The Ghost Tree

by Christina Henry

  “Sure,” Jake said.

  His answer seemed automatic, so she looked at him and saw that he hadn’t noticed the police car or her mother at all. He was looking at a red Pontiac Fiero parked in front of Mrs. Schneider’s house.

  “Whose car is that?” Jake asked.

  “I dunno,” she said. “I don’t usually notice cars.”

  “Yeah, but who would visit her? She’s like the actual living embodiment of the Wicked Witch of the West.”

  Lauren shrugged. “Even the witch had flying monkeys who liked her.”

  “They were her servants,” Jake said. “Like her slaves. They didn’t like her. They had to do what she said. Anyway, you don’t think a flying monkey drove up to Mrs. Schneider’s house, do you?”

  Lauren giggled, then covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Cover your mouth. You have a nice smile.”

  For the hundredth time that day she felt her face heat. Why did every stupid thing he said make her blush?

  “I just—well, I giggled and it sounded silly and I wanted to stop.”

  “Or you could just let yourself laugh. You’re allowed to, you know?”

  It was funny, because when he said that she realized she hadn’t really allowed herself to laugh, or to be happy at all, since her father died. She’d spent the better part of a year angry—angry at her mother for not loving her father enough, angry at the police for not doing anything to catch his murderer, angry at Miranda for changing, angry at herself for staying the same. There was a kind of relief in the realization, a feeling of lightness that she hadn’t known in a very long time.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I am allowed to laugh.”

  “But who is at her house?” Jake asked, indicating the car again.

  “I don’t know why you care so much,” Lauren said.

  “Nobody around here has a car like that. I would have noticed. And it’s not brand-new, so it’s not something that was just bought. I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling.”

  “Anyway,” Lauren said, steering him to their side of the street. Maybe if they stayed close to the houses her mom and Officer Hendricks wouldn’t see her. From what she could see they were very deep in conversation.

  Lauren felt an odd little burst of jealousy at that, the idea that her mom could engage Officer Hendricks (whom she’d only just acknowledged as an unattainable crush and thought she’d dismissed from her thoughts forever) in such a way that he wouldn’t notice anyone else on the street.

  And this feeling was immediately followed by one so full of nastiness that she wished she could wipe it from her brain.

  What’s she doing flirting when her husband hasn’t even been dead for a year?

  Lauren didn’t even know for sure that her mom was flirting. There was a quality in her stance, something about the tilt of her head that made Lauren think that there was flirting going on. Or maybe it was because Officer Hendricks and Mom were standing a little too close together.

  For all you know they’re standing close together because they’re talking about a breakthrough in Dad’s murder case and they don’t want anybody else to hear.

  Lauren didn’t think that was the reason, really. She didn’t think that at all.

  It looked like they were flirting.

  Why do you care?

  (Because he’s not supposed to—)

  He can flirt with whoever he wants. You’re not going out with him.

  (Well she’s not supposed to—)

  You know that Mom and Dad weren’t happy. Don’t you think she has a right to be happy?

  (No)

  Lauren knew then that she did think that. She didn’t think her mother had a right to happiness now that her father was dead. All she thought her mother was allowed to do was be miserable until she died, too.

  And then she knew just how unfair she’d been to her mother.

  I’ll be better, she promised herself. I really will.

  As they passed by the Lopez house, Lauren noticed Sofia weeding the front flower beds and stopped.

  “What now?” Jake asked. To his credit, he didn’t sound as exasperated as he probably felt.

  “I don’t want my mom to see the bags, or know what I was doing. I’m going to give them to Sofia so that when Officer Lopez comes home he can look at them and then take them to the police station. You keep going, though. You have to go to work.”

  And I don’t really want my mom to know that you were with me, either.

  “Okay,” he said, handing her the other black plastic garbage bag. “I’ll call you later, all right?”

  “Oh. Um. Yes,” she said. Of course he was going to call her on the phone. He wanted to go out with her. There wasn’t going to be radio silence until Saturday night.

  He waved and turned away, and she stood there for a moment with a bag clutched in each fist and a strange feeling in her heart.

  She ought to be able to enjoy this, this first-boy and first-date thing. She ought to be allowed to feel uncomplicated and giddy. She didn’t feel that way, though. She felt like she was doing something wrong, that she was being pulled in a direction she shouldn’t go.

  Lauren knew it was because of the girls, and Nana’s story, and the fact that she might be a . . .

  (witch, witch, you’re a witch)

  “Lauren, is something wrong?”

  Sofia Lopez stood a few feet away, wearing green gardening gloves, cut-off denim shorts, a tank top, and a large quantity of garden dirt. Music drifted from a small transistor radio near the flower beds.

  “Mrs. Lopez,” Lauren said, and took a deep breath. “I need a big favor from you.”

  8

  Sofia Lopez stared at the two plastic-wrapped packages that Lauren diMucci had left on her dining room table. She didn’t want to touch them, felt vaguely that they were like grenades with their pins pulled partway out.

  She couldn’t leave the bags on the table. If Lauren was right—and she’d certainly believed she was right, Sofia could see that—then these bags were valuable evidence. If they weren’t moved, one of the children was sure to find them and grow curious about what was inside. It was fortunate that all three of them were off playing elsewhere when Lauren arrived.

  They’d been in the backyard earlier but as the other children of the neighborhood drifted out to play, the lot of them had migrated to another yard, one that had a tree house. Daniel and Camila had run inside only long enough to collect a large quantity of snacks for the prolonged stay in this arboreal paradise. Val had decided then that she’d had enough of her sister and cousin for one day and taken her bike out to a friend’s house on the other side of town.

  Sofia knew she really should move the bags before the children came home. To the hall closet, perhaps, or to her bedroom upstairs.

  Sofia shook her head. She didn’t want to take them upstairs. These things were tainted by death and if she brought the bags into her bedroom then the miasma would seep into everything. Death would stalk their dreams, hers and Alejandro’s, and they wouldn’t be able to cleanse the room of its stench.

  “You’re being fanciful,” she told herself firmly.

  She was not a superstitious woman. She was a good Catholic and she knew very well that death did not cling to objects and that if her dreams were troubled she could always pray to the Virgin Mary.

  And yet she still didn’t want to touch them.

  Maybe it was because she’d seen what the murderer had done to those girls. Maybe it was because Mrs. Schneider had screamed like that, screamed like an alarm that couldn’t turn off.

  Maybe it was because for the last few days Alejandro had looked haunted, the way he had when they lived in Chicago and he saw death every day.

  She didn’t want to touch them. />
  They weren’t her responsibility. She felt a surge of resentment. Why had the diMucci girl given these horrible dirty things to her? Sofia had seen Officer Hendricks just down the street talking to her mother. Lauren could have walked straight to her own house and handed them directly to a police officer.

  She explained why. She didn’t want her mother getting upset at what she was doing in the woods.

  Sofia supposed she could understand that. Lauren always looked pinched and worried, to Sofia’s mind, even when she was supposedly having fun. Her smile never went all the way to her eyes. It didn’t take a psychologist to realize that her father’s death had upset her and Karen.

  But Sofia didn’t want these things, the possessions of two girls who’d been hacked into pieces, in her dining room.

  So she called Alejandro, and told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to come and collect them right away.

  9

  Riley sipped the weak tea that Mrs. Schneider had served in overly fussy china cups. The tea barely washed away the bad taste in his mouth.

  The woman had been deeply suspicious when he called asking for an interview.

  “What do you want an interview for? I don’t need my name in some Chicago paper. The Smiths Hollow local is good enough for me.”

  “Well, Paul Nowak is a friend of mine from school,” Riley said easily. “And he gave me a call because he’s very concerned about the parents of these girls. You see, they’re having trouble identifying them because they don’t seem to be from the town.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “I’m going to do a write-up for my paper and you’re a key witness. I’d very much like your opinion on who could have done this and why,” Riley said.

  She was silent for a moment, then said, “Come to my house at two p.m. That Touhy won’t do anything about the problem unless he’s got some pressure. I can see that now.”

  She gave him her address so rapidly that he’d barely gotten a pencil into his hand to write it down before she hung up the phone.

  At the time he’d been well pleased that she wanted to apply pressure to Touhy. From the moment Nowak told him about the incident he felt the mayor wasn’t handling the situation properly. Someone in this town was killing kids, and the impression he’d gotten from both Nowak and the mayor himself was that he wanted the whole thing swept under the carpet. It was important that people knew what was happening.

  In the name of public safety, of course. Not because this story is potentially huge and you want to be the one to break it.

  But almost from the moment Riley sat down in Mrs. Schneider’s lace-doilied living room he’d been subjected to an almost never-ending stream of bile about the Hispanic family that lived across the street.

  “And one of them is even a police officer, if you can believe that. How convenient for them. They sacrifice these girls in some kind of pagan ritual and their handy police officer is there to destroy the evidence and point the finger elsewhere.”

  Mrs. Schneider took a breath and Riley saw this as an opportunity to get a word in edgeways.

  “Leaving aside the issue of whether this family is guilty, why do you think the bodies were left in your yard in particular?”

  “Because they hate me,” Mrs. Schneider said with an imperious jerk of her chin. “They wanted me to feel terrified in my own home. I haven’t felt easy since they arrived, and they know that I’m the only one on this block who sees them for what they really are. I’m not the only one in town, though. A group of us are putting together a petition to have these people arrested.”

  Riley was startled that the woman would go this far. He didn’t think anything would come of it, because petitions by crazy old ladies weren’t going to result in arrests for a major crime, but still. The vein of her hatred was deep and committed.

  “So they put the bodies in my yard because they want me to leave. They know I’m the only one who is brave enough to identify them. And all the other bodies were in the woods, so this is obviously an intimidation tactic.”

  Riley sat up straight and put the teacup down on the table. “What other bodies?”

  Mrs. Schneider’s eyes clouded over and her mouth twisted in confusion. “Other bodies?”

  “You just said that there were other bodies. In the woods.”

  “I did?” Her hands fluttered in her lap, searching for something that wasn’t there.

  “Yes.” For a moment he’d thought that there really was a huge story here—bigger even than a couple of dead girls. But as Mrs. Schneider stared into the distance he thought it more likely that this was just another part of her fantasies.

  Sure, a cache of bodies in the woods, all killed by those Dangerous Mexicans.

  He wondered if Alejandro Lopez would speak to him. Police officers usually didn’t talk to reporters unless it was cleared by their department, and in Chicago he was more likely to encounter a press liaison than a beat cop. Riley didn’t think there was a press liaison in this one-horse town, though. Hell, he’d been able to walk right into the mayor’s office without an appointment.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Schneider said. Her voice was dreamy, far away. “The bodies. All those girls. One girl every year, just like clockwork. When I was a young girl I thought I might be one of them. My number never came up in the lottery, I suppose. Not that it’s the kind of lottery you want to win, you know. I was happy to lose, and I’m sure my parents were glad, too, if they thought of it. It’s funny how people usually don’t, you know. Everyone knows, but they don’t know they do. Even if it’s their girl that’s been taken. But it’s not the right time, you know. That’s what has been troubling me. It’s not the right time for it to happen.”

  “One girl a year?” Was this something she’d read in a book, or seen on TV? Even Richard Touhy couldn’t hide the death of one girl a year. Just how deep did this woman’s twisted fantasies go?

  Maybe she’s senile. I don’t know why I even bothered coming here.

  He put his teacup carefully into the saucer. She didn’t seem to notice. Her mind was somewhere far away.

  “One girl every year. Yes. My Janey was one of them, in 1959. They told me that she was hit by a car, one of those boys drag racing with other boys, but it wasn’t true. She was out in the woods, just like all the others. There wasn’t enough left of her to fit in a mason jar, you know. Except for her head. He always leaves the heads behind. Mr. Schneider never really was right again after Janey died. All the joy went out of him.

  “I had her late, so late we thought we would never be blessed. I was almost thirty-five when she was born. Full of spit and fire, she was. She had red curls all over her head. Beautiful thick red curls that shone in the sun.”

  Riley didn’t say anything, because he felt that to speak would be to break whatever spell Mrs. Schneider was under.

  “And Mr. Schneider loved her so much. Oh, she was his sun and moon and stars. Nothing was too good for our little Janey. Jane Katherine Schneider, that was her name, but we always called her Janey. I never saw a girl that could do figures so fast. You could put any two numbers in front of her and she would be able to solve them before you could blink. My Janey.

  “It was very strange, you know. We always thought it was very strange that she went missing, because we saw her go upstairs to bed that night. It was very chilly, I remember, because she was wearing her flannel nightgown instead of her lawn one, and she asked me for an extra blanket for her bed.

  “Mr. Schneider locked the house up tight—he always did, he was nervous about those hoodlums with their greasy hair and their whaddyacall-ems . . . flick-knives?” She made a gesture with her hand like a switchblade opening. “And Janey was safe and sound in her bedroom, which was in the attic. The attic had a little window but not one that you could climb out of and anyway, there was no way down unless you put a rope through there. We didn’
t find a rope or sheets tied together or anything. That window was shut up tight because it was cold outside.

  “When Janey wasn’t in her room the next morning, Mr. Schneider just about went crazy. He called the police and every neighbor on the block. We didn’t have so many neighbors then, and no single mothers or Mexicans or black folk, either. He ran up and down the street calling her name. He asked the police chief—it was Van Christie’s father back then, Noel Christie—if there could be a search, but Christie wouldn’t do it. Said the town didn’t have enough resources. Ridiculous! As if everyone in Smiths Hollow wouldn’t have turned out to find our girl. Every person we knew was asking how they could help. They would all have come out for a search party, but Christie said no. He always said no.

  “Nobody knew how she got out of this house and into the woods, but three days later there she was just the same, all cut into pieces like the rest of them. Like those girls in my yard.”

  There were tears now, making rivulets in the thick powder she had applied to her face. Riley didn’t know what to do or say to all of this, which was a first. How did you ask a follow-up question after a story like that?

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said, stumbling over the words.

  He knew instantly that he shouldn’t have spoken. The foggy look in her eyes cleared.

  “What loss?” she snapped.

  “The loss of your daughter?” He couldn’t help the querulous ending. Her abrupt change of mood had him confused and defensive.

  “I don’t have a daughter,” she said, brows pulling together in a tight knot. “I never did.”

  “But you said—”

  “I don’t know what kind of game you are playing, Mr. Riley, but I assure you it’s entirely offensive. My husband and I longed for children all our lives and were unable to have them. Do not try to tell me that I had a daughter when I know very well I did not.”

  Riley decided he’d had enough of this. The woman was—if not flat-out batshit crazy—definitely senile. He stood up. “Thank you very much for your time, Mrs. Schneider.”