The window slid open almost immediately. Portia hovered on the other side. “Good, you came.”
“You were being cryptic enough,” Hendricks said. “Why can’t you leave your place?”
But Portia’s eyes had already swiveled to the bandages snaking up Hendricks’s arm. A deep crease formed between her brows. “Holy shit, are you okay? What happened? And why were you at the cemetery? Did you hit your head? Did he choke you? He totally tried to choke me.”
“I’m fine, Portia.”
“Do your parents know you’re over here?” Portia asked, scandalized. “Are you going to get in trouble?”
“Not if you let me come inside.”
“Oh, right.” Portia stepped aside so that Hendricks could crawl through her window and into her bedroom. “Okay, now I need you to start from the beginning. Why were you at the cemetery, of all the creepy-ass places? Tell me absolutely everything that happened.”
Hendricks dropped onto the frilly pink stool in front of Portia’s makeup table, groaning. Her arm throbbed. “Why you aren’t allowed to leave your room?” she asked, instead of answering Portia’s questions. “Did you get in trouble?” A smile twitched at the corner of her mouth. “Did you parents catch you with Vi?”
“What? God, no,” Portia said, blushing. She sat at the edge of her bed and leaned close to Hendricks, lowering her voice. “Actually, my parents can’t know about this, okay? If I tell you, you’re sworn to secrecy.”
Hendricks mimed zipping her lips shut.
“Okay.” Portia exhaled. “So, the truth is that I was feeling pretty freaked out after Tony’s. I didn’t really want to go home so I . . . sort of went to Ileana’s.”
Hendricks blinked, certain she’d heard her wrong. “You what?”
“Eddie—I mean, the ghost,” Portia amended when Hendricks shot her a look. “He’s attacked me in this room twice now. How am I supposed to feel safe here? God, Hendricks, how am I supposed to sleep? So, anyway, I thought maybe Ileana would have an idea, like a spell or a ritual we could do to keep the ghost or whoever out of my bedroom. I told her what was going on, and she agreed to . . . to do a spell for me. Just a little one.”
“A spell,” Hendricks repeated. She tried to picture Portia standing inside of Ileana’s shop, surrounded by yellowed skulls and crystals and statues of naked goddesses, calmly explaining to the witchy girl that she was being haunted.
It felt strange, like trying to picture Portia throwing out all of her skincare products or wearing a pair of boot-cut jeans.
“Yeah, a spell.” Portia started fumbling with something hanging from her neck. It was a small burlap satchel attached to a length of thick twine. Hendricks frowned. Not exactly Gucci. “To protect my bedroom.”
Now that she was looking, Hendricks couldn’t help noticing a couple of other things, like the thick line of salt sinking into the carpet directly in front of Portia’s door, or the tiny mounds of crystals, balanced like pyramids, glinting mysteriously from the corners of her room. Black candles flickered from the tops of Portia’s dressers. The entire room smelled like sage.
“Portia,” Hendricks murmured, eyes flicking back to her friend’s face. “You can’t be serious.”
Portia looked suddenly defensive. “Of course I’m serious. This whole thing is serious. A ghost keeps trying to carve up my face. I’m scared to, like, move right now. I could die.” She hesitated before adding, “And you didn’t seem remotely interesting in helping.”
Hendricks flinched, stung. She cleared her throat. “You really think all this is going to work?”
“It has to. Only . . .” Portia trailed off.
“Only what?”
“Well . . . the spell only works in my bedroom. So, I can’t, like, leave it.”
Hendricks felt her lip twitch, certain this was a joke. “You’re not going to leave your bedroom?”
“Not until the ghost is gone, no.”
The smile dropped off Hendricks’s face. Portia didn’t sound like she was joking. “What about school?”
“I told my mom that the school nurse diagnosed me with mono. I’ve never missed a day of school, like, ever, so she bought it pretty easily. Vi and Connor are going to bring me my assignments here, although I was going to text you to see if I could share your World History notes? They’re both taking Mrs. Murphy’s class and we’re in Mr. O’Donnell’s, so the material won’t be the same.”
“Yeah, sure,” Hendricks said. “Whatever you need.”
“And do you mind checking in on Raven? I’ve been trying to go most days after school, but now I can’t.”
Hendricks felt a pang of guilt. Why hadn’t it occurred to her to check on Raven? “Of course,” she said.
“Okay, my turn now,” Portia said, crossing her arms over her chest. “You said you saw him in the cemetery. Explain, please.”
Hendricks told Portia everything. How she saw a boy crouching at Eddie’s grave, how she thought it was Eddie when she saw his leather jacket and his dark hair, but then he turned around and she realized that it wasn’t Eddie at all. She shivered, remembering the boy’s red roots, his chapped lips.
Portia looked confused. “I don’t understand,” she said, cutting Hendricks off. “You saw the ghost’s face?”
“Yeah, I did, and, Portia, he was someone else. Someone I didn’t recognize.”
“But why would he have been at Eddie’s grave if he wasn’t Eddie?”
“He wasn’t at Eddie’s grave. He—”
The tone of Portia’s voice suddenly changed. “You know, it’s a little convenient that you’re the only one who can see him. We’re all just expected to take your word for it that you’re telling us the truth, even though there’s all this other evidence saying something else.”
Hendricks reeled backward. “You think—you actually think I would lie about something like this?”
Portia cocked her head, studying Hendricks’s face. “I don’t know what you would do. You’ve been weird ever since we did that séance. It’s like you don’t want to face the facts.”
Hendricks needed a second to catch her breath. It felt ragged, like she’d just run a marathon. There was a part of her that wanted to keel over, head between her knees, close her eyes until the room stopped spinning.
She’d figured Portia was going to have a hard time believing that the ghost following her wasn’t Eddie, but she’d never expected Portia to accuse her of lying to protect her dead boyfriend. It hurt that her closest friend here didn’t trust her.
She sucked a breath in through her teeth and tried again. “You aren’t listening to me—”
“No, you aren’t listening. I can’t leave my room. Don’t you get that? I keep getting attacked. I’m terrified that I’m going to get seriously hurt, that I’m going to die. I’m tired of having this argument with you. It’s not my fault you don’t want to deal with the truth about who Eddie was.”
“And who was that?” Hendricks asked, her voice stiff.
Portia met her eyes and said coldly, “A creepy outsider who no one liked.”
CHAPTER
16
Samantha Davidson, Hendricks typed into her search engine.
It was late, and she was lying in bed, trying to distract herself from the fight she’d just had with Portia.
Portia was wrong, she told herself, bristling. The ghost had nothing to do with Eddie. It was someone else.
She just had to figure out who.
She hit enter.
A second later: 17,900,000 results.
Hendricks chewed on her lower lip. Okay then. She was going to need a way to narrow this down. Remembering the dates on the tombstone, she added, 1970–2019.
This time, only three results popped up. One of them was an obituary.
Hendricks clicked, and a photograph of a woman in her midforties filled h
er computer screen. She leaned in closer, her heart beating so loudly she could hear it. Samantha.
If Samantha had ever been beautiful, those days were long past. In the photograph, she was skeletally thin, her face made up of harsh angles, sharp cheekbones and a well-defined jaw coming to a drastic, narrow point of a chin. Her dark brown skin looked ashen in the strange light of the photograph, and there were deep shadows under both of her eyes, turning them monstrous, hollow. Her dark brown hair had been scraped back in a ponytail, and a gnarled scar took up one side of her face.
Hendricks shuddered. Even though the scar was long healed, she could tell that it had been a pentagram. Just like the girl in the library. Just like the blood-smeared tombstone.
Below the photograph was a short obituary.
Samantha Cherie Davidson died Wednesday, January 14, 2019, at the Longwood Farm Community in Dover Plains, New York. She was born October 19, 1970, and is survived by her family.
Funeral services will be 3 p.m. Saturday, January 24, 2019, at Cedar Grove Baptist Church in Drearford, New York. Interment will follow in Cedar Grove Cemetery in Drearford under the direction of Marks Funeral Home of Magnolia.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to Longwood Farm Community.
Hendricks read through the obituary twice. Two things stood out immediately.
The first was that the obituary didn’t actually mention specific members of Samantha’s family. Hendricks knew this was strange because she’d attended the funerals of two grandparents and one uncle, and all three times her name and her parents’ names had been mentioned in the obituaries. She remembered reading that her beloved family members were “survived by” her and feeling a strange, weighty shiver, like she suddenly had a job to do, that it was up to her to uphold their legacy. But here, Samantha was just “survived by her family.” No names.
The second strange thing was where she’d died. Not at a hospital, or at home surrounded by her family, but at a place called Longwood Farm Community. Her family even requested that donations be sent to this Longwood Farm Community, so it had to have some special importance.
Hendricks typed the name into her search engine and clicked on the first result. A red webpage with a little farm graphic popped up.
Longwood Farm Community read the scripted font. Below was a photograph of a group of adults grinning at the camera, along with a short paragraph:
Longwood Farm Community is a residential therapeutic community dedicated to helping adults with mental health and related challenges move toward recovery, health, and greater independence through community living, meaningful work, and clinical care.
“Adults with mental health and related challenges,” Hendricks read out loud. Had Samantha been mentally ill?
She clicked through the photo gallery. Picture after picture showed an idyllic-looking farm, rolling green hills covered with horses, adorable families of ducks, and smiling people planting flowers or milking cows. It didn’t look like the sort of place where people with serious mental illnesses lived. It looked . . . nice.
Eventually, Hendricks found the contact page of the website. She was thinking she’d give the place a call or shoot them an email, when a little map popped up. Hendricks hesitated, eyes narrowing in on the map.
Longwood Farm was only a twenty-minute drive.
* * *
• • •
The next morning, Hendricks skipped first period to drive out to Longwood Farm.
The sun was just rising above the distant hills as she steered her mom’s Subaru off the main highway and onto a twisted dirt road lined with massive boulders and spindly trees. The car shuddered over small rocks and gravel, causing Hendricks to shake violently in the driver’s seat. It was barely a road at this point. If Hendricks didn’t have a map pulled up on her phone, she would’ve doubted she was going the right way. She squinted through the tree branches, trying to make out the distant rolling hills, the gray lake, and barn.
The road narrowed the farther she drove, the tree cover growing denser, creating the feeling of being in a small, dark tunnel. Branches scratched at Hendricks’s windows, the sound reminding her of bony fingers.
The gravel road was completely dark and it left her feeling uneasy, as though whoever was in charge of the grounds had let the trees grow unruly on purpose, to make it that much harder to see anything beyond. Bits of grass and far-off barns flashed between the gaps in the trees, gone too quickly for Hendricks to get a good look.
“Creepy . . .” she murmured to herself, slowing her car to a crawl as the road curved up to meet the barn. A wood sign swayed in the wind, lopsided letters reading LONGWOOD FARM COMMUNITY FRONT OFFICE. Below was another sign, this one in the shape of a little arrow pointing straight ahead, to a squat white farmhouse with peeling paint and dirt-smudged windows.
Hendricks pulled to a stop in a gravel lot out front, working through her cover story as she jogged up the front steps to the porch. She figured a place like this wouldn’t give some random teenager private information just because she showed up asking for it. She needed another reason for coming here without any parents, asking questions about one of their patients.
The feeling of neglect hung over the farmhouse like a stench. Paint peeled from the walls and stacks of paperwork and files teetered from the tops of every surface. A soupy brown stain stretched across the ceiling. Though the front window was cracked, the breeze that moved through the room was oddly thick. It smelled of manure and wet dog.
Hendricks approached the front desk, where a woman with aggressively red, cat-eye-shaped glasses was typing away on a computer.
Behind the glasses, her eyes flicked up. “Can I help you?”
Hendricks cleared her throat. “I hope so,” she said, mentally running through her prepared story one last time. “My name is Hendricks, I’m a junior at St. Joseph’s.”
St. Joseph’s was the name of the college down in Drearford. Brady’s nanny, Gillian, went there, and Hendricks thought she might be taken a bit more seriously if the receptionist thought she was speaking with a college student.
The receptionist nodded, one bob of her small, pointed chin, and Hendricks continued, “Right, so I’m helping my mom check out facilities for her, uh, brother? Charlie? She’d heard good things about Longwood Farm and asked me if I could stop by, and, like, look around the grounds for her.”
The receptionist’s lips pinched together, a small, pouty frown. “We’re a mental health facility,” she said, speaking slowly, like she thought Hendricks might not understand. “Do you happen to know your uncle’s diagnosis?”
Hendricks felt a momentary touch of panic. She really should’ve researched different diagnoses to prepare for this. “He has . . . bipolar disorder,” she said quickly, remember the words from the Farm’s website. “But my mom doesn’t actually talk about the details of his illness with me. She just wanted me to swing by to see whether this place seemed . . . nice.”
Now the receptionist looked really suspicious. “Our tours are by appointment only. Did you call ahead?”
“Was I supposed to?” Hendricks could feel the heat climbing her cheeks. She was screwing this up. “I’m really sorry, I don’t do this often. We were interested in this place because my mom, uh, went to high school with one of your former, er . . . residents. Maybe you knew her? Samantha Davidson?”
The receptionist tilted her head to the side, blinking rapidly behind the thick lenses. “Your mom went to school with Sam? Was she a cheerleader, too?”
Cheerleader, Hendricks thought, tucking that bit of information away. “Yup,” she said easily. “That’s totally how they met.”
“Oh, well it’s really nice to meet one of Sam’s friends.” The receptionist didn’t say finally, but Hendricks thought she heard the word lingering in the air. She glanced over her shoulder and then, turning back to Hendricks, added, “Usually our
tours are a touch more formal. We like to make sure the prospective resident is present and have them talk with the doctors we have on staff, and take a look around the dorms, things like that. But seeing as you were referred by Sam . . . I guess I could show you around quickly, just the highlights. That way you have something to tell your mom.”
She stepped out from behind the desk, straightening her paisley-printed pencil skirt, which she’d, inexplicably, paired with mud-splattered Hunter boots that went up past her knees. “My name is Miriam, by the way. Would you like a pair of rubber boots?”
* * *
• • •
Hendricks quickly understood the need for the rubber boots. Mud sloshed up around her feet as they headed across a patchy, gray field filled with horses and sheep. The trees weren’t quite as dense out here, and she felt her nerves ease a bit as the sky opened up above.
The feeling didn’t last. The sky was low and dark. The animals didn’t bother looking up as Hendricks and Miriam approached, and Hendricks noticed that they looked . . . well, mangy. Their coats were patchy and rough, and she could see the thin curves of ribs poking through their sides. Flies buzzed around their flicking tails.
Miriam navigated the field easily. She had a dancer’s posture, even in the oversize boots, and Hendricks found herself marveling at how her feet didn’t seem to slip and slide in the mud the way Hendricks’s did. “Longwood Farm was established as a not-for-profit organization in the late seventies by New York native Donna Radley,” Miriam explained. “It was built in honor of Donna’s daughter, who sadly lost her battle to depression in 1986. Longwood is the only therapeutic farm community in New York and one of only a handful in the United States. We are licensed to serve up to forty adults and we employ approximately sixty full-time, part-time clinical, direct care, and administrative staff. Our aim is to help individuals understand the importance of their medications and develop the skills necessary to live more independently.”
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