by Susan Vaught
Peavine carried the flashlight, but it didn’t do much good.
I gripped the outside of his hand, swinging my arm as his pole moved forward, planted, and then swung again. If I focused on the warmth of his fingers on mine and the cool metal of his crutch touching my wrist, then I wouldn’t look at the horrible monster trees grabbing at us from both sides of the path through the woods. I wouldn’t think about Angel parked in front of a movie playing on my laptop in my room, something about space aliens and dogs taking over the planet. If she got bored and went to her mom . . .
“We’re almost there,” Peavine said.
I barely heard him over the frogs and crickets yammering in the darkness. The scent of dew-covered dirt and damp pine made my eyes water. My skin felt clammy even though it was still one thousand degrees two hours after sunset. Ahead of us, the flashlight beam doodled across the absolute darkness as Peavine handled his poles.
We broke tree cover seconds later, but no stars twinkled in the cloudy skies. The flashlight beam scalped the top of ryegrass in the field, eerily still with no breeze to stir it. Peavine led us straight through the tall stalks, down the path we mashed last weekend. We hurried toward the ghostly remains of the Abrams barn, with me stumbling beside him, trying to keep up.
We might have had forever, or we might have had minutes. It depended on when Dad came home, and when Ms. Jones checked on us in my room to be sure we were all sleeping. Peavine and I had gone out the basement door, me to try to figure out once and for all if my mom had been involved in the Abrams mess, and Peavine because I asked him to go since I was too scared of the dark to head out alone.
If we didn’t get back before they realized we were gone, we were so completely dead and grounded. Probably forever.
Peavine slowed, then brought us to a stop. “Here?”
“Yeah.” My heart beat so hard, my ribs seemed to rattle. “This is the place.”
Everything smelled different in the dark, all wet and moldy. Everything looked different too, just shadows and lumps—but we had come to the right section of the ruins, I was sure of it. This was almost the exact spot where I had hallucinated before. I held my breath, expecting the visions to hit me again right away, but nothing happened.
Pictures, sounds, smells, discussing it—that’s what Captain Armstrong told us about how to set off flashbacks. So this should be working already, right?
Why wasn’t it working?
I blew out a breath and stubbed my tennis shoe into the ashes.
Maybe I had a brain tumor after all.
“What if you didn’t see anything?” Peavine sounded hopeful. “Could be your mind’s been playing tricks on you, ’cause you’re worried about your mom.”
I flinched, because he used the M-word, and he never did that unless I brought it up first. “I saw something. And Stephanie Bridges knows it. She’s going to make a stink about Mom unless I figure this out. If I can just remember the truth, then I can tell it, and Mom will get better and come home like always.”
“That DCFS lady, she was probably just fishing around, you know?” Peavine moved his crutch and hand away from me and set the flashlight down propped on some dirt, so the beam showed across a swath of burned boards and ashes. “I bet she doesn’t really suspect your mom did anything.”
“You didn’t see her face. You didn’t have to lie to her.” My words dropped into the darkness, too loud even with the frog and cricket chorus, which sounded distant now that we were out of the woods.
“You weren’t lying, Footer.” Lightning bugs fired up around Peavine, winking in and out by his shoulders and arms, then farther away, out across the burned ground and the motionless ryegrass. “You really don’t know what happened that night, at least not yet, so how could you tell her?”
I didn’t want to lie to Peavine, even by accident. It wasn’t just the bad luck that lying to my best friend would bring, but how awful I’d feel about it—the kind of awful that would never stop, no matter how much truth I told to make up for it. “It’s like snapshots made out of dreams, but I think it’s all real. If it isn’t real, why is it happening?”
“I don’t know.” He sounded so patient. He didn’t say, You might be losing it, even though I was thinking that myself. Peavine would never say anything mean to me, even when he should.
“It’s like a broken puzzle.” I watched the lightning bugs dance and twinkle, pretending to be the night’s missing stars. “I have to put it together before somebody accuses Mom of being here during the fire. If Dad thinks she had anything to do with this—well, they’ll probably never let her out of the hospital. Mom’ll be gone forever.”
“Just calm down and think, Footer. You’re the smartest girl I know.”
That was sweet, especially since his little sister was smarter than both of us. I smiled, then felt sort of glad Peavine couldn’t see my face in the dark. “Get hold of my hand again, okay? Don’t let go.”
“I won’t.” His palm brushed across my knuckles, and I laced my fingers through his. “So, since the sights and smells aren’t doing it and we don’t know what sounds to make, try talking about it. That first time this past weekend, what did you see, exactly?”
“Cissy, standing right where you put the flashlight. At first she was just . . . there. Then she had a shotgun, and Mom was with her. They were both holding it.” I stared across the yellow beam into blackness broken only by lightning bugs, trying to ignore the part of my brain screaming at me to run.
Just the dark. The dark can’t hurt me, I told myself, like Dad taught me to do. It didn’t help much, even when I said it over and over. It seemed like the night was inside my head as much as outside. The harder I tried to look into my own mind, the less I could see.
“My mother talked to Cissy,” I told Peavine, so frustrated because we needed to hurry, and I couldn’t make the hallucinations come, now that I wanted them. “I think she told her to hurry.”
“You let go of me,” Peavine said.
“What?”
Peavine’s fingertips tapped on my fists, which were raised high. “You’re ready to fight, like when you beat on Max Selwin after he knocked me down.”
“I—”
Max. The playground. Peavine falling.
A little boy falling . . .
Lightning bugs flickered in the dark, and Peavine flickered away from me.
A tall, thin man stood in front of me with his fists clenched like mine. I could see him because the moon seemed to hang above his mostly bald head, not a full moon, but close to it, and so bright. There were lights, too, on the house and barn, and on poles between the two buildings.
Mom. I was looking for her. I had followed her out of our house, past the pond, and onto the path through the woods. Then she got ahead of me, and I got scared and ran faster. It was so dark and—
My heart stuttered. The man yelled at a boy in front of him. He couldn’t see me, because I was standing behind a tree. He couldn’t see me, so he yelled and he yelled, and the sound came at me from miles and miles away, like a bad radio broadcast, like the old speakers at school, crackly and fuzzy.
Stupid . . .
Clumsy . . .
Idiot . . .
The boy cried. He was so little. The man shook his fist at the boy.
He can’t hit him. If that man hits that boy, the kid might break.
But he did hit him.
Old Mr. Abrams knocked Doc down and stood over the boy, yelling some more.
Mom! I wanted to call out for her, but the horror, it froze me. This couldn’t be real. It wasn’t happening. Big men like that didn’t bash their fists into tiny little boys and make them scream. I needed to scream. I needed to hit the man. I needed to do something.
Breathing like a fish thrown out of the water, I shoved myself out from the light pole and charged toward the old man.
He drew back his foot and kicked the boy.
A blast ripped the night in half.
Mr. Abrams didn’t fall in sl
ow motion, like people die in the movies. He flew sideways like he’d been hit with a wrecking ball, and he crashed to the ground.
My ears rang. The world winked in and out, in and out, like lightning bugs flashing in a field. Water droplets rained down.
Only it wasn’t water.
It wasn’t water.
It wasn’t. Water.
Pooling on the ground.
Cissy stood in front of me, holding the shotgun. Mom hurried up to her and put her hands over Cissy’s on the shotgun, talking to her, maybe trying to get her to let go and give the shotgun to Mom. My ears still rang and buzzed. Nothing made any sense, not the boy on the ground or Mr. Abrams lying there, or Mom or the girl or the shotgun or the not-water covering me.
Hurry . . .
Everything turned to lines and shimmers, and my knees wouldn’t hold me.
Fontana? Fontana!
Mom’s lips pressed against my forehead. Here, honey. You’re in your bed now. My hair felt wet. My pajamas stuck to me like they did after a bath. Everything’s fine. It was just a dream. You slept through everything. . . .
My eyes closed. My nose stayed full of smoke and fire and blood. I couldn’t stop smelling it. I didn’t want to smell it anymore. I needed some coffee, like at school. I could smell coffee and stick those molecules in my nose, and the stink of the fire and Mr. Abrams dying might go away.
My eyelids fluttered.
Mom slapped my cheek. Her fingers felt smaller. “Come on, Footer,” Peavine said, and the image of Mom standing by my bed shattered into night, and a flashlight beam stabbed my eyes, then went away. Spots floated across Peavine’s very worried expression.
“You wake up now,” he said. “I’m gonna get Mom or your dad. Footer!”
He flicked the flashlight into my face again, like a doctor trying to examine a patient. “Maybe I should call an ambulance.”
“No!” I sat up so fast, I knocked the flashlight out of his hand. I gulped air, and the stench of moldy wet ash made me cough. Then I started crying.
Peavine didn’t bother to pick up the flashlight. He just wrapped his arms around me and held me. I pushed my face into his shoulder, into his white T-shirt. He didn’t smell like mold. More like soap and puppies.
“What’d you see?” he asked me, squeezing me so tight, I could barely get a breath. “What happened?”
“He blew up. Mr. Abrams blew up.”
Peavine pulled back and stared at me, even though the flashlight was pointed at my knee, not my face. “You saw him die?”
“I think so.”
“Who shot him?”
“Cissy, I think. Mom was there, and Doc, but Doc was hurt. Mr. Abrams was beating Doc up.”
Peavine hugged me again, this time letting me breathe. “If he was abusing a little boy, somebody should have shot him, then. What a snake.”
It’s not safe, Fontana. There might be snakes in those ashes. . . .
I cried harder.
Mom burned the snake, my brain whispered. Mom always burns the snakes we kill.
“What are you going to do?” Peavine whispered in my ear.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back.
“You gotta tell your dad. Footer, you gotta do it.”
What was I supposed to say? Yes? And let Mom live in some horrible locked, smelly place forever? No? Keep my mouth shut and hide what I knew about arson and murder?
Murder . . .
Oh, God.
Mom.
“I think we better go home,” I whispered.
CHAPTER
13
Thirteen and Three-Quarters Days After the Fire, Plus a Few More Minutes
“Dad.” I punched his shoulder. “Wake up. I need to talk to you.”
Dad made sleepy-troll noises and rolled to his side. I turned on another lamp and tugged the sheet off his head. “Dad, I’m serious.”
He still didn’t do anything but splutter. I rubbed my sweaty palms on the green sleeping shirt I had slipped into after Peavine and I got back to the house. It wasn’t twenty minutes later when Ms. Jones and Angel and Peavine, went home. I didn’t think I’d waited that long to try to talk to Dad, but apparently he thought Ms. Jones had already tucked me in, and he was almost all the way asleep already.
“What is it?” Dad’s voice sounded like a low groan.
I didn’t want to do this. I did not want to do this. I rocked onto my toes like I used to do when I was little and scared, then made myself stop. “Peavine and I went back to the Abrams farm tonight.”
Dad grunted into his pillow. “I told you to stay away from there. That DCFS worker doesn’t care if you and Peavine want to be cops.”
“Journalist,” I corrected. “Well, me, anyway. But, Dad, we went back because the first time we saw a scary shoe in the woods, and I had a bunch of hallucinations and I probably don’t have a brain tumor, since I’m not dead yet, and Angel found a barrette like Mom’s.”
My hand went to my mouth on reflex, because I hadn’t meant to say that much that fast, and the barrette thing . . .
Dad sat up slowly.
I kept my hand on my mouth and watched him, trying not to freak out.
He sighed and stretched, and the sheet fell away from his white T-shirt. It had a stain on the chest, right where a blop of chocolate ice cream might have fallen. When he looked at me, his right cheek was red and his brown eyes seemed bleary and exhausted.
He squinted at me, and I wasn’t sure what he was seeing.
“Brain tumor,” he mumbled. “And a scary shoe? That would be the scary shoe you e-mailed the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation about? The one you told them might belong to Captain Armstrong?”
My eyebrows lifted. “I sent them a picture.”
“They called me at work today.”
“Oh.” I sat on the edge of the bed next to him.
“They appreciate your efforts to be a good citizen, but they’d rather you not e-mail them anymore without asking me first.”
“Okay.”
“And, Footer, you realize that if the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation had taken your e-mail seriously, you could have made life very difficult for Captain Armstrong.” Dad had his way, way serious face on, and it made me squirm. “He could have been investigated. Embarrassed. Some people in town already aren’t too comfortable with him, due to his problems from the war.”
Guilt poked directly at my brain, and when I said, “I’m sorry,” I really, really meant it.
“It’s not me you owe the apology to,” Dad said, looking more serious than ever. “Captain Armstrong knows about your e-mail and the photo. He was there, you know. That afternoon. That was his shoe in the picture.”
I froze in place, totally stunned, and started to ask what Dad was talking about, but he cut me off. “He was trying not to ruin your fun, but he was watching after you because he promised Adele he would, so she’d get in the ambulance. Remember?”
Oh.
Oooooooooh.
Dread and shame settled in my belly like a hot bunch of rocks. I did remember, now that he said it. And I felt kind of awful for forgetting it in the first place.
I was such a—
“Now, that guy you had the school call the police about, the one you called a creep? That wasn’t a bad idea. He had a record and he hasn’t been out of prison very long—no business being around a school.” Dad rubbed his big hand through his hair. “All of that to say, not every wild idea you get is off-base. But, Footer, a little girl lived at the Abrams farm. You know that, right?”
The sheets on Dad’s bed felt soft when I picked at them. “Yes, sir.”
“Lots of little girls wear barrettes.”
Okay, so I had told myself that same thing over and over, and told Peavine, and he had agreed. “But this one looked like a pretzel.”
Dad made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a yawn. Maybe it was both. “So do lots of the barrettes you can buy at Walmart. That’s where your mother gets hers. I’m sure Cissy
Abrams shopped at the same place. It’s not like we have a lot of options in Bugtussle.”
I couldn’t make myself look up from the sheet I was bothering with both hands. “Mom got new barrettes after the fire. She was wearing them when she shot the copperhead.”
Dad didn’t answer right away. The only sound in the room came from me, my breathing, and my pulling at the sheet’s edge.
Finally, Dad said, “Brain tumor.” He shook his head, and I could tell he was getting ready to lie down again. “Honey, it’s late.”
“She might have been there,” I whispered, looking away from him and staring at the sheet so hard and totally that my eyes watered. “I think I saw Mom go to the Abrams farm the night of the fire. I think I followed her through the woods.”
Dad went quiet again, this time so long that I would have looked at him if I hadn’t been scared of seeing his face. When he spoke, his words came out too quiet, like when he was mad and trying not to yell. “You were asleep in your bedroom the whole time. That’s what you told me, and what you told the police. It’s what your mom told the police too.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” I took a deep breath and tried to figure out how to explain the hallucinations. Telling him outright was probably best, even if he thought I needed to go to a hospital, like Mom.
“What’s the truth, Footer? Do you even know anymore?”
Dad’s questions startled me so badly, I glanced at his face. Both cheeks had turned red, and his mouth made a straight, solid line. He had looked like that when I accidentally caught the backyard on fire, after he’d hugged me and finished hollering about taking dangerous risks and why did I have to try every experiment I ever read about.
Dad’s anger punched me right in the heart. In the night, in the dark, with the whole world asleep and Mom gone so far away, I could barely talk to her, I felt like an alien stranded on an ice planet, lost and freezing and completely hopeless.
I shook from the cold inside me. In my dreams, Cissy shot Mr. Abrams. One of them set the fire that probably killed Cissy and Doc. I think it was Mom. I looked at Dad and I wanted to say those things, but even as the words played through my mind, they sounded stupid and baby and crazy. I didn’t even know what I had seen. They were just hallucinations, nothing real, and nothing with any proof.
