Late afternoon sun filtered through the sparse, skinny trees, but lack of campus lighting made the woods shadowed and creepy as I left the main trail and cut through a narrow, worn path.
It worked. I ran until I couldn’t hear my thoughts anymore. But then I found myself sitting in the wet leaves, cold, thirsty, unable to think at all.
I heard laughing. A child ran from behind one tree and disappeared behind another. A girl. She wore a simple cotton shift dress and no shoes. She appeared again, kicked the leaves, then ran off into the dark.
I tried to stand, but my legs were too weak. I had run too far. She laughed again, loudly; the sound echoed in the empty spaces between the skinny trees.
I stumbled and fell to the ground, and when I looked up, the girl was watching me with wide, frightened eyes.
“Don’t be scared,” I said, but as soon as I said it, I felt a wave of terror of my own.
Her eyes were not quite right. They were too bright for the darkness. They looked like mirrors reflecting a sun that was not present. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and when I looked again, she was gone.
I ran again. Ran away. I could still hear the laughing. My lungs burned. I could not take a full breath. I went off the trail. I was ankle-deep in wet leaves and muck. The moon was weak.
I fell, and a sharp pain flared in my ankle. I lay there, panting, the pain throbbing. The laughing had stopped.
I was too cold.
Another girl’s face appeared over me, but this one was older, my age. She had the kind of effortless, natural beauty I envied. Mounds of thick, honey-blonde waves pulled back in a high ponytail. Damp tendrils curled at her temples. She was wearing a white sweatshirt and black jeans, beat-up Doc Martens. Her eyes were warm chocolate brown, and she had a spray of friendly freckles across her nose.
She turned, shouted, and a boy appeared over her shoulder. He was too thin but muscular. He wore a leather bomber jacket, and he shrugged it off and draped it over me like a blanket. I could see a snake tattoo that ran up his left wrist, the face curled around his thumb. He was also blonde, but his hair was like straw, different shades of yellow, short and spiked.
The girl leaning in close now, staring into my eyes.
“Get up,” she said. She gripped my elbow hard and pulled until I reluctantly sat up. Until that moment, I didn’t realize I was lying on my back. I stood but cried out when the pain in my ankle burned. I stumbled, and she caught me, wrapping an arm around my waist.
The boy leaned in. His eyes were gray-green and translucent, which gave them a strange, ethereal look. Fairy eyes, I thought.
He smiled, friendly.
Around the boy’s neck hung a camera with a large lens. He handed the girl a water bottle.
“Drink this,” the girl said, pushing the water toward me until it was right under my nose. She had slim fingers and the perfect, oval, elongated nail beds I’d always admired. Mine were short, almost round, with ragged nails chewed to the quick.
“Drink,” the girl ordered. I lifted my hand to the water, but couldn’t quite make connection to the bottle. My arm felt too light. I thought my hand might pass right through any solid objects.
The girl tilted the bottle, pressed it against my lips until I managed to choke some down. The water was cold, shocking. I swallowed and coughed.
“Easy,” said the girl, “little sips. You don’t want to puke it up. Jesus, what are you doing out here by yourself?”
“There was someone here,” I told her. “A little girl. She disappeared.”
She shook her head. I tried to explain.
“Like a ghost.”
The two of them stared at each other for a long time, like they were talking to each other without speaking. Then the boy raised his camera and took my picture.
“Mitch!” The girl scolded.
My phone buzzes in a frantic pattern, vibrating across the coffee table. I wake up confused, tapping the screen. My mouth is dry, my tongue coated. A different celebrity chef demonstrates the perfect method for roast chicken. I sit up, and my book slides to the floor.
Finally, I realize it’s the 3 p.m. alarm reminding me the girls will be home from school in twenty minutes. I shut it down and go to the kitchen for water.
When Lydia arrives, I’m awake and leaning against the kitchen counter sipping spearmint tea. I hear the front door open and slam closed, the thump of a backpack thrown to the floor. A draft of chilly air creeps into the kitchen. Footsteps in the front hall.
I turn to her and smile. I sip my tea. I don’t ask how school was. I don’t speak at all. I wait.
“Hi,” she says. She drops her backpack on the floor and turns her back to me to open the fridge.
“Any news?” I ask.
“No, stop asking.”
My phone buzzes as she’s turning away from the fridge and popping open her soda can. I touch the ignore key without looking at the screen and put it face-down on the counter.
“Hey,” I say in my brightest voice, and I hear the insane edge in it but the words are already out in the chilly kitchen. “You want to watch a movie tonight? Make popcorn?”
Lydia rolls her eyes.
“What?”
“You...” she says, but stops. She throws out her hands. “This. How you pretend to be normal.”
“I am normal.”
“If you have to say that sentence out loud, chances are you’re not.” She leans forward, elbows on the counter. “What do you do all day when we’re at school?”
“Watch TV,” I say honestly, “sleep.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say? That I wander the house aimlessly, wailing and moaning, tearing out my hair?”
“Do you?”
Sometimes.
“Of course not.”
“Mommy!” shouts Juliet from the foyer. It is a happy shout, thank goodness. Not a someone-called-me-a name-and-other-tragedies shout. “Guess what happened!”
Lydia turns back to the fridge. Each day, she and I have exactly seven minutes between the time Ben drops her off and the elementary school bus deposits her little sister. We have been doing well in those seven minutes lately. She has even told me some snippets from school. Emma likes James but James likes Madysen. Mrs. Granzi is sooo mean. She finally turned in the work-study application and she’s freaked out. That kind of thing. The tiny bits that add up to her whole life. She parses them out one sliver at a time if I am present, giving her my full attention, and willing to receive them.
Today, I’ve missed my chance. I’ve been thrown off by Beverly’s video, overdone my I’m Perfectly Normal act, and missed my seven minutes.
“Mommy!” Juliet shouts again, running into the kitchen waving a piece of paper.
She has won the physical fitness challenge in P.E. class and Mrs. Mason has printed a certificate on the computer and also given her as a prize a headband and arm wrists that whisk away sweat or something or other.
“And they’re purple!” she shouts, whipping them from her backpack in a big reveal. “Like she bought them especially for me!”
“That’s amazing!”
The phone rings again. All three of us stare at it buzzing across the counter. Lydia strikes, quicker than a snake, flips the phone, hits Accept.
“Hello?” I hear a woman’s tinny voice at the other end.
“Lydia!”
Lydia throws her backpack over her shoulder and strides from the kitchen. Heavy footsteps race up the stairs.
“Hello?” the woman repeats. I see the display. Michelle, George’s agent.
Juliet stage whispers, “Can I watch TV?”
“Yes.”
Instead of going into the family room, she runs upstairs after her sister.
“Thea?” says Michelle over the phone. “Are you there, Thea?”
“I’m here.”
“Did you find anything?”
“No, not yet.”
I explain about misplacing the phone and that I need to
contact my mother, all while staring at my open laptop on the table. Beverly Donneville’s face is still frozen on the screen.
“I have to go, Michelle. I’ll call you when I find the phone.” I reach over and touch the end button to disconnect.
Beverly Donneville smiles serenely at me.
I hit play.
“George Drake says he was wrong to doubt. He was wrong to attract the curse of the Throne. He was taken…”
She flinches, squeezes her eyes shut, presses her fingertips to her temples as if enduring a migraine.
“…taken beyond where I can reach, into the shadows. He cannot rest until he has made amends for his doubts, until he has sent this warning.”
I stop the video. So, this is her plan, to put words in George’s mouth, to claim that, in death, he’s suddenly a believer.
His books. His sales. His reputation. His career. His legacy. Everything George Drake built over the years. Gone.
“You...bitch.”
I am squeezing my hands into fists again. I pound them on the table.
“Mom?”
I spin around and find Lydia in the doorway.
“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry.”
Her eyes go to the computer screen. I hit the power button and the screen goes black. I want to ask Lydia if she’s seen her dad’s phone, but I can’t do it. I don’t want to upset her. She hasn’t been in his office, has she? I’m afraid of the answer.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
“Who was that on the phone?”
I wave my hand, but we both notice how badly it’s shaking. I cross my arms over my chest. “Your dad’s agent. Something about his last book. It’s fine.”
“So who’s a bitch?”
“Lydia!”
“Fine,” she says. She takes another soda from the fridge and I let it go without mentioning she’s already had one, she doesn’t need another. She slams the fridge door and goes. I hear her heavy footfalls running up the stairs. Her bedroom door slams.
Sales of George’s books will taper off and disappear. The girls and I will have no income.
I stare at the black computer screen.
Beverly Donneville is a fraud. But without George, I haven’t the first clue how to prove it.
Full dark has descended by 6 pm.
For dinner, Juliet and I eat apples dipped in peanut butter while watching her favorite show, Cupcake Wars. Lydia doesn’t appear.
George used to love watching this show with the girls. I never understood the drama.
“For heaven’s sake, it’s only cupcakes,” I once said in exasperation at the dramatic swell of music, the tense grimaces of the contestants flashing on the screen until I could no longer be silent.
“Hello Kitty cupcakes!” clarified Juliet.
“Shhh,” said Lydia, back when she still watched TV with us after dinner.
George, next to me on the couch, had leaned in and placed a patient hand on my knee. “It’s not about cupcakes. It’s about money. Not just the prize money, but exposure for the winner, promotion for the business sponsoring the challenge.” He patted my knee and sat back. “It’s always about the money.”
“Shhh!” Lydia admonished. “It’s about the craft and artistry of the bakers. Quiet.”
“Fine, sure…artistry and craft.” George tousled her hair and she had rolled her eyes, slapped his hand away, smirking. He winked at me. Money, he mouthed.
He had said the same thing about every investigation. Every haunting, every psychic, every magician. “Follow the money,” he said. “Somewhere, someone is always making money.”
Our TV room is in the back of the house. It is the only room that’s been completely remodeled and modernized, new electrical wire, fireplace updated to gas. Bookshelves flank the fireplace, and the TV is hung above the mantle.
On the shelves, the walls, every table, are photos. I suddenly see them for the first time in a long time. These photos have surrounded me for so long, I no longer notice them. But now, they come into focus, drifting into visibility like phantoms closing in.
The adorable babies my daughters used to be. My parents in their twenties, smiling into the camera in front of a two-story ice cream cone monument they stopped to see during a cross-country road trip. And George. Everywhere. George standing by a stone building. George in an empty, black doorway. George laughing, his arm around different versions of me. Me before his death. Me before motherhood. Me before marriage. Me as a teenager, not that much older than Lydia is now.
Faces that no longer exist. Faces I had forgotten. Places I hadn’t thought about in years. Mitch took most of these photos, always ready with his camera all the years he and George were friends.
I think of the other albums Mitch kept, the ones we would never display, taken over the years of investigations. Those photos terrified me, images that were deceptively normal at first until you studied them for longer than a passing glance.
A girl with sunken eyes who kept waking up in the locked tool shed on her family’s farm in the middle of the night with no memory of how she’d gotten there. Carol Merrit holding her daughters’ school uniforms turned inside out to show the secret, elaborate pentagrams drawn in felt tip marker on the linings. A man dressed in faded jeans and a dirty white t-shirt. He stands at the edge of a high cliff with his back to the camera, a tangled dirty mane of hair down his back, arms spread wide and holding a tall staff topped with a crystal orb.
Mitch’s photos. I hadn’t thought about them in years, not since he and George stopped speaking.
“At least let me document it,” said the boy. Mitch, that’s what the girl had called him. “She said she saw a ghost.”
“She’s also clearly fucked up, and we need to get her to a doctor.”
I fell to my knees, dragging the girl with me. I vomited into the wet leaves.
“Ugh, get George. Help me!”
I felt the cool ground on my forehead but then arms pulled me back, and when I sat up, another boy was standing over me. I wondered maybe if he’d been there the whole time. He had a beard, which was unusual for boys my age but looked natural on him, and full, thick wavy brown hair that fell over his forehead. He kept tossing it back with a quick jerk of his head to get it out of his eyes. Beautiful brown and gold eyes, kind eyes.
“I’m George,” he said, kneeling in front of me and offering his hand. “Here, hang on to me.”
The boys got me to my feet, and we followed the girl—Rita, that’s what they called her—back to the main trail and out of the woods to a parking lot. From there, the three of them drove me to the student clinic.
Slowly, I came back to reality. Between the bumpy truck ride and the cold, bleach-smelling clinic, between the nurses and the tube down my throat and throwing up, I remember a dream of a little girl running and hiding and laughing, and then so many faces, frowning, so many hands helping me to my feet, holding cups of water, standing over my bed.
I remember Mitch asking me about ghosts and Rita hushing him.
“But we were right there,” he said, “between the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth parallel, and she said the word ghost.”
“I heard.”
“And she’s obviously on something. I mean, it’s easy to refute—”
“Later.”
Their arguing was benign and comforting, a practiced choreography between two people who knew each other intimately. It reminded me of my parents. I lay back against the pillow, feeling relaxed and calm. I had warmed up, and I was no longer thirsty. I could have rested there, half-asleep, listening to them all night.
Meanwhile, George leaned against the wall by the bed and watched me, smiling, totally at ease, as if he’d rather be nowhere else than at the bedside of a deranged girl at the school clinic on a weeknight.
An older boy appeared in the doorway to the clinic room. He froze when he saw me.
George noticed. “You know her?”
He shook his head. Walking ov
er to my bedside, the older boy pressed two fingers to the side of my neck. “Are you dizzy?” he asked, looking at his watch. “Nauseous?”
“Calvin is George’s brother,” explained Mitch. “He’s pre-med. We’ve been waiting for a doctor here forever.”
“Calvin,” I said.
His eyes slid up to mine when I said his name. He stared into my eyes for a long time, touching his fingertips beneath my chin.
His brow furrowed. “You better wait for the doctor.”
“We’ll stay with her,” said Rita. “Until her parents get here.”
That roused me. I tried to sit up. “No,” I said.
“Hey, relax,” said George. He pushed off the wall and stood next to me.
“They called them when we brought you in,” said Mitch. He still wore his camera. “There’s nothing we could do.”
Calvin checked at his watch. “I’ve got class early.”
“Go on,” said Rita. “We’ll stay.”
Exhaustion dropped its weight on me. I didn’t want to see my parents. I wanted to sleep.
“Rest,” said George, as if he’d read my mind. He stayed by the bed, smiling down at me. “You’re all right. You just need to sleep.”
George sat with me. Calvin disappeared. Mitch and Rita stayed and argued. I closed my eyes and listened to them until I fell asleep.
I extract myself from the nest of blankets and pillows in which we’ve buried ourselves on the couch and stand up, stretching.
“I knew her icing was too pink!” Juliet is engrossed in the final judgment of cupcakes.
I carry my phone down the hall to the kitchen, turning on lights as I go.
I am working up the nerve to make a call. I swallowed two more pills with dinner, and finally the spread of that pleasant tingling has dulled the pulse of anxiety.
I breathe deeply, expanding my chest and letting it fall. The phone is a heavy weight in my hands. Before another thought can stop me, I touch a few buttons on the screen and wait for connection.
Six eternal rings, then voicemail.
I almost disconnect, but a spark of anger keeps the phone to my ear.
“It’s me,” I say after the beep. I then cannot think of one other word in the English language. I listen to the hiss of dead silence and think maybe my thoughts might transmit without me having to speak them.
The Witch's Throne (Thea Drake Mystery Book 1) (Thea Drake Mysteries) Page 6
