Now Entering Addamsville

by Francesca Zappia

  My hands had balled into fists and my gloves were squeaking. “Fine.”

  Forester smiled. “Great. Bach.” He nodded toward me.

  Bach pulled a folded slip of notebook paper from his coat pocket and gave it to me. A phone number.

  “Yours?”

  Bach cleared his throat. “You’re the only one who has it now, besides Sammy.”

  Forester had receded into the shadows, though I hadn’t seen him move his feet.

  “And, if I help, and Hildegard comes back . . .”

  “Sammy’s right,” Bach said. “She’ll only come back for him. If something threatens him, that’s what she’ll go after. You don’t have to worry.”

  Coming from Bach, it didn’t sound so dangerous.

  “Fine,” I said again. “I’ll let you know when I have something.” I glanced at Forester. “And uh, thanks.” I didn’t know for what. Not killing me?

  Forester nodded. A small smile. Dark eyes. “Anytime, Zora Novak.”

  I straightened my visor and slipped inside Hal’s, pressing the door shut behind me and working a violent shiver out of my shoulders. When I peered through the front window, Bach was climbing into his car again. Forester was nowhere to be seen.

  Despite all the stories about Sam Forester, no one would believe the truth. Son of a firestarter. Actual serial arsonist. There was no remorse visible in him, and no apparent guilt for what he’d done.

  Bach was something else entirely.

  Despite knowing about Hildegard, I’d never thought of Bach having a mother. He fit into this town so well it was like he’d come included in the package. But I recognized the tone of his voice when he talked about Hildegard, the way he flattened his words and evened out his expression, like it didn’t matter. Like it didn’t hurt.

  “That was a long time to correct change.” Mason rolled up on me, his face right by my shoulder. “You already took your break tonight and I don’t care if your boyfriend’s here, you can’t have another one.”

  “Mason,” I snapped, rounding on him, “He is not my fudging boyfriend and you do not know what the flipping funsicle fudgecakes you’re talking ab—”

  A gasp rose from the crowd outside. Someone pointed toward the woods. Then two people. Then ten. People stood from tables and chairs, raising their phones to the darkness and the ocean of rustling trees. Mads and Lorelei were already at one window looking out; I ducked down to see better out of mine.

  There was a light in the trees. A campfire would not have been visible from so far away, even at night. It would not have risen over the treetops, flickering, growing.

  Someone yelled, “That’s where the house is!”

  And someone else, at exactly the same time, “The crew!”

  For the second time in thirty years, the Forester mansion was on fire.

  20

  No one from the Dead Men Walking crew was seriously injured. Addamsville’s single fire engine raced past Hal’s on the way to the woods, and the next morning, the story was plastered over the news.

  The Dead Men Walking cast and crew had all been inside when the arsonist struck. No accelerants. No explosives. The investigators, the only ones inside at the time, had escaped by jumping out a window. Emergency vehicles came and went throughout the morning. Chief Rivera called in the Harrisburg Police Department to help with crowd control; even with the bridge blocked, ghost hunters and DMW fans were wading across Black Creek to get into the woods.

  Forester and Bach hadn’t been there, of course; they’d been with me, at Hal’s. Ludwig had struck while they were away. Maybe when he knew they’d be talking to me, and he’d have a whole van load of people in one place, unattended. Bach had once done the same thing with the old town hall. Forester and Bach had remained at Hal’s while the fire raged to solidify their alibi, but Forester looked ready to bare his teeth and scream.

  I just stared. I couldn’t have gotten the Chevelle past Jack and Norm at the bridge, and I would have been caught by the emergency vehicles on my way out of the woods. But more than that, I would have had to fight him. Ludwig. In the fire. Alone.

  On the news, Tad Thompson stood by the DMW van outside the local clinic, waiting for the medical staff to clear the injured crewmembers for work. “It was terrifying, for sure,” he said, “especially with how fast the flames went up, but this is the kind of work we do, you know? This is why we chose to come to Addamsville. Whoever is setting these fires is a criminal and has really hurt people, but we don’t blame the town for this.”

  The reporter took her microphone back. “You told the police you saw someone lurking outside the house shortly before the fire began. Can you elaborate on that?”

  “As we were setting up for filming, I saw someone in black creeping around. It’s not strange, you know, we have a lot of fans following us and every once in a while they’ll sneak onto the set. Just look at what happened in the mine. Our production assistants did a sweep around the house and didn’t find anyone, so we started shooting. Then maybe a minute before we noticed the fire, I saw him again. Black jacket, kind of wavy black hair, black sunglasses. Had to be at least six feet tall, maybe more. I thought it was weird that he was wearing sunglasses when it was so dark outside, but I figured he didn’t want anyone to see his face.”

  It couldn’t have been Bach, because he’d had been at Hal’s. Which meant Ludwig was impersonating Bach now, too.

  Monday became an exercise in telling myself I had to do something, then looking over my shoulder, skin crawling. I went to school on autopilot and managed to be on time to all my classes for once. Unfortunately, that meant I had to hear every rumor about what might have happened.

  In homeroom Nathan Riley claimed he saw Chief Rivera walking Bach into the police station, handcuffed. Ally Reed, in my history class, swore the fires had been started by the ghost of the arsonist who’d committed the Firestarter Murders. Then there was Joe Denford, in my physics class, who said to Will Harrison, “. . . and they teamed up so one person could have an alibi and one person could be doing the deed. Then they switch back and forth so no one can link the fires to either one of them. That’s what my dad says. He didn’t want me to come to school today because she’s still here.” He started looking around, and before he spotted me, I did him a favor and threw a pencil at the back of his head.

  “I didn’t set any fires or try to kill anyone, Joseph, thank you for asking.” I said it loud enough for the whole class to hear. “And you can tell your dad to stop spreading stories he gets from Buster Gates.”

  Everyone talked, always. I heard a story that Bach and I were some kind of Bonnie and Clyde duo, into arson kink and killing old men. I heard another story that I’d given my amputated fingers to Bach as a declaration of undying love. Another that said we were in a cult.

  At lunch I found a corner to myself, finally some peace and quiet, and put my hands around my hot cup of nacho cheese to warm them. Things like eating seemed trivial. I needed to hunt. Right now. But how do you hunt for something no one knows exists when everyone watches your every move during the day and Buster Gates is ready to chase you down with his monster truck at night?

  I looked up from my cheese. Artemis leaned toward me, frowning.

  “Jesus!”

  “We have to get my memory card back,” she said, as if she hadn’t startled the daylights out of me. “We have to make sure it doesn’t get out—people are going to want to know what happened. It’s more important than ever. Before the DMW crew leaves town.”

  I settled into my seat, willing the goose bumps on my arms down and reaching for a breadstick. I was done with the stupid memory card. “Yeah, so?”

  “So we have to go there and talk to them.”

  “You sound as stupid as your mom sometimes, you know that? Those people are probably going to have trauma for the rest of their lives. They already forgot about the memory card.”

  “You think at least one member of that crew won’t see that footage and use it as publicity? A
nd what about the fans? That footage will get out eventually, and someone is going to come here looking for the truth. It doesn’t matter what you have to do to get it back—it cannot get out.”

  A cold chill slithered over me.

  “What I have to do?” I frowned as I chewed. “I thought we were working on this together? Freudian slip? And yes, Artemis, I know what a Freudian slip is.”

  Artemis leaned back, some of her intensity fading. “I’m grounded. I’m not allowed out of the house except for school, and I have student council today, so by the time that gets done it’ll be late.”

  “So you want me to go to the hotel where the DMW crew is staying and ask them for our memory card. Less than twenty-four hours after they almost get killed in a house fire. That a lot of people think I helped start. They aren’t going to give me the time of day, much less that memory card.”

  Artemis sat in silence for a moment. She pushed her fingers together and apart on the table, spreading them flat. “You could also not talk to them.”

  She stared at the table when she spoke, only glancing up at the very end. My stomach had coiled in a rope, but I kept chewing. Then I swallowed and set my breadstick down on my tray. “Are you telling me,” I said slowly, “to steal your memory card back?”

  “They stole it from us!” she said. “And they’re not shooting tonight, so all their equipment should be in their van or their rooms. I’m sure they’ll go out for dinner or something. It’s not that hard to break into a motel room, right?”

  “Why would I know how to break into a motel, Artemis?”

  Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .

  Her ears turned red. “I thought—”

  six, five, four, three, two . . .

  “Why would I be okay with breaking into a motel, Artemis?”

  She glared and puffed out her cheeks. “We did it at Grimshaw House—”

  I shoved my tray sideways. It flew off the table and hit the wall, spraying yellow cheese and chocolate milk across the blue paint and sending breadsticks scattering onto the floor. Artemis jumped.

  “Is it because my dad was in prison?” I said, standing. “Because I’m poor? Perfect Artemis is grounded, so she can’t do it, but Garbage Human Zora is already accused of trespassing, destruction of property, arson, and murder, plus she’s got no money and nothing to live for, so it’s totally fine if she does it. And thievery is hereditary! Totally, totally. Sorry for doubting you, cuz; I see where you’re coming from now.”

  I grabbed my bag and stalked away from the table, anger knotting my jaw and turning my vision red. I kept my gaze locked on the cafeteria doors, walking fast, ignoring the hundreds of eyes following me. Angry, delinquent Zora doing what she does. Getting angry. Probably going to set a fire. They didn’t know me. None of them knew me, definitely not Artemis. They knew stories. They knew lies.

  A few boys coming out of the lunch lines approached me, and the closest one said in a soft, mocking voice, “Because I’m poor.”

  I grabbed the bowl off his tray with one hand, took his belt in the other, and dumped hot cheese down the inside of his low-rise sold-ripped skinny jeans.

  “I don’t need to tell you how lucky you are it wasn’t hot enough to burn.” Dad glanced sideways at me as we drove away from the school. He drove. He’d had to walk to the high school from town center, where he was looking for a job, and then he’d insisted on driving the Chevelle home. “I heard what Principal Sutherland said. You want to tell me what actually went down?”

  “People being stupid,” I said.

  “You don’t shove hot cheese down someone’s pants for being stupid,” he said. “That’s more of a Sadie move. They have to do something to upset you. So what happened?”

  I breathed evenly through my nose. “I don’t know. Artemis.”

  “‘I don’t know, Artemis.’” Dad nodded. “That’s something. I thought you two were getting along. It was kind of nice.”

  “She’s a spoiled rich kid,” I said.

  “Yes, but you knew that already.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “She thinks I know how to steal things because—because we’re us.” I could yell poor and thievery to the whole cafeteria, but I couldn’t say it to Dad. He knew what I was saying without me actually having to say it. People thought I was a thief because Dad was a thief. They thought we stole because we didn’t have much. They thought we were dirty people. They thought we were lazy. The more money someone had, the worse they thought of us, and Artemis’s family had the most money in town. I don’t know why I ever expected more out of her.

  I don’t know why, every time she said we, I didn’t hear you.

  “Well,” Dad said after a few moments of silence, “it does make sense that Artemis would have a blind spot to certain things. Many things, probably. She’s a smart girl, but smart people don’t always see what’s obvious to others.”

  “I get privilege,” I said. “What I don’t get is how you’re supposed to put up with this garbage from everyone all the time. Even people you kind of like. You try to tell them that they’re wrong, and why, and it goes in one ear and out the other.”

  Dad gave me a small, sad smile. “Sometimes it takes a little while. If you want them to understand, you have to keep trying. But you also have to realize the difference between someone who can understand with a little work, and someone who doesn’t want to understand. I learned a long time ago not to spend too much time on people who didn’t want to see things the way I see them. It isn’t worth the energy.” His expression brightened again. “Sometimes, though, it is. And those times can be very worth it. Those are the times you can learn from one another. That’s what happened with me and your mom.”

  I started. “You and Mom? You had to explain something to Mom?”

  He laughed. “Your mom grew up rich—she was an Aberdeen, after all. Even when their house burned down, they still had money. I had to explain a lot of things to her, like why anyone would ever think of splitting a roll of two-ply toilet paper into two one-ply rolls.”

  “Was this before or after you got married?”

  “Way before. But after we started going out. She was so naive, your mom—did I tell you how we became friends?”

  “You hung out at the Fool at, like, one in the morning.”

  “Yes, but did I tell you how?”

  “Drinking, I assumed.”

  “No, no. I tried to con her.”

  That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. “And she didn’t fall for it?”

  He smiled ruefully. “Ah, but she did. She fell hard.” He scratched his chin. “I knew who she was, but we’d never spoken. She struck me as one of those uppity types. Kind of floated around, like nothing could hurt her. A rich kid. Pampered. I wanted to knock her down a few pegs, so I scammed her and got away with all the money she had on her. It wasn’t a lot, but you could tell she was going to use it for something or other. Maybe she’d been saving up, I don’t remember.”

  “So you scammed her,” I said. “That’s super romantic.”

  “It is, isn’t it? No, I gave her the money back. It was the first time I’d ever really felt bad about stealing from someone. She didn’t fall for the scam because she was stupid, though I’m sure some people would call it that. She fell for it because she didn’t expect anyone to try to steal from her. She still had that kind of trust in others. I saw it when she handed me the money. Then it became a choice between two evils. Keep her money and have cheated the trusting innocent, or give the money back, apologize, and ruin her trust forever. Not just trust in me, but trust in anyone. What kind of rotten person does something like that? No one ever loses their own innocence. They have it taken from them.”

  By people like us. He didn’t say that, but I heard it. That was the Novaks, after all: rotten people.

  “But you gave her the money back.”

  “I gave her the money back. In the end I figured if I didn’t ruin that trust in her, someone else would, but at least I’d ap
ologize for it. I expected her to hate me. I think she was more stunned than anything. Then confused, and she thought the apology was part of some bigger scam. After I convinced her it wasn’t, she asked if I wanted a drink, and she went on and got me drunk and wheedled my entire life story out of me, along with about twenty-five bucks for the booze.”

  “So she stole back from you!”

  “She was good like that. You girls got your quick learning skills from her, I’ll tell you that. I woke up in my bedroom the next morning, hungover as hell, and found her in my kitchen making pancakes. She regaled me with my own embarrassing childhood stories, we called a truce, and we saw each other nearly every day for the next twenty-six years.”

  Twenty-six.

  “That’s all I was getting at,” he went on. “Your mom and I didn’t see eye-to-eye, but that doesn’t mean she was a bad person. It meant she hadn’t seen what I’d seen. She didn’t have the same experiences, and the worlds we lived in were very different because of it. But she learned, and I learned some things, too, and we became better people together. I wouldn’t have given her up for anything.”

  Twenty-six years. It seemed like an eternity.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. “Didn’t like that story?”

  “No. It’s just—the end of the twenty-six years was when she went missing.”

  “Ah.” He sniffed. “Yep.”

  “Do you ever think of where she might be?”

  He gave me a strange look. “I’m not big on the heaven-hell dichotomy, but if I had to choose . . .”

  “No, I mean, like, in the woods. How did her trail disappear? Where would she have gone?”

  He turned his head to look at me full on then, his expression screwed up with confusion, and a sharp stab of shame hit me in the chest. His voice went flat. “What are you talking about?”

  I turned away, focusing on the houses passing by outside. “They never found anything. Clothes, or anything.”

  “Zora.”

  “Do you think there was something else?”

  “Stop it!”