Feral (6 page)

“Fine,” Becca snapped. “Come on, Owen,” she insisted, stomping right past Claire in a flurry.

“Claire!” Dr. Cain shouted, popping into her face. “Got some things for us. Maxine, the owner,” he said, pointing at Ruthie's mother, “took me into the storeroom to give me the pick of her canned goods. Been a run on them in the last couple of hours.”

Claire accepted her father's plastic shopping basket. Cradling it in her arms, she peered inside to find cans of Spam and chili, pork and beans and vegetable soup.

“That kerosene lamp!” Dr. Cain shouted, pointing. Ruthie turned to pluck it from a shelf behind the counter. “Looks like the last one, too,” he said, happily handing over his credit card. He hummed as Ruthie punched the buttons on a brass cash register that looked like it had been freed from the shelves of an antique store, not noticing the embarrassed flush that was still painted across her cheeks following her exchange with Becca.

Dr. Cain pushed Claire outside quickly, announcing, “It's getting dangerous. I think we can make it before the storm turns the roads completely impassable, if we hurry.”

They'd moved so fast, in fact, that the couple who'd clustered about the counter were still piling into the white Honda as Claire and her father stepped through the door of 'Bout Out.

In her haste to get in the car, Becca knocked an empty NOS energy drink can into the lot. Her voice carried across the still parking lot as she urged, “Come on. Hurry.”

Car doors slammed; the Honda revved and skidded across the lot.

Claire swore that the girl in the passenger seat was eyeing her through the windshield as the car swerved around the gas pumps toward the exit. Suddenly feeling self-conscious, Claire reached for the lapels of her coat, cinching them together.

“What's that all about?” Dr. Cain wondered, as the car screeched onto the street.

“Looking for their friend,” Claire assured him. “Trying to beat the worst of the storm.”

They walked down the front steps, into the lot, grocery sacks propped on their hips. Claire flicked her free hand, once, as though to toss off the way her fingers were inexplicably trembling.

She pulled the nozzle from the Gremlin's tank and lowered herself into the passenger seat, her paper bag crackling loudly into her lap.

As her father pulled out from the lot, steering toward the farmhouse they'd rented, Claire glanced through her window just in time to see a yellow tabby cat step into the gray sheet of icy rain and completely disappear.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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C
laire felt as though night had taken her up in its fist by the time her father's car snaked its way off the main road and down a gravel path. A dark charcoal sky loomed just beyond the windshield; bare tree limbs etched an even deeper, darker black into the horizon, like a kind of deathly-looking fringe. Claire's ears filled with the sounds of deep-voiced dogs barking. Gravel popping against the tires. And the icy rain, of course. It pattered against the windshield, the roof, ceaselessly.

An animal skittered straight into the headlights, making Dr. Cain hit the brake. Claire wrapped her hand around the door handle, eyes wide, as the car slid in a diagonal line, the front tires skidding to a stop an inch from the ditch.

The cat they'd nearly hit pulled himself out of his defensive crouch and raced toward the opposite side of the road.

Dr. Cain let out a shuddery sigh as Claire shook her head at the creature who raced off into the darkness.
Just how many cats are there around here?
she wondered. Her eyes darted about, taking in the barbed wire fence in the headlights, the thick, winter-dead underbrush that seemed to have gone untouched for the better part of a century.

“Close one,” Dr. Cain muttered, backing the car up to square it in the lane, then shifting back into drive again.

He steered past a looming two-story house, down a road without a single streetlight to help cut into the darkness.

He finally pulled into a driveway, paused to let the headlights shine on a two-story white farmhouse. The house featured all the quaint details Claire had expected to find when her father announced he'd rented a home built at the turn of the twentieth century: a large covered porch complete with a swing, wooden shutters, and filmy white lace curtains hanging in old sash windows. A second-story balcony wrapped the entire home.

The years had bullied the house, though, giving it a sad, used-up look. The place was desperately in need of paint; the asphalt shingles were starting to curl, the clogged gutters coughing and sputtering in the rain like an old man with emphysema.

Tonight, the house was also wrapped in a thin sheet of ice, which caught the hazy moonlight in a break between the clounds, sparkling like a star against the black sky.

Claire took a step from the car, her shoe sliding underneath her. She gripped the door for balance, and glanced up to find a figure in the front window of the house across the street. A hulking figure, enormous, standing so close to the glass that he looked like a featureless silhouette as he stared at her, the light of his living room shining brightly behind him.

She narrowed her eyes, refusing to gasp. Turning back toward the car, she tugged her suitcase from the backseat and her phone from the glove compartment. She slammed the car door as she stared at the silhouette, hoping it sounded like a punch.

“Hey,” her dad called, already halfway up the walk. “What are you doing just standing there? You'll catch your death.”

The phrase kicked Claire. “Coming.” She forced her feet to start moving up the ice-coated front walk, straight through the entrance, into a tiny sitting room with a fireplace and a wood floor and doilies on chairs and a couple of Norman Rockwell framed prints.

“How about the official tour?” Dr. Cain asked. They dragged their suitcases with them, going from one tiny room to the next, finding that each one featured a slightly different pattern of floral wallpaper. The out-of-date kitchen décor sported a linoleum-covered counter and a small sink with a dishpan, a round fridge from the fifties, and an old enamel stove.

“We can light that thing with a match when the power goes out,” her father said, pointing at the stove while the rain continued to patter against the drafty windows.

“Wait,” Claire said. “
When
the power goes?”

But Dr. Cain had already moved on to the note in the center of the table:
Welcome!
their temporary landlords had written.
A casserole is in the fridge, a loaf of homemade bread on the counter. Make yourselves at home. —The Sims Family.

The bathroom offered only an old-fashioned claw-foot tub with a free-standing porcelain sink and pink and aqua floor mats. Her father grunted at the tub. “No shower,” he grumbled.

Together, they climbed the stairs, the threadbare green runner halfheartedly absorbing each blow from their shoes. “No second bathroom,” he sighed, after having stuck his head through every doorway.

“Which one of these do you think is the master?” Claire asked with a chuckle. Because the three bedrooms—each barely big enough to hold a desk and a twin bed—seemed exactly the same size.

Her father laughed. “Beats me,” he confessed. “Which one do you want?”

Claire pointed toward the closest room. “This is fine.” She stepped inside, gently placing her suitcase on the floor, next to a small dresser adorned with glass knobs, its top decorated with a vintage pink dresser scarf. The scarf wasn't on straight, though—it was bunched up into a pile in the middle. Claire reached to straighten it. But her fingers had not yet even grazed the material when it came back to her in a chilling
whoosh
—the memory of the robe she'd worn her first night home from the hospital.

It had been pink, too, and kind of silky, just like the old scarf. Her father had bought it for her because the weather was growing too warm for Claire's old terry cloth robe. He'd wanted her to have something light and comfortable to wear. And pretty, too—the robe was pretty. Girls were always drawn to pretty things, after all.

She'd waited for the din of her homecoming to finally subside—for Rachelle to go back to her own house and her father to go to sleep and the dark of night to cover the Welcome Home! signs in her bedroom. Claire had grabbed her walker and forced her broken body out of the bed and into the bathroom. Unable to lift both hands from the walker at the same time, she'd flicked the light on with her elbow. And she'd rolled her shoulders backward, letting the silky robe fall open.

She'd cried, seeing herself in the mirror for the first time. Cried, and sworn angrily under her breath, because everyone had lied to her—it
was
bad, the way she looked. She would never be pretty again—not like she had been.

When she'd finally run out of tears, she'd advised the puffy-faced girl in the mirror, “Cut some bangs. Wear your hair down. Move on.”

She'd avoided mirrors after that. It hurt to look at the truth in a mirror—like staring directly into the sun.

Claire snatched her fingers away from the dresser scarf without bothering to straighten it. She turned away, staring instead at the footboard of the antique iron bed that would be hers for the duration of her stay in Peculiar. But even that made her think of Chicago.

She'd been sitting cross-legged on her own bed little more than a week ago when her father'd knocked on her door and sheepishly eased into her room with a printed email in his hand.

“I don't know how you feel about it,” he'd said of the last-minute opportunity for a sabbatical in Peculiar, Missouri. “It isn't what we planned on.”

What they
had
planned on was Claire returning to her old school in Chicago for the spring semester. In all honesty, though, that email had lessened the tightening pressure of going back to her old life, like a clamp being released all at once. No Chicago alleys? No classmates looking at her with pity as she finally made her return, all of them knowing what had happened to her? No putting on the same uniform she'd been wearing the day of the attack? Not having to make incessant
I can't this afternoon, have to run
excuses to Rachelle, who would no doubt be letting her eyes roll across Claire like a woman in a supermarket turning a piece of fruit over in her hand, expecting to find bruises? It sounded like paradise.

She'd smiled at her father—the kind of honest smile that just had to be believed, no questions asked. “Let's
go.
”

Dr. Cain had cocked his head to the side in pride. “You're so brave,” he'd told her admiringly.
Brave.
He'd been using that word ever since the hospital, when she'd first cracked open her eyes and squeezed his hand.
A real fighter.

Now, though, Claire's shoulders drooped as she glanced about her new room. Instead of feeling as though she'd found her escape, Claire felt no different—no lighter, no happier, not even relieved. She was the exact same person she'd been a state away—surrounded, now, by beat-up antique furniture and overgrown everything and freezing drizzle tapping against her window. When she peered through her gauzy curtains, the hulking silhouette was still in the window across the street.

She shook her head and muttered, “What have I gotten myself into?” as a draft poured in through the ill-fitting Dutch door that led to her balcony. Though she was still wearing her coat, the cold, wet night air trickled across her face, and she shivered.

She plopped down on the old bed, pulling her phone from her coat pocket. She opened her email account, chose Rachelle's contact, and typed,
You wouldn't BELIEVE this place! So creepy! Perfect start to a horror movie!
Then clicked “Save Draft.”

Claire had been doing this for the past nine months, writing to Rachelle. No—she'd been writing to the
old
Rachelle, the friend she never would have avoided. The friend who never would have looked at her like she was about to fall apart. And clicking “Save Draft” instead of “Send,” because the old Rachelle was gone. Claire didn't know how to talk to this new Rachelle, worried Rachelle, tiptoeing-on-eggshells Rachelle. She'd smiled when Rachelle visited. She'd sent her quick, single-syllable texts in response. But she had stopped talking to her—really
talking
—like they always had. Suddenly, instantly, that always-there understanding between them was gone. There was no going to the movies to celebrate anything. No jabbing each other in the ribs. No teasing. She scrolled down the contents of her “Drafts” folder, which contained more than two hundred unsent emails to Rachelle.

“Race you to that casserole!” Dr. Cain shouted from his room down the hall. Claire smiled at the excitement in his voice, tossed her phone and her coat on her bed, and hurried down the stairs to join him in the kitchen.

“What's the verdict?” Dr. Cain asked her as he peeled the aluminum foil back from a blue-and-white CorningWare dish and shut the refrigerator door with his foot.

“It's . . . different,” she managed. “But no real adventure ever started out with the same old, same old, did it?”

Her father smiled at her again—a proud smile that warmed her.

They heated their dinners in a small convection oven on the counter beside the coffeepot, filled the floral plates they discovered in the cabinet, and carried them to the table just as sirens started wailing in the background.

Claire tightened her fist around her fork, her heart picking up pace.

“Wonder what that's about,” her father said, turning his head in the direction of the wail.

Before Claire could think of anything to say, the overhead light flickered, buzzed, then died completely.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers