Page 78 of Call Off the Dark

A woman hung from the ceiling by a noose, head down as if her neck were broken, swinging slightly from a fresh death. Helen recognized the dirtied nightgown and the tangled dark brown hair. It was the same woman she’d seen in the flash of light at the dinner table.

And then the woman lifted her head and opened her eyes wide.

Helen stared into a face that looked exactly like her own. The hair, darker than Helen’s, wasn’t actually a darker shade of brown after all. Helen realized the hair was slicked with mud when she saw how dirty the face was—her face—on this hanging woman.

Shaking in fear, Helen squeezed her eyes shut.

When she opened them, the hanging version of her was gone.

She rolled onto her side and pulled her knees to her chest, hugging herself. She stayed coiled that way until the rising sun came through the living room windows and filtered into the hallway. It was only then that she sat up, cobwebs of the earlier fright still stuck in her brain.

Helen knew something was terribly wrong, but she told herself she was going to fix it. She wasn’t going to let herself get pulled down into this madness. She was going to stop it, and she had to start at the source.

Chapter Thirty

Less than two years ago

Helen was barely going through the motions at work. She heard one coworker say it to another in the women’s restroom. “Helen is barely going through the motions,” one of them said. Helen didn’t exit the stall until they were both gone.

They were right. The world was spinning fine without her. She sat in her office and forwarded emails from one member of her team to another, and soon the emails slowed, and Helen realized the employees were bypassing her. She wondered how long her boss, Darius, planned to let this go on. She knew she’d built up karma she’d never cashed in after the drama of managing the Boom Now account. For at least a little while longer, she could get away with this charade in which she pretended to work and everyone pretended to believe her.

When the clock in her office showed the end of the workday, her despair only intensified. She was back at the apartment sleeping on the living room couch. She hated the apartment. If she’d just bought a house with Tyler, they wouldn’t have been living there at all, and he’d be alive today.

It was all her fault.

Her landlord had replaced the bloodstained carpet in the bedroom, but Helen avoided that room as much as she could. She’d boxed up her now incomplete encyclopedia collection and shoved it into the back of the bedroom closet. In her childhood, those books had transported her to past times and faraway lands, but in her time of need they’d failed her. The police had volumes A, M, P, and S in evidence because Tyler’s blood was on them. It didn’t matter, because she never wanted to read them again. She kept some of her clothes folded on the living room armchair and hanging in the entryway’s coat closet. The loaded Glock was stored in the drawer of the entertainment center. When she went to sleep, she set the gun on the coffee table beside her.

The quiet that Tyler left behind was so loud because all of the spaces that used to be filled with him were now crushed with other people’s noise. Another person’s laughter in the hallway was the absence of his. A television show through the apartment wall was a show Helen couldn’t watch with him anymore. The sound of a blender in the apartment below was a protein shake he would never again drink. It began to feel as though the city were a competition to see who could make the most noise.

All evening she heard the clatter and the clamor, but she was really listening for one particular sound: the click of a lock being picked and the twist of her doorknob. Helen thought if she wished for it hard enough, her thoughts would lure the masked man back to the scene of the crime.

And then she’d shoot him in the stomach, same place he’d stabbed Tyler, and watch him bleed out.

In the very beginning, Helen liked the hallucinations of Tyler because it reinforced the possibility that maybe he was alive. Some people thought Elvis had faked his own death, so why couldn’t Tyler have done that? He was in the Secret Service, he was a Russian spy, he was in Witness Protection! He was just waiting for the right moment to let her in on the ruse.

Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.

But deep down, Helen knew he was gone, and the hallucinations started to feel like torture. She panicked once when the city bus drove past and she was sure Tyler was sitting inside at a window seat. She ran after the bus for two whole blocks, then broke down crying when it got on the freeway. A stranger put his hand on her shoulder—“Are you okay, Miss?”—but she wasn’t okay and she wasn’t a Miss. She was a Mrs. She was a man’s wife! Had been, at least. Helen had countless stories like this, but she wasn’t telling them to anyone. Even crazy people don’t like being called crazy.

Two months after Tyler’s death, she went to a psychiatrist who said she was experiencing “bereavement hallucinations.”

Helen said, “I know,” because she had Google. And then she asked, “How do we make them go away?”

“Time will help, as you process the grief and move through different stages of acceptance.”

As if Helen would ever accept that Tyler was gone. “What about pills?”

The psychiatrist hesitated before saying, “Antipsychotic medication can help people experiencing delusions or hallucinations, but typically, in the case of grief, we like to wait and see if they naturally resolve.”

Helen didn’t want to wait.

She booked an appointment with another doctor who told her the same thing.

But the third shrink gave her pills.

If it weren’t for Genessa’s cancer, Helen would not have gone to meet her at the bar for drinks. The murder of one’s husband makes it remarkably easy to reject all social invitations, but when a cousin calls and says “I miss you”—a cousin who just beat breast cancer—there is a sense of obligation.

Helen had a feeling her mother had put Genessa up to it though. Helen and Genessa’s relationship was side conversations on Christmas Eve and croquet competitions on the Fourth of July, but it was not pale ales at the local pub.