Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  The flight attendant passing my row while conducting the preflight check gave me a cold smile and said, “Please turn off any electronic devices.”

  I nodded and tapped my phone as if ending my call, but Jennie continued talking. “It’s inside of Mischa now, just like it was inside of Violet. You have to get it to come out of her in order to get rid of it.”

  Inside of her. Like demonic possession? I anxiously waited until we reached our cruising altitude, high above the green patchwork of Georgia, to ask more questions. “Do you mean we have to perform, like… an exorcism?”

  “I don’t know everything,” Jennie admitted. “There are five spirits. They work together, and they’re powerful. You might not be able to demand that they leave Mischa’s soul. You might have to lure them out.”

  Lure them out… A nasty shiver ran through my body and left a stale taste in my mouth. A formal exorcism was scary enough. But luring sounded like something different. Luring would require bait. The only time I’d ever seen them, or what I had assumed to be them, was in Michigan when Jennie had predicted Violet’s death. They’d looked blurry, like they were figures in an oil painting that had been smeared. Or like a field of energy in the form of a person, suggesting the presence of someone without anyone actually occupying space. Kind of like a reflection in a dirty mirror. It was hard to imagine those five things being inside of Mischa, if that was actually how they always looked, and even harder to imagine what they might be capable of doing outside of her.

  “And if we find a way to lure them out, then what happens to Mischa?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jennie replied.

  In Chicago, I guzzled a large coffee during my layover. Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” was playing on the sound system again, and I momentarily marveled at the weirdness of hearing that song twice in one day.

  I really wished I had a way of getting in touch with Mrs. Robinson back in Florida. I considered calling the Oscawana Pavilion front desk and asking to be put through to her room, but I knew that could result in serious drama if Mrs. Robinson’s daughter was screening her mother’s calls.

  When the flight attendant tapped on the microphone at the gate service desk to announce boarding for the flight to Green Bay, I stood and stretched. There was no first class on this flight, but I was in the first boarding group. I stepped into the short line behind a woman with a severe haircut and a phone pressed to her ear, my boarding pass in hand.

  But then, from behind me, I heard my name called.

  “McKenna.”

  I turned around and froze before my mind registered what my eyes were seeing. Because twenty feet behind me stood Trey Emory.

  CHAPTER 6

  WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” I asked as my face broke into a wide smile. I stepped out of line and impulsively threw my arms around Trey’s neck. As I squeezed him and tilted my head back to kiss him, my heart swelled with joy. I was so caught up in the thrill of unexpectedly seeing him that only when he pressed his lips against mine did I realize that this was all wrong. What was Trey doing at the airport in Chicago? He was supposed to be at his boarding school. In an instant, my excitement turned to ice-cold dread.

  “I was on my way to Florida to find you,” Trey said. He wasn’t smiling about the irony of the two of us running into each other by happenstance at O’Hare airport. The grave expression on his face deepened my fear about his reason for not being at Northern Reserve Academy at that very moment.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “How are you even here right now?” He looked terrible. He was pale and seemed to have lost even more weight than when I’d last seen him in January. A fading green-and-yellow bruise encircled his right eye. He wore a heavy black winter coat that I didn’t recognize, which served as a reminder that it was still cold in the Midwest. I took his hands in mine and stared down at his familiar fingers, at the slim, slightly raised pale scar across his left palm. “Why? How?”

  Trey looked around suspiciously, and his eyes lingered on an airport security guard standing outside the Hudson News convenience market. “It’s a long story. Why are you here?”

  The line of passengers waiting to board my flight advanced. The flight attendant announced, “Now boarding passengers for Flight 4632 to Green Bay in Group B. Seating all passengers in Group B.”

  “I’m going home,” I stated the obvious. “You know there was a tornado, right? Two days ago?”

  “I saw it on the news.”

  “Two people in Willow died,” I told him cautiously, knowing that he didn’t have access to the Internet at Northern Reserve and usually didn’t talk to his mom and brother on the phone until the weekend. If he’d heard about the Portnoy family somehow, he probably would have already guessed—based on how I’d hinted on our weekly call that trouble was brewing—that the evil spirits behind the curse were somehow involved with the weather in our hometown. But when he remained silent, waiting for me to continue, my heart sank. I was going to have to be the bearer of bad news. “It was Mischa’s mom and dad. And her sister has a spinal cord injury. From what I’ve heard, her chances aren’t good.”

  Before saying a word, Trey shook his head. “No way.”

  “Way,” I confirmed. I went on to quickly give him a recap of the last two and a half months with details that I couldn’t share on our monitored phone calls—about how Mischa had been resisting the spirits’ orders to predict deaths.

  As I backtracked in the story and told him about how Violet had visited me in Willow before I moved down to Tampa, I noticed him balling his hands into fists at his sides.

  The flight attendant announced into the microphone, “Now boarding all passengers in Group C. If you are in Group C, you are now welcome to board.”

  I winced, knowing that there wasn’t enough time remaining for us to keep talking. “I can’t miss this flight,” I said. “Henry’s on his way back to Wisconsin from France, and I’m afraid he’s going to try to hurt Violet. Or worse. And I have to stop Mischa from doing something stupid to try to save Amanda’s life.”

  “Oh. Right,” he said, as if realizing for the first time that I really needed to get on my plane.

  “Can you come with me? To Wisconsin?” I asked. I couldn’t leave him, but I couldn’t not go back to Willow.

  He looked regretfully down at the boarding pass in his hands. “I don’t know if they’ll let me switch this for another flight. I think I might need a credit card to pay a change fee.”

  The line of passengers boarding my flight was dwindling. I didn’t know what to do.

  “Can you give me your phone?” Trey asked. “I just need a way to get online and pay the change fee without having the actual credit card like, physically in my hand. I can get myself on the next flight to Green Bay and give you your phone back tonight.”

  I was about to hand it over when I thought about Jennie and how long it had taken me to find her. If Trey took my phone and then didn’t make his way to Wisconsin, I wondered if I’d be able to hear her again. “What if… what if I text Violet and ask her to book a flight for you?”

  Something surprising—outrage, maybe—registered on his face, and I realized I’d made a huge mistake by even offering this suggestion. “No,” he said emphatically. “No Violet. If I’m going to follow you to Wisconsin, she can’t know I’m there.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “No Violet. Bad idea.” The last passenger for my flight was having his boarding pass scanned. I’d arrived—unexpectedly—at a moment I’d been dreading. I loved him, but did I trust Trey? Enough to give him my phone, my access to Jennie? Potentially my only weapon against the spirits tormenting Mischa? I could understand, based on Trey’s last interaction with Violet in the woods in Michigan, why he would be reluctant to involve her. But his reaction was surprisingly volatile.

  I wondered if somehow she had something to do with why he wasn’t at Northern.

  Trying hard to look like my heart wasn’t breaking, I handed Trey my phone. He was, after a
ll, someone I’d known my whole life. He’d known Jennie too. If there was anyone in the world I should have been able to trust with my line of communication with her, it was him. “I really need this back, and I can’t explain why right now.”

  Trey nodded. “I’ll just use it to change my flight online from here. I swear. I mean, I can’t go anywhere. I’ll never make it through security a second time. You’ll have it back tonight.”

  I leaned forward and give him a peck on the lips before dashing over to the flight attendants’ desk. I shoved my boarding pass at the flight attendant, who scanned it, and I took one last look at Trey over my shoulder.

  “What’s your PIN?” he called out to me.

  “One zero zero nine,” I called in reply. As I walked down the passenger boarding bridge, I wondered if Trey would recognize the numbers. October ninth, ten-nine. The date of the fire that burned down our house on the corner.

  By the time I buckled myself into my seat, I was already regretting what I’d done. My stomach churned from anxiety throughout the entire hour of my flight. Without my phone, it would be difficult to reach Henry, I couldn’t talk to Jennie, and I wouldn’t have any way of tracking down Mischa. And Trey would be able to look through anything on my phone… including my call log, which was full of no one but Henry.

  The fact that he’d busted out of Northern troubled me, as did his claim that he’d been in the infirmary there on Tuesday night, when we’d last spoken on the phone. How on earth had he been able to get himself to Chicago—especially if administrators at Northern were probably searching for him?

  When I landed, I found Mom waiting for me at the baggage claim. “Did you want to stop for lunch?” Mom asked. “I texted you, but you didn’t reply.”

  After the way I’d begged my parents to allow me to have a phone again after I moved to Tampa, there was no way Mom would ever believe I’d left my phone behind in Florida. But I hadn’t expected that my missing phone would be an issue almost immediately after I landed in Wisconsin. So I lied. “I think I packed it into my bag.”

  “Well, I hope it turns up when we get to the house,” Mom told me. She studied me hard for a moment before she raised an eyebrow at me and continued, “Mary Jane stopped by last night to tell me that Trey’s gone missing from his school. She asked me to let her know if you hear from him.”

  My stomach iced over, and I prayed that my face wasn’t revealing anything. “Oh. Wow. I just spoke with him on Tuesday night. He said he was in the infirmary, but didn’t say anything about leaving Northern. How could he have gone missing?” I let some of the real anxiety I was feeling play out on my face, hoping Mom would take it as concern for him.

  Mom met my gaze for just a fraction of a second, and the doubt I saw in her eyes felt like a little stab in my side. “I think he’d be smarter than to contact you and put you in a difficult position. But I hope that when you find your phone, you’ll tell me if he’s reached out to you.”

  “Mom, I really think my phone’s in my bag,” I insisted, trying to steady my voice so that she wouldn’t think I was trying to start an argument with her. “I thought I had it with me on the way to the airport, but I may have even left it at Dad’s because it was so early in the morning when we left the house. You can search my stuff if you want.”

  We stepped outside the sliding doors of the airport, and Mom looked straight ahead as we continued on to the parking lot. “I don’t want to search your stuff. I want to be able to trust you.”

  I let the conversation drop, even though knowing that my mom believed I was lying about my phone made me feel awful. On the ride back to town, I imagined scenarios in which Trey was apprehended by authorities with my phone in his possession, and tried to think up lies to have ready in case I needed to explain to my Mom how that may have occurred.

  Twenty minutes later, when we reached the outskirts of Willow, I saw the first evidence of the tornados that had touched down. The way they’d inflicted damage in focused areas was eerie. On some blocks, trees had been uprooted and cars had been flipped along one side of the street, while everything on the opposite side looked perfectly normal. Mom insisted on driving me past Glenn’s house so that I could see the tree that had smashed through his living room. I got the sense as we slowed down in front of his address that this was Mom’s not-so-subtle way of reminding me before we arrived home that Glenn was crashing there, and would be for a while until his house had been repaired.

  We turned at the corner of Martha Road and drove past the familiar houses of my street. This was the first time I’d ever traveled down our block without feeling an instant sense of security, a reassurance that I was safer simply by being home. My throat tightened; I wasn’t sure if tears were threatening to form because I felt even more endangered by being back there, or because Martha Road was no longer truly my home. Since moving to Florida, I’d focused every spare ounce of my energy on yearning to be back there, and now I had to admit that it seemed unlikely that I’d ever actually live on that street again.

  It was a gloomy, overcast day, and the dead, yellowed lawns of our neighbors made our street look as if winter had simply exhausted it. I noticed as we pulled into our garage that the FOR SALE sign was still standing on the Emorys’ front yard. It was a relief but not a shock that they hadn’t found a buyer yet, since Willow wasn’t exactly a real estate hot spot. But the sign served as a reminder that Mrs. Emory was being sued for an enormous sum of money by the Simmons family for the actions she’d taken as a college student. Trey and I hadn’t discussed the status of that lawsuit in any of our phone conversations since January.

  What Mom hadn’t told me earlier in the week when we’d touched base was that Glenn’s two dogs and ancient cat were also staying at our house until his house was livable again. “Luckily, so far everyone’s getting along,” Mom told me as Glenn’s dogs circled me, tails wagging, the moment I stepped inside the house. Maude, my mom’s puppy, certainly seemed to be happy about the company.

  As the afternoon passed, I wondered where Trey was—if he had gotten a ticket, if he had successfully got on a plane without being noticed. The uncertainty was torture.

  And I felt lost without my phone. It was possible that Violet was texting me to see if I was home yet, and her house was much too far from mine for me to even consider walking. Matt Galanis, Mischa’s boyfriend—with whom she was most likely staying—lived pretty far from us but within walking distance. I was putting Maude on her leash with the intention of strolling over to his house to see if Mischa was there when our landline rang. I heard Mom answer it in the kitchen. And then, “McKenna? You’ve got a call.”

  “Who is it?” I asked. No one ever called our landline except my grandparents and telemarketers fund-raising for charities.

  “It’s Cheryl,” Mom said.

  Out of everyone I knew, Cheryl was my only friend who would have even known my home phone number from back in the days before we all had cell phones. Maybe she’d been trying to reach me on my cell and Trey had told her that I was back in town, and that he had my phone? Cheryl was the only one of my female friends who Trey truly liked, so it was possible—though unlikely—that he would have replied to her. He hadn’t hesitated to do whatever I asked of him in an effort to save Mischa’s life, but I got the sense that he thought she was shallow and pretentious. I took the phone from my mom and pressed it to my ear. “Hello?”

  “McKenna, it’s Violet.” Her voice was trembling and high-pitched. “I need you to come over to my house right now.”

  My heart immediately started to pound. I side-eyed my mom, who was making a pot of coffee. I had to sound casual. “Uh… what’s going on?” There was no way my mom was going to agree to drive me over to the Simmons house. Technically, Violet still had a restraining order against me. But something had to be very wrong, and I fervently hoped Henry didn’t have anything to do with it.

  On the other end of the line, I heard another voice in the background before Violet replied, “Amanda Portnoy’s
doctors are saying that she’s not showing any signs of improvement, and Mischa’s here. Just come as fast as you can.”

  Mischa? At Violet’s house? “Are you safe?” I asked.

  There was a long pause before Violet said, “No. Just hurry.”

  Click.

  My chest ached as if the wind had been knocked out of me. The only reason I could think of for Mischa being at Violet’s house was if she’d decided to kill Violet—either in an attempt to rid herself of the curse, or to punish Violet for having started all of this in the first place. As extreme as it may have been to imagine Mischa showing up at Violet’s house in a murderous rage, I knew that’s what Henry had been thinking too—and Mischa had just as valid a reason.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I announced in a tiny voice. My mom said something in response about the cold, but I was already on my way into the living room to put on shoes. Maude whimpered at the front door when I set her leash back on its hook on the wall. I couldn’t put her at risk.

  Outside, I jogged toward the only destination that came to mind: the Richmonds’ house.

  My stomach sank when I rounded the corner of Cabot Drive and didn’t see Henry’s truck in the driveway. I didn’t know for sure if he’d even made good on his threat to fly home to Wisconsin. But I dashed up the front steps anyway and jammed on the doorbell, winded and frightened that Mischa had already done something irreversible in the fifteen minutes it had taken me to get there.

  It felt like an eternity passed before I heard the lock on the door twist from the other side. When the door opened and I saw Henry standing there in his boxer shorts and a T-shirt, hair rumpled, I almost cried in relief. “You’re here!”

  “What are you doing here?” he asked as he opened the screen door and stepped out onto the stoop. “I thought you were in Florida until the summer.”

  “I’m here for Mischa’s parents’ funeral,” I said. I couldn’t get into everything until I was sure no one could hear us. “I’m sorry to come over here unannounced like this, but I need a ride to Violet’s house. It’s urgent.”