Dead Silence (14 page)

“It’s the right one, isn’t it?” He was watching her expectantly, eagerly.

She wanted to tell him yes. She wanted to ask him how he’d known what was buried—hidden—deep inside her head. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and smother him with kisses for giving her this one tiny, probably insignificant piece of the crazy puzzle that had become her life.

Instead, she nodded. Slowly.

He shrugged again, looking so pleased with himself that Violet had to wonder if someone could actually burst from pride. “I heard you humming it,” he explained, answering the question she’d been unable to ask. “You do it, when you think no one’s listening. Thing is, I always listen, Vi.”

It was possibly the sweetest thing she’d ever heard. His words . . . lingering with the sound of the music that now had a name.

How had she gotten so lucky? What had she done to deserve someone like Jay, someone who paid attention to the little things? Even something as trivial as which tune she hummed.

“And it’s not too weird? You know, that it matches your imprint?” He looked uncertain now, his eyebrows drawn together in the center of his forehead, his lips pursed.

Violet reached up and settled her hand against his jaw. “It’s
so
not too weird, Jay. I mean, yes, it is, but this is me we’re talking about here . . . weird is relative.” She sighed. “I love you,” she vowed. “And I love my turtle. . . .” She let out a choked laugh and then she hugged it to her chest, even as the last notes wound down. “You, Jay Heaton, are the best boyfriend ever.”

In her room that night, Violet played her new music box again and again. She memorized every detail of the silver turtle, each etched groove and flat polished plane. She silently repeated the name of the song too.

Moonlight
Sonata.
Moonlight
Sonata.
Moonlight
Sonata.

The name was as beautiful as the tune.

She played her grandmother’s music box too, the one with Brahms Lullaby, setting them side by side, until all three songs blurred together—the two music boxes and the imprint in her head—creating a dissonant sound that probably only she could appreciate.

That only she thought was beautiful.

She listened to the last notes as she curled beneath her blankets to read her grandma’s scrawled handwriting.

July 13, 1971

Maggie is the perfect child. I’m sure every mother says that about her baby, but I’m certain that in this case it must be true.

Violet grinned, fascinated by the notion of her mother as anything but a grown-up. It was strange to consider her mom through her grandmother’s eyes. She kept reading, enthralled.

I can’t stop looking at her, studying her, trying to see who she is . . . and who she will be. She has curls and the unmistakable green eyes of her father. She has my lips though. It’s too soon to know what else she might have of mine, what else she might have inherited. I can only hope she doesn’t have it. I want nothing more than to know that Maggie will live in peace, never tasting or smelling or hearing the dead.

Violet’s chest ached as she gripped the pages, recognizing what her grandmother meant. She knew she shouldn’t let it bother her, that her grandma had wished for her mom not to share her ability—the ability that Violet herself had. But she couldn’t help it. It stung that the woman who she’d inherited it from hadn’t wanted it. Hadn’t wanted her daughter to have it.

Where once Violet had believed that she and her grandmother had shared a bond, she now realized they shared an affliction. Like a birth defect. At least in her grandmother’s eyes.

Still, Violet kept reading the passages, knowing that somewhere along the line something must have changed, because the woman she remembered hadn’t felt that way at all.

John says even if she has it, it won’t matter. He tells me it makes me who I am and he wouldn’t change a thing about me. He’s sweet that way, always trying to assure me that I’m normal, good even. If only I felt the same.

October 25, 1971

Winter’s coming, but Maggie and I bundle up whenever possible and head outdoors. She can’t tell me so, but I’m sure she likes our adventures as much as I do. I watch her closely whenever I feel them coming on, one of those echoes from the dead. So far she doesn’t seem to be aware of them. She looks safe and peaceful there, inside her stroller. She smiles and coos blissfully as they call to me.

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel it. Maybe she’s sensing something different from what I do. Hopefully, though, she feels nothing at all.

Violet tried to remember the first time she’d ever heard the word
echo
. It’s what she’d always called the sensations she felt, but she’d never really considered where the term had come from. It never dawned on her that it might have been her grandmother who’d come up with it. It was strange to think how easily she’d accepted it, how it had just become part of her everyday vocabulary, like
apple
or
cat
or
school
.

She kept reading, page after page of entries about her mother’s first words and her first steps. She learned more about her grandfather—her mom’s dad—a man Violet was sure she would have liked, probably loved even. She saw the gradual change in her grandmother’s passages as, over the months and years, she’d learned to believe her husband’s words about her being a good person, a worthy person, until eventually she’d accepted her ability. She’d even begun to call it a gift.

Like Violet, her grandmother spent as much time outdoors as possible, so there were numerous accounts of the animals she’d discovered. Several times her grandmother had used her garden as an excuse for why her fingernails had dirt caked beneath them. But in the privacy of her journal she told another story. A tale of giving those animals the peace they craved.

Of silencing their echoes.

Violet knew what that was like. She had Shady Acres, where she’d buried more than her share of the animals she’d come across. Her way of finding her own silence.

If only it were that easy now
, she thought, listening to the imprint that clung to her.

She learned too that it hadn’t been a secret in her grandparents’ household, much like it wasn’t in Violet’s.

It wasn’t until she came to a passage written during the spring of 1976—over thirty years earlier—that Violet sat up in her bed, every part of her body singing with awareness. She reread her grandmother’s entry, which had been written hastily, as if she couldn’t get the words down fast enough:

March 23, 1976

I’m not sure what it means that a body doesn’t have an echo. None at all. I wasn’t even sure the poor little mouse was dead when I first saw it, curled in a ball in Maggie’s hands. I told Maggie to drop it, afraid it was just stunned, that it might come to at any second and bite her in an effort to escape. I almost didn’t realize I’d yelled at Maggie until she started crying. But I didn’t go after her, not right away. I had to be sure about the mouse.

It was dead though. Dead as dead. I uncurled its body, which was already cold and stiff, so I had to pry it apart. Its chest had been ripped apart. Mauled was more like it. But the strange part was the emptiness surrounding it, the lack of . . . anything.

I have a theory. John’s going to help me find out if I’m right.

April 1, 1976 (April Fools’ Day)

This is probably a good day for my experiment because surely I’m wrong and then the joke will be on me. I’m dying for John to get home.

April 1, 1976

It worked! Which means I was right. I’m not sure whether I should be so elated by this revelation, but I am. Probably because it means I understand one more thing about my gift, one more thing I didn’t before.

Tonight, John brought home a live chicken. We had to wait until Maggie had gone to bed and then one of us had to kill it. I thought he’d want me to do it, since it was my idea. Instead, he did it. I told him he didn’t have to, that I didn’t need an answer that badly, but he could tell I was lying. I
did
want to know. I can’t explain why.

Before he did it, I almost changed my mind again. I thought about Ian and how he smelled (and tasted) after he’d gone hunting with his daddy. I was worried about what might cling to John in the wake of the chicken’s death. But somehow, I couldn’t tell him that. I wanted to know
that
badly. I was willing to take that risk.

He didn’t make me watch, but I was sure he must have cried. His eyes were red when he came back and the chicken was limp in his hands. Its head was hanging at a strange angle and there was a scent of chicory coming off it . . . and off John. Chicory! I could live forever with chicory!

Turns out, the heart was the key. It seems like such a simple solution now, like something I should’ve known all along. The mouse’s was gone, torn out when whatever killed it was trying to eat it, I assume, since most of its chest was missing. As soon as I removed the chicken’s heart the chicory scent vanished. It was just a chicken then. A dead chicken.

The strange part was, the scent didn’t just vanish from the chicken, it vanished from John too. Whatever chicory I’d smelled on him was gone now. Forever, I suppose.

Violet read the entry again and again, her own heart pounding in her chest now. When she was certain she hadn’t misread it, that she understood exactly what her grandmother was saying, she reached for her cell phone.

Sara answered, her voice sounding thick and bleary. Violet glanced at the alarm clock on her nightstand. It was 1:04.

“Sorry, Sara, I didn’t mean to wake you.” Suddenly she wished she’d waited till morning, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to. She had to know.

She heard rustling, and Sara cleared her throat. “It’s okay, Violet. What’s going on?”

“I had to ask you something. The boy, the one from the lake house . . . his body, was there anything
strange
about it?”

A brief pause, and then, “Strange how?”

Every muscle in her body tensed, as if this was the moment of truth. “His heart . . .” Violet said, thinking how weird this might sound if she was wrong. That maybe she’d awakened Sara for nothing. “Was it . . .
missing
?”

There was another pause, but this time there was no rustling sound coming from the other end. “How did you know that? How could you possibly know that?”

“So it’s true then?” Violet relaxed, practically sighing into the phone.

“I got a call from someone at the medical examiner’s office today. But I still don’t understand . . .
how did you know?
”

“It’s
why
he didn’t have an echo.” She explained what she’d read in her grandmother’s journals. “It’s why I couldn’t
feel
anything from him.”

“Holy crap,” Sara breathed softly, absorbing the information Violet had just given her.

Violet nodded. “I know, right?” Mentally, she added this to the ever-changing list of rules she’d created in her head.

No heart, no echo.

CHAPTER 7

VIOLET CLIMBED INSIDE JAY’S CAR, TURNING around just in time to see her mom still standing at the doorway, wearing the same I-don’t-want-to-let-you-out-of-my-sight expression she’d been wearing all weekend. Just the fact that she was up this early told Violet how worried she was.

Oblivious to her mother’s concerns, Jay leaned over Violet and waved, “Hey, Mrs. Ambrose!”

“Will you stop calling her that?” Violet complained, pushing him out of her way so she could close her door. “She’s probably told you a million times already to call her Maggie.”

Her mom made a pinched face and waved back, but it was more like she was waving him off before she turned to go back inside, closing the door behind her.

“See? Told you so,” Violet insisted.

Jay handed her one of the Starbucks cups that had been sitting in his console.

“Wow,” she said, delighting in the feel of the warm cup, and sniffing the small opening in the lid. “This whole stumbling-onto-a-crime-scene thing is really starting to pay off. Last night a present. Now this.” She grinned as she took a sip of the vanilla latte.

Jay rubbed his jaw nervously. “Yeah, I wasn’t really sure what the protocol for ‘freaked out by dead bodies’ was. You’re not sick, so bringing you soup was out the question. And you didn’t know the people, so giving you flowers seemed
wrong
.”