“You’re thinking about Miranda, aren’t you?”
“Huh?”
“You and Miranda. You’re not as close as you used to be, are you?”
Lauren shrugged. “Not really. We’re . . . interested in different things, I guess.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty obvious what she’s interested in,” Jake said.
Lauren stopped, giving him a hard stare. “What does that mean?”
He rubbed the back of his head in that sheepish gesture he’d used earlier. “Nothing.”
“No, you meant something.”
“It’s just that she kind of has a reputation already,” he said. “The guys I lived with—they’re a few years older than you, and they already know about her.”
“What, exactly, is it they know?” She heard the ice in her voice, was half-surprised he didn’t frost over just from standing near her.
“She’s, well, easy,” he said, his eyes going everywhere except her face. “A bunch of people saw her groping Tad in the booth the other night at Wagon Wheel, and it didn’t seem like she cared who saw her.”
“How come a girl is easy when she wants the same damn thing every boy wants, but nobody talks about the boys?” Lauren said angrily. “How come boys can bang all the girls they can find and they’re practically given a trophy for it, but girls are called sluts and everyone talks about them?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, go home, Jake,” she said. “I don’t even want you here.”
Lauren stomped away, her chest swelling with anger.
She didn’t want to have sex so soon, but so what if Miranda did? It was her business. And she didn’t think Jake was the kind of person who would be an asshole about it, but here he was repeating gossip.
Tears were in her eyes again, and she didn’t know what she was crying about anymore. Jake? Miranda? The girls no one seemed to care about? Or was it all just her period and being a teenager and other stupid shit like that?
She wasn’t looking where she was going, couldn’t see for crying anyhow. Jake’s footsteps were behind her again and she sped up. She didn’t want to hear his apology right now. She wanted to be alone.
“Lauren, listen, I’m really sorry—”
“Go away!” she shouted.
“No, come on, you’ve got to hear me out—”
“I don’t!”
“You’re right, you really are, I never thought about it before . . .”
He stopped, trailing off.
Lauren swiped at her face and glared at him. “What? What did you never think about before?”
He wasn’t looking at her. He seemed to have forgotten all about their argument.
“Lauren. Look.”
They had stumbled into a clearing without noticing. Lauren sucked in a sharp breath.
There was blood everywhere—so much blood, how could there be so much blood? Why was it still red and not brown and faded?—and bits of viscera that the killer hadn’t taken with him. Scraps of cloth were scattered like party confetti, and there was one brown moccasin with its sole facing up. It seemed very small and sad without its owner.
Black flies buzzed, bloated and drunk, around the clearing. All around them was the smell of rot and death and the sharp tang of that impossibly fresh blood.
There were two fingers—it looked like an index and middle finger—lying in the dirt right next to each other, like they’d been sliced cleanly away from the hand and dropped in place. There were three silver rings stacked on the middle finger.
Over here an ear, over there a jagged piece of bone with a few shreds of skin hanging off it. All pieces of the dead girls that the monster hadn’t bothered with, or neglected in his haste.
Like a child that didn’t clean up his room properly, and left bits of his toys behind.
“We should go,” Jake said, a tremor in his voice. “We shouldn’t be here. What if the killer comes back?”
Lauren ignored him, turning on the spot, trying hard not to think about the parts scattered everywhere as pieces of human beings. It was easier to think of them as doll parts, as broken toys, because if she really focused on them she would just scream and never stop.
Like Mrs. Schneider had when she found the girls in her yard. David said she did that. She screamed and screamed.
“Lauren, let’s leave.”
“I can’t go yet,” she said. “I have to see if—there!”
She pointed across the clearing. Something purple and something blue had been tossed carelessly in a bush.
Lauren picked her way across the clearing, carefully not touching any of the bits scattered on the ground. She heard Jake following behind and glanced back to see him stepping only where she stepped, like they were in a minefield and they were avoiding unexploded ordnance.
When Lauren reached the bush she realized she’d have to go around it, because she didn’t want to open the backpacks in the clearing. In fact, she didn’t want to spend any more time in the clearing than absolutely necessary.
A few of the flies circled her head and she batted at them with something like loathing. They were slow-moving and fat and they’d spent the last two days feeding off what was left of those girls. Lauren didn’t want them touching her. She didn’t want one to land on her hair or her arm, not even for a moment.
Jake followed her as she sidestepped until they were back under the trees. Then she went around to the other side of the bush and discovered a new problem: the bush was both large and filled with thorns.
“I can reach it,” Jake said.
He couldn’t really—he had to wade a little ways into the bush before he could grab the packs—but he didn’t complain about the thorns pricking him.
“Wait,” Lauren said, just before he picked them up. She dug around in her bag and pulled out the leather gloves. “Take these. So you don’t, like, get your fingerprints on the bags or whatever.”
“I feel like a criminal,” Jake said as he pulled them on.
“You’re protecting the crime scene,” she said.
“We could protect it better by finding the nearest police officer and leading them out here. Isn’t Officer Hendricks your buddy?” he said, but he grabbed the packs and pulled them out.
“He’s not my buddy,” she said. “He was nice to me after my dad died, that’s all.”
She felt strangely embarrassed that Officer Hendricks had even been mentioned. Lauren didn’t think Jake, who wanted to take her out on a date, should bring him up. She’d always had a little crush on him—even if she only acknowledged it now, at this very moment. It was like realizing Jake was interested in her made her recognize her own feelings about Officer Hendricks.
He had a nice smile, and nice eyes, and he had always been kind to her. For a long time she’d harbored that secret hope that he was quietly trying to find out what happened, that one day he would arrest the person who killed her father.
But of course he wasn’t really doing that . . . and she thought she’d known it all along. She’d only felt helpless and sad, and hoped someone who wasn’t helpless could take that feeling away.
And anyway, I’m not helpless. If I can do this—track the murderer’s path through the woods—then maybe I can find out what happened to my dad, too.
Because nobody cares. Nobody cares except me.
She wasn’t ready to believe that Dad had his heart cut out by a monster that ate the town girls as sacrifices. No, she wasn’t ready to believe Nana’s story, because there were no other dead girls. There were no other bodies. Everyone would know. There were only these two. Just the ones she’d seen in her head walking through these woods and carrying the backpacks that Jake was trying to pull out of the thorn bush.
Jake winced as he cleared the bush and dropped the packs on the ground. Lauren saw that the thighs of his jeans were covered in thorns.
> “My mom is not going to be happy to wash these,” Jake said, pulling some of them out with his gloved fingers. “Why didn’t the killer take these packs with him? Wasn’t he worried about somebody finding these? I thought the police could check all kinds of things now, not just fingerprints. Like they can find hairs and clothing fibers and stuff like that.”
“Maybe he didn’t care,” Lauren said. “Or maybe he didn’t think of it. It looks like he was in a . . .”
“Frenzy?” Jake suggested. “I gotta say, I’m glad I didn’t have a big lunch, because I don’t think my stomach is going to be right for the rest of the day.”
Lauren took two black plastic garbage bags out of her duffel. “Can I have the gloves back?”
Jake paused, a large thorn between his thumb and forefinger. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to open the bags and see if there’s anything useful inside, like an ID. Then I’m going to wrap each bag separately in plastic.”
“Why not just leave the searching to the cops?” Jake said. “Seriously, Lauren, I think it’s amazing that you found this at all, and that you’re being so coolheaded about it, but . . .”
“Why wouldn’t I be coolheaded? Because most girls would scream their heads off when they saw what was on the other side of that thorn bush?”
“You said it, not me.”
“But you thought it,” Lauren said. She sat back on her heels and looked at him expectantly.
“What?”
She held out her hand. “Gloves.”
He took them off slowly, as if he were reluctant to let her have them.
Lauren took them and put them on. They were warm inside, and for a second it was like he was holding her hand.
Stop worrying about stupid girly romantic things. You came out here to do something.
She stood the purple backpack up and unzipped it. Inside was a ball of clothing rolled together—a plaid flannel shirt, corduroy pants, a plain white T-shirt, a pair of denim shorts. Underneath that were three squashed Twinkies, a bag of plain potato chips, and a library book. Lauren pulled out the book—a travel guide to California—and glanced inside the front cover.
“Joliet Public Library,” Lauren said.
“So at least one of them was from Joliet. I think that’s enough, really. Just wrap up the bags and let’s get out of here.” He looked at his watch. “I really do have to leave soon.”
“So go,” Lauren said, feeling around the bottom of the pack for anything else that might prove useful. “I’m fine by myself.”
Jake didn’t say anything to this. After a minute the silence was awkward so she looked up.
He was staring at her. She couldn’t read his expression so she said, “What?”
“Do you really think I’m going to leave you by yourself five feet away from a pile of body parts?”
“Those body parts aren’t going to come back to life and strangle me,” Lauren said. There was nothing else in the bottom of the bag. She zipped it closed again.
“You know, you’re a lot more confident when Miranda isn’t around.”
She paused in the act of unzipping the second pack. “Yeah. I guess I am.”
It wasn’t just the lack of Miranda. She felt stronger now, more like the person she was meant to be. She wasn’t worried about saying or doing the wrong thing. Maybe it was because she’d decided to take concrete action about the vision. Maybe it was because Jake had already shown her that he was vulnerable to her and she didn’t have to fear his ridicule.
Maybe it’s because you did magic.
“I’m almost done,” she said, by way of apology.
The second bag was much more densely packed than the first one, and much more practically, as well. There were two pairs of pants, six neatly folded squares of underwear, a raincoat, a sweater, three pairs of striped socks that clearly came out of the same package. A small plastic bag contained a bar of soap, a travel-size bottle of shampoo, a yellow toothbrush, and a half-used tube of Colgate. On top of everything was a canister of Planters salted peanuts, a bruised apple, and a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. Lauren didn’t think it was a good idea to unwrap it after it had been sitting in a backpack in the woods for two days.
In the front zip pocket Lauren found a package of tissues, a few maxi pads in a Ziploc bag, and a pink My Melody wallet.
She held the wallet in her hand for a minute, the cheerful rabbit on the exterior making her unaccountably sad. There was a Sanrio store a few towns over and when Lauren was younger sometimes her mom would take her there as a treat so she could buy Hello Kitty stationery and My Melody stickers.
She remembered the way the store smelled, sort of plastic with wood shavings underneath plus a faint sweetness, like cotton candy lingering in the air.
Lauren zipped the wallet open. Inside were twenty-two dollars in small bills, a few coins, and a Joliet Junior College student ID for Rebecca Posner. The girl with the long brown braids grinned out at Lauren from the photo.
Help me.
Lauren blinked, because she thought she’d just seen the girl’s face morph from smiling to scared, thought maybe Rebecca’s mouth had moved.
She moved the ID a little closer to her face.
“What are you looking at?” Jake asked.
Help us.
Lauren nearly dropped the plastic rectangle then, as Rebecca’s face transformed into a screaming jack-o’-lantern, her eyes rounded and terrified and her mouth open.
“What are you looking at?” Jake repeated. “Is there something wrong with that picture? Do you know her?”
Lauren glanced up at Jake and when she looked back the photo had returned to normal.
“No. It’s nothing. I thought I saw something—”
“Like what?”
“Nothing,” she said. If she told him that the ID picture had changed, he would think she was either spooked or crazy.
She loaded each pack into one of the black plastic garbage bags, wrapping each one carefully. The packs were too bulky to fit inside her small duffel, so she handed one wrapped bag to Jake and she took the other.
“Are we going now?” Jake asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Thank Christ,” he muttered.
Lauren didn’t answer, because she wasn’t thinking about Jake or their date or even what the police would say when she brought them the girls’ backpacks.
She was thinking of that face grinning up at her from the photo, the face of the happy girl whose last word was a scream.
5
The last person Miranda expected to see in that part of the woods was Lauren. She hid behind an old oak wide enough to keep her body out of sight and peeked around the edge. Lauren and Jake Hanson were walking back in the direction of Lauren’s neighborhood, carrying large plastic bags. Were they out here picking up trash?
Miranda snorted to herself. Real romantic, Lauren. Why don’t you take him down to the pharmacy and ride the mechanical pony for a dime while you’re at it?
But the sight of them together, and this deep in the woods, annoyed her. She and Lauren almost always stayed near the ghost tree, and she hadn’t imagined that Lauren would even enter the forest without her. She was such a little mouse. Miranda thought that without her friend, Lauren would sit at home and play board games with her weird little brother until she was desperate. And when she was desperate she would call Miranda and beg her to go out somewhere cool in Tad’s Camaro.
Miranda had very deliberately not called Lauren, waiting instead to see if her so-called best friend would call her after standing Miranda up the day before.
Tad had called to apologize for losing her at the mall. Those were his words, “losing her.” As if he hadn’t deliberately walked away to flirt with those sluts in neon tank tops. Miranda had played it cool, but not too cool. She still wanted him
to drive her to school in the fall. No way was she taking the bus or getting sweaty riding a bike. And at the end of the conversation he offered to take her out to the fair the next day, so Miranda knew he was still hot to get into her pants.
I might even let him, she thought. But there’s no hurry now.
But Lauren hadn’t called, not even to say that she was sorry.
And even worse—she was in the woods with Jake Hanson, of all people. What was he doing with Lauren? Miranda knew that they weren’t up to what she’d been up to most of the morning. He had met her in the woods again and taken her into the old cabin. There was a proper love nest set up in there now, with pillows and blankets and cloth to cover the one small window.
He’d told her that it was vitally important that no one know about them, so Miranda told Janice she was off to meet Lauren again. She didn’t think this would backfire since Lauren couldn’t be bothered to be friends anymore.
Really, Miranda thought, getting angrier the more she thought about it. I’ve done so much for her. I tried to set her up with Billy so she could double-date with me and Tad and she walked out without a word. I’ve tried over and over to give her hair and makeup tips so she doesn’t look like such a gawky little kid, but she never takes them. And then when I ask her to meet me she ditches me and then never even tells me she’s sorry.
Miranda was angry about all of these things, but she was extra-angry that Lauren was walking around the woods with Jake Hanson.
How could he possibly be interested in her? He’s a man and she’s a little girl.
Not Miranda, though. Miranda was a woman now.
She hugged herself with her arms. Finally, finally, her virginity was gone. And she’d lost it not to an octopus-handed teenager but a man. A grown-up man who’d done things to her she hadn’t imagined were possible, no matter how many Jackie Collins novels she’d read.
And in the darkness of the cabin she hadn’t seen that look in His eyes, the one that had given her pause the day before. The one that made her think He wanted to eat her up.
Don’t be silly, Miranda. It was just your imagination.
The Ghost Tree Page 21