Free Dead Spell by Belinda Frisch Page A

keep from screaming. “I know you’re here. What are you waiting for?” The blood gushed down her forearm and Tom’s presence tightened around her like a blood pressure cuff. “Ah, there you are.”
    The heaviness let up and she lost her balance.
    “Where’d you go, my friend? What’s wrong, don’t you want to help me.”
     A shadow moved in the darkness—gray on black and barely visible—and something flickered in the only framed picture of her and her mother; the one of them blowing bubbles outside when she was two-years-old.  Someone she’d never noticed appeared in its background. She picked up the frame for a closer look.
    A cool breeze blew across the back of her neck and the picture started to change. The faces in the picture went pale and thin and a greenish hue washed over them, growing progressively darker and more gruesome until decay and rot boiled them to bones.
    “I hate you.” She threw the picture down the long hallway and it shattered on her mother’s bedroom floor.
    Tom shoved her from behind, pushing her down the hall and knocking her to her knees. Glass shards from the broken frame poked through her pants and burrowed into her skin.
     “There you are. Angry, just like I like you.”
    She rummaged through the glass and raised the largest piece. A quiet, almost imperceptible laugh surrounded her. Her hands were bleeding and she knew better than to think whatever Tom had planned for her was going to be quick. She waited for him to bury the spike in her leg, but he didn’t. He thrust her hand downward into the photo and scraped back and forth until she broke through the photo paper to the yellowed edge of a newspaper clipping hidden underneath.
    The back of the frame was glued shut and she looked for something to smash it.
    She grabbed her hardcover journal and bashed the edge of the binding into the frame until it was in pieces.
    Inside it, behind the picture, was the rest of the obituary cut from the bound newspaper in the library archives.
    She couldn’t believe what it said: Known to his friends as Tom, Gerald Thomas Shippee died suddenly at his Maple Street home. Beloved husband and father, he is survived by his wife Charity and his daughter, Harmony.
    Tom was her father.
    She picked up a half-spent fifth of vodka from the floor, twisted the top off, and took a huge swig. The rank, clear liquid spilled down the bottle’s neck and into the throbbing gash in her hand.
    Why would her father do this?
    She tucked the obituary inside her journal and refused to remember. Seventeen years of wondering, of longing, of what ifs consumed and disappointed her, leaving her raw and empty.
    “Mom always said you were a ghost.”
    She stumbled out into the kitchen with her hand in her mouth. The gushing blood swam in her empty stomach and made her nauseous. She wrapped a wad of paper towel around the cut and reached with her other hand for her mother’s personal pharmacy: partial bottles of morphine, fentanyl, sleeping pills, and codeine that she’d schemed and lied to a dozen doctors to get.
    Harmony looked at the tattoo: Summerland.
    Her heaven.
    She fumbled the lids and poured the pills out in her hand. There were at least twenty and when she tried to take them, Tom flung her hand up, scattering them.
    “What’s the matter? Isn’t this what you wanted? It’s what I wanted.”
    Crawling around on hands and knees, she gathered what pills she could find. She tossed them into her mouth and ground them between her teeth. Whole pills might not dissolve or worse, might dissolve enough to seize up her kidneys and liver leaving her alive, damaged, with a nasal tube full of activated charcoal and a stomach pumping.
    “This is the kind of thing you only fail at once.”
    The ground up pills filled the ridges of her teeth with a bitter paste that made her tongue feel numb and thick. She gagged and opened the refrigerator for something to wash them down. All that was in it were a half a bottle of