by Micol Ostow
“So you’re, what—costumes and snacks? Your mom’s going to do those blondies for the bay party after the show, right?” Lena was the only person more obsessed with my mom’s baking than I was. Mom was famous for her strawberry blondies, which she liked to claim were an homage to my hair. Personally, I thought they were an homage to her love of baked goods.
“Try and stop her. I dare you.” No one ever would. “But yes, technically the two of us will be working on that together. I’m way better with a measuring spoon than I am with a needle and thread. And you’re doing the school’s social media account, right?”
She made a face. “Don’t remind me. I can’t believe Principal Wagner tapped me for that.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Remind me why you let that happen?”
I held my hands up. “If I recall correctly, there was no stopping you.”
Lena was as notoriously hooked to her phone as phones themselves were notoriously banned during school hours. Needless to say, it wasn’t the greatest mix, and more often than not, Lena found herself getting called out for various phone-related infractions. Her most recent violation—updating her Twitter feed after she’d finished an English quiz early—had landed her the role as social media coordinator for Keene High’s Instagram account. I had to hand it to Principal Wagner—it was a punishment rooted in pragmatism.
The irony was, not only would she be excellent at it, but she’d definitely enjoy it too. If it hadn’t actually been assigned to her as a punishment, she probably would have volunteered for the job herself.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “You were made for the job.”
“Just like I was made for the role of one Abigail Dewitt!”
I looked up, startled, to see Daisy standing over us, grinning. “I literally just ate Coop’s entire cheeseburger. I’m so full I’m gonna explode.” She looked at our menus, still resting on the counter in front of us. “What’d you guys have? Lobster rolls?”
“Ha. That’s cute,” Lena said. “Please don’t mock our pain.”
“We, uh, actually haven’t even ordered yet,” I said.
“Yikes.” Daisy’s eyes went wide. “Sorry, you should have come over to our table. I definitely could have spared some of my burger.”
“You mean Cooper’s burger, right?” Lena put in. “But either way, now you tell us. When it’s too late for anything to be done.” She held up her phone, squinting at Daisy through the lens. “Come on. Smile and say, My best friends are starving! ”
“My best friends are starving!” Daisy gave her most brilliant smile, which was a lot. She held out her hand to see the picture, taking the phone to look it over and giving a quick nod of approval. “You’re good to post.”
“It’s going on the school feed,” Lena said. “This will be my inaugural post as social media coordinator of the jubilee Naming Day.”
“I’m honored,” Daisy said. She put a hand on her stomach and frowned slightly. “And still really, really full.”
Lena jabbed at the screen a few times. “Filter, filter, filter. Crop, crop, crop. There,” she said finally. “You’re live. Fresh as a daisy, ha ha. Now, we just sit back and let the likes roll in. And, of course, Nancy and I get back to the zillion other things we’ve got to take care of for Naming Day. It’s about to get real.” She looked at us.
“It’s official, girls. Naming Day preparations are underway.”
A horseshoe is known as a symbol of luck, but here in this crescent bay, some haven’t been lucky at all. Some have found the bay itself to be less a body of tranquility and more a chasm of death and despair.
Bodies of water can give life, or they can take it.
And human bodies can sink.
Our founders have their secrets. They’ve done their best to bury the past, to replace trauma with revelry and to rewrite the script.
But water has memory. Sleeping dogs don’t lie.
And secrets aren’t secrets for long.
Would that I had power, no one in this wretched town would be given even a moment’s peace. But as it is, my reach is limited, my strength finite.
How lucky, then, that this year, she should be singled out for the ceremony. I suppose the history of the horseshoe has for once worked in my favor. In our favor—mine, and those who’ve come before and after.
And on a jubilee year, no less!
Fate can, on occasion, be somewhat auspicious, it would seem.
She will be front and center amidst the revelry … and I shall be behind the scenes, waiting. Even with my limitations, it’s astounding the power I can yield.
The townspeople, so simple-minded—they call it a curse.
I call it fate.
Or, in less benevolent moments, vengeance.
Call it what you will, but I shall offer this final thought:
Whatever one chooses to call it, over the years I’ve become expertly adept at administering it.
And this Naming Day, its vaunted jubilee year, will be no different.
CHAPTER THREE Saturday
Nancy! Are you under that heap somewhere? What happened, did you rob the fabric store?” My father laughed as I awkwardly maneuvered myself and three times my body weight in supplies through the front door.
“If only.” I dropped at my feet the two enormous bags of fabric, trim, and ostensibly anything else a person might need in order to create costumes from scratch for the entire cast of this year’s jubilee Naming Day reenactment. “You wouldn’t believe what I paid for all this stuff.”
“I won’t ask,” he said, helping me move the bags from the foyer to our dining room table and gather up anything threatening to spill free. Once my hands were empty, he gave me a quick squeeze hello. “And I wouldn’t venture a guess. You’re doing God’s work, you and your mom.”
“We’re doing someone’s work,” I said, eyeing the sagging bags. “I’m not totally sure how Mom always gets roped into doing all the costumes for Naming Day. There’s no way we’re the only people in Horseshoe Bay who own a sewing machine.”
“No, but your mother is the only person in this town who’d never hesitate to offer herself up for a task that needed doing, no matter how much it inconvenienced her to do so.” There was a ring of admiration to Dad’s tone that I recognized—and shared.
“Truth.” I pulled out a chair and slumped into it, feeling as deflated as those two shopping bags. “Also? That crafts store on a Saturday afternoon? Not exactly the most relaxing place to be.”
“I believe that, too.” Dad laughed again.
I sighed. “I should find Mom and let her know I’ve got all the supplies and we can get started whenever she’s ready.” Never mind that the only thing I was ready for was a major nap.
“Actually, she’s resting right now.”
“Resting?” That didn’t sound like my mom. Frankly, none of us Drews were all that good at just lying around.
Dad nodded. “She had a long visit to the detention center this morning. New client. I think it was pretty draining. ‘Just a kid … wrong place, wrong time. No one on his team.’ You know your mother.”
“I sure do.” Mom was fiercely passionate about her career as a social worker. Case in point (literally): If a new client was being detained at the juvenile detention center and needed a meeting with his caseworker, she was there, Saturday or no. And she stayed there for as long as her client needed her.
Dad glanced at me, no doubt processing the multitude of microexpressions flitting across my face. “It’s nothing, sweets. Everyone needs a siesta now and again. Lord knows your mother deserves one. Can you maybe do something to get started on the costumes?”
“I could cut the patterns,” I said. There was no way I’d be able to handle all the costumes on my own, but that much, I could do. First, though: “But maybe I’ll bring her a cup of tea.”
“She’d appreciate that,” Dad said. In the fading afternoon light, his eyes were rimmed in shadows. He seemed tired, too. Nothing to do but keep going. If Mom was dealin
g with a tough case, the best thing I could do would be to make life a little easier for her, starting with those costumes.
Monday
I mean, if anyone deserves a little self-care, it’s your mother, Nancy,” Daisy said reproachfully. “You’re usually the first person to admit that.”
The final bell had just rung, signaling a blissful end to the first day back to school after the weekend. But for Daisy and me, the day was hardly over. After a quick stop at our lockers that was one part dropping off books we didn’t need and three parts lip gloss and hair check, we were on our way to a newspaper meeting.
I’d been on the school paper since I was old enough to form sentences. That’s not an exaggeration; in first grade, I’d spearheaded my own handwritten newsletter that my father Xeroxed so I could distribute copies to my classmates. Now that we were less than a week out from the jubilee Naming Day, you could bet I wasn’t going to miss the meeting where the entire staff of the Masthead divvied up coverage of what was definitely going to be one of the biggest events of the year.
“I just miss her when she’s buried in work, that’s all. She puts so much into it.”
Daisy elbowed me lightly. “That’s something you two have in common, huh?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I could be pretty strong-willed when it came to things I cared about—journalism school, seemingly unsolvable mysteries—and Daisy and Lena rarely passed up an opportunity to point it out.
She flashed me a grin that I caught in my peripheral vision. “You have to loosen up, girl,” she said. “Plus, I have some real family drama for you.”
“Ooh, do tell.”
“You want real weird?”
“Always.” We’d reached the third-floor landing and I jumped in front of her to pull the door open, looking at her curiously as she stepped through.
“Let’s just say my parents were unthrilled to hear I’d been cast in the reenactment.” She tried to play it off as no big deal, but I knew how excited Daisy was about the show, and I could read the disappointment on her face.
“That’s crazy,” I protested. I paused. “It is crazy, right? I know they can be … protective sometimes.” It wasn’t a secret that Daisy’s family was strange. But it also wasn’t something the rest of us went out of our way to highlight. “They knew you were trying out, right?”
She shrugged. “They had to. I brought it up a few times at home. Not to mention”—she looked at me, uncomfortable—“there’s the whole ‘Dewitt’ thing in the first place.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Daisy,” I said, smiling. “I know your family’s important to this town. I agree—it would be bizarre if they hadn’t expected you to be cast.” A darker thought crossed my mind. “Wait—they didn’t tell you not to do it, did they?” But no, of course not. A crisis of that magnitude would have been the first thing Daisy mentioned when I saw her. When they’d forbidden her from participating in our holiday choir back in fifth grade, Daisy had wept for hours on Lena’s canopy bed.
As expected, she shook her head. “Definitely not—I think they knew it would be pointless, anyway, given how excited I was. But they were not into hearing about it. Mom, in particular, turned a terrifying shade of green when I tried to tell her about the script.”
“Yikes.”
“Serious yikes. I don’t get it—especially given that the event is basically an ode to our ancestors, right?” She wrinkled her brow. “Maybe they just think it’s, like … unseemly or something.”
“That could be it.” A family of eccentric homebodies might not be into a town play celebrating the awesomeness of their very own history. Then again, we celebrated Naming Day every year. What would their objection be to this year’s reenactment? Was it just that Daisy was poised to star in it?
The slight sag in Daisy’s shoulders told me that her parents’ lack of enthusiasm was bothering her more than she wanted to let on. I tossed an arm over her shoulder, hoping to be reassuring. “Maybe you were just overreacting, like me. Something in the air this weekend. I bet when they see you up onstage, they’ll be super into it.”
“Maybe.” Daisy sighed. I could smell the rosy notes of her shampoo. “From your lips to—”
A crackling sound, ominous and sharp like a rumble of thunder, from overhead cut Daisy off. It was followed by a pop, short and staccato, and a shriek from Daisy. On instinct I jumped back, pulling Daisy with me.
“What the …” My gaze darted around the space as I tried to figure out what was going on.
There was another pop, and a shattering sound, and then small shards of … something were hailing down on us. The smell of smoke, acrid and dense, filled the air.
“Watch out!” Daisy called. “It’s the light.” She backed against the wall, ramrod straight against the cold cinder blocks, and pointed.
Overhead, I saw what she was indicating: It was a light, just like she’d said—one of the large, rectangular fluorescent fixtures. Blackened, smoke-scorched, but otherwise … alarmingly indistinct.
“I guess it … blew out,” she said after we’d both calmed down a little bit. My heart was no longer threatening to explode out of my chest, but the two of us were still breathing like we’d just finished a marathon.
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “Except … I’ve never seen a light blow out as … dramatically as that one. Like, with extreme prejudice.”
Almost as though it had been … I don’t know, waiting to shatter at the very second Daisy and I happened to pass beneath it.
It hadn’t been, of course—that was totally illogical.
But even with that being true, my heart was still leapfrogging at the back of my throat.
I was trying to joke, hoping that my voice didn’t betray how unsettled the explosion had left me feeling. Lightbulbs blew out, yes—that was just a fact of living in this modern world of ours. But this one hadn’t blown out so much as it had exploded directly overhead, to the point that Daisy and I were currently both aggressively brushing shards of glass out of our hair and off of our shoulders.
I glanced around: no exposed wires, no flickering lights other than the one that had just freaked out, no smoke that I could see, except from the burned-out fixture.
“Ouch!” Daisy said, holding up one finger for examination. “I cut myself.” The cut was tiny, but blood quickly pooled and spilled down her finger. “It’s fine. It’s small. Just a drop. But—how crazy!” She looked at me. “You cannot mention this in front of my parents.”
“Extremely crazy,” I said. “And I won’t.” I was still trying to will my pulse back down to a reasonable rate. The drop of blood on her finger felt ominous, like a fairy-tale omen.
She gave her hair one final, cautious shake. “We should probably let, like, the office know, so they can send maintenance to come clean up.” She shook her head, considering. “It’s amazing we weren’t hurt.”
I glanced up again, where the fixture was still smoking, curls of black snaking out from the blown bulb. “It is,” I agreed. “Come on. We can call from the Masthead meeting.” Keene High School was almost as old as the town itself, and even in the age of iPhones, the inter-class telephones were still fully functional and used on the regular.
I filed away the details of the scene and put them in a tiny lockbox in the back of my brain. In the absence of any actual clues to solve, there was nothing to do but forge ahead.
Daisy delicately sidestepped the various piles of glass as she gave me a knowing smirk. “Typical Nancy Drew,” she said. “Never let anything get in the way of a scoop.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
CHAPTER FOUR
By the time the Masthead meeting was in full swing, I’d regained my composure. Or, at least, well enough to fake it. After digging a Band-Aid out of my bag for Daisy, I had called down to the office, and the secretary promised the light would be cleaned up right away. It was hard to convey to her how spectacular the whole incident has been, so that was the best we could expe
ct. All of which meant that Daisy and I both were fully free to jump into Masthead mode, unfettered. We’d agreed not to bog the meeting down with any discussion of what happened in the hall. These meetings dragged on forever as it was.
Jumping right in, I perched at my normal spot, on top of the teacher’s desk at the front of the room scribbling notes on my spiral reporter’s pad, stopping intermittently to point at people as I referenced them in my diatribe. “So, that’s me on reenactment coverage,” I said, reviewing, “Melanie on the founding families’ profiles, Theo on—”
“Seriously, Drew, I’m fine sitting this one out.” Theo MacCabe, our resident disaffected emo boy, flashed me a pleading look.
Theo, Seth Farrell, and Melanie Forest rounded out the editorial board alongside Daisy, Lena, and me. Being a self-proclaimed contrarian, Theo was almost always guaranteed to run counter to popular opinion, so that made him vital to our staff. I’m all about journalistic objectivity, which means fair and balanced representation. But sometimes, his rage-against-the-machine stance was exhausting.
Like now. I sighed. “Are you sure?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. The shattered light had knocked me off my game, clearly.
I wasn’t the only one unimpressed by Theo’s antagonistic tendencies. The entire staff of the Masthead was shooting Theo variations on the expression I assumed was plastered across my own face too.
“You’re, like … the Grinch of Naming Day.” Daisy looked like she was taking his disdain personally.
“You’re too kind, Daisy,” Lena put in. “Everyone knows the Grinch eventually comes around.”
“Well, then I guess that makes you Cindy Lou Who,” Theo said. He ran a hand through his dark hair, letting it flop over one eye in a move that seemed calculatedly casual to me. I stifled an eye roll as he narrowed his gaze at Daisy. “I know who I’d rather be in that scenario.”