Chapter 4
Violet
The woman behind the counter at Rona’s Burgers knew I was hungover. Probably because I was at a roadside burger place at eleven in the morning when they opened, ordering a hamburger and greasy fries.
“Rough night?” she asked. She was about sixty, with creases bracketing her mouth and eyes that had seen some things. I was the only customer in the restaurant, my car the only one in the parking lot beside hers. Past the lot, cars flew by on the highway.
“Rough few years,” I admitted. “I need my burger to go.”
“I hear ya,” the woman said.
Two days of wine were taking a long time to leave my system.
I’d worked extra hours to finish cleaning out the old woman’s house, going in at six in the morning and not leaving until nearly midnight.
Since no one lived there, my hours didn’t matter.
I couldn’t have said why I did it, only that it was wrong to leave her hanging like that when she’d trusted me with her photo of baby Thomas.
I couldn’t let her down, even for Ben. Maybe because of Ben.
But I’d brought several bottles of wine with me as I worked, sipping through the day so I’d never be entirely sober.
When the house was finished, I’d taken leave from my job, telling Tess I didn’t know when I’d be back.
There was no pay, of course. That didn’t matter to me, which Tess had started to suspect.
She told me she’d call in a replacement and she couldn’t guarantee I’d have a job waiting when I got back. We left it at that.
It had been surprisingly easy. It was harder to call Lisette, who was at Clay’s house, and tell her I was going away for a while.
She was sullen, angry, and childish, even though she was fourteen and she hadn’t wanted to stay with me in the first place.
“So you’re going, just like that?” she’d snapped. “You’re leaving me?”
“I have to,” I’d said. “My family needs me.”
“You hate them!”
Had I said that? Where did she get it from? Had Clay told her that? I didn’t think I hated Vail and Dodie, and besides, I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about Ben. None of us had ever hated Ben.
“Well, I’m going home for a while,” I’d said, peevish with my own daughter as the wine headache gripped the back of my skull. “It has to happen, so deal with it. I’m not going far. I’ll call you every few days.”
“Don’t bother,” Lisette said dramatically, hanging up on me.
I was a bad mother. The courts knew it, Clay knew it, and I knew it.
There was something missing in me, and I had never been good at it, never been able to do it right.
But in that moment, I knew that Clay wasn’t winning any awards, either.
If my daughter was an asshole, it wasn’t entirely because of me.
Still, I’d drunk most of a bottle of wine after that conversation.
During my next glass, I’d realized I’d referred to Fell as home.
When I moved out at seventeen, I got a job as a waitress in the restaurant of a Long Beach hotel, the kind that catered to tacky weddings and boozy work retreats.
I was tall and reasonably good-looking, and when I wore my hair tied back, the right makeup, and the black uniform of the staff, I looked older than my age.
I’d worked hard at the job, motivated by the fact it came with cheap shared lodgings that kept me away from Fell.
I wasn’t the strange girl with the missing brother anymore.
Instead, I was just another server plating canapes and dodging ass grabs.
Behind the scenes, the job was a master initiation into drugs and alcohol, and I was an eager student.
I’d gotten drunk fast, got high even faster, hoping that taking something—anything—would make me stop seeing ghosts.
The line cooks taught me that a bump of coke gave you the perfect second wind to drink longer, a trick you could repeat until dawn.
When I was blacked out, I didn’t think about my parents, or my siblings, or the dead man I’d faced in an upstairs hallway my first week there, or Ben. Ben.
It worked at first. I spent a year in a blur of work and alcohol. My mind was never calm or sober enough to think about anything. The perfect solution. If it killed me, so be it.
Then, one night as I lay in bed, listening to one of my roommates throw up in the bathroom, I felt Sister’s hand on the back of my neck.
I’d known immediately what it was. That struck me later—that there was no question, no what was that? I hadn’t wondered, even for a second, whether I was imagining it. I never imagined Sister. She simply was.
Her icy fingers had squeezed me, and then she was gone. She hadn’t needed to speak. She was reminding me that I hadn’t escaped her, that I couldn’t escape her. That she was watching. That she could still make me afraid.
I should have stopped then. I should have sobered up and begun a virtuous life. But I didn’t.
My father was sober in very few of my memories, his handsome face red, his eyes bleary.
Mom waited until after her youngest son disappeared, and then she started drinking with a vengeance.
She was hardly capable of caring for herself by the time she mercifully died.
The thought of both of them brought me such sick shame, such hatred of myself, that it also should have sobered me.
I should have learned from the example they set, but I didn’t.
Clay was on a corporate weekend with his coworkers when I met him.
He was just good-looking enough, just charming enough, paid me just enough attention, that when he asked to see me after my shift, I said yes.
We met in his room and split one bottle of wine, and then another.
I remembered thinking, He’ll do. He likely thought the same about me, and I didn’t care. I felt nothing at all.
It was quick, and then it was over. He went back to his cushy job, I went back to work, and I didn’t think about him again.
Everything that came after I found out I was pregnant was a series of dreary, predictable mistakes.
I hadn’t wanted to track down Clay, but I had to because I needed money.
We’d married when we barely knew each other because Clay felt guilty and because his parents insisted on it.
The marriage was a hopeless disaster that fell apart.
After Lisette was born, I’d vacillated between depression and paranoid terror, which came over me whenever I remembered Sister’s hand on the back of my neck.
Now she wouldn’t only haunt me—she would haunt my daughter.
Clay called me unstable, and he was right. The only thing I did right in those days was get sober when the doctor told me a baby was coming. I screwed up everything else.
Blunder followed blunder—a separation, and then a custody battle. Lawyers. And then the mental hospital. I had never forgiven myself for that. I had never forgiven Clay, either.
When I got the call about Ben, I’d allowed myself two long, blurry days soaked in wine like the old days, feeling sorry for myself, wishing all of this had happened to someone else.
Then it was over. This morning, I’d winced through the headache and the rolling nausea, packed my car, and started driving.
The woman behind the counter was grilling my lone hamburger while I waited, my temples throbbing and my eyes dry as sandpaper. The silence stretched too long, so I said, “Are you Rona?”
The woman made a scoffing sound. “Hell no. Rona was my mother. She started this place. She’s been dead for fifteen years.”
She was looking at what she was doing, so she didn’t see me glance around, nervously wondering if I’d see old Rona lurking in the shadows of the walk-in freezer or hovering in the doorway of the bathroom. It was too early, and my head hurt too much, for that.
“My mother died, too,” I said.
“Good riddance,” the woman said.
I blinked. Her hostility was shocking and kind of refreshing. “Something like that.”
The woman melted a thick piece of cheese on top of my burger, then flipped the whole thing onto a warm bun. It actually looked pretty good. “Where are you headed?” she asked.
“Fell.” I was thirty minutes away.
The woman gave me an assessing look, her eyes narrowed. Then she said, “I can see it.”
I wondered what gave it away. The hangover? My obvious misery? Fell was a weird place, bigger than a town, smaller than a city, a dot on the map of New York State. Most people drove past it or through it without noticing it, but it was a place where strange things happened.
Murders happened in Fell. Disappearances.
Bodies turned up in weird places. People there died in “mysterious circumstances.” They also lived in mysterious circumstances.
Mysterious circumstances were, honestly, what defined Fell.
It was hard to explain if you hadn’t grown up there, but I knew more about Fell than I knew about any other place I’d lived, even though I made a point not to visit.
Staying away from Fell was my attempt at not knowing the things that went on there. It hadn’t worked.
Rona’s daughter had obviously spent time in Fell at some point, and she hadn’t liked it much. Most people didn’t.
Did I look like I belonged there? I didn’t know what other people saw when they looked at me.
Thick, dark, unstyled hair, dark eyes, the corners of my mouth turned down.
I never looked particularly happy. My natural expression was very serious.
Men thought I was good-looking, and they came on to me, but when I turned them down, they backed off.
Something about me was intimidating, even a little scary.
So yeah, I looked like I belonged in Fell.
I took the grease-spotted bag of food to my car and left the parking lot. As I pulled onto the highway, I rolled down my window and ate my hamburger as I drove. My hangover was starting to dissipate. I was as ready as I could be for the sight of my beloved hometown.
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