The Scream Sisters: A Troubled Spirits Novel, page 29
“I don’t know. I was with Corbin and…” She almost said the words, revealed what he’d told her, the sickening truth, but it got lodged in her throat.
“Did you know?” Lex asked.
Blair blinked at him, thought suddenly he’d discovered what her mother had done.
He took out his cell phone, clicked an image, and handed the phone to Blair.
65
Teagan wove through the bodies downstairs at Alpha Lambda. They’d begun to turn on their flashlights.
Outside the lawn was filled with students and when she turned toward Rho Upsilon Nu, she saw most of the girls were headed for Alpha Lambda. The Rho house was deserted when Teagan reached it.
She thought of the cabinet of tapes. Was there another one from the night Jessica Meyers had disappeared?
Teagan breezed through the front door, unlocked, no one guarding it. She ran up the stairs to the third floor, found those rooms too still unlocked. Teagan doubted anyone had even noticed she’d opened them.
She hurried through the ritual room, casting a disgusted glance at the cauldron by the window, and slipped into the office, paused at the file cabinet in the closet.
Her phone buzzed.
Teagan looked at it—Lex.
She ignored the call. A text immediately appeared.
Lex: Check your email. It’s important.
Teagan frowned, turned her attention back to the cabinet and started rifling through folders, searching for the tapes from two years before.
Another message lit up on her phone.
Lex: URGENT! Stop whatever you are doing and check your email!
Teagan scowled, closed her message app and opened her email. At the top of her emails, she saw a message from Nate with Lex cc’d.
Subject: Harley’s Family Tree
Teagan and Lex,
I found something on Harley’s computer. Before she disappeared, she was in contact with a woman named Celeste Cleary—a genetic genealogist who helped Harley build out her family tree. What she found was pretty shocking. See for yourself.
Best,
Nate
Teagan clicked a link and an image started to populate the screen. A basic family tree appeared with boxes labelled for Harley as well as her parents, Robert Thomas and Lisa Rand.
Another line appeared next to Robert’s name and beneath it two additional boxes with an arrow, which read ‘half siblings.’
“Half-siblings?” Teagan murmured, waiting impatiently for the names to appear on the screen. “Who were they?” Even as she asked the question the names materialized, as did the name of their mother.
Across the room, the door swung open.
66
Teagan darkened her phone and tucked herself into the corner of the closet, holding perfectly still. Footsteps moved through the ritual room and paused at the open doorway of the office. She held her breath, imagined Sloan or maybe the Rho Upsilon Nu house mother out there, wondering why the office door was not only unlocked but standing open.
After a moment the door pulled closed and silence resumed.
Teagan sighed, pressed a hand against her heart thumping behind her ribs, and stepped from the closet.
Across the room a figure stood inside the door. In the dark, Teagan could see only their silhouette, and yet she knew she gazed at Blair’s mother—Margo Davenport.
“I know everything,” Teagan blurted. “I know you’re Peggy—Robert Thomas’s college girlfriend—and that your children are Robert’s biological kids and that.” But what did she know? Not that Margo was involved in Harley’s disappearance. Or Jessica’s.
Something sparked blue in Margo’s hand. Teagan started, tried to make sense of it and then realized Margo held a stun gun.
“It was you,” Teagan said, eyes fixed on the stun gun. “You did something to Harley.”
The woman didn’t speak, and Teagan braced herself. She sensed Margo would soon rush her, and if she tased her and got her unconscious she’d likely never wake up. She’d go to the same place Harley had gone and Jessica before her.
“Why?” Teagan demanded.
Margo said nothing. Her breath came out low and deep, animal-like. Teagan fixed her eyes on the door beside her, knew she’d never get to it. She glanced toward the window, that high third-story window with no balcony, no feasible roof to crawl onto, nothing but a forty-foot drop to the ground.
“It’s because she confronted you, isn’t it?” Teagan asked. “Harley told you she knew that Blair and Nolan were Robert Thomas’s kids-her half siblings.”
Teagan’s eyes stayed locked on the stun gun, but her mind tripped over the links. It didn’t make sense. Had Harley threatened to expose the truth or was Margo just that cold hearted? Had she killed Harley to ensure no one ever knew. Or was it something else that made her kill, the same something that caused her to be implicated In Thomas’s murders.
Teagan risked a look at Margos’ face and even in the dark, she saw the white of her teeth. Margo was smiling. She wasn’t afraid-wasn’t filled with horror. Like Robert as he’d leered at Teagan through the bullet proof glass-this woman, this wolf, was reveling in having cornered her prey.
“You’re sick,” Teagan muttered. “You’re sick and you’ll never get away-“
Before she could utter the words, Margo darted forward, arm outstretched, stun gun releasing little blue sparks.
Teagan screamed and dove to the side, kicking out a leg. She connected with Margo’s arm, but not the one that held the stun gun, and the woman had already turned, twisted toward her.
“Mom! No!” The scream ripped through the room and suddenly Blair was there, barreling into her mother, who shrieked and bared her teeth and tried to whip the stun gun toward Blair’s face.
Teagan crawled forward, grabbed one of Margo’s ankles and pulled her back, prevented her from reaching her daughter, who’d fallen backwards and landed with a crack that Teagan suspected meant a fractured bone.
Blair gasped as her elbow connected with the wood floor. The pain, unlike anything she’d ever experienced, sent a bolt of searing red light into the center of her skull. Maybe she screamed. She didn’t know.
Suddenly her vision was fuzzy, her consciousness liquid, and the door into the room was no longer a plain brown wood. It was a brilliant scarlet and it pulsed and groaned as if something large and angry wanted to break through. Dazed, Blair stared at the throbbing door, the pain a distant memory, the sounds in the room fading.
Margo jerked her ankle from Teagan’s grasp and lunged toward Blair.
The scarlet door burst open and shadows poured into the room. Blair watched as they took shape. Girls. Once-pretty girls with long blonde hair whose skin had gone gray or fallen away filled the room, screaming and sobbing.
Margo, who’d been reaching for Blair, inches from shoving the stun gun into her face, faltered as if she too could see the dead girls, hear them, or perhaps, like her daughter, both.
“Peggy,” they whispered, their voices sandpaper. “Peggy…”
The door to the room slammed closed. The file cabin drawers crashed open and shut. Papers burst into the room and filled the air. A picture above the desk fell and shattered.
Blair didn’t move, couldn’t move.
Someone pounded on the door.
Margo, her eyes void of feeling, turned back to Blair. She bolted forward and pressed the stun gun against Blair’s neck. The jolt moved through Blair, fire in her veins. Her body went rigid, her teeth clamped shut and her bladder released.
Teagan screamed and stood, tried to intervene, but the huge wood desk slid across the room and trapped her against the wall.
Margo tased Blair a second time, a third. Spit flew from her lips. She was growling and screaming. “Ungrateful… ungrateful!” she shrieked.
Blair was no longer in her body. She was above watching as the windows exploded, as the papers rained down, as the scarecrow mask flung from the closet and struck Margo in the face.
The swirl of gray-faced girls slipped into Blair’s unconscious body. Blair watched herself stand, though she had no control of her limbs, was little more than a whisper in the howling room.
Margo cried out and shrank away from her daughter, who snatched the stun gun from her hand and forced it against Margo’s chest.
67
Teagan sat on the curb. Lex had wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and held her near to him. He’d called the police and the block swarmed with emergency vehicles, lights flashing.
They’d set up spotlights, as the power still hadn’t come back on. The lawns, streets and sidewalk were filled with students, their faces turned toward Rho Upsilon Nu.
Both Blair and her mother were gone, rushed away in ambulances.
“I tried to get in,” Lex said again. “But the door…”
Teagan nodded. She knew he’d tried, had heard him outside pounding, screaming. She also knew that no one was getting in that room until the girls, those wisps of light and dark, a roiling energy of life stolen, had had their chance at Margo.
When Teagan’s grandma arrived her face was ashen, her shoulders slumped.
“It’s okay,” Teagan told her. “I’m okay.”
But her grandma didn’t perk up and Teagan waited for the words she sensed were coming.
“Lisa called me on my way here,” her grandma said. “This afternoon the Husher Police received an anonymous tip. The caller said they knew the location of Harley’s body.”
Teagan closed her eyes, felt Lex’s arm pull tighter as if she might run.
“They think they found her, but… Lisa can’t identify her, so I said I would.”
Teagan opened her eyes. They were full, spilling over. “I have to do it. I need to see her.”
Holding tight to her grandma’s hand, Teagan walked down the long dim hallway and stood at the glass that peered into the cold, steel room where the person she’d loved most in the world lay obscured beneath a white sheet.
When the coroner pulled the sheet back, there was Harley.
Teagan’s breath hitched as she stared at her friend, who, even in death, was as familiar to Teagan as her own face in the mirror. Harley’s eyes were closed, and if Teagan tried really hard she could almost imagine her friend was merely asleep.
“Goodbye, Frog,” Teagan murmured as her grandma sobbed quietly beside her. Teagan’s own tears rolled like ocean waves down her face and her body shook as if she were adrift on a turbulent sea.
When they emerged from the room, Lisa, Buzz beside her, crumpled to the floor. Teagan went to her, knelt and gathered Harley’s mother in her arms.
EPILOGUE
Three Weeks Later
“Do you think Robert knew all along?” Lex asked Teagan.
They sat in A&W drinking root beer floats and talking about all the horrible things that had come to light since Margo’s arrest—an arrest largely attributed to Robert Thomas.
Robert had called the Husher police tip line anonymously, but it had been easily traced back to the Marquette Department of Corrections. Robert told investigators he suspected Harley Rand and any other girls who’d gone missing from Husher might be located in an old root cellar on the Doxon farm.
He'd also turned over letters to police-letters that had been going on for years between him and Margo Davenport and though she never confessed to him what she’d done, the innuendos were there. In her most recent letter, which had been dated the day after Harley vanished, Margo had written: ‘The wolf took another sheep last night. No matter how hard she tries to be good, the wild in her must be satisfied.’
Teagan remembered her meeting with Robert Thomas, his cold, measuring eyes. Had he already known what Margo had done? Had he encouraged her to do it?
“I don’t know. He must have had that letter for days before he called the police.”
“There she is,” Lex said.
Teagan turned as Blair walked into the restaurant. She’d cut her long blonde hair short and dyed it brown. Teagan barely recognized her.
Blair offered them a nervous smile and walked over.
Lex stood and hugged her. “You look good, Blair,” he said. “I’m going to get some curly fries. Give you two some time to talk.”
Blair sat across from Teagan. When their eyes met, Blair’s filled with tears. “Thank you for the flowers and card in the hospital.”
“I was worried,” Teagan admitted. “I was really afraid you might not…”
“Wake up?”
Teagan nodded.
“There was a time when I was unconscious when I didn’t want to,” Blair admitted. “It was so peaceful. I didn’t want to come back, but… this is going to sound weird and I hope it doesn’t freak you out, but I saw Harley. She said I had to come back.”
Teagan slipped back to those long, strange minutes on the third floor of the Rho Upsilon Nu house. The swarm of girls, a glimpse of one who looked like Harley, green eyes and long wheat hair, there and then gone.
“I’m glad she sent you back,” Teagan whispered, her own tears breaking loose.
Blair reached into her bookbag, pulled out a notebook and flipped it open to a face that resembled Jessica Meyers, though in Blair’s depiction, the girl’s eyes were black, her mouth a yawning hole.
“I was a junior in High School when I started drawing her. Nolan was a freshman here at Husher. I didn’t know who she was, but night after night I woke up to her next to my bed—bloody, crying out with no voice.
“One day at school, I was standing in the cafeteria. I’d just gotten my food, and I realize now somebody had called out ‘Jessica,’ to a girl in my class. And it’s like someone shouting her name summoned this Jessica and suddenly she was right in front of me, clawing at me. I screamed and threw my tray at her, except it wasn’t her. I hit Miss Rayner, the art teacher. I broke her nose. Blood exploded everywhere.
“It was so terrible and Jessica, the ghost Jessica who’d always been silent, started screaming, and I couldn’t hear anything except her screaming and everyone in the lunchroom panicked. I lay on the floor, covered my ears. They ended up calling the police, an ambulance. I spent three weeks in a mental hospital. After that I was ‘that girl,’ weird, creepy, unstable.
“I’d always had the… visions, visits, whatever you want to call them, but Jessica was the beginning of the really dark stuff—the scary stuff.
“I didn’t realize who she was until Corbin told me what he and Nolan and the other Alpha Lambdas had done. And then I understood. Jessica wasn’t trying to reach me. I was just the doorway. She wanted Nolan and my mother. They were the ones who hurt her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about your brother?” Teagan asked.
Blair sighed, closed her notebook. “My mother erased him and… I let her. It was easier that way, easier not to remember him. There were so many things she asked me to do that I just accepted.”
“Since that night at Rho, have you seen any more of the… ghosts?”
“No. I believe, honestly, it’s because they were found, Harley and Jessica. They weren’t lost anymore.”
Lex returned, slid a root beer float in front of Blair and left a basket of curly fries. “Just dropping these off,” he said, winking at Teagan.
“Thank you,” Blair told him. She pulled the float close, took a drink.
“What about your mom?” Teagan asked. “Has she confessed or-”
“My dad says she’s taking a plea deal, whatever that means. Even if she does, the prosecutors might go after her for the murders back in the nineties. At the time, they didn’t believe she could have been involved, but now they’re giving it a second look.”
"What about Robert Thomas? He’s still not giving her up?”
Blair shook her head. “He won’t talk about the murders he was convicted of. My dad says he operated alone-that my mom couldn’t have been involved, but… he’s never seen her for what she is.”
“He’s still defending her after this? She murdered Harley and Jesscia. She tried to kill you. Not to mention she was obviously not faithful to him. Both you and your brother are Robert Thomas’s kids.”
Blair rubbed her eyes. “I think my mom is telling him she was a victim of Robert. That he’d abused her and even after she married my dad, he’d show up when my dad was at work and force her to…” Blair trailed off. “I don’t want to think about it. It’s a lie. Everything she says is a lie.”
“Have you seen her?”
Blair wrapped her arms across her chest. “I’m going to visit her tomorrow. I’m dreading it.”
“I can’t even imagine what this is like for you,” Teagan murmured.
“Yeah, me neither most days. My dad has been oddly more present, which is especially strange considering he discovered that he’s not my biological father. I almost think… maybe he suspected all this time, and now that he has an answer, he can be more open, more himself.”
“Harley was your half-sister,” Teagan said, still unnerved by that news.
Blair nodded. “Teagan, I am so sorry I chased her that night. If I could change places with her, if it could all be different…”
Teagan wiped her eyes, shook her head. “It can’t be.”
“Yeah.” Blair sighed.
"Blair, do you have any idea why Sloan visited Harley at Curly’s the last night she was seen alive?”
Blair fingered her hair, tried to pull a strand long, but let it fall as if realizing yet again she’d cut it short. “I think she went there to confirm Harley intended to walk straight back to her dorm that night. Sloan had lined everything up, I’m assuming at the request of my mother though she never told me that. I was set-up to scare Harley. Corbin was in place to pick her up, and my mom must have been waiting…”
"To kill her,” Teagan muttered. “If only Harley had run into the woods, turned the other way. Anything.” But Teagan doubted such a maneuver would have saved Harley’s life. Margo had made a decision that Harley had to die and would likely have tried again if the first attempt failed.
