Blood Will Out Read online

  PENGUIN TEEN

  an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a Penguin Random House Company

  First published 2018

  Text copyright © 2018 by Jo Treggiari

  Cover design: Leah Springate

  Cover image: Moment Open/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Treggiari, Jo, 1965-, author

  Blood will out / Jo Treggiari.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735262959 (hardcover). —ISBN 9780735262966 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8639.R433B56 2018  jC813′.6  C2017-904341-2

                    C2017-904342-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945564

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Acknowledgments

  For my father, Arnaldo, who encouraged me to read all the books.

  You will be hollow.

  We shall squeeze you empty, and then

  We shall fill you with ourselves.

  GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

  CHAPTER ONE

  Someone seemed to be shouting her name from far away—“Ari Sullivan!” She sat up and was instantly rocked by a wave of nausea and an excruciating pain that knifed through her head. She clutched her stomach and moaned. She was breathing too rapidly and she felt as if she were about to pass out. She forced herself to take deep breaths, counting between inhalations. Gradually the pain subsided to a throbbing ache and she peered around in shock. She could see nothing. Was she blind? She blinked rapidly but there was no difference.

  It was dead quiet except for the thrum of blood in her ears. Pushing herself onto her knees, she crawled forward a few inches. She could feel earth under her fingers, smell the dank rooty cool of it. She ran shaking hands over her body. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt and running shoes. She ached all over but nothing seemed broken, except for maybe her head. There was a lump at the back of her skull, but the worst injury originated just above her ear. She probed that area and felt a mushy spot. How had she hit her temple? She moved her head gingerly, half-afraid it might detach from her neck. Another crescendo of pain battered at her and she breathed through her nose, imagining that she was at the cool blue bottom of the pool. Take stock, she told herself, remembering the guidelines she’d learned in lifeguarding. Assess the injury. Her neck muscles were stiff but her spine was all right; her fingers wiggled, and she could feel her toes even though she couldn’t see them.

  Okay, so she’d live, probably. Now, where was she? Her brain cried in agony, as if all her nerve endings were centered in her skull, but she struggled to focus. Clearly she’d had an accident, fallen down the stairs to the cellar. But not her cellar, she decided, trying to pin down the muddied swirl of her thoughts. Her cellar was concrete-floored and brightly lit and smelled of laundry detergent and fabric softener. Not rotted leaves and swamp water. She was somewhere unknown.

  “Mom, Dad?” she breathed, as if the sound of her voice might summon something terrible from the pitch black. All the horror movies she and Lynn had giggled over came back to her in a flood.

  The darkness pressed down, a physical weight as if she were pinned under two tons of water. She held her eyelids open with her fingers and still there was nothing—not a flicker of light. This must be what it felt like to be buried alive. And with that thought, it seemed suddenly as if there were not enough air. She gulped, choked, desperate to fill her lungs, and felt the hysteria swell until it burst from her.

  “Help! Help! Please!” Over and over until, propelled by rising panic, she was on her feet, unsteady and swaying, her voice ripping out of her throat. “Anyone!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I am remembering the very first time. I am nine. My eyes follow Ma Cosloy’s finger from the pigs to the knife as she tells me, “You tend to them. You tend to this too.” Her work-rough hands are on her wide hips. She looks ten feet tall and not a hair straggles from the tight bun she wears from early morning to night. If I were to sketch her, it would be as something carved from granite, not flesh. She is unyielding. One couldn’t call her expression kind, but it is not without compassion. Even so, I wouldn’t dream of arguing.

  The chosen piglet comes snuffling around my feet. He knows me. I bottle-raised him and his siblings and now, at near three months, he is the biggest. His rubbery snout prods, greedy and insistent. He is looking for acorns in my pockets. “None today, Ferdinand,” I murmur, fondling his soft, pink ears, looking into his bright, curious eyes with their white lashes. Pigs are only slightly less intelligent than dolphins and apes. No one wants to hear that though, because we like to eat bacon so much. I named him after the gentle bull in the storybook: the one who wouldn’t fight even when provoked. I scratch along his spine, feeling the stiff hairs. He leans and pushes against my side, his trotters scrabbling in the hay. I gather him up in my arms. He is a good weight but not impossible for me to lift for a short time. His whiskers brush my cheek in wet kisses. His breath smells sweet from the breakfast of hot bran mash and potato peelings he’s just had. I put him down again and he frisks, puppy-like.

  He trusts me and wants to be near. Even when I move over to the other end of the barn, with the big iron pot full of water bubbling over the fire pit, the knotted ropes and pulleys hanging from the blackened rafters like a simplified web, the razor-sharp knife lying ready on the table. Old stains spatter the floor; bluebottle flies buzz. He follows me there, making those grunting sounds that mean pure happiness. Smart as he is, he has no idea what is coming until he is hoisted into the air by his hind legs, and by then it is too late.

 
Later, when I have been scoured clean with the bristle brush and a bar of Ma Cosloy’s gritty rosemary soap, which never lathers no matter how much you try, and my skin is sore and tingling, and I am alone again in the shed, I sit with my knees tucked close to my chest. My heart gallops. Ferdinand’s squeals still ring in my ears; his blood is a cold slick of metal in my throat. The bath is an iron pot, similar to the one in the barn, and at first the water was scalding but now it has cooled, though it is still warmer than the frigid air around. I can see my breath and the small window is beaded with moisture, and my fingers and toes have pruned, but still I sit in the dirty water replaying it all in my mind. I barely recognize the emotion rushing through me. Exhilaration? Excitement?

  My best shoes are cleaned and polished; my new clothes are folded neatly on the bench next to the rough towel. Ma Cosloy only finished sewing them last night. I know they will fit well, but the seams will scratch and the fresh-dyed cloth will feel stiff against my neck. My old clothes have been taken away to be soaked and scrubbed with lye, though I think the stains will never come out. I think about the colors I have just seen. So vivid and unlike the browns and grays and solemn blacks I am usually surrounded by, those I am clothed in.

  It’s as if Ma and Pa Cosloy and I live in an old photograph—monochromatic and yellowed, the house and barn timbers bleached by the sun, and the earth stripped of nutrients and turned to ashy dust. On occasion I look at my adoptive parents and wonder if their hearts are as shriveled and hard as the dry old potatoes I find sometimes after the fields have been plowed. My heart, though, feels as if it is swelling—plump, juicy, like a split ripe plum. It’s as if I was blind before and now the colors are so bright in my mind that they hurt my eyes and fill my entire rib cage with wonder. That was life that spilled thickly over my hands. I can still smell it on me: rich as beef broth.

  I think of a line from my favorite tale, “Black as Ebony, White as Snow, Red as Blood,” and I trace an outline of Ferdinand on the glass, his body limp, his neck articulated, the new lines I made with the knife. I can’t wait to capture it in my sketchbook.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Help,” she yelled, over and over again. “Someone? Please, help me!”

  She blinked hard against tears, but they splashed forth as she continued to shout. And then somewhere along the way the words turned to screams until her throat was raw and her ribs hurt and her head threatened to explode into a thousand shards. Blackness washed over her as if she’d taken a dive into a vat of ink, and then nothing.

  Minutes? Seconds? Hours? Ari had no idea how long she’d been passed out, but she came to still curled up on the dirt, arms hugged around her cramped body. The truth crept like cold snow into her heart: no one could hear her.

  And no one—not her mom or her dad or Lynn or Coach—was coming.

  Where was she? Her mind was dull. She couldn’t think past the pain pulsing near her right eye. Putting her fingers to her head, she investigated the pulp of matted hair and the congealed mass of blood. It made her fingers tacky, and the metallic tang caused her stomach to heave again.

  Was she concussed? Or worse? A traumatic head wound? Was that why she was unable to see? She felt for her tiger’s-eye bracelet, the beads warm from her body heat. Tiger’s eye for bravery. Lynn had one too, and Ari almost seemed to hear her friend’s voice. For fuck’s sake, grow a pair, sweetie! Which was basically what she’d said when Ari had hemmed and hawed about trying out for first string on the swim team. And you know what? She’d made it. So…

  When they were young, before they’d conceived of the signal-flag-out-the-window idea, she and Lynn had been convinced they could communicate telepathically. They felt the same way about so many things—from Oreos to Iceland to The Little Prince—that they often finished each other’s sentences.

  Come find me, Lynn, she prayed.

  The tears were gone, sucked up by the desperation that gripped her now. What if she were never found? Where could she be? How had she gotten here?

  Think, Ari.

  Okay, start with what you know. She took a deep, calming breath. She knew her name. “Ariadne Isabel Sullivan,” she said into the black. What else? “Seventeen years old, five foot seven inches tall. 132 Fox Street, Dempsey Hollow, 453-8678. Best friends with Lynn Lubnick. Likes swimming, mushroom pizza and glitter nail polish. Dislikes centipedes, turnips and mean people.” Her voice sounded so thin, so weak. She straightened her spine and spoke louder. “Absolutely hates what chlorine does to my hair.”

  She reached into her back pocket. No phone. Where the hell was her phone? Had it slipped out when she fell? She patted the ground all around her but found nothing. She felt the feathery slither of a many-legged insect as it scuttled over her hand. Centipedes liked damp, dark places. She’d seen one crawl out of the basement sink drain once. She leapt to her feet but lost her balance as another wave of dizziness assailed her. Fuck fuck fuck! Crashing forward, she connected with something solid. Pressing her hands and then her forehead against the rough, slimy coldness until the white flecks stopped their frenzied dance before her eyes, Ari felt her head clear a little. The surface felt like a wall and was slightly curved under her palms. She detected the indentation of bricks. She tried to hook her fingers in but they slid free; no way to climb, then. She stood on her tiptoes and stretched her hands up; it extended beyond her reach. She crouched down and felt along the bottom until she touched the gritty soil. There was no door or opening. A bitter draft blew from somewhere up above, carrying the autumn scent of decaying leaves. She crumbled a pinch of dirt between her fingers. It was slightly damp, though whether from rain or ground moisture she didn’t know.

  She realized she could just make out the shadowy shape of her limbs. She placed her palm against the wall and walked. It was circular. She pushed off from it and inched forward, hands held defensively in front of her, counting steps under her breath. Her shoes were almost silent on the hard-packed earth. Eight paces toe to heel, roughly eight or nine feet in diameter, before she hit the bricks on the other side. Walls surrounding her, stretching up who knew how high. A childhood memory sparked. Summer in the country. Her grandmother warning her to “stay away from the cistern where the old barn used to be. The cover is all rotted away.” She hadn’t listened of course, but spent hours on her tummy throwing rocks and sticks into the deep water. And once there had been a desperate rat swimming around and around in circles, unable to find a way out. A cistern. Like a big well buried below ground. She was at the bottom of a big fucking well! She made a circuit, clawing at the bricks, feeling like the rat. Perhaps there was a ladder bolted to the side? A rope with a bucket?

  A flicker of hope rose in her and was extinguished just as quickly. No escape. The rat had just stopped swimming at some point, even though Ari had thrown down the biggest chunk of wood she could find, thinking it could use it as a raft. It had just given up.

  She turned around and sank down on her butt as her legs gave way beneath her. Turning her face up, she squinted, trying to see to the top of the wall, but it seemed miles away and still too dark. No silhouettes of trees, no stars. A well with a cover over it, then.

  She yelled again, caught up in the terror, even knowing it was no use. Cisterns weren’t located in the middle of town. They were on private land, out on the country back roads where town water couldn’t be piped in, far from anywhere.

  How had she even gotten here? Had she driven herself in her dad’s VW? Had she come with someone else who even now might be going for help? Lynn? Lynn didn’t have a car either but maybe….She grabbed onto that slim hope and tried to calm herself.

  The pitch blackness continued to weigh down on her like some tangible thing occupying all the space. Was enough air getting in? Her brain was a lump of unresponsive flesh. It was hard to follow the broken trail of her thoughts.

  “The well cover is on,” she said out loud. Saying the words helped her think. It reminded her of struggling her way through algebra with Lynn. “It’s a series
of logical steps,” Lynn would say. “You go from here to here until you get to the answer.”

  “Therefore, someone must have placed it there.” She squinted upward again.

  Someone is coming back for me.

  But who? She saw a figure, silhouetted, face in shadow, a mouth moving with words she could no longer recall. The last thing she remembered was—what? Her brain fuzzed, the headache back again, pounding with a furious intensity.

  Big blocks of time seemed to be missing.

  Shopping. She remembered shopping. She tried to hold on to the thought as she felt her consciousness rush in and out, scrambling for the fleeting image of clothing racks, and Lynn’s familiar smirk. She hooked into the memory, desperate.

  It was Friday, after school, and they had been looking for dresses for the big fall dance at the end of October.

  “What do you think?” Lynn asked, holding up a short, tight red number with tiers of net flounces, and spaghetti straps.

  “Sure, if you want to look like an eighties reject.”

  “Like early New York, Madonna cool? Or Kajagoogoo groupie?”

  Ari whistled a few notes of “Too Shy.”

  Lynn’s face fell. “Really, poppet?”

  Ari shrugged.

  They’d recently scored a crate of record albums from the Goodwill junk shop. All eighties New Wave, pretty-boy bands with bleached-out hair and tons of eyeliner. Luckily Ari’s dad was a hoarder and still owned a turntable and a pair of gigantic speakers. It was funny how big all the electronics were back then; those boat-like boom boxes, the headphones that covered half your head.