by Micol Ostow
Feathers cling to the tattered hem of her dress.
A discolored string of dainty pearls—the one she always wears—around her neck like a noose.
It’s Daisy.
The hanged girl—it’s Daisy.
I woke up from that stunner screaming, bathed in sweat, flailing, and grabbing desperately at my sheets. After a moment, though, as my eyes adjusted to the sunlight, I realized where I was—home—and, more important, that I was safe.
For now.
I sat in bed, gasping for breath, waiting for one or both of my parents to come racing in to see what I’d been screaming about, willing my heartbeat to slow to a normal pace and practicing at my “casual, nonchalant” response. But no one came, so instead, I took a steamy shower, longer than usual, luxuriating in the scalding water beating down on me like needles, needing the intensity of that sensation to scour away the lingering images from my dream. By the time I was dressed and downstairs, waiting on Daisy and Lena, the sun was out in full and it was easy to imagine that indeed, I was safe, here and now.
Mom and Dad were both in the kitchen, arguing amiably over the newspaper, which they both still read in print, religiously, every morning over coffee, eggs, and toast. They were each wearing running clothes—sleek leggings and some high-tech top for Mom, old-school sweats and a fleece for Dad—and earbuds dangled around their necks.
Not earbuds. A ruined, crumbling string of pearls.
I took a deep breath, and when I looked again, they were just earbuds again.
You’re losing it for real now. Or maybe I’d already lost it, past tense, and then what?
“You guys went … running,” I managed. Here was that “casual, nonchalant” thing I’d been working on in the bedroom, and thank goodness for that.
It wasn’t totally uncommon for either of them, the morning run, but it wasn’t a regular thing. “You guys know date nights are supposed to be at night, right? And they’re supposed to incorporate actual fun? Not exercise.” I mock-shuddered.
“Ha ha,” my mom said, tossing a balled-up napkin at me. “Maybe it’s corny, jogging together—”
“Oh, it’s definitely corny,” I assured her. “At best.”
“Don’t tease a poor old woman.” She laughed. “It’s just that I’ve been feeling so stressed lately,” she said.
“So naturally, a run at the crack of dawn was the only solution.”
“More like a last resort. But I didn’t make it up, I promise! I read an article that said that high-impact movement first thing in the morning can have a huge positive impact on energy levels and cognition,” she insisted.
“That’s why you’ve got to stop reading the news. It’ll rot your brain,” I joked. I looked at Dad. “You support this?” He was an athletic guy, very fit for a dad. (My friends sometimes allowed that he was cute, for a dad, which was totally intolerable information.) But a tandem run still felt very next-level.
“Your mom wanted to give it a try,” he said, taking a long swig of his coffee. “Who am I to stand in her way?”
“Who, indeed?” At least they liked each other, which was more than I could say for lots of my friends’ parents. Loved, even. That was never in question. I was lucky that way. We all were, our little family. I was relieved that there wasn’t any lingering tension from our semi-argument the night before.
“You okay there, Nancy?” my dad asked, peering at me. “You’ve gone off into a little reverie.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis.
I shook my head, realizing he was right. I blinked and was surprised to discover hot tears pricking at the corners of my eyes.
Settle down, Drew. A little gratitude was a good thing, sure, but there was no need to be having a Lifetime movie moment right here in the kitchen, out of the blue, coffee machine burbling away on the counter.
Still shaken up by that dream, I decided, and was pouring myself my own cup of coffee when, mercifully, Daisy’s horn beeped outside.
“Do us a favor, Nancy,” my mother said. “Promise you’ll focus on school today, and not mysteries.”
I didn’t want to lie to them. “I’ll do my best,” I said. I kissed them each a quick good-bye and ran to meet my friends.
* * *
“I overslept,” I said, breathless, as I shimmied into the back seat and brushed my hair from my shoulders. “Didn’t even have time for a cup of coffee. Weird …” Weird dreams, I’d started to say, before realizing I didn’t want to get into it just then.
“Well, good thing we’re going for coffee,” Lena drawled.
“Yeah, Nancy”—Daisy cast me a quick look via her rearview mirror—“you did agree to meet so we could hit Harbor Joe’s before school, right? Like, that was the whole plan?”
“Of course.”
The truth? I knew that we’d made plans to meet up this morning, and Harbor Joe’s made the most sense—it was one of the only places open this early, anyway—but I’d been so distracted by that dream that the specifics of our text thread from the night before had gone straight out of my head. But I wasn’t about to admit that.
“So spacey this morning!” Daisy said, practically trilling. She was grinning from ear to ear and fiddling with the presets on her radio, finally settling on some aggressively chipper pop station.
“I’m gonna get a cavity listening to this,” Lena protested. “I mean, are you kidding me with it?”
“What?” Daisy shrugged. “I’m in a good mood. The chief is investigating Caroline, he’s on the case, and he hasn’t canceled Naming Day, which I know is what my parents were pushing for. It’s all very win-win.”
“I mean, not for Melanie,” I pointed out. “But I hear you.”
“Am I allowed to be excited about Naming Day at the same time as I’m worried about Melanie?” Daisy asked. “Because I swear to you on my own role in the reenactment, I’m both.”
“You’re allowed,” I said. “But given that someone is actually missing, maybe let’s take it down twenty percent.”
“Nancy’s right. Just play it cool around people who aren’t us,” Lena warned. “If you seem too happy, you’ll end up a suspect.”
We all had to laugh at that. Daisy was the sweetest, friendliest, kindest girl in our grade, maybe in the whole school. The idea that she would be behind a kidnapping and sabotage was literally laughable.
“I’ll be cool, I promise. If you guys agree to one tiny detour this morning.”
“Where?” I asked, wary, but glancing out the window, I’d already guessed what she had in mind.
We were headed in the general direction of Harbor Joe’s, but Daisy took a sharp left as we came to the intersection, veering in the opposite direction, to the immediate outskirts of town, just beyond the bay, where the fairgrounds lay. In the distance, the gray-green ocean glittered in the morning sun.
“They haven’t started putting up the scaffolding for the reenactment,” I told her. “I think that’s supposed to start later this afternoon. There won’t be anything to see yet.”
“I know,” she said, her shoulders hunching guiltily. “But I’m excited. I still want to take a peek. And it’s kind of on the way, right?”
“In the sense of being exactly in the opposite direction at the intersection, sure.” Lena shrugged. “But as long as we get out of here with enough time to hit Harbor Joe’s before first period, I’m cool.”
“You are cool!” Daisy agreed, exuberant as ever. “We’re all cool. The coolest.”
“Daisy?” Lena was tentative, guarded.
“There will be plenty of time to get coffee!” Daisy said, feigning exasperation.
“No, there won’t,” I said flatly, seeing what Lena was looking at.
Coffee is officially off the morning agenda, I realized, my heart sinking.
“We’ve got to go straight to school to talk to Principal Wagner. And she’s gonna have to loop McGinnis in,” I finished.
Daisy didn’t protest. The jocularity had drained from her face, now pale and clam
my. Her eyes darted back and forth as she surveyed the scene:
The fairgrounds, typically a broad, grassy expanse. But today, patches had been burned dead-to-center in the lawn to reveal yet another dark, ominous warning. I shook my head, blinked. Looked again. It was still there.
Daisy swallowed. “You’re seeing this, right? You’re both seeing this?”
“We are,” I said, as Lena nodded.
There, in the grass, each scorched letter at least three feet high and just as wide, was the ugly message:
TIME’S UP.
* * *
“Oh, good,” I said weakly, as we pulled into the Keene High parking lot. “Chief McGinnis beat us here.”
“Maybe he brought coffee,” Lena quipped darkly.
As Daisy parked, the three of us took in the tableau: two police cars, thankfully parked and silent, in the emergency vehicle lane up along the front entrance to the school. A gaggle of concerned Keene teachers clustered along the sidewalk, bottlenecking into a staggered throng of parents up the front steps and through the open doors. Anxious chatter rose in a din.
I looked at Lena and Daisy. Neither of their parents were immediately visible in the group, but that didn’t mean they weren’t in there—you could have shoved a small dinosaur into the middle of that mob and it would have taken a while for even me to sniff it out. Wordlessly, we grabbed hands and moved down the pathway to the side entrance to the school.
“Now, do you want to be the one to tell the chief what we saw?” Lena asked, as we entered the building. “Because I dunno, Nancy—I feel like you kind of have a way with these authority figures.”
Ha. “Yeah, a way of ticking everybody off.”
“The good news is, he already seems super ticked,” Daisy pointed out. She gestured.
We hadn’t even made it halfway down the hall before we stumbled onto the scene. A row of lockers, one thrown open, the chief flanked by three other officers. (Horseshoe Bay was so small, it felt odd that we even had that many officers available to report to a crime scene, but I guess it never hurt to be prepared.) One had a menacing-looking German shepherd at the end of a leash, standing alert, tail extended, at his heel.
“Whose locker is that?” Daisy asked. “And—just curious—what, exactly, do you think McGinnis is having those dogs sniff for?”
“I’m going to go out on a limb,” Lena said, “and guess that the locker is Caroline Mark’s.”
It was hanging open now, and while Chief McGinnis’s body was blocking our view of the contents, the two officers behind him who weren’t handling the dog were carefully bagging items from it in large, meaty gloved hands.
One of those items? A can of red spray paint.
And in two other, smaller bags: what looked like a lipstick and a nail polish, respectively.
“Taking bets on what color you think that lipstick is,” I murmured. Bloodred, no doubt. No bookie alive would take those odds.
“So she was the one who trashed my locker? And the newsroom?” Daisy said, forehead furrowed.
“Looks that way,” I replied.
Which could mean: Someone out there wanted it to look that way.
Then again, she did have means and motive. She’d been on my own suspect list, after all. And Stephenson, her alibi, could have had reasons of his own for covering for her. I’d definitely seen stranger things in other investigations.
But still: my gut.
That curse. My dream. The visions in my rearview window. Two people whose headlights were mysteriously malfunctioning on and off—one of whom I’d recently learned I very much liked to kiss.
Perhaps it could be that simple. Maybe Caroline was behind all the vandalism, and looking into planted evidence, etc., was just wandering too far down bizarre conspiracy-theory paths. Maybe I could get on board with that, tell my gut to calm down, at least for a beat or two, while we sorted this whole mess out.
But that still didn’t account for Melanie.
I was processing, mulling the various threads over, as McGinnis cleared a path for himself and his officers through the gathered students and other rubberneckers. “Excuse me,” he bellowed, loud enough that his words bounced off the tiled hallway wall. “Coming through. We need to get by. Thank you for cooperating.”
But no one was cooperating, not really. Students craned their necks, and the various assistants from the front office hovered anxiously at a just-close-enough remove. (No one was fooled.) Principal Wagner stood in the midst of it all, hands on hips. Her expression was stern, her face stony. Behind McGinnis, another uniformed officer had an arm around the shoulder of one Caroline Mark. A courtesy, I guessed—kinder than leading her off in handcuffs, which theoretically felt like overkill. Until you remembered the carnage at Daisy’s locker, the newsroom … and the missing student, who still hadn’t been found.
I grabbed the shoulder of a passing student. “What time did McGinnis get here?” I demanded.
He shrugged, eyeing me warily. “Not sure. Not too long ago. Maybe just after the school doors opened.”
Not helpful. Doors officially opened at seven for staff, and students who wanted to grab breakfast at the school—a small group, but it existed—could come in as early as seven thirty.
Did that give Caroline enough time to have burned the lawn at the fairgrounds? If she was responsible for the locker and the classroom, did that make her the most likely culprit for the warning sign in the grass, too? Or was that just what someone wanted us to think? Someone, for instance, who had Melanie stashed away somewhere, and wanted to be sure we were busy looking elsewhere instead of hunting them down?
I flashed back to the fairgrounds: the grass had been placid (albeit singed), not smoky. Which meant the burning had been done at least a few hours before we arrived. Time enough for the air to clear.
It could have been Caroline. She could have done it overnight.
But “could have” wasn’t “did.” There was more work to be done. And meanwhile, Melanie was still missing without a trace.
The clock was ticking.
Boldly, I stepped in front of McGinnis as he swaggered down the hall, a Pied Piper leading his own grim band in a short, tense trail behind him. He rolled his eyes when he registered me. “Of course. Nancy Drew. Just what my day was missing.” He gestured at his team, everything they’d collected. “You’ll be happy to know that after we got a warrant to search Caroline Mark’s locker, we were able to gather enough evidence to question her about the recent spate of vandalism.”
“That’s …” “Great” didn’t seem like the right word to use, in this context. “That’s good news,” I agreed. “Were there …” I took a leap. “I’m guessing you didn’t find any connections to Melanie’s disappearance?”
He gave me a bemused smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Now, Nancy, I know you’re our resident child sleuth,” he said, presumably trying for “patient” but missing it by a lot.
I tilted my head at him. “I prefer ‘detective.’ ”
Now he did smile with his eyes, a slow, condescending grin that slithered over his lips unappealingly. “Sure. Detective. Well, I’ll tell you, we’ve been very grateful for all the help you and your friends have given us”—he shot me a loaded look, reminding me of my reluctance to come forward with the information about the bird when it first happened—“but we’ll take it from here. You’re right, we still don’t know where Melanie is, and while I can’t exactly comment on the details of an ongoing investigation, I assure you that we are following any and all leads.”
“But I—” I needed to tell him about the fairgrounds. But the writing on my windshield—that was—
What, a hallucination?
Well, it was unreliable at best. But the grass, that was real, a concrete, tangible thing. Even Daisy and Lena had seen it. And for once, that total-transparency switch had been flipped in a way that would not be ignored. At last.
“But nothing,” he said, cutting me off. “I have to get down to the stati
on. I have some questions for Ms. Mark, as I’m sure you’ll understand.”
“We have something to report!” Lena blurted. “There was more vandalism. Someone burned a note into the grass at the fairgrounds—a warning.”
McGinnis tilted his chin at that, curious. “Really?”
“Yes,” I said, locking eyes with him.
“Well, that’s definitely useful information,” he said. “I thank you for bringing it to our attention. My men and I will be looking into that.”
“That’s—that’s it?” I sputtered, stunned and frustrated. “You don’t want to ask us about it?”
He shrugged. “You told us you saw something at the fairgrounds. We’ll check it out.” He leaned closer to me. “Don’t you get it, Nancy? For me, this isn’t some silly little high school puzzle to solve. This is actually my job—my duty. And believe it or not, I know how to do my job. I’m very good at it.”
“Of course,” I snapped. Barely seventeen and I’d already learned the hard way that very few people in the world enjoyed being in any way shown up by a puny little girl.
Too bad for them.
Because I also was very good at what I did. And what I did, as McGinnis so deprecatingly put it, was solve puzzles.
Maybe he didn’t want my help, beyond the occasional tip or point in the right direction. But he was going to get it anyway. Just because Caroline Mark had been clinched as a suspect didn’t mean the case was closed. Melanie was still missing. Was her disappearance related to Caroline’s vandalism? Was it connected to the warning in the grass? And had someone been following me the other night in Stone Ridge?
The biggest looming question, hanging over me, heavier, even, than a noose:
What was the Naming Day curse, and were we all falling victim to it, even as preparations for the festival churned on?
