So there had to be a way to reset everything. Then the girls would die at their appointed time and the factory would keep running and more people would move to the town and no one would ever know what kept the gears of Smiths Hollow turning except him. The old woman at the top of the hill would know how to fix it. She was a descendant of one of the original witches’ relatives. She even lived in their house.
We all have our part to play, Touhy thought.
And the only way the play would keep running was if the curse was fixed.
Jo Gehlinger would know. And she would tell him.
Whether she wanted to or not, she would tell him.
14
Janice was out cold in bed and it was only ten in the morning.
So what if she lost her job, Miranda thought as she passed by her parents’ bedroom on the way to shower. She was only up long enough to drink a bottle of gin for breakfast and now she’s back in bed.
Miranda had returned home on Friday after the argument with Lauren with a credible explanation for her all-day absence. The last thing she wanted was for her parents to suspect she’d lost her virginity that very morning. Though she was certain her expression gave nothing away. She’d been working hard on her poker face.
But it turned out she needn’t have bothered. There had been a ton of layoffs at the factory and Janice had been one of them.
Miranda had not been surprised by this, since Janice seemed to come home early to drink pretty much every day. Even before the layoffs she didn’t think her mother’s job situation was very secure. How long could the owners overlook Janice’s constant absences?
But the news of her firing had come as a shock to Miranda’s parents. Her father hadn’t lost his job, and he seemed to think that since they were both managers, they should have been exempt from these kinds of cold-blooded economic decisions.
“We’ve both worked there for over fifteen years,” he said at dinner that night. “You’d think that would count for something.”
Miranda refrained from saying that she was sure lots of people at the factory had worked there a long time and were probably just as outraged that evening. She didn’t say it because she didn’t want her father looking too closely at her or deciding to take out his anger on her by grounding her for talking back.
So she just murmured, “I know, Daddy,” and picked at the pot roast her mother had overcooked.
It didn’t taste good and she didn’t want to eat too much, anyway. She didn’t want Him to think she was a fatass. Now that someone was going to see her naked on a regular basis, it was even more important not to eat like a little piggy.
When she was little if she wanted extra dessert her mother would make a pig-snorting sound and say, “No, Miranda. You’re a little lady, not a little piggy.”
Well, I’m not really a little lady, either, she smirked to herself as she climbed into the shower.
She hadn’t heard from Him since the previous morning, but she wasn’t worried. He’d told her He would find a way to be in touch.
In the meantime she’d agreed to allow Tad to take her to the fair that night.
He’ll probably try to feel me up on the Ferris wheel. She rolled her eyes as she lathered the shampoo through her hair. Well, it was a price she had to pay, she supposed.
She knew that He couldn’t take her around the fair, because their relationship was a secret. And Miranda still wanted to ride to school next year in Tad’s Camaro.
So if Tad wanted to cop a feel or two in the dark, she’d let him.
But what if Lauren is there?
Miranda scrubbed the shampoo out of her hair with more force than necessary. So what if Lauren was at the fair? It was a public place. And Smiths Hollow wasn’t that big. They were going to run into one another sooner or later.
It doesn’t matter if you run into her. She made it clear what she thinks of you.
Miranda felt a lump in her throat, and she determinedly swallowed it. She was not going to cry. She hadn’t cried after they argued and she hadn’t cried all day Friday when Lauren didn’t call to apologize and she wasn’t about to cry now.
Lauren was not going to make her cry. Lauren was just a teeny tiny pathetic loser who still went around on her bike like a baby. She didn’t even have breasts yet. She was still a child. But Miranda was a woman, and she had a lover to prove it.
Miranda carefully shaved her legs and underarms—she’d started doing so at the first hint of fuzz about a year ago, and she shaved every single day without fail. The idea of someone catching her with stubble on her legs was too embarrassing to contemplate.
She didn’t even want to think what He would say if He touched her and found bristles on her skin.
Miranda was just rinsing the last of the soap off when she heard her father’s voice through the door.
“How much longer are you going to be in that shower? You’re using up all the hot water!”
It’s not like Janice needs to take a shower, Miranda thought. She’s going to be in bed for the rest of the day, probably.
But she said, “Getting out now, Daddy,” and shut the water off. She was finished anyway.
“Don’t spend the next two hours in there curling your hair, either,” he said.
“Okay, Daddy,” Miranda said.
She didn’t curl her hair in the bathroom. Her curling iron was in her bedroom and so was her hair spray and he knew that. He was just angry about Janice and wanted to complain about something.
Miranda wasn’t going to give him an excuse to get angry with her. She was going to be the sweetest angel there ever was, because she was going to the fair that night and nobody would stop her.
She pulled on her bathrobe, wrapped a towel around her wet hair, and went down the hall to her own bedroom. As she passed her parents’ room she saw her father standing at the foot of their bed, looking at Janice. His shoulders were hunched in a defeated way.
Miranda hurried quickly past. She didn’t want to see the look on her father’s face. Miranda did not want to know if he was sad or mad or anything else that had to do with Janice. Janice was his responsibility. If he wanted to stop her from drinking all day he could have done that years ago. Instead he just pretended that it wasn’t happening, and Janice had gone from one too many glasses of wine with dinner to passed-out drunk on Saturday morning.
It wasn’t any concern of Miranda’s. She had her own life. She closed and locked her bedroom door, then went to the closet to survey her summer dresses. It was too hot out to wear anything heavy, and anyway she wanted something that showed off her body without looking too slutty.
I’m not a slut like you.
Lauren had said that.
You’re not going to think about Lauren or worry about her opinion, either. Who cares if she thinks you’re a slut? Just because you’re getting some and she isn’t. She’s just jealous.
(But you are a slut aren’t you Miranda everyone knows you’re easy and whenever you walk by they talk behind their hands in whispers)
“I don’t care what anyone thinks of me,” Miranda said firmly, pulling off her bathrobe and putting on her best underwear—a white lace bra and matching underpants that she’d bought at the mall when her mother was not with her. Her mother only bought cotton underwear for Miranda. She looked at herself in the mirror, turning sideways to check that her stomach still looked flat.
And you better not eat fried dough and cotton candy tonight either or else you’ll swell up like a balloon.
(little piggy little slut pig)
She shook her head, trying to dislodge the words that wouldn’t go away. She shook hard enough that the towel flew off her damp hair.
Miranda ignored the towel and pulled out her three best summer dresses, laying them on the bed side by side so she could choose the most flattering one.
“I’m going to look spect
acular tonight,” she told herself. “And everyone who sees me is going to say so.”
She didn’t feel sick when she thought of what else they might say about her. She really didn’t.
15
Around midday on Saturday Mom dropped Lauren and David off at the fairgrounds. She handed Lauren two twenty-dollar bills with a worried smile.
“I won’t lose it. And I won’t spend it all, either,” Lauren promised.
“It’s okay,” Mom said. “You two haven’t had that many treats this past year.”
Lauren could tell that Mom was trying really hard not to stress out about the expense, and she privately vowed to bring home at least half the money later.
“Have fun,” Mom said as she waved to them from the car.
“Okeh,” David said, and waved back.
He immediately took Lauren’s free hand. She knew she wouldn’t have to worry about David darting away in a crowd. He always stayed close and listened, unlike pretty much every other kid in the world.
Lauren stuffed the money in the pocket of her shorts and joined the line of people paying the $1.00 admission fee. She didn’t want to wave the money around and have it snatched out of her hand.
The fair was already very crowded with families and large groups of teenagers. From the entrance gate Lauren could see the top of the Ferris wheel halfway down the field, painted white with brightly colored designs on the gondolas. The scent of frying things wafted in the air—corn dogs and funnel cakes and freshly made doughnuts. Screams of delight emitted from the Tilt-A-Whirl just beyond the gate. Bells rang as someone won a prize from the shooting gallery booth.
Lauren bought two orange Admit One tickets from the bored woman at the booth and put them in the opposite pocket from her money. She definitely did not want to accidentally drop the tickets when she was digging around looking for her cash.
“Okay, David, what first? Should we eat a lot so that we feel sick on the rides, or ride first?”
Neither of them had had lunch before going, as a cold sandwich hardly appealed in the face of fair food, so she thought she knew what David would choose first.
“Food,” he said. “But not too much. I don’t want to get sick.”
His little face was so serious that Lauren laughed and kissed his forehead.
“Food, but not too much,” Lauren agreed. “Not yet, anyway. What do you want? Cotton candy? Popcorn?”
“Popcorn for lunch?” he said with wide eyes.
“Whatever you want, bud,” she said, and winked. “Mom’s not here to tell us no.”
David took a moment, seeming to think this over carefully. Then he looked up at her and winked back, one side of his face screwed up with the effort.
“Funnel cake first,” he said. “With ice cream on top.”
They ate the funnel cake quickly because they were hungry and also because several bees kept flying around the plate. Lauren batted them away from David’s face with an irritated wave.
“I don’t like bees,” David said.
“Me neither,” Lauren said, dumping the plate—clean except for a few streaks of confectioner’s sugar—into the nearby trash can. “Now what?”
David gave the Tilt-A-Whirl a long, thoughtful glance.
“Not yet,” Lauren said. “Let’s wait a little bit. We just ate that funnel cake.”
They went on the merry-go-round instead. David didn’t have the best sense of balance so Lauren decided to forgo riding on an animal and instead stood next to him, keeping her hand on his back as the tiger he’d chosen went up and down and he laughed wildly.
She almost never heard David laugh like that, and it made her laugh, too. He was such a serious little kid.
And maybe some kind of seer, too, she thought, remembering the half-finished drawing on his scroll yesterday. She’d meant to go back and look at it, to see what else he’d drawn besides her and Jake at the fair, but then the whole thing happened with Miranda and she forgot about it.
Anyway, you’re not going to think about all that stuff today. Dead girls and witch powers and old stories. You’re not even going to think about Miranda. Today is just a day to have fun.
She’d been trying very hard not to think about the date with Jake later. Whenever she did all her insides seemed to squish around and make her feel off-kilter.
Besides, she was there to have fun with David, not think about Jake.
After the merry-go-round David wanted to play games. Lauren looked doubtfully at the price of the games and said, “Pick three, that’s it.”
“Okeh,” David said. She didn’t even need to explain why.
He pointed to the Whac-A-Mole first, and they enjoyed trying to hit the robotic animals popping out of the holes.
Then they lined up with a bunch of other players to shoot water guns at targets. The pressure of the water made a teddy bear attached to a pole rise up to the top of the booth. The first teddy bear to reach the top won. David had a lot of trouble keeping the water from his gun on the target, but to Lauren’s utter shock her bear reached the top first and she won a very small stuffed frog of lurid green.
“Ribbit,” she said, putting the frog on David’s head.
“For me?” he said, his eyes lighting up.
“Yes,” she said, and kissed his cheek.
He tucked the frog in the crook of his arm and hugged it to him.
“Which game next?” Lauren asked. “You can pick one more.”
They walked past a game where you had to throw pennies onto a moving platform and one where you had to make three baskets in a row to win a prize. Lauren pointed at that one.
“I’m pretty good at making baskets,” she said, and she was, even though she was short. “Maybe we could win another prize there.”
David shook his head. “Uh-uh. They make it so you can’t get the ball in. Dad told me.”
“Dad told you that?” Lauren asked, wondering when such a topic could have come up. She didn’t think David had ever seen a game like that before. “When?”
“Just now,” he said, and pointed at the Skee-Ball corrals. “Those.”
Lauren stopped walking then. She heard Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” blasting over the speaker at the top of the Himalaya ride, drowning out the screams of the riders. The scent of cotton candy filled her nose, sickly sweet. Her body felt stiff, clutched with some unidentifiable emotion.
She crouched down to look David in the eye. “David. Are you telling me that Dad is . . . is . . .”
She couldn’t get the words out. The inside of her lungs felt like they were frozen over. A ghost? A ghost walking around next to David, talking to him?
“Is what, Lauren?” David asked, frowning a little. “Can we play Skee-Ball now? If you get even one ticket you can win a prize. If we get lots of tickets and put them together we can get a big prize.”
“Just wait a second,” Lauren said, taking a deep breath. It definitely felt like the air wasn’t going all the way through her lungs. The bottom of her ribs was seizing up. “David, does Dad talk to you?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
Why do you talk to David and not me? Even in her mind she sounded like a little girl, plaintive and all alone.
“Can you see him?”
David shook his head. “No. It’s not like he’s a ghost, silly.”
“Then how does he talk to you?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes I just hear him.”
“In your ears?” She felt that this was important, to understand that it was something exterior and not some wishful-thinking voice he heard in his head.
David nodded. “Like a little whisper in my ear.”
“But why you and not me?” She hadn’t meant to say that, hadn’t meant to show that open vein that pulsed and bled inside her.
“Maybe you’re not listening r
ight,” David said.
He put his hand on her cheek. He still had chubby little baby hands, not boy hands, but his expression was a thousand years old and just as wise.
“It doesn’t mean he didn’t love you, Lauren,” he said.
She choked then, hot tears in the back of her throat, and David put his arms around her neck. She felt the fuzz of his prize frog rubbing against her hair.
“I love you, too,” David said. “I think you’re the best sister.”
She stroked his fine smooth hair. He was still a baby really, only four years old. How could he be so knowing? Her stomach lurched again, this time in worry. What would happen if other people found out about David? He would go to kindergarten next year. What if he made predictions about the other kids and freaked them out, or mentioned talking to his dead father?
Don’t borrow trouble from another day. Today is for fun.
“Right,” Lauren said. “No ghost and no ghoulies and no beasties today. Only fun. Let’s play Skee-Ball.”
David immediately unwrapped his arms from her neck and tugged at her arm. “Come on then, come on.”
She laughed. “It will still be there in five minutes. It’s not going to disappear into a black hole.”
“It might,” David said. “You never know in Smiths Hollow.”
Lauren knew he meant it as a joke, but it felt more like a warning.
No magic, no ghosts, no stories today, remember?
But she thought that she finally, finally might be ready to talk to Nana again. Somehow, hearing that Dad was conversing with David from beyond the afterlife convinced her in a way that nothing else had so far.
There was something different about their family, and Nana knew what it was.
I’ll go and see her tomorrow, Lauren promised herself.
David managed to earn just one ticket from his Skee-Ball machine—he had trouble rolling the balls high enough to score points toward the center of the target—but Lauren got eight tickets off hers, so they pooled the tickets together to get bigger prizes.
The Ghost Tree Page 27