by Abigail Boyd
"Did you hang out with Lainey and Madison and not tell me about it?"
The silence that followed told me she was caught. I was surprised at how jealous it still made me feel, the old wound instantly splitting fresh.
I sat up and looked at her unmistakably guilty face. Her necklace had fallen back into her hair. Her mouth opened and shut several times. Rinse and repeat.
"How did you know about that?" she asked quietly, caught in her own web.
"So it is true?" I asked. I had known it was, of course — Theo had been the one to tell me, and she was the most honest person I'd ever met. I just wanted to hear Jenna admit it.
"Yeah." She pulled a strand of hair through her teeth.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because you would have shunned me," Jenna said. Her eyes flicked to my face, searching my emotions. "Don't tell me you wouldn't, because it's completely true. I know you better than your own hand, Ariel Rose Donovan."
"Would you blame me?" I asked, still feeling the burn of jealousy, though it was fading. Film machine gun fire erupted above. "Why would you ever hang out with those vipers? We've hated them since first grade. Was it about being popular?"
"I never cared about that. I still don't. My mom...thought it would be a good idea," she said carefully. As if timed for us, another boom from the TV rumbled above.
"Since when do you do anything Rachel says?" I questioned. "You normally run in the opposite direction as a rule."
"Well, yeah, normally," Jenna admitted. "But it seemed so important to her."
"Why?" I had waited so long for any answers, and didn't think I'd ever get any. I had built up a reserve of questions.
"Mom was talking about joining that stupid Thornhill Society," Jenna said. "And she said it would help if I got in good with Lainey, because her dad is like one of their bigwigs. And she and dad had been fighting so much over money..."
That made no sense. It made me think of McPherson's timely induction. Thornhill members were supposed to be the wealthy people in town, not the regular schlubs like Jenna's parents.
"Why would they even consider your family?" I asked bluntly.
"Maybe they needed more butt-kissers."
I let the subject drop for now.
"When you and Lainey were together, did you guys talk about me?" I asked lamely. I shut my eyes. I wanted to know, but at the same time didn't.
"No, dork," Jenna said, chuckling warmly and sitting up on her elbows. "We mostly talked about the Winter collections in Vogue and shoes. I was trying to weasel a free tanning membership out of her. Nothing important."
But I didn't know if I could fully believe her. I never would have thought she could lie to me before. Now I didn't know.
As if reading my thoughts, Jenna said, "You know I wouldn't lie to you about anything important, right? It was just a little white lie, I knew it wouldn't hurt anything." Never mind that it had hurt our friendship.
"I just have a lot of questions. Your mom said something about emails, too, ones she wouldn't let me see. Ones that suggested that you ran away, that you'd been planning it."
This revelation made her shoot up on her feet. I looked up at her in disbelief. "She was snooping around in my emails? What the hell?"
"That's what she said."
"Even if she was, there was nothing there. I never even gave Madison or Lainey my email, they just texted me a few times. I wasn't going to run away, I mean where would I go on my allowance?"
I nodded, trying to believe her.
Suddenly a big boom sounded from upstairs, much louder than anything before.
"That wasn't from the movie," I said, frowning. We both ran upstairs.
Hugh and Claire were standing by the sliding glass door. At least, they were standing where the door had been. Broken glass had shattered all over the floor. I moved over near them to get a closer look. Behind us, their movie was still blaring, forgotten.
A huge crow had flown into the door, its body a twisted mess of black, bloody feathers. Blood oozed in between the glass shards. Some of the feathers were still floating down in the horribly still air.
Later on, when Hugh had finished sweeping the glass into a dustpan, Claire and I were sitting at the kitchen table over coffee. Claire's white knuckles clutched her mug, the undiluted coffee shaking inside.
I normally didn't drink coffee, not liking the bitter taste. Especially ever since the gallon I had downed after Warwick was arrested. But I took a swig of the liquid from my own cup. It warmed my insides on the way down.
"I don't know how that could have happened," Claire murmured. Hugh was busy tacking up a plastic sheet in the empty hole where the door had been.
"It just means the window was really clean," I said, trying for a joke. It sounded inappropriate. I wanted to comfort her, but when she got like this, it mostly just freaked me out. I didn't know how to react when the roles were reversed and I was the one taking care of her.
Jenna wouldn't stop bugging me about the emails. A repairman came in the next day to measure the door and decide the best way to fix it. Claire made herself busy in the exercise room Hugh and I had set up for her a long time ago, that she'd rarely used up until now.
"I'm telling you, check my inbox," Jenna persisted. I was still trying to pretend I was talking to no one as we sat on the couch together, watching the installer and his yellow tape measure.
Claire's office was empty. I went in, feeling like I was being sneaky even though I was allowed to use the computer during the summer without asking.
The room was dark, from a lack of windows, the only light the blue indicators on the monitor and computer tower. I swung the mouse so that the monitor blinked to life and sat down, Jenna crouching beside me.
"Of course she would invade my privacy," Jenna was complaining as I navigated to the sign in page. "Not like she has anything better to do."
"I don't know, if my kid went missing, I'd probably cross all the lines, too," I mumbled. She ignored me.
"You know how she's always going through my room. She says she's putting away laundry, but it's like, socks don't go underneath the mattress, mom," Jenna ranted.
"Well, maybe if she didn't find things like cigarettes and random dude's phone numbers..." I said with a sideways grin, remembering.
"Those cigarettes lasted me four mouths!" Jenna said defensively. "You know they were just a prop."
I remembered every time Rachel caught her up to trouble, it had seemed like the end of the world. Jenna's privileges would get stripped for a few days, then her parents would reverse the decision like nothing had ever happened. Flip-flop parenting, Jenna called it.
"What's your password?" I asked, fingers poised over the ergonomic keyboard.
She looked at me sheepishly. "Uh, Twinklebug22." I had the feeling she should be blushing.
"One or two g's on that?"
"One. It was my dad's nickname —"
"I remember," I said, cutting her off.
We both sat and waited for the page to load, watching the screen impatiently.
"Wow...is that all spam or what?" Jenna asked. "When did I become so popular?"
There were 2000 unread messages in the inbox. It looked like many of them were alerts from her fanpage. I moved the scroll bar uselessly up and down, a little lost for a minute as to how to proceed.
Backtracking several dozen pages, to last June, I didn't find anything out of the ordinary. Then I checked the outbox, but the last message Jenna had sent was addressed to me, asking if I still had her yellow sweatshirt. The one she was now permanently stuck wearing, incidentally.
A hard lump formed in my throat. Jenna is right here, I reminded myself, and forced the lump away. Jenna clicked her necklace against her teeth, otherwise silent and watchful.
"If your mom did have your email, why didn't she give it to the police?" I asked aloud. "Most of these emails have never been read. If the police are investigating this thing as thoroughly as they say they are, this whole thing should have been
dug through."
"Rachel's good at lying, too," Jenna said bitterly. "She probably just said that to get people off of her back." I looked at her questioningly. She was glaring at the screen, but there was also a kind of triumph on her face. Then she glanced at me, eyes searching. "Why the police? What did I do?"
"You went missing, remember?" I didn't even tried to mention the fact that she was dead. It would just start a losing argument.
"Is that why so many people have been emailing me?" she pressed, her voice soft.
I didn't want to tell her that after she'd disappeared, she'd become popular with people who barely knew her, people who felt compelled to express their massive grief. Even if they'd barely exchanged a word.
"You were gone for a while. It builds up."
"But see. There's nothing. I told you, I wasn't planning on running away. And if I had, I would have taken you with me."
That stirred a great deal of suppressed emotion in me. "You mean that? I thought you hated me that night you left..."
"Of course! I wouldn't leave you in Hell."
As a last ditch effort, I checked the trash, but that had been deleted long ago. Still, I believed her. There weren't any messages to or from Lainey or Madison, or even Warwick, although I knew the last one was a slim to none chance anyway.
She jumped to her feet, flip-flops snapping against her bare heels.
I checked the local news website idly, hoping to find some information on the birds. They hadn't let up, and only multiplied as the weeks past. Yet no one seemed to be talking about it, as if they didn't notice it. Or as if they thought if they didn't comment on it, they would go magically disappear.
Instead, I found a small article that the old Berhardt Asylum a few towns over was going to be gutted. They hadn't used the place for anything but an outpatient clinic for years, and now St Joseph's Hospital was taking the facility over.
Skimming the article, it reminded me of the medical papers of my grandmother I'd found last year.
Eleanor had been a patient at Bernhardt, though Claire had gone to great lengths for me not to know that, shredding her medical file. I'd only found a few slips of paper, but the fact that she felt the need to destroy it made me very suspicious. Maybe it was time to discover why she'd been so quick to destroy the evidence.
CHAPTER 8
I HEARD CLAIRE clomping up the basement steps, and I hurriedly put the computer to sleep and scrambled out of the room.
"Did you have a good workout?" I asked her. A towel was wrapped around her neck, her blonde hair slicked back in a bun, face red and moist. She patted her sweat-dampened forehead. Weighted wrist and ankle bands coordinated with her workout gear. Everything she did required an appropriate uniform.
"It was invigorating," Claire said. She looked towards the door installer, who was waiting patiently in the kitchen to speak with her. She went and talked to him, laying on the Claire charm, and wrote out a check. He gathered his things and left.
"When is he going to be able to fix the door?" I asked. It had been covered by thick, frosted plastic sheeting, held in place with masking tape.
"When he gets the glass order in," Claire said, sighing. She poured a glass of water from the faucet and sipped at it daintily. "Could take a week, maybe two. Of course. One more inconvenience."
As was common for us, we stood in awkward silence. We communicated more with clunky pauses than we did with words.
"What do you say we go get Chinese food?" Claire asked, tossing the towel on the counter and resting her hands on her bony hips. She stretched from side to side, tilting her torso at angles.
"Sure."
We got in the car and drove up into town, talking in little bursts of mundane details. Her garden was coming along well, and I talked about the novels I had been reading. It had been a while since I'd ridden with Claire in the car, and I had forgotten that every time she hit the breaks, her arm shot out in a protective gesture in front of me.
She placed an order at the China Gardens while I waited in the car. A lucky gold cat statue lifted its paw out front. After she brought the paper bags bulging with food, the car smelled mouthwatering, like egg rolls and lo mein noodles.
Claire happened to take the long route home. It took us by Jenna's old house, which I realized when the familiar houses started to roll by. There was a sign out front, and no cars in the driveway. The grass was long and unkempt.
"What's going on there?" I asked, craning my head.
Claire glanced briefly over. She knew exactly what I was talking about, I could tell. She drove past before speaking. "Her parents put the place up for sale a few months ago. They're eager to move."
"You knew, and you didn't tell me?"
"There wasn't much to tell."
"Well, I mean, it's pretty final."
"I know it's been hard for you, but you need to let people move on. Jenna's parents have had a hard time of it since...well, you know."
I was glad that Jenna had stayed at home. I didn't think she could take this news now.
My phone beeped in my lap, distracting me. Jerk read the contact. It took me a second to remember that's what I'd changed Henry's contact name to.
When did everything get so ruined? the text read. I dropped the phone like it was hot, feeling a blush spreading up my neck and across my face.
This didn't go unnoticed to Claire. She looked from me to the phone and back again. "Secret admirer?"
"Hardly," I said, my voice catching in my throat and giving me away. "Theo was just sharing some gossip."
I didn't know what to say to Henry, or the motives behind why he was suddenly trying to get in touch with me again. Maybe he'd texted the wrong person by mistake. I certainly didn't want to talk to him, not after the way he treated me. I had no reason to exchange words with someone so manipulative.
With a swift movement, the same as tossing my medication away, I deleted the text and shoved the phone in my pocket.
At home, after I'd stuffed myself with enough fried rice and sweet and sour chicken that I felt like I would explode, I went down into my room. I maneuvered around the bed to the side table, pulling open the drawer.
Rooting through old magazines and paperclips, I dug out what I was looking for. The notecard with Henry's handwriting, Assassin's Apprentice written out with effortless, lovely strokes. I'd kept it all this time. I ran my thumb over the words, then tore the card into pieces.
I'd kept out of the library since the day I'd seen Henry there, sending Hugh once to pick up the books I'd needed.
"What, do you think the place is haunted?" he had complained.
Not unless Henry counted.
But I was sick of being cooped up in the house. There was a string of days when it poured outside, and I couldn't even go in the backyard. There were only so many internet forum discussions about cat pictures and adjective-choked stories I could take.
Jenna had no interest in following me to the library, much like in real life. She declared it gloomy, and stayed at home.
Callie wasn't there; instead, a mean-looking old woman with a tattered patchwork knitting bag on her lap sat behind the counter. Knitting needles clicked and glinted — it looked like she was making a very large pink diaper. Her nametag read Stickler. She caught me looking at her, and glared at me like I'd done her a personal disservice. I hurried away.
I picked up more books off my summer reading list pretty quickly, but I had some time to kill. I wandered over to the nonfiction section, since I normally was a fiction girl. I hadn't made much of a dent in the cookbooks and craft how-tos.
The library was busy with afternoon drifters, a bunch of them occupying the study tables. There were a lot of college students with their laptops open. Some people had just wandered out of the rain and were milling around. The light that filtered in through the windows was blue, like there were aquariums built into the walls.
Perusing the titles, I turned the corner into the paranormal and metaphysical section. As I should h
ave expected from our town's history, the section was packed. I wasn't really looking for anything in particular, but I ran my finger over the spines.
I hadn't been reading or watching as much spooky stuff, since my own experiences, which was a complete change for me. Horror and ghost stories had always been my bread and butter, my go-to source of entertainment no matter the source. It all seemed a little too real now.
On the top shelf, there was a short, oddly fat book tucked in between a few others. It was the color of deli mustard, and had no dust jacket. Other Worlds read the fading silver scrawl on the spine.
Reaching up on my tiptoes, I pulled the book down, yanking it out of its comfy crevice. There was no author name, and I flipped open the cover. None on the inside either, not even a publishing company listed. The binding had begun to fray.
I realized more time had passed then I thought, so I took my books to the counter. Stickler was still knitting her ghastly incontinence aid. She silently started checking my books out, but she stopped when she reached Other Worlds.
"You can't take this book out," she bleated in an unpleasant voice.
"What?"
"This book can't leave the library," she reiterated impatiently, her eyes beady behind her reading glasses. She flipped the book so the spine was facing out and tapped a tiny oval sticker that read FOR REFERENCE ONLY.
"So there's no way I can check it out?" I asked.
She just glared at me like I was stupid.
"No, young lady."
There wasn't much I could do. She finished checking out my other books and handed them to me, putting Other Worlds behind the desk in case I might try to take it anyway. Yep, I'm just going to snatch it and run. You have me all figured out. Hoodlums and their baggy pants.
As I walked out, someone was coming in. It only took one glance to see it was Henry, a hideous but well-tailored plaid raincoat draped on his shoulders. My heart did its usual leap into my throat move, but I steered past him.
"Ariel," he said.
"I'm just leaving," I said under my breath, keeping my eyes averted.
"Did you get my text?" he asked.
"No. Changed my number. Goodbye, Henry." His name tasted odd in my mouth, metallic, harsh.
