Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  Jennie had said there were five sisters. “That’s only three sisters,” I commented.

  Mischa said, “There was another baby,” she continued. “Another girl. Jane Victoria Simmons, born on June sixth, three years after Violet was born. She lived a day. The death certificate gives her date of death as June seventh.”

  “That’s only four sisters, not five,” I pointed out.

  “You said Jennie told you they had something to do with it, right? We have to figure out why Violet was the one who lived. Like maybe the ones who died are pissed off that she survived, so they control her from beyond. Or maybe”—her voice became raspy, as if she was falling more in love with the idea of her narrative—“the dead sisters all take turns controlling her body. Like a new one takes over with each cycle of the moon!”

  A fifth and final stick figure had been drawn on my window, leaving a row of three, then a gap, and then two more. The gap must have been where Violet belonged. There was something to this that I was missing, I was sure of it, and I suspected it had something to do with Trey. He was, after all, their brother. He would have been born about four months before the third daughter, Elizabeth Jane.

  Of course, I couldn’t tell Mischa that, even though I was dying to tell someone. There was no way of knowing how she’d react if I informed her that Trey was Violet’s blood relative, but it was a safe bet that she’d tell Henry. And if Henry believed for a second that Trey was in cahoots with Violet, and that he had intentionally gotten into the accident in which Olivia had died, there was a chance that Henry might really hurt Trey. No matter what, sharing that information was going to make it impossible to confront Violet before the next new moon.

  We only stood a chance against her if we worked together.

  “We might be overthinking this,” I told Mischa. “Violet might not even know about the dead sisters, you know? At least not the ones who died before she was born. She’s never referred to the spirits that tell her how people are going to die as sisters.”

  “Well, the dead sisters are real. That part of what Jennie told you pans out. There was probably another, you know? The fifth? Maybe a miscarriage or something, and a birth certificate wasn’t issued. So what Jennie told you about breaking the curse by playing the game again must be true. We have to play Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble and predict her death so that they see her with them.” Mischa was really wound up. I couldn’t remember ever actually talking on the phone with her before I’d gone off to Sheridan. All of my communication with friends was conducted primarily with one- and two-word text messages and emojis, so it was strange to hear so much zeal in her voice. It sounded like she was pacing on her end of the conversation.

  “I know, I know. I went with Cheryl this morning to visit Tracy in the hospital, and she mentioned that New Year’s party. I think that might be our best shot at cornering Violet,” I said.

  Waiting until New Year’s Eve was risky. I was scheduled to drive back up to Sheridan the next morning. But we knew exactly where Violet would be that night, and there wouldn’t be any parents around. Plus, if kids were drinking, it was a lot less likely that anyone would dare to call the cops if I showed up uninvited. I told Mischa how awful Tracy looked and how I was willing to bet that she’d played a game with Violet, but I didn’t mention that Violet had made a surprise appearance at the hospital.

  “I’ll float it past Henry,” Mischa announced.

  “Keep that candle burning,” I urged her.

  I ended the call and immediately reached for the pendulum, not bothering to cleanse the space because I had just burned palo santo the night before. “Pendulum, did the ghost of Olivia just draw these stick figures on my window?”

  Counterclockwise. No. “Was it Jennie?” I asked. The pendulum slowed down and started up again in the other direction. Yes.

  Jennie! Joy surged in my heart. Kirsten had said that the more often I communicated with spirits, the easier it would be for me to receive messages from them. I dared to hope that interacting with Jennie the other day on Route 32 had strengthened the channel between us. It seemed like she was invested in making sure I followed her advice. “Was it Jennie who kept calling my phone last night?” The pendulum wobbled and then rotated in reverse, counterclockwise. “Was it Olivia?” Clockwise. So Olivia’s ghost seemed to only get in touch with me to express anger when another one of Violet’s victims was about to die.

  “Pendulum, does Violet have a fifth dead sister?” I asked. The pendulum continued swinging in a clockwise motion, not slowing down in the slightest.

  “Did Violet’s mother get sick because no one who Violet predicted a death for actually died in November?” It picked up momentum. Clockwise.

  Yes.

  Our theory was correct; Violet was sacrificing souls to keep her mother alive. It was perhaps a strange thing to take pride in, but we were slowly setting the pieces of the puzzle into place.

  CHAPTER 9

  WE WERE IN WAY OVER our heads—more than even back in November.

  It was starting to feel like I’d tumbled down a well and just kept falling without ever hitting bottom. I’d come home from Sheridan expecting a relaxing visit with my mom, during which I had hoped to repair our badly damaged relationship. I’d thought Trey and I would find a way to see each other, and that I’d possibly even lose my virginity to him before heading back to Sheridan since it had been on my mind the whole time we’d been separated. Stupid me. Now, Stephani was dead, Tracy was dying, and worst of all, Violet was onto us.

  That afternoon, the snow started up again, and this time the flakes were much heavier than the ones that had fallen on Christmas Eve. Through our living room front window, I noticed Trey outside shoveling. I was in agony not having had a chance to ask him more questions about his relationship to the Simmons family, and I was going to have to take a risk to get some answers. I couldn’t stand the idea of him going back to Northern Reserve on Sunday morning without my having disproven Kirsten about him being dangerous.

  The snow continued to fall after it was dark outside. By the time I let Maude outside for her last outdoor romp of the day, there was over a foot of snow on the ground. Mom turned in for bed early, claiming that she had to drive to campus in the morning. She’d been reviewing research theses since I’d gotten back from Sheridan and wanted to log her notes into the system from her office at the University of Wisconsin–Sheboygan because she’d been too lazy to learn how to use their Virtual Private Network to log onto their intranet securely from home. Even though the weather report suggested it was going to snow all night, making a drive to Sheboygan pretty treacherous by morning, I didn’t mention that to her. Instead, I listened for the click of the lamp on her bedside table turning off, waited an hour, and then climbed out of my window.

  Knowing that I was leaving behind a telltale trail of footprints from my bedroom window to Trey’s, I walked along the side of my house to the fence that encircled our backyard, and then walked next to that until it met the fence around Trey’s house. Then I crept along the side of his house, below the windows of his kitchen and his brother’s room, to make my trajectory a little less obvious. Once I reached Trey’s window, I threw a loose handful of snow at it. Almost a minute passed before the shade lifted and I saw Trey standing there in a T-shirt and sweatpants, smiling. He raised the window a few inches and asked, “Can I help you, miss?”

  “Help me up! It’s freezing out here!” I whispered. Trey’s brother’s bedroom was next to his, so I had to be quiet to avoid waking him.

  Trey raised his window as high as it would go and removed the screen. I hoisted myself onto the ledge and rather ungracefully contorted my legs to make my way inside. As quietly as possible, Trey lowered the window again and popped the screen back into place. “My mom sets her alarm to come in here every hour to make sure I haven’t snuck out,” he whispered.

  “Is it safe?” I asked, shaking with cold. I’d slept over in Trey’s bedroom once before, but that was long before my moth
er and his parents had started watching us like hawks.

  “Take off your boots and coat.”

  He placed my boots behind his dresser and pushed my puffy coat under his bed, and then tossed a sweatshirt onto the floor to cover the clumps of snow I’d carried in with me. He then lifted the blankets on his bed and pointed for me to slide in, which I did.

  “All she ever does is open the door and make sure I’m still in bed,” he whispered as he crawled in beside me and pulled the comforter up to our chins. “So you could probably stay all night as long as you stay hidden under the covers.”

  “Very tempting, but I have to get home while the snow is still falling,” I said, being completely honest about how much I wanted to just stay with him. It had been so long since I’d been this physically close to him, warmed by his body heat. I wrapped my arms around him and was surprised to feel his ribs so prominently beneath his T-shirt; he really had lost quite a bit of weight. “Footprints.”

  “Ah,” he said, instantly understanding. “Good point. I guess that would be pretty incriminating. We should have rigged up a zip line a long time ago.”

  I giggled, imagining the two of us gliding back and forth between our windows in the middle of the night. “You’re crazy.”

  “That’s what they keep telling me at Northern Reserve,” he said. “The psychiatrist there just can’t wrap his head around why I’d steal my own mother’s car and swipe a necklace from a girl I barely know.”

  “Oh, Trey. I’m sorry. I really am,” I said, cradling his head and rubbing my thumbs over the stubble on his scalp, which was all that remained of his dark hair. Everything that had happened in November must have sounded outrageous to other people. My mother’s attorney had suggested that I consider using the defense that stealing Violet’s locket and driving to White Ridge Lake had been Trey’s idea, which, naturally, I had flat-out refused to do. “Is it awful there?”

  I could tell by the way he waited a second before replying that he was deciding whether or not to give me the unedited lowdown. “I’m sure it’s not much worse than yours. You know. Line up in the morning, line up before bed. The hardest part is keeping to myself,” he told me, and added sarcastically, “since I’m such a social butterfly.” He’d encouraged me before I’d left for Sheridan to avoid trying to make friends and to keep a low profile, and I’d realized the value in that advice during my first twenty-four hours away from home.

  “What’s up with your parents putting the house up for sale?” I asked.

  As he stared into my eyes, he ran his finger down the bridge of my nose, down its tip, and traced the curves of my lips. “They think it’s best for my brother, you know? He got bullied pretty bad at school during all that court stuff.” His answer was so sensible that I wondered if he had any idea his mom was in financial trouble.

  “That sucks. I didn’t think what we did would have any impact on Eddie,” I admitted. Truthfully, we hadn’t put much thought into how our predicament with Violet would have affected any of our family members. Now, especially when our parents were paying for both of us to attend expensive boarding schools, that seemed like an obvious oversight.

  “I know. I feel really bad about it.”

  “It’s gonna be weird when you don’t live next door anymore.”

  “It won’t matter. Nothing’s ever gonna be the same as it was before.” He sounded so sad that I hated myself for ever wondering if he’d been collaborating with Violet. But still… I couldn’t fight the urge to press him for the full truth. I wanted so much for Kirsten to be wrong.

  “I visited Tracy Hartford in the hospital today, and she—”

  Trey raised an eyebrow at me. “Tracy’s in the hospital?”

  “Yeah. Turns out she has bacterial meningitis, the super-dangerous kind.”

  He exhaled in disgust and shook his head. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “I know, I know. I can’t believe Violet would do that to her most devoted worshipper, but no one’s safe,” I said. “Anyway, Tracy said that Violet’s throwing a big New Year’s party. Mischa and I think it might be the only opportunity we’ll have to try to get Violet to play the game with us.”

  Trey was silent for a moment, thinking this over. “That’s Tuesday. I’ll already be back at school by then.”

  “We might not get another chance. I’m supposed to go back on January first,” I reminded him. The timeline was so tight it was dizzying; I was due back at Sheridan twelve hours after the stroke of midnight, when I hoped to be at Violet’s house, breaking the curse.

  Trey shook his head. “It’s a bad idea to confront her on her own property. She knows the layout of that house, and you’ve only been there, like, once. The more I think about this notion of playing the game again, the more it seems like this isn’t the right time. I know you’re worried about Mischa, but there has to be a way we can keep protecting her until we have a better plan. We’re not going to get more than one chance. If we blow it, then she’ll know what we’re trying to do, and we could end up in so much more trouble.”

  Despite the coziness of our embrace, I felt my limbs turning cold. Everything he was saying suggested he didn’t want to even try to break the curse, which certainly seemed like evidence that Kirsten had been right about him. “But even if Mischa isn’t the person who dies, someone dies with each cycle of the moon,” I argued. “We’re the only ones who can do anything to stop this.”

  “That’s not true, though,” Trey said. “The kids in Lake Forest could have done something about her, but they didn’t. It’s not fair that we have to. You and I can’t afford to lose any more than we already have. I mean, for you, college is on the line. The rest of your life is at stake.”

  I felt my throat closing up as if I was going to cry. It sounded like he was backing out on helping me, Mischa, and Henry. I was starting to wish that I hadn’t walked over, even though if Kirsten was correct about Trey, I had to know. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to help us. I know your situation at school is worse than mine. But I have to see this through. I can’t even explain why—it has to do with Jennie dying in the fire instead of me. Like maybe some kind of survivors’ guilt. But I just can’t quit. Every time someone else dies, it feels like I’m responsible for letting it happen.”

  Trey stroked the side of my face and gazed into my eyes before saying, “McKenna, you’re all I think about at school. I mean, all of this stuff with Violet and everyone dying is just… Who could have guessed that this would happen to us? But I believe, I have to believe, that you and I will leave all of this behind and be together. That’s all I want. For this to be over and for us to be together, away from here.”

  “I want that too,” I assured him, meaning it. I missed the feeling of our fingers interwoven on long walks to school. I missed his breath on my neck in the middle of the night, and the comfort in knowing he was just a few inches away if I woke up in the dark. I missed the cool blue pools of his eyes, and how I felt when he looked at me like I was the only person in the world who really saw him, and how he was the only person who really saw me, too.

  “Then please don’t do anything that will make it impossible for us to be together,” he pleaded. “If she found a way to do something bad to you, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  I knew he was expressing genuine concern for me, but I couldn’t get rid of the lump in my throat. He was holding something back from me—I sensed it, and I might never have a chance to demand answers from him if I didn’t work up the courage right there and then. “Trey? What were you doing in Green Bay at the mall the day Olivia died?” I’d asked him that question once before we’d been sent away, but his explanation about being out in Ortonville to buy spark plugs just didn’t seem right. “Please don’t say it had something to do with Coach Stirling’s car.”

  As I feared he would, he looked up at the ceiling so that I couldn’t see what was going on behind his eyes. Trey shut out the world when he felt like someone was incriminating him. It was how he h
ad landed in such poor favor with so many teachers at school even before the chase with the cops in the fall. “I’m not accusing you of anything,” I clarified. “But it’s starting to seem like maybe you know how we could end all of this right now, and for some reason you aren’t telling me.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. I don’t know even where to start.”

  My heart sank like an anchor. So there was more. Trey and I had lived on the same street our whole lives, and Violet had grown up in another state. How could there possibly be elements of his life that were unknown to me? If he’d been working with Violet all along, or had known how the curse functioned but had neglected to tell me, then all of the nights we’d spent together in my room, all of the effort he’d put into researching ghosts, had been… for what?

  To impress me?

  Or to keep Violet’s ruse going a little longer by throwing me off course?

  “Just… start at the beginning.” I needed to hear it all.

  He chose his words carefully, speaking slowly and in a whisper. “Sometimes I have dreams, and parts of them come true. It’s always been like that, as long as I can remember. The dreams aren’t like the predictions Violet has,” he explained. “They usually don’t make any sense. Only sometimes they’re a little more real than other times, and right before Olivia died, I had a dream that she went to the mall and a storm was coming. I saw her stranded in a car that wouldn’t start… and it seemed like something bad was, like, coming to claim her—which is a weird way to put it, I guess. I didn’t really think anything was going to happen, but I followed her to the mall that day out of curiosity. That’s it. Honestly. Paranoia. And then she was there, in the parking lot, and her car wouldn’t start, exactly like in my dream. I thought I was doing her a favor by offering her a safe ride home. I thought I was saving her, as stupid as that sounds now.”