“Do you need any help?” Mom asked.
“Uh, no. I think I can figure it out,” Lauren said.
“Rinse out your underwear and leave it in the bathroom. I’ll put something on it to take the stains out after,” Mom said.
“Okay,” Lauren said in a tiny voice.
When she came out of the bathroom Mom was waiting with a bottle of Midol. She handed Lauren two of the pills and said, “You’re going to need those.”
Lauren returned to the sink, put some water in a paper cup, and swallowed the pills.
When she came out of the bathroom again her mom hugged her.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” she said.
Lauren stopped herself from jerking back in surprise, but only just. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard Mom say she was sorry.
But since Lauren wanted Mom to stay in a good mood and not decide to enact any punishments for her behavior, Lauren said, “I’m sorry, too.”
“If I had known . . .” Mom said, trailing off. “It’s hard to keep your emotions steady just before your period.”
Lauren had heard this, had seen articles about PMS in some of the magazines that Miranda liked to read. Was that what had happened to her yesterday? Had she freaked out because her hormones were going crazy and she didn’t realize it?
No, you really were angry with Nana. And hormones don’t explain the floating book, she thought. But that was information she was keeping to herself.
Nobody would ever believe her about the book. Not unless she could duplicate that event, and since she didn’t know how it happened in the first place, she didn’t know how to do it again.
Her dreams had been strange, half memory and half imagination, dreams of the ghost tree and the girls in the woods and also of a red-haired witch and her grieving lover.
Just before her eyes opened she dreamed of being caught by the ghost tree, of the branches pulling her inside so she was embraced by the rough bark. But there was something else there with her, something that was made of the night, something with teeth that wanted to devour her.
She woke covered in sweat and her body felt like it was made of swollen pain.
As soon as she realized the book was floating next to the bed, she’d uttered a tiny scream and then it dropped to the floor.
Lauren realized her mom was looking at her expectantly, that she’d gotten lost thinking about the book.
“I guess, yeah, I didn’t really know what to do with myself yesterday,” Lauren said.
“Well, you can lie down if you need to,” Mom said. “The first few times seem like they’re especially hard.”
“Thanks,” Lauren said. “I guess I’ll see how I feel later. Maybe I’ll take a walk or something, get some fresh air.”
She threw this out casually, laying the groundwork for some forest exploration. She hadn’t forgotten that she wanted to look for the girls’ backpacks.
And I’m not bringing Miranda with me, either, she decided.
Miranda would just ask a lot of questions that Lauren didn’t want to answer. And if they did find any evidence of the dead girls in the woods, then Miranda would be sure to try to claim any glory for herself.
Like always.
It was somewhat startling to realize this was true and not just random resentfulness. Miranda always did push herself into the spotlight and leave Lauren standing in the wings.
“A walk would be good for you,” Mom said. “Do you want to come down and eat something? I could make pancakes.”
Lauren didn’t really feel like eating pancakes, but her mom gave her such a hopeful look that she agreed. And it was worth it when David cheered as Mom took the griddle out.
Breakfast was a completely argument-free meal, and Lauren couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. It was before Dad died but it had to be a long time before, because Mom and Dad had squabbled over every little thing the last few years.
Lauren helped clean up without being asked, and she reflected that it was a much happier house when the air wasn’t carrying the remnants of an argument like a malicious fog.
“Wanna play Sorry!, Lauren?” David asked.
She really didn’t want to. She wasn’t really in the mood for a board game and she was hoping to get out to the woods early, before Miranda called and asked her to go somewhere.
But she was enjoying the rare peace, and she knew that if she said yes her mom would smile in approval and then later when Lauren disappeared for a while Mom wouldn’t complain.
Karen went upstairs to sort the laundry and left Lauren and David in the living room. Lauren unfolded the game board on the coffee table.
“What color do you want to be?”
“Red. Are you going to find the girls today?” David asked.
Her hand stilled above the game box, the small bag of red pieces in her hand.
“What . . . what do you mean?” She felt her heart hammering away, startled into frantic action by her baby brother’s words.
“You’re going to look for where the girls are. Or were.” David said it as a statement, not a question.
“How do you know that?”
David shrugged, taking the bag of pieces from Lauren’s hand and carefully setting them up in the red home base area.
“I just know,” he said.
“Like you just knew about the girls in Mrs. Schneider’s yard?”
“She was screaming.”
Lauren considered her brother in light of everything Nana had told her yesterday. It seemed to her that David was much more of a witch than she could ever be. There was no reason for a four-year-old boy to know about these things. And she hadn’t breathed a word of what she intended to do that day, even out loud to herself.
“David,” Lauren asked as she set up the blue pieces for herself, “can you . . . ?”
She hesitated, because she felt that to say what she was thinking out loud would be like crossing the Rubicon. Her sixth-grade social studies teacher, Mr. Connolly, had used that phrase once and when she asked what he meant, he told her it was a way of saying a step that you couldn’t take back.
There are so many things happening that I don’t understand, she thought. And I think that I need to understand.
David didn’t prompt Lauren to continue. If she never asked the rest of her question he wouldn’t wonder about it, or pester her. That was just David. He was really a patient little kid.
And is that because of his nature, or because he can read people’s minds and so he doesn’t have to ask?
“Can we go to the fair this weekend? On Saturday?” he asked.
Lauren, who’d been about to say the thing rolled up under her tongue, felt like she’d been caught wrong-footed.
“Uh. Sure, bud,” she said. Maybe she wouldn’t ask him after all. Maybe, if he really could read people’s minds, it was better not to know for sure. “What do you want to do most, eat cotton candy and funnel cakes or ride the merry-go-round?”
“Cotton candy,” David said, almost absently. “I think you have to be there on that day. He wants you to be there.”
Lauren rubbed her arms. She felt cold all over.
“Who wants me to be there?”
David tilted his head to one side, like he was listening to a conversation in the next room. “Dunno. But it’s important. He wants you to see something.”
“Okay,” Lauren said.
This was the perfect opportunity to ask how David knew these things. Who was “he”? Why would “he” want Lauren to see something?
Is David talking about Jake Hanson? And if he was, how come Jake Hanson suddenly seemed to pop up everywhere?
Why was Jake standing outside her window the night before, smiling up like he knew she was there?
“Can I go first?” he asked.
�
�Go first?” Lauren asked.
“In the game,” David said.
She’d forgotten about the game, even though the board and pieces were laid out in front of her. “Sure.”
“You have to shuffle the cards,” he said patiently.
“Okay,” she said, and picked up the deck. She felt somehow the moment was gone, that if she asked David about mind reading now, he would only give her a puzzled look.
I bet Nana would know what to do.
No, I’m not going to see Nana.
She was still angry at her grandmother. And she didn’t need Nana cluttering up her head with stories just now.
“Cards,” David said, holding out his little hand.
Lauren put the deck on the table and watched David draw a 6.
“Can’t move,” he said. “I’m stuck.”
Me too, Lauren thought.
Maybe in the woods she would be able to get unstuck. Maybe out there she’d find out what really happened to those girls. But there was no one to talk to in the meantime. No one to help her. It was just Lauren and her migraine-vision and a thin thread of hope that if she knew for sure how those girls died, then she could also figure out if Nana’s story was true. If Lauren really was a witch. Or something.
“Your turn,” David said.
Lauren drew a one, which meant she could move one of her pawns out of home base.
“Lucky.”
“Yeah,” Lauren said, looking at her pawn standing all alone on the game track. “Lucky.”
2
Alex really was not in the mood for the fair. The captain decided that Alex and Miller would rotate shifts with Hendricks and Pantaleo and that there would be at least one pair patrolling at the fair at all times from open to close—which was from eleven to eight every day, and until ten p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. The chief tried to soften the blow with the promise of overtime pay (“already authorized by the mayor, who’s grateful for our presence”), but Alex didn’t care about the money.
He cared about the hours he was going to spend walking in the heat, dealing with out-of-towners who lost their kids in the crowd or got their pockets picked by teenagers. And when he wasn’t dealing with petty theft and children distracted by the sight of balloon vendors, he’d be giving directions.
People, Alex had noticed, had a firm belief that a police officer in uniform was better than a compass any day. It wouldn’t matter that maps were handed out with the tickets at the gate. Why consult a piece of paper when there was a policeman right there?
But all of these irritations were secondary to the knowledge that as long as the fair was in town he wouldn’t be in the station. And if he wasn’t in the station then he couldn’t search the archives for the other girls.
After his lunch with Miller the day before, they’d gotten stuck dealing with a fender bender on the county road. Once blame had been assigned and the drivers taken away with their cars by AAA, Alex and Miller were called to Pete’s Roadhouse, which was about three miles away from the accident on the same county road. A wannabe bike-gang group had gotten embroiled in a fight with a couple of members of a real bike-gang group.
The fight broke up pretty quickly once the uniforms (and more importantly, their sidearms) appeared, but it had still taken Alex and Miller almost two hours to take down all the witness reports and determine just who was going to pay for the bar’s damages.
By the time all this was done their shift was over. It would have appeared deeply suspicious for Alex to go digging around in the basement archives, so he’d headed home, frustrated that there was no time for him to work on his search.
He thought that in a regular town—or even back in Chicago—he would have been praised for using his own time to work on an active case. At the very least there would have been indifference—an it’s your time, do what you want kind of attitude. But he didn’t think that would be the case here.
It wasn’t anything that had been said outright. Alex just sensed that somehow the department was being steered away from any real investigation of these murders.
But who’s doing the steering? The mayor? Or someone else?
He couldn’t admit, even to himself, that there was some kind of supernatural force at play. He couldn’t admit this even though he’d physically struggled just to take notes on everything he knew so far. He couldn’t admit it even though two girls’ decapitated heads had spoken to him.
Alex was certain that if anyone knew what he was doing they would find a way to stop him. And he didn’t want to be stopped.
He owed it to the dead girls, and he owed it to the living girls of Smiths Hollow. He had two daughters. The thought of Camila or Valeria falling under some madman’s knife nearly paralyzed him. And if something happened to one of his children like what happened to those dead girls, then he would want to know. Alex couldn’t imagine what was going through their parents’ heads, the worry and the waiting.
So he needed to identify them, even though Christie wasn’t exactly prioritizing their identification. And he needed to find out if there were other victims.
The third item on his list was to find out who the stranger was—the one he’d seen at Sam’s Dairy Bar, the one whose clothes and car and attitude marked him out as an outsider.
Alex didn’t know why he felt this person was linked to the murders, but he did. It wasn’t necessarily that the man was the perpetrator—although it wouldn’t hurt to rule him out completely. It was, again, a sense—a sense that this person was tied to everything that had happened, or a sense that he would be important to the outcome.
Alejandro Lopez wasn’t accustomed to all these vague feelings, these hunches, this lack of firm and solid footing. Smiths Hollow had gone, in the course of a day, from the friendly town that welcomed his family to a shifting, seething mass of quicksand that could pull them under.
It wasn’t just the murders, either.
That night Beatriz had told Alex and Sofia at dinner—after the children went outside to play and they were all enjoying a second glass of wine—that there were rumors of job cuts at the chili plant. Alex’s sister-in-law tended toward anxiety, and it was all over her face as she told them this.
“I don’t think we should get too worried about it, Bea,” Ed said comfortably. Alex’s brother was not the worrying sort, the complete opposite of his wife. “Pam McLaren—she’s on the line next to me—told me that these rumors go around every couple of months, usually right after they’ve done a lot of hiring. And we were just hired as part of an expansion, so it’s just about time.”
Bea shook her head, her smooth dark bob swirling around her chin. “This isn’t the same. I overheard some of the men at the next table talking at lunch yesterday. They seemed concerned that this time was different. A couple of them were actually talking about moving away if the cuts happened.”
“Moving away to where?” Alex asked.
“To Chicago, to work in the Nabisco factory. Wouldn’t it be funny if we moved out here only to move back?”
“Not really funny ha-ha,” Sofia said, frowning. “And anyway, it doesn’t make sense for us—or even those men—to move to Chicago. You know what we were paying in rent only got us a fraction of the space we have now. Do you really think those guys, who’ve lived in big houses all their lives, are really going to downsize just so they can keep working in a factory? That big mall just went up—there are lots of jobs there.”
“But no guarantee that you’ll get forty hours, and those hours will be all over the place. And factory jobs have the best benefits,” Bea said. “You know that. What will we do if we don’t have health insurance?”
Everyone was silent at this, because if Bea and Ed both lost their jobs, then at least one of them would need to find a position with benefits. Though they were both young and healthy now, they wouldn’t always be. And accidents could happen at any time.
Alex received health insurance through the police department, and always had, so even if Sofia had to go back to work she could take a job without worrying about the benefits package. Alex felt a little guilty about this, although he knew he shouldn’t. It was his job and he’d earned it. God knew that he’d earned every dime and benefit in Chicago. Though his position in Smiths Hollow had reduced his stress and workload by more than fifty percent, he figured he was still due some psychological rollover from his CPD years.
“Let’s not borrow trouble,” Sofia said finally, breaking the silence. “There’s enough trouble to go around without worrying you’ll be fired.”
“I think the correct term is ‘let go.’ It sounds more like they’re gently releasing you down the river instead of forcibly removing you from your livelihood, you know?” Ed said.
“I don’t think the correct term will matter if we’re both jobless,” Bea said.
Alex heard the back door slam, then pounding feet thundering along the hallway. Camila and Daniel appeared in the doorway, faces flushed.
“Can we have some Popsicles?” they asked, almost in perfect unison.
“If you help clear the table,” Sofia said, rising with an empty plate in her hand.
“Told you,” Daniel said. “We should have waited another half hour.”
“I don’t mind helping out,” Camila said primly, although Alex saw her nose wrinkle. “Anyhow, all we have to do is put the dishes in the dishwasher. It’s better than washing them and drying them and putting them away.”
“And the faster you do it, the faster the Popsicles will appear,” Bea said.
No one brought up the subject again that evening. More interestingly—or strangely—to Alex, no one brought up the murders, either. Not even Sofia, who’d been a witness to the atrocity.
It was almost as if she’d forgotten what happened.
The way that Chief Christie had seemed to forget what happened.
The Ghost Tree Page 18