Page 12 of They Say a Girl Died Here

“I wasn’t making any noise.” Anna spoke calmly, hoping her voice would bring Grandma back around. It didn’t. Instead, Grandma tilted her head sharply to one side like a bird. No, not a bird, Anna realized. More like a field mouse in the night, aware of some terrible death circling above. Grandma was afraid.

“Shut up, shut up.” Her hiss softened into a desperate whisper and she half raised one arm as if trying to swat something away from around her head. “They won’t shut up.”

“Who won’t shut up?” Anna took a careful step forward. “There’s nobody here.”

Only then did Grandma look at her, eyes full of terror and confusion. “The girls in my head,” she whispered. “They won’t shut up.”

Anna’s skin prickled with a shiver. “You’ve had a bad dream. There’s only us here. It’s all right.”

“Was it a dream? Or was it real?” Grandma looked as if she was about to cry, and then the hall light came on, startling them both. Grandma automatically grabbed Anna’s hand, and something about it made Anna want to weep herself.

“Anna? Is that you?” Mom came down the stairs, her slippers soft feather touches on the wood. Her tread used to be heavier. She’d lost weight. Anna wondered how she hadn’t noticed. “I went to wake you up so you wouldn’t sleep in your clothes again, but—” She stopped short. “Oh, Mom.” There was frustration, loss, and exhaustion in those two words, and more than a little love. She looked at Anna. “Where did you find her?”

“Here. In the kitchen.”

“I’m cold,” Grandma said. Her hand was icy and Anna took her gray cardigan from where it was once again slung over the back of the kitchen chair and wrapped it around Grandma’s narrow shoulders.

“It’s fine,” Anna said. “She just wanted a drink. I’ll take her. You go back to bed.”

“Are you sure?”

Anna nodded and started to lead her grandmother back to her room.

“Thanks. Oh, and Anna?”

“Yes?” She looked back at her mother.

“Maybe make her a hot chocolate. So we can all sleep.” Her eyes slipped from Anna’s guiltily, but there was no doubt in her meaning. Pills. Give Grandma a pill.

“Sure. Sure, I will.”

Grandma got back into bed, and while she wasn’t in the agitated state she’d been in when Anna found her, she was dozy and confused, so Anna talked soothingly for a few minutes, somethings and nothings about Caroline’s schoolwork and Dr. Burdett’s cooking and his visit, and she waited until the old lady was completely calm before going back to fetch some water.

She was nearly at the door when she saw a pack of American Spirit, a large dent in one corner, on the top of Grandma’s dresser. Anna frowned. She opened it up and there were ten left, one turned the wrong way around for luck, just like she did with a fresh pack. They weren’t her cigarettes, though. She didn’t earn enough to forget about half a pack of smokes somewhere. Maybe they were Doc Burdett’s. He’d still been here when she’d gone upstairs, and maybe they’d come to Grandma’s room for some private conversation. She left the pack where it was. Wasn’t worth the hassle from Mom if he came back for them.

In the kitchen, she took a capsule from the blister pack on the top shelf and washed it down the drain before getting a glass of water to take back to Grandma. She felt better. Lighter. There was no way she was drugging Grandma without her permission. There might be little love lost between them as women, but Anna wasn’t doing that. Not a hope in hell.

Grandma was still awake when she got back, but drifting on the edge of sleep. “I got you water, Grandma,” Anna said softly. “In case you need it.” Grandma murmured some small response, and Anna turned away, heading to the door. She looked to the dresser, suddenly tempted to take the cigarettes, but they were gone.

She searched around a little but there was no sign of the beaten soft pack. She looked back at Grandma. She must have put them away somewhere while Anna was in the kitchen. There was never a reward for anything in life. As Grandma finally drifted into silent sleep, Anna crept out and headed back to her own bed.

Undressing, she thought about what Grandma had said about girls’ voices in her head. Where did she think she was during these odd moments? Back at school, maybe? Some time in her youth? What girls would be talking to her?

Anna sat on the window ledge and peered out at the still night, getting a breath of slightly cooler air. The yard and the land and road beyond were filled with shadows and for the briefest moment she thought one looked like the shape of a person staring up at the house. She froze, but then a cloud suffocated the moon with darkness, and when it passed, the shape was no longer there. She stared, unblinking, until her eyes began to water, but nothing moved that she could see.

Just her imagination, she decided, although her heart was beating hard. In bed, she took the poster of the dead girls out from the bedside table and stared at it, thinking about what Dr. Burdett had said about death. Death has ripples and waves. Poor Jamie drowned in one.

She opened her laptop, the light from the screen the only illumination, and clicked into the New York Times writing competition. She might have dropped out of her journalism program at Columbia after the thing, but she found she still had that curiosity, that urge to dig deep into something and write about it. She stared at the competition details for a long moment, then opened a Word file. Her fingers hovered over the keys as her brain searched for a title. Something simple. Powerful but effective. After a moment, she typed: The Haunting of Harper’s Creek: The Ripple Effect of Murders in a Small-Town Community.

She sat back and closed the lid, strangely satisfied. A title was at least a start. It was something.

15

The land, despite its appearance, is not dead, nor is it sleeping.

The land exists as it always has, and it has suffered this thirst before, and will again, and though the crops fail and wither into it, beneath the surface insects scurry and under boulders snakes sleep the days away. The land feels it all. Every tremor on its skin. Every tear spilled, every drop of blood shed. It remembers all and simultaneously forgets everything. Time means nothing to the land that was once cooled into formation under a shallow sea and now scorches under a baking sun. Time ebbs and flows, building in layers, one on top of the other, endless.

The land remembers the creatures by the feel of them against it and inside it, not by their names. The trilobites, the ammonites, the sea turtles, the rhinoceroses, the mammoths, so many of which have gone or changed, evolving, evolving, evolving as living things must, and all before the softer and yet more insidious footfall of man arrived.