by Zoe Aarsen
Henry shook his head and said, “It’s okay, McKenna. You don’t have to say it.”
“No, I do,” I insisted. “I hope you’re not doing this to prove anything—or to try to win my heart,” I said as gently as possible. “Because you already have it, in so many ways… just…”
“I get it,” Henry said gruffly. “And I want to be a part of this anyway, because I love you whether you love me back or not.”
Before I could reply, Henry descended the stairs and joined Violet and Trey in the car. I felt like I’d just been struck by lightning—unable to move and speechless, my mind completely blank except for the words Henry had just spoken.
Overhead, a crow cawed, pulling me back into reality. It was time to go. I reached for the door handle behind me and took one last look at the parlor. It was then that I thought of the gun Violet had put back in the top drawer of her father’s desk.
And my scalp began tingling.
The previous day, in Mr. Simmons’s office, after she’d returned the handgun to the drawer where Trey had found it, Violet had slipped the key to the top desk drawer into the pocket of the black pants she’d been wearing. But Violet was a planner, and although she’d been far more helpful in the last two days than I ever would have expected her to be, she did know these spirits better than we did. And I was absolutely certain as my eyes scanned the parlor and came to rest on the sofa on which she’d slept that she had stowed the handgun beneath her pillow at some point before we’d all fallen asleep. She’d wanted to keep it close to her during the night, and now Jennie had directed my eyes to the exact place where it was stashed so that I’d know Violet had already taken precautions to protect herself.
And in doing so, she’d made it abundantly clear to me what role I would need her to play.
CHAPTER 17
THE PARKING LOT AT GUNDARSSON’S was even more packed when we arrived that day than it had been for the memorial. Storm clouds had rolled in, but the weather report didn’t predict rain until later in the afternoon. I sat in the back seat of Violet’s car next to Trey, who slouched down as low as he could, and with Violet behind the wheel, we waited in tense silence for Henry to emerge.
“This is taking way too long,” Violet mumbled. We’d all thought he’d be able to step inside, nab a sticker, and leave, but he’d been in there almost ten minutes. “Maybe he ran into that Eastern European gymnastics guy from yesterday.”
“Something’s wrong,” Trey said, shaking his head. “One of us should go in there and see if he’s okay.”
“No,” I said sternly as Violet unbuckled her belt. “If Mischa sees more than one of us in there, it’ll tip her off.” My scalp wasn’t tingling, and I popped one earbud into my ear and opened my radio app just to confirm with Jennie that there wasn’t reason for us to be concerned. “Jennie, is Henry in trouble?”
There was a long stretch of crackling static before I heard her reply: “I can’t tell. He’s too close to them, so I’m sensing danger, but that could just be general danger.”
Trey, whose eyes were fixed on the entrance to Gundarsson’s, said, “Look,” and shifted on the seat next to me. Mourners dressed in black had started exiting the funeral home. I saw Michael Walton walking hand in hand with Tracy Hartford, followed by two of Matt Galanis’s brothers, both looking uncharacteristically dressed up.
I said, “The prayer service must be over. This is normal. They’re just walking to their cars.”
We all breathed a sigh of relief when we saw Henry step through the doorway carrying a bright yellow sticker. He walked toward Violet’s car at a brisk pace, checking twice over his shoulder as if he feared Mischa was following right behind him. The second he opened the front passenger-side door, Violet barked, “Did she see you?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Henry told us as he set the yellow label in the windshield.
Two black hearses pulled out from around the funeral parlor’s side lot, then drove slowly past its entrance and toward the parking lot’s exit lane. Cars all around us were backing out of their spots and assembling in a line that formed behind the hearses, which had turned right from the lot onto State Street. Through my window, I saw Pete walking with his mom, who had been friendly with Mischa’s mother. “We should go,” I told Violet.
She started the engine, and suddenly we all cringed in pain. The radio came on at top volume, blasting music. Wincing, Violet clapped her hands over her ears before reaching to turn the radio off on the dashboard. “Jesus!” she shouted. “That wasn’t on before I turned off the car.”
When I managed to calm down, I said, “Turn it back on. I need to know what song was playing.”
I would have been thoroughly freaked out if the radio had been playing “Ring of Fire.” But when Violet twisted the knob to turn the radio back on at a lower volume, the last few seconds of Alicia Keys’s “Fallin’ ” played through the speakers.
“… the way that I love you. Oh baby, I-I-I-I’m fallin’, I-I-I-I’m fallin’.”
Falling. I shot a look at Trey, who frowned at me in response. Falling had everything to do with air. This was a warning. I had no doubt.
“Ugh,” Violet snorted. “This song is, like, a million years old. I don’t even know what station this is.” She threw the car into reverse and politely waited her turn to merge with the vehicles in the procession.
The Mount Zion Cemetery was all the way on the far side of town, in the direction of Green Bay. The long procession of cars, at least forty in total, stretched the length of several blocks, and at a slow speed we continued right through intersections without stopping. Traffic slowed to a crawl when the front of the procession reached the ornate gates of the cemetery.
When it was our turn to drive through the tall wrought-iron gates, we saw why the procession had decelerated so much. The street that wound through the cemetery was barely wide enough for two lanes of traffic, and it snaked through hills covered with tombstones. In some places, the paved road was almost impassable where cars had already parked in the other lane. Some cars ahead of us in line were pulling over to parallel park while others continued onward to stop closer to where Adam and Elena Portnoy would be laid to rest.
Henry said, “We should probably park back here so that if we need to leave quickly, we aren’t boxed in.”
“Good point,” Violet said, and flipped on her turn signal. There was a spot a few feet ahead into which her tiny car would fit.
Trey leaned forward in between the two front seats. “Actually, just drive a little farther. I don’t want to be all the way back here if you guys are on the other side of that hill. I won’t be able to see anything from here.”
Without saying a word, Violet obliged and turned her signal off. We continued onward over the hill.
My stomach began to sink. I hadn’t eaten anything that morning before leaving the Simmons house, and for that I was grateful. It was starting to feel like we were on our way to the gallows to be executed in front of an audience.
Violet shut off the engine, and we all looked through the windows on the right side of the car to where the pallbearers were carrying the caskets. The hillside was crawling with people dressed in black, and from where I sat watching, the scene looked almost horrific—as if the mourners were insects scurrying toward their destination. I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing that I was seeing what Mischa wanted me to see. She—or rather, the spirits masquerading as her—wanted me to be intimidated. I had to remember that this was just a funeral, nothing more. Just two caskets being lowered into the ground with plenty of witnesses around, keeping their eyes on Mischa.
There was no reason to be scared… yet.
“I guess this is it.” Violet slid a pair of oversize Gucci sunglasses with black frames up her nose and climbed out of the car, with Henry following her.
Seizing my last seconds with Trey and knowing that the moment had arrived when I had to assign his specific duty to him, I inhaled deeply. “When we get back to the house, there’s going to
come a moment when I’ll need you to pull the black pins out of my voodoo doll.”
Hurt flashed across Trey’s face. He’d probably assumed all along that Jennie had given me more description about what would have to happen that day than I’d shared with the group. It was fair for him to feel a little betrayed. “That’s all I can tell you,” I told him.
“I thought the pins were supposed to protect us,” Trey said.
“They are. But there’s going to be a moment, and I can’t describe exactly how you’ll know it’s time—but I think you’ll know when you’ll have to take them out.” He nodded, staring deeply into my eyes. “I wish I could tell you more, but that’s all I can say.”
“I’ll be ready,” Trey assured me in a small voice.
I unfastened my seat belt so that I could lean over and kiss him gently on the cheek, and then climbed out of the back seat.
Henry was already walking ahead of Violet toward where the large group of mourners had gathered. I trotted to catch up with Violet, suddenly wishing I’d handled this matter before leaving the Simmons house. It didn’t seem like a great idea to bring it up now, in such close proximity to Mischa, but I couldn’t put it off any longer. Impulsively, I grabbed her by the wrist and spoke in a low voice.
“I have to ask you to do something when we get back to the house, and only you can know about it,” I said, speaking rapidly.
Violet’s lips parted as if she was about to object, but then she asked, “What?”
“The gun,” I told her. She wrinkled her eyebrows as if she was trying to act like she had no idea what I was talking about. But we didn’t have time for feigning ignorance. “I know you had it under your pillow last night, and you left it in the living room. I don’t care; that’s not why I’m bringing it up.”
“I was just—”
I cut Violet off. “Listen. At some point, once we get Mischa back to your house, once we start negotiating the deal and we come to an agreement on whatever the terms will be, I’m going to need you to threaten to shoot me.”
Violet blinked twice and shook her head. “What?”
“The spirits have to believe that you’re going to kill me and prevent their prediction for me from coming true. So that means I need you to pick a fight with me, or I’ll attack you—I don’t know exactly how this will play out. It’s going to have to be convincing. But you might”—I looked over Violet’s shoulder to her parked car, where Trey had hidden himself in the back seat—“actually have to shoot me.”
“You’re crazy. I’m not murdering you.”
“Violet,” I said. It didn’t seem like an appropriate time to remind her that she’d already essentially murdered a lot of people. “If you do, then it dies with me. You know it’s the only way, and you said yourself that the spirits most likely won’t let that happen.”
“No. I said that they won’t let whoever is cursed kill themselves,” Violet argued.
Ahead of us by about twenty feet, Henry had noticed we weren’t following behind him, and he’d paused to watch us. I grabbed Violet by the shoulders to make her pay attention. “I need the spirits to try to get inside of me, okay? That’s all I can tell you, and scaring them into thinking that I might die in a way that doesn’t deliver my soul to them is the only way. Promise me you’ll do this.”
Violet scrunched up her face and shook her head again. I wasn’t getting through to her at all, and I was starting to panic. “Violet,” I repeated, but then my attention was captured by a voice behind me.
“McKenna.”
I turned to find myself looking into the face of Mrs. Emory, and couldn’t prevent myself from gasping in surprise. She looked much more polished than usual, with her hair blown out and rosy blush brushed onto her cheeks, despite the fact that her eldest son was missing and she was presumably providing temporary shelter to Mom as well as all of Mom and Glenn’s pets. I hoped with all my might that she hadn’t seen us driving in the procession, when she might have spotted Trey sitting next to me in the back seat of Violet’s car.
“Hi, Mrs. Emory,” I said uneasily. Though it would have been laughable to suggest that anyone—especially me—could have been considered a bad influence on Trey, I was sure that her opinion of me wasn’t far off from that.
She glanced disapprovingly at Violet, and I was painfully aware of how difficult it must have been for her to even acknowledge Trey’s half sister; Violet took for granted all of the benefits of being a legitimate Simmons that Trey had been denied. She was a living, breathing reminder of the life that Mrs. Emory had wanted for herself. But Mrs. Emory didn’t seem interested in Violet at all. She fixed her pleading eyes on me. “If you’ve heard from Trey—”
“I haven’t,” I blurted. There couldn’t have been a more inconvenient time for her to have begun interrogating me about Trey’s whereabouts. “I don’t know where he is, and I’m worried about him, too.”
Mrs. Emory took another step closer to me, and now there was urgency in her eyes. “Well, if you do, tell him that he should accept what’s rightfully his,” she said as her expression turned sour, and she side-eyed Violet. “Your father’s attorneys have been in touch with me, and I understand they’ve reached out to Trey, too. I don’t know what your father’s motivation is to finally be acknowledging Trey as his son, but it’s about time he did.” Returning her attention to me, she said, “Tell Trey that he can have his inheritance placed in a trust and access it from wherever in the world he chooses to go. He doesn’t have to come back to Willow. But it would mean everything to me to know that he’s safe.”
I didn’t know how to reply; it was best that she had no idea I knew anything about Trey, the attorney who’d been threatening him, and Mr. Simmons’s sudden interest in forcing an inheritance on him. So I nodded foolishly and said, “If I hear from him, I’ll let him know.”
With her face hardening, Mrs. Emory gripped my shoulder. I instinctively flinched, startled that she’d touched me. In a low, gravelly voice, she told me, “Remind him about cutting his hand when he was eight. Ask him to remember how that happened. That,” she said, looking me straight in the eye, “is part of this.”
Mrs. Emory let go of me and took a few steps backward, still maintaining eye contact with me as if daring me to look away. Instead of returning to the group of mourners, she walked down the slope toward the road, presumably to her car. Violet and I watched her in silence, and she turned to look at me once more over her shoulder. As I returned my attention to Violet, intending to continue our conversation about the gun, I realized that Henry had backtracked to fetch us and was standing right behind us. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, looking genuinely apologetic. “But they’re getting started. We should get up there.”
I shot Violet one more loaded look, hoping that I’d effectively communicated how very, very important it was for her to fulfill my request. But she refused to look my way from behind her sunglasses, instead holding her head high as she forged ahead of Henry and led us toward the funeral ceremony. I offered Henry a weak smile, feeling guilty that now he suspected I was keeping secrets from him—as well as simultaneously protective of him, because although I’d spent hours deciding whether to ask Trey or Henry to make a threat on my life, it was obvious to me now that Violet was the one who’d been my only real option, all along.
The voice of a female rabbi speaking in Hebrew soared over the crowd that had gathered at the graves as the three of us stepped into the large group. There were enough people assembled that I wasn’t sure where Mischa stood, although I was sure she was in the front row. I inched up toward the middle-aged couple standing in front of me and peered into the gap between their heads. But I couldn’t see past the extremely tall older gentleman standing in front of them.
On my right, Henry nudged me in the arm with his elbow, and nodded his head on an angle to suggest that I should take a few steps to the right along with him. The three of us inched over by a few feet, and suddenly I could see Mischa.
Or rather, she
could see me.
She was standing on the left side of the two polished, slate-gray caskets, which had been arranged side by side, both set atop the straps of lowering devices arranged over the rectangular graves that had been dug in the ground. She looked more serious and mature than I’d ever before seen her in a fitted black wool coat. Her uncle Roger stood beside her and rested his hand on her shoulder.
But I could tell even from her posture that Mischa was not Mischa. And she didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see me as our eyes locked. A barely there grin curled at the corners of her lips. The expression on her face informed me that I was right where she wanted me.
“Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varach l’alam ul’almei almaya,” the rabbi said as everyone listened politely. A tiny redheaded woman standing next to Mischa’s gymnastics coach sniffled and dabbed at her nose with a handkerchief. The rabbi switched to English to continue praying the Mourner’s Kaddish. “Blessed, praised, honored, exalted, extolled, glorified, adored, and lauded be the name of the Holy Blessed One…”
A bitterly cool breeze rustled the bare branches of a nearby tree, and everyone in the crowd shuddered. But I was barely paying attention to what was happening around me. All I could focus on was Mischa’s face, and the menace that I saw in her dark eyes. I’d stowed my earbuds and phone in the pocket of my coat, which still stank like smoke, hoping to make it less easy for the spirits to realize that the phone was my method of communication with Jennie—just in case they weren’t already aware.
Even as the caskets were slowly, ever so slowly, lowered into the ground, Mischa’s eyes remained fixed on me. She only looked away when the rabbi handed her a small shovel, and she stepped around the two open graves to raise a scoop of dirt to dump into her father’s grave, and then her mother’s. As soon as Mischa handed the shovel to her uncle Roger so that he could take his turn, and her gymnastics coach and his wife embraced her in a group hug, her eyes returned to me.