The Ghost Tree

by Christina Henry

  She blinked, seemingly startled by his abrupt change of mood. Then she returned to her normal imperious manner.

  “I hope you will include everything I’ve told you in your article, Mr. Riley. Those Mexicans are a menace and the public should be aware of that.”

  Riley nodded—he had no intention of printing the old woman’s racist screed—and hurried out of there before she either started up ranting again or drifted off into another weird trance.

  Once he was on her front stoop he sucked in a deep breath. Even though Mrs. Schneider’s living room was air-conditioned and it was hot as hell outside, the air still felt fresher than in her house.

  Behind him he heard the sound of the old woman laboriously relocking the four locks on her front door. If there were ever a fire in this house she’d probably die of smoke inhalation before she managed to get the door open.

  He walked slowly down the driveway toward his parked car, thinking about all the things the old woman had said. He felt a trickle of sweat run down his back. It was damned hot out—really too hot for mid-June, and it hadn’t rained much. All the lawns in view already had grass turning brown around the edges, or dried patches. They were end-of-August lawns and it was only the beginning of summer.

  Just as Riley reached his Fiero, a Smiths Hollow squad car pulled up in front of the house across the street. Alejandro Lopez climbed out of the car, giving him that sideways cop glance, the one that let you know they knew you were there and they were watching.

  Riley made a sudden decision and crossed the street. Lopez stopped, his hands on his belt, his impassive cop’s eyes waiting. Lopez was about five-eight or five-nine, same as Riley, so when they stood across from each other they were eye-to-eye. Lopez wasn’t wearing the hat that came with his dark blue uniform. Riley saw it on the passenger seat of the squad car.

  The police officer had black hair that was long on top and short on the sides. The top was combed back. His eyes were very dark, so dark Riley couldn’t see the pupils. They were eyes that gave nothing away.

  “Officer Lopez?”

  Lopez nodded.

  “George Riley.” Riley held out his hand and Lopez shook it. There wasn’t any of that false machismo in the handshake either, and Riley knew immediately that Lopez didn’t feel he had anything to prove to a stranger.

  “Listen,” Riley said, lowering his voice to a confidential tone. “I was just across the street interviewing Mrs. Schneider—”

  “Interviewing her for what?” Lopez asked.

  “Oh, I’m a reporter from Chicago,” Riley said, then hurried on before Lopez decided to walk away. “Don’t worry, I’m not here looking for an interview from you. Although I wouldn’t mind if you gave a statement.”

  He tried his usual self-deprecating smile, the one that usually put people at ease, but Lopez didn’t look like he relaxed a single muscle. If anything he was more wary than before.

  Because he’s part of the conspiracy to keep the news about the girls away from the public?

  “So what do you want, Mr. Riley, if not an interview?” Lopez asked.

  “I wanted to warn you about that old lady. She seems to think you and your family killed those girls that were found in her yard a couple of days ago,” Riley said.

  “Thanks, Mr. Riley, but we’re already aware that Mrs. Schneider doesn’t want us here,” Lopez said. He started to turn away.

  “She also told me a strange story about one girl being killed in this town every year. Said that her own daughter Jane was one of them, back in 1959.”

  Lopez turned back slowly. Riley had hoped to startle him into a reaction, but this man was no fool.

  “You just moved here from Chicago, didn’t you?” Riley said. “So you couldn’t possibly know anything about this business.”

  “What business would that be?”

  “This business about a girl dying every year. Sounds like some kind of old wives’ tale, doesn’t it? A yearly sacrifice.”

  A sacrifice for what, though? Riley thought. Why on earth would girls go missing and die once a year, every year, for more than thirty years? It couldn’t be one person doing it. And why would anyone stay here if it was true? If Riley lived here and had a daughter he’d have her out of this place. No, the old woman’s story was just that—a story. A strange and haunting story, to be sure, and she certainly seemed like she believed it when she told it. But her belief didn’t make it true. She also believed her neighbors were part of a Central American death cult.

  But there was something about it that nibbled at the back of his mind. Somewhere in there was the ring of truth.

  “I don’t think you should take what Mrs. Schneider says very seriously, Mr. Riley. Does Chief Christie know you’re out here interviewing a witness?”

  “I’m not required to ask permission of the town, Officer Lopez,” Riley said. “We do have freedom of the press in this country.”

  He didn’t say What are you hiding? although the impulse to do so was very strong.

  “I didn’t say we didn’t,” Lopez said easily. “I just know that Mrs. Schneider was in a lot of distress after the . . . event. And Christie would want to know that you’re speaking with her. This case is still open.”

  “Sure you don’t want to go on the record?” Riley asked, pulling out his notebook. He knew what the answer would be.

  “I think you ought to speak with Chief Christie,” Lopez said. “Thanks for the warning about Mrs. Schneider.”

  He walked away then, leaving Riley dismissed. It didn’t bother him, though. Maybe he should talk with Christie, at that. It would be irresponsible to publish a story without getting a quote from the chief of police.

  And maybe he would check the town records while he was at it. It would be a simple thing to verify if the Schneiders ever had a child named Jane, and if and when she died. It was possible that Mrs. Schneider had given birth but the child had been disowned for some reason. That made more sense than a death, actually.

  If your child died young—suddenly, tragically—your house would be like a shrine to that child, or at least that was the way Riley figured it. But there were no photos of this child anywhere, no sign that she ever existed.

  But what if something terrible happened to your child, and you just wanted to forget?

  Speculation was useless. Facts were verifiable. He’d have a look at the town records.

  A woman came out of the house to Lopez—his wife, Riley assumed—and as she did a white Chevrolet Chevette entered the cul-de-sac and then pulled into the Lopez driveway.

  “Beatriz?” Mrs. Lopez said as a second woman climbed out of the car, crying. “What’s the matter?”

  “I lost my job at the factory!” Bea said.

  “What?” Mrs. Lopez said, hurrying to the crying woman. Officer Lopez was a step behind her. “What happened?”

  Riley hadn’t moved a muscle and he wasn’t about to start now. He had no idea if this woman’s job loss was in any way relevant to his story but his basic philosophy was “no information is bad information.”

  “I wasn’t the only one. Two hundred people were laid off today,” Bea said as Mrs. Lopez put her arm around Bea’s shoulders.

  Two hundred people from a factory. She must be talking about the chili canning factory. That place employed most of the town. Layoffs like that would be a huge blow to the local economy.

  Alejandro Lopez looked at him then, and the look clearly communicated that Riley shouldn’t be standing at the end of the Lopez driveway watching the family drama like a television program.

  Riley held up his hands in surrender and walked back to his car. He saw Mrs. Schneider’s front curtains twitch. He wondered if the old woman had already forgotten the tale she’d told him.

  For that matter, she might have forgotten his identity entirely.

  He climbed into his car and headed t
oward the Observer office. Pete would point him in the direction of the town records.

  He’d find out if Mrs. Schneider ever had a daughter in the first place.

  And then he’d go and see Chief Christie, and see what he was hiding.

  10

  Alex stood on the lawn and waited for Riley to drive away. He wanted to make sure the man was gone before following Sofia and Bea into the house.

  Alex heard Bea’s sobs coming from the kitchen. He saw the black plastic garbage bags that Sofia had called him about on the dining room table.

  He desperately wanted to know what was in those bags. He also wanted to talk to Lauren diMucci about where she found them. Sofia hadn’t been able to give him a great deal of information. She only told him that Lauren had found some things that belonged to the two dead girls in the woods, and that Lauren didn’t want her mother to know what she’d been doing so she asked Sofia to take them.

  But Alex knew he couldn’t go through the bags while his sister-in-law was in the kitchen crying. First because Alex and Sofia and Ed and Bea had come to this town together, and they were a family. If Bea lost her job it affected all of them.

  And second because if he didn’t make at least a token effort to soothe Bea, then Sofia would make sure he heard what an insensitive clod he was later.

  He couldn’t stop himself from opening the bags, though. The pull of his curiosity was too strong.

  Inside each bag was a backpack. Lauren must have searched the bags herself if she knew for certain that the packs belonged to the dead girls. That meant her prints would need to be eliminated from the evidence, and she’d have to come to the station.

  Alex didn’t want to handle the bags himself without plastic gloves. The smart thing to do, in normal circumstances, would be to take the bags back to the station and search them there, preferably while the chief was watching. But these were not normal circumstances. He was certain that if he brought evidence related to the girls’ murder back to the police station, it would disappear into a black hole. The reports he’d spent the afternoon reading were proof of that. Whether by his own will or some external direction, Christie was not going to do anything about the murders.

  She also told me a strange story about one girl being killed in this town every year. Said that her own daughter Jane was one of them, back in 1959.

  Could those murders really go back that far? Just what in the hell was going on in Smiths Hollow if it was true?

  Well, he could check the files as soon as he got back to the station. He knew the name of Mrs. Schneider’s supposed daughter and the year of her supposed death. He hadn’t even known the old woman ever had a daughter.

  It wasn’t as if they were friendly neighbors.

  He knew Sofia kept some gloves under the kitchen sink for cleaning, which meant he’d have to go into the lioness’s den if he wanted to search the bags here at home.

  He carefully reclosed each bag and folded the excess plastic underneath each backpack. The kettle whistled in the kitchen, which meant Sofia was making some restorative tea for her sister-in-law.

  “Ed’s job is still safe for the moment,” Bea said as Alex walked into the kitchen. “My supervisor understood that we both couldn’t be jobless. But I don’t know if that decision will hold. I’m sure the union will argue that Ed shouldn’t have a job over someone who’s been there longer. And I don’t know what we’ll do if that happens. I mean, this house. How will we pay for the house if only one of us is working?”

  Sofia carried two cups of tea to the table and handed one to Bea.

  “You don’t know for sure that Ed will lose his job as well,” Sofia said. “And it’s not as if the chili factory is the only place to work. There are a lot of jobs at that mall in Silver Lake.”

  “Those jobs don’t pay anything,” Bea protested. “And they don’t have health benefits.”

  “As long as Ed is working at the factory you don’t have to worry about health benefits,” Alex said.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Bea said. “We just moved here! Everything about this town seemed so perfect—low crime, good jobs, friendly neighbors. But now everything is going wrong. First those dead girls. Now I’ve lost my job. And that old bitch across the street has been trying to kill us with her eyes ever since we moved in.”

  “Don’t get yourself worked up about Mrs. Schneider,” Alex said. “Maybe the stress of having two girls murdered in her backyard will cause her to drop dead of a heart attack.”

  “Alejandro!” Sofia said, crossing herself. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “No, it’s terrible for her to say that everyone in this household is part of some murderous cult that killed those girls,” Alex said without thinking.

  Bea looked horrified. “Did she really say that? My God, what if people believe her? We could all be arrested!”

  “We’re not going to be arrested,” Alex said in his best soothing voice. “I’m one of five members of the police force. I assure you that if they think we’re murderers I’ll have advance notice and we can sneak out of town in the middle of the night.”

  Bea choked out a half laugh, half cry. “Yes, advance notice will be such a comfort when we’re all on the run from a capital murder charge.”

  Sofia glared at Alex, and he knew she was angry because he’d mentioned Mrs. Schneider’s accusations when Bea was already in distress.

  “There’s not going to be a murder charge,” Sofia said, patting Bea’s hand. “Because Alex is going to find out who really did it. Aren’t you, Alex?”

  Alex thought of the reports he’d hidden in his backpack, and Riley’s remark about a murder from 1959. Could he find out who did this? Could anybody?

  “Sure,” he lied.

  11

  Lauren found herself walking very slowly to her own house. Normally she would rush to Officer Hendricks’s side (God, you really did do that. What a stupid little puppy he must think you are), but she didn’t want to talk to him today.

  It had something to do with Jake and his declaration, she realized. She felt guilty about accepting his invitation to the fair and then talking to Officer Hendricks, even though she shouldn’t. It wasn’t as if Hendricks was planning on asking her out himself.

  And you know that you really do like Jake.

  She liked what she knew of him, she amended. He had been kind to her when they were young, and kind to her when she’d been sick. He was smart—she knew that because he’d graduated from high school early, and he would have had to take extra classes to do that.

  He listened to music she’d never heard of. On the way back through the woods he’d told her about the Clash and the Smiths and Iggy Pop. He promised to make her a mix tape of all his favorite songs.

  He didn’t seem like the other boys. But it was possible that he would be like the other boys—only interested in his own hobbies and not hers, always wanting his own way, constantly turning the conversation back to himself and his experiences, only trying to get into her pants.

  That’s what boys really are like.

  That, she realized, was why she hadn’t joined in when Miranda made lists of all the hot guys in their eighth-grade class. “Hot” being a relative term—gawky thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys with bad celebrity copycat haircuts could hardly be called hot.

  Jake wasn’t like them. Or he didn’t seem to be.

  He might be a terrible disappointment, in the long run.

  You’re not getting married, Lauren. You’re going to the fair with him. You don’t have to stay with him forever.

  This thought made her feel more comfortable. She could always say no if he asked her out again.

  She wondered what Officer Lopez would think about her discovery. She liked Alex a lot—not least because he told her to call him Alex instead of Officer Lopez, which made her feel like a grown-up—and she knew
he was from Chicago, where they probably had crimes like this all the time. He would know what to do, she was sure of it.

  If only he’d been here last year. Maybe then we’d know who killed Dad.

  Chief Christie was nice and all, but Lauren didn’t think he did a very good job with actual investigations. She was pretty certain he’d never done anything for her father.

  It was almost as if there were some kind of spell over him, something keeping him from finding out.

  Right, the curse of the three witches and the monster in the woods.

  She was still reluctant to believe Nana’s story. It was too fantastic, so many girls dying and nobody even knowing that it ever happened.

  Even if there was a curse, Lauren reasoned, people had to notice that their daughters disappeared. There would be an awful lot of grieving parents in Smiths Hollow.

  No, Lauren didn’t believe Nana’s story. There was no proof.

  But maybe she believed the part about being from a family of witches.

  There was the floating book, after all. And the way she found the trail of blood in the woods—Jake could hardly see it while it was bright as sunshine to Lauren.

  What else can I do if I’m a witch?

  She felt a little clutch of excitement at the thought of secret powers.

  Somehow, despite dragging her feet from the Lopez house, she’d managed to arrive at her own. Her mom and Officer Hendricks stood halfway up the drive, facing one another. Hendricks’s back was to Lauren, but she could see her mother’s face.

  She looked radiant.

  There was no other word for it. She was smiling and laughing. The skin of her face seemed smoother, brighter, younger. Her eyes actually sparkled.

  Lauren realized with a pang that she’d never seen her mother look at her father like that.

  They must have loved each other once, though Lauren didn’t really remember that. She remembered her mother always frustrated, always angry, and her father always dismissive.