Chapter 12 #3
Charlie faked a yawn as his review of that answer. Nora took off her other sock and threw it at him. This time it easily hit its mark. Charlie jumped up, dusting himself off as if he’d just been doused with tarantulas. “Nor, gross, I don’t want your foot fungus.”
Nora, who had never had any fungus in her life, not even shiitake mushrooms, and did everything in her power to keep it that way, blanched. “How dare you!”
“I’m going to bed. You going to bed?”
Nora let her shoulders drop. They, like the rest of her, were heavy with exhaustion. “Yes. Of course. It’s after midnight. Have we discussed the health risks of getting too little sleep for a sustained period of time?”
“Not for about six minutes.”
Nora glared at him.
“Aw, and you’ve run out of socks. Sucks to suck. Cute nightie, by the way. Is it from the Mrs. Claus collection?”
Nora retrieved the offending—but fungus-free—sock from where it had landed by the stairs and charged at Charlie, who knew this was coming before she did and was already halfway to the bedroom.
After a truce brought about by Charlie’s threat to start using his own socks as ammunition, the twins took to their beds.
Jessica curled herself into Charlie’s neck and they were both snoring before Nora had finished tucking herself in to her satisfaction.
She rolled her eyes. The lights in the room weren’t even off yet.
Charlie always could sleep without effort, as if he didn’t have a million worries suddenly cued to the stage by his head hitting the pillow.
Nora pulled out Charlie’s file one last time.
With any luck, this was it. The last way he would be fated to die.
She ran her eyes down the page, but the answer revealed itself with the same clarity as before, which is to say none.
The cloud of ink remained, the letters lost somewhere within.
Nora looked at her own writing. S-T-A. They were the only letters she’d been able to make out so far, and they might not even be in the correct order.
She turned back to the gyrating ink. In a space that had never shown the hint of a letter before, a shape appeared.
Half a shape, anyway. It looked like a U with the two stems shaved low.
Nora threw the file to the ground with a grunt of frustration and curled under the covers that smelled like her dad.
* * *
When Nora woke up again, it wasn’t yet morning.
The house was still, the darkness in the room heavy with the final hours of night.
And yet, something had woken her. She didn’t have to pee; a little jostle confirmed that.
She looked across the room to her brother’s bed, but he remained fast asleep.
At least from what she could tell. Something was blocking the upper half of the bed.
Nora tried to focus her eyes, but they were still too filled with the weight of sleep, the darkness too thick to make sense of what she was seeing.
She tapped her watch, the little light setting her wrist aglow and efficiently blinding her in the process.
The only thing she could make out through the spots of light now dancing across her eyeballs was the glint of something raised just above Charlie’s bed.
A glint of something polished, and sharp.
“Knife,” Jessica squawked, echoing Nora’s own fuzzy thoughts. The word set both parrot and woman into motion, Jessica flapping wildly, Nora attempting to untangle herself from the covers that presently bound her legs.
By the time she’d freed herself, the holder of the weapon was out the door and thundering up the stairs.
Nora flopped to the floor, and Jessica hitched a ride on her shoulder as she bolted after the intruder, but it was too late.
She reached the top of the danger stairs to find the back door gaping open, the night sheltering the knife wielder in its boundless black.
“Did you see who it was?” Nora asked the parrot, struggling to steady her breath from both the panic and the exertion.
Jessica didn’t reply.
“Holy shit, holy shit,” said Nora.
“Holy shit, holy shit,” Jessica agreed.
They trudged back down the stairs, Nora defeated, Jessica bobbing her head. The lights were on when they got back into the bedroom, Charlie hunched over a mess of bedding.
“There you are!” he said.
“Yeah, I—”
He scooped Jessica off Nora’s shoulder. “I was looking all over for you, beautiful.” He gave the bird’s head a smooch and turned back to Nora. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, sneaking off with my little sweet pea in the middle of the night?”
Nora just stared at him for a moment, words lost to her in the wake of everything that had just occurred.
She’d barely had time to realize how close she’d come to death in an effort to protect him from a similar fate.
That thought alone sent the ability to speak far from her tongue. Instead she kicked his shin.
“Ouch, what the fuck?”
“Charlie,” Nora said, words returning to her. “Someone just tried to kill you.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t hear anything just now?”
He shook his head.
“Unbelievable.” Nora took a sharp inhale. “Charlie. Someone was just in here with a knife. I tried to chase them down, but—”
“You what?”
“I’m trying not to think about it. The point is, someone wanted you dead. Not just your file this time. An actual human being. With a knife. And I—wait. Your file.”
Nora dove for the manila folder on the floor beside her bed. The ink cloud beside “cause of death” had not changed shape.
“S-T-A. It wasn’t the stairs that were going to kill you, Charlie. I was wrong. You were supposed to be stabbed.”
“Why the hell would someone stab me?” Charlie asked. “I haven’t been here long enough to piss anyone off yet.”
“I don’t know, but we need to find out quick. Because according to your file, they’re not done with you.”