Kitty

Two Months Later (Epilogue)

"Un minou gris dormait. Sur son dos dansaient cinq petite souris. Le minou les a prises. Tant pis!" Marie raised the infant's arms and gently wiggled her fingers beneath them, laughing with Evangeline, who'd begun full belly-giggling the past few days.

"You'd better be careful," chided Anjulie, not entirely pleased at the nursery rhyme Marie had chosen yet unable to hide a smile. "You might grow attached."

Marie mock-scowled. "Never!" She scooped the baby from her sister's bed and finagled her into the infant carrier she'd taken fifteen minutes to figure out. "I'm taking Evie for a walk before I go back to work."

"Nice, isn't it? That we've brought on someone else?"

Stepping from her sister's bedroom into the hall, Marie rolled her eyes upward as if she'd just sampled the most delicious treat. "Oh! I can't even tell you. You were right, Anj. Now that business is crazy, we can afford it. And Hal's nephew is so reliable." She snorted a bit, put her hand vertical at her lips like she spoke a secret: "More so than that daughter of yours, anyway."

Anjulie crossed her arms.

"Not that I don't love her!" Marie called across her shoulder as she disappeared from view.

In the vacuum Marie's uncharacteristic flurry of activity left behind, her sister sank to her bed. Anjulie's room was a mixture of refurbished furniture and Halloweenish accents, not quite enough to scream haunted house but just enough to keep a visitor wary. She lay back on a huge, furry black pillow and stared at the ceiling. The way the light from her window played in speckles across the walls thrummed a chord, took her thoughts backward to the conversation she'd had with Helen's daughter in that sun-dappled courtyard the day after Joanna's murderous streak, after Helen's mental breakdown, after Danielle's disappearance. Juniper seemed a nice girl, and yet she'd made Anjulie nervous, the way she'd been able to communicate with that thing and speak of it so confidently. And the thought of Kitty being like an untaught little kid, as Junie had mentioned—well, that was somehow more terrifying than not. How Anjulie's innocuous childhood words had brought such a bizarre and volatile force into the world, she would probably never know, but whatever the result of their mock séance, if what Junie suggested had been right, the first thing Kitty had learned from them was cruelty, abuse. It'd watched them vent their animosity and dysphoria on Emily, and it'd built its own behavior from that lesson.

How much of the recent torment had been Kitty and how much had been Emily was impossible to discern, but it was surely true that Emily had resented them for what they'd done. Perhaps she'd used Kitty to get to them, as Juniper had suggested, or perhaps the thing had entirely lied to the girl. The reality that they could never quite be sure upset Anjulie, but at the same time, she knew she'd come out of it all far better than the others had, and why she'd been left largely unscathed was as much an enigma as the rest of it. She'd offered the invitation, hadn't she? She'd opened the door to whatever Kitty was (though she wasn't even sure that mattered anymore because it seemed to be gone), but if Emily had been out for vengeance, for justice, wouldn't Anjulie have been at the top of her list? And not just for unwittingly bringing the thing into their lives but for . . . for what she'd written large and clear on Emily's backside: Fuck me up, Kitty—Anjulie's contribution to the depravity of that night. She'd encouraged it to harm Emily, to take her, to "play" with her.

And yet here she was, Anjulie, largely let be except for the loss of Emmett, while Joanna awaited trial without bail for the murder of four people (it was assumed she'd killed her little boy, whose body had been found in her home), and Helen sat in a white-walled room being force-fed sedatives while her hands remained bound for fear she'd continue to harm herself. Who knew if either of them would ever regain their sanity, their former lives? Danielle, of course, had forfeited hers. Wherever she was, now, Anjulie couldn't say, but she was sure it couldn't be anywhere good.