A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

There’s a chance I’ll never need to use this letter anyway, I tell myself. Missing isn’t dead. No one has any good reason to suspect me. Not yet.

The police discover Clara’s car abandoned on the side of the road; her prints were the only ones on the wheel. “Maybe she left it there herself,” Leonie says, picking the polish off her bitten-down nails. But the suggestion only brings the other possibility into sharper relief: Or maybe the killer wore gloves.

I can’t listen to more of this. I slip away from the door, back up the stairs toward my room. I only make it to the second floor. Ellis stands on the landing, a slice of shadow in all black. She lifts an envelope in one hand and arches a brow. “We need to talk.”

But all I can think now is…what Ellis must have thought of me. How pitiful I must have seemed to her: the girl who may or may not have killed her friend, the girl who believed in ghosts, the girl who went mad. And I’ve proved her right, haven’t I? I’ve proved Alex right, too. I meet Ellis’s gaze and feel something cold close around my heart, a feeling like a door slamming shut.

Ellis and I circle each other in that house like twin vultures over dying prey.

When I return to the kitchen, Ellis and Leonie are making dinner. Ellis catches my eye and stabs her knife into a hunk of meat. I imagine her cutting into my flesh the same way, carving it off bone. Blood on the floor. At last I understand. In this, as in all things, I am alone.

I plot my own Night Migration. The note is written in Clara’s hand, copied from the passive-aggressive note she left me earlier in the year about leaving my dishes in the sink. I pick Ellis’s bedroom lock while she’s in class and leave it on her pillow, then escape to the library stacks.

“Me too,” I say. “You made me who I am. You made me who I was always supposed to be.” Night hangs over us like a guillotine blade. Ellis lets go of my hand, and I count the seconds as they pass. One…two. We’re alone at the top of the world. She takes a shallow breath—I watch her shoulders shift as the air comes in—and I move forward.

If I had all the words in the English language, I could not string them together adequately to describe the expression on Ellis’s face when she falls. Surprise, perhaps. But also a grim, inevitable recognition. Ellis doesn’t scream on the way down. I hear the crunch of her body hitting pavement, but I don’t see the impact. I’ve already turned away.

Ellis knew. Ellis saw me in a way no one else could; she saw the black and twisted heart of me. She took my hand and guided me into that darkness. She opened the door, and truth entered, and nothing can undo that now.

When Alex died, people could barely look at me. Everyone believed I’d killed her. Or at the very least, they believed there was something I could have done differently. Some way I could have saved her, or died in her place. I murdered Ellis Haley in cold blood, and at last they lend me their pity.

Margery Lemont might have been buried alive, but I won’t return her skull to the earth. Or to Godwin, for that matter. Instead I wade into the frigid lake, deep enough that the water ripples around my hips. I lower the skull in cupped hands beneath the surface. A few air bubbles escape, and for a moment I can imagine it’s a last breath—a last goodbye. Then I let go. The skull sinks quickly, a weight falling out of sight, obscured by the shifting silt.

She isn’t the girl in that casket, the same way Alex isn’t the girl I buried under Godwin House a year ago. They both exist outside of time, fragments of memory and imagination—like Ellis’s characters, in a way. They exist only insofar as I allow them to exist.

The two women exchange glances, but I don’t wait for them to speak again. I bend over, set the stack of pages down in the damp grass, and dart away, chasing the distant figures of Kajal and Leonie, the mourners milling like ravens in the church parking lot. When I glance back, Ellis’s mothers are flitting around, chasing pages that have caught the wind, snapping desperately after paper and ink—the last that remains of their daughter.

London is not where I thought I’d live, at the end of it all. I always thought I’d want mountains towering overhead, a wide-open sky and seasons as fickle as the sea. And yet here I am, with a flat in Mayfair, and a little dog, and a favorite bakery where they know me by name.

So this is it. Ellis’s magnum opus. The book she cared for enough to sacrifice anything: Clara’s life. Her own. And all the rest of us bit players in her masterpiece. I open the cover, flipping past the title page. For Felicity. I did it all for you.

I think about drowning, about euphoria, the red orchids I planted on Ellis’s grave. I think how falling would be worse. And here, my heart beating fast and the taste of ink on my tongue, the city opening wide below us like a waiting mouth— — It begins to snow.