Beautiful Demons

23. Claire

I spent the rest of the weekend in bed. On the following Monday, the other girls were at school during the day and Ella Mae had stuff to do around the house, so I stayed in my room or went downstairs to play games on the laptop. My body slowly recovered from the illness. With each day, I could feel my strength returning.

By day three, I was bored out of my mind. I started to roam around the mansion, looking at which books they had on the shelves and what paintings were on the walls. Since I had first come to Shadowford, I hadn't spent much time looking around and really paying attention to the house itself. It was by far the most beautiful place I had ever lived. And it was huge.

The first floor was pretty boring as far as exploration goes. Since I wasn't allowed into Mrs. Shadowford's suite of rooms, that left the same old rooms we all moved around in every day. I glanced up the narrow staircase leading to the third floor and bit my lip. Ella Mae had told me not to go up there, but she was all the way downstairs and no one was home.

I stepped gingerly onto the staircase and made my way up to the door. One of the stairs near the top creaked and I froze, waiting to see if Ella Mae would call out to me. When she didn't, I kept going. At the top, I pushed open the painted blue door and glanced inside. There was only a single room up there, and it was full of old boxes. Why would they care if anyone came up here? Not finding any big secret, I went back downstairs.

The second floor was more interesting. In addition to the four bedrooms us girls stayed in, there were four other empty bedrooms.

In the first empty room, I didn't find anything of interest. Dust. That was pretty much it. But the second room was a different story. At first, it seemed like the other. Dusty and ancient. The floral bedspread was perfectly made up. The windows were shut tight. But when I sat down on the bed, I felt the sudden urge to look under it. I got down on my hands and knees. When I lifted the bed-skirt, little dust bunnies fluttered through the air and I coughed.

"You okay Miss Harper?" Ella Mae called up. Man, how did she even hear me from down there?

"Yes ma'am," I said back. It was still a struggle to raise my voice too much.

I lifted the bed-skirt again and peered under the bed. A sliver of light shone through from the other side and there, near the wall, I saw something. A small box, maybe?

In order to get to it, I had to practically crawl underneath the bed. If anyone had walked into the room, they would have only seen the bottom half of my body sticking out. I stretched my arm and reached forward, finally grasping the elusive object.

Not a box. A picture frame.

A small silver double frame with a hinge that let it open and close. I sat on the hard wood floor, covered in dust, and opened the frame. On one side, a young woman with long brown hair piled on top of her head in a complicated twist of knots and braids. It was an old picture. So old that the color had long faded into browns and tans. The woman looked vaguely familiar. But that was sort of impossible, wasn't it?

In the second frame was a much newer picture of a group of girls in cheerleading uniforms. The uniforms were different from the kind the cheerleaders wore now, but they were still the same blue and black Demon colors. I studied the faces of the girls, then gasped. The one in the middle - the tall girl with blonde wavy hair - was my mother.

I was sure of it.

My heartbeat raced. How was this possible? I couldn't wrap my mind around it. I stood and moved to the window, wanting to get a better look in the light.

"Harper?" Ella Mae's voice at the bottom of the stairs.

Shit. There was no clear and fast rule about coming into these deserted rooms, but intuition told me they wouldn't want me in here. Not if they knew this picture had been left behind.

I shoved the bulky frame into the waistband of my sweatpants and quickly made my way to the top of the stairs. "Yes?"

"Are you alright? I thought I heard you coughing. Do you need anything?"

I shook my head. "No, I'm fine. Just had an itch in my throat."

"You look a little bit flushed," she said. Her hand gripped the banister like she was about to come upstairs and check on me. But I didn't want her up here. I needed more time to look around. Plus, I didn't want her to find the picture frame.

"Really, I'm fine. I just heard you calling and ran out here too fast. I'll just go lay down for a bit."

She hesitated, then looked back toward the kitchen. No doubt she still had a lot of work to do before the others got home from school. "Alright. But you call down if you need anything."

"I will," I said.

Back in my own room, I sat on my bed and took out the small frame. Carefully, I took it apart, separating the black velvet backing from the frame. The pictures were stuck to the glass inside, so I had to be very gentle with them. After a little bit of prodding, they both finally came loose.

On the back of the first picture, I could barely make out the hand-written words. Probably a name and date, but it was too smudged and faded to see. The picture of the cheerleaders was much more clear. In neat print, it read: Daneka, Julie, Claire, Mazie, and Audrey. The date was almost exactly twenty years ago.

I turned it over in my hand and studied the faces again. A young black girl with a wide, shining smile. Sheriff Hollingsworth? Next to her was an Asian girl that looked exactly like Lark Chen. Her mother maybe? That would put her at about the right age. The other three girls looked similar. White girls with blonde hair of varying lengths. But I knew the girl in the middle. Her smile beamed up at me from the photograph like a greeting from the grave.

Claire.

Knowing her name made my heart long for her.

But how was this possible? My mother had lived here in Peachville? Even if I believed in coincidence, this was way beyond that. What were the chances of me finding a picture of my mother here in a group home in Peachville, Georgia?

My gut told me it had nothing at all to do with chance.