The Ghost Tree

by Christina Henry

  No more meetings under the ghost tree. No more riding her bike wherever she wanted to go.

  But Lauren had been biting her tongue for days, suppressing her irritation at Mom’s constant nagging. When they were sitting there at the table and she asked Mom about magic, Mom had given her that slightly superior look that she always gave when she thought Lauren asked a stupid question.

  And it had just been the last straw.

  But it wouldn’t have happened at all if Mom had just left her alone the way she’d asked her to. Lauren wasn’t hungry, hadn’t wanted to eat at all. Moreover, she hadn’t wanted the burden of being expected to sit up straight, shovel food in her mouth, and make meaningless conversation when she was dealing with a personal crisis.

  “But nooooo, Mom said I had to come downstairs or I would lose my allowance.”

  Which was profoundly unfair, because Lauren did a ton of chores around the house and spent a lot of time watching David and she earned her allowance. Her mom shouldn’t be allowed to take it away just because she didn’t like Lauren’s attitude. Lauren’s attitude shouldn’t come into it at all. She’d done the work and she deserved the money.

  And she was saving her money so she could buy a real pair of Converse sneakers.

  “Not like these stupid cheap ones,” she said, picking up the sneakers that she’d thrown near the bedroom door when she came home earlier. She threw one as hard as she could against the wall. It hit her Purple Rain poster and the corner of it ripped.

  “Goddammit!” Lauren screamed. She threw the other sneaker at her closet door. It made a satisfying thump but the cheap wood had a dent in it.

  “Great, something else for Mom to yell at me about,” Lauren said, and flopped facedown on her bed.

  The comforter was an ancient pink one that she’d had since she was nine or ten. There was an underskirt made up of pink ruffles that went around the box spring and covered the underbed area (because God knows we can’t have anybody seeing what’s under the bed, Lauren thought sourly).

  She’d been begging for something more grown-up. What she really wanted was a red plaid quilt she’d seen in a catalog, and plain sheets in red or white or gray. The sheets on the bed at the moment were threadbare and covered in a Raggedy Ann print. And her other sheet sets weren’t much better—strawberry patches and daisies and Holly Hobbie prints. Whenever Miranda came over she made fun of them.

  Lauren knew that it was unlikely her mother would ever be able to afford the particular quilt she wanted from the catalog. But she’d seen a halfway decent set at Kmart—a plain blue comforter that reversed to gray and a set of blue and gray checked sheets. The price hadn’t seemed outrageous to Lauren, but her mother had said no immediately.

  Lauren never got anything she wanted.

  “If I were really a witch I’d make money appear,” she said into the comforter. “I’d buy anything I wanted. I’d take my money to the music store and buy twenty tapes if I wanted. I’d have a new denim jacket and new sneakers and Jordache jeans. No, Sasson. Even Miranda doesn’t have Sasson.”

  And now she was back to the thing that she really didn’t want to think about—that bullshit story that her nana had told her about Smiths Hollow and the family of witches. The more she thought about it, the angrier Lauren got.

  Why had Nana tried to push that stupid garbage on her? Did she think Lauren was an idiot?

  She rolled over onto her back and spoke to the ceiling. “If there was a stupid curse and a bunch of stupid girls were dying, everybody would know! Does she think I’m dumb? And what was that crap at the end about being magical?”

  Magic wasn’t real, even if her mom did try to make her feel better by answering so carefully. Lauren could admit, now that she was cooling off, that Mom had been trying not to offend her.

  But that doesn’t change the fact that she’s annoying ninety-nine percent of the time and she never lays off me.

  She felt a sudden and profound longing for Miranda—not the new Miranda, not the one who never listened to her—but the old Miranda. Miranda used to keep Lauren’s secrets. She used to wrap her arm around Lauren’s shoulders when she was sad. She used to care about Lauren as a person, not a prop.

  If Miranda had been who she used to be, Lauren would have called her right away after the disaster at Nana’s house. She would have whispered, “Meet me by the old ghost tree,” and Miranda would have been there.

  But not anymore.

  And you forgot Miranda today, anyway, so what kind of friend are you? Lauren thought with a guilty little start. She’d never called Miranda back to say why she’d been unable to come today. She wondered if Miranda was mad about it.

  Who cares? If she’s mad then you won’t have to deal with her dragging you around to places you don’t want to go anymore.

  Lauren sat straight up, climbed off the bed, and went to the window. Her room was in a little nook just below the attic, and the one thing she really liked about it was that there was a built-in bookshelf and window seat beneath an old-fashioned window that pushed out instead of going up and down. She didn’t know what kind of window it was called, although maybe she could look it up in the encyclopedia.

  Her room looked over the front yard and the street. There was a large oak tree in their yard and just enough of the branches reached out to block the view so that she couldn’t see down the street to the right, only what was directly in front of the house and a little bit to the left. The window was open to let the air in and she heard the kids down the street playing in the cul-de-sac. There was the crack of a bat against a ball and a variety of cheers and groans. Lauren wished she could go out there and play with them, but she was too old now.

  A movement to the left caught her eye and she saw a little orange Gremlin driving slowly up the street toward the cul-de-sac. She couldn’t see the driver but it seemed like the car slowed for a moment in front of her house, but maybe it was her imagination. Lauren strained to see where the car went, but the leaves were too thick and it disappeared out of her sight.

  “Nobody who lives here has a car like that,” she said. She didn’t usually care about stuff like cars, but an orange Gremlin stood out.

  She thought about trying to sneak out of the house to see where the car went.

  Why do you care so much?

  She didn’t care, not really. She was just angry and sad and confused and a whole bunch of other things at the same time and she didn’t want to think about Nana or what Nana said. She wanted to think about anything else but that.

  I am not a witch. Just because I had some weird vision yesterday does not mean I am a witch.

  Yes, that vision. It was strange, because it should have stuck in her mind. She’d seen—well, more like “seen,” she thought, mentally putting air quotes around the word—two girls get killed, and her own head had felt like it was going to explode. So the incident should have been constantly in her thoughts.

  But it wasn’t. Instead, it was like she completely forgot it for long periods of time, and when it came back to her it was like a swimmer pushing up from the depths of a very deep pool, gasping for air.

  “And there was the blood on my bike seat,” she murmured.

  She thought she’d acted very strange there. She’d washed off all the blood like she was guilty of something, instead of showing someone. (Not Mom, she wouldn’t have been helpful. Before today I would have said Nana. Why didn’t I show Nana?)

  Was it because she felt guilty? Why should she feel guilty? It wasn’t her fault, what that monster had done to those girls.

  But maybe it’s your family’s fault, if Nana isn’t lying. Maybe some ancestors of yours cursed this town when they were grieving and furious and wild with those feelings. Maybe they lashed out in anger and because of that, innocent people have died.

  Maybe if your vision had come sooner you could have saved them.

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sp; The thought made her gasp. No. It was already over and done before you saw anything. There wasn’t anything you could do.

  And what if you did have a vision sooner? How could you fix it? Tell the police that you think someone might be murdered in the woods later?

  Officer Hendricks wouldn’t smile at her with those kind eyes anymore then. He’d think she was crazy, and so would everybody else. They’d say, “Poor Lauren diMucci. Her dad got killed and it’s finally made her nuts.”

  She thought she might be halfway to the nuthouse already. She was thinking about her vision like it was a real thing, instead of an especially vivid side effect of a particularly bad migraine.

  “Which was all it was, because there are no such things as witches and magic powers,” she told herself.

  Except something happened to David, too.

  And there was the blood on her bike seat. The blood in the shape of a man’s hand, but with claws.

  Doesn’t mean it’s a monster. It could be a serial killer. Like Freddy Krueger.

  Miranda had made her watch A Nightmare on Elm Street, and though Lauren spent half the movie peeking through her fingers, she’d seen enough to know the killer wore a glove with razor blades for fingers.

  It was a lot more likely that some weirdo was copying the movie than that a monster lived in the tree and it came out at certain times.

  So Nana was full of it, like Lauren thought.

  Though that still meant a killer was running around somewhere. Possibly wearing a glove with claws on it.

  And he touched your bike with that bloody glove, which made the strange handprint.

  Then you, like a total dummy, washed off all the evidence.

  Why had she done that? She could have taken it to the police station. Even if she couldn’t tell them that she thought a murderer touched the seat, they still would have thought it was weird. She bet Officer Hendricks or Officer Lopez would at least have taken some pictures or something.

  Instead she brought it home and scrubbed it off so thoroughly that the bike, formerly mud-spattered, appeared brand new.

  It had never even occurred to her at the time to do anything else. She’d panicked. She’d acted like she’d done something wrong.

  Why? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Lauren caught movement out of the corner of her eye and glanced out the window.

  Jake Hanson stood at the end of the driveway, looking up at the house.

  Lauren jerked away from the window automatically. She didn’t want him to see her.

  What was he doing there? As far as Lauren knew, he didn’t live at home. He was away at college most of the year, and the rest of the time she was pretty sure he had an apartment of his own.

  She ran to the light switch by the doorway and turned off the overhead light in her room. Then she returned to the window but stayed back far enough and to the side of the glass that he wouldn’t be able to get a good look at her. If he did look up at her window he might think she was just a shadow.

  He was staring up at her bedroom window, and something about the way he looked made her think that he knew she was there.

  Was he concerned about her because she’d acted so strange earlier? His manner at the gas station had indicated he wanted to talk to her, but she’d rushed away.

  And why did he seem so interested in her all of a sudden? Was watching her puke yesterday that attractive?

  “Attractiveness does not even come into it,” she said. “You’re in high school and he’s in college, so don’t get any weird ideas.”

  But she did have a weird idea. She had a weird idea that he was attracted to her.

  Stupid. He’s so much older than you are. Why would he want to hang around a kid like you? She hovered in the shadow near the edge of the window. Half her face was pressed against the wall. Her fingers curled around the sharp edge of it. Her palms were damp and she didn’t know why.

  He smiled then, slowly, a smile that knew all her secrets but promised to keep them.

  Everything inside her chest felt all fluttery then, like a moth-jar set near the flame of a candle. She gripped the corner of the wall with slippery fingers.

  Then he walked away. He hadn’t tried to ring the bell or wave at her in the window or indicate in any way that he wanted to speak to her.

  Disappointment crashed over her, washing her body from the top of her head down to her heels. Whatever Jake Hanson was up to, he wasn’t interested in her.

  If he were, then he would have actually tried to talk to her instead of standing in the driveway staring at the house.

  “Stupid,” she repeated again. All she did was think stupid things and do stupid things.

  She collapsed on the bed again, all the weight of everything that had happened in the last two days pressing down on her.

  The truth was, even though there had been blood on her bike seat and there were clearly two dead girls in Mrs. Schneider’s yard, that didn’t necessarily mean that the thing she saw was the thing that happened. So maybe there was no vision after all—just a weird coincidence.

  “They were carrying backpacks, though,” Lauren muttered, covering her eyes with her arm. “What happened to their backpacks?”

  She wasn’t sure where exactly the murders took place, but if she could find the backpacks, then . . .

  Then what?

  Then at least she would know for sure that she wasn’t completely crazy, that whatever she had seen while in the throes of that migraine was true.

  And it would be evidence, evidence that could help the police. It wouldn’t matter then that you washed the blood off your bike.

  She imagined presenting the girls’ backpacks to Officer Hendricks, imagined how he would smile at her and the corners of his eyes would crinkle up.

  But how was she going to get out to the woods to explore? If Lauren knew her mother (and she did know her), then she was downstairs plotting to keep Lauren stuck in the house doing chores for the rest of the summer.

  You’ll just have to sneak out.

  But what if you get caught?

  It would be worth it if she found the girls’ backpacks, or maybe some other kind of evidence that would prove useful.

  You would be like a hero. You would be helping find out who killed them. Your picture might even be in the paper.

  Miranda would be so jealous if that happened. Lauren thought that might be good for her, actually. Miranda was too used to being the sun around which all the planets of her life revolved.

  Her mom couldn’t monitor her every second of the day. Sooner or later there would be a chance for Lauren to sneak out. And what was Mom going to do then? Ground her again?

  She couldn’t chain Lauren to the bed, or lock her in her room. That would be child abuse. All she could do was say, “You’re grounded,” and if Lauren didn’t cooperate then those words were useless.

  It was a strange realization, that her mother was not all-powerful. That part of her authority stemmed from Lauren’s belief in it and Lauren’s compliance.

  I don’t have to do what she says.

  She could refuse to give Lauren her allowance, though. That was definitely true. There wasn’t a lot Lauren could do about that unless she was willing to steal money from her mom’s wallet.

  Her stomach squelched nervously at the thought. No, she didn’t think she could do that.

  Well, when she was fifteen she would be able to get a job and her mom’s piddly allowance wouldn’t matter anymore. Even if she had to wash dishes at a restaurant or something. Lauren didn’t care as long as she could get out of the house and make her own money.

  Lauren rolled onto her belly and saw that the book she’d been reading was across the room on top of her dresser. She wanted to read, but she didn’t want to get up and get it. All the frantic bike riding and emotional conflicts of the day were ca
tching up with her. She felt like something was pulling her down, like her body was filling up with molten lead.

  You’re a witch.

  “Okay, Nana. Prove it, then,” Lauren said.

  She held out her hand in the direction of the book and concentrated hard. Her eyebrows scrunched together. The muscles in her neck strained. Her back teeth ground against each other, but nothing happened. Shouldn’t the book just fly into her hand if she had magic powers?

  “Of course not. Because there’s no such thing as witches. Or Jedi, either,” Lauren added.

  She didn’t think any amount of running or doing handstands would make it possible to move objects with her mind. Nor would a cape and a spellbook. It was all a lot of garbage.

  She didn’t really feel like getting up to get her book, though. It was easier just to stay there and look at the ceiling and think about everything in her life that had gone wrong in the last couple of days. The sun shone outside her window, but her eyes drifted closed.

  When she woke up the sun was still shining, but she could tell from the angle that it was morning. Her abdomen hurt, a sharp twisting pain between her hips, and there was a thick wet feeling in her underwear. For half a second she thought she’d peed in her pants. Then she realized that she’d gotten her first period.

  The second thing she realized was that the book she’d wanted the night before floated in the air next to the bed.

  1

  Friday

  Lauren fully expected her mom to flip out over her behavior the night before, and that might have happened if she hadn’t needed her mom’s assistance finding the sanitary pads.

  Mom had taken one look at Lauren’s red face and the clean pair of underwear clutched in her hand and said, “Well, that explains a few things.” Then she went into her clothes closet and pulled down a box of Stayfree maxi pads. She handed the box to Lauren. There was a woman walking on a beach in a white dress. Her dark hair blew in the wind and she looked unreasonably happy for a person who presumably had her period, Lauren thought. Across the bottom corner of the box it said Beltless.