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I take the notebook off the table and flip to the day the video was uploaded.
March 15th
Breakfast: Egg whites
Ran 1 mile
Upon waking, felt fine. Clipped nose hair.
Wore: dark blue jeans (Monarchy), coat, blue dress shirt (HUGO)
Logged into C’s email and found video. Clearly shows L. but no clues as to where she is now. C is at the old house, but G there and keeping an eye on everything. P says he’s going to take care of it. This is all his fault.
Beware the ides of March. Some joke. I found her collar, but no clue as to how she got out of it. P must have not clipped it on correctly. I have to find a way to use this to wedge P and A further apart.
I have to control the situation.
“Control” is underlined twice, the second line so heavy that it ripped through the page.
I stare at the entry until the words blur in front of me. C is Cassel—the video must have been of me up on the roof. P must be Philip. A could be Anton, since Barron mentioned him before. I blink at G for a moment and then realize it’s for our grandfather. But L? I immediately think of Lila, even though it makes no sense.
I grab the laptop and play the video of me again, frame by frame. We barely see any of the crowd; the camera pans over people too fast to catch anything but blurs. The only faces I can pick out belong to students. No Lila. No dead girls. No one that doesn’t belong. No one wearing a collar.
The only thing in that video that could be wearing a collar is the cat.
Only you can undo the curse.
The thought is so absurd that it actually makes me grin.
I walk toward the bathroom to splash water on my face, but as I pass a door, the strong smell of ammonia stops me. It opens into a room, empty except for a metal cage that sits near the window. The hinged wire door is open. The newspaper stuffed into the cage and the wooden floor around it is stained with what, given the sharp smell and the yellowing, is probably cat piss. Thick crusted layers of it, like something was kept locked up for a long time and not cleaned up after.
I hold my breath and lean closer. Caught in a wire joint are a few short white hairs. I back out of the room.
Barron’s losing his memories. So’s Maura, and maybe me too. I don’t remember the details of Lila’s murder. I don’t remember how I got onto the roof. I don’t remember what happened to my memory charm.
Let’s say someone is taking those memories. I don’t think that’s too much of a stretch.
Let’s also say someone gave me that dream, the one where the cat was begging for help. If I were cursed to have it, that would mean someone had to touch me, hand to skin. The cat—the one that slept on my bed, the one near my dorm room in the video—did touch me.
So maybe the cat gave me the dream.
Of course, that’s ridiculous. Cats are animals. They can no more perform curse work than they can perform a sonata or compose a villanelle.
Unless the cat was once a girl. A transformed girl. A dream worker. Lila.
Which would mean something so monumental that I almost can’t contemplate it. It would mean she’s not dead.
8
IN BARRON’S BATHROOM the beige tile walls look too familiar, but like I’m seeing them from the wrong angle.
It’s crazy, the idea of Lila being a cat. The idea that Barron had her locked up in his house all this time is even crazier. And the idea that I might not have killed Lila throws me so off balance that I don’t know how to right myself.
I look in the mirror—staring at my face. Looking at the scraggly black hair curling around my jaw and my ink-blot eyes, looking to see if I should be afraid. If I’m still a murderer. If I’m cracking up.
There’s a dizzy sense of déjà vu as I glance at the reflection of the tub behind me. I stumble and barely catch myself.
I thrashed in the water and my hands turned to arms turned to starfish curling like snakes. Everything went wrong and I was coming apart and water closed over my head and—
