Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
Isit at the kitchen table all afternoon, and the day moves past me in shows of light across the loch, changing from silver, to pewter, to bronze.
The tea has gone cold three times. The kettle’s been refilled twice.
I’ve tucked into a bottle of Speyside whisky I bought when I first got here, and even though it’s tempting to keep going and down the whole thing, I know I need to stay sharp.
I know I need that more than ever if I plan on figuring out what to do.
I glance at the salt jar on the counter.
I think about the back step. I think about Alasdair telling me, leave the salt at the back step and I’ll know to keep going.
I think about him saying it just this very morning, when I still thought he was a man humoring my aunt’s habits.
I think about how his face looked when he said it, that he didn’t look like he was humoring anything, that he looked absolutely grave.
He’s been waiting for me to know the truth; to find it out on my own. He’s been waiting for me to know for weeks. Maybe months. Maybe years. He knew there would be another Galloway, just like my great-aunt, and that I could be the one that would finally give him what he wants.
And I did just that.
I gave him what he wanted.
That thought sits in my chest like a stone.
The betrayal is real. It doesn’t feel like it did with Ryan, but it’s still there, still this acidic thing that’s eating away at my ribs, trying to get at my heart.
Mhairi was right—he used me. None of what he said was real, he was just trying to get into my pants, just trying to break this age-old bargain so that he could be free to…what? Continue his murder spree?
And what did he do with the victims anyway? Why were they only females? Why was the liver left behind? Did he just kill them or did he…
I push back from the table, refusing to think about that.
Of everything I just heard at the shop, we didn’t discuss how he killed or why, and I don’t want to know what he did with the bodies.
All I know is whoever they were, they became the drowned women of this loch.
The drowned women were real, which meant that gull I saw in the water the other day might have been one of them.
That woman swimming, beckoning me in? That might have been one of them, too.
I pick up the salt jar and walk to the back door, standing there with my hand on the latch, staring through the window at the ever-changing water.
I open the door an inch. The cold off the bay comes in, smelling of brine and fresh air and the faint smell of a campfire. I glance up at the castle and see the smoke rising from one of his many fireplaces. He’s there. He’s home.
But he’s sure as fuck not coming here.
I pour the thickest line of salt at the back step, as wide as my finger.
Then I lock every fucking door and window in this cottage and resalt everything, moving through the rooms with a manic energy in my chest.
After, I take a long bath, too hot, doused with copious amounts of salt for my screaming muscles that are angry at me for running around like a loon, and I get out after ten minutes because I can’t lie there with my eyes closed feeling so vulnerable.
I put on my flannel pajamas and make toast because I realize I haven’t eaten much of anything today.
The toaster is terribly loud, the pop when it’s done making me jump, my heart racing.
I butter the slice with a trembling hand and sit at the kitchen table with lavender tea; the sound of my chewing fills the cottage and my head.
Until…there’s something else…
Some other sound.
I stop chewing. I sit with the toast in my hand I listen.
A footstep on the gravel in the driveway.
Then another.
I don’t breathe.
The kitchen lights are on overhead and the windows are black against the night. I can see myself in the glass—my face, my wet hair, my pajama collar—reflected back at me in the dark.
I look at my reflection.
My reflection looks back.
I tell myself it is the wind at the eaves, that the gravel settles, that it is just an animal outside, a fox. I sit totally still and I keep my eyes on the woman in the window.
Her face moves.
Just half an inch, to the left. The shift of a face that has been still and turns slightly…
But I haven’t moved at all.
I’m frozen at this table with a toast in my mouth, and my reflection is doing what reflections never do— moving without me.
For one beat I see it. The second face fitting into mine in the glass.
The blue eyes filling in my brown ones.
Then it’s just me again.
My hair. My collar. My eyes wide.
I should get up and close the curtain, but I can’t make myself walk to that window. Instead, I manage to get to my feet and reach for the light switch on the wall. I flick it off without turning my head, and the kitchen goes dark, the reflection going with it.
There are no more footsteps.
There is only the wind.
Time for fucking bed.
I check the bedroom window, the salt at the sill.
The horseshoe points up above the doorway, and I lock that door too for good measure.
I flick on the lamp and read three pages of one of Effie’s notebooks, trying to figure out what kind of trouble I’m in—what the hell I’m supposed to do now—before the words start swimming, and my eyes go heavy with the kind of fatigue that’s been sitting on me for two days, the fibro coming up under the dread like a hand under a sheet, reaching for me and pulling me under.
I want to stay awake.
But I close my eyes and immediately fall asleep.
The first thing I do when I wake up is grab my robe and slippers and head straight out to the kitchen, peering through the window of the backdoor and onto the step.
The thick pale ridge of salt is exactly where I laid it last night. The line has not been broken. Nothing has crossed it. The bay beyond is silver-grey in the early light, and, beyond it, the castle.
Was it Alasdair last night walking around my cottage?
Was that his face at the window? Had he come by earlier and seen the salt, then came back in the darkness to see if I had changed my mind?
Or was that all in my imagination, rapidly running wild in order to catch up with the reality that Mhairi bestowed upon me?
I stand against it for a beat with my hand flat on the wood and do the calm assessment my therapist back home got me to do: Where are you? What did you do? What is the situation?
I’m in my great-aunt’s cottage. I salted the step against a monster, and the monster did not come in.
The monster did not come in.
I let out a breath I’ve apparently been holding since last night and press my forehead to the cool door.
I should not be relieved. I should be more worried.
The salt holding means the salt has been holding for over sixty years against the same thing, which means everything I’ve been doing in this cottage to make myself feel better about Effie’s habits has been keeping a literal monster off the back step—a sentence so insane I can’t let it sit in my mind for more than a second.
But the salt held.
I let him inside my body, and yet the salt held.
I put the kettle on and notice my hands are not entirely steady, but I go through the motions of a normal morning anyway, because what else am I supposed to fucking do?
I drink my coffee and stare out at the bay, at the drowned wives hidden beneath the water, at the looming castle where the monster resides, but the feeling of normalness, that falseness, doesn’t hold for long.
It’s not like the salt; it holds nothing back.
I have to do something, and I have to do something today, because if I sit at this table any longer I’m going to lose what’s left of my mind.
I finish my coffee and get my neglected phone.
There are two texts from Maddie. The first from yesterday morning: checking in love, you’ve gone weirdly quiet.
The second from late last night, when Maddie’s evening would have been my middle of the night: Iris if I don’t hear from you by tomorrow, I’m calling.
I look at the texts.
I think about all the shit I could text back—the way she’d laugh at the truth, then realize that I’ve gone crazy and need psychiatric help. Then she’d get on the next plane, Andrew in tow, and come get me to bring me back to the States.
Was that really such a bad idea?
Isn’t leaving this place exactly what I should do?
But it’s not what Mhairi suggested, and it’s not what Effie wanted for me.
She wouldn’t have left me the cottage otherwise.
She chose me for reasons I don’t fully understand, but I think at least one of those reasons is really important.
Is it an Iris Galloway Saves the World kind of responsibility?
God, I hope not. But I do think things would be worse for the people around town if I wasn’t here.
I type back to Maddie: Hey, sorry, day got away from me. All okay. Call you later. Promise.
Now, what the fuck am I going to do about this situation?
To be fair, last night I had gone looking for something to read about the each-uisge so I dug my Kindle out from my backpack—turns out I had never taken it out of my bag since I got here.
But it had given me a small spinning circle, then a black screen, and then a tiny battery icon flashing for thirty seconds before it died entirely.
I had plugged it into the charger and gone to bed.
I head to the bedroom and pick up the Kindle, thinking it should be fully charged by now. I tap the screen and it does the spinning circle of death and the black screen again and then it dies. Again.
The Kindle has chosen the worst possible day to lie down and give up.