Chapter Twenty-Four

Havermouth, Present Time

Daylight was glaring. The beginning of the end, she thought, as she showered and dressed. She ate in the kitchen, looking out onto the uncompromising desert of the back garden, and remembering how it had looked when she had last stood in that same position.

Her mother had always had a penchant for greenery. There had always been some new exotic plant being coaxed into reluctant life under a palace of plastic-wrap and wire, watered precisely on the hour, to a measure – no more and no less.

If Tiffany had paid as much attention to her marriage or her daughter…, Aislen thought, and then pushed it aside, identifying it as internalized misogyny. Tiffany’s marriage breakdown was in equal measure the responsibility, if not more so, of Patrick, who had been the carbon copy of his era.

“I have never…” His glower bore down on Aislen. He had been wearing the shirt that Aislen had zip locked in her suitcase. “Never been as ashamed to show my face around town, as I am in this moment. My daughter, the… the whore,” he spat the word.

She grimaced in remembered pain, an adult standing in the empty kitchen, looking out onto the back garden, that he had rendered baren for more than practical reasons, her pain as raw as it had been so long ago, a heartbeat, a moment, a day.

She braced a hand on the Formica bench top and sobbed in a breath, her clumsily placed coffee cup leaving black stains on the surface like Olympic rings of agony.

Her grief brought her to her knees, her arms wrapping around herself. So much had gone unsaid that would never find the words now. So much pain, resentment, and… sadness. So much disappointment.

The moment she needed Patrick the most, he turned away from her.

When she had needed her father’s approval and acceptance, support and ANGER, his shame had soiled, dirtied, and suppressed her wounds into blame for being female and failing to protect her reputation.

If she had been a better woman, she would have avoided becoming shameful to him. If she had been a better woman, she would have avoided being the victim of the Triquetra’s sexual appetites. If she had been a better woman, she would not have been the subject of the town’s ridicule.

If he had been a better man…, she tried to turn her mental monologue around, as her therapist always encouraged her to do. If he had been a better man, he would have seen what the Triquetra were doing to her. If he had been a better man, instead of being outraged at her for being a victim, he would have been outraged at them for making her one. If he had been a better man, he would have been furious at the town for blaming her, rather than blaming her too.

“Oh, god,” she pressed her shaking hands to her mouth as she sobbed in her sorrow. “Why… Why?”

At what age did a daughter cease to be something to protect because of her femineity, and became culpable because of it?

Her resentment for her mother had become entangled in her disappointment and disillusionment with her father. She resented Tiffany, with the bitter disenfranchisement of someone who had been drowning and seen her mother stand on the deck above her holding a life-saving float, only to throw it to someone else.

She had never been the one worth saving for her mother. She had been condemned by her father and sacrificed by her mother. Neither parent, when she had needed someone to reach out with guidance, had offered it.

Rather they had blamed her for failing to swim in the confusing, bewildering tide of Havermouth.

They had not known, she told herself. They had not known about Havermouth’s werewolves.

But she did not truly believe that herself, because, without fail, on some level, humans always knew.

She picked herself up off the floor. “Stupid fucking sentimentality,” she told herself. “Have a shower, shake it off. One more day." It was that which was making her mopey – the funeral the next day. It was understandable that she would be upset. She had, after all, lost her father.

She threw herself into the housework – gradually filling the skip bin with anything personal. So easy was it to wipe another human being out of existence, she thought, as she took a break on the porch with a cup of tea and a cigarette, her eyes on the skip bin. A few days of work and a skip bin, and suddenly Patrick Carter was gone.

A mailman walked by the house nodding his head pleasantly to her as he passed by.

There was no mail, Aislen thought to herself. There had been no mail delivered since she had arrived, none piled up in the mailbox, none stuffed under the door. Where was the mail? She went inside and found the envelope, shaking its contents out onto the kitchen benchtop.

The keyring had more than just the keys to the house and car on it, there was another key, with a number stamped onto it. A mailbox key.

“Fuck,” she complained. She’d have to go to the post office and see if there were a stack of bills piling up there.

She tidied herself up, rolling her hair into victory curls, and tied a lace scarf around her head before applying her reddest lipstick. Combined with the black pirate shirt and waist-corset, black jeans, and boots, she’d give the Post Office something to talk about, but there was no fighting it, she stood out in Havermouth, so she might as well stand out completely.

She drove into town, wanting to keep the trip quick.

The Post Office was an old building, built in Victorian Italian Renaissance style, out of sandstone. It smelled old, she thought, as she stepped into the entrance hall, with its glossy tiled floor in contrasting coloured patterns. The mailboxes on the wall were original to the building, the little metal doors with their dark patina and ornate little numbers set into the stone.

Aislen found the door she was after and used to key to open it. As suspected, the mailbox was full. She removed the pile of envelopes, and locked the little door behind her, flicking through the pile as she returned to the car.

“Bill, bill, another fucking bill…” She trailed off as she found an envelope written out in her father’s tight handwriting, addressed to Morgana Ivy care of Patrick Carter.

Her father had sent a letter addressed to her, to his own mailbox dated two weeks before his death.

She slid into the driver’s seat, placing all the other envelopes on the passenger seat, and opened the envelope.

“Dear Aislen, if you receive this, it is because I have been murdered…”

“Holy fuck!” Aislen exclaimed.