The Secret Grave

by Lois Ruby

  “Yeah, I remember that video clip he showed us of Churchill’s speech, and Mr. Treadwell making a joke about how all newborn babies look like Churchill,” Sara says.

  “Gracie sure did!”

  We all snicker—does it seem disrespectful to laugh while you’re leaning on people’s gravestones?

  Ashamed, I get serious again. “Winston Churchill said something in that speech that’s stuck with me like a song you can’t get out of your head: A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. That’s what this cemetery is, and everything about Cady, too.”

  After a while, we get up, brush the grass off our bottoms, and silently find our way back through the grassy field and towering forest. But the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma is no closer to being solved.

  Vivienne, the cameo, Cady, the dead girls, Cadence—Do they all link, like some cosmic paper chain?

  “Franny, do you remember having a friend named Olivia when you were in fifth or sixth grade?”

  Franny and I are baking brownies to welcome Scooter and Mom and Dad home.

  She pops a chunk of walnut into her mouth. “Sort of. It was a long time ago.”

  “I think her family moved away around 2008. Bainbridge. Olivia Bainbridge.”

  “I have a spotty memory of someone by that name. I’m getting a bad taste in my mouth, and it’s not the brownie dough. Something about Olivia Bainbridge … ” She shoots cooking spray onto the Pyrex pan. “Here, scrape the batter into the pan and stick it in the oven for twenty-five minutes. I’m running upstairs to see if I can find my middle school yearbook.”

  I’m up to my elbows in soap suds and just about have our baking mess cleaned up before Nana Fiona sees it. Warm, sweet smells are coming from the oven as the brownies bake, and then Franny rushes into the kitchen with her yearbook open.

  “I remember her now,” she says somberly, and she points to a picture of a girl with a pixie haircut and huge, laughing eyes. Below her picture it says,

  In Memorium.

  April 4, 1996 ~ August 13, 2009

  Meaning Olivia Bainbridge is dead. “How did she die?”

  Franny shakes her head. “No one really told us. It was summertime, between sixth and seventh grade, so we guessed it was a car crash when her family was on vacation, or maybe she drowned.”

  Drowned! My heart jerks at that word. “Does her family still live here?”

  “I don’t think so.” Franny pulls out her phone and taps in “Bainbridge Dalton.” “Nope, no Bainbridges here now. Sad, isn’t it?”

  Sadder than she could possibly imagine. My eyes keep drifting back to the yearbook page. Something troubles me about the picture of Olivia. What? What? Then it hits me, yes! It says In Memorium, April 1996 to August 2009. She had a birthday in 2009, which would make her thirteen when she died, not twelve. But her effigy says 1996 to 2008. How odd is that? Either it’s a misprint, or somebody made a big mistake carving her headstone. Which one is wrong?

  A half hour later, Mom’s SUV comes sputtering into our driveway, and everyone pours into the kitchen, including Trick, who’s decided running away to the circus would make it too hard to play third base.

  “Scooter!” we all shout. He looks better than he has in months—a few pounds heavier with rosy cheeks. And the best part is, he’s not wheezing.

  We give hugs all around, though Gracie shyly hangs back. Could she have forgotten Mom and Dad and Scooter in such a short time? Or is she just mad at them for leaving her behind while they went to New Mexico?

  Nana grabs Scooter and swings him around the room. “Scott, you are the prince of this castle!”

  Trick asks, “When will the brownies be cool enough to snarf?”

  And Mom and Dad explain how the hospital in Denver figured out the best way to treat Scooter’s asthma. He’s to go back every four months for a tune-up.

  “We’re not moving!” Mom says. “Georgia Dawgs all the way. See, Franny, we’ll make it to most of the home games during your freshman year.”

  “Fab-u-lous,” Franny says sarcastically.

  “The Studebaker’s packed. I’m leaving as soon as the brownies cool. Feels like I’m being sprung from the pokey at long last,” Nana Fiona says, but the love in her face, and the I’ll miss you all in her eyes say the opposite.

  Dad kisses her chipmunk cheek, then picks up Gracie, who gives in and nuzzles and slobbers into his ear. “Anything exciting happening around here?” he asks.

  “Same old thing,” Franny says, slamming her yearbook shut. I notice that she’s stuck a napkin as a placeholder on the Olivia Bainbridge page.

  Same old thing except a bunch of dead girls and a pinkie promise to go swimming in Moonlight Lake tomorrow night!

  It sure is easier getting Luisa and Sara up the ladder to the attic this evening than it was getting Nana up here. The family’s in the backyard where we can’t see them, finishing up a disgusting dinner of fish tacos, which I wouldn’t eat if I’d been on a diet of shoe leather all week. The balcony carpenters are done for the day, and their equipment litters the ground like eerie fossils beneath the window. There’s an uneasy feeling about the three of us all alone up here.

  Once we’re nestled on the cushions, with two fans giving some relief in the stifling attic heat, and my blue-shaded lamp generously offering some cozy comfort, I tell them about Vivienne living in this house more than a century ago. “One night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, she was struck blind.” I snap my fingers. “Just like that.”

  “A person doesn’t go blind in, well, in the blink of an eye,” Luisa protests.

  I shrug. “That’s the story I heard. You decide what to do with it.” Never sure whether Vivienne is listening, I’m careful about my words. I remember how she knocked the cup and saucer out of Nana’s hands in fury, though I can’t remember what we said to feed her rage.

  “Could have been some medical mystery that took her sight,” Sara suggests.

  I’d been giving this a lot of thought. My brother Trick, who has no curiosity about anything besides food and the life-changing debate over aluminum vs. wooden bats, says I’m a Google junkie, and he’s right. So I offer Luisa and Sara my latest theory. “Maybe it wasn’t lightning at all, or even night. Say it was no darker than it is right now, but there was an eclipse in the middle of the day. Maybe she looked directly at the sun during totality when it was just a black circle in the sky. That could fry her eyeballs. All I know is what Cady told me … ”

  Ca-dee … Ca-dee?

  I hear the name drawn out, but neither Luisa’s nor Sara’s lips move. It must be Vivienne!

  Carefully, I continue, “What Cady told me, and what’s happened up here in the attic this summer. Even Nana’s had a Vivienne experience. Vivienne actually talked to Gracie.” That should convince them.

  Sara’s eyes dart around the dark shadows of the attic. “You mean, she’s here? The ghost is right here with us?”

  Luisa laughs. “You don’t believe this stuff, do you? At camp the counselors told scary stories around the campfire, and we all imagined woo-woo spirits rising in the flames, but we knew it was just for fun to spook us before lights-out.”

  The lamp suddenly sputters. Then when the lightbulb shatters into a zillion slivers of glass, we jump like scared rabbits.

  “Whoa!” Sara cries, and Luisa shifts nervously as the attic darkens.

  Vivienne’s listening, I’m sure of it now. She doesn’t know that I’ve been hanging around with somebody named Cady. And, come to think of it, I never mentioned to Cady that I’d been visited by Vivienne’s ghost. Hmm. I sense a few pieces sliding into place like squares on Trick’s old Rubik’s Cube.

  I take the cameo out of my pocket and turn it over so Sara and Luisa can see the initials, V.A.S. “It was hers. Cady told me the V was for Vivienne, but I don’t know about the A and the S.” And then I get a brilliant idea, another hint toward the missing link of the riddle wrapped in the mystery. “What if the S stands for Stanhope?” As soon as the
words are out of my mouth, I’m convinced they’re true.

  “As in Cadence Stanhope in the cemetery,” Sara offers.

  “Get real, both of you,” Luisa says, rolling her eyes. “Forget the stupid cameo pin. The scary midnight moonlight swim is tomorrow. What are we going to do?”

  I’m only half tuned in to the conversation. The other half of me is scanning every inch of the walls, the rafters, the unloved furniture, searching for Vivienne.

  “ … think all those dead girls swam in Moonlight Lake?” Sara asks.

  Luisa groans. “Your imagination is in hyperdrive.”

  I lay the cameo down on the floor beside me. The black onyx profile isn’t blinking, the hair ornament is the same as always, and the gold filigree border hasn’t changed, though it’s not glimmering here in the dusky attic as it would in the brilliant sunlight. But there is something different about it. What is it?

  Sara and Luisa chatter on about the midnight swim. Should we or shouldn’t we? How would we sneak out of our houses? I’m not listening. Something’s nagging at me about the cameo. I can’t put my finger on it. And then that’s exactly what I do—put my finger on it when I pick it up to look more closely and gasp.

  “What?” Sara asks in alarm.

  I tap my lips—shh—and stare at the cameo and trace it with my fingers to be sure what I see is really there, or actually not there. It’s like when you see two cartoons that look just alike, and you have to find the five teensy differences between them. There’s only one difference in the cameo: the pearls tight around the woman’s throat—they’re gone! And then I can’t remember for sure that they were ever there.

  Vivienne, I say silently, if you want the cameo back, come and take it. It’s yours.

  “Because if those girls are all buried—or, I guess, not buried—in the same place,” Sara says, “then maybe all their ghosts are there, and we’re … ”

  “There is no such thing as ghosts!” Luisa roars.

  At that very moment, a fluttery see-through form floats across the room and fades into nothingness.

  Sara whispers, “Did you see … ?”

  We all gape in disbelief, our three hearts beating to the same terrifying rhythm.

  “Vivienne?” I whisper. No answer. “Vivienne!”

  And a voice, as thin and fragile as the lightbulb shards on the floor, calls out.

  I see all.

  Sara clutches her throat, and Luisa slides closer to the fading light from the window.

  “See all?” I ask. “But you’re blind, aren’t you?”

  I SEE ALL, the ghost says more emphatically, as if she’s annoyed with us for doubting her.

  On a hunch, I try out the chant: “Luisa, Sara, Hannah, and Cady, Midnight moonlight loon nightshady.”

  She repeats it just as I said it!

  “I’m not crazy. You both heard it, right?” Sara cries.

  “Loon nightshady.” I roll that around in my head a while. “Loon-night-shade-y.” Then something I hadn’t noticed becomes clear. “Our house is called Nightshade, did you know that? But now I also know that it’s named after the poisonous belladonna plants that grow in the dark.”

  “Loon nightshady,” Luisa repeats. “What do we know about loons?”

  I wake my iPad and click on a YouTube of loon sounds. At low volume, they sound eerie, haunting—like the wails of Nana’s banshees foretelling death. At top volume, they explode in our imaginations. In a panic, we scramble to gather our stuff and scuttle down the ladder to the safety of my room.

  But a haunting voice trails us just before we slide the ceiling door shut:

  Midnight moonlight—NO!

  All three of us are lying on our backs across my bed with our legs straight up the wall. Red toenails (Sara), white toenails (Luisa), and blue toenails (me, of course) lined up on the rosy wallpaper.

  “We look like a commercial for the Fourth of July,” Sara observes, kicking one of Gracie’s bean bags across Luisa’s feet to mine. It’s a game called wall soccer that we invented and we’ve played since kindergarten. That was before we believed in ghosts.

  “Yeah, but it feels more like Día de los Muertos,” Luisa says. “Day of the Dead. Big in my culture, to remember friends and family who’ve passed on, wish their souls well on their journey, that sort of thing.” She picks up the guitar that Trick and I share. I know about three chords, which is two more than Luisa knows. Plink, pluck, plink, brmmm, and then the same thing over again, as she tunelessly sings a song in Spanish.

  “So what are we going to do about the midnight moonlight disaster?” Sara asks. “It’s only about twenty-nine hours from now. Twenty-nine hours to our doom, girls!”

  “Okay, here’s a plan,” Sara continues. “I’d never be able to get out of my house at midnight. My parents are practically bloodhounds when it comes to hearing things like a door squeaking open. You’d never get out of your house, either, Luisa, ’cause your parents are total night owls. But here at Hannah’s it’s always a tornado of activity. Her parents wouldn’t notice if we climbed out a third-floor window.”

  “So why don’t we all sleep over here?” Luisa says. “That is, if we’re actually going swimming.”

  I smile. “Even if we don’t, it’s been forever since we had a sleepover. My dad’s got a quadrillion movies we can watch until they go to bed. They usually conk out about eleven o’clock.”

  Luisa says, “It’s a plan!”

  Later, after Mom tucks Scooter and Gracie in, she peeks in on us three girls with a hint that it’s time for Luisa and Sara to go home before it gets too dark. Then she heads upstairs to work on her “Dear Bettina” column. She’s got a letter from a guy engaged to two women named Sandra, and he’s having trouble keeping the details of the two weddings straight. What to do? How do people get into messes like that?

  But I’ve got a mess of my own, one that “Dear Bettina” can’t solve for me.

  Up in the studio the next morning, Dad’s got his yellow hardhat on. He’s getting ready to go to a new job site. Mr. Mosely’s crew finished up with our balcony and has moved on to adding a wing onto a beauty shop called Hairs to You, which sounds like a place where dogs shed a lot, and he’s asked Dad to help with the plans. The new sliding door to the balcony is crystal-clear. Glass without Gracie’s fingerprints! I slide it open and step onto the balcony with its tiled floor surrounded by a latticed stucco half-wall. Standing here in the cool morning breeze, I try to imagine Vivienne in this space, while she could still see inspiration for her paintings from the brilliant greens and golds of the forest beyond. It’s peaceful now. A tiny hummingbird hovers nearby. Vivienne would like this. And then I imagine the horror of losing her sight out here when the black sky ripped open with a burst of jagged light, or was it an eclipse?

  I hurry inside, locking the door behind me.

  “Hey, Dad, something’s on my mind.”

  “I’m all ears. Hit me.”

  Ordinarily I’d just reach over and punch his arm as a joke, but today I’m deep in serious thought. “You know your grandparents’ old trunk? I got into it and found their wedding picture.”

  “Handsome couple. Runs in the family,” he says, pinching my cheeks.

  “How come your grandparents only lived here for a year?”

  Dad scratches under the hardhat with a scary architect’s tool that looks like something from a torture chamber. “I don’t know the whole story, but what I’ve heard is that they bought the house after the war. That would be World War II, the war after the War to End All Wars. The plan was to fill it up with children, like we have. But your Nana Fiona turned out to be their only child, so what did they need with a huge house like this? Talk to Nana about it. Sorry, I gotta get going. Mac Mosely’s waiting for me to make a big, expensive decision on that hair place.”

  Dad’s explanation about Cecil and Moira sort of makes sense, but I still wonder. Was there some other reason why they moved in and out so quickly? Could it have been because Vivienne made it
impossible for them to stay?

  The cool of the morning is my perfect opportunity to dash off to the forest for a few minutes. I’ve been wondering about Cady’s boat, and where she got the planks for it.

  It’s not hard to figure out as soon as the cabin is in sight. It’s leaning toward some trees as if a truck accidentally nudged it off its foundation. Closer up, I see that the whole back side is gone.

  “What did you do?” I bellow. There’s no answer, not that I expected one. “Cady! Cady!” I call at the top of my lungs, furious that she’s destroying this cabin board by board. But then, why should I care? It was just a pile of rotten wood. Still, it was the one thing I could count on being there, when Cady wasn’t.

  I’m answered with silence. When Cady’s gone, she is so gone, and I have no idea where. What’s that weird thing Dad says? If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there, does it make a sound?

  Moonlight Lake lies a few yards from the cabin. Two ducks lazily swim circles around each other. The lake is calm and beautiful in the thin, early light of day. What will it look like at midnight tonight?

  No one’s inside what’s left of the cabin. If I poked at any of the three remaining walls, the whole thing would crumble. Cady’s picnic basket is back on the rickety table, taunting me to open it. Why am I not surprised to see the peach music box Nana Fiona gave me? Glued on the bottom is a metal sticker with my name: Hannah Ruth Flynn. I twist the key, and “Sweet Georgia Brown” fills the empty room as the peach slowly revolves.

  Cady’s been here this morning, which I can tell by the fact that another fat yellow candle is burning on top of the dried wax in the center of the floor. Should I blow it out? The candle flame is flickering, fluttering toward the open space.

  An ominous feeling prickles my skin, and I tear out of the cabin so fast that my feet can barely catch up with the rest of my body. I shoot like an arrow straight out of the forest. I hate this place. I’ll never come back!