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CHAPTER ELEVEN a catholic's worst dream ᴏᴄᴛ. 18ᴛʜ, 9ᴀᴍ
"WHAT DID YOU say to her yesterday?"
As instructed, Spencer and Derek were sent to the Blanchard home the day after Bernadette's meltdown. They had visited the scene once before, just after the Blanchard sisters were extracted from their suicides, and now that the corpses were gone and all that was left was bloodstains and the effluvium of chemicals, Morgan pulled up into the empty driveway of 76 Rosefield.
"I didn't say anything," Spencer lied.
"Reid—"
"I didn't say anything."
Silence clogged the car. Syrupy-thick and terribly-sour. The sun had swapped out scorch for steely silence, and Spencer felt himself grow small under the skies. He stared at the empty house where the willow tree was thinner than he recalled from the other night, and things started to feel sad for no good reason. In another life, he fondly imagined pulling up to the Blanchard's house in another way. Just before the sisters cut ties with their unfulfilled lives, just before he was too late.
October felt like a cruel month. Growing somber, growing darker. It was on the cusp of winter when things would start to get inexplicably choked with grief. Spencer stared out the car as Morgan focused on the steering wheel. It hadn't been silent for long but Spencer felt the seconds pass by like years.
The house, the Blanchard's home, was a pretty house. A kind looking house. He wondered who had built the house and he wondered how many generations had passed through it, unknowing of the carnage that it was fated to witness. Five deaths in one night. Nobody would be able to laugh from the bottom of their hearts inside those death-scarred walls every again. It was tainted like carbon monoxide polluting a child's body.
The sudden thought of that was ugly and extreme and it sat in his stomach like a hot rock. How alone had Primrose Blanchard been as she stared at the oven? Her hands, so blind to what the world still had left for her, gripping the handle and pulling the gates of Death open. He thought about how she had kneeled first, as if to Christ, before pressing her head beneath the metal racks and breathing in the poison that would burn her from the inside out. She must have felt alone, Spencer thought, because after all, nobody was there to stop her in time.
He felt like an unhealed bruise. Dark like a spoiled fruit, rotten-smelling and unmoving. Had that been how Agatha felt as her neck crushed around the horrible grip of rope? Had she felt useless as she let her feet, shrouded in white dolly-socks, swing from the stool and hang mid-flight, flailing, as she clawed at her throat before it emptied out of life? Had the Blanchard sisters really been that desperate? Had he really been too late?
