by Zoe Aarsen
“Henry,” I managed to say, feeling tears forming in my eyes as I assumed the worst.
Violet leaned forward, closer to me, and lowered her voice. “That’s why I’m here. I was hoping I’d get to talk to you before the cops. I’ve been telling everyone that my dad came home early from his trip and thought there were intruders in the house, and that he shot Henry.”
That didn’t answer my question. I tried to prop myself up on my elbows and found that my left shoulder was strangely stiff. Bandages, I realized. I vaguely remembered a bullet grazing my shoulder blade; someone must have tightly bandaged it. “Is he alive?” I asked fearfully.
Violet smiled widely. “Of course he’s alive! He’s upstairs, recovering from the surgery he had yesterday. He just lost a lot of blood.”
My entire body went warm with relief. Then I remembered the chaotic moment when the police had burst through the door of Violet’s bedroom. “What about Trey? And Mischa?”
“Trey’s fine,” Violet said. “And Mischa’s… weird, but I think fine. Listen, this is important.” Her eyes flashed toward the door to make sure no one was entering the room. “I told the police that we were all hanging out on the roof for fun when my dad came home, and he thought we were burglars. Then, after shooting Henry, when he went up there? You stumbled, he realized who you were, and he fell off the roof while trying to save you.”
“None of that makes sense,” I said, wondering why in the world the police would ever believe that story.
Violet shrugged. “It makes more sense than trying to get the police to believe that my dad chased you to the roof to kill you and break an evil curse.”
I wondered why Violet was acting so nonchalantly about her father’s recent death, and why—after everything we’d both survived in the last six months—she was willing to lie to the police to spare Trey from having to take responsibility for what was definitely a murder. As if reading my mind, she said, “Look, I’m as relieved this is over as you are. I loved my father very much. But I know that he played a big role in architecting all of this. I think he knew what his mother was doing all those years, and that he at least suspected it had been passed on to me. But he let it continue. He never offered to help me make it stop. He didn’t even apologize when I told him about it in January, when I thought this was over.”
A tear escaped her eye and rolled down her cheek. Lost in thought, she let it linger there before wiping it away. “I guess we probably are all gonna need some serious therapy.”
I thought of poor Ms. Hernández back in Tampa, and her attempts to get me to spill my guts. “Or something,” I agreed, pretty sure that therapy wasn’t going to be the answer to any of our future problems. “You just said you’re relieved that this is over. Is it?” I asked. “Over?”
Violet nodded. “I think so.” She reached for me and rested her hand on my arm. “You’re normal again, at least. It’s off you.”
* * *
Five days later, on Saturday, Trey and I walked the long distance across town to the abandoned house that had belonged to his grandparents before he was born. It was the house in which his mom and her sister had been raised, where Mary Jane Svensson had dreamed about her life beyond the limits of Willow, Wisconsin, before venturing off to college and crossing paths with Michael Simmons. It was located, ironically, on the road that ran alongside the rural highway that headed south, toward Chicago—almost as if Trey’s mom had literally been born on the path leading to her destiny.
“When did your mom’s family move away from here?” I asked as we came to a stop in front of the one-story house on Frontage Road. It was almost impossible to see it from the street due to the overgrown grass and shrubs out front.
“My grandparents died in car crash when I was a baby, and the house has just sat here, empty, since my mom’s younger sister moved to Ohio,” Trey said. The bruises on his face from Northern had faded into a barely visible shade of yellow, and he looked like he’d gained weight during the last few days while he’d been living back at home with his parents. “I think my mom tried to sell it, but it was already in pretty bad shape, and she didn’t want to put in the time or energy to repair things that would have increased its value. We used to come here on weekends when I was a kid to try to keep up with the yard work and scrub off the graffiti, but eventually it just got to be too much work. This isn’t a place that held a lot of happy memories for my mom, anyway.”
Between us, we’d lugged a shovel, gardening shears, and thick gardening gloves all the way over from his garage on Martha Road. Mom and I were still staying in a motel in Ortonville, and I was due to fly back to Tampa the next morning. I had spent two days at St. Matthew’s Hospital after the day of violence at the Simmons house, unknowingly having suffered a condition referred to as “suspension trauma” after hanging off the roof for so long. My doctor had been amazed that I’d remained conscious for as long as I had after Trey had pulled me back up to safety; they’d explained I had passed out in Violet’s bedroom because the oxygen level in my blood had been dangerously low.
When Trey had come to visit me in the hospital, he’d already been reunited with his mother. In a strange turn of events, the police in Willow had been so preoccupied with the tragic death of Mr. Simmons that they’d completely chilled on their pursuit of Trey. It didn’t seem like Northern Reserve was eager to welcome him back, and without Mr. Simmons making demands on Judge Roberts to banish him from town, there was no longer any urgency around making sure Trey served out the rest of his punishment. It was frustrating to think that our lives had been so controlled by Mr. Simmons’s influence in Shawano and Suamico Counties, but I was trying my best to focus on being grateful that we were both still alive and that Violet’s willingness to invent a cover story had spared us trouble with the cops.
I hadn’t had a chance to ask Trey at Violet’s house about how he’d cut his hand when he was eight as his mom had advised me to ask at the Portnoys’ funeral. But Mrs. Emory had reminded him that he’d cut his left hand so badly on a thorn from this rosebush at his grandparents’ old house that he’d needed stitches across his palm. She had also told him that if he and I believed that the Simmons family was involved somehow with all the recent deaths around town, the rosebush she’d planted was the beginning of it all. It might not have mattered that Violet had cut down the bushes on her family’s property, or that she hadn’t taken care to destroy their roots. This rosebush still bloomed every spring.
Our oversight in not having taken care of this over the winter back when I’d first found the spell that Trey’s mom had tucked away in her journal was glaring; we should have known better.
I had texted Kirsten that morning about our plan to destroy this bush, and she had messaged me back immediately.
KIRSTEN 10:08 A.M.
Be careful. Remember the rule of 3. Trey’s mom cast that spell in anger.
The rule of three, of course. It was a basic principle of witchcraft specifying that any spell cast to bring harm to another would backfire threefold. But Trey and I weren’t the ones who’d cast the original spell. Even if our destruction of the rosebush might have brought bad luck to Trey’s mom, he and I were both in agreement that we had to do this, anyway. After all, Violet had visited me in the hospital and assured me that my electric “charge” was back, but there were still four more days until the next new moon.
I wasn’t about to take any chances.
“There it is,” Trey said, nodding in the direction of the front of the house. Underneath one of the front windows, an enormous rosebush grew. For the last few days, the temperatures in Wisconsin had warmed considerably, and the bush had sprouted fresh green leaves. It felt like it had been winter for ages, but now bees buzzed around us, and birds sang overhead, announcing the long overdue arrival of spring. Since the ground had thawed enough that week for Mr. and Mrs. Portnoy to be buried, I wondered if Stephani deMilo had finally been buried in St. Monica’s cemetery. When she’d died over the winter, it had been too
cold.
There weren’t any buds on the bush yet. But that was just as well. We had walked all the way over to ensure that this particular bush never, ever bloomed again.
This was the bush that Trey’s mother had planted upon learning that her lover’s wife was expecting a baby. As Trey stared at it, he told me what his mother had shared with him in the days that had passed since the dramatic events on Monday at Violet’s house. “My mom told me that when I was about four months old, she decided to drive down to Chicago to confront him.” He couldn’t bring himself to even say Mr. Simmons’s name, and I didn’t blame him. “Kind of shady. She was already married to Walter at that point, which makes me think I haven’t really appreciated how much he must have cared about her, you know? To marry her when she was six months pregnant with some other guy’s kid? And she was still head over heels for Violet’s dad, really hoping he’d take her back. I guess she got it into her head that if she just showed him his son, he’d change his mind. She thought he’d at least want to be involved in my life.”
I tried to imagine Trey’s mom when she wasn’t much older than we were, making the long drive down to Chicago alone with an infant buckled into a car seat. Desperate. Scared. Probably feeling a little like all of us had been since October.
Trey continued, “She’s embarrassed about the whole thing now, obviously. She said she was young and hopelessly in love, and she didn’t understand then that people from families like his don’t just marry young, uneducated girls from families like hers.”
I couldn’t help but feel sympathetic toward Trey’s mom.
“When she confronted him on campus, he was furious. She’d accepted a ton of money when she’d agreed to terminate the pregnancy, and the moment he saw me he started threatening her with legal action. He told her that his wife was expecting a baby, and that she was stupid to think he’d leave the woman he loved after the fertility troubles they’d been experiencing to instead run off with some hick from his hometown.”
“What did your mom do with the money?” I dared to ask. When I’d pinched a letter from Mr. Simmons’s attorneys out of the Emorys’ mailbox over the holidays and read it, it had said that Mr. Simmons was attempting to collect almost two million dollars from Trey’s mom.
“Turns it out wasn’t that much,” Trey admitted. “It was like a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. And to my mom, back then? That seemed like a fortune. It was enough to buy the house on Martha Road with cash. The two million dollars they were trying to squeeze out of her was based on some kind of penalty for violating the contract and an insane interest rate that they’d applied. But they only started really pushing her for that money last fall, when Simmons and his family moved back to Willow.”
I shook my head. “A likely story.”
Trey gestured at the seemingly innocuous rosebush again. “So she was angry. And embarrassed. And eager to do anything to hurt him and his wife.”
“Do you think she had any idea this would work?” I asked. The spell that Trey’s mom had cast in a moment of fury had resulted in the deaths of Olivia, Candace, Stephani deMilo, and countless others for whom Grandmother Simmons and Violet had issued deaths. It had nearly killed Tracy Hartford and Mischa, and—in a roundabout way—had resulted in the deaths of Mischa’s parents and Michael Simmons. Amanda Portnoy and Henry had both come very close to dying, too, and both of their lives would be forever changed due to injuries they’d incurred… all because of the fateful words that Mary Jane had chanted while planting this very rosebush by the light of the moon.
Trey shook his head. “I doubt it. My mom told me that after a while, she really did fall in love with Walter. I mean, at least she loves him now. She loves him enough to have kept all of this a secret because she didn’t want to hurt him—at least until recently, when the threats about the money became more demanding. She thinks the money was just about Simmons wanting to scare her into moving our family far enough away that his wife would never find out about me.”
I rested my hand gently on his shoulder and asked, “She knows now, doesn’t she?”
Trey hesitated, thinking about Violet’s mother. She’d looked out of her mind with horror when we’d seen her last at Violet’s house, shortly after she’d discovered her husband’s body. “They’re reading the will on Monday, and the Simmonses’ lawyers requested that my mom and I be present. So I guess, yeah… Violet’s mom must know something.”
I didn’t want to press him for more details about the will. Whether Michael Simmons had bequeathed anything to Trey, and Trey’s acceptance required him to do anything in exchange for his inheritance, I already knew that Trey would refuse. Listening to the reading of the will was simply a formality.
Trey went on to tell me that his mother had been so angry after her trip to Chicago that she’d driven straight back to Willow and immediately set about researching ways to punish Michael Simmons and his wife using witchcraft. “Actually, she said she’d thought about just murdering them outright. But she had me to worry about, so at least she wasn’t completely out of her mind.”
“How much did you tell her about what’s been happening?” I asked. I’d still not told my mom much, although I’d promised her up and down when I checked out of the hospital that this time, all of the sneaking around and lies were really over.
“Not everything. But enough that she feels horrible that her actions hurt so many people,” Trey said. “Although I don’t know if she really believes that there was a curse, or evil. I mean… it’s probably hard for anyone who hasn’t seen what we have to believe any of it.”
Trey’s grandparents’ house wasn’t the only abandoned house around Willow. Like the others, the old Svensson house had quickly become the kind of place where college kids partied when they were home on breaks, and occasional transients passing through town made it their temporary home. Its front windows had been smashed and then haphazardly covered from the inside with cardboard boxes. The front door hung loosely on its hinges, unlocked and water-damaged, slightly ajar to welcome curious creatures of all species.
The house in front of which we stood could not have been more different from the Simmons mansion. Even when it had been in great shape, it was still miniscule in comparison. Humble in its design. It wasn’t so different from the one-story ranch-style houses on Martha Road, like the ones in which Trey and I had grown up.
“I guess we should both start cutting, and then dig after we clear the branches?” I suggested. Trey agreed, and we each pulled on a pair of gloves to begin.
As I carefully cut, twisted, and pulled off the tenacious branches of the rosebush, I was reminded of the words of the spell that I’d found in Trey’s mother’s old journal.
As the plant grows, so will your revenge
Nourished by bitterness
With each cycle of the moon, year by year
As your plant blooms, your enemies will suffer.
Destroying the rosebush took us the better part of the morning. The sun was beating down on us by early afternoon, when Trey had started digging up the bush’s roots so that we could destroy them, too. Watching Trey handle the shovel made my heart swell with love because it reminded me of when he’d helped me bury my dog Moxie in our yard. Although our project probably would have seemed ridiculous to anyone else, working alongside Trey outdoors reminded me fondly of all of our adventures as kids, when we’d race up and down our street on bikes and build forts every summer break.
I’d been listening for Jennie constantly on my radio app, scanning the AM and FM dials for her voice. But so far, I hadn’t been able to connect directly with her again. Instead, she seemed to be reaching me without the radio, placing abstract words and phrases in my head in a familiar chorus of voices. Tree, tree, tree, I heard the voices in my mind chanting. Yes, when we were kids, Jennie and I had loved climbing trees with Trey. I wasn’t surprised that she remembered that. I could only hope that in time, I’d get better at hearing her, and would be able to communicate with he
r inside my head just as easily as I’d been able to with the radio.
When Trey and I had cut down the entire bush, branch by branch, and had done our best to dig up its long, sinewy, dry roots, a pretty large hole remained in the ground where the bush had stood for the last nearly eighteen years. I wrapped my arms around Trey and kissed him tenderly.
“Geez. I didn’t know shoveling turned you on so much,” he teased.
We were both out of breath and overheated enough to abandon our winter coats, but our work wasn’t done. Together, we made several trips from the front yard through the empty house to build a bonfire out back, taking care to contain the fire within a ring of large rocks.
I felt like I was trespassing each time I stepped through the house’s front door and walked through its rooms to reach the back door in the kitchen, but reminded myself that this house was technically Trey’s real inheritance. The house was in a pitiable state of decrepitude, with stained, sagging ceilings, trash and bottles littering the floor, and mouse droppings everywhere. Carrying my last armload of dirt and roots, I followed a sunlit hallway farther into the house toward the bright kitchen, passing family portraits that remained framed on the wall despite all of the other destruction that the house had endured. There was a studio portrait of Trey’s mom and her sister as little girls, both holding parasols and smiling for the camera. That hung next to a picture of Trey’s mom on the day of her high school graduation from Willow High School. In it, she wore a cap and gown, and beamed proudly with her arms around her parents’ shoulders. She was different then, when she was our age, before she’d learned the hard way about greed and lust. It was easy to see from these pictures how Michael Simmons had been taken with her.
In the backyard, Trey and I held hands and silently watched the roots, branches, leaves, and thorns of the rosebush smolder. Smoke curled up toward the azure sky, and I let myself imagine that the smoke was pure evil, drifting out of our lives. We’d done it. We’d broken the curse. I tightened my grip on Trey’s hand and felt certain that this was the beginning of the rest of our lives. I’d agreed to finish the rest of the school year in Florida to make things easier for my mom while she and Glenn resettled, but there was nothing standing in the way of Trey moving down there to be with me now. And the idea of the two of us, moving on from this nightmare together, over a thousand miles away from this town, made me more excited than I’d been in a long time.