Bad Blood

by Carly Anne West

  So, a ghost.

  I’m so desperate to find him, I even considered asking Dad. It doesn’t seem like he’s all that mad at Mya and me anymore, not that either of us have seen very much of him.

  But there’s no way I can ask him today. Today is Unveiling Day, the day Dad’s brilliant designs for the Golden Apple Amusement Park are revealed to the entire town, and then … well, it’s probably best not to think about what comes next. One crisis at a time.

  In any case, I’m on my own when it comes to finding Mr. Gershowitz.

  Mya pops her head into my room without knocking.

  “I could have been naked!” I say, covering myself unnecessarily.

  Mya shivers. “Just the thought makes me want to tear my eyes out.”

  “So knock.”

  “Can I have your waffles?”

  I take a second to switch gears. “There’s waffles?”

  “Mom’s been calling you for like ten minutes.”

  The lure of maple goodness is strong, but I still haven’t come up with a plan, and I don’t want to face Mom and Dad before I have one.

  “Hurry up. We have to leave for the unveiling at nine thirty,” she says, clearly still vying for my waffle. She’s ready to go, and I haven’t even gotten out of pajamas yet.

  “Wait, I thought Trinity said it was going to be at eleven.”

  “No, that’s when it starts. We have to get there early,” she says, looking over her shoulder. “Your waffles?”

  “Fine, whatever,” I say, and before I have a chance to realize what I’ve given up, she’s bounding down the stairs to the kitchen.

  The ceremony doesn’t start until eleven. That means my family will notice if I leave midway through … but they won’t if I’m not with them from the start.

  * * *

  “What kind of project?” Mom demands to know, her arms crossed tightly.

  “For school,” I say, just as I rehearsed in my room moments before.

  Dad looks at me gloomily, like he’s only just started to like me again.

  “But you’re going to miss the beginning!” Mom frets.

  “I’ll try really hard not to,” I promise. “It’s just that Trinity and I could only meet at this time to hand off our civics notes, and the project is almost due, and I don’t want to get her in trouble, and—”

  I see Mya’s ears perk up when I peer over Mom’s shoulder into the kitchen. She lifts her head from my plate of waffles long enough to give me a disapproving look for dragging Trinity into this. I make a mental note to apologize later—to both Trinity and Mya.

  Right now, though, Trinity is my only chance to break away from the crowd without anyone noticing.

  Mom sighs. “Can’t you meet with her later today, after the ceremony?”

  I shake my head. “She has, um, plans.”

  “She does?” Mya calls from the kitchen, scowling at me behind Mom’s back.

  “She sure does,” I say, burning a hole into her as discretely as possible. “How are those waffles treating you, by the way?”

  Mya puts her head back down and keeps eating, reluctantly complicit.

  Up to this point, I haven’t heard from Dad. I might be able to fool Mom for a short amount of time, but Dad’s an entirely different story. My only hope is that he’s too nervous about the ceremony to pay much attention to all the massive holes in my story, like why I never mentioned this project earlier, or how we could possibly finish it in such a short amount of time and still make it to the ceremony before it starts.

  And I have to go now. It’s the only time in the foreseeable future I’ll be near the weather station. If I miss this opportunity, it’ll mean courting another grounding from my parents, who forbade us to go anywhere near the woods after our last adventure. My only other option is to sneak out of the house again at nighttime, and that’s just not happening again. Not if I can help it.

  I take as deep a breath as I dare to, hoping Dad won’t notice, and slowly tip my head to meet his eyes. I stare directly into them, with their green twinkle looking more like a spark in this moment. I try to remember when the last time is that I heard him laugh, or when I saw him smile. I try to remember when he last seemed like my dad.

  Somewhere behind the green of his irises, I think I see it, that warmth, the way the skin used to crinkle around his eyes even when he wasn’t smiling, the way his huge shoulders used to look protective instead of looming.

  Somehow, I think I still see the old him. Somehow, somewhere.

  “School comes first,” he says quietly. I try so hard to read the tenor of his voice, but it tells me nothing.

  We all stay silent for a moment, waiting to see if there’s more, waiting to see if maybe he’ll explain how he really feels.

  Instead, he reaches out and presses his hand gently into my shoulder, holding my gaze, and returns to his study for his plans.

  When Mom, Dad, and Mya leave, only Mya gives me a second look. She knows I’m up to something, and she probably resents being left out of it, but I need to confirm this myself first, and the memory of losing her at the weather station last time is still fresh.

  “Come as soon as you can,” Mom says over her shoulder, but she’s more focused on my dad, who is a ball of nerves as he juggles his rolled-up blueprints and colorful presentation boards.

  It takes all of my willpower, but I wait until I hear the sound of the car’s engine fade to nothing before I bolt upstairs to change my clothes. Mya mercifully left me a single waffle, and I scarf it down before slamming the door behind me and sprinting down the street toward the opening to the forest.

  There’s no chance of getting turned around in the woods on the overgrown trails today. The noise from the gathering crowds for the Unveiling Ceremony can be heard from way back. All I have to do is follow the distant laughs and squeaking microphones they’re testing for feedback.

  I think it’s safe to say I underestimated the importance of this celebration. It’s like Raven Brooks has nothing better to do than to get excited about a bunch of blueprints.

  Or maybe I just didn’t want to admit that this could be Fernweh Welt times two.

  As though to punish me, a blackberry vine rakes its thorny stem across my shin, tracing a deep scrape into the skin.

  I bend to squeeze the cut and try to stop the bleeding, scowling at the plant all the while.

  “I get it. I’m a horrible son.”

  I don’t bother explaining to the plant that I’m just trying to keep the watchful eyes of Raven Brooks off of my obviously cursed family.

  I have to stop before I even reach the future grounds of the Golden Apple Amusement Park. The crowd is so big, it’s already swelled beyond the roped-off area designated for spectators, and people have trickled into the woods. Parents have set their rambunctious kids loose to chase one another between the trees, and I’m quickly realizing I’m going to need to give the area a much wider berth if I’m going to avoid being seen.

  I duck from tree to tree, catching snippets of conversations as I pass.

  “Now you’re the dookie head!”

  “Ahahahaha! I’m the dookie head! I’m the dookie head!”

  “Kimberly! Marcus! Stop it! No one is a dookie head.”

  I pass the first obstacle, but now I’m really in the thick of it, and a cluster of teenagers has gathered around a stump at least thirty feet into the forest behind the rows of seats that face a large stage.

  “I’m telling you, no one’s seen him for over a week.”

  “There’s no such thing as Forest Protectors, Jun.”

  “You didn’t think buffalo were real until last year.”

  “For the last time, I thought you were talking about woolly mammoths.”

  “Also real.”

  “Extinct! There’s a difference.”

  “All I’m saying is, you’d have to be crazy to go into these woods alone.”

  I hurry past the arguing teenagers, suddenly missing the dookie head conversation.
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br />   I’m nearly to the edge of the grounds when I stop cold because I hear my dad’s voice.

  And he doesn’t sound happy.

  “What do you expect me to do? I don’t have a magic wand, Marvin.”

  “It’s just very disappointing, Ted. I was told you were something of a miracle worker, with your ability to meet the Fernweh Welt opening deadline.”

  “Which was ill advised and five months’ more time than you’re giving me,” Dad says. He sounds like he’s practically sitting on his voice to keep it from rising.

  “And you were able to hone your craft and improve your efficiency in the process,” says Marvin, a man with a pair of round glasses and a round stomach to match. He’s wearing a vest under his sports coat, and it looks like his buttons are really struggling. He’s smiling, but not really. He’s smiling like my dad is smiling.

  “I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with your bid for mayor,” says Dad, and this makes Marvin’s smile slip a little.

  “Careful, Ted. Careful. Wouldn’t want to dig up any of the bad blood between your family and mine.”

  Dad’s smile fades, too, and now they’re just glaring at each other, waiting for the other one to say something. It looks so weird with Dad’s colorful designs pinned to presentation boards behind them, all fun and family and wholesome goodness, while the two of them stare each other down, waiting for the other one to keel over.

  It’s Marvin who talks again.

  “If you’ve lost your knack, Ted, we can always find someone else who needs the job.”

  Dad’s smile creeps back in underneath his mustache, but there’s nothing happy about it.

  “Of course not, Marvin.”

  Marvin squeezes Dad’s shoulder, then immediately appears to regret it because he draws it back like he’s afraid Dad is going to bite him. To be honest, he probably should be a little scared.

  “Can’t wait to see what surprises you have in store for us,” Marvin says, then hails a passing woman to drag her into some other conversation, leaving Dad all alone.

  It feels like walking in on someone else’s dream. I don’t feel like I should have seen any of that. Dad is standing there, staring into the trees ahead of me, looking like he’s anywhere else but here. I would like it so much better if he looked mad. Instead, he looks like he did when he said goodbye to me this morning.

  I don’t mean to take a step. Maybe it was my subconscious trying to flee. But my foot betrays me, and of course, it finds the loudest twig in all of Raven Brooks, snapping in half while the crack echoes through the patch of trees right next to the one person who absolutely can’t see me right now.

  Dad’s eyes twitch, but his head doesn’t move. He’s like a predator, instinctively still while he relies on his senses to search out his prey.

  I slowly lower myself to the ground, not that this is hiding me exactly. Maybe the leaves are a little denser by the brush, but if Dad so much as turns his head, I’m toast. There’s no way he won’t see me.

  I have every reason to believe he’ll catch me. The odds have never been stacked less in my favor than they are right now. I brace myself for his wrath, my imagination failing to conjure a punishment worse than death. Dad will think of something, though. His imagination knows no bounds.

  Then, in a twist nobody could have seen coming, Dad turns around and walks in the opposite direction, his back firmly to me and the path of the forest I still have to travel.

  I am one hundred percent, miraculously and inexplicably, in the clear.

  I don’t question it; I just run. My feet pound faster and harder than they did when I thought I was being pursued by Forest Protectors, faster than when I thought I’d lost Mya, faster than when I tried to outrun the memory of Germany and all we left undone.

  I run until I literally hit a wall.

  “We meet again,” I say to the weather station, trying to ignore the eerie quiet that’s suddenly upon me now.

  Once I’m on the side of the wall with the front door, though, I see something I didn’t expect.

  The door is boarded up.

  “What?”

  * * *

  Someone doesn’t want me snooping anymore … but whether that person is Mr. Gershowitz or the developers of the theme park, or someone else entirely is anyone’s guess.

  “Mr. Gershowitz,” I whisper, as though maybe I could conjure him by name.

  It makes sense, though. He warned me about hanging around the woods, about trespassing at the weather station. And sure, that’s his job, and yeah, it’s probably not a good idea to stumble around an abandoned building in the dark, but there’s more to it than that.

  Ted, I’m telling you, things are happening. Strange things, like before …

  Mr. Gershowitz knows there’s something here to find, something my dad won’t even talk about with him.

  I grab the edge of one of the boards and try rattling it loose, but it won’t budge. I brace my foot against the door and pull, but I can’t even pry it an inch. I’m running short on hope when I remember the night I came with Mya.

  Swatting at the overgrowth, I follow the wall around to the other side of the weather station, beating back the panic that I felt the last time I ran this same path. When I arrive at the place where Mya and I crashed into each other, I begin searching the wall.

  Okay, maybe “searching” is the wrong word. I start slapping the wall. I’m pushing and pounding on every board to see if one shakes loose. It’s impossible that Mya just spilled out of the weather station from an imaginary hole. There has to be something else here.

  “There has to be something I’m not se—”

  It would be so cool to say that I dove through the hole in the wall hidden behind a thick bundle of weeds and vines. Maybe I somersaulted through it, sprang to my feet like a ninja, ready for my stealth mission. It would be so cool, except there was no diving, and if there was a somersault, it was purely accidental and absolutely not ninja-like.

  Nope. I fell through the hole.

  But, I found the hole.

  I can already tell, even in the dark, that I’ve never been to this part of the weather station before. It just smells different, like mold and something else I can’t identify but that’s equally unpleasant.

  “It’s not a dead body. It’s not a dead body.”

  Still, invading thoughts of dead bodies lining the cracks of the damp hallway will probably haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

  I try to remember that Mya managed to make her way through this same hallway—in the middle of the night, no less—without completely falling apart. That helps me to keep walking without hyperventilating in the almost pitch-black passage.

  At some point, the wall I’m using as my guide bends, and suddenly, I turn a sharp corner and find myself once again in familiar territory.

  I’ve turned down a different hallway and landed myself right back where I would have started had the front door not been boarded up.

  “Take that,” I tell the door, but when my voice echoes all the way down the corridor, I have to stifle a shiver.

  “Get a grip, Aaron,” I tell myself. It’s the middle of the day. It’s just a building. The entire town of Raven Brooks is less than a mile away in a different part of the forest.

  But they feel a million miles away, and if there’s nothing to be afraid of, why is someone trying to keep me from finding something here?

  I didn’t realize until now that I’d been holding out some hope that the lantern in my grandparents’ abandoned office would still be burning. That would at least have kept me from having to creep through the dark to get my bearings. Of course it isn’t burning, though. Even if whoever was here last hadn’t turned it off, surely the light would have burnt out by now.

  I drag my fingertips along the damp wall until they find the doorway at the end of the corridor. Mostly, my grandparents’ office appears as I left it, at least from what I can see in the teeny bit of light that’s shining in from some crevice o
r another. But the light from the lantern isn’t just burnt out.

  The lantern is gone.

  That shouldn’t bother me, but it does.

  “This was a really bad idea,” I tell myself, but I have no intention of leaving. Not now, not after I’ve made it this far without chickening out.

  I feel for the folded photocopy of the article, still pressed against the pocket of my pants, but without any light to examine it by, it does me no good. I’ll just have to work from memory.

  The picture that showed the shoulders and head of my dad and Mr. Gershowitz indicated that they were standing somewhere in the hallway just across from the door to my grandparents’ office.

  I take four steps out of the office and into the middle of the hallway, then let the darkness of the corridor swallow me completely.

  I take a few more steps, reach for the opposite wall, and start moving my hands up and down the bumpy plaster.

  “I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” I mutter, but that doesn’t stop me from sliding my hands up and down, reaching high and low, inch by inch, examining every nook and cranny of the surface.

  I don’t want to find a basement. That’s all I really know for sure. A basement means there might—might—have been something the police missed. Something that incriminates my grandparents.

  “Maybe they were just kneeling,” I say to myself about the picture from the newspaper. But the way my dad and his friend were positioned, they were definitely not kneeling. They were walking, moving downward.

  I take a few more steps into the darkness, and there it is: a cut in the wall so thin, I’m not sure I would even be able to see it if I had a light. I follow the seam down to the floor, and it runs in a straight line. I follow it up and it makes a perfect right angle, then falls again to the floor.

  I press the middle of the small rectangle my finger has just traced.

  That’s when the floor underneath me opens.

  I don’t know how far I fall. Ten feet? Twenty?

  What I do know is that my head is hurting badly enough to make me feel like I might throw up, and the air around me smells even worse than it did in the hallway Mya found. Damp doesn’t even begin to describe the heavy, wet atmosphere. I feel like I’m in a swamp, except the ground is hard and cold. I can hear the echo of a steady drip somewhere nearby, but I’m still seeing stars, and I’m not sure how I’m going to sit up.