Becoming The Shadows (Shadow Series #4)

24 - Move On

"Meredith was only at my grandmother's lake house once." Lydia shares with all of us. The story of her grandmother was brought up and she situated herself on Derek's bed. "But I think once was enough." 

A pang of pain aches in my heart. Poor Meredith. After we talked to her about trying to find out more information, she was found dead in her room that night. Meredith hung herself with the sheets on her bed. 

"How did your grandmother know her?" Derek asks her. 

Parrish wraps his arm around me when he notices the goosebumps on my arms. They aren't because I'm cold. They are there because Meredith was brought up in this conversation. 

"She didn't. She found her because of another woman named Maddy, the woman she loved." Lydia smooths out a folded picture that was in the pocket of her skirt. Her legs carry her over to Scot and she hands him the picture. "I never met her, but I saw her name everywhere. She used to be part of a yacht racing team." Lydia roams the room. "There were plaques and trophies in the lake house from all the regattas she'd won."

"How'd she die?" Parrish curiously asks her.

"How's not the story. It's what happened right before." Lydia spins around to walk back towards the bed and the large wall of windows behind it. "My grandmother, Lorraine, used to work in San Francisco for IBM. She was there on a weekend, catching up on work. She started hearing this sound...like rain."

I watch as she walks right up to the windows, peering outside. 

"But when she looked out the windows, all she saw was blue sky." 

"But she kept hearing the rain?" I find myself standing up. 

"And it just kept getting louder. Rain and thunder crackling like gunshots in her head so loud, she finally just screamed." Lydia turns away from Scott and the windows. 

"Like a banshee." Derek says from his spot against one of the pillars.

Lydia walks in a different direction. "She called Maddy, who was planning on taking one of the boats out on the lake, but Maddy said the sun was shining there, too. So Lorraine didn't say anything." 

Parrish stands up on my left side. "There was an accident?"

"It took them four days to find Maddy's body and then it took decades to figure out how Lorraine knew. She started with parapsychologists, like the PhD in their name made it more scientific. They built the study in the lake house according to every pseudoscientific theory they could find."

"None of it worked. So then she started going to more extreme occult. Things like mediums and psychics All of them were failures until she found Meredith. They found her in Eichen House. This fragile girl who didn't understand the things she heard. They brought her to the study. And they almost killed her." Lydia walks over to the table in the room while pulling some folded up pieces of paper from her bag. 

The rest of us follow her to the table to see what she has. Scott and Derek stand on one side while Parrish and I stand on the opposite.

"She was hospitalized for over a year. She...never really recovered. My grandmother drove her insane I drove her to suicide. And all she ever wanted to do was help. My grandmother created the code for the dead pool. They think she's the Banshee who put the names out in the first place. She left me this message in the same code." Lydia slides a paper with random letters and number scribbled on it towards Derek and Scott. 

"But she didn't leave a cipher key, did she?" Scott wonders out loud. 

A shake of her head confirms all of our thoughts. Of course not.