Now Entering Addamsville

by Francesca Zappia

  Another staircase went up to the third floor. At the top was only one room, empty except for a dirty, unkempt bed. Artemis went straight to the dusty curtains and peeked through. The windows faced west, not out toward the street, and the western strip of the Goldmine, all the way to Hillcroft House, was visible.

  Artemis turned on her light, and dozens of photos scattered across the floor were caught in it.

  The photos were clustered to the left of the bed, trailing toward the door. Artemis kneeled, sweeping her light over each one, examining them without touching them. Sadie kneeled beside her and pointed to a spot on the floor. Artemis swung her light back. A rectangular area free of dust sat among the other pictures.

  “Tad got the one of Mom from here,” Sadie said. “And look—his footprints.”

  I kneeled. The photos ranged from Polaroids to drugstore-developed prints. A partially torn CVS envelope poked out from underneath the bed. Some were of people, some of places around Addamsville. The bridge. The church. The old town hall. The coal mine entrance. The crowds at the homecoming parade. Bach’s black Mustang, parked by the graveyard. Aunt Greta as a teenager with the old town council members.

  Artemis started flipping them over. All had years scrawled on the back in the same handwriting. She started lining them up by year. “Maybe someone was trying to tell a story.”

  I reached for the CVS envelope and any other photos still scattered under the bed, shining my own small flashlight through the cobwebs and dust, and found a section of one of the floorboards resting beside the hole it should have covered. Had Tad pulled it up earlier and not put it back, or had whoever left the photos cleared out in a hurry and Tad hadn’t looked under the bed? Frowning, I spread out on my stomach, swiped the cobwebs out of the way, and crawled beneath the bed frame.

  Inside the hole was an open shoebox, and in the shoebox was an old map, a mouse skeleton, more photos, and a small tan notebook.

  I grabbed the box and wriggled out from under the bed. Artemis glanced inside and uttered a soft, “Effing dead animals.” Sadie took out the map.

  “It’s old,” she said, spreading it out on the floor. “From a few decades ago. See, the old town hall is still there. What do these mean, though?” She motioned to scrawled pen lines all across the map, areas of town that had been circled in red, lines drawn from one place to another in black. The most obvious marks were several fat black Xs.

  “Those were the locations of the Firestarter Murders,” I said, and my spine knotted up. I handed the new photos to Artemis to look at while I skimmed through the notebook. There was no clue as to who owned it. The handwriting inside matched the writing on the photos, scrawled and loopy, like the person writing couldn’t be bothered to restrain the strokes of the pen. Some of the writing wasn’t legible. There were lists of names, first or last but never both; truncated sentences like in the trees? and been here too long; and occasionally pages headed by a location and filled in with small observations.

  Old Town Hall Lot 10 12 12

  5

  Little movement

  All red

  My glove groaned as my hand tightened around the spine of the notebook. Each one of these pages listed the location of one of the Firestarter Murders. Each page named the number of ghosts at that location and their behavior. The writing was so vague, no one except the writer would understand what was being recorded.

  One marking on the map, in the woods just a little north of where Mom had disappeared, was labeled with Pg. 53. Just to see, I flipped the notebook to page fifty-three and found an entry there that was dated and said, Fnd Chvy.

  “Is there anything else in there besides dead rodents?” Sadie asked, peering into the box. “I was hoping—I thought maybe we could find something for Grim. Something about the will.”

  I shook my head, numb. “I don’t think we’re going to find the will here. Look at this. Do you . . . do you recognize this handwriting?”

  Sadie glanced over the entries in the notebook. Her eyebrows furrowed. “That’s Mom’s. That’s exactly hers.”

  I looked around at the mess. The photos. The map. The little notebook crammed from cover to cover with the strangest notes. “This was hers,” I said. “When she went out at night, this must have been where she came. Or at least where she stopped before she went out to find . . . all of this.” I motioned to the pictures, the notebook.

  Sadie sat back, looking lost. “I thought she just went out to clear her head. She was trying to solve the Firestarter Murders? But why? And what do these notes mean?”

  Artemis and I glanced at each other. She’d been trying to find Bach’s entrance, and she’d hidden all her notes here. The Fnd Chvy page was dated shortly before Mom and Dad got married, and had to mean “Found Chevy”—so Mom had found the Chevelle, not made it into what it was. There were pages in the notebook dedicated to Grimshaw House specifically, but I couldn’t make out what she’d been trying to say—she’d been investigating this place, too, and maybe that was why she’d used it as a base of operations. But Sadie couldn’t be allowed to know that.

  “Look at these.” Sadie plucked two photos from the floor. The first was Bach’s black Mustang at the graveyard. “This is dated 1996. Bach is a senior at Harrisburg, right? He wouldn’t have even been born.” Before we could reply, she held up the second picture. “1973.”

  It was a fuzzy Polaroid of a manor house nearing completion in a clearing surrounded by trees. Construction workers moved in the background, and in the foreground stood a woman holding the hands of three children. All three kids looked like the woman, but the older boy and the girl were smiling, and the littler boy just looked scared.

  “Hermit Forester’s wife and kids?” I asked.

  “No,” Artemis said. “Hermit Forester is the little boy, with the darker hair and eyes. He would have been our age during the Firestarter Murders. He’s in his forties now. The girl is Valerie, who haunts the Now Leaving Addamsville sign on Valleywine. The older boy is Brandon, who’s supposed to be in the woods. Their mom is Lenore.”

  Forester’s human mother. Not the firestarter mother.

  “No, but look.” Sadie pointed to a figure in black watching the construction crew work. Black hair. Sunglasses. Pale skin. The picture quality wasn’t great, but I knew Bach at a glance. “He’d have to be fifty, sixty years old.”

  “Maybe the Foresters have a biased hiring process,” I said. “You know. ‘Only pale-skinned, black-haired teenagers need apply.’”

  “Or he’s an actual vampire.” Sadie’s voice had started to wobble. “Why did Mom have all of this? Why was it hidden here? I don’t understand. What was she doing?”

  I shrugged half-heartedly. I couldn’t tell her. It would only make her life harder. “She was weird,” I said, and it felt like a betrayal.

  “I don’t understand,” Sadie said softly.

  I dumped the mouse skeleton out of the box, then reached past Artemis and began scooping up the photos. “We’re taking them with us. They belonged to Mom; they’re ours now.”

  Artemis would be as eager to look over all of it as I was, but Sadie kept her distance like I held live snakes. We found Grim kneeling by one of the front windows, gazing to the northwest. Sadie grabbed him, and we left the house the way we’d come in. Down to the lakeshore, east to the bluffs. I clutched Mom’s shoebox the whole way home.

  Mom had always said it was her job to protect the town and its ghosts by solving the mysteries no one else could see. I understood why—not to atone for anything wrong you’d done, just because it was the right thing to do—but what we’d found in Grimshaw House made infinitely more sense to me.

  She’d thought the firestarters were linked to the Aberdeen disappearances. Maybe specifically the Firestarter Murders. She’d gone back into the woods because that was where she’d disappeared, but it was also where Hermit Forester lived. So what had happened? Had she entered the woods and hadn’t come back yet because she hadn’t found what she was looking for
?

  Or had something else found her first?

  16

  On the morning of the homecoming parade, town center bloomed with mums and falling leaves, and streamers striped the lampposts lining the parade route. Locals and tourists alike filled the streets. The day was a sunny sixty-five degrees; smells of hot dogs, tacos, kebabs, and funnel cakes wafted down the street. Parents brought folding chairs, and games for their children to play while they waited; others found seats on the curb or the stoops of the shops along Valleywine. Even the ghosts had their spots, as if the people who had come to watch had subconsciously made space for the dead they couldn’t see. There were far fewer ghosts than in previous years, and they hung around the buildings as if they meant to flee at a moment’s notice.

  I’d only come to be seen. It was way more suspicious if someone didn’t come to the parade, no matter who they were. Better to stay out in the open so everyone could keep an eye on me. I planted myself on a picnic bench outside town hall. Above me four American flags hung along the face of town hall, framing the town seal showing a covered bridge adorned with the words ADDAMSVILLE, IN; EST. 1865.

  Mom’s shoebox was tucked underneath Sadie’s bed, where Dad wouldn’t go looking for it. I’d spent the rest of last night, long after Sadie claimed a headache and finally turned in, sorting through her photos and her notes, unable to put them down. The notes were a mess of code, even knowing that she was writing about ghosts and firestarters. She had kept track of routines and habits, likely spots for entrances to appear, the best ways to lay traps for firestarters that had already possessed humans, to get rid of them without anyone thinking she was a murderer.

  Her pictures at least had an order to them. A sense of what she was looking for. Bach and Forester were part of it. She’d been looking for Bach’s entrance for a long time, but her map drew so many lines between the spot where she’d disappeared, Grimshaw House, Forester House, and the Firestarter Murder sites, she must have also thought it had something to do with her and Aunt Greta.

  The only evidence I took out of the house was the photo of Mom and Aunt Greta. It rested snugly in the inner pocket of my jacket. They had been normal girls once, and something had changed them.

  Artemis found me twenty minutes before the parade began, carrying two funnel cakes and a cherry slushy.

  “Here.” She handed over one funnel cake and took a seat beside me. I scooted over to give her more room. “What’s that stare for?”

  “How did you know I like funnel cakes?”

  “You always walk around with one at the parade.”

  “I didn’t know you paid attention to me.”

  “You’re kind of hard to miss.”

  That was fair. And maybe also insulting. But fair.

  “I didn’t figure anything else out from the box,” I said. “Still trying to decipher it.”

  “It was a huge find,” Artemis said quietly. “We could have spent the night better. The firestarter from the mine will get stronger every day. We have to stop it before it kills someone else.”

  “Sadie never would have let me out of the house. Even if she had to sit outside so she didn’t fall asleep.”

  Artemis made a noise. “Can I look through the box soon? She took so many photos around Addamsville. I’ll definitely be able to learn more about all the things that happened here.”

  “Why are you so concerned with the town’s history?”

  Artemis took a long slurp of slushy, thinking. “When you understand the town’s ghost stories, you understand the town. Tragic events and dark times are part of our psyche. Take the lake, for example. It’s been haunted since it was created.”

  “Created? The lake hasn’t always been there?”

  Artemis shook her head and took another slurp. “It used to be a quarry. They started strip mining the coal so they didn’t have to make more mine shafts. Part of it collapsed in the late eighteen hundreds, and a lot of people died. They filled it up after that. The origins of a lot of the lake stories can be traced back to terrible things that happened in the strip mine. Dynamite blowing arms and legs off, accidental burials, flooding.”

  “Huh. So it’s like a middle finger to people like the DMW crew, who do it for the views.”

  Artemis held out a hand in acknowledgment. “The people we tell stories about were real once. They had lives, you know? We shouldn’t let stupid stories bury the truth.” She stopped, sliding the slushy straw around. “Think about your mom. We don’t know what really happened the day she went missing. There are plenty of stories, but there’s a truth there, and I’m sure you want to know it. Right?”

  I kneaded my hand. “Right.”

  “With what we found last night, you’re a little closer to that. Those pictures, that notebook—those are Dasree Novak’s history. A piece of it.”

  “I think all of this is her history,” I said, looking down the road at Addamsville gathered for the parade. “The ghosts, the fires, the disappearances. Figure out one and you figure out the rest.”

  “Too bad it couldn’t clear your name,” Artemis said.

  I snorted. “All we have to do is make the town believe the supernatural exists. ‘Yes, Chief Rivera, Bach is actually a very youthful septuagenarian! I have an old picture to prove it!’”

  Artemis laughed.

  Sadie and Grim appeared before the parade began, Dad corralled between them. He’d bounced back from last night and looked like the sun had risen inside his face. They stopped at one food truck for a walking taco, at another for a vegetable kebab, and at a third for an ice cream cone. Dad double-fisted the kebab and the ice cream while Sadie cradled the walking taco for him. I reminded myself to breathe evenly; they didn’t know what was going on in town. They had no reason not to be at least kind of happy.

  “You look like a smiling terror,” I said. Dad finished a bite of zucchini with a satisfied sigh.

  “It’s a bright day, Zoo! Everyone’s here, the parade’s going to start—hey there, Artemis! Wow, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you. What’ve you been up to?”

  “Hi, Uncle Lazarus. I’ve been fine, focusing on school. My mom should be around here somewhere, if you want to talk to her. She’s been all over the place this morning.”

  “Hopefully she’s a little more welcoming than Buster, eh?” Dad beamed.

  “Everyone’s more welcoming than Buster,” Artemis said.

  Dad laughed. Honestly laughed. Apparently one of the town council members hating you to your face because of something you did was super funny. I wanted to punch Buster as much as the next person, but if someone stole a bunch of my money for something I thought was a worthy cause, I’d be pretty pissed, too. I’d be furious.

  I pressed my lips together and picked at my funnel cake.

  Something caught Dad’s eye down the street and he jumped like an excited dog. “Oh! There’s Abby Rivera. I have to go say hi. See you girls later. Don’t get into trouble, okay?”

  Sadie gave me an exhausted look as she and Grim trailed after him. She wasn’t used to getting up before noon on weekends, definitely not when she’d stayed awake so late, and definitely not when she had to babysit someone with as much energy as Dad, outside, around a lot of people.

  The distant thump of the drums and high keening of the brass floated over the buildings. The parade began at the high school, marched down Handack Street, turned east at Walton, then southwest along the diagonal of Valleywine, where it would pass through town center and make the jackknife to go north up Handack again and end at the high school. The marching band led the way, followed by the four class homecoming floats and the color guard. The mascot, Morty the Dead Miner, ran up and down the parade line, high-fiving little kids and throwing candy.

  Sidebar: the mascot was really called Marty the Miner, but ghost miners are more intimidating. Kind of insensitive about all the real miners who died in this town—some of whom had appeared today to watch the parade—but there were bigger fish to fry.

 
Artemis grew still as the marching band turned down Valleywine. I nudged her. “Why do you look so nervous? Do you have a crush on someone in the marching band? Who?”

  I’d been joking, but she seized up like a rabbit in a flashlight beam.

  “Nobody.”

  “Yeah, okay, that sounds legit.”

  Now she was picking at her funnel cake. I kept an eye on her, and not a moment after I’d turned away, she looked up again and became very focused on the band. At the head of their column was Mads. When she wasn’t working at Hal’s, Mads was in one club or another, or acting as drum major for the marching band. Today her long dark braid was gathered up at the back of her head, and she smiled and marched like a Miss America contestant. I wasn’t a smiley Miss America sort of person, but if I was, I would have wanted to pull it off like Mads.

  Artemis paused with a piece of funnel cake halfway to her mouth.

  “Is it Mads?” I said.

  She dropped the funnel cake. “No.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  Her cheeks flamed. “Oh my god, shut up.”

  “That’s super cute. You should ask her out.”

  “She doesn’t know who I am.”

  “What? Yes, she does! Everyone knows who you are. You’re a town council kid, and on top of that you’ve been on TV.”

  Her blush deepened. “Yeah, for weird things like investigating ghosts.”

  “So? You’re still popular. You have tons of friends.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “If you have at least two friends, that’s ‘tons of friends’ to me.”

  “You can have people who call themselves your friends and you can still be alone. It’s not about hanging out or liking the same things. It’s about understanding each other. When you understand someone, you care about them, for good or for bad. You have a bond. That’s friendship.”