Chapter Text
The first thing Daphne noticed when she woke up wasn't the body lying next to her, or the fact that, judging by the light streaming through the large kitchen window, it must have been noon. In fact, she didn't even realize she was in the house where she had grown up.
When she woke up, the first thing she routinely did was stretch. First, she stretched her legs, then scrubbed her face so roughly that she was grateful her mother and sisters weren't there to see how she treated her skin, and finally, as she stretched her arms while arching her back, she felt a kind of pain she hadn't experienced in a long time.
She put her hands to her head as she sat up and touched something damp. It was then, in fact, that she realized her head was damp from the back of her head down to a certain point on her neck. That was undoubtedly the main reason, she told herself, why she didn't like returning to Crystal Cove. Because, although she loved winters in the forest, she also detested the humidity during the summer, which worsened with the rising temperatures each year.
Spring seemed to blend more and more into the arrival of summer, and autumn seemed almost nonexistent. Suddenly, winter would arrive without warning, and in such a hostile way that it ceased to be welcoming. The snow stopped being a delicate part of the landscape and began to freeze the streets and roads, making it impossible to leave homes and becoming the only thing one could see if one looked out the window.
It wasn't that this was a problem isolated to Crystal Cove; in reality, almost no place she knew was exempt from the consequences of climate change, but when it came to finding problems, as tiny as they could be, with the place she had worked so hard to leave behind, it seemed to her that nothing could be worse than that place.
After processing the fact that she was covered in sweat, she assumed the AC in the hotel room where she'd been staying must have turned off or, more likely, broken down during the night. And when she lowered one of her hands again to place it in her lap, she saw it.
Her world crumbled.
She had a broken nail.
"Fuck," she muttered angrily. She hurried to check the others, just in case. Those nails were one of the most beautiful sets she'd ever had; her trusted manicurist had taken at least three hours to achieve the final result. And having a broken nail in her hometown was a luxury she couldn't afford, because, although she didn't expect to stay more than a few days for the reading of her parents' will, it wasn't like her to look like that. And although she hadn't been to a nail salon in Crystal Cove in many years, she knew they wouldn't be able to replicate the style or quality anywhere else while she was stuck there.
She looked at her nails again, trying to remember what she could have done to break one in the last 48 hours, but no memory came to mind. It probably had something to do with the excruciating pain in her head. She'd probably hit it in her sleep, she thought, maybe fallen and climbed back into bed while… She moved her hand to watch it from a better angle and finally noticed the blood covering the palm of her left hand.
Her breathing paused for a second.
She looked at her other hand and touched her head again; then it hit her. It wasn't sweat, she was soaked in blood, some parts drier than others. Her hair was a mess, and she definitely had a serious wound on the back of her neck. She touched the wound with trembling fingers; it was swollen and hot.
Daphne doubted it was something she'd done to herself and no longer thought it was an accident in her sleep, but she knew it was recent.
She began to look around as she stood up, recognizing the stained-glass window in front of her at once, the tile surrounding it, and the small round table with two chairs the same age as her grandmother's. Which was, to say the least, strange, because her last memory was of falling asleep in the best hotel the town had to offer; her plan had always been to spend the night and meet her sisters and the notary in front of the house the next day.
Above all, she was certain that, besides the notary, none of them had a key.
And unless her sleepwalking episodes had worsened drastically and no one had warned her, there was a huge difference between talking in her sleep, perhaps taking a few steps and going back to bed, and…
A body.
A pool of blood.
Her first instinct was to back away. Tears began to well up, and she didn't even realize she was back on the floor until she bumped into one of the counter doors behind her. She was curled up, and hadn't been able to identify where her extremities were until her right hand hit the floor. No, not the floor. A knife. A bloody knife.
She stifled a scream and slowly raised her hand. As if doing it would change the fact that there was a dead person in front of her. He was dead. God and she both knew that the body of the man, whose face Daphne couldn't see from where she was sat, was dead.
Emergency.
She had to call emergency services.
The problem was that she didn't have her cell phone. All she had were her matching lilac pajamas. They were her favorite. On other occasions, they were also one of her least favorites, because they reminded her too much of home, too much of the lilac hue so characteristic of the Blake mansion, and the Blake family, so characteristic of her younger self and of the life and people she had left behind. That's how anything about Crystal Cove was: complicated.
After a few seconds, although she wasn't really sure anymore, it could have been minutes, she stood up silently, very carefully, as if she could do the stranger more harm than he had already suffered. She walked in the opposite direction from him, to the landline phone that had always been by the kitchen door, the one she'd only used as a child to talk to her friends at night while eating ice cream straight from the tub, secretly from her parents, to dial the emergency number.
Her hands tingled, she felt dizzy. It was a strange mix of wanting to vomit and faint at the same time, but she stayed standing still. She stayed standing, and because of that, she had to do the right thing and call the police. She had to call Sheriff Bronson. He would know what to do. She put the phone to her ear. Sheriff Bronson would answer, he'd arrive before she knew it, like only he used to do when it came to… - There was no dial tone.
The phone didn't make a sound, not when she dialed the numbers, not when she picked up, not even when she cried harder, and Daphne saw that the cord was simply broken. Or rather, cut? A clean cut. And unless her parents had done it at some point in her life that she couldn't remember, someone else must have been in the house. Maybe someone else was in the house.
She pressed her forehead desperately against the base of the telephone and, while she wept and muttered (or perhaps not so much) a hundred curses, she heard a noise. A noise that at that moment had no direction for her. It made her freeze; her crying stopped at the same time as her breathing. She saw nothing but the wall in front of her, and yet she felt that she had never had her eyes more open in her life.
Two… three… four seconds passed, and she heard it again. It echoed in her ears several times, probably caused by the lack of activity in the house during the past year. Daphne didn’t really give it so much of a thought, because before she knew it, she had started running.
To reach the nearest door, the one in the kitchen that was nearest to the corpse than it was to her, she would have had to turn around. And that terrified her. She would have had to turn around and very likely come face to face with the source of that noise. “With the killer”, she thought. So, she ran straight to the front door, flashing past amorphous white shapes, which, although she knew they were nothing more than measures taken to protect the furniture from dust once the house was empty, she couldn't help but think that at any moment someone would jump out of one of them and catch her.
When she finally reached the front door, as expected, it was locked. And what else could she have hoped for? She hadn't thought that someone who had entered through the large oak door of the Blake mansion with two motionless, bloodied bodies would have left it open, and no one would have noticed. It was then that she thought of the large kitchen window and ran again. Not the kitchen, but the guest bathroom, which was right next to her father's study on the first floor. More importantly, it was one of the only places on the first floor where the windows could be opened.
She heard more noise. Closer to her. She heard the murderer slink up to the entrance of the main room, into the lobby hall where she had been standing seconds before, and then run off again. After her.
On the one hand, she had the advantage, and only she knew where she was going. As soon as she reached the guest room, she locked the door, climbed onto the toilet lid, and opened the window.
The disadvantage? The other person, whoever it was, was fast and was already outside. They were furious, perhaps because she had escaped, perhaps because they had already assumed she was dead before she even tried to call the police, perhaps both.
Daphne nervously pulled out (rather ripped) the mosquito screen as best she could while the door was being aggressively pounded on, as if someone on the other side were trying to break it down with their whole body. When she finally managed to do it, she pushed herself up with all her might, first her arms, then her head, then, with a little more difficulty because of the position of her torso, and finally… the door opened. She felt a hand, not a full hand, just the fingertips, brush against her leg before she fell headfirst into one of the rose bushes that her mother so insisted enhanced the house's facade.
She was on one of the side paths leading to the house's enormous garden. With more scratches than she had when she woke up, she rolled over until she fell onto the hard cement and kept running, now in front of the house.
She would run to the first person, car, or house she saw, ask for help, and… why on earth was one of the Dinkley’s mystery tour buses driving past her house? Undoubtedly, the passengers on the upper deck saw her before the tour guide did. They started talking while she, almost as if she were in a fever dream, slowed down, waving her arms.
Then she heard her. For the first time since waking up, she felt a glimpse of peace. Of security. Everything was going to be alright; everything was going to be okay. The tour guide, whom she recognized by the uniform she had seen for so many years and who had offered to do so once too many times, as she put it when she referred to altering someone’s clothes to make them more fashionable, "Daphnify," turned and glanced at her. Just for a second, and then looked back at her audience. Daphne couldn't make out the words coming out of her mouth, only the sound of her voice. The next second, the guide didn't know what she was saying either, turned abruptly, and put on her glasses. Looking only at her.
"Velma… thank God." Daphne sighed to herself with relief and stopped running completely, still not on the street in front of the Blake mansion but on the round road between the street and her house.
"Blake?..." Then she looked at her, really looked at her. She saw the blood on her hands, her torn clothes, and her scratched skin. And stranger than that altogether, she saw her barefoot on the sidewalk, and even worse, in her pajamas at three p.m. That's when she knew something was very, very wrong.
And while she listened to the passengers murmuring, wondering if it was all part of the show or not, she dropped the microphone she was holding and ran to the lower deck of the bus to tell the driver to stop. By the time she got there and was about to ask him, it was already done. Mr. Dinkley had seen the girl before his daughter. After all, it was part of his job to keep a watchful eye on the streets.
However, he didn't recall them hiring someone for that part of the show, and when it dawned on him what was happening, all he could do was stand up frozen, just as Velma ran past him.