fully hide the fact that she doesn’t have any hair.
Nolan watches me as I look at her, his quiet voice filling the room. “She has cancer and it’s progressed pretty rapidly in the last few years. But she’s a fighter, and she’s going to get better real soon.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here, son,” Beatrice mumbles, her body wracked with a coughing fit.
Nolan reaches between her blanket-covered leg and the arm of the chair, pulling out a handkerchief and handing it to her. Beatrice quickly grabs it, holding the white cloth against her mouth as she coughs. When she lowers her hand from her mouth, I notice the handkerchief is dotted in bright red blood.
“So you came back,” Beatrice says as she looks me up and down while I stand like a statue in the middle of the living room. “I always knew you’d come back and finish what you started.”
Nolan stands up next to her chair and looks between us. “Mom, what are you talking about? Ravenna has never been here before.”
Beatrice shakes her head slowly back and forth, her eyes never leaving mine. “I warned them, but they didn’t listen. Now they’re surrounded by death.”
Nolan puts his hand on her frail shoulder, rubbing it gently. “Why don’t you take a nap? When you wake up, it will be time for your medicine again.”
He leans down and places a kiss on the papery skin of her cheek, walking back to me. Grabbing my hand, he laces his fingers through mine, gently tugging me toward the door. I let him hold my hand and lead me away, only because I don’t like the way his mother is staring at me. My skin crawls with each word she speaks, and I just want to get as far away from her as possible.
“The dead speak, and you should always listen,” Beatrice shouts in between coughs as Nolan opens the front door. “I see the letter T. Do you remember? Do you know? T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER! My husband pulled that little body from the water. He was a hero and he paid with his life for going against evil’s wishes.”
Nolan quickly pulls me the rest of the way out the door, closing it gently behind us. I feel sweat trickling down my back and a sharp pain shoots through my head, stabbing behind my eyes and making me squeeze them tightly closed. I let Nolan blindly lead me down the stairs and back into the woods, moving us quickly through the path until we come out on the other side on the prison grounds. He pauses in the middle of the yard, and I finally open my eyes as the headache subsides. He faces me, and I stare up at him silently while he rubs his hands up and down my arms soothingly.
“I’m sorry about that. The medication she’s on sometimes makes her say some pretty strange things,” he explains. “Before my father died, she used to work at the prison doing palm readings for some of the tour groups. She’s always had kind of a sixth sense about things and your father thought it would be something fun to add to the tours. Mostly, it’s a lot of just reading people and their reactions, telling them things you know will get a rise out of them. It’s not like she actually speaks to the dead or anything.”
Nolan laughs uncomfortably, but I look away from him and stare at the prison off in the distance, thinking about the words she spoke to me. He continues talking to fill the awkward silence.
“I heard shouts and screaming coming from the woods that night. I had woken to give my mother her medicine,” he explains, his hands still moving softly up and down my arms while he speaks. “I ran into the woods and found you lying there on the ground, bleeding from the head. I scooped you up and took you back to the prison. Your father told me to put you on the floor and leave immediately. When I tried to argue with him about calling the police or getting you to a hospital, he threatened my job. He told me if I said one word about anything, he’d fire me and kick my mother and I out of the house.”
Swinging my gaze away from the prison, I look up at him, seeing the truth written all over his face: the truth, the guilt, the pain,