"Oh." Cam scrunched up her face thoughtfully.
"How about peppered?" Jason asked.
"Cool!" Alex congratulated the boy.
Prescott Newton Junior College was a girls' school a few miles outside of Boston. Its ivy-covered brick buildings were decorated with smirking gargoyles sticking out their tongues.
Alex reciprocated the gesture as the Volvo stopped before the arched entrance to the school. Jason said he'd wait for them at the visitors' parking lot, and they promised to meet him there as soon as possible.
"The question of the day," Cam said as they headed for the administration building, "is what do we do if and when we find her?"
Alex passed her the pad on which she'd written the spell.
O, cheater of your roommate
You caused so many pain
Now accept your fate
And end your blackmail game.
Free Karen Richman,
O, Jennifer Shepherd,
Or you'll be assaulted...
And peppered.
Cam groaned. "Assaulted and peppered?"
"I thought it was cute," Alex said defensively, grabbing back her pad. "You know, like salt and pepper; assault and peppered."
A loud, shrill laugh distracted her. Alex turned toward the group of girls gathered on a nearby bench. One of them, a pretty brunette, was hysterically amused.
"I know that laugh. Is that her? Does she look like the girl in the BMW?"
Cam glanced at the same crew. "The one in the red sweater? Yes! That's exactly how she looked."
Alex trotted across the lawn to the bench, dragging Camryn with her.
"But we have no herbs, no crystals, no stones," Cam protested. "Just that... um, thing you wrote."
"It's not a thing. It's an incantation," Alex pointed out irritably. "And anyway, we also have your mojo and my mean streak."
Conversation on the bench grew hushed as Cam and Alex approached. The red-sweater girl looked them up and down, then burst out laughing again. "Just in time for Halloween," she erupted. "It's Cinderella—before and after."
"And what are you going as—a felon?" Cam questioned her.
"A... what?" one of the other girls said.
"What my sister means," Alex explained with a smile, "is that your friend Jennifer—"
"You are Jennifer Shepherd?" Cam asked her.
"The shepherd and her sheep." Alex took in the staring crowd. "You were in the car with Karen, weren't you? That would make you an accessory—"
"Oh, no, no," Cam insisted. "An accessory is something that brightens up a boring outfit."
The brunette stood up slowly. She seemed to be uncoiling rather than getting up. She was tall, way taller than Beth, Cam realized as the girl glared down at them.
"I don't know who you are or who sent you," she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a handful of bills. "But why don't you take a dollar or two, and go play trick-or-treat on someone else."
Jennifer was a regular riot. At least her crowd thought so. Giggling and elbowing one another, they laughed at Cam and Alex.
But Alex's attention was on the crumpled bills in Jennifer's hand. She wondered if the careless heap of cash was money from Cade.
Cam was on the same page. Dirty money, Alex heard her thinking.
Blood money, Alex silently amended. Which gave her a monster idea!
Golden, Cam agreed, tuning into the plan. But can we do it?
"Worth a try," Alex said aloud, handing her the incantation again.
Cam skimmed the work. "Got it," she said. "Now what?"
Alex took her hand. "Let's say it. I just hope our amulets don't act up again. My neck's still sore."
"O, cheater of your roommate," Cam began, "who caused so many pain."
Jennifer's friends were giggling harder than ever now.
"Accept your fate, and end your blackmail game," Alex recited, to loud guffaws of laughter.
"Free Karen Richman, O, Jennifer Shepherd," Cam intoned, grateful that the final line was Alex's.
"Karen?" someone asked. "Wasn't she your roommate, Jen? The one who had the breakdown?"
"I really liked her," another girl offered. "I couldn't believe it when I heard she dropped out."
"Or you'll be assaulted," Alex vowed, "and peppered!"
That did it. Although Jennifer had gone pale, the girls around her had totally lost it. Breaking up, they were bent over double with unrestrained hysteria.
But Alex was focused on the currency Jennifer was holding... which had begun to bleed.
"Hey, no fair. Wait for me," Cam grumbled, taking Alex's hand and shifting her own gaze to the bundle of bills.
"Ugh! That is so icky," one of the college girl's clever friends shrieked. They had all stopped laughing.
"Jennifer, your money. It's, like, all bloody!" another scholar chimed in.
Dirty money, Cam was thinking. Putrid. Filthy. Polluted.
"And it stinks!"
"It smells just like poop!"
The lot of them were prancing around, holding their noses and looking dangerously queasy. Then someone gasped. "Maggots!"
The bills in Jennifer's hands were suddenly seething with slimy white creatures that looked like writhing rice.
"Drop it! Let go!" her friends were hollering, even as they backed away from her, sickened.
Violently wagging her hand, Jennifer was trying desperately to do just that. But while the white worms that had begun to mass at her wrist flew every which way and the putrid stench also took wing, the bleeding money stayed stuck to her.
"Help me," she pleaded to Cam and Alex, who were the only ones still near her.
"No probs," Alex said. "Just come with us—"
"To the Marble Bay police station," Cam added.
"Anything!" the trembling, spooked-out girl promised. "Just get this money away from me!"
Chapter 21 – Halloween
Eddie was off the hook. Cade's dad refused to press charges against his son. Karen was slated for therapy. Jennifer was charged with extortion. And Nguyen was on the mend.
There was nothing left to do but celebrate!
Except that in the car, on the way home from the police station, a strange feeling crept over Cam and Alex. More like a nonfeeling, really. It wasn't loneliness, exactly, or depression, or even disappointment. It was just this windy emptiness, as if all that they'd accomplished meant nothing. For starters, they still hadn't figured out who the messenger was. But that wasn't it.
Dave, at the wheel, sensed that something was wrong. Even Emily picked up on it, too.
Only Dylan, sitting between his sisters in the backseat, was too psyched to notice that neither Cam nor Alex was answering his fast and furious questions. "How'd you find out that Cade took the money? Where'd that girl who smelled like toxic waste come from? Why was the Vietnamese lady crying?"
"What is it?" Emily finally asked when they got home. She pushed back a length of Cam's hair that had fallen over her beautiful gray eyes. "Sweetie, it's your birthday—"
Cam sighed as she followed Alex upstairs.
That was just it, she thought. It was her birthday. Hers and Alex's. Their first one together. And all they really knew about their birth was that it was also the day of their real father's death. He'd been murdered by his own brother. Their uncle. Who, supposedly, wanted to kill them, too. Talk about dysfunctional families!
What they didn't know was way more important. Like what had happened to their mother.
The answering machine in their room was blinking. There were five messages they didn't bother listening to—and more on e-mail that would also have to wait.
"Happy birthday!" Beth phoned a little while later. Alex was stretched out on her bed staring at the ceiling. Across the room, Cam sat at the desk, with her feet up. Though she was nearest the phone, she had let the answering machine pick up. "So what are you going as tonight? Call me!"
They didn't say anything for a while after Beth hung up. Then, without looking at her s
ister, Alex asked, "So what did Doris Bass say? Tell me again."
Cam toyed with her necklace, zipping the charm lazily back and forth on its chain. "Well, to tell you she loved you and that lots of people have been asking for you and sending regards—"
"About my mom," Alex cut in. "About Sara."
"Mrs. Bass went to school with her," Cam replied. "She said Sara couldn't have kids. And she knew your, uh... dad, Dwight."
"Ike," Alex said coldly. "That's what they called him."
"She didn't think much of him," Cam said uncomfortably.
"Neither did I," Alex assured her, still staring at the ceiling. "Losing him is like the one bright spot in this whole mess."
Cam glanced over at the bed, then turned away. "It isn't about them, is it?" she said softly. "It's about her, right?"
"Miranda. What kind of funky name is that?" Alex asked.
"You think she's dead?"
"Might as well be for all the good she's done us."
"I don't think so," Cam decided.
"Thantos," Alex agreed.
"He said he could take us to her."
"Maybe he meant to her grave." Alex had tried to sound laid-back, but it came out sounding angry.
"I know. I thought of that," Cam said. "How messed up would that be?"
"Hey, I lost one mom about a month ago," Alex answered. "What's one more? I can handle it."
"I can't." Cam let her feet fall, pushed out of the chair, crossed the room, and flounced down on Alex's bed. "You know, if he caught us or whatever—Thantos I mean, if I ever saw him again, I'd go with him. I'd tell him, like, 'Okay, take me to my mother.'"
Alex kept staring at the ceiling. Finally, Cam asked. "Would you?"
"If you went I'd have to, wouldn't I? Emily would never let me stay here alone. And I definitely couldn't pass for you—"
A moment later, Alex sat up. "What are you wearing tonight?"
"Ugh. I was going to wear my soccer uniform," Cam confessed. "I thought that would get a laugh, the way I blew the big game last season. It just doesn't seem all that funny now. What about you?"
"I was going as myself. That always gets a laugh," Alex retorted.
"No, seriously."
"Seriously. Only now I've got this killer idea. It'll totally blow their minds."
By six o'clock the Barnes' garage had been turned into a curtained, jack-o'-lantern-lit, spiderweb-draped cave. Dylan and his crew were in charge of decorating and haunting it.
Beth was the first to arrive at the birthday blowout. A shrieking maniac in a ketchup-soaked sheet swinging down from a garage beam greeted her. To get into the party, she was forced to shut her eyes and put her hand in a dish of worms, which felt a lot like soggy spaghetti. Dylan himself offered her the eyeballs—peeled grapes floating in lukewarm water.
Alex seemed strangely hyped to see Cam's best, who was done up as a wiry haired Peter Pan. "Bethie!" she shouted over the music as the willowy girl entered the house.
"Am I early?" Beth asked suspiciously. Cam's Montana sib hadn't gotten into costume yet, she'd noticed. Unless that mess of pin curls on top of her head and the multiple jangly earrings were supposed to be it.
"I know how ticked you are with me," Alex said, taking the startled girl's arm. "I mean, my moving in here and, like, getting so much attention. But, in case you ever doubted it, Cam still considers you her very best friend in the world."
"And you'd know that how?"
"Well, uh... because she confides in me," Alex answered.
"Give me news, not history." Beth pulled away and deposited her sleeping bag in a corner at the bottom of the stairs. "I mean, it's kind of hard not to notice that she confides in you. Have you noticed that she doesn't confide in me anymore?"
"Oh, Bethie, that's not fair," Alex said, running her charm back and forth on its chain.
"You see!" Beth pointed to the necklace. "Like she'd really ever let me wear her precious sun!"
"I am going to hurl!" It was Bree, decked out in the gown her father's girlfriend, a soap starlet, had worn to last year's People's Choice Awards. "Was that eyeball thing not totally gross? Whose idea was it, yours?" she asked, handing Alex her sleeping bag.
"Is that what they do in Montana instead of bobbing for apples?" Kristen, done up as Lara Croft, the digital action heroine of Tomb Raider, teased.
"No way," Cam came down the stairs. "They bob for roadkill."
"Puke-ola. Where's your costume?" Kristen asked.
"Did you cut your hair?" Bree wanted to know. "I love the shaggy look. So retro."
"Blame it on my volumizer," Cam said, fluffing her 'do. "So, where are the rest of the Six Pack, of course—"
Bree and Kristen exchanged surprised looks, then burst out laughing.
A deep-throated chuckle announced Sukari's arrival. She tossed her bedroll onto the pile in the corner. "Buenos dias, my peeps!" she greeted her buds. She was wearing a Mexican serape and sandals—but her bleached hair was hidden under a red, green, and black knit cap from which frizzy Rasta dreads dangled.
Kristen high-fived Sukari. "What are you supposed to be, a vision of ethnic diversity?"
"You've heard of Salt 'n' Pepa? I'm their Latin cousin, Adobo. That's salt, pepper, and garlic powder." Sukari checked out Kris's Tomb Raider outfit. "Grouchy Tiger!" she declared.
"You mean, Crouching Tiger," Bree said, hugging Suki.
"No, she didn't." Beth laughed.
"Where's 'Manda?" Alex asked. "I thought she was coming with you."
Surprised at Alex's interest, Sukari answered, "She texted me ten minutes ago saying she was feeling really sick—"
There was a scream, then a thud and a groan from the garage. Everyone turned toward the surge of sounds.
"Whew, that haunted-house scene was majorly scary." Madison entered in a pink frenzy, two soaring bunny ears poking through her lifeless hair. "Dylan's, like, sooo creative. And that guy who swung down from the beam... you know, the one wearing that totally barf-inducing bedsheet with all the red gunk on it? His rope snapped!"
"Oh, no! That's terrible," Beth said.
"No, no. Don't worry. I'm okay," Madison assured her. She spun around, showing off her rabbit costume, which had feet attached like the Dr. Denton pajamas Cam had worn as a baby. "Like it? Oooo, wait!" Madison reached into a pocket in her fluffy pink suit and turned her back to everyone. When she faced them again, she was wearing bunny teeth—two long, white, bucked teeth overhanging her bottom lip.
Cam broke up, as did Sukari, Beth, and Kristen. But Alex, without cracking a smile, just stared at the bizarre little rabbit. And Bree, whose mouth had flopped open at the sight of Madison, finally managed to say, "Excuse me. What planet did you say you're from?"
Dylan ran in then. "That was really rotten," he said to the tiny girl. "He could have broken his back."
Madison grinned her grotesque bunny grin. "Totally," she hissed at Cam's brother. "But he didn't, did he?"
"What's going on here?" Cam asked, turning to Dyl for an answer. But before he could respond, a redheaded witch carrying an orange cat swept into the party. "Are we having fun yet?"
"Amanda!" Alex screeched. "I thought you weren't coming."
Everyone turned to Alex, who seemed way over-elated to see their bud. Everyone but Amanda herself, who whispered to Dylan, "It's okay. I fixed your friend. Just keep him off that rope for a while."
Dylan stared bug-eyed at the witch in the peaked black hat. "Wow, you're really good at that 'whole' stuff—"
"Holistic," Amanda corrected him. "Works like a charm. Now run along."
Cam overheard the exchange. "Er... 'Manda?" she asked, peering at the girl, whose pale eyes didn't look blue tonight. They appeared almost gray. Black-rimmed and gray.
Seeing Cam's surprise, Amanda blinked deliberately. When her eyes opened again, they were blue.
"I... I must have been mistaken," Cam said uncertainly.
"What's with the orange cat? Where's Willis?" Sukari asked her best. "W
illis is 'Manda's fiendish black cat," she explained to Alex, who said unexpectedly, "I know."
"Oh, really?" Kristen commented doubtfully.
"Cam knows about Willis," Amanda said.
"You're right. Cam does." Sukari gestured at the bobby-pinned, overly earringed girl. "But that's Alex," she pointed out.
T*Witches: Building a Mystery Page 13
