16

“Help me . . .”

A whisper floated through her subconscious, waking her. The sheets were twisted around Kailey’s legs, her T-shirt stuck to her chest with sweat, and the purple shorts she’d worn to bed were tugged up over her hips. Her bedroom was cold. Kailey opened her eyes, her breaths coming in fast, short gasps. Someone had spoken, and as they had spoken, they’d touched her. Ran fingers down the side of her face, under her chin, skimmed her neck . . .

She shot up in the bed, untangling her legs and grabbing her phone off the nightstand. Kailey tapped it. 3:38 a.m. A quick glance toward the window showed the lake illuminated beneath the moon. Waves rolling in with their persistent attack on the shore. The cedar and poplar trees swayed, but there was no major storm, no gusts of wind, no thunder or lightning. But her face tingled. Tingled from the feeling of a whisper touch trailing her skin, ominous and threatening.

There was enough moonlight in her room to make out the shapes of the antique wardrobe, the dresser, the wing-back chair in the corner, a bookshelf, and her pile of discarded shoes by the bedroom door. The air mattress on the floor beside her bed held the mature, male form of her brother. Jude was curled in the fetal position, his light-brown hair tousled, his chin covered in whiskers. In his hand, he still held a pencil, and on the floor beside him lay a sketch pad with a half-drawn image of a fireplace on it. The fireplace from the downstairs study, along with its intricately carved mantel.

She glanced toward the in-room phone. The intercom light blinked red. She wasn’t typically on call during the night, but she was reachable if needed.

Kailey swung herself out of the bed and padded across the floor. She hit the intercom button for the main nurse’s room.

“Tracee?” Kailey called softly into the intercom.

She was met with a white noise of empty response. Either Tracee was asleep or she was assisting a resident and wasn’t in her room.

Kailey tugged her shorts over her hips, then wrapped her arms around herself as she peered about the dark room. She eyed the light switch but resisted flicking it on so she didn’t awaken Jude.

Help me.

She’d heard the voice so clearly. Like a little girl pleading to be carried. A little girl whose legs were weary, whose body was tired. Kailey looked at her bedroom door and stilled. It was opened a crack. Two inches at the most. She ran her fingers through her messy hair and tentatively approached the door as though it were going to turn into a monster and leap out to scream in her face. It didn’t. She palmed the doorknob and pulled it open. The hallway beyond was empty and long. Two hall lights with very dim bulbs were lighting the path. She had the brief recollection of there being a carpet runner down this hall when she was five. She remembered it because it’d been warm under her bare feet when she’d snuck to the room where Jude had slept. Snuck there to sleep where she felt safe.

“Help me.” The voice dropped to a whisper, but the breath of it seemed to lift a tendril of hair by Kailey’s ear. She slapped at it like one would a mosquito and spun, staring back into her bedroom. Empty. Her heart punched her chest from the inside out, and Kailey took short breaths, blowing them out through open lips.

“Hello?” she called quietly. Her voice echoed down the hallway. Eerie with its power to sound loud when really she’d barely raised her voice above a whisper.

With no answer from the hallway, Kailey pulled back into her room and tiptoed to the wardrobe, flinging open the doors. Her clothes hung there like limp, lifeless bodies. All in a row.

Edgar.

Poe.

Kailey swiveled her head left and right, searching the room for her cats. Both were missing. Edgar, who normally curled beside her legs, was nowhere to be seen. Poe . . . maybe he’d been the one to slip through the doorway in search of his buddy Raymond. Only . . . Kailey squeezed the bridge of her nose. Poe couldn’t open a door. He was a cat. And unless the door hadn’t been latched tight, the idea of a fluffy white cat turning a doorknob was ludicrous.

The hallway floor creaked under the weight of a footstep. Kailey hurried back to the doorway.

“Tracee, is that—?” The empty hallway met her vision.

She’d heard the footstep. She’d heard the child’s voice.

Kailey stepped into the hall. The doors to the other rooms were all shut. Closed and harboring sleeping residents. She tiptoed past them, noting that her own weight made the floorboards complain. They were cold beneath her bare feet.

In her peripheral vision, a flash of white at the end of the hall snagged Kailey’s attention.

“Hello?” She snuck toward it, reticent to explore, but an unseen force—call it curiosity?—tugged her forward. “Hello?” Kailey hissed, wanting to avoid waking the residents. She reached the end of the hall and looked around the corner, toward the turret-floor stairs. When she was five, she’d ventured there. An unsuspecting little girl climbing creepy old steps to an empty set of rooms in a round, turreted space. She’d not returned, not then, and not since she’d arrived back at Foxglove Manor.

“Helllllllp me.”

With the whisper came a brush of chill, caressing Kailey’s face like the breath of the dead. She froze. At the base of the stairs was a girl. Her blond hair almost white, hanging over her face. Her skin was translucent, her dress hung to just above her ankles. Or nightgown. Yes, that was it. It was a nightgown. Gray in the darkness, with long sleeves that hugged her wrists.

The little girl stepped onto the bottom step as though she were going to ascend to the turret, but instead of her feet balancing on the stair, she hovered just above it. The girl’s bare feet were pointed like ballet toes. She raised herself onto them, then lowered herself to her heels, then back up to her tiptoes again.

Kailey wanted to shout—to scream—but her voice was strangled as she was pulled into the little girl’s eyes. Black eyes. Shrouded in violet hues as if someone had beat her with fists. Her face was sunken, the skin around her mouth puckered—wrinkled—the sure sign of death and partial decay.

Kailey couldn’t move as her hand clutched the corner of the wall. Her body trembled, terror racing through her like a roller coaster out of control.

The little girl moved up another stair but remained facing Kailey.

She opened her mouth, dark and cavernous, as if to utter another plea for help. Instead, from the pit of it a moth fluttered, carrying itself out of the girl’s mouth and up the stairs, disappearing into the dark.

“Help me, Kailey.” The girl’s whisper was a pleading whine. “Hellllllllp me . . .”

“Kailey.”

A hand lightly slapped her face.

“Kailey.”

She could feel herself being pulled, sand scraping the bare skin of her back. Her body was shivering. Her legs were in water. A cold wave rolled over her, soaking her, spraying onto her chest and bared arms.

“Kailey. C’mon, Kailey, wake up.” The hand was stinging now. She squeezed her eyes tight, against the cold, the pain.

Groaning, she rolled to her side and coughed, trying to curl into the sand as if it would somehow provide an insulated warmth.

Voices murmured around her. A warm hand pushed wet hair off her face. Two arms wriggled under her, jostling her, pinching her skin unintentionally. She was lifted—hoisted, really—with an awkward stumble.

“Let’s get her to the manor,” a woman said. “Jude is frantic.”

Yes. Jude.

Kailey bounced against a man’s torso, her head hitting his shoulder bone. There was nothing comfortable about being carried. Kailey moaned, trying to open her arms, but she was cold. The cold seeped into the marrow of her bones, and she realized the clicking she heard was her teeth.

A door must have been kicked open because it slammed into a wall.

“You found her!” Raymond’s voice—relieved—in the distance.

“God bless you.” Teri’s words drifted into Kailey’s conscious mind, and somehow she knew whoever Teri was thanking was the person carrying her.

“Take her into the infirmary.” Tracee. She was giving orders in her short, no-nonsense way.

“N-no,” Kailey whimpered. She tried to open her eyes, but they were heavy. “Jude.”

“Put her on the bed,” Tracee directed.

“I’ll get some heat pads.” A whiff of frankincense followed Teri from the room.

Kailey was lowered, her body meeting the softness of the mattress. A vague recollection came to her. She was in the infirmary. The only downstairs room that had a bed in it in case a resident was sick enough to need special care.

“I need to go. Jude—he needs me—”

“Shh, Kailey,” Tracee interrupted her protest, running her palm over Kailey’s forehead. Kailey finally got her eyelids to cooperate. She opened them. Tracee was worried. It was etched in her face, even though she was tending to business. Axel was shaking out a blanket from its folded square. He laid it over her as Tracee ran a thermometer across Kailey’s forehead.

“She’s just under ninety-six degrees. She’s verging on hypothermia. Start rubbing her feet, Axel.” Tracee took the heat pads Teri had returned with. They were wrapped in orange plastic. She ripped them open and started shaking them. “I’ll put these on pressure points around her body, but we’ve got to get her out of her clothes.”

“Maddie is coloring with Jude,” Teri’s voice assured them all from the distance. “She has him calmed now.”

The blanket Axel had laid across her was tugged off. Kailey tried to clutch at it and pull it back on.

“No, Kailey.” Tracee pressed her arms back down gently. “Shh. Just hold on.”

Kailey was aware of her wet shorts being tugged off. She had a fleeting, out-of-body question as to whether Axel was still in the room. Her T-shirt was next. Then blessed warm compresses met her skin. A heating pad was laid over her chest. The blanket was returned. Someone was rubbing her feet between warm palms. She opened her eyes just a slit. It was Axel, fixated on her feet as if he could will his personal warmth into hers. She supposed it wasn’t all that bad if he’d seen her in her underwear, not if he was helping her get warm.

She wondered if Axel had ever had a girlfriend. Maybe he’d never seen a woman in her wet pajamas before? Or without them, like she was now, beneath the blanket.

Kailey’s mind wavered from its senseless rumination. Her skin tingled as warmth began to return.

Teri’s arm slipped under her neck. Kailey met the nurse’s eyes. “Hey, sweetie. Sip this water. It’s warm, with some lavender. Let’s get some heat in you.”

Kailey did so, the liquid soothing her tongue and throat.

Tracee skirted by Teri and placed a blood-pressure cuff around Kailey’s arm. “This will squeeze a little. I’m sorry.” She pumped, the band tightened, pinched her bare skin, held, then released. “It’s high.” Tracee tugged at the cuff, and the Velcro made a ripping sound.

“Eesh,” Teri muttered.

“She’s going to be okay, isn’t she?” Axel asked, his hands not pausing in their rubbing of her feet.

“She is now. She’s not full-blown hypothermia, thank the Lord,” Teri replied. “But much longer in that water and we’d be calling 911.”

“And you know how quick they’d make it here.” Tracee gave a sarcastic snort of doom. She leaned over Kailey and held a light up to her eyes as her fingers gently lifted Kailey’s eyelids. “Pupils responding normally. I don’t see signs of a fall or a concussion.”

“How on earth did she end up at the bottom of the cliff in the water?” Teri mused, clicking her tongue as she urged Kailey to sip again. “Sip, sweetie.”

Kailey did so. Coughed. She had to speak. Had to explain . . . A vision entered her memory. The little girl on the stairs. She’d seen her disappear up the stairs, begging Kailey to help her, and then . . . then there was nothing. Only blackness. Now she was here, in the infirmary. She could hear voices in the hall. Raymond. Stella. Whispering loudly so their hearing aids could pick up each other’s voices.

“She’s been missing since bedtime last night!” Stella said.

“I saw her head to the restroom at eleven,” Raymond responded. Yes, Kailey remembered peeking into his open door and waving at him on her way to the bathroom just before she went to bed.

“Something’s not right,” Stella inserted.

“Darn tootin’ something’s not right!” Raymond snorted.

Their voices cut off as the infirmary door was shut. Tracee blew a breath from her mouth, and her hair lifted off her forehead. “Our local snoops are concerned about you,” she said, then gave Kailey a smile.

Axel’s hands on Kailey’s feet had slowed to a stop. Teri was slipping warm socks over them. Axel stood and stared down at her, helplessness on his face.

“Kailey?” Tracee eased herself onto the bed next to Kailey. “Can you tell us what happened?” She pushed wet hair away from Kailey’s face.

Kailey swallowed, the aftertaste of lavender on her tongue. She drew in a shuddering breath. Her mind was becoming clearer, her memories more vivid, but she still couldn’t process logic enough to filter her words.

“The little girl . . .” Kailey squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again. She locked gazes with Axel. His expression encouraged her even though she read confusion on his face. “She—she’s in the turret.”

“What little girl?” Teri tucked the blanket around Kailey’s feet.

Kailey frowned. “She’s—white. White hair and nightgown.”

Tracee exchanged looks with Teri and then lifted her head to give Axel a meaningful glance.

“What?” Kailey looked among the three of her caregivers.

Tracee’s hazel eyes were sharp and searching. “Kailey, how did you get on the shore at the bottom of the cliff?”

Kailey ached to remember. Ached to recall. She searched her memory, but all she could see was the little girl’s dark eyes. She could hear the pleading in her voice.

“She—she wanted me to help her.” Kailey ignored the way the others in the room stilled. “She’s younger than Riley. Maybe as young as I am. We’re so little. Too little.” She could see for some reason her words confused them. A thought spiked through Kailey, and she struggled to sit up. Tracee pushed her back onto the pillow. Kailey swiped at her arm, an urgency rising in her throat. “No, let me up. Please.”

“Kailey,” Axel intervened. He crouched by the bed and caught her hands. “Lie down. You need to get warm.”

Kailey shook her head. “Riley. The little girl last night—Axel, they need to be heard. We need to be heard!”

“Shh,” Tracee soothed behind Axel.

Teri tapped Tracee’s shoulder, and Tracee nodded, moving out of the way.

Axel reached for Kailey’s forehead and rested his palm on it. “We’ll listen, Kailey.” He glanced at Teri, then back to her. “But you need to get some rest first. Okay? Just rest.”

“I don’t want to rest.” Kailey struggled, but Teri was leaning over her now.

“She’s going out,” Kailey heard Teri observe.

“Is she okay?” A worried question from Axel.

Kailey heard them talking, but it was a distant echo. She focused on Axel’s eyes. So gray. Like the lake. Like the girl’s nightgown.

The steadiness of Axel’s expression reassured Kailey. Her eyes were heavy. So heavy. It reminded her of when she was five. The darkness. The weight of the air in the van.

Help me.

Hellllp me.

Her eyes flew open. Axel was staring back.

“Don’t let him take me!” she begged, grappling for Axel’s hand. “Please.”

“I won’t.” His grip tightened even as his profile started to lose focus.

Kailey closed her eyes, then tried to reopen them, only to have her lids win the battle and shut again. “I won’t,” she heard once more, just as she slipped away into sleep.