I jumped. Dad’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel; a muscle strained in his jaw.
“You’re eighteen, not twelve.” He sounded like he wanted to say more, but closed his mouth. He flexed his hands until his jaw stopped twitching, then said, “I don’t think we should talk about this right now. Let’s get home.”
If anyone was going to believe Mom was alive, it was him. For all his flaws, Dad always bet on Mom.
“No,” I said, and he glanced over at me. “I want to talk about it. Right now.” I swallowed hard. “You can’t tell me what I can and can’t think about Mom.”
He laughed, a harsh sound. “You can’t think she’s still—still alive!”
“Like hell I can’t!”
“Have you believed that this whole time? Have you been telling other people that?”
“Yeah, I have. What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s wrong—it’s not healthy—”
“Oh, okay, now you’re lecturing me on what’s right and healthy? The guy who had a mental breakdown and committed a major crime? Whose main career is stealing things from other people?”
“And I’ve had a lot of time to think about the things I did and why they were wrong—”
“—and while you were thinking about it, the entire town was punishing us! You got to leave! Sadie and I had to stay here. I bet it was nice in prison, being away from everyone who hated you, being able to come back cheerful and happy like everything in the world can be fixed. Things weren’t great for us before you did all that, but after was—was—” There were no words for it. Waiting in the trailer for someone to take everything we had. Fearing school because of the horrible things people said, learning how to skip. Hunting firestarters because it was the only thing that eased the anger, until I got sloppy. “First Mom leaves, and then you think it’s totally okay to fly off the handle and rob the whole town? Did you even think about me and Sadie before you did it? I know you didn’t do it for the money, so don’t lie and say you did.”
His lips were pressed in a thin line. His eyes were glazed. He said nothing.
“If Mom were here,” I said, “she would never have done something to hurt us, not without good reason.”
A pause. A tremble in his voice. “I never meant to hurt you girls.”
“Save it,” I snapped, leaning my forehead on the passenger door. “You taught us how to lie.”
21
In my whole childhood I only saw my father cry once.
Lazarus Novak wasn’t an especially stoic man. He wasn’t hardened by bitterness, or cynical. He enjoyed having fun. He believed you won life by being happy, and he was always a winner. He never yelled when Sadie or I did something we shouldn’t have, and he didn’t have to—we understood our mistakes because he stopped smiling. He never, ever raised a hand against us.
He wasn’t the kind of man who cried because he was sad. It wasn’t that he’d learned to bottle it up in some show of masculinity. More like nothing dug so deep into him it struck sadness. He didn’t seem to have any sadness inside him. Sad things passed right through.
Neither Sadie nor I received this mystical power. Sadie cried often and for anything, sometimes just because the box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch was empty. Once, because she’d accidentally bought wingless pads instead of winged ones, and decided maybe she should bite the bullet and wear tampons, even though she hated having something jammed inside her all day. I cried never and for nothing, but not because I didn’t feel like it. I felt like crying sometimes. Doesn’t everyone? I wanted to cry when I was angry, mostly, and I was angry a lot. It’s hard not to be, when people look at you like you shouldn’t be allowed to breathe. But I kept that bottled up, because I was apathetic delinquent Zora Novak, and I wasn’t supposed to cry.
So I didn’t cry when they told us Mom was gone. But Dad did.
Mom was a strange spirit, perching on top of the trailer, gliding around aloof and mysterious often enough that people called her a witch. They knew something was different about her. When she didn’t come back after a night of hunting, I was the first one to get worried. Then Dad. No one had seen her. Her phone couldn’t be reached. After a full twenty-four hours, Dad got Chief Rivera on the case. He tried to smile then, and I believed it, because he didn’t know what I knew, that she might have run into something much worse in the woods than a wild animal.
Then the chief came to the trailer. The Chevelle had been found by Black Creek Woods, abandoned. The windows were rolled down, the keys in the ignition, the driver’s door open, as if Mom had meant to return. A trail of footprints led north into the woods, and they matched Mom’s shoe size, but they disappeared near an offshoot of Black Creek. Her trail went cold. The chief tried to get a team together to comb the woods, but not many people offered to help.
Dad stayed out there longer than others. He only came back when the chief made him, and for days after he tried to form a group to go back and look. He would have gotten lost in the search if not for me and Sadie. I was thirteen. Sadie was twenty. The ghosts hadn’t acted strangely, so I went on as normal. Sadie walked around in a daze.
It wasn’t as if Mom had died, after all. She’d just gotten out of her car and walked into the woods. She was hunting, but she knew how to handle herself. She knew a lot more than me.
A week after she went missing, Dad was making macaroni for us in the microwave when he burst into tears. I’d never heard those noises out of him. They made my stomach turn and my eyes water, and when Sadie leaped up to cry with him, I wanted to crawl away and disappear.
I think Dad cried a lot after that, but I only ever saw it the one time. And that one time was enough. The look on his face, not any worry I had about Mom, was what made me shove my head under my pillow that night and sob silently until I fell asleep. It was the last time I ever did. I didn’t shed a tear when Dad got arrested for turning the town upside down and shaking the money out. I didn’t cry when Ludwig tore my fingers off and tried to kill me. I didn’t cry now, when it felt like every movement was wrong, every option a trap.
I had found the secret to Dad’s magic: crying was useless. A waste of time and energy better spent fixing the thing that upset you in the first place. Do menial outdoor chores for your neighbors to assuage your guilt. Scare off the tourists. Get rid of Dead Men Walking. Dad only cried about Mom because there was nothing to be fixed, nothing he could do. There was only pain building and building and building on itself, and with no release, he had been overwhelmed.
I wonder sometimes if he had felt it coming and knew, one day, he wouldn’t be strong enough to stop it.
I wonder if he feared it.
22
After we got home, every one of Dad’s words was tight-lipped, every sentence short. He rearranged the boxes crowding the trailer, making a slightly neater path from the kitchen to the bedrooms. He told me to start working on my homework. Wanted to know if Grim was coming over after Sadie got off work. Then, when it seemed like he didn’t have anything left to say, he grabbed his axe and went out to chop down the saplings that had begun to creep up on the trailer. It was the first time he’d touched the axe since coming home; before prison, I only saw him clearing brush on quiet, overcast days when no birds sang in the trees.
I watched him until Sadie came home, and then a little after.
“How long’s he been like that?” she asked, voice flat. She still didn’t look at me when she spoke.
“Couple of hours,” I said. Six. He had been out there for six hours, cutting anything he could find. I’d finished my homework. I’d cracked open one of the fantasy tomes Grim had left at our place and read some of that. Even silly fantasy jargon couldn’t distract me today.
I made dinner for all of us, ravioli with some broccoli and a near-expired tray of watermelon Sadie had picked up on her way home. Dad acted like his usual bright-eyed self, and though Sadie appeared to play along with it, she frowned and watched him carefully every time he looked down at his plate.
Sadie retreated to her bedroom at 9:25, but I didn’t know if she’d be able to conk out like she usually did. Dinner must have helped Dad find his groove again, because he smiled and kissed my head when he said he was tired, too, and asked me if I wanted my room back yet.
I didn’t believe him. He was lying with that smile and that happiness. He didn’t want to be around me; that’s why he’d spent six hours outside, instead of talking to me. He thought I hated him. I didn’t tell him otherwise.
“I’m good.” I patted my blanket and pillow on the couch. “I’m going to sleep soon, too.”
The shadow that swept across his expression told me everything. Yes, he had been lying. Yes, he knew I was lying. No, he wouldn’t say anything about it, because even though none of us could risk this family getting in deeper trouble than we already were, and he didn’t trust me not to get in more, he knew I’d been right this afternoon.
But the shadow passed. After a moment he said, “Okay. Sleep well.”
“I will.”
Artemis was right. It didn’t feel good.
Dad put his hand on my head, over the spot where he’d kissed me, then disappeared into the smaller bedroom. I waited a few minutes for another laugh out of Cheers, then flipped the TV off and grabbed the Chevelle’s keys from the stack of boxes by the door. I paused there, where Dad’s axe rested against the wall. I reached for it. Brushed the wooden handle.
A spike of fear drilled my chest. I whipped my hand back and hurried out the door.
A cold mist had settled along Valleywine Road. My butt went numb against the Chevelle’s chilled seats long before I reached the outskirts of town. The streets were empty of the living and the dead, and lights shone in every window. I thought I saw Buster’s truck turn a corner, so I crept along a little more carefully. Even the Chevelle’s engine seemed to rumble a bit softer tonight, like it was afraid to draw attention.
The Cherry Motel was at the town limits, with a Marathon gas station on the opposite side of the road and long empty cornfields straight out to the horizon behind it. The motel’s neon sign, with its big double cherries, looked like an advertisement for a strip joint. It was a squat brown building with a long line of rooms. There used to be a dead man holding an empty dog collar on the end of a leash near the motel check-in, but he wasn’t there anymore. The Dead Men Walking van sat outside room ten, on the south end of the building, and next to it was the SUV. I parked a few doors down and cut the engine.
The DMW team and their crew would have rented more than one room. I couldn’t walk up to the front office to get any information; even with a good lie, they would assume I was an obsessed fan. No telling how many of those they’d already had. I could knock on every door until I found them, but I didn’t want to get someone who was going to automatically call the cops on me. Their stuffy producer probably would. The camera people had been following the producer around like puppies since they’d gotten here, so I doubted they’d listen to me without telling him. Eric would tell Tad. I wasn’t sure about Mike or Leila, but they had gone along with everything else up to this point.
Tad’s sheer narcissism was going to be the only thing that saved me. If I could get him talking, maybe he wouldn’t call the police. And if, God help me, I begged, it might stroke his ego enough to show mercy.
I heard yelling. The door to seven swung open and banged against the wall, and Leila stalked out. Her clothes looked pristine but her hair was ruffled.
“Christ, Tad, you’re such a pig! I am so tired of all your weird bullshit! We almost died!”
Tad appeared in the doorway, pulling his shirt back on. “At least I’m not a fucking iceberg!” he yelled back. “Yeah, go tell Mike, I’m sure he wants to hear all about your gross woman problems!”
Leila slipped into nine. Tad stood outside seven for another moment, sneering, then went back inside and slammed the door behind him.
I hopped out of the Chevelle and started down the sidewalk. The wind pinched at the tips of my ears and nose. Room seven was quiet. Eight was, too.
“Hey!”
I jumped and spun. Tad was leaning against the doorframe, arms folded.
“What are you doing? Here to screw with us some more?” he said.
I forced myself to straighten up and did my best to wash the look of disgust off my face. “No. I wanted to ask one more time for our memory card back. Please.”
“I already told you, you can’t have it.”
“What do I have to do for it? Seriously. For you to get rid of copies you made, not to air it, to give me the footage, what do I have to do?”
Tad rolled his shoulders and looked me over from head to toe. I had to clench my teeth to suppress the full-body shudder that came over me. I was glad Artemis hadn’t come here; I could deal with people looking at me like I was something less than human, but I didn’t think she had quite as much experience.
Tad motioned with his head. “Come in, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Is the card in your room? Because if it’s not, I don’t see the point of coming in.”
“Do you want the card back or not?”
I’d dealt with firestarters this week. I could probably handle a blue-balled nerd. Probably.
I went inside, hands out of my pockets, every hair on my body standing on end. If he came within arm’s reach of me, he was getting his nose relocated to his brain. He closed the door. The room had one bed with sheets the color of mustard, an old tube TV on the long dresser on the opposite side of the room, and a large window facing the cornfields, the curtains pulled closed. Both lamps on either side of the headboard were on, as well as the lamp on the desk by the dresser. A suitcase sat on the floor by the desk chair, overflowing with wrinkled shirts and balled-up socks, a toothbrush without a holder, and a collection of CDs in slim jewel cases, neatly slotted into the netting in the top. It was so much warmer than it was outside, sweat gathered on my neck immediately; he had to have the thermostat set to eighty. The whole room smelled like smoke.
“Are you cooking something in here? Why’s it so hot?”
“Why’s your damn town so cold?” he shot back. He walked around to my left, staying carefully out of arm’s reach, like he’d read my mind. He circled around and sat on the very corner of the bed, more resting on the balls of his feet than anything, and looked me up and down again. He wore old jeans and a button-down short-sleeve T-shirt that made him look like his shoulders were too narrow and his neck was too long.
“I don’t have any weapons on me,” I said. “If you’re thinking anything else, stop now; it’s not happening.”
He snorted. “You must think you’re hot shit if you go around accusing people of wanting to have sex with you. You do know you look like you crawled out of a garbage can, right?”
I never accused people of wanting to have sex with me—I never even thought about it—and he wasn’t going to gaslight me into submission.
“You literally hit on me the first time we met,” I snapped. “Did you forget that?”
He blinked slowly and said, “Wait, you’re into Bach, right? Or is he into you? He would be into you; look at him, he looks like he climbed out of the garbage, too. So have you hit that yet? Or no?”
If my own head didn’t explode first, I was going to pop his off his neck. “What do you want?” I said. “You brought me in here because you want something for that memory card. What is it?”
He leaned back and rapped his fingers on his chin. “Well now, let’s see. What would that footage be worth to you? Five hundred dollars? A thousand?”
I held my arms up. “Does it look like I have any money?”
“Fair. Any property, family heirlooms? No? Hmm . . . and the sex thing is completely off the table?”
My nostrils flared. I would not break my hard swearing rules for this jerk. I wouldn’t.
“Okay, okay.” He thought for another moment. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to kick him in the crotch and go find someone reasonable to ask. “Ho
w about this?” He held his hands open and smiled. “You help me frame Sam and Bach for these fires.”
I froze.
“It would be easy, with me backing you,” he went on. “You could clear your name and get them out of town, just like you want. Then we could discuss more after that—like you helping me get into Grimshaw House.”
A cold and unsettling feeling spread from my spine, out through my back, and down my arms and legs. There’s a deep animal instinct that tells you when a person is no longer joking. It tells you the heat in the room isn’t coming from a thermostat. It tells you those appraising looks were not the usual kind of inappropriate. The rational side of your brain wants to tell you these feelings are silly or stupid or insane. The rational side of your brain is wrong.
Tad’s eyes snapped up to mine. Still, dark. Black. His thumb rubbed a slow circle on his knee. The room was quiet except for the low whistle of the wind outside. No ghosts watching in the window. No blasting heater set too high.
“So,” I said, “your name is Ludwig?”
His lips split to reveal straight white teeth. His eyes lit with glee.
“Nice to see you again, Zora Novak.”
23
“Do you know what a pain in the ass it was to get back here after you kicked me out the first time?” Ludwig stood up from the bed, his shirt wrinkled and bunched up around his belt, his jeans catching under his heels. “I need you to do something for me. Tell me I’m smart.”
He waited. I said nothing.
“I’m smart because this time I found out who I could kill that would make problems for you. I couldn’t have you running around trying to hit me with your car, right? I think I had pretty great self-control, waiting that long to set a fire.
“I was going to do a few more before I took a body, but then you and your cousin and these ghost chasers waltzed right into my mines! I tried to take you, first, but surprise—can’t be hurt by fire, can’t be possessed. Turned out fine, though.” He patted his chest. “Did you know people let healthy young boys like this one get away with almost anything? I should have tried this much sooner—”
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