David wanted a jacks set, which was four tickets, and that left five for Lauren. She surveyed the remaining choices with little interest.
“Why don’t you pick something else, bud?”
His mouth flattened as he looked inside the case that displayed the prizes. The teenager working the booth appeared amused at David’s seriousness. He was a gangly-looking redhead with acne on his neck.
“Hey, you’re Lauren diMucci, right?” he said.
She gave him a startled look. “Yes.”
“You’re friends with that hot blonde, right? Miranda Kowalczyk?”
“Yes,” she repeated cautiously. No need to report to this stranger that she and Miranda weren’t friends anymore.
“Do you think you could give her my number?” he asked, scribbling something on a piece of paper and handing it to her.
Lauren didn’t take the scrap of paper. “Who are you?”
“Oh, sorry. My name’s Owen Dahlgren. I’m going to be a senior next year.”
“Do you know Miranda?” Lauren asked.
“Well, no,” he admitted. “But I thought maybe I could take her out sometime.”
“Why do you want to take her out if you don’t even know her?” Lauren asked, bewildered by this line of conversation.
“Are you kidding?” he said, and drew the outline of a curvy body in the air with his hands. “Besides, and I’m not trying to be rude or anything, but everyone knows she’ll put out.”
Lauren was saved from replying as David finally made his choice. Which was a good thing, because she had absolutely no idea what she would say in response to that.
“That ring,” he said, pointing at a silver-plate ring. He handed over the remaining tickets while Owen Dahlgren scooped it out of the case and put it in David’s hand.
“Let’s go,” she said, steering David away from the booth.
“Hey, what about my number?” Owen called after her, but she pretended she didn’t hear.
“What’s that ring you got, bud? Is it for Mom?”
“Nope,” David said. “It’s for you.”
She took the ring from him and examined it. It looked like a cheap plate ring that would turn her skin green, but it had an unexpected heft when she held it, like it was made of real silver. It had a basket-weave design, two strands woven together.
“Thanks,” she said, and slid it onto her right-hand ring finger. It fit perfectly, like it was made for her, and it didn’t feel like something cheap and throwaway, either. How could this be a prize for a few tickets at the fair?
“Don’t lose it,” David said. “It’s the same ring that Charlie gave to Elizabeth. It will protect you.”
“Charlie?” Lauren asked, tilting her head to one side. Where had she heard that name before?
“Charlie,” David said. “You know. Charlie. He married Elizabeth, and Elizabeth was killed in the woods, and then the witches got angry and the monster came.”
Lauren stared down at her hand. “The ring didn’t protect Elizabeth, though. She died anyway.”
And so did all the other girls, too. All the other girls in the woods, ring-around-the-rosy, we all fall down.
Her voice sounded hollow, like it was coming from a faraway place. She felt like she might just untether from the earth and float away.
David squeezed her hand. “But it will keep you safe. So don’t take it off, okeh?”
He’d never sounded so serious, and that was saying something.
“Okay,” Lauren said.
“Promise,” David said.
“I promise.”
“Pinky,” he said, holding out his hand.
Lauren hooked her pinky around his.
“Stamp it,” he ordered, and they touched their thumbs together.
As they did Lauren felt a little spark of heat, like a charm that was just sealed.
16
Jane, Jane, Janey,” Mrs. Schneider muttered to herself as she stared out the window. “Jane, Jane, Janey.”
She’d forgotten all about Janey, but now she remembered. Ever since that nosy reporter came poking his nosy nose around.
The Mexicans across the street were all home today except for the police officer. The two women were out front, weeding the flower beds together and laughing. The other man was watering the front lawn with the hose. As Mrs. Schneider watched she saw him turn and spray the women briefly with the hose and laugh. His teeth were very white against his brown face and she thought he looked handsome for a moment.
“Like that Ricky Ricardo that Lucy married,” she said. Except he wasn’t Mexican, she recalled. He was Cuban.
“Not that it matters,” she said. “They all look the same and they all jabber at each other in Spanish, what’s the difference?”
Her fingers kept rubbing against each other, like she was washing her hands without any water or soap. She couldn’t seem to stop doing it.
“Janey,” she said again.
And it wasn’t only Janey that she remembered. She remembered other girls too, girls that Janey went to school with or who were a little younger. Girls that ended up in the woods with their bodies all ripped to pieces, nothing left but their heads.
It was like something had peeled away in her brain, a tightly wrapped bandage that was coming undone.
And underneath the bandage was something red and black and pulsing, a wound that had never healed but suppurated.
But now that it was open again she didn’t know what to do. Those Mexicans couldn’t have killed Janey or the other girls. It had to be somebody else.
“But those girls were always killed in November,” she said. “Remember, remember November.”
No, that’s not how that rhyme goes. It’s “remember, remember the fifth of November,” and it’s nothing to do with America. It’s all about some plot in England. But all those girls were killed in November, and my Janey too.
“These girls were killed in June, though, and that’s wrong. They’re not at the right time. They’re not even from Smiths Hollow, either. They’re outsiders, just like those Mexicans.”
That’s why it happened. Because those Mexicans came in and they were outsiders and so outsiders were killed at the wrong time and that means it is their fault after all.
Her hands stopped chafing one another as she realized this. A strong sense of relief washed over her. All was in order again. She’d been right in the first place.
“But what to do about it?”
She didn’t think Chief Christie would be any help. He’d hired one of them, after all. And his father had never seemed to care much about Janey.
Poor little Janey. Dead little Janey.
Janey wasn’t the only dead girl, though. There had been other girls, other parents who wept. Mrs. Schneider wondered if they remembered now, too.
If they did, then perhaps they could do something about these outsiders that had upset the apple cart.
“But do you really want to go back to the way it was before?” she asked herself. “One girl every year?”
Yes. That was the way of things here. It was sad, but once the outsiders were removed, then everything would return to normal.
And she would forget about Janey again, forget about the years of happiness and the pain that followed.
She would forget, as she should.
Mrs. Schneider went into the kitchen and took out her address book. She thought she knew who might be able to help her.
17
Alex swiped sweat off his forehead with his handkerchief. The fair was on an open field and the sun beat straight down onto the grounds. There was hardly any relief to be found—the one place with guaranteed shade was the performance tent. Alex supposed he could justify spending some time in there since many of the attendees were no doubt having their pockets picked while they watched the circuslike
spectacle. The presence of police officers might deter that behavior, even if it was just for fifteen minutes or so.
He and Miller had separated so that they could cover more ground, but Alex was pretty certain that Miller had found a bench near a fried-food booth and was “patrolling” from there.
Alex glanced at his watch. His shift had begun at two and would run until the fair closed at ten. It was only three thirty, which meant many more hours of walking in the heat.
Many of the townspeople who saw him as he walked along waved and called his name, but Alex saw a good number of people he didn’t recognize. The fair was a big success, then—it had done what Touhy wanted and drawn out-of-towners to Smiths Hollow. The previous night Alex had seen the evidence of this as he’d hauled several drunk and disorderly types into the two cells that they had at the station. Almost all of them were not Smiths Hollow natives, and Alex was counting down the days until the fair ended and everything went back to being quiet and normal.
Or as quiet and normal as it could be with one girl being murdered every year.
The day before he’d had some time in the evening to continue his search of the archives. What he’d found had made his blood run cold even as it bewildered him.
There had been one death every year in the woods going all the way back to the beginning of paper records—1937. And Alex felt sure that the deaths went back even further, even if there was no written evidence of it. That meant fifty-plus years of dead girls, always taken on the same day, always found in the same place.
Yet no one mentioned it. No one seemed to think anything was wrong. There had to be generations of grieving families in Smiths Hollow, but it was never, ever discussed.
There’s something very wrong in this town, he thought. And he didn’t even know how to begin to get to the bottom of it. At first he had an idea that it was somehow related to Van Christie and the mayor, but the line of deaths going back so far put them out of the picture. The history of the murders went back before they were born.
He had a vague thought that it could be some very old serial killer, one who’d started young and would be ancient now. But that didn’t explain why Christie was so intent on pretending the murders never happened. Could this person be a relative of his? Christie’s father had been the chief of police before him. Maybe two generations of cover-ups had all been in service of keeping some cousin or uncle or brother out of jail.
Alex shook his head. It didn’t make sense. No matter how many ways he tried to fit the jigsaw puzzle together he never got the full picture.
Maybe it’s Christie himself? That thought gave him pause. And, what? His father was a killer before him, and his father before him?
It would explain why every chief of police (and they were all named Christie, every single one) had so determinedly ignored the murders. But it seemed crazier than any other theory he’d come up with yet—the idea of an annual murder being passed down like some kind of demented family legacy.
He detoured to a food booth where burgers were being charred on a grill and ordered a cold Coke with extra ice. A man with a large black mustache and heavy Greek accent waved away Alex’s dollar bill.
“Thanks for being out here, Officer,” he said.
“No problem,” Alex said. “Thank you.”
He popped the top off the cup and pulled out the straw, drinking half the contents in one gulp. He continued patrolling even though he really wanted to sit for a few moments. He felt that he shouldn’t sit down unless he was on a meal break. When he finished the pop he fished out the few unmelted ice cubes and chewed on them.
Alex saw Lauren diMucci and her little brother standing in line to play at the half-size miniature golf course. He wanted to talk to Lauren about her discovery of the backpacks in the woods, but he didn’t think it was appropriate to talk about it in front of her four-year-old brother, so he decided to leave it until later.
The heat, the smell of cooking grease, and the constant chorus of screams were making Alex feel a little sick to his stomach. He decided to sit for a few minutes, even if it wasn’t an official break time.
He found a nearby bench and closed his eyes, breathing deeply in and out through his nose. It wasn’t just the atmosphere of the fair that was bothering him. It was a sense that the town had taken an indrawn breath, waiting for a blow to fall.
But that’s idiotic, he thought, opening his eyes and looking at all of the people smiling and laughing and stuffing popcorn in their mouths. None of them seemed like they were braced for impact.
His eyes roamed around. As he looked it was like an ugly seam opened up under the cheerful exterior. There was a stressed-looking mother dragging her teenage daughter by the wrist away from a smirking long-haired boy. There were twin boys fighting over who got to hold the stuffed monkey their father had just won at the shooting gallery. There was a twenty-something man wearing a gray ARMY T-shirt arguing with a bottled blonde in the tiniest denim shorts Alex had ever seen this side of Daisy Duke.
Something about the man’s face and body language had Alex up and running toward the couple. He was still a few feet away when the man swung a roundhouse fist toward the blonde’s pink-glossed mouth.
She stumbled backward, clutching her jaw. “Son of a bitch!”
“And there’s more if you keep talking back to me like that, you dumb little cunt,” he shouted.
Several people stopped walking to stare at the altercation. They immediately created roadblocks for Alex, who was already pulling his cuffs off his belt.
“Excuse me! Police!” he shouted, pushing his way through the crowd.
A young mother holding the hand of a fat-faced toddler shouted at him as he shouldered past her. “Hey, watch it, you fucking spic.”
It had been a long time since anyone had called Alex a spic while he was wearing his uniform. He’d heard it plenty in Chicago when he was out of uniform, and of course Mrs. Schneider regularly insulted his entire family, but somehow he hadn’t expected it in Smiths Hollow.
He thought about stopping, about telling her to watch her language (she’d popped off the F-word without any concern for who might be listening), but the blonde had just been assaulted and his duty was to the victim, not his own feelings.
Before he could clear the crowd, however, a second man wearing a navy blue Hawaiian shirt shot out of the group of onlookers and tackled the man wearing the Army shirt. Hawaiian Shirt held Army Shirt down with his left hand and delivered several punches to Army Shirt’s face with his right.
“Dammit,” Alex swore, taking two quick steps and dragging Hawaiian Shirt off the first man.
Hawaiian Shirt automatically back-fisted Alex’s nose. It didn’t crunch, but it made Alex see stars for a second.
“Police!” he shouted in Hawaiian Shirt’s ear. “You will cease and desist that shit immediately.”
Hawaiian Shirt immediately went limp in Alex’s grip. “Sorry, Officer. I didn’t realize.”
Army Shirt was lying on the ground, not moving, and the bottled blonde he’d punched crawled over to him and began to wail.
“Vinnie! Vinnie, speak to me!” she screamed, shaking his immobile form.
What a fucking pain in the ass, Alex thought. Where the hell was Miller? How was he supposed to deal with the injured man, his hysterical girlfriend, and this third party all on his own?
“If I let go of you, will you stand still and not make any more trouble?” Alex said to Hawaiian Shirt.
The man nodded. “Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Larry Franco.”
“You live in Smiths Hollow, Larry Franco?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Alex let the man go, confident that if he ran off, Alex would be able to find him again.
“What are you doing arresting him?” someone shouted from the crowd. “He was just trying to help
that girl.”
Several people murmured in agreement. “Yeah, don’t harass that guy. What’s wrong with you?”
Alex ignored them. He needed to get the girl off the guy, check his medical condition, and call the EMTs. The girl’s jaw was swelling, too—she’d need an ice pack at the very least.
“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to move away from the victim,” Alex said. He clicked on his radio.
“Miller?”
No response.
“Miller,” he said again, trying not to let his frustration creep into his tone. He felt like he was performing on a stage with all the people watching him, but he didn’t have time to shoo them away and deal with the couple at the same time.
He had used his cop voice on the woman, the one that expected cooperation, but he should have expected the woman wouldn’t cooperate. After all, she was on the ground hugging the man who’d punched her in the face.
“You arrest that asshole!” she screeched, pointing at Larry Franco. “Look what he did to Vinnie’s face!”
“He was just trying to help you, you dumb bitch!” someone shouted. The crowd was growing larger by the second, and Alex felt a current of ugliness running underneath.
“Fuck off!” she shouted at the crowd.
“Ma’am, I need to check your friend’s medical condition,” Alex said, ignoring the interaction.
Army Shirt’s face was far too pale. Alex was going to have to pull the girl off him. She had thrown her body over his torso, making it impossible to so much as check the man’s pulse.
“Just drag her off by her hair,” someone said.
“That’s police brutality,” someone else said, and laughed.
Oh yeah, there’s something wrong here. And it was getting more wrong by the second.
“Miller!” he shouted into the radio.
Finally, there was a lazy, half-asleep “Wha?”
Christ, he fell asleep somewhere. “Get your ass up and over by the Zipper ride. And call the EMTs while you’re at it. We’ve got two assault victims here.”
The Ghost Tree Page 28