“Didn’t see you stopping me, baby.” Will Patrick laughed, wiped his own mouth, then punched Flanagan. “What were you’re doing, just watching me get run over?”
“Bro, it happened wicked fast, and she moved like, like . . . damn.”
Wicked fast.
Wicked.
Something wicked this way comes, I thought and wiped my mouth again. I felt sick to my stomach, like the birthday cake and pizza were a bad idea. I wanted to be home, on the couch with a cup of tea, my ma singing and hustling in the kitchen the way she used to. “Know what?” I said. “Life’s too short for this crap. I’m going home.”
“Hey!” Kelly said. “Don’t go. Don’t waste the tickets.”
“Sorry.” I flipped up my collar and started across Tremont. “But one bloodsucker’s enough for one day.”
Will Patrick hooked Kelly’s arm and pulled her close. He pressed his lips against her ear, and she blushed the way she always did when impure thoughts crossed her mind. He had pulled the same trick on me, the sweet words, the invitation into his charming world of bad boy-ness. I felt another prick of jealousy and betrayal, but it passed quickly this time. I realized that it was all just an act, a well-rehearsed trick to make a girl think she was the center of his world. There was only room for one person in his world, though, and it was William Patrick Wilson III.
“Willie!” Siobhan loped across the crosswalk and grabbed my arm. “Don’t leave me with those asswipes! Butt chin! Come with!”
“You guys!” Kelly took a lingering look at Will Patrick, sighed loudly, and then followed us. “Don’t just walk off, for chrissakes.”
I expected Will Patrick and Flanagan to say something smartass, but they were looking past us, pointing, along with the others standing on line. I turned to the massive trees that overshadowed the burial ground. A murder of crows lifted from the thick branches as one dark mass. They swirled above us, cawing to one another in hoarse grunts and deep rattles. The wind from their black wings touched my face, and the calls filled my head with noise, a roar that grew so loud that I clapped my hands over my ears and clenched my eyes tight. Then just like that, the sound was gone, and when I opened my eyes, the birds had disappeared into the night.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A half hour after leaving the theater I was in a window seat at Frank’s Mini-Mart, sitting between the Two Towers, aka Siobhan and Kelly, slurping down double hot fudge sundaes. Our faces were reflected like ghosts on the glass. On the wall behind us, a big-screen TV was tuned to the Bruins game, which had been interrupted twice by a weatherman reporting a nor’easter forming off the coast.
Kelly licked her empty sundae dish and turned to watch the game. “God, I miss Tim Thomas.”
“Tim who?” Siobhan baited her.
Kelly imitated a Southie accent, badly. “Only the best freaking goalie evah.”
“Impossible,” Siobhan said, and for her, the accent wasn’t imitation, “as I’m the best freaking goalie evah. Which All Saints is gonna to find out this time tomorrow. Am I right?”
The three of us started for Beacon School girls’ hockey. Kelly and I played defense, and Siobhan was goalie. She wasn’t the fastest keeper in the scholastic league, but she had flawless technique and a knack for knowing where the puck was going. Our coach called it hawkey smahts. Siobhan was this close to a D1 scholarship, which was the only way she was going to a Public Ivy. Unlike Kelly, who had the grades and money to go to anywhere, she was a blue-collar girl. She lived with her dad in a duplex three blocks from us. As for me, no coach wanted a defender too short to reach her own cookie jar, so my career would end after high school.
“Best goalie ever?” Kelly said. “And I’m Brad Marchand.” She flung her arms wide. Her hand knocked the ice-cream dish off the table, and she gasped as it fell toward certain destruction.
I grabbed the dish and in one fluid motion, returned it to the counter.
“Wicked save!” Siobhan applauded. “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”
“How did you move so fast?” Kelly said.
Wicked fast. Unnatural. “I just . . . got lucky. That’s all,” I said, then felt a weird tug, like a wire was hooked to my belly button.
“You’re pale as a ghost.” Siobhan touched my forehead. “Skin’s clammy, too.”
“It’s the weird lights.” I pointed to the neon green beer sign, then giggled compulsively. “You guys look like Hulk’s little sisters.”
“Since when do you giggle?” Siobhan checked my pulse. “Your heart’s pounding.”
“I giggle. I have giggled many times in my life.”
“Name one,” Siobhan said. “You’re so uptight you could swallow a lump of coal and—”
“Third grade!’ I snapped my fingers. “During the Christmas pageant I giggled for a solid minute.”
“Because you were Rudolph and you forgot your lines,” Siobhan said. “Then you cried so hard, your ma had to carry you home.”
“It still counts.” I tried to stand up and found my knees had melted like double hot fudge.
“Wullo?” Siobhan said, sounding as if she were underwater.
Her lips were moving, but the words were distorted. Siobhan’s and Kelly’s faces looked frozen, their mouths open, eyes half shut. It felt like I could reach out and touch their eyeballs before they blinked. Their breath was visible, and I could see every pore in their skin.
I turned to the TV. A thick black band rolled down the screen, like when you take a picture of a television with a camera. My science teacher said it was because TVs always had black lines running through them, but they moved so fast, the human eye couldn’t perceive them.
Siobhan shook me. “Willow Jane!”
“It’s the birthday cake,” I said, snapping out of it. “Sorry, my blood sugar’s just screwed up.”
“Come on.” Siobhan nudged Kelly. “Let’s get Miss Sweet Sixteen back to the palace before she turns into a pumpkin.”
“She looks more like a zucchini than a pumpkin,” Kelly said.
“It matters why?” Siobhan said.
“Zucchinis are green.”
“You’re a zucchini.”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “You said she was looking green, not orange.”
“And I thought Willie was the literal one.” Siobhan waited for Kelly to open the door, then steered me outside into the evening. “Butt chin, you okay to walk yourself home?”
“Like I’m going home,” Kelly said, waving good-bye and blowing us a kiss. She pulled her phone out and was texting before she turned the corner.
“One day’s she’s gonna fall in a manhole,” Siobhan said when we reached the crosswalk. “What’s up, Willie? You’re acting funny. Not funny ha-ha, funny strange.”
“We live in the Hub of the Universe!” I said, arms wide. “What could possibly be wrong?”
She pulled me in for a bear hug that got me a face full of curly black hair. “Happy birthday, Willow Jane.”
“Your hair still smells like charcoal,” I said, picking a strand of hair out of my mouth.
“Cause I’ll walk through flames for you.”
“You lit your hair. It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s even better! Cause sparklers!”
We said good-bye, and I turned for home. God, I was glad the day was finally over. It had been just a few hours, but I was shuffling like the walking dead up the front stoop, hoping for a quiet dinner and a night’s sleep without nightmares.
I reached for the doorknob and heard the flapping of wings. In one quick movement, a grackle swept past me, so close I felt feathers on my cheek, and slammed into the window next to the door.
The glass shattered.
The bird fell to the sidewalk. It lay there, twitching, wings mangled, dusk dancing in its iridescent feathers.
“Poor thing,” I said, but as I reached for it, the bird jumped up and with a flap took to the air. I stepped back, dizzy again.
The bird, the buildings, the street, ev
erything moved in and out of focus, as I bent over and threw up the cake-and-pepperoni remains of the worst birthday ever.
CHAPTER NINE
“SERIOUSLY, bro,” Will Patrick told Flanagan. “The voice said ‘treasure.’ Heard it loud and clear, just like my grandmother yammering in my ear.”
“Clean out your ears then, because I ain’t heard jack.” Flanagan popped the first bottle of a sixer. “You owe me ten for the beer.”
The movie at the Orpheum Theatre had long since ended. The crowd had thinned to a few stragglers hunched in the darkness against the cold. In the Granary Burying Ground, Will Patrick and Flanagan sat at the base of the Franklin family obelisk, backs to the deserted street. They’d scored a couple of six-packs by slipping a homeless guy ten bucks, plus an extra ten when he refused to turn over the goods.
“Goddamn extortionist,” Will Patrick said. “I should’ve kicked his ass.”
He tossed an empty bottle across the graveyard. It crashed against the headstone of Paul Revere and broke into thousands of pieces.
“Hey,” Flanagan said, “you just defiled the grave of a great patriot.”
“Yeah right,” Will Patrick said but started tromping toward the grave anyway. “My history teacher said nobody ever heard of Revere until some dumbass wrote a poem. He made all his money as a silversmith. When he died, he had his silver hidden in his casket so grave robbers couldn’t find it. Wait! That’s it! Treasuuuuuuuuu—”
With a crack the ground collapsed beneath his feet. One second he was standing, the next he was writhing on his back, nine feet below, covered in dirt, leaves, and chunks of the lid that had once hidden the hole.
“You total wad.” Flanagan looked down into the hole. “What the hell?”
Will Patrick moaned and crawled to his feet, a sharp pain in his lower back bending him over. He raised a hand but couldn’t reach the lip of the hole.
“You’re in a freaking grave!” Flanagan crossed himself and spit. “Get out!”
“It’s not a grave. These walls are stone. It’s a tomb.” Will Patrick snorted. “I’m a tomb raider. Ha-ha.”
“You ain’t gonna think it’s funny when you see the goose egg on your skull.” Flanagan turned on his cell phone light. A stairway led down into darkness. “Stairs? Seriously?”
“Follow the yellow brick road.” Will Patrick laughed and started toward them, still hunched over.
“Hey!” Flanagan called. “Don’t go down there!”
Will Patrick waved him off and disappeared into the shadows.
“Ten bucks says you piss yourself,” Flanagan said. He knew he should follow but Grandmother had raised him Catholic, and even if he never listened in Mass, he knew doing belly flops with the dead was a bad idea.
For a few seconds his cell phone light continued to illuminate the stairway. Then, without warning, it went out.
“Yo!” Flanagan’s voice echoed, but there was no answer, and there was no light. Seconds ticked off, but they felt like minutes, and panic formed in the pit of his gut. Something was wrong. He could feel it. Holes didn’t suddenly open up in cemeteries, and you sure as hell didn’t go crawling around them in the dark.
“Asswipe!” he stage-whispered into the blackness. “Answer me!”
“Boo!” Will Patrick shouted, jumping out of the darkness.
“Holy hell!” Flanagan screamed and fell backward into the dead leaves. He clutched his pounding heart. “Don’t do that! I had too many beers for that shiz.”
Digging his toes for purchase onto the stone wall, Will Patrick pulled himself from the hole and knocked the dirt off his pants. A goose egg was rising on his head, and a rivulet of blood trickled down his face to his neck, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You’re not going to believe what I found!”
“For real?”
“A casket covered in writing and pictures.”
Flanagan let out a long burp. “Liar.”
“What if the casket holds Paul Revere’s hidden stash of silver? Huh? Huh?”
“You didn’t look?”
“I tried. The lid wouldn’t budge. You want to try?”
Flanagan had no desire to open some dead jackweed’s coffin, but if there really could be treasure? “I’ll get a crowbar and maybe a sledgehammer. Meet back here to open the bitch up.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Will Patrick said. “What time?”
“Midnight.”
“The witching hour. I like it.”
“Sláinte.” Flanagan raised a toast. “May the road rise to meet you, boyo.”
“Erin go bragh,” Will Patrick said. “Or some Irish shiz like that.”
“Watch your mouth about the Irish,” Flanagan called back as he cut across the burying ground. “Or the road’s going hit your pretty face.”
A street cleaner rumbled down Tremont. Flanagan waited till its bright lights were almost past, then stepped on the low wall and vaulted over the iron fence. He looked up as a massive crow soared into the trees behind him. The bird landed on a thick branch and started preening. It yanked its feathers by the beakful and let them drop into the hole below. In minutes half its breast was plucked bare, as if it were molting, and its corneas had turned milky white like the eyes of an ancient blind man.
That’s one fugly bird, Flanagan thought. His grandmother always said crows were an evil omen. Even though he didn’t believe any of the crap, he crossed himself just to be sure, unaware that it had already marked him for death.
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN I got upstairs, Ma stood by the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes. She wore her cooking apron, a bright yellow frilly job with a red rooster on front. Maggie Mae Conning was magical with needle and thread, but she was a danger to herself and others when it came to food preparation, so she usually either left dinner to me or grabbed something from the frozen food aisle.
Lots of weird things had happened today, but none of them were as strange as seeing my mother cooking again.
“You’re home early,” Ma said when I came in. “Everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” I lied. “Just wasn’t in the mood for bloodsuckers. Be right back.”
I dashed to the bathroom to clean up, and when I came back, Devon was sitting quietly in front of the couch, cutting out paper dolls and arranging them on the oak floor. Our apartment had once been a grand home. Its ceilings were high and trimmed with crown molding iced with dust. The walls were last painted when I was six, and the sunflower yellow had wilted to pale ocher. The sloping floors were swept once a day and mopped on Friday. A bay window in the living room looked into the building across the street and down on the corner. Traffic, voices, and the oily scent of Silver and F Streets intruded when the windows were opened and were barely smothered when they were closed.
Our furniture was Early American Little Old Lady. The pieces were inherited from my late grandmother, who had lived a block away in an apartment that mirrored this one, but they couldn’t be called antiques. That word implies that the pieces had once been expensive, designed by craftsmen, not modest furnishings that had weathered three generations of abuse by children, husbands, and pets. The only heirloom was from my dad’s side—a curio cabinet in the corner of the dining room. It was so old that the glass had begun to run, like water frozen in time.
“You’re cooking dinner?” I asked. Cooking had been my job since the sixth grade. “I thought you had a dress rehearsal? Everything okay?”
“Isn’t that what I just asked you?”
“Seriously, Ma.”
“My, aren’t we the little mother?” Ma smirked and shook her head. “The actors were grousing about rehearsing on Sunday, so the director threw a tantrum and told the bunch of them to go home and thank God they had jobs.”
“You’re not fired?”
“Fah! Who’d make the costumes?” She pointed to a bag of vegetables on the table. “Start peeling. Pizza’s nobody’s idea of dinner.”
I sighed in relief. She hadn’t been let go agai
n. Since Dad died, she’d had trouble holding down a job.
“I’ll be happy to help.”
“Before you do.” She took a wrapped box from the top of the fridge. “For your birthday.”
The paper was plain silver, and the red bow was a stick-on. Ma never cared much for wrapping, even Christmas presents.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Open it and find out,” she said while I plucked the bow and ran a finger through the cellophane tape. “Times are hard, so . . . well, you know. I didn’t want to give you some useless piece of crap, you know?”
“You shouldn’t have,” I said.
“Yeah, I shoulda, and it shoulda been better.”
Ma never got nervous, and she almost never apologized. There was an edge in her voice that was both an apology and a hope that I wouldn’t be disappointed. No matter what was inside, I was prepared to love it.
I pulled the wrapping off and set it on the table. Inside was a cherry box no bigger than my hand. I had seen the same box on Ma’s dresser since I was old enough to walk. It sat between her jewelry and a silver-framed portrait of her mother. The only difference was that the wood had been freshly oiled, and my initials were carved into the lid and gilded with gold paint.
“The set designer did the carving in trade for me taking in his suits.” She rubbed her hands, concentrating on her swollen knuckles. Four decades of sewing had taken its toll on her joints. “Your dad’s ma gave me those for a wedding present because Connings never have girls. Since you’re sixteen now, I thought . . . well, you know, time to pass the torch back to the Connings.”
My heart skipped a beat. Yes, I’d seen the box every day, but I could count on one hand the number of times I had been allowed to marvel at the contents. The gold hinges creaked when I pushed the lid open. Twin thimbles lay in a nest of red velvet. They were white porcelain, hand painted with blue and yellow flowers and green foliage. The bottom of each was wrapped with a gilt Gitterwerk band made of fourteen-karat gold. Ma once told me they were made in the 1750s in Meissen, Germany. They had been in the family for hundreds of years.
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