Page 46 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow
“Nope, pretty sure I’m the only one here whoisthinking straight. I admitted that the shed had been latched—and maybe locked—when I saw someone inside, even though that suggests I imagined it. I asked whether you’d seen the hatchet. I was confused when you said it was in the shed. How does any of this suggest I’m responsible?”
“Because you’re under a lot of stress. You might not remember doing it. Your mother said that after your dad died, you sleepwalked—”
“And went looking for my father!” I shout, my eyes stinging with tears. “Not cutting up small animals!”
I want to say more, scream more, shout that I cannot believe she would think I’d do this. Instead, I turn and I stride out of the shed and then break into a run.
Fourteen
I run through the woods, blinded by tears. This is a nightmare. A terrible dream where the one person who still sees me—really sees me—could accuse me of something so horrible.
I’ve had so few people in my life I can trust. There’d been many at one point. Back when I was a child and believed everyone around me loved and cherished and understood me.
Then the person who’d loved me best murdered a boy and killed himself, and something inside me—some capacity for trust—shattered. I’d seen my grandfather for who he really was, self-centered and cruel. My grandmother for who she was, kind but ineffectual. Even Gail had retreated, nursing her own pain, but at the time, it felt like rejection. All I had was my mother, who was always—even before the disease took hold—only half there, and I felt as if she’d betrayed me, too.
I came to trust my mother again, and then lost that part of her. I also came to trust Gail again, and that’s who I clung to. No matter what others thought of me, how badly my extended family treated me, Gail knew me.
And now she thinks I would carve up animals and scare the shit out of her because I’m too proud to just admit I want to leave. That Iwould frighten her, file false police reports, disrupt everyone’s life… just so I can escape while saving face.
When I reach the porch, I stumble. My knee cracks down hard on the step. Hands grab me and I spin, fighting them off, but she grips my arm tighter. Something whines in the distance, and I look up sharply, but it’s just the wind picking up.
“Sam,” Gail says. “Please. I don’t blame you—”
“You think I wasn’t sufficiently freaked out by those animals?” I say, wiping my free hand over my tears. I meet her gaze. “What you saw was what I wanted you to see. To look calm while I was melting down because it’s not the first time this has happened.”
She blinks. “Not the first time… what?”
“Someone has done that. Left me chopped-up animals as a warning.”
“Someone has been doing that to you at home?”
“No.Here.Someone did that to me here.” I lock my gaze with hers. “Until my father killed him.”
I wrench from her grip. I get onto the porch, and she grabs for me. I dodge, only to smack into the railing, and when she tries to steady me, I rip out of her grasp. She lets go too fast, and I fall to the porch as the wind whips past, sand blowing everywhere.
“I am so sorry,” Gail whispers. “I didn’t mean—”
I scuttle backward when she steps toward me.
“Sam—”
“Just leave me alone.” Tears blind me. “Please. Leave me alone.”
I use one hand to pull myself up, the other outstretched to ward her off.
“If you think I mutilated those animals, then you don’t know me at all,” I whisper.
“I do know you, Sam. The trauma—”
“Trauma makes me cry myself tosleep.Trauma made memelt downwhen I saw those dead animals. Trauma didnotmake me chop them up. The obvious conclusion is that someone left that hatchet and gloves for one of us to find and blame the other. If I’d been the one to find them, I would never, for one second, have thought you did it.”Tears stream down my face, and she blurs behind them. “Because I know you.”
“Sam…”
She reaches for me again, and all I see through my tears is the blur of her as I stumble back, smacking into the wall hard. I wrench from her grip, stagger into the cottage, and slam the door behind me.
Once inside the cottage, I go straight to my room and stay there. When Gail tries opening the door, I wedge a chair under it. When she tries talking to me, I put on my headphones. I tell her to go away. Just go away and leave me alone. Eventually she does.
It takes forever for me to fall asleep. I’m hungry, having missed dinner. I need to pee. And I know I’m being immature hiding in my room, but I can’t face her. The thought of it makes me break out in a literal cold sweat. Even when I start to drift off, I’m tormented by memories of Austin Vandergriff, of the things he’d done that last summer.
