by Susan Vaught
“Fire, storms, floods, more hauntings,” I said. “What else could Thornwood’s Revenge turn out to be, if it’s hitting a whole town?”
Lavender did a dance stretch, bending over to her ankle with her leg stuck out to one side. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Ellis laughed. “Better not tell your mom that, given all the ghost-y stuff in Something Wicked.”
“Yeah, I know.” Lavender groaned. “But just because she’s superstitious doesn’t mean I buy into unscientific principles. I like comic books and sci-fi, but I know what’s possible and what isn’t.”
Riley and Ellis looked at her like she might be growing horns.
“I’m out,” Riley said, jerking his thumb toward parts storage and heading in that direction.
Lavender held open the shop door and I rolled out into the cold winter air. Sunlight blazed into my eyes, making me drive sightless for a few feet until I could stand the fresh outdoor glare. I pulled my hand off the clown-nose joystick and the chair rolled to a stop near a parking meter. When Lavender caught up, dancing different jetés in wide circles around my chair, we headed toward Something Wicked.
Lavender landed nearby and posed, hands above her head. “I wonder how many people Toppy’s arrested in his career. Has to be hundreds, or maybe thousands. Those records aren’t all on the computer. Searching them will take—”
“Forever,” I agreed as she took off again, spinning and hopping. The few people out in the chilly morning gave her plenty of room. “But whoever this is doesn’t like Mayor Chandler, either. Maybe that narrows the cases a little.”
The air chafed my cheeks as Lavender once more came to rest near my chair and said, “I still think it has to be somebody local, or at least somebody who grew up in Blue Creek, or who lived here for a while.”
I rolled forward, careful to miss her toes. “Will they stop with messing around on social media, since Facebook took down that page?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “We should keep a watch on Twitter, too. And I keep thinking about that light in Thornwood Manor.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t like the way my chest felt, all tight, with my heart beating kinda funny. “It flickered like a candle, straight from all the scary stories. But I don’t know what it means. Seems weird the Facebook page with the Thornwood Owl in the corner and that light would happen on the same night—and the hacker said stuff about Thornwood’s Revenge. We should go up to the manor and look around.”
Lavender’s eyes widened. “That makes about as much sense as tap dancing on an anthill. That place is halfway to condemned, and—and—”
“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”
“Shut up, Max.” A dance shoe flashed in front of my nose like a karate kick.
I rolled more slowly, lining my chair up with the door of Something Wicked. “I saw a flickering light in Thornwood’s windows.”
“Then tell Toppy!”
“Right.” I honked my clown-nose and stopped outside the shop with its display window of books and crystals and dream catchers and incense packs, arranged with peacock feathers and hay and chunks of geodes. “Toppy doesn’t believe in ghosts, either.”
Lavender pulled open the shop door, setting off fairy-chimes and bells. “No, but he believes in vandals and robbers who might break into old haunted mansions.”
“I don’t think a robber was carrying that light. We should check it out. All of this might fit together somehow.”
“No,” Lavender said as I rolled into the smell-cloud of cinnamon and exotic spices and old books that was Something Wicked. “I am not getting arrested or grounded for the next decade.”
“You don’t have to get grounded,” I told her as I pulled off my coat and tossed it on my chair’s push-bars. “Doesn’t your mom still have keys from back when she did tours? Let’s ask her. She could let us in and burn sage or something to—you know, ward off ghosts, just in case they do exist.”
Lavender let the door slam behind us, wrecking the melody of the chimes. “Absolutely not, and that’s final, Max.”
5
Sure!” Joy Springfield said, her brown eyes glittering with excitement. “I’ll take you two up to Thornwood Manor Monday, after school. I love that old heap of a house, and I haven’t been up there in almost a year.”
“Mom!” Lavender looked up from her phone and glared first at her mother, then down at me. I was sitting on the floor using Ms. Springfield’s metallic paints to add more dragons to my wheel covers, to go with the rainbow stripes and unicorns Lavender had painted on them last month. I wondered how long it would take people to notice that the dragons were eating the unicorns. I had also painted a couple to look like they were full and farting out rainbow stripes.
We were all sitting around a table in the back, surrounded by statues of dragons and unicorns, occult books, and stacks of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, eating kale-wrapped tofu bites and arguing about Thornwood’s Revenge.
“The floor’s falling in,” Lavender said. “And you’re not even supposed to have that key anymore!”
“Junior Thornwood knows I’ve got it.” Ms. Springfield waved a hand, graceful as ever in her sky blue peasant shirt and jeans, her long red hair tied back with a thin blue ribbon that curled against her shoulders. She smiled at both of us. “I’ll text him. He’ll probably be glad to have somebody give it a look, other than the cleaning crew that goes in once a month.”
“Do you talk to Junior Thornwood often?” I asked, intrigued.
“Every now and then,” Ms. Springfield said. “We met back when we were kids, when his family would come to town to check on the house. He used to be scared, you know. Of being in that house, and of Thornwood’s Revenge swallowing up Blue Creek while he happened to be visiting. But he’s done okay for himself up North.”
I couldn’t help noticing how Ms. Springfield smiled when she talked about Junior. “He’s what, Thornwood’s great-great-grandson?”
“No, it’s way more than that,” she said. “Five greats down the line, I think. But he doesn’t like to talk about his family history much. I think it gets old. That’s why he wouldn’t let the city fix the floor when it collapsed.”
“I know,” I said. “I read that in Complete Haunts and Haints of Middle Tennessee. He called Hargrove an ambitious man who made unfortunate choices, and said it was time for the legend of Thornwood’s Revenge to die.”
“He should just sell the place,” Lavender said. “Let somebody else fix it up for tourism.”
“Well, it’s still his ancestral home,” Ms. Springfield said. “If tours start back up, that’ll just keep all the stories going.” She pointed to a big green ledger book lying under a bunch of newer brown ones on her bookshelf. “Besides, there are lots of valuables in Thornwood. The inventory we had to keep when we did tours, it was massive—and antique dealers made regular offers.”
I hadn’t thought of that. “Wow. I bet ghost hunters would pay a fortune for Thornwood stuff, wouldn’t they?”
“But if the cleaning crew only goes in once a month,” Lavender said, “why did Max see a light?”
“No idea,” Ms. Springfield said. “The power’s on right now to keep the heat and protect the water pipes, but nobody should be inside the house at night.”
Lavender’s face filled with worry. “We should tell Toppy.”
“I will, I will.” Her mom sounded a lot like me when I had to disagree with Lavender about something—insistent but hopeless at the same time, because it would take a Batman-level superhero to win an argument with my best friend. “I’m sure Toppy will be fine with it—he’ll probably come with us.”
Lavender frowned. “Yep. There’s a Twitter account.” She leaned down and showed me a page with a Thornwood Owl in the spot where a photo should be. “About thirty tweets. I reported it already. Seems like it got set up a day or two before the fake Facebook page—so, see? The cyberattacks started happening before the light showed up in the Thornwood Manor windows.
They probably aren’t related. No need to go risking the ridicule of the whole school—never mind the entire town—if we fall through some board and get stuck upside-down in the floor.”
“Thornwood’s not that dangerous,” Ms. Springfield said as I put down my brush and took Lavender’s phone with my paint-flecked fingers. “The floor in that room just rotted.”
Lavender ignored her as I scrolled through tweets on Lavender’s phone—tweets people out in the world might think my grandfather actually wrote.
Crime rate in Blue Creek going up. Guess I suck at my job. #badcop
Mayor Chandler shouldn’t run for reelection. Sign petition. #dragonlady
I don’t know why I took on caring for a handicapped kid. #parentingfail
Somebody needs to purge the corruption in Blue Creek. #thornwoodsrevenge
They were all bad. I tried not to focus on the “handicapped kid” snark. The hacker managed to find nasty stuff to say about Bot and Bot’s Electronics, the post office, Something Wicked, and even the local grocery store—#badlettuce. Poor Danique Mitchell, the woman who owned Danique’s Foods. She’d be so upset. She was way proud of her fresh produce and cheeses.
On impulse I went to Pinterest, and a few seconds later I pulled up yet another fake account in my grandfather’s name, this time using his initials superimposed on the Thornwood Owl. It had one board full of photos of Toppy and Mayor Chandler, all with weird or ugly facial expressions and postures. Snapchat—just never mind. Those filters were awful, and the captions would get me grounded if I said them out loud.
Lavender pulled at my hand and turned her phone until she could see it. She winced and closed Snapchat, then stared at Pinterest for a while. “Looks like they took screenshots from videos and freeze-framed them halfway through eye blinks and movements.” She took the phone and blew up a picture and turned it toward me. My grandfather gazed back at me through half-drooped eyelids, cheeks flushed red, nose even redder. His right hand was out in front of him like he was warding off a bad fall.
“Toppy looks drunk there,” Lavender said. “But he’s probably just about to sneeze or cough or something. I wonder if the hacker is going to start making memes with these pics.”
Ms. Springfield had a look at the photos, and her smile fell away. “Oh, poor Mayor Chandler. That one looks like she’s picking a beagle’s nose.”
My watch beeped, and I shifted my weight. Lavender reported the Pinterest and Snapchat fakes, then handed her phone back to me. I called the police station and let Mayor Chandler know about the additional social media troll accounts—but I left off the picking-a-dog’s-nose part.
“We’ll need to check each of these for threats, and respond to them on the city and police department websites.” She sounded tired and irritated. “I don’t even know what all other sites we should visit.”
“I think there are too many possibilities,” I said. “And the hacker can make new ones any time. Looks like he’s using the Thornwood Owl as a signature.”
The mayor let out a soft groan. “Life was easier when people who were mad at me rolled my yard or lit bags of dog poop on fire and dropped them on my front steps.”
“Ew. That’s gross.”
“And effective.” Her voice seemed happier now, as if burning dog doo and toilet paper messes cheered her up. “Hard to squelch the instinct to stomp out the flames even when you know something disgusting is probably inside.”
“Well, at least all this is just online,” I said.
“Exactly. This is frustrating, and we don’t know where it’s headed—but for now, it’s just words.”
I shifted Lavender’s phone in my grip. “So, how are you going to explain Pinterest and Snapchat to Toppy?”
Mayor Chandler laughed. “Not even gonna try. It’s all nonsense to him—and honestly, he may have a point about ignoring social media. Talk to you later, Max.”
We hung up, and I forked over Lavender’s cell.
“You know, Max,” Lavender said, “you totally should use all this mess to make Toppy get you a phone. For safety and all.”
“Lavender Dusty Springfield,” her mom said, horror lacing each word, and Lavender closed her mouth.
Fairy-bells tinkled, and Ms. Springfield got up to go see if it was a customer, still giving Lavender a shame-on-you frown.
I capped the paints and set them and the brush aside. It took me a few seconds to pull myself back into the chair, but once I was seated, I powered up and rolled toward the front of the store, and Lavender came along behind me. “Tell Toppy you need a phone in case this freak kidnaps you or something,” she whispered. “It’s not manipulating if it’s true, right?”
“Right,” I said, working to let the thought go. I had tried everything to get Toppy to understand that everybody in the universe other than me had phones of their own, but he wouldn’t bite. I got you that iPad whatsits. Just use that.
And I did, and it was great, especially since he let me get wireless on it through his phone account, but I didn’t take it out of the house very often. Too afraid it would break and leave me with nothing. Just because something’s new and the latest-greatest doesn’t make it good, Toppy often reminded me, or even necessary.
A phone felt necessary to me, but Toppy—
Whoa.
Ms. Springfield had stopped right in front of me. I let go of the clown-nose and my wheels stopped just short of her Birkenstock clogs. Lavender squished into the back of my wheelchair with a little “Oof.”
“May I help you?” Ms. Springfield said to a woman decked out in an army-green Tennessee State Trooper uniform, right down to the tan shirt, green tie, and green pants with a darker green stripe down the center.
The woman had to be six feet tall or more, with broad shoulders. She pulled off her great big green trooper’s hat with its rank badge and gold cords and acorns to reveal very short hair, all white with just a few hints of black. The lines on her face underscored the white hair. She looked to be about Toppy’s age. She had no expression at all, though her dark brown eyes darted around, taking in every detail of the shop like she might be searching for bad guys hiding in the bookshelves. When she finished, her gaze came back to Ms. Springfield, then to Lavender and me. The name badge on the right side of her chest read Captain Merilee Coker.
Captain Coker raised a paper in her hand, studied it, then nodded as if she had answered some unasked question. She ignored Ms. Springfield and focused on me with a quiet but stern, “Maxine Brennan?”
I tried to speak but couldn’t get out a word.
Lavender said, “Oh cripes, did you set something else on fire, Max?”
The trooper’s heavy eyebrows lifted. I backed into Lavender just enough to knock her sideways.
“We will have no fires,” said Captain Coker.
“We will have no fires,” agreed Ms. Springfield, holding her arms very still at her sides. “How can we help you, officer?”
“Captain,” the uniformed woman corrected. “Captain Coker. And I need to speak with Maxine Brennan.”
I raised my hand and managed to squeak, “Present.”
Captain Coker eyed Lavender and her mom. “Do the two of you have substantial contact with Miss Brennan?”
“Substantial?” Lavender sounded offended. “Uh, yeah. She’s my best friend.”
“They’re together or texting every waking moment,” Ms. Springfield said, talking fast. “Does that count? And would you like to sit down? I have a table in back.”
Captain Coker gave us all hard, long looks. She probably didn’t have any trouble arresting people. I bet if she glared at them, they confessed all their crimes and probably even made stuff up for good measure.
After way too many seconds, she said, “Do you want to talk to me in front of these people, Miss Brennan?”
Why did I have to talk to a trooper? What had I done?
Impulsive . . .
Quick to anger . . .
Good leader, but tramples other people’s feelin
gs . . .
That’s what the school had said about me after I got in all that trouble a year ago—but counseling had helped. I was doing better. I hadn’t done anything I wasn’t supposed to.
Except almost accidentally burn down your house . . .
I started to sweat like it was the middle of summer. “Yes?” I said, hoping it was the right answer. “And I’m Max.”
Captain Coker waited another few moments as she studied all three of us. Then she tucked her hat under her arm. “The table would be fine.”
Ms. Springfield, Lavender, and I crammed into one another trying to turn around. Ms. Springfield sort of squirted backward, then shooed Lavender and me ahead of her. Somehow, we made it through the store to the round table without knocking over any bookshelves. Lavender even managed to get the kale-bite trash swept into the can before the trooper settled into her chair.
Lavender and her mom sat next to Captain Coker, seeming tiny. The tall trooper looked like a grown-up in a kid’s seat at school.
She placed her hat on the table and gazed at me. I tried not to squirm and mentally went over everything I had done in the last month, year, and my whole life, ever, anywhere, for any reason. Seriously, what would a trooper want with me, now that I was doing better with my temper? Unless screwing up house electrical boxes was illegal. And if that had been illegal, Toppy would have hollered at me about that when he was hollering about everything else, and—
“Miss Brennan,” Captain Coker said, “I’m here to do a welfare check. Do you know what that means?”
My thoughts spun in slow circles, like a top winding down before it fell over and quit moving. “No, ma’am.”
She leaned forward.
I pressed myself against my wheelchair and wished I could fall through its back.
“I went to your home,” she continued, “but when no one was there, your neighbors suggested I check for you here, or at Lavender Springfield’s home. I have to talk to you today, because someone called Social Services and reported that you were being abused and neglected. Since it’s the weekend, police respond instead of child protection workers, and since the alleged caregiver involved was a local law officer, State was asked to make the check. State as in the nearest State Police headquarters, which is mine.”
