Deception

by Lee Nichols

  I straightened in my chair. That’d be killer. Maybe I’d get into Berkeley after all. I’d already moved all the way across country—my parents could no longer balk at across the Bay. I frowned. That is, if I ever saw them again.

  Coby tossed a note onto my desk.

  A note!? Edmund tsked. Believe me, he is not getting any smarter. He can’t afford to be passing notes.

  Oh, go away, I said, and fluttered my hands to compel him to leave.

  You may be getting stronger, but you’re not getting any nicer, Edmund said before fading.

  I inwardly sighed, because I agreed with him. Then I checked that Sakolsky wasn’t looking and unfolded the note.

  Pay attention. I’m not going to have to help you with your homework again, am I?

  I answered:

  Ha! Text me tonight and I’ll give you the answers.

  I tossed the note back and noticed a few girls looking between me and Coby. Probably imagining romantic liaisons. Let them dream—maybe Coby and I wouldn’t last past Homecoming, but at least I had him through Trig.

  I couldn’t face the cafeteria at lunchtime, so I ate my chicken sandwich in the computer lab. I needed to work on my research project for Western Civ. One of the benefits of a superexpensive private school is access to state-of-the-art databases. I removed my necklace, and scanned the amulet. Kinda blurry. I scanned the image a few more times, then did a graphics search.

  Ten thousand crappy matches, including a Victorian brooch on eBay with a pearl border, a glassy green jade bamboo charm, and a jade filigree Edwardian ring. None of which looked anything like my mother’s pendant.

  After half an hour, my eyes blurred. I narrowed the search and kept scrolling. Forget the design, I’d just focus on the history of jade trading.

  I started to close the search window when I saw it. The exact design.

  Seventeen hits of the image on some true-crime Web site. I clicked before I realized what the pictures showed. The crime scene of a murder.

  A mutilated woman. Shapes carved into her skin—shapes that echoed the design of the jade amulet. And branded into the floor beside her body, an exact match to my mother’s necklace.

  I read the page in blank horror. The woman, name withheld, was killed at home. In San Francisco, only a mile from my house.

  “Oh God.” I covered my mouth with my hand.

  The Curlicue Killer. Not an urban myth, a brutal murder.

  I felt a sickening sense of foreboding in the pit of my stomach. What was my mother doing with the symbol found burned into the floor of a ritualistic murder?

  I needed to learn more about the amulet. But who could I trust?

  After two more classes, I stumbled outside to head home, and remembered Periwinkle Antiques on Charles Street in Boston. The same day I’d found that death mask, I’d found the paperwork about Max’s internship. And anyone who knew Max would help his little sister, right?

  Well, maybe. Still, I didn’t have a better idea.

  Except how was I going to get to Boston? Echo Point was fifteen miles north with no T service. I stopped just outside the front gates, wondering about calling a cab, when Sara approached.

  “You look lost,” she said.

  “You have no idea.”

  She laughed. “Your name is Emma. You live in a museum. Do you need directions?”

  “Let’s go shopping,” I said.

  She peered at me. “If you’re teasing, I hate you.”

  “No, no. I’m serious. I need to steal your style.”

  Her eyes lit up. “When? Saturday?”

  “What are you doing right now?” I asked. “Let’s go to Boston.”

  “Yay!” She dragged me to her BMW, which she unlocked with a satisfyingly expensive noise. “Where do you want to start?”

  “Charles Street?” I suggested.

  “Oh. I was thinking Neiman Marcus.”

  “Well, I need to make one stop there,” I said. “Say hi to a friend of the family. If you don’t mind.”

  “No, that’s cool.” She steered the car through the village toward the highway. “But you have to spill—where’d you and Coby go after the party?”

  I bit my lip. This is exactly why I’d been avoiding her all day. “Didn’t you ask Coby?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “He won’t say. He didn’t even tell Harry. Except about Homecoming. God, he’s so perfect it makes me sick.”

  “It does kind of make him hard to live up to,” I said.

  “He’s just completely nice with that freak of nature beautiful face. And his body …” She gave a little shiver. “If he was an ass, girls would still lust after him, but he’s not, you know?” She sighed. “He’s always there for you. I mean, you can trust him, right?”

  She fell silent, looking slightly embarrassed.

  “Were you ever … you’re not into him, are you?”

  She drove in silence for a moment. “Always,” she admitted. “Since the day I met him.”

  “Sara! Why didn’t you tell me? You know I’d never have gone out with him!”

  “Yeah, because I love Coby, he should never date.”

  “But you helped me dress up!”

  She cocked her head. “He likes you, and I want him to be happy. You can’t help it, can you? Who you like. And you can’t force them to like you back.”

  “No, you can’t,” I said, thinking of Bennett. “But how can he not like you? Look at you!”

  “He loves me,” she said, her voice wavering slightly, “like a sister.”

  “Oh, Sara.”

  She shook herself. “Stop. I’m a walking pity party. I don’t want sympathy. I want gossip.”

  So I told her we’d just gone to the Point, and onto the beach, where we found my insanely jealous guardian stalking me. I didn’t tell her about the kiss in the car. Then we traded boyfriend stories—hers were far more numerous than mine—until we got into Boston.

  “What about Harry?” I asked. They seemed to get along great, better even than her and Coby. I wondered if she liked him, too.

  “He’s not a bad kisser,” she said.

  “You’ve kissed him?!”

  “Once or twice. All that caffeine makes me kind of … you know.”

  “Oh my God, you’re a coffee slut!” I teased her.

  She giggled. “We’re here. What’s the address?”

  I took in the neighborhood around us. We drove down a narrow lane with cute shops on either side. I didn’t want Sara to tag along, but I wasn’t sure how to tell her to just let me out.

  “Why don’t we meet back here in half an hour?” I said. “You don’t want to get stuck listening to my great-aunt talking about her bowels.”

  That did the trick. I waved good-bye to Sara, and headed down the sidewalk, looking for Periwinkle Antiques. In two minutes, I stopped outside a little hole-in-the-wall shop, not nearly so grand as my parents’. It was closed.

  No, not just closed. Out of business. With a For Lease sign in the window.

  I put my hand against the glass and peered inside. Empty. I ran my fingers over the window, sensing the faint remnant of some ghostly presence.

  My spine began to tingle and I turned to find a woman suddenly beside me. She was a tall blonde, dressed in an original Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress from the seventies, with an incredibly large collar and ridiculously loud pattern. She wore brown suede platform sandals, and I tried not to shudder at her suntan panty hose.

  Poor Mr. Periwinkle, she said.

  What happened? I asked. Is he dead?

  Very much so.

  I need to talk to him. Maybe I can summon him.

  I should think not! she said. You ghostkeepers cannot return.

  He was a ghostkeeper?!

  Until the day he died. Murdered, right there—in the middle of his shop.

  Murdered? Who killed him?

  A ripple passed through her, and she shook her head.

  I can compel you to tell me.

  Please don�
��t, she said, trembling with fear. Please.

  I swallowed. Did you ever meet his intern, Max? Max Vaile?

  Oh, yes—he was here that night. Despite being a ghost, she managed to pale. Poor Mr. Periwinkle. So much pain. Such a long time dying.

  Who killed him?

  She shook her head. There’s a spare key to the side door inside the frog in the alley.

  I reached within myself to gather the force to compel her, but she looked at me with such terror, I couldn’t continue. Still trembling, she started fading away. But before she disappeared entirely, her lips formed a word: Neos.

  That word again. What did it mean?

  Fine. I’d try the side door.

  Around the building, a narrow arch extended over a tidy brick-lined alleyway. I passed a bank of electric meters and a fire escape, and next to a stack of recycle bins found a little ceramic frog. In its mouth was a key.

  “Great.”

  I slipped the key in the lock and went inside the shop, a little surprised there was no alarm. It looked just as empty from the inside. Three rooms with nothing in them. The showroom had built-in cabinets with empty shelves and a looming chandelier and burnished hardwood floor.

  Was I supposed to conduct some arcane ghostkeeping rite to find an answer? The air smelled of old wood and dust—and I felt a shiver of dread.

  Not a tingle, like a ghost. Just a sudden premonition.

  I crossed the room, searching the floorboards. Then stopped suddenly, goose bumps on my arms.

  The symbol from the jade amulet was branded into the floor. I clutched my chest. My mother’s jade amulet. There were a dozen stains splattered around it—bloodstains, from designs carved in flesh.

  I felt myself pulled to the floor. I reached toward the branded wood and ran my fingers around the rough, charred edges and whoosh—

  Pain. Mr. Periwinkle’s memories. His agony and terror, and a hellish place beyond pain and fear, a place of hopelessness and torment. And beyond that, worse. Something had been torn from Mr. Periwinkle, but what? His soul?

  The agony turned unendurable, and—

  I tore my fingers from the brand, my harsh breath echoing in the empty storefront. And I remembered another empty storefront, from ten years ago, and fear broke over me like a wave.

  I fled.

  I slammed into the passenger seat of Sara’s car, trembling.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Someone was murdered.”

  “What? Who? Your great-aunt?”

  I shook my head. “No, a—a neighbor.”

  “Whoa! Did you know him?”

  “No. My brother did.”

  Oh God. My brother. The first murder happened a mile from my house, the design from my mother’s necklace carved into some poor woman. And now this—also linked so closely to Max. The ghost even said she’d seen him here the night of the murder. But ghosts, they weren’t good with time.

  I needed Max. I needed to know what happened. They were all gone, like they were on the run, with no way to contact them. My whole family had disappeared.

  Except me.

  Me, they’d left behind.

  “Wow,” Sara said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m kinda freaked.”

  “Let’s just go home.”

  “Do you mind? I dragged you all the way here.”

  “Sweetie, you’re a mess. I’m taking you home.”

  We drove back to Echo Point in silence, as I tried not to relive every moment of Mr. Periwinkle’s murder.

  “Thanks, Sara,” I said, when we pulled into the drive. “Thanks for being a friend.”

  She smiled. “You know, I’m glad you moved here. You make everything … interesting.”

  I half laughed. “I could use a little less interesting.”

  “You’re supposed to say that you’re glad, too!”

  I hugged her good-bye. “I am.”

  Not only for my new friends, but because I was getting closer to the truth. About who I was, about Max and my parents. The only question left: did I really want to know?

  22

  I found Martha in the kitchen, compelling Anatole to make dinner.

  “There’s a dead ghostkeeper!” I blurted.

  “What?” She clanked her cup into the saucer. “Who?”

  Maybe that wasn’t the best way to tell her. “Mr. Periwinkle—he owned an antique shop in Boston. Someone killed him.”

  “Oh. Yes, I know.” Martha stared off into the distance. “Francis. He was a dear friend.”

  I scooted next to her in the breakfast nook. “I’m so sorry. But I—do you know who killed him?”

  “The Knell is investigating. Bennett’s working on that.” She furrowed her brow. “What were you doing there?”

  “My brother Max interned for him. I thought maybe …” I found myself reluctant to say too much. “Maybe he’d heard from him.”

  Martha smoothed her linen napkin. “Did you hear anything else? About how he died?”

  I nodded. “I saw the bloodstains.”

  “And … ?”

  How could I reveal what I’d seen without implicating my family? Between my brother’s internship and my mother’s jewelry, I was even afraid of my own suspicions. But this was Martha. I could tell her. “There was some kind of design burned into the floor.”

  Martha took a deep, shuddering breath. “Francis wasn’t the first victim. That mark on the floor—remember I told you some ghostkeepers need a focus? The Knell believes that mark is someone’s talisman.”

  “Whose is it?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “Was,” she said. “They stopped practicing a long time ago. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  She hadn’t answered my question, but I was afraid to ask again. Instead I said, “Where are my parents? That’s what doesn’t make any sense. Why don’t they contact me?”

  “The Knell can’t find them.”

  “The Knell,” I said. “They didn’t bring me to Echo Point just because there’s so much power here, did they? They’re not only curious about what I can do—they suspect my family’s involved with these murders.”

  “Maybe they wanted you here to protect you.”

  Or maybe they knew I wore my mother’s talisman around my neck. Or were using me to bait a trap.

  “I can protect myself,” I said, and stomped away.

  . . .

  The next morning, I woke with a new resolve. Forget the Knell—I’d do my own investigating. So in fencing class I managed to pair up with Natalie, to ask what she knew about the murders.

  She beat the crap out of me. With the proper fencing posture, and all the rules, I’d finally improved to the level of average, but Natalie was superb. I resisted the impulse to fight dirty, and managed to surprise her with a riposte. But as she was in the middle of a remise—another immediate attack—I didn’t get far.

  I glanced at the two ghost jocks who, as usual, mocked me from the bleachers.

  “They think you’re hot,” I told Natalie.

  She didn’t deign to look at them. “What’s it like, communicating with them? Ben and I have always wondered.”

  She called him Ben? I frowned then yelped as she scored another point. Why was she always catching me off guard? Had she called him Ben just to throw me?

  “It’s better than talking to someone who keeps jabbing me with a foil,” I said.

  She grinned. “En garde!”

  After a few passes, I started digging for information. “So you and Bennett both work for the Knell. How’d you start with that?”

  “Did he tell you how we met?”

  “Should he have?”

  “I grew up in a fundamentalist sect in Texas.” She easily parried a wild thrust. “You know that polygamous group they raided?”

  I nodded, trying to keep my back arm at the proper angle.

  “It was like that, without the polygamy. Though if our minister had suggested it, I’m sure my parents would’ve agreed. Hell, if he’d su
ggested cyanide, they would’ve agreed.”

  “So they aren’t ghostkeepers?”

  “My mom was,” she said. “My dad convinced her that ghostkeeping was the devil’s work. So my mother stopped practicing and tried to ‘cure’ herself.” Natalie shuddered. “Then I started showing tendencies …”

  We stopped fencing and I bit my lip at her expression, forgetting all about interrogating her.

  She stared into the distance. “They beat me, they starved me. They locked me in the basement. And when nothing worked, they tried exorcism.”

  I shivered. “What does that mean?”

  “They found more inspired ways to hurt me.” She shook her head, like she was banishing the memories. “I didn’t break, though. I never broke. I like it, Emma. I like summoning ghosts. It’s who I am.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.” And I realized it was true, despite everything.

  “Then once, the minister tried to choke the devil out of me. That’s when my mom finally called the Knell. They sent Bennett.”

  “Oh my God. Natalie, why didn’t you tell me?”

  She half smiled. “It’s not something you bring up over lunch. I just—I wanted you to know why I’d do anything for the Knell, anything for Bennett. He saved my life.”

  So Bennett really did fulfill my knight-in-shining-armor fantasy. Just not for me.

  “We’re not here to gossip,” Coach snapped, crossing the gym toward us. “Natalie, you should know better. I’m afraid I’ve almost given up on you, Emma.”

  “Maybe I can’t fence,” I told her. “But I do know how to use a sword.”

  Which was exactly the wrong thing to say.

  Coach saluted me. Her impressive calves bulged as she curled her back arm and drove me across the gym. Her style was much more intent and controlled than the Rake, who’d seemed to pay about as much attention as someone brushing their teeth. I think that helped me, actually, because it had caused my own style to be similar.

  So I switched my grip and easily batted her away. She redoubled her attack, quick and controlled, and I lazily parried every strike. I felt a grin rise on my face—the Rake’s grin, infuriating and smug, but I couldn’t help myself. For once, I felt in control. For once, I was simply better than my opponent.