by Nancy Holder
“My mom and I used to read aloud together. She loved poetry, adored Robert Frost. ‘Whose woods these are, I think I know.’ Sometimes she would be overcome, and me, too, and our eyes would well with tears because we were just . . . I don’t know. Moved.”
Troy listened.
“After my dad married CJ, I was playing the melody line of Ode to Joy on my cello and it was so beautiful. My chest was tight. I couldn’t remember if Beethoven had gone deaf by the time he wrote it. But I was hearing it. I was alive to hear it. And I started to cry.”
He took my hand.
“My stepmom came into the room and saw me crying, and asked me if I was missing my mom. And it wasn’t really that. I told her, ‘It’s just so beautiful it makes me cry.’”
He gave me a squeeze.
“And CJ said, ‘Then why do you play it?’”
Troy was silent for a moment. I glanced at him, mortified that I had revealed so much. “TMI,” I blurted.
“No. That’s why.” He ticked his blue eyes my way.
“Why what?” I asked quietly.
“Why I like you. You’re . . . you’re real.” He stopped walking. “There’s so much phoniness in the world. My world, anyway.” He smiled sadly. Then he shook his head, as if he had said too much.
I stared out at the lake, and I saw my past in the inky reflection. I saw myself standing in the hall of my parents’ house. I was having a party for Jane; it was her birthday, and people I didn’t know were spilling guacamole on our rug and breaking our glasses. I had cleaned up three shattered glasses so far; I’d refused to buy paper cups because Jane thought they were tacky.
I was looking for Riley; Aimee, one of the cheerleaders, said he had a surprise for me. I knew he was going to ask me to go to Homecoming with him. As I walked down the hall, I rehearsed my yes.
And then I heard . . .
I heard two people, moaning and giggling and . . .
They were in my parents’ room.
I heard them.
Aimee had come up beside me, making a face. “Oh my God,” she’d whispered.
“Who is that? My dad is going to be home any second,” I had whispered back.
“Oh.” Aimee blanched. “Hey, guys?”
There was a lot of fumbling and whispering and the door had opened . . .
I shook my head, snapping out of the uncomfortable memory. I reminded myself that Troy had a girlfriend.
Suddenly thunder echoed across the lake; bluish-white lightning crackled directly overhead and the sky cracked open. Ice-cold rain poured down on us like a waterfall. I yelped, and Troy unwrapped his parka and threw it over my head. We raced back into the cover of the trees. A wind rushed by so hard I felt as though I had been slapped. It caught at my hair, my crazy hair.
“Come on,” he said, moving to the left, more deeply into the trees. I remembered the mist. Mist, not a ghost.
We found shelter beneath a thick tree and stood close together, panting. Troy pulled me close so we could share the parka—it was waterproof, I realized—and as we huddled, I felt his warmth and smelled his skin.
“Stay close,” he urged me.
The ground was turning into mud and slippery mats of pine needles. I wondered if Ms. Krige would send the cavalry out for me. I was with a boy. That could not be good. On impulse, I whipped open my phone. I had programmed in the Grose landline number before I’d left San Diego.
To my amazement, I had good reception, and she answered on the second ring.
“Hi, it’s Lindsay. I wanted to tell you I’m okay. I’m going to stay put until it stops raining.”
“Tell her you’re at some dorm,” Troy whispered, as I stood in the crook of his arm.
I grimaced. All she had to do was call that dorm’s housemother, and I would be busted.
“I’m at—” I began, and then I froze, as a cold, sick dread clutched at my throat. I recognized the path we were standing on.
I turned my head. The black hulk of the operating theater peered through the pines as if it were crouched, waiting for us to get closer before it sprang, ripping itself off its foundations and crushing us to death.
“I’m with some girls,” I said, and hung up.
“We can go in there,” he said, gesturing to the OT. “Wait it out.”
The operating theater, where Julie and Mandy hooked up with Spider and him.
Mandy’s screams and laughter still echoed in my head from that night. I smelled smoke. And burning meat. I smelled them as surely as I smelled the wet cotton of Troy’s sweatshirt.
And he didn’t.
He didn’t.
Or he was pretending he didn’t.
Then his cell phone rang, and he looked startled. He pulled the phone out of the front pocket of his parka and stared down at it. Then he put it back in his pocket without answering it.
I knew it was Mandy.
And my suspicious mind started connecting dots—I go jogging; Troy jumps out from behind a tree; he leads me to the operating theater; Mandy checks in.
Prank.
I said, “I want to go back to Grose.”
His face fell.
“I’m going,” I said. My voice shook. I wouldn’t let him see me cry, wouldn’t admit how devastated I was.
“Okay.”
The rain fell, and we half-ran the distance back to Grose. We didn’t speak; we were too cold and wet, running too fast.
When we neared Grose, I saw Ms. Krige standing beside the open door in a red-and-black-plaid parka over a pair of black pants, her kind face wrinkled in concern. I turned to Troy, who saw her, too, and we moved out of her line of vision.
“I have to go,” I said, searching his face, his blue eyes, for some sense of how things stood between us. I wanted to be wrong.
His eyebrows and lashes were dusted with white crystals. “Lindsay, why . . . ?” But he didn’t press. He probably knew why. He licked his lips. “I wasn’t taking you there, y’know, for a quickie or anything.”
I blushed awkwardly.
“I’ll text. Or call,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything. I opened the door and flew into Grose. I was trembling. Nearly weeping.
I smelled hot chocolate, and I knew Ms. Krige was nearby. I didn’t want her to ask me what was wrong. “Oh my God,” I called, still breathless from our dash across campus, or from what had passed between Troy and me—I wasn’t sure. “I am sopping wet.”
I listened to my shoes squeaking and squishing on the hardwood floor. I wrenched them off, and my socks, too. Gathering them up, I trotted down the hall, past the kitchen, and into my room.
Swathed in black cashmere lined with white fur, Mandy Winters was sitting on my bed. She smiled pleasantly as I ground to a halt.
“Get caught?” she asked me.
twenty-one
“Caught. In the rain,” she said. She clicked shut her cell phone and leaned back on her hands.
“I thought you’d left,” I replied, which bordered on rude and awkward. I set down my shoes, pulled off my socks, and stepped into my slippers. “I have to squeeze these out,” I added, as a drop narrowly missed our tapestry rug.
“I’ll leave you to that,” she said. “I just dropped by on my way to the car.” She tilted her chin. “So I passed the time, talking to Miles. He thinks he’ll be able to come home soon. For Christmas.” There was a small smile on her face.
I glanced around the room, saw nothing out of place. Wondered how long she’d been in here, waiting to pounce. I wished she would take that stupid white head with her.
She saw me looking at it, and smiled. “Do you know what that’s for?” She went over and touched her finger to its forehead.
No snarky comeback occurred to me. I shook my head.
“I don’t, either,” she said.
I knew she was lying. A chill rippled up my spine. Why would she lie?
She got up. I almost took a step back, but I caught myself in time. She gazed hard
at me. I held my breath. Something was going to happen. I was about to find out what was going on. I was. Right now.
Then Ms. Krige said from the doorway, “The cocoa’s ready, Mandy. Why don’t you ask your driver to wait a few more minutes?”
“No. I really need to get going,” Mandy said. She brushed past me and went out of my room. “Have a nice break . . . down,” Mandy whispered as she passed me.
She knows. I was speechless. How could she know? No one—
Did Dr. Ehrlenbach know? Had my parents told her?
Oh no. I closed my eyes.
“Lindsay? Cocoa?” Ms. Krige asked sweetly.
My heart was pounding. My face felt numb. I was outed. Not even Julie knew about my breakdown.
So what? I asked myself. It was practically required to have some kind of issue at Marlwood. Look at Kiyoko. Look at Mandy. And Alis, Sangeeta, and Lara. All of them. The girls with the black eyes.
Has she been setting me up, all this time? Doing things to scare me so I’d snap?
That was stupid. Why would she bother? I was nobody.
Then why had Troy come looking for me? Did Mandy know we’d been together in the woods just then? Would she tell Miles? Mandy had said Miles would kill anyone who ever tried to hurt her. So what would he do to Troy if he found out Mandy’s hot boyfriend had spent all morning sharing his trail mix with me?
“Lindsay, phone,” Ms. Krige said, holding the landline portable out to me. I hadn’t heard the phone ring, hadn’t noticed her go into the kitchen to answer it.
Troy, I thought.
“It’s Rose,” Rose announced. “And I’m feelin’ groovy. You want to break into Jessel after dinner?”
Wait, I thought. She conveniently has a key. She’s rushing headlong into going in there.
Was she part of a prank? Or was I totally losing it?
“Oh God,” I blurted aloud. Did I actually think there was a giant conspiracy to drive me insane?
“Yes? God here,” Rose chirped.
“Nothing. I’ll see God at dinner.”
“God knows,” Rose said cryptically.
We hung up, and I looked across the quad toward Jessel. The drapes in Mandy’s room were shut...but I saw a dark oval on the glass. I knew I saw it.
And I trembled as if I had tumbled head-first into the icy blackness of Searle Lake.
We decided that the first night of break was too soon. I half-expected Mandy to reappear, and bust us flat for breaking and entering, and we agreed we had to be careful. So the next day, we began our recon, sitting in my room and studying Jessel. I made the observation that there might be security cameras we didn’t know about. Maybe they had something to do with the improved cell phone reception around the building.
Next we went on a long walk, circling Jessel, then heading down to the lake where we called each other on our cells until we figured out where our signals went weak. Lots of bars along a wide swath of shore, but the best reception was on the grounds of Jessel itself.
Jessel, which was located lower than Grose. I would have expected the opposite effect. Which worried me about going in there.
We watched TV with Ms. Krige that night; then after she went to bed, we sat in the dark, studying Jessel’s many windows. The shades were drawn. There was no porch light. Rose had brought a flashlight and some extra clothes with her; she dressed in black, including a black ski mask, which she pulled over her face as soon as we left my dorm. I had on my army jacket and some jeans, my boots. My only concession to stealth was my black knitted cap, pulled tightly over my hair. And my gloves. We both wore those.
We scurried through the slushy wet and made our way silently onto the porch. We both took off our shoes and tied the laces together, and slung them over our shoulders. She unlocked the door. It swung open, no melodramatic creak, no ghostly laughter. No faces. I gazed into the darkened room, seeing nothing but black on black, hearing nothing but our breathing. Jessel was a building. It was bricks and wood and glass.
I walked over the threshold in my stocking feet. Rose shut the door and turned on her flashlight. The hardwood floor was highly waxed and I saw . . . I saw . . . It’s just me, I thought, flinching at the blurred face in the wood, captured in the filmy glare.
A floorboard creaked. I gasped, and Rose elbowed my side.
“That was me. Jeez. Chill.” She cupped her hand over the beam so that only a thin, watery film of light played over the floor. The dimmest outlines of furniture swam in the shadows; it was like being in a shipwreck.
Rose headed for the stairs. I looked up at the balcony, seeing nothing but Christmas decorations—of course—and followed close behind her. Her body heat reassured me.
I looked back over my shoulder once, twice; I thought I saw a sliver of light around the jamb of the front door and tried to remember if I had heard it click shut.
We reached the top of the stairs, our backs to the balcony. Mandy’s door was to our right. I had never been in her room, ever.
“It’s probably locked,” I said.
“No locks at Marlwood,” she reminded me.
“But it’s Mandy’s room.”
Rose turned the knob and we were in, shoulder to shoulder in the pitch-black. The drapes were closed.
“You’re so pessimistic,” Rose chided me.
Wordlessly, she swept a low yellow arc. Mandy’s incredible room was revealed in blurs and smears of light: the canopy bed, the gilded nightstands, the ornate desk cluttered with gold frames of photographs. Her drapes were damask; I’d never seen them from this side before. She had ropes of necklaces draped one over another like pirate treasure; she’d just left them out. Half-open drawers revealed sweaters and scarves, gloves, knitted hats, a digital camera, another digital camera, an autographed picture of Prince Harry that said Thank you, Amanda!
Then Rose’s flashlight hit a three-foot-tall portrait of a girl with a deformed face; half her flesh was eaten away. My throat clamped down over a scream. Picture, I told my panicking brain. Damaged picture.
It was a photograph, tea-colored like the ones on the mantel, and half-covered with mold. The frame it rested in looked like shellacked shredded wheat. The girl’s hair was black, and she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat adorned with large feathers and roses. Her eyes were dark and wide, and her chin was tucked in slightly, as if she were gazing at something that frightened her.
As if she had seen a ghost.
I jumped back and Rose snorted.
“That’s pretty much what I did. The picture’s rotted. It’s from the attic.” She said the word with undisguised eagerness.
The beam hit a faded rectangular cardboard box with OUIJA! COMMUNICATE WITH THE SPIRITS! in faded letters on the top. A cartoon drawing of a scary-looking man with intense, dark eyes glared up at us. He reminded me of the white face with the dark eyes, and I looked away.
“He looks like that Munch painting called The Scream,” Rose said. “That’s the very Ouija board we used to contact Gilda, the spirit Mandy was trying to call up.”
The flashlight washed over a tall bookcase. “Let’s see . . . Haunted Houses of Northern California. Demonic Possession. Beyond the Grave. She’s got hobbies, our Mandy.” She clicked her teeth. “We could be here all night, you know?”
She was right. And I was beginning to wonder why we were here. What had we hoped to accomplish? To find out “the truth” about Mandy. But what could we find? A bottle of pills marked ILLEGAL DESIGNER DRUG, DILATES PUPILS? MASTER PLAN TO SCARE LINDSAY? Her rocket launcher?
Rose walked toward the center of the room. I followed; her flashlight washed over my stockinged feet like a searchlight.
“Oh ho,” she said. She came up to me and dropped to her knees, reaching beneath the satin coverlet over the bed.
She pulled out a dark wood trunk with shiny brass fittings. It made a sliding noise against the wood floor, and I worried about telltale scratches.
Is it the trunk from the attic? I wondered.
“Come here,�
� Rose urged, patting the floor. I was afraid to sit; I felt more vulnerable. “No one’s here,” she insisted.
Remaining standing, I took a breath as she handed me the flashlight and ran her gloved hands along the trunk. She handed me her shoes, too. Then she pushed her finger under the brass lock in the center, and grunted.
“Okay, well,” I said. “That’s that.”
“Hold on.” She grinned at me and reached into her pocket, bringing out a small plastic case and flipping it open to reveal several five-or-six-inch-long pieces of black metal that looked like screwdrivers. As I watched, she selected two and crammed one of them into the keyhole.
“What are you doing?” I whispered. But I knew. She was picking the lock.
“I had a boyfriend once,” she muttered, by way of explaining how she knew what she was doing.
“You can’t. She’ll know,” I protested.
But it was too late. There was a click.
“Did you break it?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer. Instead she lifted the lid. She put the tools back in her plastic case and handed that to me, too. I didn’t want to take them.
Julie, I reminded myself. I’m doing this for her. And, maybe, for Kiyoko, too.
The first thing on top was a piece of silky white material, and then another one . . . I realized they were underwear . . . and then Rose whistled, and when I saw what else was in the trunk, my mouth dropped open in shock.
twenty-two
Inside was a photograph of Mandy and a guy who looked almost exactly like her, only older—white-blond hair, dark blue eyes, and the same slightly cruel smile. He had to be Miles. She had on a fire engine-red bikini, and he was wearing slim boardshorts that left very little to the imagination. Their arms were coiled around each other, and her boobs were pressed against his chest.
“Houston, we have liftoff.” Rose handed me another photograph. This one was of the guy only, lounging in a pair of baggy pajama bottoms, smiling seductively at the camera. “Holy moly, who took these?”