Chapter Four

As usual, I dream about the Axe Murder House right after falling asleep.

Mud squishes through my toes as I stand on the dirt road in front of the house. The sky is clear but smells of rain and manure. The house is new, painted white, and a small rose bush is beginning to bloom near the front porch. Children’s laughter hits my ears just as I wake up.

My recurring dreams are always quick—over just as soon as they begin. It’s a little past three a.m. I force myself to ignore my bladder and fall back asleep. In my next dream, I’m standing on Highway 71, the main highway that leads to Villisca.

Cold asphalt prickles my bare feet. Highway Patrol cars and an ambulance block the road as the paramedics bring a small body up from the ditch.

It’s a little girl. She’s tiny—and dead, having drowned in the Nodaway River that runs parallel to the highway. Her length barely takes up half the gurney, and I wish the paramedics would put her in the damn ambulance already. Her little arm still has traces of baby fat, and her knuckles are dimpled in a way that tells me she likes—liked—milk and cookies.

My dad suddenly appears next to me. He’s crying, and through muffled sobs, he says, “The river.”

When I turn to look at the gurney again, the little girl isn’t on it.

She’s standing right in front of me.

Her eyes are blood shot, her face bloated and ashen. She starts to giggle. The high-pitched sound vibrates the air around me, beating against my skin in rhythmic waves.

I stumble back and fall, scraping my elbow on the road.

Her giggles grow louder as her hand reaches out to touch me, grotesquely stretching her arm several feet as her bones crack and her flesh rips. I scramble backward, screaming for help.

Her cold hand grabs my shoulder—

“Shit!” I jolt up in bed, heart pounding.

I’m at my grandparents’ house. There’s no dead girl. There’s no bloody scrape on my elbow. It was just a dream, I repeat over and over again.

Despite my morbid recurring dreams, I don’t have nightmares very often. My entire body is trembling, trying to force the drowned girl from my mind. The way she looked at me and reached for me, as if she needed me. I rub my eyes to get rid of her.

In my head, I can still hear my dad crying. “The river.”

When he was in high school, Dad’s best friend drowned in the Nodaway River. He fell through the ice. Gone, just like that. My dad told me that story only once, but once is all I needed. The image stuck. The ice cracking. The sound of it like breaking glass. The last look on his friend’s panicked face before disappearing under the frozen sheet of river ice—until his body was found a week later several miles away, washed up on the shore, barely recognizable.

Dad doesn’t like the river. He’s probably the one Villisca native who doesn’t fish.

I lie back down in bed and take deep breaths through my nose. The air in the bedroom is stuffy, but cool. I wrap the comforter around me and flop onto my side.

Everything in the bedroom smells like Grandma. It should comfort me, but it doesn’t. It’s a stark reminder that I’m not at home. This mattress is firm, not like the springy one in my real bedroom. Even the pillow under my head isn’t quite right…lumpy and unfamiliar.

I concentrate on my breaths to keep homesickness from creeping in. In. Out. In. Out. Eventually, my mind composes itself, then goes blank, and I begin to drift to sleep.

But almost immediately, a soft sound rouses me. Barely there, it hums through the air with a methodical pace.

Giggling.

My eyes flicker open, and I strain my ears but am unable to decipher which direction it’s coming from. I close my eyes. It’s the wind. Go to sleep. But the sound continues. Muffled, but distinct enough that it’s not the wind, or the hum of a fan in another room, or air flowing through the ductwork. It’s giggling.

And it’s not a dream.

It must be Grandma, because it’s too high-pitched to be Grandpa. I make a face, not wanting to think about why my grandma is giggling in the middle of the night.

“Oh my god, yuck.” I pull the covers over my face. But my bladder has other plans and eventually forces me up.

The wood floors are cool under my feet. I walk out of my room, but two steps into the hallway, the giggling noise pivots. My grandparents’ bedroom door is straight in front of me. But the giggling isn’t coming from in front of me. It’s behind me.

It’s coming from my own bedroom.

A chill ripples down my spine as the giggling continues nonstop, machinegun-like, with no pauses for breathing, vibrating the air around me.

Just like the drowned girl in my dream.

As if she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor right behind me, playing a board game or having a tea party. Or ready to reach out and touch me again.

The hallway is dark, but there’s enough light to make out the white walls and dark woodwork around each door. Slowly, my head swivels around to look at my bedroom, unsure of what might stare back.

But the doorway is dark. The floor is empty. No girl. Nothing except giggling and a slight beam of pale-yellow streetlamp light streaming in through the window. The curtains are open again.

I step inside the room, measured and cautious. In the darkness, a creak of old hinges stops me cold. My closet door is moving—slow but steady it opens as though something inside is extending a hand against it.

“Chessie,” a childlike voice whispers.

My hand flies to my mouth to keep my scream in my lungs.

The cool air of the house swirls around me. All the muscles in my body constrict, as though trying to make my frame as small as possible—a smaller target for anything around that might try to grab at me.

I run out of the room and fly down the stairs. At the sofa, I grab the quilt off the back and lie down, pulling it over my entire body.

The giggles go away.

The whole house is silent except for a rhythmic tick-tock of the wall clock over the TV. I concentrate on its rhythm and ignore my bladder. I’m awake for what feels like all night, but it’s still dark when I drift off.