to. She says she doesn't feel old enough to have two teenage daughters." She reached the landing and turned to me. "By the way, I meant to ask--why aren't your parents here? You said your mom wanted you to come home?"

"Right." I focused on a lit wall sconce. "Mom's a workaholic, and Dad's a momaholic, so they went back to Boston for a few days."

"Awesome," Paige said, stepping into the hallway. "I would kill for my own space every now and then. Want to trade?"

I laughed, but the funny thing was, even if the trade included Zara, I kind of did.

I followed her down a long hallway lit by two small crystal

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chandeliers. "Are you sure I shouldn't wait downstairs?" I asked when we stopped in front of a closed door. "Your sister doesn't seem to like me that much."

"Z doesn't like anyone that much." Paige smiled reassuringly and pounded on the door with her fist. "You should hear her talk about Jonathan."

She banged again before I could ask who Jonathan was. I pressed one hand to my forehead when music playing on the other side of the door grew louder. It sounded like jazz, but with drums and a fast, throbbing beat.

"I'm not going anywhere, Z," Paige yelled. She pounded again, and the pain reverberated between my ears each time her fist connected with the door.

She started knocking and bobbing her head in time to the music. This went on for at least a minute, and I turned away and stood by a tall window, massaging my temples as I watched the rain fall in one heavy gray sheet into the ocean far below. My head started to spin and, feeling like I might pass out, I turned back to Paige to excuse myself and wait in the car.

I was about to tap her shoulder when the jazz stopped and the door flung open. As soon as Zara saw me, her eyes flashed surprise, then confusion, then anger.

"Not feeling well, huh?" Paige asked.

It was a legitimate question. I'd seen Zara only at Betty's, so had only seen her in khaki shorts, a black T-shirt, and an apron. The standard uniform was a far cry from her current ensemble: a tight black skirt that ended about six inches higher than the

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khaki shorts, a fitted black strapless shirt, and sparkly stiletto sandals. Her hair, which I'd only seen in a long ponytail, hung perfectly straight down her back, and her makeup made her silver eyes shine like Christmas ornaments.

"If you're having trouble breathing, you may want to let out a few stitches," Paige suggested, eyeing Zara's bulging top.

"And unless you want to never breathe again, you'll tell your little friend to leave." Zara's voice was calm.

Paige nodded. "Okay, then." She looked at me. "Meet you downstairs?"

I was grateful for the out and started down the hallway before Paige had even closed the door behind her. I hoped whatever issues they had could be worked out quickly, because I now wanted nothing more than to make it out of there before the winding roads leading down the mountain and back to town flooded.

Vanessa ...

I quickened my step.

My dear, sweet, Nessa ...

Justine was outside my head again, calling to me from the crystal chandeliers above, the pictures lining the walls, the rug beneath my feet.

You've come so far.... Please don't go...
.

I walked faster, shaking my head sharply against wailing sirens and flashing red lights, purple and yellow bruises, and Justine standing in the water, her skeletal arms reaching for me.

I had one foot on the first step leading downstairs when the house fell silent. I stopped and held my breath. Nothing. No

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funky jazz. No shouting from the end of the hallway. Not even the rain pounding the roof overhead.

"Vanessa?"

In the mirror hanging on the wall across from me, my eyes widened and my face went white. The voice didn't belong to Paige or Zara. And there was no one behind me. The hallway was empty.

"You've lost it," I said to my reflection before starting downstairs. "Officially."

"Vanessa?" the voice asked again.

I froze, my heart hammering in my ears.

"Is that you ...?"

It was coming from the opposite end of the hallway, nowhere near Zara's room. I stared at the landing at the base of the stairs and willed my feet to move.

And they did move, finally--upstairs and down the hallway.

My pulse threatened to break through veins, and my fingers and toes tingled. My timid inner voice warned me, begged me to turn around and get out of there. But I ignored it. Every muscle and nerve fought to pull me in the other direction, but I had to see who was there.

Because, what if? What if it was her? What if, somehow, despite all logic--and the medical examiner's report, the wake, the funeral--Justine was still here? I knew it was crazy ... but how was it any harder to believe than everything that had already happened?

The door was open slightly, revealing a thin, vertical line of

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light. Not breathing, I placed one palm on the door and pushed it in.

It took me a second to see her. When I did, I was a combination of disappointed and relieved that she wasn't Justine.

A woman sat in front of a fireplace on a lilac-colored chaise lounge, wearing a purple robe and weaving a needle and thread through a thin piece of fabric. Her hair was long and wavy like Raina's; it had probably once been as black as licorice, too, though time had turned it a powdery charcoal, like the ash under the logs burning in her fireplace. When she smiled at me, her eyes were more gray than silver, and cloudy. They focused not on mine, but above my head.

Somehow, the woman had known I was there without seeing me. Because she couldn't see anything.

I wanted to turn around and tiptoe back down the hallway. But I didn't. I couldn't. Maybe because it didn't feel right to ignore her and make her think the senses she had left were starting to fail. Maybe it was because her purple walls were covered in dozens of needlepoint tapestries depicting different views of Chione Cliffs in winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Or maybe it was because I stood there waiting for Justine to say something, anything, inside my head or around it ... and she didn't.

"I'm Bettina," the woman said quietly, her voice as smooth as ice. "But you may call me Betty."

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CHAPTER 9

"YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S BLIND," I said when the Betty's crowd finally thinned out several hours later.

"Yes," Paige said, drying a wineglass.

"She can't see," I said. "At all."

"Right."

"Okay ... then how did she know who I was?"

Paige glanced around, then pulled me to an empty corner behind the bar. "Grandma Betty was in a very bad accident two years ago," she whispered. "She hasn't been the same since."

"What kind of accident?" I asked.

"Good news," a male voice said before she could respond.

We looked across the bar where Garrett stood, holding up two tickets.

"Dave Matthews. Portland. Tonight."

"I thought that show sold out months ago?" I said, since he was looking at me.

"I pulled some strings--and gave an online broker next year's

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tuition." He started backing away. "I know you're busy, so don't say no yet. Think about it first."

"Aw, someone has a summer crush," Paige said once he was outside. "He's a sweetie. You should go."

The idea of going out and having fun was too strange to consider. "You were saying? About your grandmother?"

"Right." Paige resumed drying. "She kind of went swimming in a lightning storm."

"Ouch."

"No kidding." Paige shook her head. "Before the accident, Grandma Betty spent more time in the water than out of it. It didn't matter what time of year or how cold the water was--as long as it wasn't frozen, she was swimming. That's actually how she ended up here, in Winter Harbor. She grew up in Canada and came down the coast on a road trip with some friends. She was so excited that the water here wasn't iced over--the way every other body of water this far north is in the middle of winter--that she never went back."

"That's dedication to your sport."

"Or the kind of dependency that can get you in trouble." She looked at me. "You know when you were little and counted the seconds between thunderclaps and bursts of light? And the longer the time between them, the farther away the storm was?"

I nodded without sharing that I'd actually done that quite recently.

"Well, on the day Grandma decided to jump from our backyard into the ocean below, the thunderclaps and bursts of light

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were happening
simultaneously
. The storm was right over us. She said it was just something she needed to do, which, of course, doesn't explain squat. And she hasn't talked about it since."

Paige looked up when a table of four men across the room burst into laughter. It had taken the promise of the next weekend off to get Zara out of the miniskirt and back into her Betty's uniform, but she had eventually conceded. By the time she did, I was waiting in the car. I'd shaken Betty's hand and complimented her needlepoint, and then I'd hightailed it out of there. Paige and Zara had emerged ten minutes later and driven together in Zara's red Mini Cooper so that Paige could make sure Zara didn't embark on an unexpected detour. Now, it was back to business as usual.

"Grandma wasn't the same after that," Paige continued. "She lost her vision, and her other senses were also affected. She thought she was dying when she was still in the water because she couldn't see anything, but she could hear the rain, waves, crabs crawling, whales singing. In the hospital, she couldn't see the shock on the doctor's face--but she heard him say that she was going to live ... and also heard a patient breathing on the respirator in the next room, and another patient's heart stop on the floor below."

"Wow."

"I know. We thought the insane claims would end once she was home and the trauma was behind her, but she kept insisting that she could hear the fish bubbling in the ocean, the roses

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blooming in the front yard, the mailman coming from miles away. Then she started smelling and sensing things, like some kind of super senior citizen. We joked that we might see her shooting across the sky one day, wearing her purple bathing suit and a beach towel tied around her neck like a cape."

"Is that how she knew who I was without seeing me?" I asked. "Did her super senses clue her in?"

"Your guess is as good as mine." She put a glass down and leaned toward me. "No one outside our family knows that Grandma Betty went off the deep end and never fully returned after the accident. Raina tells anyone who asks that she's just suffering from normal old-age issues and is too weak to leave the house. She thinks that's easier than dealing with questions we don't know how to answer ... and I know she'd appreciate it if our little family secret stayed a secret."

"You got it." I nodded. "No problem."

"Thanks." Paige smiled, then looked at the TV perched above the bar. "Hello, daily depressing update."

I followed her gaze and hoped she didn't notice the color leave my face. The news anchor was easy to hear, since everyone with a clear view of the TV stopped talking to listen to what she said.

"Winter Harbor police are having a busier summer than usual," the woman said into the camera. "Instead of dealing with the usual seasonal issues of underage drinking and unapproved late-night beach parties, local authorities are contending with a series of seemingly unrelated deaths."

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Next to me, Paige shook her head.

"The first victim, eighteen-year-old Justine Sands, who would have been a freshman at Dartmouth College in September, leaped to her death from a cliff. Paul Carsons, an entrepreneur and father of three, died when his boat capsized in a severe thunderstorm. Charles Spinnaker, a corporate attorney and father of five, drowned while fishing fifty feet from shore."

As their pictures flashed across the screen, I focused on breathing.

"The fourth victim, Aaron Newberg, president and CEO of pharmaceutical company ImEx, Inc., was discovered earlier this morning at the base of the Winter Harbor Lighthouse. It is believed that he also drowned, though authorities are still investigating."

The news clip ended abruptly with a list of phone numbers for witnesses to call with more information. It seemed as routine as a traffic and weather report.

"Hey," Paige said, lifting a crate of water glasses to the counter and snapping my attention from the television. "What time is it?"

I checked the clock hanging over the sink behind me. "Almost ten."

She folded her arms and rested them on the edge of the crate. "Well, that's strange."

I followed her gaze across the dining room. My heart skipped once, then seemed to stop.

It skipped again when I saw Oliver sitting in Zara's section--