The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,96

around. “I mean, look at it. It really should just sell itself. Look at how the sun’s hitting the widow’s walk.”

Inside the arbor she notices the shards. “What’s that?”

“Some glass I broke.” Pratt kicks the pieces away.

A glinting necklace over a patch of dark sea. A great, wide net of glass. That’s what saved me. A fishing net, ringed with floats. I grabbed each one with my hands, one after the other, round and perfect, woven into the knotted ropes between them. I splashed and coughed and knew, somehow, something as big as this would be strong enough to cradle me.

With all my will, I pulled a piece of hemp underneath me until my chest and stomach were over and I could feel my skirt being buoyed up, and my hair, and my feet, and then with a reach and a twist I turned on my back and could feel the web of strong line holding me and the embrace of blue glass all around me. I crawled on my back to what I thought must be its center and looked up at the clouds just beginning to part and the stars just beginning to glisten. And I laughed, for pure joy. Because it wasn’t over. The storm hadn’t taken me. The deep hadn’t done me in. Maybe, after all, I wasn’t meant to die here. Not yet. Not me, Emma Rose Finnis. I was meant to live and breathe and float, in spite of everything. As if the spirits of the night, the far darrig, had saved me for some better plan, as no one else in my family had ever been saved. Maybe the spirits had seen in me something they’d never seen in another Finnis. They’d seen I wasn’t finished.

I rode the water lightly, like a cork. The rain had ridden out to sea and the wind had shifted and was pushing me right along the coast. The full moon came out and showed me how fast the current was taking me along. Before long, I saw pinpricks—the first lights of Benito, darting up from the headland. The wind was still rough and the cold split my lip and my shoulder was cut, but I was riding on a good course, and if I could make it to the cove, why then the turning tide might still pull me in the rest of the way. I wound my fingers and boots through the net and hung on. My heart beat fast. Look, look how easy it was not to die! Oh, if only my Da, and my mother, and my siblings could have known. That you had to show the darkness you had will, and you had to keep yourself up as long as you could, and fight.

I could make out the black reaching limbs of the cypress trees around the cove now. The wind was pulling me one way, and the tide another. But it’s all right, I told myself, you’re almost home. Just keep your heart calm and your eyes steady, and watch for the first rocks. The back-current, the undertow, that’ll be strong nearer the cliffs. You don’t want to be washed out to sea again. Fight for that first bit of land. Reach it on the first try.

Ellen is taking the key from her satchel and unlocking the door.

Pratt stops her hand. He takes the key from her, so he can lead the way into the house. He closes the door behind them and then turns toward the dead Lambry photographs.

“Portrait of a family that had all the good fortune it could have ever wanted. And then lost it. Piece by piece. Once upon a time, this was a house that nothing had happened to. Nothing had really happened to the people in it. But then a beloved son died. Businesses started to falter. Times changed. It’s all recorded here. In the garden. In the steeple. In the very bones of this house. But there’s always an original sorrow. Albert Lambry. Only sixteen years old. Remembered by a flower, Lambry’s Ache. Why not Albert’s name on a headstone, Ellen? Why wasn’t his name remembered?”

“Because of the old superstitions, Mrs. Fanoli said. Or maybe because some things are too awful to remember.”

Yes. Like a father who lost his head to the sea. Whose head was later pulled out, with a fishing hook, by a Lambry dinghy.

“Possibly. Or maybe it’s because we never name the thing that really is the culprit. The real demon in