Page 87 of House of Salt and Sorrows
I nodded.
“What killed them? Papa won’t say. Roland told me it was a bear.”
“There are no bears on the island,” Fisher reminded her.
“It wasn’t a bear,” I said. My voice felt rusty, corroded from tears.
“Then what was it? He said they were ripped to shreds. There was blood everywhere.”
“Roland is going to find himself without a job. He should never have said such things to you. They’re not even true. When we…found them…they were just in the thicket, on their backs.”
“Did someone poison them?” Mercy asked.
“Of course not!”
“Then how?”
I shrugged. “It looked like they wandered out into the storm and just got too cold. It was very peaceful. And they were together. I don’t think they were scared or sad.”
“Then why didn’t they come back?”
I wondered the same thing myself. Lenore had made it through the storm. When I pressed her for details, trying to find out what had happened that night, she turned to me with her strange and empty stare and simply walked away.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “There’re lots of things I just don’t know.”
“The curse,” Verity said, her voice soft and small.
“There is no curse. Just bad luck.”
“Couldn’t bad luck be a curse?” Mercy asked.
“No. It’s just coincidence.”
“The curse could make itself look like coincidence.”
“There is no curse!” I shouted, much louder than I meant to. The girls jumped in surprise. It wasn’t nice to have startled them, but the carriage was blissfully silent for the rest of the ride.
When we reached Highmoor, Mercy and Verity hopped out of the carriage, anxious to get away from me, but Fisher remained behind, his eyebrows furrowed into one straight line.
“What?” I prompted when it was clear he had something on the tip of his tongue. He shook his head, reaching for the door. I grabbed his hand, stopping him. “Fisher, what is it?”
“Cassius was with you when you found Rosalie and Ligeia?”
“He was.”
His brown eyes flickered over mine for a moment before returning to the window.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s obviously something.”
His breath billowed around him in the cold air. “It’s just…I went through those woods myself. During the search…I know my memory of that day is a blur, but I feel like I’d have seen the girls when I went past the berry bushes.”
“What are you getting at?”
He rubbed his forehead as if his fingers could erase the dark thoughts piling up. When his eyes met mine, they were as sharp as tacks. “I’m saying they weren’t there. I’m saying someone put them there later on.”
“Put them there?” I repeated. A bit of cold sparked in my heart, running through my veins like icy water, freezing me in place. “What do you mean? You think…you think they were murdered?”
