The Ghost Tree

by Christina Henry

  Alex tore out the pages in the front that had things like Elmer’s glue (Val school project) and napkins and don’t forget oil change written on them.

  The notebook suddenly seemed full of possibility, all those blank pages waiting for his thoughts.

  On the first page he wrote THE GIRLS, directly in the middle of the page in all caps, like it was a chapter title. As he wrote it he felt the pen wobble and he had to grip it hard to make sure the words actually got written down.

  When he finished writing he half expected to see the words fade into the page and disappear. A bead of sweat trickled over his cheek and he wiped it away with his wrist.

  Miller was sitting at his desk across from Alex. His feet were up and he was reading an issue of Time from the previous month with Madonna on the cover. Alex fully expected the cover of this magazine to end up hanging on the wall behind Miller, which was already papered with photographs of the singer torn from countless publications. The area behind Miller’s head looked like the inside of a high school kid’s locker.

  Miller looked up as Alex wiped his face. “What are you doing?”

  “Making some notes,” Alex said.

  “On what?” Miller asked.

  “The dead girls,” Alex said.

  “What dead girls?” Miller asked.

  “The ones in Mrs. Schneider’s backyard yesterday? Don’t you remember? You puked in the yard when you saw what was left of them.”

  As he said this, the scene from the day before grew sharper in his own memory, like speaking the words made the dead girls real.

  “Oh, yeah,” Miller said, and then went back to his magazine. He expressed no curiosity or interest in what Alex was doing at all.

  There’s something wrong here. It was the same as when he asked about Joe diMucci—a sense that the person he was speaking to had no memory of the incident, and that they had to dredge it up from the furthest reaches of their mind.

  Even he was struggling to hold on to the details. Were there two girls, or one? Or three? His mouth felt dry. They were slipping away from him, and he couldn’t let that happen. There were more girls than those two.

  Two, he thought. That’s right. There were two.

  Yes, one with short blond hair and one with long brown braids. And they spoke to him.

  They spoke to him and told him that there were more.

  He’d been charged by the dead to find them.

  He remembered now.

  He wrote quickly then, put down everything from the moment he stepped into the yard right up until the girls delivered their message. His hand shook and the back of his uniform shirt grew damp but he wrote it all, all the details, even the ones that would make him sound crazy if he told someone else about them.

  Nobody was going to read from this notebook but him, and he wasn’t about to insult the memory of those dead girls by pretending that the vision of them speaking hadn’t happened.

  It was weird that it didn’t bother him. Receiving messages from beheaded girls wasn’t half as strange as the way everyone but Alex had already forgotten them. It was easier, somehow, to believe in ghosts than in collective memory loss.

  There is something wrong with this town, Alex thought. Why hadn’t he and Sofia noticed it before they bought the house here?

  Alex knew why. Because they were so desperate to get their kids away from the city before something happened to them. Because they were exhausted from the constant hand-to-mouth struggle. Because they saw the house in the cul-de-sac and the smiling neighbors (okay, all except one—Mrs. Schneider had only scowled at them from the start) and the big yards and thought that Smiths Hollow was just perfect. And when Alex and his brother and sister-in-law all found jobs so easily it was just the cherry on the sundae. Why wouldn’t they move as quickly as possible?

  But girls got killed in Smiths Hollow. That was what the dead ones had told him.

  Find them. All the other girls, girls like us.

  At the bottom of the narrative about the crime scene he wrote, Find the other girls.

  He didn’t want to forget about the other girls.

  The act of writing down what happened seemed to fix yesterday’s event in his mind. It seemed more solid, less likely to slide away from him. That was good.

  He stood and Miller looked up at him like a hopeful puppy. “Time for lunch?”

  Alex looked at his watch. “It’s only ten thirty.”

  “But I’m hungry.”

  “Go to the vending machine and get something then.”

  “Nah, I want French fries.”

  Miller went back to his magazine, perfectly content to wait until Alex was ready to get lunch with him rather than find something for himself in the meantime.

  Alex didn’t tell Miller where he was going, and Miller wasn’t interested since it was clear that he wasn’t going to McDonald’s. Miller wouldn’t care if Alex was going into the basement, which was a good thing, because Alex had a feeling that he wasn’t supposed to go down there.

  All case files from previous years, whether active or not, were kept organized by month and year in file cabinets in the basement. Christie had given Alex the strong impression during Alex’s interview that most cases in Smiths Hollow were minor crimes with an obvious perpetrator. He never mentioned that there might be multiple cases of slaughtered girls.

  Alex shook off the feeling that he was doing something wrong. He was a police officer; there had been two bizarre and gruesome murders the day before. It only made sense to go back through the case files for similar crimes.

  He didn’t have a ton of experience (okay, no experience, you were just a patrolman) investigating murders, but he’d hung around enough detectives to know that most murderers didn’t start right off with a big killing like the one yesterday. There were usually smaller crimes first, indications of future terrors.

  And if Christie found Alex in the basement digging around in the file cabinets, that was exactly what Alex was going to tell the chief.

  He was not going to say that the dead girls had told him to find the other dead ones.

  That was between him and the girls.

  The file cabinets were coated in a thick layer of dust. Nobody ever comes down here for any reason, Alex thought. Once the calendar year was over, the files were deposited in the next empty drawer and never thought of again.

  But why?

  Alex held that in place in his mind. Why?

  Find the girls. Then maybe you’ll find out why.

  Find the girls.

  He opened the newest filing cabinet, the one with all the files from the previous year, and started digging.

  14

  Lauren and David’s grandmother called just after their mom got home from her shopping expedition. Lauren put four cans of store-brand green beans on the floor (she was transporting them to the pantry) and picked up the phone.

  “Hello, Lauren?” Their grandmother didn’t sound like a frail, fluffy old lady. She had the kind of commanding voice that made everyone in the vicinity stand at attention and obey whether they meant to or not. She never bossed Lauren around, but Lauren bet it wasn’t easy for her mom growing up.

  “Hi, Nana,” she said.

  Her mom looked up from the paper bag she was unloading and gestured for the phone.

  “Do you want to talk to Mom?”

  “No, not right now,” Nana said. “Lauren, do you think you could come and visit me this afternoon? You could just pedal over on your bicycle.”

  “Sure,” Lauren said, though she was surprised by the request. What could Nana want to talk to her about?

  “One o’clock or so?” Nana said. “You can eat your lunch first.”

  “Okay,” Lauren said.

  “Very good,” Nana said, and hung up. Nana wasn’t much of a small-talker.

  “Why did
n’t you give me the phone?” Mom asked, her mouth twisting.

  Here it comes, Lauren thought with an inner eye roll. Her mom hadn’t had an opportunity to dig into her all morning.

  “Nana said she didn’t want to talk to you right now, but she wants me to come over and see her after lunch.”

  “Why just you?” Mom asked.

  “I don’t know.” Lauren picked up the cans of beans and headed for the pantry, hoping to avoid an argument. It wasn’t her fault if Nana didn’t want to talk to her own daughter.

  “You should have given me the phone anyway,” Mom said, following Lauren and standing in the doorway of the pantry as Lauren stacked the beans on the shelf next to a box of Minute Rice. “No, don’t put them there. Put them next to the other vegetables so I can keep track of what we have and what we don’t have.”

  Lauren moved the green beans next to the cans of carrots and Veg-All mixed vegetables. She could tell that her mom was looking for something else to find fault about but couldn’t, so she went back to complaining about Nana.

  “What if I needed you to watch David this afternoon?” Mom said. “She never thinks of anybody but herself.”

  “I would have told her that,” Lauren said.

  “Told her what? That she’s selfish? I hope you wouldn’t be so rude.”

  “No,” Lauren said. “If I needed to stay with David I would have told her. And she would have said to come another time.”

  She’s not unreasonable, Lauren thought. Not like you.

  Mom pressed her lips together and said, “Put those boxes of spaghetti away, please.”

  Which was her way of saying that she wanted to complain about something else but couldn’t think of anything and so settled for telling Lauren what to do.

  After lunch Lauren got on her bike and headed for Nana’s house. Mom and David were playing Snap at the kitchen table when she left. Mom didn’t have to let David win, either, because he had surprisingly fast reflexes for a little kid.

  Nana lived in a big old house at the top of the only hill in Smiths Hollow. It was the oldest house in the town, Nana told her once. Lauren liked it because she could see almost all of Smiths Hollow from there.

  The ghost tree looked like it was waving to her from the woods when she stood on Nana’s porch, like it was watching the house for a secret signal.

  Damn, Lauren thought, suddenly remembering Miranda’s phone call. I was supposed to meet Miranda after lunch.

  Nana’s house was the opposite direction from the woods, but Lauren had a couple of quarters in her pocket and knew there was a pay phone at the gas station between her house and Nana’s. If she was lucky Miranda would still be at home.

  She rode into the parking lot and skidded to a halt in front of the pay phone attached to the side of the convenience store building. Several people were filling up their cars, and all four parking spaces in front of the building were full. One of the parking spaces had a Camaro in it.

  Lauren peeked inside the store from where she stood and saw the back of Tad’s greasy head. He and Billy were standing in front of a display of potato chips.

  She turned her back on the front door, hoping that she could finish her call before they came out—or if they did come out, maybe they wouldn’t notice her.

  She dropped the coin in the slot and dialed Miranda’s number.

  The phone at the other end rang once, twice, three times.

  “Come on, come on,” Lauren muttered.

  “’Lo?”

  It was Miranda’s mom. She sounded like she was speaking from the bottom of a fish tank.

  Or the bottom of a bottle, Lauren thought.

  “Mrs. Kowalczyk? It’s Lauren.”

  “Lauren?” The way she said it was like she was trying to place Lauren’s face in her mind, even though Lauren had practically lived at her house since she was small.

  “Yes, is Miranda there?”

  “She was going to meet you, I thought?”

  “Yes, but I’ve had a call from my grandmother and I have to go there now, so I was hoping Miranda hadn’t left yet.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Kowalczyk said. “No, she’s gone.”

  Shit, Lauren thought. Miranda was going to be really pissed at her.

  “Can you tell her when she gets home that I’m sorry and I’ll call her later?” She thought this message was easy enough not to get too garbled when Mrs. Kowalczyk passed it on to her daughter.

  “Of course?” she said, but with a question mark at the end so Lauren wasn’t sure if the message had been simple enough.

  Lauren hung up the phone and risked a glance over her shoulder. The Camaro was still there but Tad and Billy hadn’t come out yet. She swung her leg over her bicycle, her stomach churning a little.

  She’d never ditched Miranda at the ghost tree before. And since Lauren had walked out of the Dream Machine yesterday, that would make two days in a row.

  Even Miranda could not be so clueless as to ignore that.

  “Hey, Lauren!”

  She winced, shoulders hunching. Tad and Billy must have come out of the shop and spotted her. What would she say if they asked why she’d left yesterday?

  Who cares what they think, Lauren? You thought they were losers anyway.

  But there was a tiny part of her that wanted them to think she was cool, even if she wasn’t. Even if she was just a skinny girl in a Purple Rain T-shirt and jean cutoffs and the Kmart version of Chuck Taylors.

  “Lauren!”

  The voice was nearer now, and she couldn’t pretend not to hear. She turned around.

  Jake Hanson stood there.

  She felt the tension ballooning in her chest deflate, to be replaced by a different kind of tension. Blood rushed to her cheeks. “Oh, Jake. Hi.”

  “Are you feeling better today?”

  His eyes were so blue and seemed so sincerely interested in her that she had to look down. When she did she saw he was wearing black Chuck Taylors today—real ones, not off-brand like hers.

  Of course, he has a job, she thought. He can buy whatever he wants.

  He was staring at her and his expectant smile was starting to fade around the edges. She realized she’d never answered him.

  “Um, yeah,” she said. “Loads better.”

  He wore a white T-shirt with a black-and-white photo of a soldier repeated four times on it in a square. On the side it read THE SMITHS in big black capital letters.

  “What’s that? Some kind of ad for the town?” she asked, pointing at his shirt.

  He laughed, and his smile seemed really big and white. He had a little dimple in his left cheek that made him look younger.

  “Nah, they’re a band,” he said. “From England.”

  “Oh,” Lauren said.

  She didn’t know any bands from England except for Duran Duran. A couple of years earlier she’d really been into Duran Duran, had even joined their fan club. Her dad had taken her to the post office to buy a special stamp for the envelope because the fan club was in Birmingham, England.

  “What kind of music is it?” Lauren asked, even though she knew she should leave. Nana was waiting for her.

  “Hmm,” Jake said. “Kind of chirpy and depressing at the same time. Guitars, no synthesizers like all that radio garbage.”

  Lauren felt her cheeks get even redder. She liked all of that radio garbage, but she could tell that it was not cool to do so.

  Well, what do you expect? You’re just a dorky kid and he’s a college student. Of course he knows more about everything than you do.

  “It was, um, nice to see you,” she said, not wanting to prolong this awkwardness any longer than necessary. “I have to get to my grandma’s house.”

  “Oh,” he said, and he seemed kind of disappointed, although maybe that was her imagination. “Well, I’ll see you around,
Lauren.”

  “Yup, see you around,” she said, and rode away as fast as she could.

  When she got to the stop sign at the corner she gave a quick sideways peek back over her shoulder and found him staring after her. He had a strange look on his face, one she couldn’t define. Lauren hurriedly turned her head forward again so he wouldn’t catch her looking.

  Why did he seem to be everywhere all of a sudden? Lauren hadn’t thought about Jake Hanson in years, and now she’d seen him twice in two days.

  “Stop worrying about Jake Hanson,” she told herself as she coasted toward the bottom of Nana’s hill. “The important thing is that you didn’t have to talk to Tad.”

  Once the road began to climb she stood up on the pedals rather than change gears. The lower gears always made her feel like a hamster on a wheel, like she was going to slide backward if she didn’t keep her legs pumping.

  Lauren heard a car coming up the hill behind her. For a brief and panicked second she thought it might be Jake Hanson following her. What should I do if it is him? Should I wave? Should I pretend I didn’t see him? I don’t even know what kind of car he drives.

  She kept pedaling, because the best thing was just to pretend that the car wasn’t there. It was unlikely to be Jake Hanson, although she didn’t know who might be driving this way.

  There was no other house on the hill, only Nana’s. It stood alone like a watchtower, and even though there was plenty of space to build more homes, nobody had.

  The car pulled even with her. She could see the hood just out of the corner of her eye—a wide, black sedan.

  A male voice called, “Hey, Lauren.”

  Lauren was trying so hard to pretend the car wasn’t there that the sound of her name made her jerk the bike handles suddenly to the right. She lost her balance and tipped over in a heap, her elbow scraping the edge of the road where it met a shallow ditch that ran along the side.

  “Shit,” she said. She felt her face filling with blood, knew she would be bright red when she stood up—not to mention covered in gravel and generally disheveled.