The Secret Grave

by Lois Ruby

  I am not leaving here, no matter what Mom and Dad decide.

  It’s Scooter we have to think about, they said. How could I let them take Scooter away while I stay here? What am I going to do? I’d die without him around, I’d just die!

  And then a strange thought pushes the misery out of my mind. Cady ate the belladonna berries, and she survived. Or maybe the poison doesn’t kick in for a few days?

  I’ve got to get back to the forest first thing tomorrow to make sure she’s still alive!

  “Cady? Cady!” I shout, frantically running around the bank of the lake the next morning. “Where are you? Please, please come out!”

  I force my way through the jungle of greenery; it grows thicker and wilder every day, but I’m careful not to brush against belladonna. Can it poison you just by touch?

  At the cabin, I yell, “Cady? Are you in there?” My heart pounds. What if she’s on the floor and breathing about as much as Smokey Bear is on the poster? In other words, dead.

  I peek in the empty square where the window would be. No sign of her, but maybe she’s behind something I can’t see from this angle. I inch the door open, ready for the most horrible sight possible.

  Everything looks the same as usual, down to Cady’s picnic basket sitting on the rickety table that’s missing a leg, and the giant ball of orange wool poking out of the leather bag. The black cameo that Cady had buried deep in the wool sits on the table. It’s as frosty as sleet. Does she store it in the freezer? No freezer here. In fact, no electricity. My fingers trace the woman’s delicate features carved in black onyx on top of white quartz, or maybe it’s ivory. The hairstyle and an old-fashioned hair ornament prove that the lady is from another time. Maybe it was Vivienne’s. The whole piece is encircled in fancy filigreed gold, like a locket Nana Fiona has. And the cameo lady is wearing a single strand of pearls tight around her throat.

  I’ve never stolen even a stick of gum in my whole life, but suddenly my hand slides across the table as if it’s not ruled by my brain or attached to the rest of me. I close my fist around the cameo and slip it into my pocket.

  There’s a rustling sound outside, like an animal in the brush. My heart speeds up. What kind of animal? I don’t want it in here with me. Kicking the door shut is dumb, because whatever is out there can crawl or leap or climb in through the empty window. My body goes clammy. I crouch behind the table, which is also dumb, because it’s too small to give me cover. At least I can throw it at anything coming into the cabin.

  A face appears in the window, and I gasp. It’s not an animal, it’s Cady with her hair done up like the woman in the cameo! “Hi!” she says, all merry.

  “Oh! You caught me by surprise.” As usual.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Her sort-of apologies never sound sincere. “I’m just so glad to see you here. Sometimes you run away, and I’m never sure if you’re coming back.”

  Slowing my thundering heart, I manage to get a few words out. “I was so worried about you.”

  “How sweet of you. See? You are my honest and true friend. What were you worried about?”

  “The belladonna. I Googled it, and you were right about the poison, and then I remembered that you ate some of those berries and I … ”

  “You thought I might be dead?” Cady asks.

  “Yes! But I see you’re alive and up to your usual tricks. I’m trying to think back … maybe you didn’t really eat them.”

  “Maybe I didn’t,” she agrees. “I have some fabulous plans for us this afternoon, before those other girls come back to spoil it all.”

  I start to say, “They won’t,” but something makes me keep my mouth zipped. Instead I say, “Tomorrow is my brother Trick’s birthday. We’re all going to the Rib Shack for dinner, because Franny can get a discount. Why don’t you come with us?”

  “I don’t eat … ”

  “What do you mean, you don’t eat?”

  “Meat,” she quickly adds.

  “They must have some veggie options. Beans, coleslaw, fries … ”

  “Some other time,” she says evasively. Maybe she’s just shy about hanging out with my family after the awful things she’s said to Scooter and Franny.

  “I have to tell you something terrible, Cady. We’re moving out of Nightshade, out of Georgia.”

  At first she looks perplexed. “Why would your family do such a stupid thing?”

  “If we move to a dry, desert climate, Scooter will breathe better.”

  “It’s always about pitiful Scooter,” Cady mutters. “I won’t let it happen.”

  “I know, I hate the whole thing myself.”

  “I mean, I will not allow it!”

  “You know a way to stop it?” Maybe she has a bright idea that I haven’t dreamed up yet.

  Cady’s eyes narrow into dark, piercing dots. A clump of her dyed-black hair lies on one shoulder that’s hunched up in vengeful rage. She’s ready to take on a whole army!

  I back away, my knees knocking. “If my family moves, can I stay here with you?”

  Her whole posture changes. Her shoulders relax, her eyes light up, and a smile spreads across her pale face. “Of course! We’ll swim and go on picnics. I can show you how to catch damsel flies in the palms of your hands. Every day will be one big sleepover.”

  The sudden switch leaves my head spinning, and I know I couldn’t possibly live here in the forest if my family is gone, but it makes Cady so happy to believe I might, that I don’t let on. I give myself over to the afternoon, which zooms by, with Cady teaching me more than I ever wanted to know about the forest. Under a canopy of water lilies, we uncover a nest of ducklings smaller than my fist. Hide-and-seek takes us all over the east side of the forest. The only safe is the one wild persimmon tree, which I wouldn’t have recognized without Cady telling me because there are no actual bright orange persimmons hanging from it in the summertime.

  Sweaty from racing around the trees, we wade into the lake. So what if my dress gets soaked. It just feels good to have my toes squishing the cool mud at the bottom of the shallows. All the yucky thoughts and nagging questions about Cady are shooed away, like the annoying mosquitoes sucking my blood. I’m not worrying about Scooter, or Franny leaving, or us moving. I’m here, now. I’ve never felt so free, not with my family, and not with my other friends. I’m powerful and bold.

  So bold, I say, “I haven’t been over to the other side of the lake. Let’s wade over there.”

  “Oh, no, the lake’s much too deep in the middle to wade.”

  “Then, let’s go ashore and walk around to the west side. From the cabin we’re halfway there already. I’m hot, aren’t you? It looks so green and shady over on the other side.”

  “NO!” she shouts. “NO! NO! NO! You must never, ever go over there!”

  Uh-oh, here we go again. “Why not?” I ask, pouting like Gracie does.

  Cady slogs out of the water as fast as she can, kicking up mud in her wake. I follow, and her splashing water nearly blinds me.

  “You haven’t told me why,” I shout at her back. “Why can’t we go over to the other side?”

  She’s on the shore now facing me, while I’m still knee-deep in the water, my dress slapped onto my thighs.

  “Hannah Flynn, I swear, if you go over there, I will never speak to you again. We can’t be friends, ever, do you understand?”

  I nod, and she probably thinks I mean it. But all those ugly thoughts seep back into my mind. Scooter’s asthma … Franny leaving for college … our family moving … and how furious I am that Cady is always telling me what to do, what not to do.

  My mind’s made up. I am going over to the other side of Moonlight Lake the next time I’m here and Cady’s not.

  Something’s alive in my pocket on my way home from the forest. It’s purring against my hip! I panic for a second—what if it’s some forest animal, like a frog, which totally creeps me out? Then I realize, oh, it’s just my phone vibrating. Maybe Sara’s calling f
rom the royal palace on Princess Kate’s cell phone. Wait, I didn’t take my phone to the forest. There’s only one thing in my pocket, the cameo brooch I stole from Cady’s cabin. It chills my hand as I flip it every which way, looking for a hidden watch battery. Nothing unlatches or slides open. Then, why is the thing vibrating like a Mexican jumping bean in the palm of my hand, shooting shivers up my arm?

  Did I just see the cameo woman blink her eyes? It’s gotta be an optical illusion. Angled in a better light, yes, she blinked! I fling the spooky thing to the ground facedown, bury it under magnolia leaves, and run like crazy.

  Three steps from our kitchen door, I have second thoughts and turn back to rescue the cameo. It hangs in my pocket like a stone, silent and still, until I get upstairs and hide it in a shoebox on my closet shelf.

  The cameo is going back to Cady the second I get to the cabin in the woods!

  Last winter, Granddaddy Mason Oglethorpe, Mom’s father, told me, “Hon, y’all prolly noticed that life’s what happens when y’all’ve made other plans.” It was Christmas morning, and I’d woken up with chicken pox. Granddaddy’s wife—we call her Shug, as in short for Sugar, because she’s not technically our grandmother—echoed Granddaddy’s words, adding, “Bless your little heart, sweetpie. You just go right ahead and scratch.”

  And I’m under the umbrella of “itchy other plans” right now, meaning I can’t get back to the forest to explore what’s beyond the lake, like I promised myself, or to return the creepy cameo.

  Mom and Dad are on their way to New Mexico, dragging Scooter and all of his medical equipment along with them, to see if he does better in that high-desert air. I’ll bet they’ll be looking at houses to buy. They say they’re not, but I don’t believe it, and even if they find the most fantastic adobe mansion in the whole Southwest, I’ll never in a thousand years move into it.

  Let’s not even talk about the shouting and door-slamming and stomping up the stairs when Mom and Dad announced that we might be moving. Franny, the one who can’t wait to leave home, shouted loud enough for people camping way down in Big Canoe to hear, “Y’ALL ARE JUST GOING TO ABANDON ME HERE?!”

  Scooter felt so guilty about the move that he wandered around muttering, “It’s all my fault. I hate my lungs.”

  Gracie clung to him, saying, “I wuv your wungs, Shooter!”

  All the blubbering and bawling reminds me of the banshees wailing when someone’s about to pass into the next world. Leaving Nightshade—leaving Georgia—is a kind of death, so I’ll be listening for the banshee wail. No surprise: I’m the maddest of us all. Well, maybe Trick’s worse. He hasn’t been out of his room in three days except to sneak to the bathroom when no one’s looking, and to the kitchen after he’s sure we’re all asleep. I know, because I followed him last night, and we had a little baloney sandwich picnic washed down with milk muddied with half a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. Mom would have a fit if she knew.

  Our parents asked Granddaddy and Shug to stay with us while they’re gone, but Granddaddy says they’re the travelin’ kind, and they have a Panama Canal cruise lined up and paid. So, Nana Fiona is back. There isn’t a lot of the usual mess to clean up, since she didn’t even make it back to Poughkeepsie before she was called back. Besides, we’re all too grumpy to work.

  The house is so quiet. No printer going in Mom’s office. No footsteps from Dad’s studio. No Scooter machines humming and hissing. The huge house is an empty cave without Scooter. Gracie misses him so much that she’s started sucking on anything she grabs—dish towels, a wooden airplane, a hairbrush, or two more fingers than usual jammed into her mouth.

  “Hannah, darlin’, I’ve been thinking about your attic,” Nana Fiona says, waggling her eyebrows. “I’d like to see that attic for myself.” She means the ghost. How are we going to get her up those narrow ladder steps?

  “Trick! Help!” I shout down the hall.

  He plows like a bull into my room, streaming the Braves game on his phone. “Sheesh, is the house on fire?”

  “Turn that thing down! Nana and I have a geometry problem for you.” I pull down the steep, open ladder that is maybe eighteen inches across, and motion toward Nana, who is at least twice that wide.

  Trick’s eyes move from the ladder to Nana and back a time or two, measuring both. “Aw, Nana, why do you have to go up there?”

  “My parents’ trunk is up in the attic.”

  “It’d be easier to get the trunk down than you up,” Trick reasons.

  “People have climbed Mt. Everest, where there’s not enough oxygen for a fly to breathe. If they can do that, I can do this. If you can’t engineer the climb, Patrick, I’ll just do it myself,” Nana huffs, with her neon-green sneaker on the first rung of the ladder.

  Trick gets behind her to squeeze Nana’s hips into a package the width of the ladder. This makes her about four inches taller. She’s wedged in there nice and tight. One knee comes up to step on the next rung, but she hasn’t got a lot of strength in her pretzel-stick legs, so I push her rump up like we do when Gracie’s trying to climb up on Mom and Dad’s four-poster bed.

  Trick swings onto the ladder above Nana’s head and grabs her arms. “You push, Hannah, and I’ll pull.”

  “Don’t go disconnecting my shoulders, boy. I need them attached to the rest of me, or I won’t be able to drive you to your baseball game tonight.”

  “We’re doing the best we can, Nana,” Trick mutters, gentler now because she’s said the magic B word.

  It takes a good fifteen minutes, but finally Nana flops onto the floor of the attic like a hooked fish, a big one, and she says, “Well! That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “Nah,” Trick says, escaping super-fast. I’m already worried about how I’m going to get Nana down. That’s for later. Right now we’re hoping Vivienne’s ghost will make it worth the climb to her attic.

  Nana lies panting on my attic pillows. “What do we do, call her name?”

  “I’ve never called her; she just comes. If she wants to.”

  “How long do we wait? Grace will be bellowing from the wilds of her crib any minute. That child’s nearly three. She shouldn’t be caged in a crib. While your parents are gone, I’ll train her for her big-girl bed and the potty, too. Vi-vee-ennnnn, Vi-vee-ennnn,” Nana croons.

  “She might come if we’re quiet,” I hint. We wait, the only sound is us crunching Cheetos. No Vivienne, no shadows on the wall, no cold fingers.

  “Mercy, if she’s going to be shy, or stubborn as an old mule, we might as well delve into that trunk,” Nana Fiona says. She’s quite a sight crawling across the attic floor.

  We wipe our Cheetos-orange fingers on an old rag and flip open the lid of the trunk. Nana pulls out bolt after bolt of cloth, muttering, “Why on earth did my daddy save all this stuff?”

  “It’s vintage. We could sell it for a lot of money on eBay, Nana.”

  “Look at this!” She unwraps a ball of something covered in fabric with tiny pink roses on it. Inside are a cup and saucer so thin that you can see right through them. “Oh! This lovely Irish bone china was from my mother’s collection. She kept a dozen cup and saucer pairs, each one different, in a beautiful glass breakfront.”

  This set pictures two lovers picnicking in the country, all in pinks and delicate greens. Nana gently sets the cup into the groove in the saucer—and suddenly the cup begins to rock. Nana rears back, the saucer flat on her hand with the cup nearly jumping off. I steady it, and it stays put for a few seconds, then begins rocking again. We both glance at the window—a big wind? But no, the air’s so still that you can see flecks of dust just hanging there.

  “Vivienne?” I call quietly.

  The cup and saucer both spin out of Nana’s hands and crash to the floor, and Nana bursts into tears with the shards at her feet. “My mama’s beautiful cup … ”

  I slam the trunk shut, but it flies open with such force that one hinge in the back loosens and clatters to the floor.

  “I don’t thi
nk she wants us here,” I whisper, kicking the pieces of china into a sad heap under the window.

  Scrambling down the ladder is much faster than going up.

  Back in my room, Nana catches her breath on my bed. “Tell me, what just happened up there, darlin’?”

  All I can do is shake my head.

  Nana reaches into the drawer of my bedside table and lifts out the little bundle wrapped in the white silk scarf. “At least that evil spirit—or whatever she is—didn’t get my mama’s pearls.” She wraps them again and sets them back in the drawer. “What’s this, something Shug gave you? Looks like her tacky style.”

  The cameo! “It can’t be there,” I cry. “I stood on a pile of books to put it in a shoebox way in the back on my closet shelf.”

  Didn’t I?

  Nana says, “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, yes!” I am. I think.

  “Hmm,” Nana says, “So now we know that Vivienne isn’t confined to the attic. She can materialize anywhere in this house.”

  Like Gracie’s wady in the broom closet.

  Nana’s hooded eyes are pulled close together and her forehead is more wrinkly than usual.

  “Hey, guys, come down to the family room,” Franny shouts from the bottom of the stairs. “Mom and Dad and Scooter are on Skype.”

  I rescue Gracie from her cell, sling her over my hip, and run down the stairs with Trick. Nana waddles after us, muttering, “Who decided a house should have so many stinking stairs?”

  Scooter’s face is the first I see. It’s hard to tell on the screen if he looks healthier or not. We all talk at once, like at our dinner table.

  “Feeling better, Scooter?” That’s me.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he answers, looking forlorn, as if he feels even guiltier that the air is better for him.