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She smiles. Her teeth are jagged peaks in her mouth. She reaches out and cradles my face slowly. I know it won’t do me any good to scream.
“You have something I want,” she coos before dunking my face into the icy water. I scream.
I feel the water filling my lungs as I struggle against the tide. I thrash wildly, managing to come up for air momentarily before Beatrix forces my head back down.
“Eleanor?”
Joseph’s strong arms drag me out of the water. I’m still flailing as he takes me to the shore.
“Eleanor, what the fuck?!” Are you okay?”
I pant and vomit a stream of salt water down my nightgown, clawing at the ground on my hands and knees. I’ve never been so happy to be on land.
“Joseph?” I say weakly.
He kneels before me and clutches my face. “I got up to go to the bathroom, and you weren’t in bed, but then I remembered what you told me about the beach,” he explains.
I look around, and it fully hits me: The beach is half a mile away from the Beachfront Inn, a hefty walk compared to the mere steps away from Idylewylde Hall. And yet, I ended up here, and I have no idea how it happened.
“I lost time,” I whimper. “It’s- it’s so cold.”
“Shit,” Joseph shrugs off his coat and drapes it over my shoulders.
“Let’s get you to the hospital. Your lips are blue,” he says.
The nurses peel off my wet clothes at the hospital and get me into a bed. They hook me onto an IV and toss a silver warming blanket over me. A kind attending obliges when I request an ultrasound. The babies are fine. I nestle beneath the blanket and fall asleep, thinking of the constant sound of their heartbeats.
When I wake, Dante, Joseph, and Iphigenia are all huddled in the corner, sipping lukewarm paper cups of coffee.
“Hey, Eleanor!” Dante calls with a wave.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, still groggy from sleep and whatever medication they gave me.
“We’re planning a seance. The solstice is on Tuesday, and from the looks of you, it can’t come soon enough!”
I look over, and sure enough, Joseph has a yellow legal pad open on his lap.
“You too?” I ask.
Joseph nods, “Beatrix won’t even know what hit her.”
“Now, Eleanor, you can go back to sleep. But I need to ask. Evan said something about a diary. Can you bring that and any of Beatrix’s other personal effects you may have found?”
“Totally, but you might have to convince your boyfriend to let me take some archival materials out of the archive.”
“Oh, he’s coming, too! Don’t worry, I wouldn’t let him miss it.”
Friday morning, I get discharged from the hospital with a clean bill of health, strict instructions to stay out of the ocean, and a handwritten list of seance supplies.
Joseph looks at me like I’m insane when I insist on going to work at two, but we’re supposed to present my findings to the board at four.
“I doubt anyone would mind if you took the day off! The archive’s not going anywhere!”
“Between that and seance prep, I’m missing work over my dead body!”
Joseph winces.
“Sorry,” I add.
