Breakfast and Black Butterflies |ONC 2021|

Ch. 18: Shadows

Con strode past the check-in desk, ignoring Clara's surprised call. He shoved the door open, letting it fall closed with a bang behind him. The late autumn chill cut right through him, wind whipping at his hair and tugging at his skin with icy fingers. He didn't care. He just needed to get out of there.

His long strides ate up the space between the hotel and the surrounding forest. A hiking trail had been marked off, and Con angled toward it, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. The thin material of his shirt did nothing to ward off the cold, and he was shivering by the time he hit the tree-line.

The trees didn't offer much solace. Everything was dead. Bare limbs knocked against each other and leaves crunched under his boots. There were no insect sounds surrounding him or the soft scurry of small animals. It was all too quiet. It had been a bad idea to come here.

There was absolutely nothing to stop the loop of memories playing in his head.

You drugged her and lured her into the pool. Mariah told me about you. She told me how you looked at her that night. Not killing her would have changed it.

Nina Marino's words and accusations tumbled through him, cutting at his insides. 

Who knows what else you might have done!

The very idea made him sick. Images of the dead girl splashed themselves across his mind. Her soaked hair, her blue lips, the delight on her face when Mrs. Marino had started accusing Con of her murder.

"It wasn't real," he muttered, running his hands through his hair. "She wasn't real. You know that. She said those things because she lost her daughter."

Still, he couldn't make his insanity believe that Mrs. Marino hadn't been egged on by the shade of her dead daughter.

You drugged her. Who knows what else you might have done.

Bile surged up his throat and Con darted off the path, catching a tree as the spare contents of his stomach spewed across the forest floor. His guts heaved against his spine, the force dropping him to his hands and knees.

When his stomach finally realized there was nothing else to bring up, Con slumped backwards, gasping. He lay on a bed of crackly leaves, their hard edges scratching at the skin of his forearms and the back of his neck. He stared up, the branches overhead a black lace across the pale sky. 

When he could finally breathe normally again, Con coaxed his muscles into standing. His legs shook and he leaned against a tree for support. A broken branch pressed into the flesh just below his shoulder blade and he leaned more of his weight onto it. Pain was generally a good distraction—his mind couldn't help but focus on it.

Con closed his eyes, breathing deeply until it was no longer shaky. He swept his tongue around his mouth and spat, trying to clear away the taste of bile. When he felt a bit more in control, he opened his eyes and pushed off the tree. The spot the branch had stabbed into throbbed dully.

"She was drugged," he whispered to himself, the words burning his raw throat. "Does that make it murder for them?"

If it did...did that make him the prime suspect as Nina Marino had implied? Wouldn't the police have come back to speak to him already? 

Con used his sleeve to wipe away the sweat on his face. The new scratches Mrs. Marino had left him with stung as the fabric brushed over them. When he dropped his arm, he grimaced at the blood staining the cuff. Carefully, he probed at the scratches, trying to determine how deep they were.

All he could determine was they were deep enough to make him bleed.

Fingers still tracing over the stinging lines, Con made his way back to the path and began walking, winding farther into the trees. Compulsively, his brain began to replay his run-in with Mariah Marino. Was there something he should have noticed. Had her words been slurred? Had she stumbled when she walked and that's why she ran into him?