Now Entering Addamsville

by Francesca Zappia

  Finally Norm broke the silence. “Do you know anyone else who might have done this, or had a problem with Masrell?”

  Anyone who had a problem with Masrell and could make all the ghosts on a street flee for cover?

  “As far as I know, nobody’s set a house on fire since Hermit Forester,” I said. “Have you talked to him yet?”

  Jack’s expression turned sour. That was all the answer I needed.

  “We’re going to find out who did this,” Norm said, flipping his notebook closed and stuffing it in his breast pocket. “A man died last night, and all this town can talk about is ghost hunters and television shows. If you know or find out anything about what happened, you come tell us. Understand? Anything.”

  “Understood.”

  “I need to speak to the officers now, Zora,” Principal Sutherland said. “I want you to go straight back to first period. If you don’t, I will find out, and you’ll have detention for the rest of the semester.”

  I stopped outside the office with my skin tingling. Artemis was in the waiting area. Her phone was open on her lap and her fingers flipped through the pages of her Moleskine notebook. Of course she couldn’t use the regular-ass spiral notebooks. She had to get the pretty, expensive ones for her ghost research.

  She didn’t look tired at all. She looked like a princess with a fairy godmother who could magic her into made-up cleanliness every morning.

  “Hey, slugger, you’re up.”

  She looked at me. She had more fat on her cheeks than I did, but Dad always said he could see the family resemblance because we both kind of looked like our moms. The Aberdeen girls.

  Her pretty cherubic face sank into a scowl. “What did you tell them about last night?”

  I glanced around; the office assistant was in the break room, making coffee.

  “I told them the truth. They want to confirm with you. And probably talk to you because you’re into death, or whatever.”

  “I’m not into death.” Any of the sympathy that had tempered Artemis’s reactions to me this morning was gone. “I’m into uncovering the history of this town, you effing raccoon.” She stood and snapped her notebook shut.

  “You still say ‘effing’?”

  Artemis rolled her eyes and strode past me. “I don’t have time for this. The Dead Men Walking crew is coming this afternoon, and I have about a million things I need to put together before they get here. I know you don’t care about protecting anyone, but I do.”

  “They’re still coming? After Masrell?”

  “Of course. You think my mom would stop a nationally aired television show from filming in town?”

  So Sadie was right—they were still going to bring Dead Men Walking here, which meant the show’s fans would come, too, and the story of Masrell’s murder would spread. The last time firestarter attacks had hit headlines this big was thirty years ago, when Hermit Forester was still out and active.

  “Whatever.” I pushed the office door open. “See you, buttface.”

  “You’re the worst,” Artemis called back.

  Instead of going straight back to class, I stopped in the restroom and shut myself in the third stall. The first stall was occupied by a blank-faced girl in a floral-print dress, staring into the toilet and flickering at her edges. I needed the second stall as a buffer.

  If the police thought Artemis might know something more about me than where I’d been last night, they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Artemis and I were branches of a tree that had forked off in wildly different directions. Sometimes we weren’t part of the same tree at all. Sometimes I thought maybe we weren’t even the same species.

  Artemis was into death, but not the way I’d implied. She’d been trained by her mother to help me hunt the way Aunt Greta had once helped my mom, though she could only sense the presence of ghosts, not see them. She’d been mentioned on the local news a few times for her research into historical sites around Addamsville and Harrisburg. Just looking at her, with her cashmere scarves and sleek, shiny hair and designer boots, you’d never guess she was into the supernatural at all. She looked more like a social media star.

  No one would ever suspect Artemis of arson, despite that she’d been out last night, too. Even if they never found any evidence I’d set the fire at Masrell’s house, they’d still suspect me, because fire and Novak were the only things most people knew about me. They never tried to dig deeper, even when I went straight up to their doors and asked if they’d like me to show them myself.

  I slumped against the scuffed stall wall. A rising tension headache pounded in my temple. Artemis was right. Protecting people was more important than what the town thought of me. It was exactly what Mom would have said, if she was around. I uncurled my right hand; only then did the prosthetics look natural under the glove. If Mom was around, I wouldn’t have lost any fingers. If Mom was around, she could tell me how to handle all of this, what to say, where to start.

  But it had been five years since she disappeared. There was no telling when she would come back, which meant I had to deal with this firestarter myself before it hurt anyone else.

  4

  After a day of eavesdropping, I’d heard three decent theories about who had set the fire—besides myself—but only one of them was close to right.

  The first was Pastor Keller. I totally believed Pastor Keller might emerge from Black Creek Church one day to burn people with the fires of heaven and cleanse them for their sins, but even if he was possessed by a firestarter, I’d seen him at 2:20 that morning, digging around in his trash with his usual audience of ghosts. The guy threw his glasses away once a week, minimum. He lived in an old house behind the veterinarian, across town from George Masrell, and ghosts didn’t hang out around firestarters.

  The second suspects were the Birdies, who were on people’s lists for the same reason I was. They had a reputation for wrecking things. They weren’t known for fires, though. They took baseball bats to mailboxes, graffitied concession stands, and once put dead bluegills in all the air ducts in the high school. None of them were possessed, either. I’d seen them around school, and they’d been just as interested in the rumors as anyone else, and causing no trouble with the ghosts.

  The third suspect, and the one who came the closest, was Hermit Forester. Thirty years ago, the Foresters had lived in a mansion in the woods, bigger even than the Goldmine houses. One night the mansion caught on fire, killing the oldest son and sending the rest of the family to live in town while their house was rebuilt. Kids nicknamed them “the Firestarters,” because it sounded close to “Foresters,” and kids can be so clever sometimes.

  While they were here, a rash of arsons swept through Addamsville, killing some teenagers, an auto mechanic, five people in the old town hall, and three more members of the Forester family. That left only one of them to return to the woods and the rebuilt mansion, suspected but never convicted of any crime. Hermit Forester holed himself up while Addamsville dealt with the fallout of what the media dubbed “the Firestarter Murders.”

  That was where Mom had gotten the name for the creatures. When I’d asked Jack and Norm if they’d talked to Hermit Forester, I hadn’t been kidding. Forester wasn’t a firestarter, but his assistant, Bach, was. The ghosts had pointed Mom toward Forester and Bach when she’d gone hunting for the culprits of the Firestarter Murders, but she couldn’t get rid of them. Cutting off a firestarter’s head would neutralize the threat it posed, but then you had a head. To get rid of it for good, you had to send it back through the entrance it used to get into Addamsville. Mom had never found Bach’s entrance.

  The fires had ended when Forester returned to his home in the woods, and in all the time I’d known Bach, he had never given off a whiff of danger. Mom had always said firestarters weren’t inherently evil creatures; we were their prey, like any other animal relationship, and Bach was like a fox adopted by a pack of rabbits. He had killed in the past, and there was no forgiving him for that. But I wasn’t sure h
e’d done this.

  I sat in the Chevelle, tapping on the steering wheel while I waited for the parking lot to empty. One person was already dead. The firestarter that did it would be feeding on Masrell’s ghost right now, and would continue to do so for as long as it was allowed to remain in Addamsville. With one dead under its belt, it would easily have enough power to possess someone else. I squeezed my prosthetics through my glove. It was already worse than the last one I’d taken out, which hadn’t even killed one person.

  I prowled through town with my gut doing somersaults. Even the Chevelle’s growling seemed a little subdued, like it knew where we were going and was trying to warn me what a bad idea it was.

  George Masrell lived off a dirt road that trailed northeast, toward the junkyard. A long strand of trees had been planted to shield the junkyard and the east side from the tourists who drove into town on Valleywine Road.

  I parked the Chevelle two streets away from Masrell’s house so the engine wouldn’t attract attention from the people still gathered outside. As I approached, my stomach turned over again, my hands tingled, and a small voice in the back of my head said Get away get away get away from this place there was FIRE HERE. I tucked my hands into my jacket pockets, curling my prosthetics around so they fit, and pushed on.

  The ruin of the house, still slightly smoking, was visible from the end of the street. Police tape cordoned off the yard. The roof and half the outer wall had gone down, leaving a gaping, blackened corpse. Withered beams speared out of the rubble like broken bones. The smell was the worst part of it, the part that had all my hairs standing on end and made me want to run for the hills. Burned wood, burned rubber, burned plastic. Fire lived here, it said. Fire destroyed here.

  A fire truck and a police cruiser sat by the curb. A few firefighters poked in the wreckage. One spoke with Chief Rivera. The Chief was a short lady with a heavy brown coat, dark hair up in a bun, and aviators hiding her eyes despite the heavy cloud cover. I had literally never seen her crack a smile, and she definitely wouldn’t if she saw me lurking around, so I hunched my shoulders and ducked behind the cars lining the opposite side of the street.

  I wasn’t alone. People I didn’t recognize loitered on the sidewalk. Some had their phones out. Some had camera bags. Some carried whole backpacks bursting with equipment. A few wore Dead Men Walking sweatshirts. There were only a handful of ghosts among them, and all hid near the houses, away from the street. They watched Masrell’s. A host of blackbirds weighed down the power lines overhead, like vultures waiting for predators to vacate a recent kill. I hid myself near two women and a man wearing the sweatshirts.

  The police knew this was arson and not just Masrell falling asleep with a lit cigarette. If they were interviewing me, they hadn’t found much evidence, if any. They hadn’t asked any specifics about fire, hadn’t tried to find out if I knew what accelerants were used, nothing like that. Because they knew none had been used, just like in the Firestarter Murders. Those fires had burned hot and fast, and sometimes right in the middle of the day, in front of witnesses. No accelerants, because firestarters didn’t need them. The house looked like it had burned for hours. There was barely a skeleton left.

  One of the women from the group I’d hidden behind glanced back at me once, then again. I didn’t like the look, so I moved on to the next gathering of onlookers and positioned myself behind them and a car. Chief Rivera had finished talking to the firefighter and now paced around the heap that used to be the front porch.

  She stepped on dry grass. Dry and brown from the uncharacteristic drought we’d had through the fall. I scanned the lawn in front and to the sides of the house. All dry, none burned. The trunks of the trees near the house didn’t look as if they’d been touched by the fire, nor did the sides of the houses on either side of Masrell’s. A fire that hot and that big, and nothing nearby had been burned. Another firestarter staple. The porch roof had squashed a few bushes, and the branches of those that peeked out from underneath waved in the breeze, rustling yellow leaves.

  A firefighter stepped from the wreckage of the house. There was movement in the doorframe behind him. A man appeared, wearing a white T-shirt and boxer shorts. George Masrell. Potbellied and stick-limbed, wrinkles of skin pulling his face into a frown. Everything about him was slightly red, like an oven coil still glowing. There were ragged black holes where his eyes should have been. The firefighter stepped back into the house, right through him.

  My gut lurched. Even ghosts who’d died in the most tragic accidents and the most gruesome murders appeared as whole as they’d been in life. They had color, and eyes. I saw ghosts like Masrell on a regular basis, but that never made it easier to look at them and know the remains of their spirits were being eaten away. There were twelve from the Firestarter Murders, nine I saw often: five town council members, on the lot where the old town hall once stood; the auto mechanic, in the middle of Elmwood Lane; Yvette Forester in the grocery store parking lot; Lenore Forester, under a beech tree in the neighborhood near the Goldmine; and Valerie Forester, the pale-haired sentinel of Valleywine Road.

  Masrell turned toward me. I knew he sensed me there, the way all the ghosts did. He knew I could see him. Which way, I thought. Which way is the one who killed you? Ghosts couldn’t speak, but they could still move their bodies, and the ghosts made by firestarters always knew where their predators lived. He faced me for a moment, and then he turned just slightly, toward the east, and he pointed. I followed his finger to a swatch of trees hiding the old coal mine.

  I looked back, heart pounding, but Masrell was gone. I was sure he hadn’t meant the junkyard or the bluffs: the junkyard was too far north, the bluffs too far south. The mine was possible; that place spawned ghost stories for a reason. And it was on the opposite side of town from Forester’s house.

  I turned to go, sure that my luck avoiding Chief Rivera would run out soon, and met the gaze of a woman standing thirty yards down the sidewalk. I froze on the spot. She was tall and blond and had eyes like the pits of hell.

  Aunt Greta.

  Greta Wake was what you got if a Greek statue had sex with the Williams-Sonoma catalog. She wore a green blouse under a neat white cardigan, white pants, and spring-mint Crocs that clopped as she started toward me. She was Artemis’s evolved form, divine judgment in a woman’s body, sainted protector of Addamsville, and the unspoken leader of the new town council.

  Two men flanked her: Pastor Keller, with the cobwebs of Black Creek Church still hanging from his shoulders, and Buster Gates, the pig-faced owner of the junkyard. Both town council members. Neither big fans of the Novaks.

  They were the ones I should have checked for before I visited the crime scene. Hindsight’s 20/20.

  “Zora Novak.” Greta’s voice was low, but it carried across the distance between us. “What are you doing here?”

  The group of onlookers I’d hidden behind scooted out of her way. Running wasn’t an option, so I planted myself where I was and stood to my full height.

  “I figured if the cops were going to accuse me of something, I should find out exactly what I supposedly did.” I gestured toward the house. There was no sign of Masrell or any other ghosts.

  “And you thought it would be wise to show your face here?” All three of them were on me now. It felt like they all loomed over me, even though I was taller than everyone but Buster. Greta put her hands on her hips. “George Masrell was a respected member of this community, one who your father cheated nearly into poverty—”

  “Oh man, poor, that’s like the worst thing to be!”

  She powered right through me. “—and you think it’s okay to come here? When the whole town has seen your family show hostility toward him?”

  “Are you still talking about my dad, or do you mean when I yelled at Masrell about the coffee? Because he yelled at me first—”

  “There is a history of bad blood between you, a known habit for starting dangerous fires, and clear motivation!”

  I had tr
ained myself well this past year, but Aunt Greta was my kryptonite. Forget ghosts, forget the people nearby; everything inside me went brittle when she was around, ready to shatter on first impact.

  “Yes,” I said through my teeth. “There’s a whole Novak family mafia running the Addamsville underground. We get rid of anyone we don’t like, and we do it in the most horrific ways possible.” I put my hands on her hips to mirror her, and by the twitch in her cheek, she hadn’t missed it. “We’re your family, too, don’t forget. The police talked to Artemis, you know.”

  That didn’t seem to faze her. Aunt Greta shouldn’t have been acting like this. She had helped Mom with the firestarters once, the way Artemis wanted to help me. She could sense them, too—she had to sense what was going on here.

  Greta seemed to ignore it all, though. She and I stood toe-to-toe, and she smelled overwhelmingly of lavender.

  “Yes, we share a family,” she snapped back, head held high. “Which is why it’s so important that I stop my family from trespassing on private property and getting their fingers cut off—”

  “You old hag! I didn’t do anything wrong, and I didn’t hurt anyone!”

  “Like hell you didn’t.” Buster stepped up. Color flushed his cheeks and forehead. His hands balled into fists the size of Christmas hams. “And your old man didn’t take all our money, neither.”

  “Screw you, Buster,” I snapped. “It’s your own damn fault you bought into that scheme so hard. Thought it would help you get a Goldmine house, right?”

  Buster inflated like a hot-air balloon. He’d been one of many to donate to Lazarus Novak’s Fund for the Establishment of Historical Landmarks in Addamsville and was its biggest supporter until it all turned out to be a lie. But he, unlike George Masrell, would be more hurt by his stolen dignity than his stolen money.

  Greta put a hand up, warding Buster off. “What would your mother say if she could hear you now?” Her voice was calm. “Justifying theft? Making flippant comments about a man’s murder?”