Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

“You’re not dealing to her,” Sylvie said.

“Does it matter where she’s getting the shit? There’s a poor med student in the house, and the daughter’s got pills enough to give away. Who will be blamed? Tell me.”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I still need to talk to Bella.”

Eleanor waved her upstairs. “About the drugs? Always in trouble.” She speared Sylvie with a pissed-off expression. “But it’s Zoe who gets her there.”

“Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “It’s Bella—”

“Believe what you will. Why listen to the maid—”

“Bella upstairs?” Enough of this. She’d come with a purpose. She wouldn’t be sidetracked.

“You won’t listen; why will I tell you anything?” Eleanor shut the door in her face.

Left on her own, Sylvie wandered the cool hallway, looking in on an immaculate kitchen, a living room that had been in Homes and Gardens . She followed the gentle curve of the house, running her hand along buttery yellow walls, as warmly colored as Florida sunshine, and took the tiled stairs upward. Where did a spoiled princess sleep? In the tower room, of course.

The arched dome of the upper hallway had the hush of churches, and dried flowers in the vases only added to the impression. A shimmer of chlorine blue through the plate-glass windows sent dancing shards of sunlight cascading over her skin like spotlights.

Sylvie opened the door to Bella’s room, found it dim and cool, the very thing for an invalid. The blinds were shuttered tight, blocking out the sun. Left to her own devices, Bella would probably sleep past two o’clock.

A whimper reached her ears; the bundle of blankets on the bed thrashed for a moment.

Maybe not. Maybe Bella was going to greet the world after all.

As minutes passed, and all Bella did was groan and whimper, Sylvie lost patience. She leaned against the elaborate footboard, white, wrought-iron scrollwork, sharp and cold against her hands, and kicked the mattress. The bed billowed, startling Sylvie—water bed.

“Wakey, wakeys,” she said.

Bella jerked up, hands clenching tight on the edge of the mattress, panting. She focused on Sylvie with slow awareness—alarm, familiarity, recognition, relaxation. Irritation. Everyone always got to irritation.

“Sylvie? What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Need to talk to you.”

“Go away. I’m sick,” Bella said. She flopped back onto the mattress, tugged the blanket over her face.

Sylvie hopped down from the footboard, flipped on the overhead light-and-fan combo. Bella groaned but only hunched deeper into the covers against the sudden brightness.

In the moving air, Sylvie smelled Bella’s sour sweat, and sheets days past due for changing.

“C’mon, Bell—”

“No.”

Sylvie busied herself in the room, snooping openly, certain that would get Bella’s attention. She opened dresser drawers, found a pill bottle in the jeans drawers, another in her closet, a third under her bed, all nearly empty, all with their labels stripped off. She set them on the bedside table, kicked the mattress again. “Bella!”

The girl woke with a muffled shriek, a flailing hand, and Sylvie jerked back. She hadn’t really expected her to fall asleep again. They went through the whole panic-to-recognition cycle once more, then Bella scrubbed at her face with shaking hands. “Jesus,” she muttered. “I keep having the worst nightmares.”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Prescription drugs’ll do that to you. Especially if you’re taking them just for fun.”

Bella reached over, swept the bottles off the nightstand and into the Kleenex-riddled trash can with soft thump s and muffled rattle s. “Happy now? Take ’em with you when you go.”

The girl did look sick. Bella hung over the side of the bed as if it were too much effort to lie back again; the arm propped against the side of the mattress frame shook, and her skin was greased with milky sweat; her eyes were dilated, the sclera nearly yellow.

Sylvie almost felt sorry for her, but the hand propping her up was capped by nails manicured in high-end silver gloss. The same shade Sylvie had found on the fingernail in the van. Another tick on the confirmation chart, another mark that moved Bella one step further from the “innocent” category.

Sylvie said, “Nightmares, huh?” She hoped she could prompt the girl back into speech, that she hadn’t shut her down completely, but she couldn’t regret her first response, not if it took the drugs out of Bella’s hands.

And Zoe’s.

Still, there was a real likelihood that Sylvie had just found the decoy bottles, all close to empty, just there to make Bella’s mom feel like she was making progress. “Tell me about your nightmares.”

“Going to shrink me?”

“Might slap you,” Sylvie said. “You gave my sister drugs.”

Bella eyed her sidelong and sly, calculating her odds. “Is that what she told you? Such a bitch—”

Sylvie’s face must have done something really forbidding; Bella shut up all at once, then, when she decided to talk again, it was on the topic Sylvie had chosen.

“My nightmares are all the same,” Bella said, and if she started off belligerent, she faded to plain scared. “I’m doing something . . . horrible.”

Sylvie took a seat on the end of the bed. “Tell me?”

Bella dragged her knees up to her chest with much billowing and shifting of the bed. Her legs stuck out of the bottom of her Victoria’s Secret pj’s, skinny even for a girl who took fashion cues from Barbie dolls. “I keep killing a boy. A little boy.” She glanced up at Sylvie, added hastily, “In my dreams. It’s not real.”

“Didn’t think it was,” Sylvie said mildly. One of the regrettable truths of her job was that she met a lot of killers.

Bella was a lot of things—spoiled, vain, grasping—but Sylvie didn’t get a whiff of killer from her. Not yet. Sylvie knew how slippery a slope it could be.

“How does it happen? Always the same way?”

It was just a dream. It shouldn’t be important. Except . . . magic had a cost. The benign magics, or what passed for benign, cost the user effort, concentration, energy, time, left them drained, ready to eat a gator, burp, and take a nap. The bad stuff corrupted , unless the user was very, very careful, and had a whipping boy to soak up the worst of it. It was the sole reason power junkies like the Maudits took apprentices—not to share knowledge but to protect their own skins.

If Bella had screwed around with big, bad magic—and the fingernail argued that she had—she’d first feel the corruption in her soul, and one’s soul had its own way of making its complaints felt.

“I’m sitting by a pool in my chair, and this toddler comes wandering up to me, smiling, and I just . . . shove him. He falls into the pool, starts kicking, but he’s too little, y’know? Like water wings little.” Bella buried her face in her knees, her words, muffled, distorted, kept on. “He gets to the edge anyway, hanging there, and I push him off with the net until he doesn’t come up anymore; he’s red-faced, and trying to scream, but his mouth’s full of water. And his mom’s just inside the house, and she doesn’t have a clue what I’ve done. I wake up when I hear her scream.”

Ugly enough, Sylvie thought, for a one-time nightmare. As a recurrent theme? Yeah, that might make a girl . . . uncomfortable. Bella looked up at her expectantly, and Sylvie thought, Oh, analysis later. Comfort now. Bella wanted to be told it was all right, that she was all right, that everything was going to be fine.

Thing was, Sylvie was crap at that, and not sure her sympathies should be wasted on Bella anyway. After all, she was one of the most likely suspects for leaving her and Wright dead to the world last night.