I did catch the last thing she said.
“If you don’t start doing something about yourself, you’re going to send the whole town up in flames.”
I refused to move out of spite.
“You were right,” Chief Rivera said after they’d gone. “I got Sadie’s voice mail. Is there anyone else who can come get you?”
I sat up. Grim probably would, but I didn’t want to bother him; he had enough problems in his life. The Happy Hal’s gang might come, but I didn’t want them to know about this sooner than absolutely necessary. They’d trust me less than they already did. And that was the end of my list of people I could call.
“No, it’s fine,” I said.
“Then you’re here till morning. I left Sadie a message, but we’ll try her again after five.”
I scooted back into the corner and curled up. “Thanks, Chief.”
She didn’t leave right away. Her eyebrows creased very slowly. She looked worried, not angry, and the way she stood made her seem tired. She wasn’t freaking out, though, which I took to mean the firestarter hadn’t made a reappearance at the mine.
“You’re not a bad kid, Zora,” she said, “but you do make bad decisions. I’m sure the reasons sound good or feel right, but it has to stop before you do something you end up regretting. I don’t want to see you waste years of your life in prison.”
“Like my dad, right?”
She shook her head. “Lazarus Novak isn’t a bad guy, either, but like you, he tends to let his emotions get the better of him. I’ve known him for a long time, and after your mom died, he wasn’t the same—”
He wouldn’t have left us alone if he wasn’t a bad guy, I thought, but said, “My mom’s not dead.”
Rivera tilted her head. “She’s not?”
“No one ever found her body,” I pointed out. “I get it—lost in the woods, never came back, been five years—she’s probably dead. But she’s not for sure dead. People go missing in the woods all the time. Some trees wouldn’t be enough to kill my mom. She knows how to survive out there.”
The Chief’s frown deepened. “Zora, I investigated your mother’s disappearance myself. If she wanted to leave town, she could have taken Valleywine to the interstate. She wouldn’t stage a disappearance in the woods.”
I didn’t say anything.
“All right, well—after your mom went missing, your dad didn’t deal with it in the most constructive ways. I can’t say I blame him. Grief does things to you, especially when you don’t have the resources to deal with it. All I wanted to say was that I think you’re a smart girl and that you could make something of yourself, despite what everyone else thinks or says. If you’re up for it, in the future, if you’re thinking about doing something that might get you in trouble, you can come tell me about it, and we’ll decide together if you should do it or not. You don’t have to, but it’s an option if you want it.”
Unfortunately a lot of things relating to firestarters could get me into trouble, and I couldn’t mention any of them to Rivera. “Sure.”
“Get some sleep, Zora.”
She left. A heater kicked on behind the walls. I stretched my legs across the muddy mess of the sheets. I kicked the boots off so hard they clanged against the cell bars. There was no fire here. I took a deep breath and repeated it several times in my head, once out loud for good measure.
We’d found the firestarter standing in front of its entrance. That round black nothingness past the wooden bridge was its gateway from wherever it had come, and I had to get it back through. Mom would have already had it done by now. It may not have even killed Masrell; she would have found it before that. She never stopped hunting. She was never scared of anything. Not firestarters. Not the town. She’d spent thirteen years teaching me everything she knew, but she’d never taught me how not to be scared.
I curled my right hand tight to my chest, the prosthetics stiff against my sternum, and turned on my side to draw my knees up. I had until morning to get myself back in order and figure out what to do about this firestarter. I knew where its entrance was, but it wouldn’t stick around the mines now that we’d seen it.
I had time. Time to think. Time to breathe.
There was no fire here.
12
I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. After the lights went out, I stayed awake, listening to all the little creaks and groans in the building and staring at the dark corner of the hallway. No matter how many times I told myself the mine firestarter wasn’t coming after me, I waited for those eyes to appear in the shadows. If I hadn’t been stuck in a cell, I could have at least run from it; Rivera had given me ice for my ankle, and it felt well enough now for me to flee, at least.
I spent all night worrying about the firestarter when I should have worried about Sadie.
I had thought Greta’s fury would be worse than Sadie’s. I had forgotten my sister’s long-standing, if partially buried, reputation. I had forgotten she had once sent half the Addamsville High baseball team running after a pop fly dented the roof of her car, and the bat she’d stolen to chase them with that day was the one that later became her weapon of choice.
Livid was too soft a word for her face. Her hair was up in a ratty bun, and she wore a bright pink sweatshirt with the words LIVIN’ LIFE across her chest in bubble letters.
“What the fuck,” she hissed, which was impressive for a sentence with no sibilant sounds.
Chief Rivera opened the cell door. “There’ll be a ticket to pay,” she said, “but it’s better than what could have happened. Make sure she gets to school, too.”
Sadie didn’t say anything. By the muscle jumping in her jaw, I wasn’t sure she was capable of speech. The chief spared me any more lectures and let me leave with Sadie, and only once we were heading home did I open my mouth.
“You can’t tell Dad about this.”
Sadie’s grip made the leather on the steering wheel creak.
“Oh no,” she said, voice much softer than I anticipated. “I won’t tell him anything. You will.”
“It was—”
“Chief Rivera told me what happened,” Sadie snapped. “Trying to stop tourists from ruining the town? I hate to tell you, but we’re already there! It’s done! No ghost-hunting crew is going to make it worse than it already is. What did you think was going to happen? You’d make them look like assholes? Good job, you did that to yourself.”
“No one’s wrong about the tourists. They walk all over everything we have, and—”
“Oh, come on.” Sadie rolled her whole head. “I hate the tourists, too, but Aunt Greta is right. This town sucks without its ghost stories. We don’t have anything else to keep us afloat anymore. No coal mine. Just tourism. And yeah, maybe there should be some stricter guidelines about what the tourists are allowed to touch and where they can go, but there’s nothing we can do about it. I know you don’t like her, but Addamsville was dying before Aunt Greta turned it into a giant tourist trap.”
I crossed my arms and looked out the window as the Goldmine passed by. Sadie didn’t say anything else until we were back on the path up the bluffs.
“And you left the Chevelle out here in the open.” She pulled to a stop so I could get out. She handed over the car keys, flashlight, and my phone. “You better tell Dad about this part, too, so he can be properly upset.”
I raised my arms. “Mom left the Chevelle by the woods overnight, too!” If it was impervious to fire, some bugs and dirt weren’t going to hurt it.
Sadie had already rolled up her window and started toward the trailer. I was glad she hadn’t heard me; bringing up Mom’s disappearance was too harsh, and I regretted it as soon as I said it. I should have brought up Dad, instead. That he didn’t deserve to be upset about this. He didn’t deserve to scold me for this when he had no idea what was going on in our lives, and what he’d done. But Sadie wouldn’t listen to it. She always sided with Dad.
I found the Chevelle in the foliage, cleared some leaves off the hood
, and climbed inside. My phone clung to the last of its battery, and there was one unread message from early this morning. From Artemis.
I’m sorry. You’re right, I don’t understand. But we need to get that footage back.
She still thought we were on speaking terms? She was so naive sometimes, like she thought she could get whatever she wanted as long as she was polite.
But Artemis knew what was going on. One of the few who did, and the only one willing to help me.
I replied:
Yeah, we do.
Let that be an acceptance of her apology. I started up the Chevelle, said sorry to the dashboard for leaving it outside in the woods all night, and drove back up to the trailer. By the time I got there, Sadie had thrown my backpack and coffee thermos out the trailer door, and Artemis had sent me another message.
Also, Tad Thompson can suck eggs.
I laughed.
13
I kept my head down at school and walked through the soreness of my ankle until it faded. No getting to class late, no extra-long bathroom breaks to calm down, no trampling freshmen in the hallway, even when they made passing jokes about me getting caught by the Dead Men Walking crew and I had to breathe through my nose and count down from ten until the red in my vision went away. There’d been no other fires, no injuries, no deaths; the firestarter had either been temporarily spooked by all the people in the mine or it was smart enough to bide its time.
Rivera had been right; the story had gotten out quickly. It was worse for Artemis than it was for me, ironically, because people expected me to do something like that, but from Artemis it was shocking. She avoided me at school, either because Greta had told her to, or because she didn’t want to prolong her misery.
The rising excitement about the homecoming parade came as a bit of a blessing, since it took at least a little of the attention off me. I liked homecoming okay. It meant more people out in the streets, but at least they were the residents of Addamsville and not tourists, and it was one of the few days of the year they didn’t seem to mind if there were Novaks among them. This year it was a relief. To be forgotten would be better than being feared.
And to be forgotten would be especially nice this year, because Dad was coming home.
He’d been sentenced to seven years but had only served three and a half thanks to Indiana’s good-time credit. Probably he’d schmoozed someone. My memories of him before he got arrested—when he took Sadie and me to Hal’s to get ice cream, when he taught me to drive, when he sat with us and Mom on the bluffs and looked out across Addams Lake—were overshadowed by the new memories of visits to a concrete room with a table and plastic chairs, us explaining what we’d been doing for the last month and trying not to bring up how much the town hated us. Sadie had eagerly awaited those visits. I had dreaded them, because there was always a chance I would get angry and say something to Dad that would hurt him, and the guilt would weigh me down even more than before. It seemed like cruel irony that he could cause us so much harm and I could still feel horrible for feeding even a little bit of it back to him.
When the seventh-period bell rang, I bolted for the Chevelle, keeping an eye out, always, for any of the eyeless dead, and escaped the parking lot before the three o’clock rush. The drive took longer than usual, and when I got there, Sadie’s car was parked in its normal spot, by the raspberry bushes along the treeline.
The trailer sat on the lot where Aberdeen House had once been, our plumbing jerry-rigged to the Aberdeen well and septic tank. The generator out back was already grumbling away, and a light was on in the kitchen window at one end of the trailer. My heart beat hard. I wanted to scream obscenities. I wanted to cry.
Instead I got out of the car and yelled, “PAPA BIRD SAYS WHAT?”
A heartbeat later, the front door of the trailer crashed open and Dad yelled back, “COME HOME, BABY BIRDS!”
I met him halfway to the door. He had to lean back to lift my feet off the ground, and he swung me around once before setting me back down and squeezing me hard enough to make breathing difficult. It was the first hug I’d gotten from anyone since the last time he’d hugged me, and I held on tighter, and I hated him, and I loved him.
“You weren’t so heavy last time,” he said.
He let me go and held my face. He smelled like shampoo and aftershave. His hair had been recently cut, probably by Sadie. There was gray at his temples where there hadn’t been before, and more lines on his face than I remembered from the last time we visited him. He was a handsome guy, my dad, not especially tall or bulky, because you don’t need to be when you’re as charming as he is. But there was something different now in his eyes and his shoulders; where there once had been a glint of Novak mischief, now there was only weariness. Good, I thought, and reveled in that weariness. Good.
He took my hands in his and pulled them up, raising an eyebrow at my gloves.
“It’s just so people don’t ask questions.”
“We talked about the gloves before.”
“I don’t want people to stare.”
Both eyebrows went up. “You can’t bullshit the bullshitter, Zoo.” He held my hands tight. “You are a Novak,” he said slowly, “and Novaks don’t hide from their shame. They accept what they’ve done and the decisions they’ve made, they take their punishment, and they move on.”
A snarl threatened to form on my lips; I quickly looked down. He didn’t have any right to tell me what to do. I’d been the one taking his punishment for three years while he sat in prison.
I pulled my hands out of his. He cleared his throat. Wiped his hands on his jacket.
“I’m so glad to be home,” he said.
“Can you guys hug over dinner?” Sadie came out the front door, locking it behind herself. The lights were off, the generator killed. “I’m starving.”
“Shut up, Sadie!”
“You shut up, skunkface!”
“So glad to be home!” Dad crowed, dancing to the driver’s door of the Chevelle. The change in him from hesitant to buoyant was instant, as if nothing strange had passed between us.
Sadie stopped with her car keys in hand. “Oh. Are we not taking my car?”
Dad looked stricken. I bit my lip to keep from laughing.
“Sadie. My darling.” Dad held his hand out for the Chevelle’s keys, and I tossed them over. “I have been away from all my children for almost four years, and you expect me to leave my eldest at home?”
Sadie rolled her eyes. “Fine, but I get shotgun.”
“Oh, come on—”
Dad cackled as he climbed in the car.
“Home!”
Fool’s Gold was a local restaurant that served great biscuits and gravy, good pizza, and mediocre everything else. A couple of pool tables and a dartboard were clustered at the south end of the room so players could watch the TV behind the bar, usually set to whatever seasonal sport was on. Today it was the news. We arrived before the dinner rush and got our table near the north window, where Piper Mountain made a purple shadow against the darkening horizon. A few bikers lounged by the pool table in the back, not stirring even when a living man walked right through them carrying beers to his table. There were fewer of them than normal. Fewer ghosts in the parking lot and on the streets, too. They’d been dwindling since Masrell’s fire, like a classroom with too many empty seats.
We ordered, not on purpose, the same meal we’d ordered the last time we’d been here. Dad: a Coke, a Pyrite (a cheeseburger with jalapeños), and an order of onion rings. Sadie: sweet tea and a chicken Caesar wrap (which sounds healthy but is actually the fixings of a Caesar salad spread on a small pepperoni pizza and rolled up). Me: water, french fries, and the hottest hot wings they can possibly make (lovingly nicknamed “Eyeblisters”).
When I pointed out it was the same meal from almost four years ago, Sadie said, “How the hell do you remember that?” and Dad said, “Yeah, sounds like us.”
I remembered because it was the last meal all three of us at
e together before Dad got arrested.
“So, who wants to go first?” Dad asked, twirling an onion ring around his finger.
“First for what?” I said.
“Telling me what’s been going on recently. With you two.”
Dad was already looking at me. Sadie’s head turned slowly, as if she was giving me time to start talking. I bit down on my straw until my teeth ground together. This wasn’t fair.
“Nothing,” I said. “Everything’s peachy.” I stuffed a chicken wing in my mouth. Sadie bared her teeth.
“Zora has something she wants to tell you about, Dad.”
I shook my head.
“Oh? What kind of something?”
My eyes began watering. Damn Eyeblisters.
“Did you hear about the Dead Men Walking crew filming here?” Sadie said.
“Sure, it’s all anyone’s talking about.”
“Zora paid them a visit when they were shooting at the coal mine.”
I swallowed, chased it with a handful of fries for the heat, and, still crying, said, “Wait, wait, wait. He needs to hear the whole thing. You’re making it sound like I just arbitrarily decided to go do that.”
“Do what?” Dad’s voice dropped.
I cleared my throat. “Sneak into the mine and fake paranormal evidence.”
“And then get caught on your way out and get arrested,” Sadie finished. “Her and Artemis. They snuck in to mess with this film crew and got themselves arrested. I had to pick her up from the police station this morning.”
Dad ran a hand over his face. “Why would you do that, Zo?”
He called me Zo and not Zoo when he was really disappointed. I’d already given him my answer. What else was I supposed to say? I knew what I’d done wrong.
“Tourists,” Sadie said. “They did it because they’re tired of tourists.”
“That seems a little reductive,” I said.
“Who isn’t tired of tourists?” Dad sat back. “But that’s not a reason to go into the mine—that makes me worry about you, you know? You could have been hurt, or gotten lost. The mine isn’t safe.”
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