Hilltop House

Maeve, Fifteen

"She didn't tell me her name, mom," Cora insisted. "She just said she knew you, and . . . she was my friend Ben's stepmom."

Maeve sat at the kitchen table, attempting to process her daughter's words. Cora had called her in a panic, begging her to come home, so Maeve had listened, old people be damned. "And you didn't call 9-1-1 because?"

Cora was more upset than Maeve had ever seen her. Something had definitely happened, but whatever it might've been, she wasn't sure it was what her daughter said it was. "Because I couldn't find my phone! It took me, like, twenty minutes before I found it under my bed, and by that time, when I went to check on her, she was gone!"

"Honey," Maeve reached across the table in an attempt to take Cora's hand, but the girl pulled away.

"I am not lying! Just because you're seeing things doesn't mean I am!"

Maeve sighed. "I don't think you're lying. I just . . . I looked out back. There's no sign of anything. You said she was bleeding onto the grass, but there's no blood, Cora. And there's no stone on the ground, and no . . . nothing. So even if it did happen the way you said, she must've been all right and just gotten up and left."

Her daughter was shaking her head, crossing her arms, looked ready to cry. "No, mom. There is literally no way."

Unsure what to do, Maeve sucked on her bottom lip, scrutinized her daughter, and pushed back her chair. "All right. Well, I can't think of anything to do except maybe talk to the neighbors. Dottie's home, I think, and Eunice next door just sits inside all day at her window. Maybe they saw something, right? If there was a woman here, one of them might know."

"Oh don't go over to Niecey's--I was supposed to visit her, and I never did."

"She's an old lady; she doesn't remember. None of them ever do."

Before Maeve could walk out the door, though, her daughter asked her to wait, went to her room, returned with a photograph--an old black and white one--said something about asking Niecey who it was, that she'd found it and was curious. Maeve hardly looked at the image as she slipped it into her coat pocket, just nodded and reassured Cora that she'd be back in a few minutes.

Once outside, the air refreshed Maeve. Her house had seemed unbearably stuffy, but that might've been the subject matter she'd been discussing with Cora. Maeve believed her daughter, all right; she believed that something had most definitely happened, but what exactly it was or meant was beyond her. Someone that had known her? Maeve had never made many friends, really--not the kind she could talk about real things with--but she'd made acquaintances wherever she went. She'd had a few co-workers back in their last town, people she'd been at the other eldercare center with. And some of the parents at Cora's school. And some of the people she drank with regularly at the local bar. None of them were anyone close enough she'd call friends, but if they were her daughter's friend's parent, they must've been someone from her last location. She just couldn't think of who it might be. In any case, it was weird. Maeve didn't trust anyone at all; she hardly trusted herself. So she absolutely added it to her running mental list of potential red flags.

As cold as it was, Maeve appreciated being home from work on such an afternoon. She so rarely had a day off that her spirits were high even in spite of her daughter's weird incident and the fact that she'd decided to try to talk to their unfriendly old neighbors. Maeve had seen almost nothing of Niecey since the weather had turned, nothing of Dottie since they'd sent her off to rehab. For all Maeve knew, either one of the old women could be as dead as Mr. George. She wasn't sure which scenario would be worse: dying in her home all alone, or waiting to die in an eldercare center surrounded by people in identical circumstances.