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“The Pattersons? Dad, where’s mom?”

  “I can’t do it,” my father said, but his voice was muffled, like he had put his hand over the phone. “I can’t tell her.” More crying and then I heard my Aunt Jenna telling him it was okay, that she’d do it.

  “Sheridan, honey, it’s Aunt Jenna.” She’d been crying too. “I don’t know how else to tell you this except to just come right out with it.” She took a deep breath.

  “Aunt Jenna?” I had never heard her sound so sad and serious. She was the fun one in the family, always laughing and having a good time. “Please tell me what’s going on.”

  “It’s your mother, honey.” Another deep, ragged breath. “She’s gone, Sheridan.”

  “Gone?” The room started to spin in front of me and I was sure I would pass out. “Gone where?”

  “I’m sorry, honey.” Aunt Jenna sniffed back tears. “Your dad found her when he got home this morning. She was… she was killed, Sheridan. The cops are looking into it. I’m so sorry.”

  “Killed?” This had to be a mistake. Or another nightmare. Or maybe I was still in the middle of the same nightmare. Why would anyone kill Mother? Sure, she had a way of rubbing people the wrong way, but not to the point of murder!

  “Yes, baby. I’m so sorry, so, so sorry. Your Uncle Paul and I are here with your dad and we’ll take him home with us for a few days. The police are calling the house a crime scene. It’s just so unbelievable. Mr. Patterson got here fast, thank God, ‘cause your poor dad was beside himself. They heard him screaming – woke them up. Mr. Patterson ran right over while Mrs. Patterson called the police. It’s just so unreal.” She paused to blow her nose and catch her breath. “Is there anything we can do for you, honey? Do you want us to come get you?”

  “Murdered?” I asked, the weight of it still not sinking in.

  “I’m so sorry we had to tell you this way, over the phone like this, but your dad didn’t want you to see it on the news and he was just in no condition to drive. I thought it best we call you before you heard it from anyone else, or, like I said, you saw the story on the news. I’m sure it will be all over the local news tonight. Nothing like this has ever happened in town before.”

  Images from the nightmare that had awakened me flooded my mind – Mother’s bodiless head grinning that Mona Lisa smile, the blood pooled around her neck on the pillow. I shivered violently.

  “How?” I asked, my voice barely audible. “How did she die?”

  “She was killed, Sheridan,” Aunt Jenna said, blowing her nose again.

  “But how?”

  “Oh, honey, you don’t need to know the details.” More crying.

  “I do, Aunt Jenna,” I said. “I do.”

  “You can’t think about how, and please don’t watch any of the news, okay?”

  “I need to know!”

  More talking in the background, someone saying they needed to tell me before somebody else did. And then my aunt crying hysterically, covering the phone with her hand. More muffled cries and whispers and then Mr. Patterson was on the line, his voice strong and authoritative.

  “Sheridan? It’s Mr. Patterson from next door. I think you need to know before you hear all of this on television later, or before someone else hears it and tells you. I know it’s hard, but you need to know.”

  “Just tell me,” I told him. I was squeezing the phone so tightly in my hand I’d begun to lose feeling in it.

  “Sheridan,” he said. “Your mother was decapitated.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  There was no way it could possibly be true. There was no way any of this could possibly be true. The only logical explanation was that I was still asleep, that all of this was one big, long, hellish nightmare. And if I was still asleep then all I had to do was wake up.

  “Good luck, Sweetheart,” spoke the cigarette-soaked voice that belonged to no one. She laughed that deep rustling cackle of hers that made me tremble every time I heard it.

  I had to wake up. I remembered reading somewhere that people never died in their dreams; that they always woke up first. Like if you were dreaming that you fell off a cliff, you’d wake up before hitting the ground. So if I could convince my dreaming subconscious that I was about to die, I’d wake up. Problem solved. All I had to do was wake myself up.

  I opened the drawer next to the stove where we kept the cooking utensils – utensils that never got much use. That was one of the joys of living in the city. You could get anything delivered. Mother had given me a set of knives as a moving out gift the day Cyn and I left to start our new lives.

  “Now that you’re going to be living on your own you’re going to have to learn to cook,” she’d said. “Especially if you ever want to land yourself a husband.” Like landing a husband was a girl’s top priority.

  I picked up the biggest knife in the set, its blade almost as wide as my palm, and held it in both hands. Chicago Cutlery was engraved on the blade. It was just like the one Mother had wrapped and stuck in her purse all those years ago when she went to my dad’s gig.

  “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” The woman in my dream chanted.

  I curled my fingers around the wide, shiny blade.

  “The wicked witch is dead!” She crowed.

  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and squeezed my hands tightly around the blade.

  “Oh, dear,” croaked the woman. “Just look at you!”

  I opened my eyes and saw that my hands were covered in blood. But I felt nothing, which proved that this was a dream.

  “Sweetheart,” she said. “You don’t really think a little cut on your hand is gonna be enough to wake you up, do you?”

  She had a point. Falling made people wake up before they hit the ground and died in their dreams. Cutting up my hands wasn’t enough. Setting the knife on the kitchen table, I walked toward the little window that faced the parking lot in front of the building. Using all the strength I had, I tried to open the window, but it was painted shut.

  “Looks like you won’t be jumping out of that window,” the woman said. “Too bad, too. I was really looking forward to it.”

  “Just shut the hell up!” I screamed. I had to wake up!

  “Listen, Sweetheart, just use the knife. The knife will work if you use it right.”

  She was right again. I ran back to the table and grabbed the butcher knife. A deep calmness came over me as I raised it to my throat. The blood from my hands ran down my arms. I closed my eyes and pressed the sharp tip of the knife to my neck, tilting my head back.

  “Oh my!” croaked the voice in my dream. “You’re going to do it! You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?”

  I took another deep breath and pushed harder with the knife. I still didn’t feel anything.

  Wake up! You have to wake up!

  “Ding dong, ding dong,” sang the woman. “The witch is dead and you’re going to join her!” Cackling laughter swam around me.

  I pushed the knife further still until finally I thought I felt the cool blade against my skin. It was working!

  “More!” shouted the raspy old woman. “Push it more! Join the witch in Hell! It’s not like you have anything to live for! Go on! Do it! I dare you!”

  I exhaled slowly and then took another deep breath. The calmness deepened.

  “Sheridan! My God, Sher! Stop!” My eyes flew open and the calm I’d felt inside suddenly vanished. Cyndi was standing in the doorway. She dropped her purse and ran to me. “What are you doing?” Horror filled her ocean-blue eyes as she peeled my bloody fingers from the knife and tossed it into the sink. I saw that Cyn’s hands, shaking, were covered in my blood now and my legs buckled beneath me. She grabbed me by the shoulders and held me up, tears springing to her eyes.

  “Sher? Sher? Say something!” I tried to speak but nothing came out. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Come sit down.” She helped me to a chair and sat me down, making sure I wasn’t going to fall before running to the sink to rinse the blood from her shaking
hands. Grabbing a clean towel from the drawer she dried her hands hastily and ran back over to me, wiping my hands and neck and then tossing the bloodied towel into the sink with the knife.

  “You’re okay,” she soothed. “They’re just little cuts, nothing major. God, I’m glad I came home!” She pulled the other chair over close to me so that she could hold onto my hands. I could feel everything again – Cyndi’s hands on my skin, the cuts, the pounding of my heart – and knew that I was not asleep, that this was not a nightmare at all.

  “She’s dead. She’s really dead, isn’t she?” I whispered, my throat so dry it ached.

  “Oh, God, Sher. Yeah.” Tears sprang from her eyes, rolled down her pink cheeks and fell onto her lap. “Your Aunt Jenna called my mom and told her what happened and mom called me on my cell. They didn’t want you to be alone. I’m so sorry!” She hugged me tightly and I buried my face in her honey hair.

  “Oh, Cyn,” I sobbed. “How could this happen?”

  “I don’t know, Sher. I don’t know.” She held me for a long time as we both cried.

  And the woman that only I could hear howled with laughter.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  I awoke on the couch, sweating under a thick blanket. It was dark, but the kitchen light was on and I could hear Cyndi in there, moving around and talking to Matt, their voices just above a whisper.

  “Babe, you’re exhausted. Why don’t you just try to get some sleep?”

  “I can’t sleep, Matt. I’ve known Sher – and her parents – since I was twelve.” She sniffed and blew her nose. She’d been crying. “Now her mom’s dead. Murdered in her own bed, for God’s sake. Decapitated! Like someone from a fucking horror movie! I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep again. I mean, shit, Matt, if a woman can be murdered like that, way out there in the country…” her voice trailed off, afraid to finish the thought.

  “I know. It’s fucked up. But it had to be someone she knew, don’t you think? Somebody she pissed off one too many times?”

  “Fuck, Matt.” Cyndi blew her nose again. “How pissed off does a person have to be to do that? I mean, what the hell could she have done to anybody that would make them… do that?”

  “You’re right. There has to be more to it.” I heard Matt’s lighter. Cyn hated that he smoked. I’d been surprised when she didn’t dump him after the first date and now, here they were, sitting in my kitchen trying to solve my mother’s murder. The distraught best friend, and her law student lover.

  “Yeah…but it’s not like that was a house you’d just happen upon by accident in the middle of the night.” Cyndi blew her nose again. “So it had to be somebody she knew, just like you said, right?” I could hear her fire engine red nails clicking on the kitchen table like horse hooves on pavement. She always drummed her fingers like that when she was deep in thought. Or nervous. “But who? You’d have to be crazy to do that to somebody, whether they pissed you off or not.”

  “A fucking lunatic’s my guess. And if they knew Sheridan’s mother, they probably know Sheridan,” Matt pointed out. “And if they know Sheridan, they know you. I’m not leaving you girls alone until they catch the monster who did this.”

  ‘This’ being chopped my mother’s head off like she was a chicken in a hen house.

  “You can’t stay and baby sit us, Matt.” Cyndi’s voice was trembling now. “You have classes.”

  “Your life is more important than school, Babe. It’s your life!”

  “Oh come on,” she forced a nervous laugh. “Nobody’s coming after me and Sher.” I got the feeling she was trying to convince herself more than him.

  “We didn’t expect anyone to go after Sher’s mother, either, did we?”

  “Okay, you made your point. You can stay. I could use the help with Sher anyway. God, Matt. You should have seen her with that knife.” She paused to blow her nose again. “All that blood running down her arms and she just stood there, staring off into space. I‘ve never been so scared in my life.”

  “You think she was sleepwalking?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her like that.”

  “Maybe we should get her checked out.”

  “The cuts weren’t that bad, really. There was a lot of blood but once I got her cleaned up I could see she wasn’t even gonna need stitches.”

  “I don’t mean just for the cuts.” Matt lit another cigarette. Cyndi drummed her fingertips when she was nervous; Matt chain-smoked.

  “Then what?”

  “What if she freaks out again? What if next time she hurts herself really bad? Or worse, what if she hurts you? She could have cut you when you tried to take the knife from her, Cyndi.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could anyone think I’d ever hurt Cyndi?

  “Sher’s not gonna hurt me, Matt. So she was a little freaked out. Who wouldn’t be after finding out their mother had been murdered like that? I mean, Jesus, she wasn’t exactly Mother-of-the-Year, but Sher still loved her. Besides, even people who didn’t know her are gonna be freaked out by this.”

  “I can understand a person being upset that their mom died, but don’t you think what she did was a little more than that? Don’t you think we should take her to the hospital?”

  “I am not going to let them lock up my best friend, and you know that’s exactly what they’d do if we told a doctor or anybody what I walked in on here this morning.”

  “But…” Matt started but Cyndi cut him off again. Good ole Cyn.

  “No buts,” she demanded. “I am not going to do that to her. She just needs some time to process what’s happened.” I heard Matt sigh.

  “I already called both our bosses,” she went on. “Her boss’s son is gonna run the store until he gets back in town in a couple days to take over himself. Sher can start back again whenever she’s back on her feet. And the girls at the shop were all too happy to split my appointments for the rest of the week. After the funeral she’ll be better.”

  “Will she?”

  “Come on, Matt. Give her some time. Jesus, the body’s not even cold yet.”

  The body. A shiver crept up my spine, slowly, like the bony finger of an old lady. A bony old lady with a voice like Freddy Kruger.

  “And when is the funeral?”

  “They’re not sure yet. They have to wait for the autopsy. But I guess it’ll be next week sometime.”

  Funeral. Autopsy. This couldn’t really be happening. Mother couldn’t possibly have been killed like that. Not like that.

  “Shit,” he said. “What’s the autopsy gonna tell them that they don’t already know? The woman died because some freak cut off her head!”

  “Shhh! Sher’s sleeping,” Cyndi warned him. “Anyway, I don’t know. Maybe the little prick left some evidence, you know? I mean, maybe he did other things to her, too.” She blew her nose once again.

  “You mean sexual things? Shit, I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  I closed my eyes against the dark room and imagined myself in a different time and place, where everything was the way it was supposed to be, and I was curled up in my own bed dreaming of sugar plums and fairies…

  But when I opened my eyes Mother’s head was floating in the darkness before me like a giant balloon. Her emerald eyes were lined in that same gaudy black liner she’d worn in my nightmare the night before, her pencil-thin lips smeared with that same dried-on blood. She looked into my eyes and smiled.

  I was asleep… I was having another nightmare.

  “Oh, Sweetheart,” croaked the voice of the woman who couldn’t exist. “This is no nightmare.”

  Mother’s balloon-head swayed silently in the darkness, grinning like the Cheshire cat.

  “This is your life.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The next time I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital room. Pea-green walls, white sheets and blanket tucked in so tightly I could barely move my legs, and an IV stuck in my hand. The door was open but there was
no one in sight. I tried to sit up but I felt so heavy. It was like my entire body was somehow anchored to the bed, shackled to the metal bedrails by an invisible chain.

  A short, wide nurse came through the door, a small plastic cup in her hand. “Oh good!” She exclaimed. “You’re awake!” Noticing my struggles to loosen the blankets and allow myself some wiggle-room, the nurse set her plastic cup on the nightstand and un-tucked the sheets. The nametag pinned to her purple scrubs said Tami. “Take this,” Tami said, handing me a small blue pill and the little cup of water she’d brought in with her. She wore a too-large, gold watch on her left wrist that looked more like it belonged on someone named 2Pac than someone named Tami.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Just something the doctor ordered to help you stay relaxed.”

  I put the pill in my mouth and swallowed it. “How did I get here?”

  Tami, who had already started for the door, turned on her heel and came back towards me.

  “You don’t remember?” She asked, gingerly.

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Tami patted the back of my hand. “I’m going to let the doctor know you’re awake. He’ll be in to talk to you as soon as he’s free.” And then she was out the door before I had time to ask any more questions she obviously didn’t want to answer.

  I tried to think, to remember why I was in the hospital, but I couldn’t remember anything after seeing Mother… floating. And where the hell was Cyndi? Had something happened to her? And Matt. He’d been at the apartment, talking with Cyndi in the kitchen. They were talking about Mother’s murder. And that’s when I saw it. But then what?

  I tried again to get out of bed, and although the sheets were loose enough now (thanks to Tami), my body was still too incredibly heavy and fatigued to stand. After several hours the doctor came in, tall and slender, with hair so black it shone blue when the light hit it just right.

  “Miss St. John,” he said, smiling wide. His snow-white teeth positively gleamed against tanned skin. “I’m Dr. Chute. How are you feeling?”