HeartLines

She was not beautiful in the way all girls are at the height of their youth. Beautiful simply because their bodies are thin, and their skin has not yet learned how to wrinkle. Beautiful simply for a lack of ugly. Beautiful simply on the surface, the kind that faded into mundanity the longer you looked at it.

Aleah was…interesting. Perpetually so. Her features did not fade into a backdrop of beauty, rather each one carved out its own existence, begging for attention and praise in the way only odd things do. She was light, bleached directly from the sun itself. Her hair so white it shone silver, like the moon’s glow was a constant sheen.

Consequently, he found her presence intimidating. Benignly so, like the itch of a mosquito that required little focus to forget, but still, his constant awareness of her frayed on his nerves. Her eyes floated throughout the room, dismally obtuse to how his attention snagged on her and refused to let go. The way he stared, rapt and assessing, wondering, calculating.

Was she capable of murder?

With skinny wrists handcuffed to the metal table before her, she hardly seemed the part. But from the other side of the one-way glass, under the harsh lighting of the holding cell, Rider Greene thought she looked downright beastly.

The already sharp angles of her face were thrown into gaunt, lengthy shadows. Her eyes, a blue so pale they looked gray, seemed to sink within their sockets.

She was enchanting.

Haunting.

Deadly?

Rider spared her one final glance across the expanse of the monitoring mirror before striding into the holding cell.

Aleah didn’t blink at his entrance.

She gave no indication she’d marked his presence at all.

“Miss Dawson,” Rider whispered.

He should have announced himself with more dignity than a terrified whisper. But she stared off in the distance as if trapped in a trance.

It seemed unwise to startle her.

So, he approached slowly, smoothly, gently. A hunter charming his prey, taking those final steps towards a kill.

Only once he sat, straight-backed in the cold metal chair opposite her, did Aleah acknowledge him.

Those unearthly eyes snapped to him. One moment lost in the recesses of thought, the next boring into him with a newfound ferocity.

That face looked capable of murder.

“Miss Dawson,” he said again. Louder this time. With authority. “Do you know where you are?”

She cocked her head. “Do you mean the police station? Or Grotto Falls? No, our glorious state of Massachusetts? Or perhaps our godly United States of America?”

Rider fought against his urge to gulp. “The police station is fine.” God, she was unnerving. “Do you know why you’re here?”

She made a face that said do enlighten me.

“Miss Dawson, you’re here so we can ask you some questions about the deaths of Payton and Eleanor LeBrun.”

Payton LeBrun filled Aleah’s glass until the champagne overflowed.

She yelped and Payton gasped. “Oh heavens! Must stop drinking, must start thinking,” he giggled.

A grown man.

A businessman.

Giggled.

Aleah winced something akin to a smile. “Thank you for the invitation tonight, the house looks lovely.”

Lovely was perhaps the wrong word.

Around them, a party raged. Guests swiped glasses of champagne from smartly dressed waiters and picked at toothpicks of cheese and grapes. Small strings of white lights twined around each banister, complimented by great candelabras on nearly every table. So many feet pounded upon the wooden floors in a symphony of heels and dress shoes.

Truly the house looked seconds away from a call to the fire department.

“Yes, yes, lovely. All thanks to your generosity.” , ton glanced around the hall, his eyes wading through a boozy haze to fix upon his wife at the top of the stairs.

Eleanor LeBrun rapped a knife against the stem of her champagne glass. Few heads turned so she hit the glass harder. With one aggressive knock she shattered the entire base of the glass.

The crowd swiveled towards the shower of broken shards. Eleanor smoothed her soaked skirt and gave the gathered people a tipsy smile. Without so much as a word, Payton left Aleah, shoving shoulders aside to climb the stairs next to his wife.

Aleah drained her entire glass with a repressed groan.

“Welcome, welcome, our beloved family and friends!” Eleanor declared.

Payton wrapped an arm around her waist, tugging her close, pressing a kiss to her throat. “We are honored to welcome you all to our Grand Opening Fete!”

A round of polite applause from the crowd as Eleanor continued, “We won’t keep you from the festivities much longer. But we have one person we feel is owed our gratitude. Aleah? Aleah Dawson?”

Fuck. Them.

The crowd parted as if on cue, a path emerging to lead her straight to the LeBrun’s feet. As if the crowd sensed her new station.

Beneath them.

At least she’d had that champagne.

Aleah forced herself forward, step overstep, until she stood below the glittering LeBruns.

“To Miss Dawson. For her honorable parting with Dawson House, so that it can be remade anew under our tutelage. Without Miss Dawson, our dreams would never have become a reality. To Miss Dawson and our partnership!” Payton announced, Eleanor sealed the toast with a sloppy kiss on his mouth.

The guest roared their approval, drinking and cheering to Aleah’s demise, to the loss of her inheritance, to her continued humiliation under the feet of the LeBrun’s.

To being used.

“The community suffers greatly from the loss,” Aleah told Rider.

Their deaths were no secret. Rider studied her face, her breathing. No change, not even a hitch at the bald discussion of death.

“But you don’t believe that. Do you?” Rider dared to ask.

A breath.

Another.

“Tell me,” Rider continued. “Do you feel their deaths were a loss.”

Silence.

She blinked once, recognition flaring in her eyes.

Aleah knew the game he played; knew the questions he was going to ask. Knew why exactly they had brought her here.

If the handcuffs hadn’t been a massive clue, this certainly would be. No polite dancing around the subject anymore.

So, Rider pushed.

Hard.

“Does insanity run in your family?”

The ground crunched beneath Aleah’s feet. Frost coasted the lawn, sharpening the tip of each blade of grass into a steely white point.

The black of her grandmother’s coffin shattered the serenity of the landscape.

Against the backdrop of white, three figures surrounded the construction of polished black wood.

Two tall, one small.

The preacher, the woman, and the child.

Meredith, Aleah’s closest classmate, hadn’t spoken to her all week. Her final words had come on Monday when Meredith informed Aleah that her and her family would not be present at the funeral. Due to the “bad things” Aleah’s grandmother had done to the mayor.

The “bad things” had clearly not been described to Meredith.

For Aleah knew her grandmother had done more than “bad things” to the mayor.

Terrible things.

Atrocious things.

Deadly things.

Her grandmother had picked up a butcher knife, tucked it in the lining of her coat, and walked across town to the mayor’s house.

At dusk, just as the mayor and his family were sitting down to a pleasant supper, her grandmother had rang the doorbell.

And stabbed the mayor seventeen times in the chest.

The mayor’s wife had turned the corner just as her grandmother delivered the final blow and before the wife could get out a scream, her grandmother took the knife and slit her own throat.

She bled out in the mayor’s foyer, right over his dead body.

Aleah’s mother didn’t believe in sugarcoating things to an eight-year-old.

“What sort of question is that.” She wasn’t asking.

This close to her, Rider could see the veins spiderwebbing under her skin. Two particularly potent branches framed her eyes, a mimicry of a mask.

Like she was feigning being human.

“There hasn’t been a murder in town in years. Funny that the last one was committed by a member of the Dawson House,” Rider noted. Aleah’s eye twitched at the implied as was this one.

Rider watched her swallow. A long slow movement.

“Dawson House no longer belongs to me,” she whispered.

That news was the talk of the town.

After a long and historied tenure as the estate of the Dawson family, with extensive grounds forming the backbone of the Massachusetts floral industry, the house at 17 Rosewood Lane, commonly referred to as Dawson House, was sold to Payton and Eleanor LeBrun. The LeBrun’s expressed their great interest in opening a Bed and Breakfast to capitalize on the quaint New England scenery and continue the legacy of Dawson Florals.

The ink was still glistening on the contract when the LeBruns had announced their Grand Opening fête and invited over half the town to celebrate.

What had made Aleah Dawson sell?

Or, perhaps more importantly…

What was she willing to kill to get back?

“As I understand,” Rider began. “Dawson House now belongs to Everly LeBrun.”

Aleah’s nose wrinkled, her lip curling.

“Is Everly next, Miss Dawson? She stands as the only obstacle between you and your inheritance.”

People crowded the cemetery to the fences, muddied boot prints tracking along gravel pathways. Rain poured down overhead. The deluge mingled with the tears on each guest’s face.

Aleah lingered several steps behind the people.

The preacher struggled through his sermon, the crowd sniffled or outright bawled. Hugs were doled out between strangers, tissues passed from umbrella to umbrella, comfort within community.

Aleah could name every face.

Yet no one had come years before. When it was her family standing before a gravesite.

Her eyes remained dry.

When it was time, the grave men lowered the caskets. Twin monstrosities of mahogany covered in white roses. At their head stood a small blond figure, drowning in her dress and her sorrow.

Everly LeBrun watched the bodies of her parents drop into the earth. A torn piece of paper, scribbles scrawled sideways along the lines, was clutched in her tiny fist. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old.

Life didn’t believe in sugarcoating things to her either.

Aleah wanted to speak to her, needed to. One kindred spirit to another, one broken soul to its twin.

Everly cleared her throat and began her poem.

“Do not stand at my grave and weep.”

A thudding echoed. The caskets reaching their final resting place.

“I am not there. I do not sleep.”

Shovelfuls of dirt, showering down, spraying the coffins in muddied, sopping, grit.

“I am a thousand winds that blow.”

Her voice cracked, choking off with a sudden rasp.

“Do not stand at my grave and cry.”

“I am not there.”

“I did not die.”

She crushed the paper between her palms and released, letting it drop the distance into the grave.

A crumpled shred of white amidst the darkness.

A moment. Another.

The dirt swallowed the poem whole.

Buried beneath the weight of bloody graves.

Everly stood, captain of her sinking ship, until every guest had shuffled their way out.

Every guest except Aleah.

From the pathway, across an expanse of submerged grass, riddled with headstones and freshly packed graves, the two faced each other.

Everly glanced up from the grave, meeting Aleah’s eyes through curtains of rain.

Aleah opened her mouth to say something, anything, to tell Everly she understood, she knew that pain in her very bones.

A single shake of Everly’s head cut her off. The small girl surveyed Aleah with gut-wrenching disdain.

Her face said she knew who Aleah was.

She knew what Aleah’s family had done.

Everly LeBrun called through the storm.

“You’ll never get it back. Atone all you like. They’re still dead. And Dawson House is still mine.”

“You have no idea who-” Aleah bit off her words.

Rider watched her temples flicker as she clenched her jaw. A fury bordering on animalistic flickered in her eyes.

He wondered, perhaps it should have been his first thought, what Aleah Dawson might do to him.

The chain linking her to the desk was meant to stop her from simply escaping. He sat well within its reach.

“I renounced my inheritance. But they defiled it.”

The room ricocheted her hiss back at them.

It was one thing to assume, but to see how broken she looked, her eyes fracturing behind the statement.

“If it means that much to you, why would you sell it?” Rider asked. The question that had been haunting them all.

His entire department could not come up with a plausible answer. The Dawsons were not struggling for money. The LeBruns had begged Aleah to stay on as a partner in the business, to manage the monstrosity of an estate they purchased.

If she didn’t need the money, why sell Dawson House at all?

Why go through the effort of killing the LeBruns just to regain the house she could have had all along?

Aleah simply tsked, head turning away.

She was done answering questions.

And he was no closer to the truth.

So he left her with one final remark.

“I don’t think you did this at all, Miss Dawson. It may be characteristic for your family but anyone in town would know that. I think someone tried to take advantage of your particular history.”

Rider rose, chair legs screeching across the cement floor.

“I think you know precisely who I’m talking about, Miss Dawson. You’re protecting someone, aren’t you. Someone is hiding behind that Dawson reputation to get away with murder.”

Blood gushed from Eleanor LeBrun’s throat. The throat Payton had kissed no more than an hour before.

Aleah froze at the door to the office.

The body lay crumpled against the base of a bookcase. Blood cascaded in a sluggish drip down her party dress, the pinkish stains spreading across the gold fabric like ink through water. Her face was scrunched in surprise, like the ghost of a scream might still appear from her stiff lips.

A fist rose from behind the desk, a gloved hand brandishing a knife.

No, not gloved.

Coated.

Blood glistened from wrist to fingertip, rolling down the handle of the blade, dripping off the serrated edge, thrown into sharp relief from the lamp directly next to it.

A grunt, then an unmistakable squelch.

Oh.

Fuck.

The fist rose again, accompanied by a slender body, gazing downwards. The head of Payton LeBrun rolled into view, severed completely from his body.

Holly Hart turned at the sound of Aleah’s gasp.

A slow smile spread across her blood-spattered face. Freckles of red dusting her cheeks and forehead. Holly wiped her brow, smearing the blood of her godparents across her forehead like a fucked-up halo.

“It’s mine,” she whispered.

Aleah stood, horrified. She knew exactly what she meant.

The legacy of Dawson House had always been steeped in death. She could never escape it.

Holly pulled the massive chair out from the desk, its legs shoving aside the lifeless limbs of its previous owner with terrible thuds.

Everything she touched was blessed with blood.

Christened with a crown of death.

“What did you do?” Aleah breathed. Rage thundered through her.

Holly stabbed the knife into the desk as she sat. Her fingers ran lovingly over every inch of its surface, touching papers, the lampshade, a small crystal paperweight in the shape of a rose blossom.

“I claimed my prize.”

Aleah could only shake her head, lips pressed tightly. “It is not your prize to claim.”

It had never been. Aleah had not wanted to live under the House’s reputation, but at its heart, Dawson House was hers and hers alone.

The head of Eleanor LeBrun smacked against the bookshelf in agreement.

That devil of a smile faded as Holly hissed, “What do you mean.”

Aleah regretted it the moment she said it, realizing she had damned her to a fate worse than her parents. “The house goes to Everly. Not to you.”

Never to her.

Holly Hart stared from the seat of her former godparents. Dead at her hands.

Her hand wrapped around the knife handle, yanking it from the wood with an ear-splitting screech.

“Not for long,” she promised.

She crossed the room in a heartbeat, leveling the blade at Aleah’s throat so close Aleah didn’t dare breathe too deeply.

“Will you be next?”

Aleah knew what she asked.

Silence.

In exchange for her life.

Like the coward she was, Aleah accepted.

If Dawson House wanted to breed killers, Aleah would be no force to stop it.