by Lois Ruby
No what?
Cady keeps tugging at me beneath the weight of the lake. I know what now! With inhuman strength, I pump and thrash and kick until my head is out of the water again. It’s a tug-of-war between Cady and me. Again and again I break loose, my hair whipping around my face. I’m so tired. My whole body goes limp with exhaustion.
Someone else is in the water! I don’t want it to be one of Cady’s friends. I can’t battle two of them. So why resist any longer? It’d be easy to just give myself over to the water and moonlight.
Behind me, wild splashes come closer, and a voice that’s not Cady’s floats across Moonlight Lake. “Hold on, Hannah, we’re coming.” It’s Sara!
“I’m doing the best I can,” Luisa says, gasping and sucking air, “but like I said, I’m not a great swimmer.”
With my last burst of energy, I pivot my body around to see Sara and Luisa wrestle the lake, with their arms slashing through the water, their feet kicking like mermaid fins.
Cady’s head darts out of the water between Sara and me without causing so much as a ripple in the lake.
An arm slips around my waist. Luisa’s, not Cady’s! Sara is on the other side of me, bearing most of the weight, free-styling with her other arm and kicking like mad. A cloud slides away, and in the harsh moonlight Cady’s eyes are fierce and feverish. She’s neck-deep in the water and motionless, even though she can’t be standing on anything.
Luisa and Sara swim me to the shore, and all three of us collapse in the soft mud, panting and coughing. My heart’s slowing down a little, and my eyes begin to shed the stinging lake water, until Cady’s face, contorted in fury, looms over our shivering bodies.
In a rage, she’s sputtering frenzied words: “I invited you all to come, but y’all are cowards. Only Hannah is worthy. You spoiled everything.”
Cady is wearing sweatpants and a black hoodie, not a swimsuit. Somehow her clothes and hair are perfectly dry. And then she’s gone. Poof.
“Where did she go?” Sara asks. She’s the fastest of us to recover. Luisa’s totally wiped out, and I’m not exactly dancing on the shore myself.
The banshee wail—or was it the loon’s call—is silent now, as if the whole forest is holding its breath. I sit up and look around. Cady’s nowhere in sight. “She comes and goes like that,” I say, snapping my fingers. “Where would I be if y’all hadn’t swum out to rescue me?”
Sara and Luisa exchange looks, but neither says what we’re all thinking: I’d be headed for one of those graves. I’m sure, now. Cady meant to drown me in Moonlight Lake.
“How did you know to come?” I ask Sara and Luisa.
“Scooter. The little twerp set his alarm for eleven forty-five, because he was curious to see whether we’d be going at midnight.” Luisa sinks back, still exhausted.
Sara fills in the details. “When he saw that you’d gone alone, he panicked and shook us awake. He gave us a head start before he woke your parents. I hope they didn’t call mine yet! All the parents will be basket cases by the time they see our faces.” Sara stretches out one hand to Luisa and the other to me, pulling us up, and we head for home with mud glued to our backs and water dribbling down our legs.
“Who is Cady, really?” Luisa asks, but we all suspect the answer. The girl who can appear and vanish in a flash; who can stand in water above her head; who can swim in the moonlight and come up desert-dry. The girl who survives poison berries; who talks about tangled time; whose friends are all dead and buried …
“She’s some kind of a witch,” Sara says as we come close to the fallen log at the mouth of the forest.
Luisa’s idea is more shocking: “She’s Cadence Stanhope, and she’s buried out there in her little cemetery.”
Then I say what we’re all thinking. “She’s a ghost.”
Mom and Dad and Scooter meet us halfway back to Nightshade, with towels and blankets and hugs and tears. They’ll yell at us later for doing such a stupid thing, I’m sure, but right now they’re just grateful that we’re on our feet and breathing.
We dump our wet, muddy clothes in the washing machine and change into dry things, and then Mom’s interrogation begins.
“What were y’all thinking!”
It’s not easy to explain, but we try, and they listen. I tell them the easy stuff that won’t make them totally crazy right away, about meeting Cady, and how lonely she was—and so was I with my best friends gone and Scooter getting sicker and Franny ready to leave for college. I tell them about the cabin that burned and the cameo, the poisoned belladonna berries, and how Nightshade got its name.
Dad’s face is full of questions. “You’re saying that your new friend Cady lives in the forest? That she’s been enticing you to play with her, and you’ve done it, even though it’s against the rules?”
Play with her sounds so babyish, but it’s a pretty accurate description. Miserably, I nod. “Yes, but … ”
“I’m not through, Hannah. So all she had to do was invite you to come swimming at midnight. Midnight, Hannah! And you did it! Do you realize how foolish, how dangerous that is? You could have drowned.”
My heart beats frantically in my ears, because he’s so close to the truth.
Luisa and Sara have the good sense to keep quiet while they wait for their parents to arrive with zillions of questions of their own.
I take a deep breath, and glance over at Scooter. His eyebrows are raised with questions, too.
A stuttering tape plays and rewinds and plays again in my mind: Luisa, Sara, Hannah, and Cady … Midnight moonlight loon nightshady. “I know it sounds insane,” I tell my parents, “but Cady was unbelievably persuasive about the midnight swim. None of us really wanted to do it.”
“Yet you did,” Dad says again. His tone surprises me, because he hardly ever gets mad. It’s because he’s so worried about me.
“I couldn’t bear to disappoint Cady. She really, really needed a friend. So did I,” I murmur, avoiding Sara’s and Luisa’s eyes. “I just couldn’t let her down. Remember what you always tell us about doing the right thing, Dad? Even if it seems wrong? After Luisa and Sara fell asleep, I did what I thought was right. Cady and I, we were … friends. I imagined her voice calling me, and so did the loons.”
“The loons?” Mom asks, as though this is the craziest thing I’ve said all night.
“Yes, the wail of the loons kept drawing me closer and closer to the water, and then Cady’s voice drew me deep into Moonlight Lake until I was in over my head.”
Mom gasps and tucks her lips into her teeth to keep from saying what’s on the tip of her tongue. Whatever it is, she knows I don’t want to hear it right now.
Sara can’t hold her tongue any longer. “Cady isn’t like a normal kid, Mr. and Mrs. Flynn.”
“No, I guess not,” Dad says sadly.
Scooter catches my eye and jerks his head toward our parents, as if to say, Go ahead, tell them the rest.
A gob of spit hangs in my throat, which I swallow and say, “There’s a small cemetery on the other side of the lake.” Sara and Luisa look shocked that I’d mention this. But I can’t stop now. “There are seven graves there.” My throat tightens. This will scare Mom and Dad out of their skins. “All of the graves are for girls my age.”
Mom clutches her throat. “Seven dead children? Good Lord!”
“Yes, but six are effigies,” Luisa says, and my parents’ eyes turn toward her.
“Which means that those girls aren’t actually buried there,” I quickly explain, as if this is really going to comfort Mom and Dad.
“And the seventh?” Mom asks.
I glance at Luisa and Sara again, and they both close their eyes. “The seventh is Cadence Stanhope, who is buried there.”
Scooter’s been chomping to jump into the conversation. This is his chance. “Y’all get it? Cadence … Cady?”
Mom’s eyes widen with confusion, and Dad’s pressing me for more.
“Let me see if I understand this. You’re telling us tha
t your friend Cady who lives in the forest is … dead? That a ghost has been talking to you all summer? That’s a little hard to swallow,” he says, sinking back into his easy chair.
“I know, Dad, but look at the facts. Isn’t that something else you’re always telling us?”
He lurches forward. “The fact is that this Cady is a mentally disturbed child. The fact is that you let her lure you into the forest again and again, when you should have known better and should have told us what was going on. Couldn’t you trust us to help? This child needs help, Hannah.”
“She’s dead, Mom and Dad. Dead! Get it? She’s a ghost!”
All six of us sit in silence, with the words dead and ghost ping-ponging off the walls until Sara and Luisa’s parents arrive and we have to go through the whole thing again.
Luisa and Sara and their parents are gone. Scooter’s been sent up to his room. It’s just Mom and Dad and me in the living room.
“I’m really tired. Can I go to bed?”
Mom says, “Yes, we’re all exhausted. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
I’ll bet we will! I bolt out of the room fast enough to beat my shadow to the stairs.
Scooter is crouching behind a chair on the second floor landing.
“You heard the whole thing?”
“Missed a word or two,” Scooter admits. “I’ve gotta talk to you.”
Upstairs in my room, we huddle on the floor, leaning against my bed, and Scooter dumbfounds me with his news.
“While you were at that happy little swim party, I was taking care of business in the attic.”
“Scooter, no! There’s so much dust up there!”
“It’s okay. The new meds are helping a lot. I told myself, if I think hard enough, Vivienne will talk to me, and she did.”
My jaw drops. “Just like that?”
“Not the way you think. Hey, you should have swept up the glass from the broken lightbulb and tea cup. I could have made hamburger out of my bare feet. Anyway, I found your iPad up there. Why didn’t we think of Googling stuff about Vivienne, if she was this hotshot artist?”
“Find out anything interesting?”
“Plenty. You really want to know?” Scooter teases. “Maybe I’ll just go to bed and tell you in the morning.”
“It’s already morning. Talk!”
He shifts around, pulls a foam pillow off my bed, and stretches out on the floor. His words float up toward the ceiling, but I snatch them out of the air.
“They both died the same night, Vivienne and Cady.”
“How horrible for poor Anthony, losing his wife and daughter on the same night.”
“Ah, bzzzzz, wrong answer. He was Vivienne’s husband, but not Cady’s father.”
“He wasn’t?” I ask.
“And Vivienne wasn’t Cady’s mother.”
“What? She lied about that, too? How do you know all this?”
“I’m trying to tell you. It was 1898, three years after Autumn Splendor, also known as Nightshade, was built, and a year before Vivienne went blind. And incidentally, she swears it was because of that bolt of lightning, which doesn’t seem possible, since the lightning never touched her.”
“Yeah, that’s what Cady said, but we’ve already established that she plays loose with the truth.”
“Here’s the weird part. Vivienne let me know that she was there with me. The lamp flickered on.”
“Without a lightbulb!”
“Right-o. Clear sign, wouldn’t you say? Not that I saw anything like a real body. But she was moving around so quickly that my hair was blowing in the draft she caused. Her thoughts were pinging me from this corner, that corner, from under the chair with the stuffing hanging out, from the shelf by the window. The mice got your Cheetos, by the way.”
“Who cares about the Cheetos. What was she saying?”
“Nothing … until I told her that you were swimming at midnight with Cady, and she screamed ‘NO!’ ”
“I heard her say that once, too!”
“Then your iPad started blinking like a railroad stop light, and blue links flashed across the screen, dozens of them. And then everything went blank, except one website lit up in a highlight color I’ve never seen before, a bright sparkly silvery-blue like water.”
“You clicked on it?” I ask, breathlessly.
“That’s how I got the whole scoop. Cady was her husband’s niece who came to live with the family just before Vivienne went blind. And Cady didn’t fit in with the family. There were three other kids, two older and one younger. Cady did nasty stuff, like hiding a dead rat under the little kid’s pillow, and throwing soup at the walls in the dining room. She stole their stuff and hid it in the forest.”
“Like my nail polish and my Sweet Georgia Brown music box!”
“It gets worse. She tried to feed the other kids those belladonna berries, but they never trusted anything she said or did, which is why they didn’t drop dead. Cady and Vivienne were like cats and dogs, hissing and barking at each other even before Vivienne went blind. Afterward it was worse.”
“Yeah, Cady told me even the dog was a wreck.”
“There was no dog. Cady wanted a dog, but Vivienne said no way, because there were already too many things for her to trip over. Cady was always leaving things in Vivienne’s path. She was a real pain, wasn’t she?”
“Still is,” I say softly, but I wonder if is implies living, whereas Cady isn’t.
Scooter continues in rapid-fire bursts of information. “One night, way back then, Vivienne was standing on the balcony, the one outside Dad’s studio. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her eyes, or anything else, but she hung around out there imagining the twinkling stars and planets. Cady came out to the balcony, but she wouldn’t say who she was. Another one of her mean tricks. To Vivienne, it was pitch-black on the small balcony, and she didn’t know who she was bumping shoulders with. So she reached out to flap her hand around Cady’s face, to figure out who it was. Cady wasn’t gonna let Vivienne paw her, so she leaned away and backed against the little low wall, and then it kinda went downhill from there.”
“You mean they had a real knock-down, drag-out fight?” I ask.
“No, when Cady jerked away from Vivienne, the whole balcony went downhill because it was built by carpenters with sawdust and spackle for brains.”
“Do we know what happened next?”
“Vivienne lost her balance and both of them tumbled over the wall.”
“Or the floor collapsed under them,” I suggest. “Whatever happened, they both crashed into the pool below the balcony. Did you know there used to be a pool in our yard?”
“Yeah, but not the kind of pool where you can just swim away like a stunned eel. The water was shallow. There would’ve been just enough to drown in. Or maybe their heads bashed into the concrete before they had a chance to drown. The fact is, they both died, and Vivienne blames herself. Oh, and one other thing,” Scooter says with a sheepish grin. “Your iPad is totally blown. It’s deader than a popped balloon.”
My mind races through the menu swarming in my head. “Why did Vivienne shatter the lightbulb and Nana Fiona’s tea cup?”
Scooter twists his mouth in thought. “Theory Number One: maybe she just wanted us to know she’s there. Not even a cockroach likes being ignored.”
“Yeah, but there’s got to be some other reason, something more … ghostly.”
An apple on my desk tempts Scooter. His biting and crunching drive me crazy, because I want to hear more. Instead, what I get is, “If I swallow the seeds, think an orchard will grow in my gut?”
“Forget the apples. What do you think about Vivienne?”
“Theory Number Two: she wants our help.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. To settle some mess?” Scooter spits the seeds halfway across the room toward my trash can and misses. In a hundred years this spot will be an orchard. “Here’s the way I figure it,” Scooter says. “Cady blames Vivienne and Vivienne bl
ames herself for the balcony thing, or maybe it’s the other way around.”
“That means one’s hissing-mad, and the other’s burning up with guilt,” I speculate.
“Get over it. More than a century’s passed already.”
“Their souls are locked in eternal battle. How sad is that, Scooter?”
“Theory Number Three: after they bump into each other in the world beyond, they strike a deal—Vivienne gets Nightshade. Cady lives in the forest and stays away from our house.”
“She got in here at least twice—once to steal my things and once to move that cameo around.”
He shrugs. “Okay, she swings by every so often for kicks, but she doesn’t hang out here, right?”
“Because she doesn’t want to run into Vivienne, and Vivienne never sets foot in Cady’s forest.”
Scooter gets a faraway look in his eye. “If we don’t do something to fix things between them, they could go on hating each other forever.”
Last night, Mom said that we’d talk some more about my adventure—near-death experience, she calls it—and today we’ve talked about it until I’m so bored I could spit. I’m never to go back to the forest under any circumstances, not to talk to Cady, not to swim at all until further notice, not even in the kiddie pool at the country club, and not to go out after dark without one or more chaperones over the age of eighteen. Meaning Mom and Dad, who would be happy if I stayed in my room under house arrest with one of those ankle cuffs for the next thirty years.
Luisa and Sara are under the same reign of terror at their houses. We have been called irresponsible. Foolhardy. Defiant. Untrustworthy. Lucky to be alive. I feel badly that I’ve gotten them into this mess. And I can’t stop thinking about those moments in Midnight Lake: clenching my teeth until my jaws ache so I can’t swallow water, feeling it crawl into my lungs through my nose anyway; gasping for breath whenever I come up for air, sinking back under the surface no matter how hard I try not to; feeling my leaden legs and arms refuse to pump. And all the while hearing the wail of the banshee loon growing more frantic until it’s nearly screeching its warning.