BY RACHEL FEDER
Editor’s Note: This is part of a serial novel, THE TURN, which will be published in installments at Luna Luna. This is Part 13. Read the rest here.
30.
An unseasonably warm day. I wait for nightfall. Try to get Thebes to go down in the carrier, but he refuses to fall asleep.
Bracing him against my hip, I make my way across the yard.
9-1-1-7. What can it mean? I need to search the house.
Enter through the back door, tiptoeing inside, but of course nobody is home. Check Thebes’s room, which is pretty picked over already. There are clothes he’s outgrown since Alison and Quinn disappeared. Plastic toys. I open every cabinet in his play kitchen, trying to find a clue, but there’s nothing. He grabs a plastic banana, rakes his teeth against it.
Stepping into my own room gives me an eerie, sinking feeling. What happened here? Who watched me here? Nothing appears to be out of order. Same with the bathroom; it’s just an empty bathroom, the sink starting to stink.
As I wind up the stairs, a dream comes back to me. Alison standing in the window, Thebes on her hip. The world around us is the sea. Back when I had the dream, I thought it was the isolation getting to me, this feeling of being trapped with nowhere to go. Now, it feels like a premonition.
What was it trying to tell me? What am I missing?
I’m pretty sure I’d know if there was anything I needed to attend to in the kitchen; I’ve ransacked it so thoroughly. Let myself into Quinn’s room, stale, lingering stench of stinking child, the way a girl’s feet grow, their path written in the lines.
Quinn has a little pink dresser, and I kneel before it. Most of her clothes are missing, which comes as no surprise—after all, she’s missing.
And then, I see it. In the bottom shelf. A little jewelry box, antique, maybe, faded white with pink roses. I open it and a ballerina pops up, eliciting a laugh from Thebes and a gasp from me.
It’s full of ceramic teeth, pointed and sharp.
I pour them out on the carpet, shuddering. Sift through them. What, why?
Thebes reaches for the pile, and I stand up, checking with my free hand to make sure he hasn’t grabbed anything. Did he have one in his mouth, the night I thought I saw a sharp tooth in the moonlight? Irrationally, I panic at the thought of him having something dangerous squirreled away in his mouth, even months ago.
I tuck one of the teeth in my bra for safekeeping. I’ll examine it more closely later.
I need to check Alison’s room.
Throw open the door, throw open the closet. Dig around like a burglar looking for hidden jewelry.
And then I see it, glinting at me from the corner.
There’s a safe.