You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,74

asking, while looking at the pages on the floor. As if the innocent pink paper sheets can tell her.

Janus shrugs before he answers: “I don’t know.”

“Dead somewhere?” Penelope’s gaze is drawn to the window, to the branches of the apple tree lashing at the glass, at the rivulets of moisture from the rain. Imagining my bones, perhaps, licked clean by wind and frost, covered in fungus and crawling with ants.

“She would have us believe she’s off with the fairies,” Janus says. “She would like us to believe that she has mounted the silver stag and entered the woods for the very last time, her fairy protector behind her, gray hair whipping in the breeze…”

“What do you think?” Penelope looks like a child in that moment, lips parted, eyes wide.

“I think the same as you, she was a very confused woman, and she died.”

“That is certainly what Mom would say.”

“And right she would be, too. Did you read the things she wrote?”

“But still.” Penelope is a little enchanted. A part of her always wanted to believe in faeries and ghosts. “What if she is right and we are wrong?”

“Penelope, the woman was a killer.” While Janus speaks, his eyes scan the room. You flipped the light switch sometimes during your reading session, and a golden light spills from the brass chandelier in the ceiling, but the shadows still bleed from the corners. Shadows to hide in, to watch from. Faeries like the shadows best.

“I don’t like this house very much.” A shiver runs down Penelope’s spine. “I just wish that we knew where she was.”

“I can’t argue with that, it would certainly be comforting to have her safely buried.” In his mind, he sees me—well, not me, because he hasn’t really seen me for a while, and doesn’t know exactly what I look like, but some blue-haired woman in a faded pink cardigan running wild in his house with an axe.

“She went through so much, there’s so much pain in there.” The tip of Penelope’s high-heeled shoe gently touches the pages on the floor. “At least I hope her death was painless—if she is dead, that is.”

“Of course she is.” Janus would rather think of me that way, and erase the axe murderer from his mind.

“Why didn’t they find her, then?” Penelope is thinking of the search party that doubtlessly combed through the woods last summer. “Why are there no traces of her body?”

“Because she went into the fairy mound?” Janus is aiming for sarcasm, but the tremble in his voice gives him away. He is frightened of the mound. The idea of a place like that gives him the shivers, touches something tender in him that makes him feel things he hasn’t felt for years: that the night is vast and very dark and something lives in the closet.

Penelope speaks, “Uncle Ferdinand, though … do you think—”

“I don’t know, Penny … Something certainly happened there, but we will never know the truth.”

“Mom blames her, Aunt Cassie is right about that.”

“Mom always blames her. I don’t think she is very rational either, when it comes to this whole dratted mess. If a fuse pops or she runs out of hot water, what does she do? She curses Aunt Cassie, as if her sister was some evil witch, cooped up in the woods muttering spells. That whole generation of our family is deranged, if you ask me … At least Aunt Cassie made some money from it.”

“Thorn,” Penelope says the password out loud, as if to test it on her tongue.

“Just that. Let’s just hope she hasn’t fooled us … Even if she is alive, running about the woods somewhere, we have done everything by the book. We have legal claim to that money, all her instructions are followed to the letter.”

“I know.” Penelope’s gaze has glazed over, looks out in the room, dreamy and soft. It makes her brother worried.

“You don’t really believe it, do you? That she had a supernatural companion and visited the fairies? Come on, Penny, don’t buy into the madness.”

“It would explain a lot.” The poor girl is halfway down the rabbit hole already.

“No, it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t even make sense! Why would there be a fairy mound in the woods surrounding S—? With thousand-year-old dead people in it, no less. Where did they come from? Were there even people here a thousand years ago?”

“Maybe they can travel.” Her eyes are shiny with excitement, spots of red have appeared on her cheeks. “Maybe the fairies can move