Page 57 of They Say a Girl Died Here

Anna sat down hard on the bed, head spinning. Dead girls in Grandma’s head. They weren’t Lila and Bonnie. They were Anna. Other Annas. Annas who failed. Annas who bled in the basement. “Did I die in the basement, Grandma?”

Grandma nodded, her eyes glistening with the effort of keeping hold of this moment, of helping to make Anna understand.

“How many times?” Bile burned Anna’s throat.

“I found the Lord inside me,” Grandma whispered, staring straight ahead, the words coming fast. “The first time. There was so much blood. From your head. You were dying. I opened up my empty space and the Lord worked through me.” A tear trickled down the crevices of her face, making a pattern as random as her words. “I had to save you. I had to stop it. But now I have to keep stopping it. Every time. So many times. But they all exist. All the Annas. All the times. Sometimes the basement. Sometimes you make it outside into the dust. Sometimes in the hall. Until it’s over. They fill me up. No more space. It leaks out. Bleeds into each other.” She rocked backward and forward, keening. “They’re all so loud.”

Ghosts in my head

In my head

Anna’s hands were freezing and her teeth chattered, her whole body trembling. The ominous feeling she always had in the house. The sense that there was someone just out of sight in the corner of her eye. Different realities playing out. Other versions of herself. Girls who died. Grandma outside keening on her knees and so surprised to see Anna. Had Anna died right there one time?

The tips of her fingers were cold, her blood drawing inward. When she’d woken with that awful headache, was that everything starting again, trying to change the ending? Anna’s own death. How many times had this happened?

“It gets closer every time.” Grandma tugged at a strand of her hair. “Eating me. I can’t send us back so far.”

Anna carefully moved Grandma’s hand away before she hurt herself and tilted the old woman’s chin up so they were looking each other in the eye. “Who kills me, Grandma? Do you know?”

It was Grandma’s turn to tremble and shake, and for a moment Anna thought that more madness was coming her way and that maybe monsters did exist, and that she’d say the Farmhand, but that wasn’t the word she spoke. She leaned in, a thin strand of drool running into the crease at the side of her mouth, and held one arthritic finger to her lips before she whispered, almost inaudibly—

“Clown.”

67

All of them are everywhere, all at once. The house is busy, busy, busy through the days and nights, people moving from room to room, dizzyingly fast. The land beneath can feel it all.

Stars, sun, moon, spinning overhead.

Lights come on and lights go off.

Girls everywhere. Dead girls, live girls. Mothers, daughters, sisters, friends.

They come, they go. They are here, they aren’t here. They live, they die. They are all in between.

And the one aged constant at the center of it all. Holding together the universes she has created as she herself unravels. She doesn’t give up.

Women. Always women. The life-givers. All that energy inside them.

All that love. All that rage. It’s a powerful combination.

68

Anna was in a surreal bubble behind the counter of Jeannie’s as she poured coffee and took orders that were few and far between. The atmosphere inside the cool diner was still as oppressive as the heavy heat outside, surely ready to burst, or maybe that was just her. Bonnie was murdered three years ago. This time back then, Bonnie was still breathing, laughing, worrying about the usual daily bullshit, not knowing what the night would bring for her.

Anna had thrown up twice before leaving home, her head spinning with the madness of what she knew. Anna and Grandma losing their shit together. Another girl was going to die in Harper’s Creek, and that girl was her. Clown.

She’d watched the men coming and going, either on the sidewalk outside or at the counter and booths as she served them. No one seemed to pay her any extra attention, but that didn’t mean anything. She was a waitress in the only diner in town; any one of them could be the killer and fixating on her. Right kind of age, right kind of girl. She felt at once terrified and doomed. This had been coming for her since the thing. The final humiliation. Found dead and naked in a field somewhere, the skin on her back cut off, pressing the meat of her into this alien land. Failing everyone all over again.

She thought of Suzy, at home packing for her weekend in the city, and wondered how weird she’d find it if Anna asked to tag along. But what would happen then? Would another girl die instead? Victoria the dental hygienist? Melissa? A terrible thought crept up on her. Caroline?

“Anna. Anna!”

She was so lost in her reverie that Jeannie had to say her name twice before Anna turned to see her pursed red lips, face full of disapproval, hand on her hip. Sheriff Adams and Todd were on the other side of the counter and all three were looking her way. “What?”

“Is this right?” Jeannie continued, sounding very much as exasperated as Mom did when she spoke to her but without the undercurrent of love. “Is it you who’s been putting these posters up?”

“I’ll take it from here,” the sheriff said, wearily leaning on the counter, and, huffing, Jeannie withdrew to the register. Anna looked down at the sheet the sheriff pushed over to her. Those smiling faces. She could almost see her own alongside them.