by Nancy Holder
Soon the oily rags began to smolder, then to burn. But the fire traveled too quickly; drugged for the surgeries, the seven girls were having trouble staying in advance of the flames.
Then the door flew open and David appeared on the threshold. Celia held out her arms to him, joyful, terrorized—
And he pushed her back in.
To make her burn.
“Oh, God, oh, my God,” I gasped, snapping out of the vision. I was gripping the sides of the chair, rocking back and forth.
Across the desk, Dr. Morehouse held a box of tissues. When he saw that I was looking at him, he pulled a few sheets out of the box and passed them to me.
I twisted them in my hands. I couldn’t stop crying. Every part of my body ached. My head was throbbing. Even my teeth hurt.
He didn’t soothe me or tell me that everything was all right. He let me cry, and I wept as I had never, ever cried before. Deep, low, soul-shattering, heartbreaking.
Celia’s hair on fire, she burst through the tunnel wall beneath the operating theater. The tunnel wall was blazing, but she dared to run through the flames. The world was falling down into ash.
The sky shook with smoke and screaming.
“Damn you, Celia Reaves!” Belle shouted, left behind to die. “I’ll send your soul to hell for this!”
And Celia, on fire, every inch of her burning, ran.
To the forest, to the ground, to sizzle in the snow. And he found her there, and buried her . . .
“Let me out, let me out!”
Celia pounded hard against the prison of my flesh. I coughed and bent forward so that I could look into the polished wood of the desk to check my reflection. My eyes were chocolate brown. I was myself. Still, she kept fighting. I could feel her.
“When we’ve been traumatized,” he said, “we try to find a pattern. It’s human nature to look for a cause so that we can avoid it in the future.”
“Men,” I heard myself say. Celia’s word, my voice.
“I’m afraid we haven’t given a very good accounting of ourselves.” He handed me more tissues. “I doubt you trust even me.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurted. I didn’t know what to do. He started to reach for my hand, then stopped. I knew about therapists and the no-touching rule.
“No need to apologize,” he said. “Now that we know where we stand, we can move forward. That’s a step in the right direction.” He smiled at his little pun. “We have to find ways for you to learn to trust me. And then I can help you. Are you willing to give it a shot?”
“Help me! Help me help me help me!” Celia screamed inside my head.
Could he help us both?
“I’ll give it a shot,” I said.
“Good.” He turned on his flashlight and aimed it at the wall. I gazed at it.
“There is a path,” he prompted.
Fire! Fire!
“With geraniums,” I said loudly. “My path.”
“Yours,” he assured me. “Let’s count together. Ten.”
Nine.
TWENTY-ONE
“ONE,” I SAID, and opened my eyes. Across the desk, Dr. Morehouse gave me a concerned-therapist face.
“Better?” he asked.
I paused, and checked. Celia’s frenzy was over. So was mine. I felt calm and relaxed. Safe. And not quite so wounded.
“We’ll work on this together, once a week,” he reminded me. “We can’t do it all in one day, so you need to be patient. Today we just got started.”
“It’s just . . . ” I tried to find the words to describe how badly I needed this to be fixed, now. It could be a matter of life and death. Correction: it already was.
“Healing takes time,” he said. “It’s not like we can do something once and be done with it. There’s no shortcut. No pill, no shock therapy. No special surgery—”
“Like a lobotomy,” I blurted.
He looked at me strangely. “Miles Winters was just discussing that with me. It seems Marlwood has a sordid history on that subject.”
“He told me too,” I said. I cleared my throat. This was risky territory. I wasn’t sure how much Dr. Morehouse knew about the night I had lost it. Why had I brought it up?
“Well, luckily we don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”
“No kidding.”
“It was barbaric,” he said. “What makes it problematic is that in some cases, it did work.”
“A quiet zombie is a happy zombie.”
He dipped his head. “The people of that time suffering with severe incurable schizophrenia and chronic deep depression might agree with that statement.” He made as if to rise. That was my cue to leave.
“But that’s not you. You’re a runner, yes? You can’t run one time and be done with it. You have to run every day. You’re training your mind to think a different way.”
“Got it.”
“We need to substitute new habits for the old ones.” He smiled wearily. “Which can be pretty tough.”
I went outside into the fresh air. I didn’t realize that I’d smelled smoke in Dr. Marlwood’s office until I was outside. Or dreamed that I’d smelled smoke. It had rained while I was inside, and Marlwood smelled clean. I looked for Miles and didn’t see him.
I went back to my deeply depressing room and unpacked. Claire told me I was crazy to move in there. She stayed in the doorway and wouldn’t come in.
“They should clear out one of the extra rooms and let you move in there,” she said.
“It’s not exactly wonderful,” I agreed.
“I’ll leave the art for you. It’s original, from our gallery in Maui.”
“That’s sweet.” I smiled at her. “Thanks.”
Julie didn’t make an appearance. Marica told me everyone was mad at her. No one else believed I had broken the head and torn Panda apart.
“It’s like . . . she was picking a fight,” Marica said. “Just looking for something to blame on you.” I agreed with that. Julie had wanted to dump me. Her destroyed possessions provided an excellent reason to do it.
“THEY THINK YOU broke the head,” I told Mandy when I met her in the conservatory. “You or one of your henchpersons.”
Mandy wrinkled her bruised forehead as she poured us each a glass of wine. She had given up on wearing a bandage, and the bumps and purple blotches were spectacular. It amazed me how much abuse a body could take and still function.
The goblets we were using were cut glass, with flat bevels bearing an M in the center—for Marlwood or Mandy, I wasn’t certain. Someone must have swept up the evidence of our last meeting. No one said a word about shattered glasses or drips of Bordeaux red on the fireplace stone.
“We did rip up the mattress last semester. Actually, Kiyoko did it.” She grimaced. “I told her it was going too far. She was OOC.” I thought it was convenient that she could pin the blame on someone who was no longer here. But I glossed over it. I had more pressing matters to discuss. I just wasn’t sure how to explain what I knew.
“I got sent to see Dr. Morehouse,” I continued. “After Julie found the head.”
She nodded. “I’m scheduled for tomorrow.”
I filed that away. “I mean, it was an extra visit, because Julie threw me out. Anyway, I was in the hall, and I heard him talking to someone in his office. And whoever it was, was freaking out. So... ” I trailed off.
“So you put your ear to the door. You got an earful.” She grinned at her own cleverness. “And you have something juicy to tell me.”
I looked down. I was going to make her force me to tell her. She’d be more likely to believe information she had to work for. That was how people were wired.
“Come on. You can’t stop now.”
“It was Lara. She was completely losing it. Mandy, I think she’s the one who trashed your room.” The look on her face would have been funny, if any part of the situation could have been funny. I thought about Miles and his definition of sanity—feeling many things at the same time.
“That
’s not possible.” Blinking rapidly, she swallowed down half her wineglass. “Lara’s my best friend.”
I hesitated. “Remember that night we went to Troy’s together? You went somewhere without her.”
“I go all kinds of places without her. We’re not married. Even if she’d like to be, she’s such a dyke.”
I let that statement speak for itself.
“I heard her talking about stealing things. From classmates. Little stuff. Kleptomania.” I drank some wine, uneasy about the way I was squishing the truth so that Mandy would believe it was the truth.
“That’s just . . . stupid.” She threw back the rest of the glass and poured herself another. “Swiping pencil sharpeners and destroying all my worldly possessions are two different things.”
“That’s true. But it sounded like she was on the verge of copping to it. She sounded like she wanted to unburden herself about something else. Then her time was up.” I shrugged. “I would have let her have my hour.”
“Therapists,” she grumped. “You could tell them you’re suicidal and they’ll ask you to make another appointment because they have a golf game.” She topped off my glass. “Do you think she broke the head, too?”
I sat back in my chair and tipped my glass from side to side, watching the red liquid slosh. No, I didn’t think Lara had.
“I saw your brother,” I ventured.
“I know. He brought us the messenger bag.” She bent sideways and grabbed something, then hefted it onto the table like a dead fish. It was the bag, moldy and smelly. I made a face and cradled my wineglass against my chest.
Did he happen to mention I bit him? I mentally asked her. I gazed down at the bag, remembering that night of screaming ghosts. How terrified he and I had been. Our first kiss.
She opened a tiny black leather shoulder clutch and got a tissue. Cupping the tissue, she opened the messenger bag and reached inside. “He found these in the road.”
It was a pair of men’s black leather gloves. They smelled like smoke, and I recoiled. Then I took the tissue from her and lifted one up, examining it.
“Lined with cashmere, very nice. There’s a burn on the inside of the left wrist. Miles thinks it’s from a cigarette.”
“Was there any ID?”
“We have no clue who they belong to. But he found them at the side of the road, right where he saw the white thing that made him swerve on the Vespa. And . . . ”
She pulled a wad of transparent fishing line from the bag as well.
“Check it out.” She wadded a fresh tissue into a ball and covered it with another one. Then she wrapped the line around the newly formed “neck” below the covered ball and dangled it above her head.
“So someone stretches this line across the road. If you’re on a motor scooter in the rain, and you see something in the road...”
“Oh, my God.”
“Or, someone was going to do some beading and also dropped their gloves.” She reached into the bag a third time. “While they were smoking.”
She showed me the soggy remains of a white box with a red rectangle on the front. The writing was too damaged for me to read.
“Dunhill cigarettes. Pricey. Miles loves them. But these aren’t his.”
“If someone wanted to kill me, they could have done it while I was unconscious.” I felt cold chills running through me. I should be used to almost getting killed, but I wasn’t.
“They were probably after Miles.” She said it like a joke.
“Your brother is scary. Did you find anything else?”
“Aside from all my papers ruined, no. Nice of you to tell him everything, by the way. About the possessions.”
When I started to defend myself, she held up a hand. “It was the right call, Lindsay. I should have told him myself. It just seemed like it would be so . . . tedious to go through the persuasion part. ‘Ghosts are real, spirits are real, I’m possessed . . . ’”
“I skipped it,” I told her. “I told him he could believe it on his own time.”
She snorted. “Sweet. You know, you two skulking around . . . it could make me jealous.”
So maybe you alienated my best friend by destroying her prized possession? I wondered. Or had she talked Miles into doing it? He’d just happened to be outside the storage room when I’d come blasting out. It was a short walk from my dorm to there. Maybe he’d snuck in, ripped up Julie’s things, then waited to see what would happen next.
Maybe he hadn’t found the gloves and other things. Maybe he just said he did. And he was waiting to see what would happen now.
I glanced through the leaves of the conservatory’s lush garden, out the windows into the darkness. Above us, the moon hung fat and yellow.
“You don’t seem too upset about Lara,” I said.
“I’m just hiding it well. I’m upset about all of it.” She nervously tapped the glass with her fingernails. “I look around at everyone, wondering who’s doing these things. Who tried to kill me. And you.”
It’s different now that you’re in danger, I thought. Now that your evil little schemes have come back to haunt you.
“They’re isolating us, don’t you see?” She kept drumming on the table. “Your best friend made you move out. By trashing my room, they’re making me doubt all my friends. Maybe Lara wasn’t even in that office with Dr. Morehouse. There might have been a tape playing. Like in my haunted house.”
There was no easy way I could let her know I was sure Lara had been in there without tipping my hand. I was confused about how much to tell her.
“They who?” I asked, to redirect her attention.
“They who. Exactly.” She shifted anxiously in her chair. “While Miles and I were going through the moldy, disgusting papers in this bag, I did remember that I originally performed the ritual on the full moon. It was a big deal. Like magic is more powerful because of the lunar pull or something. And we can use that to our advantage.”
“We can? Why?”
She huffed at me as if I were a complete dolt.
“There’s a full moon tomorrow night. It’s a Friday night, too. So I thought I’d have one of my parties. We could invite all our suspects and see if anyone acts suspicious.” Her nails clicked on the glass.
“Like... if they’re moonstruck?” I said.
“God. How dense are you?” She tipped the wine into her glass, killing the bottle. “Maybe the moon has nothing to do with it. Maybe that’s just a superstition. But if someone else knows about how this stuff works and holding it then helps make anyone nervous, that’d be a good sign.”
I thought a moment. Mandy gathered up her pretty blond hair and let it cascade over her shoulders. The lack of hair emphasized her bruises, making it look as though her injuries were seeping out from inside her head.
“So we’ll have a full-moon party. And tell people not to moon each other. But if the killer is plugged into any of what’s going on, maybe it’ll be an extra pebble in their shoe.”
“Or maybe it’ll make things go haywire.”
“We can’t hide. That isn’t working,” she countered.
Celia had chosen her host well. Like her, all I wanted to do was hide. But that was no longer an option for either one of us.
“Okay, what’s your suggestion?” she demanded, drumming the table.
“Maybe Celia or Belle knows who it is.”
“I got nothing,” she bit off. “You?”
“No. I—I’m kind of afraid to deal with her.”
“Good.” She mouthed, I’m done. So we both wanted to stop being possessed. That was good.
“I’m not going to sit around and wait for another attack. Spread the word about the party.” She reached down and picked up a second bottle of wine.
“At the lake house?” I hated that place.
“If we’re going for shock value, we should have it at ground zero,” Mandy argued. “The operating theater.”
I hated that place even more. I hated it the most of all the bad places on ca
mpus. Mandy had tried to kill me there. She had set it on fire. Snow had drifted in through the gigantic hole in the roof. And still, it remained standing. And haunted. And evil.
“That was where it all happened,” Mandy said. “The lobotomies. The fire. And that’s why we’re having another bottle of wine.”
“Bring it on.” I held out my glass. We toasted each other.
“We shouldn’t invite too many people,” I said. “We won’t be able to watch them all.”
“I disagree. There’s safety in numbers. Plus we don’t know if it’s someone in our inner circle. It might be some sad little loser stuck in one of the bad dorms, out to pay me back for failing to acknowledge her pathetic existence.”
“You do have a practically infinite number of enemies.”
She moved her shoulders. “I like to make an impression.”
“I’d just like to make it to spring break.”
“We’ll say we’re both throwing the party,” Mandy said. “That way, all the have-nots and are-nots will feel emboldened to show. That’ll mix it up even more.”
“Why do you have to be so mean all the time?”
She picked up her wineglass and squinted at it. “There’s sediment in this.” She looked at me. “I’m not mean. I’m honest. And direct. You think these things too. You just don’t say them.”
“I don’t,” I insisted.
“That’s why you’re in therapy. To learn how to be honest with yourself.”
I exhaled. “I’m not going to argue with you.”
“Good. Because I really don’t care if you’re honest with yourself or not.” She swirled the wine and frowned at it. “This is garbage. Now listen, since you’re poor and have no resources, I’ll provide all the refreshments. But we won’t serve any of this crap.”
“Thank you, your majesty. Do you want to decorate? Meet early?”
“Decorate? Gee, yeah, maybe we should get a piñata, too.” She looked heavenward. “See, this is why you’ll never command any respect.”
“I’ll help you carry the supplies over.” She wasn’t grasping that I was attempting to find out the time of her appointment with Dr. Morehouse without asking her. So that I could spy on her.
