Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  “And she’s having some complications,” he added. “That’s not a great sign, so early on.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, my face turning red. This conversation had suddenly gone in a much different direction than I’d anticipated. “That’s big news. Great news. I mean, not the complications, but I—you know. Didn’t know that you guys were even—” I cut myself off. Talking to my dad about something that even loosely bordered on his sex life was just too gross to continue.

  “We’ve always kept things kind of open-ended on the topic of kids. Rhonda didn’t seem too keen on the idea of changing diapers in the middle of the night until… Well, opinions change when different circumstances present themselves,” Dad said, sounding tired. “But right now, it’s important that she not be under any additional stress.”

  I held my breath for a moment, waiting for him to specify that stress being caused by me. But instead, he said, “Please don’t mention to her that we spoke.”

  CHAPTER 3

  AFTER CLEARING THE TABLE, I boiled eggs that I’d have to peel in the morning for Mrs. Robinson and placed them in the fridge. As I climbed the stairs to my bedroom on the second floor to be ready when Trey called, my thoughts were racing. A little half brother or sister? Butterflies swirled around my stomach at the thought of having a tiny sibling around. Of course, my mom might have been upset by the news, but I was getting the sense that her relationship with Glenn was more serious than she was letting on, so perhaps she might not have minded too much if Dad were to have another kid.

  And then darkness crept into my thoughts: If Violet’s spirits were able to jeopardize my mom’s safety and lure poor Stephani deMilo out onto thin ice, what chance did a defenseless infant stand against them? Caring about another person only made me more vulnerable. Just when I thought that breaking the curse couldn’t seem less possible, the stakes were unfairly raised on me again.

  I stepped into my bedroom, wondering how I might explain any of this to Trey, when I noticed the top drawer of my nightstand had been left open by an inch. I dashed around the foot of my bed to peer inside. My fears were confirmed: the candles, candle holders, salt, and lighter were gone. Rhonda must have thrown them out, and the realization made my heart beat wildly. This would not have been a big deal except that the sun had set. There was nowhere within walking distance where I could buy replacements for any of those items before I had to perform the protection spell again in the morning.

  Panicking, I texted Kirsten to ask if she might be able to light the candles in Chicago on my behalf in the morning. Even if she agreed, that still would have been a disruption in the routine, which was troubling. But I had to try.

  She hadn’t texted back yet when my phone rang at seven thirty with Trey’s call. Although I really hadn’t wanted to upset Trey with news about Violet or the curse while he was stuck at Northern Reserve, I now felt compelled to at least make him aware that it wasn’t over—if only for his own safety.

  “Hey,” Trey said once the operator at Northern Reserve had patched through his call to my cell phone. As always, even under the most awful circumstances, the sound of his voice sent a thrill through me. Connecting with him, hearing his breath on the other end of the phone, knowing just for a few minutes exactly where he was and what he was doing, calmed my nerves even as my pulse quickened. It wasn’t as if contact with Trey made me forget about the danger that Mischa was in, that we were all in. Rather, he reset my belief that one day the nightmare that Violet had unleashed upon us would end. Deep in my bones, I felt that Trey and I belonged together. Knowing that he was mine and I was his reaffirmed my belief that there was order in the world; despite all of the chaos we had yet to conquer, our bond was real, and nothing could tear us apart.

  “Hey,” I replied. Subtly updating him about Mischa and her fear of the number three, Mrs. Robinson, and candles in my bedroom lighting themselves on fire was going to be tricky. Since I knew a monitor was listening on the Northern side of the call, I had to choose my words carefully. I assumed from my own experience at Sheridan that the guards at Northern probably only half listened, and most likely had a list of keywords based on Trey’s case history for which they were supposed to keep their ears peeled. So I had to do my best to avoid saying words like “violet,” “curse,” “death,” and “revenge.”

  “How are things in sunny Florida?” he asked. “Have you found a date to prom yet?”

  “Ha.” From what I’d gathered, prom was a really big deal at Hyde Park High School, even bigger than it had been in Willow. I’d made the mistake of mentioning the chosen theme, Moulin Rouge, to Trey on our last call. I had guessed correctly that he’d find the idea of teenagers in suburban Florida dressing up like turn-of-the-century Parisian courtesans to be amusing. If Olivia had simply not invited Violet to her birthday party back in September and set a horrific chain of events into motion, I probably would have been very excited about prom. I had to believe that one way or another, Trey and I still would have fallen in love that year, and I’d be begging him to humor me by renting a tux. As a tenth grader, I’d imagined going all out for prom with a full-length gown and gloves. But there was no way I’d even consider going to the dance in Tampa with anyone besides Trey. Prom was just one more part of the normal high school experience I’d have to forfeit, and resenting it would prevent me from remaining focused. “Haven’t been looking for one, to be honest.”

  “I’d assume you wouldn’t have to look too hard, being the mysterious new girl in town,” Trey teased. His voice sounded different, and I realized it was because I could hear an unfamiliar echo. “You’re probably way more of a source of intrigue than you realize.”

  I asked, “Where are you? It sounds like there’s an echo.”

  He hesitated before replying. “The infirmary. It’s a big room with a lot of tile.”

  I was lying on my stomach across my bed, but at Trey’s mention of infirmary, I rolled over and sat upright in alarm. “Um, are you going to tell me why you’re there?” I asked, instantly worried.

  He hummed, “Uhhhh,” for a prolonged moment as if he wasn’t sure whether or not it was safe to say. “Just not feeling well. They quarantine you here at the first sign of the sniffles—or any other kind of trouble.”

  The melodious tone his voice had taken on insinuated that this wasn’t the whole truth. Trey was usually being sarcastic, and he normally spoke with a cool, detached delivery. But he shifted into a more vibrant, singsong voice when he was hinting there was something he couldn’t tell me. Something was going on at Northern, something he couldn’t describe over the phone, which made me even more worried. Automatically I wondered if he’d gotten into a fight or was more ill than he was telling me. Not being able to ask outright killed me. I just needed to know he was okay.

  “Oh, really,” I replied flatly to suggest that I got the message that something else was happening. “I wonder where you might have picked up a case of the sniffles.”

  “How about you? Have you been feeling blue?” he asked.

  I waited a beat before responding. We often used “blue” and “purple” to refer to Violet, and I was tempted to reply that I had indeed been feeling a little blue. But knowing that Trey—one way or another—had landed himself in need of some kind of medical care made me a lot less eager to burden him with an update about evil happenings back in Willow. Nothing frustrated Trey more than being closely handled by authority figures, so if this infirmary business had anything to do with that, he was probably already in a volatile state of mind. The last thing I wanted to do was tell him something that might serve as a catalyst for him to mouth off to a guard or lash out at a fellow student.

  For a second, I considered telling him about Dad and Rhonda’s big news, but even that seemed too personal to share on a monitored phone call. “All good,” I lied.

  After we said our good-byes for the week, a lump formed in my throat. Something was wrong, I was sure of it, and there was no way for him to communicate what it was
.

  Even though I knew that tinkering around with my pendulum while I felt like Mischa and I were in danger wasn’t a great idea, I couldn’t resist the urge. By nothing short of a miracle, it had still been in my pillowcase atop my bed when Mom and I had driven up to Sheridan in February to collect the handful of belongings I’d left behind there.

  I snuck downstairs to the kitchen carrying my last stick of palo santo, lit it with a safety match from the box that Dad kept over the sink, and carefully carried it back up to my room, cupping the glowing end of it with my hand to avoid setting off any smoke detectors. The small stick of soft wood burned for only a few seconds before the ember died off. But the scent of it in my room made me feel a little more secure about withdrawing my pendulum from my sock drawer, where I kept it hidden.

  “Pendulum,” I asked. “Is Trey in trouble?”

  Yes.

  “Does the trouble he’s in have something to do with Violet?”

  The pendulum rotated clockwise twice—yes—but then wobbled and dangled from my fingers without moving in any particular direction. “Does that mean… maybe?” I asked in confusion.

  Yes.

  Great. Frustrated, I sighed. I was going to have to insist that Mrs. Robinson teach me how to reach out to Jennie the next day. Maybe even explain to her why it was so urgent. Mischa and I couldn’t afford to be taking actions based on assumptions any longer, and if Trey was in serious jeopardy, then I needed detailed guidance. Getting real answers out of the pendulum took too long, and I could never be sure if yes or no was the complete answer to my question, or just a response to part of it.

  As far as I could tell, since arriving in Florida I’d only been receiving messages from Jennie rather than being able to effectively transfer any information back. Our communication was completely one-sided. Although Olivia’s spirit seemed to have been able to master communicating with me by manipulating physical objects like my music boxes, Jennie’s spirit had an easier time with electrical devices. Early in March, when I’d set my earbuds in my ears as I began my walk to school, I’d heard a voice I knew was Jennie’s before I’d even tapped my phone to start playing music. She’d been repeating a three-syllable word over and over again. At first it had sounded like “tomato,” but it was quickly drowned out by a noise that sounded like high winds, the kind that knock the breath right out of your lungs and whip your hair around your face. Wisconsin storm season wind, the kind I’d never yet experienced in Florida—the kind that used to drive Moxie to hide under the bed and whimper. Almost a week ago, I’d left my laptop open to a blank page in Microsoft Word while doing homework late at night, and I’d come back from refilling my water bottle to find that she’d managed to type characters that formed a shape on the page like this:

  —

  /

  At first I’d thought she was warning me about a “V.” Violet. Being certain that Jennie was trying to caution me about something but having to guess what it might be felt like scratching off a lottery ticket to find all winning numbers until reaching the last one and realizing I hadn’t won anything at all. Like being hit with a one-two punch of hope and defeat. Upon seeing the characters on my screen last Wednesday night, I asked the pendulum to confirm my shot-in-the-dark suspicion that Jennie was trying to warn me about a tornado, and the pendulum had said Yes. From there, the messages became muddled, and no matter how I phrased my question about who was in danger because of a tornado, the answer was always yes, yes, yes.

  But it was early April. Tornado season didn’t truly begin in Wisconsin until summer.

  I checked the local weather in Wisconsin every morning on my phone, and never once in the last six days since the weird typing incident had unseasonable storms been mentioned in the forecast.

  By midnight, when I knew I had to at least try to sleep, Kirsten still hadn’t replied to my text. I was panicking. A thorough scouring of social media with what little information I knew about her turned up nothing. The only account that I came across that I suspected might be hers was on Instagram, and it was private. I tossed and turned, knowing that it wasn’t fair to be furious since Kirsten was basically a stranger who didn’t owe me anything. But still, I didn’t want to think about what might happen the next day if too many hours passed before one of us was able to perform the candle ritual again.

  In the morning, I slept through my alarm but was relieved to see that Kirsten had texted me back at around four a.m. She promised to light the candles and chant the words of protection for Mischa and her family as soon as she arrived at the bookstore that morning, but urged me to buy more supplies as soon as possible. I can’t promise that my version will be as effective as yours, she texted me, reiterating her belief that somehow I had more control over witchcraft than she did.

  I fired off a text message to Henry apologizing for missing his FaceTime request, showered, and quickly peeled the eggs I’d boiled the night before. I placed the broken shells in a Ziploc bag, slipped that into my tote bag along with the other items I’d bought for Mrs. Robinson, and dashed off to school.

  Throughout the day, a powerful feeling of impending doom followed me around like a shadow. I attributed it to my most recent conversations with Mischa and Trey, but this felt different than just a general sense of looming danger. This felt much more urgent, much more targeted at… me. By lunchtime, as I tucked myself away at the end of the table where I always ate alone outside, I had started to get the sensation that I was playing hide-and-go-seek with someone, or something, and they were getting closer to finding me.

  Ms. Hernández stared at me patiently during our weekly appointment from her seat across from mine. I’d already told her—probably unconvincingly—that there wasn’t much going on in my life. “Really? Nothing? How’s Trey?”

  “Fine.”

  “You seem awfully quiet today. But I can see the wheels turning in your head. You look like you’ve chewed through your lower lip too. You can trust me, McKenna. If there’s something going on, I’m here to listen.”

  I forced a smile, imagining a world where I could unload all of my normal teenage problems on her. This wasn’t it. “Nope. Everything’s, you know. The usual.”

  During chemistry, my lab partner kept shooting me dirty looks as I checked my phone every ten seconds or so. I was certain that I was going to receive a text from Mischa, Kirsten, or my mom, informing me that some kind of tragedy had occurred.

  As I waited for the bus, I gave in and texted Mischa. It was still only lunchtime in Wisconsin, so I figured she’d reply quickly since there was no way she’d already be at the gym for practice. What’s up? I wrote, not wanting to let on that I was more worried than usual. It was better that she had no clue about the candles and my failure to light them that morning.

  The bus was later than it had ever been before, and Mischa didn’t reply. As a distraction, I popped my earbuds in my ears and was scrolling through my apps on my phone in search of Spotify when I heard high-pitched static. Even though I wasn’t listening to any audio, I tapped my volume + button several times until the static was loud enough to hurt my ears, and then I heard it: that wind sound again. Wisconsin storm wind—with an earsplitting, high-pitched whistle at the top and the threat of destruction roaring at lower octaves.

  “What the…,” I mumbled. “Okay, okay. I’m on it.” My heart beat wildly; something was happening—if it was a tornado touching down in Willow at that very moment, I had no immediate way of finding out. My brain short-circuited for a second as I tried to decide what to do first: text Mom, or check the weather? My fingertip made the decision for me. I tapped my phone to check the weather in Willow. Nothing strange. Gray skies, 60 percent chance of rain at that hour.

  Feeling my chest tighten as my breath hastened, I checked local news in Wisconsin, scrolling furiously. My eyes scanned over headlines in search of something—anything—absolutely positive that I’d see a shocking breaking story. The Brewers had won the game the night before against the Reds. The State Assem
bly was preparing to vote about moving a bunch of coal piles in downtown Green Bay. A new medical facility had been opened in Kaukauna. The bus pulled up to the curb, and I boarded it, so distracted that I knocked shoulders with a guy carrying a skateboard as he passed me to exit.

  “Watch it,” he snapped at me.

  I mumbled an apology over my shoulder as the doors closed behind me, flashed the driver my fare card, and sank into the closest available seat. As the bus merged into traffic and my heart rate returned to normal, I gave up, clicking my screen off. I couldn’t find proof of anything out of the ordinary happening in Willow, and I was relieved that I hadn’t texted Mom and freaked her out.

  And yet the weird feeling persisted.

  Once at the assisted living facility, I said hi to my manager, Luis, changed into my uniform, and hurried through my schedule of visiting patients. I was saving Mrs. Robinson for last, but I also wanted to make sure I had enough time remaining at the end of my shift to receive a proper lesson from her about reaching out to Jennie.

  And, of course, because that was my plan, every possible thing went wrong on my rounds. Mrs. Schwartz on the second floor—who walked painstakingly slowly with a walker—wanted me to escort her down to the dining room, and she insisted on stopping in the open doorways of all her girlfriends to chat. Mr. Torres asked me to open his mail and read a letter to him from his daughter in Puerto Rico, and I struggled to phonetically sound out words I didn’t recognize from Spanish class. Then Mrs. Jacobson insisted that the dinner she’d received hadn’t been what she’d ordered, and the head of kitchen services angrily told me that she had been pulling this stunt almost every night, and I had to sort that out to make sure she ate something before the kitchen closed.

  Finally, with only eight minutes to spare before I had to clock out, I arrived at Mrs. Robinson’s room. “Did you bring the oils and the eggshells?” she demanded the moment I stepped through her doorway.