Deception So Dark

by Clara Kensie

  Hesitantly, she gave me one nod.

  “Thanks, Melanie. Call me the moment you see it.”

  The warning bell rang for first period and she looked nervously down the hall. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “You won’t. But call me,” I said. “Not Tristan.” I ripped a piece of paper from my notebook and scribbled my phone number on it.

  She tucked my phone number in a textbook and rushed away, probably thinking I didn’t want her to call Tristan so she could win him back. But that wasn’t it at all. I didn’t want her to call Tristan because if he knew what I was planning to do, he would try to stop me.

  In art class the next morning, Mr. Vargas assigned us to do a self-portrait using oil pastels. I accidentally drew the Nightmare Eyes instead. I threw my paper away before anyone saw it and told Mr. Vargas that I’d try again tomorrow.

  It had been an entire day since I’d asked Melanie to find my Anne of Green Gables book, and she still hadn’t found it. Every time I passed her in the hall, she shook her head. I kept my phone in my back pocket, but it never rang, except once, when Tristan triumphantly called to tell me I was about to trip over my shoelace on my way to chemistry.

  My book was still inside that small, moving, humming square, and every minute that passed, my stomach knotted tighter with anxiety and worry. Dennis had reported this morning that Beverly Jacobs would support the shoot-to-kill order, but only if innocent lives were at risk. That was good news, but knowing Kellan, he wouldn’t wait to make that judgment. He would kill them the moment he saw them.

  I stopped at my locker before Spanish to grab my textbook, when Melanie came rushing up to me.

  “It’s on fire,” she said, slightly out of breath.

  “What’s on fire?”

  “Your book. It’s on fire.”

  I clamped my hand over my mouth. “Inside that moving square?”

  “It’s not inside that square anymore. It’s outside. On fire.”

  Why would Jillian and Logan have kept my book this whole time, only to burn it now?

  It didn’t matter why. For the first time since they went missing, I knew what my brother and sister were doing now, this very moment. Not in the past. Not in the future. Now. I knew what they were doing, but I still didn’t know where they were.

  “Do you know where it’s burning?” I asked, trying to be casual, trying not to get my hopes up. “Like in a field, maybe?”

  She tilted her head and closed her eyes. “It’s in a garbage can. Red. Near a brick building.”

  I bounced on my toes with excitement. This was it. I was going to find my brother and sister today. “Do you see a road sign near that building? Anything that would identify its location?”

  She scrunched her face in concentration. Then she exhaled, shoulders slumped. “It’s gone.”

  I stopped bouncing, my heels dropping heavily to the floor. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “The vision. It’s gone.”

  “How can it just be gone like that?”

  “Because it burned up,” she said, shrugging. “It doesn’t exist anymore, just like your bag. There’s nothing left for me to see. I’m sorry, Tessa. I know you wanted your stuff, but it’s all gone.” She started to walk away.

  “Wait,” I said. “We can’t just give up because the vision is gone. Did you remember seeing any landmarks?” I prompted her. “Describe the building to me.”

  She closed her eyes again, squeezed them tight. “Well, the building was brick. There was a sign over the door.”

  “Do you remember what it said?”

  “Something Coin-Op Laundry. Lano Coin-Op Laundry? Something like that.”

  I whipped out my phone and typed Lano Coin-Op Laundry into the browser. “There are no results for Lano Coin-Op,” I said, “but there’s a Lako.”

  “Lako,” she said, nodding with her eyes still closed. “Yes, that was it.”

  There was no website for Lako Coin-Op Laundry, only an old yellowpages.com listing. The business was marked closed, but there was an address. 56 Boynes Street. Woodmoor, North Dakota.

  I entered the address into my Google Earth app and held my breath as it zoomed in on a building surrounded by an empty asphalt parking lot. The trees at the edge of the lot were in full bloom. It was winter now, so the image had been captured a while ago.

  Heart pounding, I showed my phone to Melanie. “Is this the building in your vision?”

  “Yeah, that’s it!” she exclaimed.

  I couldn’t help it: I threw my arms around her and squeezed her tight. Jillian and Logan were in Woodmoor, North Dakota, this very moment.

  Melanie Brunswick found my brother and sister.

  Six hours later, I shivered beneath a blue North Dakota sky as I stood next to a dented red garbage can, behind the abandoned building that used to be Lako Coin-Op Laundry. Unlike the Google Earth image on my phone, icy wind blew snow across the cracked asphalt parking lot.

  Inside the garbage can, the ashes of my Anne of Green Gables book were cold.

  After Melanie gave me Jillian and Logan’s location, instead of going to Spanish class, I’d slipped out of school. Took a cab to the Lilybrook airfield. Hired a charter plane—the same plane Tristan and I had taken to Tennessee, not the APR’s plane, of course—to an airfield a few miles outside Woodmoor, North Dakota. The disinterested pilot had asked no questions. Then I took another cab here, to 56 Boynes Street. Lako Coin-Op Laundry.

  To pay for all of this, I swiped the cash Tristan kept in his desk. He would forgive me when I returned to Lilybrook with Jillian and Logan.

  If I didn’t bleed to death inside a little silver-walled house first.

  But I was not inside a little house with silver walls. I was outside, in a frigid empty parking lot, behind an abandoned laundromat. No house. No silver. Just wind, asphalt, brick, and concrete.

  And the Nightmare Eyes. They had accompanied me the whole way here. I couldn’t escape them. No matter how far away I went, I’d never escape the guilt and shame of being Killers’ Spawn.

  But soon I’d have Jillian and Logan back. I was only six hours behind them. Now I just had to follow their path.

  I glanced at the cab driver, who was waiting for me in his dirty white cab. He was lighting a cigarette and watching me from under his ungroomed eyebrows. He’d asked why I wanted to go to this place, and I’d told him I’d lost something here. True. I lost my brother and sister.

  I took a breath, preparing myself to lift the fog. Should I do this without Tristan? I left my phone in my locker at school, on purpose, because I didn’t want him to call and find out I’d left Lilybrook. But maybe that was a mistake. His premonitions were working again, but without my phone, he wouldn’t be able to warn me before I lifted the fog too high, or brought it in too low.

  Didn’t matter. I’d come out here, risking bleeding to death inside a little house with silver walls, to find them. I could certainly risk lifting the fog to find them too.

  Clutching Jillian’s ballet shoe and Logan’s sheet music for strength, I steeled myself against the wind.

  Took a breath. Held it.

  Concentrated.

  Raised the fog.

  Just half an inch.

  I only had to lift it a teeny bit more before I saw Jillian and Logan.

  It was easy. Not many people had ever been to this isolated parking lot behind this deserted building. Wisps of long-gone customers carrying baskets of laundry. A flurry of skateboarding kids doing tricks, one of whom fell and got a concussion. A runaway dog.

  And two lonely and frightened teenagers, standing over a dented red garbage can, burning their dead sister’s favorite book.

  ❀

  “Logan! What are you doing? Give it back!”

  “I can’t believe you’ve been carrying this book around this whole time. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We have nothing of Mom and Dad’s. We burned everything else of Tessa’s after Tennessee. I just want one thing to rem
ember her by. She loved this book.”

  “We have to burn the book too. We can’t take any more chances. Dennis Connelly keeps finding us.”

  “Don’t you dare, Logan. This book is all we have left of her. And what if another psychic can sense something from it?”

  “Lady Elke couldn’t sense anything from it. She said Tessa was in art class drawing nightmare eyes. What does that even mean? Tessa’s dead.”

  “That psychic was obviously a fake. We’ll find one who’s legitimate.”

  “Did you ever even open this book?”

  “No. I don’t need to read it. I just want to keep it.”

  “Look. Right here, inside the cover. This book was a gift from Tristan Walker. He signed a dedication to her. To Sarah, and rainy days. -Tristan.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “That dedication is completely insincere. He was tricking her the whole time. He knew her real name was Tessa all along. She’s dead because of Tristan Walker. Do you want to keep something he gave her?”

  “No. Get rid of it. Destroy it. Set it on fire. Burn it to ashes.”

  “Give me the lighter.”

  ❀

  The vision shattered when someone grabbed me from behind and growled into my ear, “Did you really think you’d get away with this?”

  Strong, warm, sturdy arms. Clean, fresh, soapy scent.

  But I knew it was Tristan by his low, angry voice.

  Was I relieved or disappointed?

  Both. Relieved because I knew that this was not the start of Deirdre’s dream, that I was safe.

  Disappointed because I knew he would force me to go back to Lilybrook before I found Jillian and Logan. “Let me go, Tristan.” I struggled, but he crushed me tight against his chest. He didn’t hold me in a desperate hug. He held me so I wouldn’t run away again.

  “How could you?” he said. “How could you leave Lilybrook and come here all by yourself?”

  “Because you would have stopped me.”

  “Yes, I would have stopped you. I would have come out here myself, so you could stay home, where it’s safe.”

  I pushed out of his arms and threw my own arms wide. “Look around, Tristan. Do you see a little house with silver walls anywhere?”

  “No. But you still shouldn’t have come,” he said, fuming.

  I crossed my arms, shielding myself from the wind. Next to my cab was a blue car with a Woodmoor Auto Rental sticker in the window. “How did you find me so fast?” I’d only been here, behind the Coin-Op, for twenty minutes, tops. He must have been only twenty minutes behind me the whole time.

  “I asked Ember to keep an eye on you at school, to make sure you were safe and to make sure Nathan wasn’t bothering you. When she didn’t see you before your Spanish class, she texted me. I tried calling you, but you didn’t answer your phone.”

  He took my hoodie between his fingers. “This sweatshirt,” he said, “is technically mine. So the next person I called was Melanie, to ask her to find it. And she told me that just a few minutes prior to that, she found your Anne of Green Gables book for you, but it was burning. I figured it out from there.”

  Something shuffled in the shadows, then stepped out. Melanie, shaking like a baby bird, her black hair spilling out from under her knit beret. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you told me not to say anything to Tristan, but when he asked…I just can’t lie to him.”

  I, clearly, was very good at lying to Tristan. Another strike against me; another reason he should be with Melanie.

  What had they talked about during the flight out here? Or had she straddled his lap and kissed him the whole time, the same way I had kissed him when we flew to Tennessee?

  “You didn’t have to bring her with you,” I muttered.

  “Yes, I did,” Tristan said. The anger still hadn’t left his tone. “I couldn’t risk her telling her uncle. Kellan would be out here in a second.”

  Melanie shuffled in her Doc Martens, then sniffled. Was she crying? She gave me a resentful glance through her tears.

  Tristan seized my arm. “I’m taking you home. Let’s go.”

  Perking up, Melanie nodded eagerly.

  “We can’t go back,” I said. “I have a new lead. The best one yet.”

  With a dubious raise of his eyebrows, he said, “What is it?”

  “Before they came here, they saw a psychic named Lady Elke. They gave her my book and she told them I was alive, that I was drawing—” I stopped myself before I said Nightmare Eyes. I didn’t want Melanie to know my secret shame and grief had manifested itself into Nightmare Eyes that I never remembered drawing. I didn’t want her to know the Nightmare Eyes were an almost constant presence, burning down on me, crushing me from all sides.

  “She told them I was in art class,” I said. “They didn’t believe her, so they left and burned my book. But I was in art class. She knew exactly where I was this morning. She’ll know where they are now.”

  Tristan raked his hands through his hair, then gave a long, reluctant sigh. “Then we’d better find this Lady Elke.”

  See, Tristan? I flashed to him. No silver walls here.

  I was squeezed between Tristan and Melanie, pressed shoulder to shoulder, on a dirty loveseat inside a run-down house. Its walls were covered with faded wallpaper and a cracked, dusty mirror. Cigarette smoke hung in the air like fog, clogging my lungs. But there was not a silver thing in sight.

  We had found the psychic who’d told Jillian and Logan that I was alive and drawing Nightmare Eyes, and we were now sitting in her house. Tristan didn’t have her in his database, and an internet search on our phones had revealed nothing. We found a listing for her in a coffee-stained Yellow Pages at a pancake place located across the street from the Lako Coin-Op Laundry. Lady Elke lived the next town over in Aldana, a town even smaller than Woodmoor. Her advertisement in the phonebook showed a sketch of a beautiful young woman wearing a jeweled turban and gazing dreamily into a crystal ball that looked amazingly similar to the one Brinda Lakhani had drawn.

  Lady Elke in person was nothing like that sketch. She was in her fifties, and despite the cold February weather, she wore cutoff jeans and a yellowed tank top, both of which were several sizes too small. Her right eyelid was sunken and closed, as if she was missing her eye, and a thin white scar ran from her right cheekbone, over her eyelid, and disappeared into her scalp. Her remaining eye was the color of moss. Dark roots belied her frizzy blond hair. She sat across from us in a threadbare easy chair that at one time might have been white. Now it was just a dingy gray.

  In addition to the crystal ball, Brinda had drawn a picture of a four-legged animal with one eye. I’d thought it was a deer. One of the psychics Tristan contacted had said it was a horse. Now I knew it was an elk. For Lady Elke.

  Lady Elke had so far ignored Tristan and Melanie. She stared at me as her single eye gradually narrowed. Her lip curled up a little, like she smelled something bad. Her hands shook as she drew a puff from her cigarette, then released the smoke from the side of her mouth.

  She used her cigarette to point to me. “You’re the girl who was in that art class this morning,” she said, like she was accusing me of something.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied. In contrast to Lady Elke’s low, gravelly voice, mine seemed high and squeaky. I gave her a smile, but she didn’t smile back.

  “I told them two kids that you was alive. I told them, but they didn’t believe me.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Lady Elke frowned. “You three is like me,” she said. “You see things. Visions.”

  I glanced at Tristan. He nodded cautiously, so Melanie and I did too.

  “Then what do you need me for?” she asked. Her single eye darted back and forth between us.

  “We need you because you can see things that we can’t.” I pulled Jillian’s ballet shoe and Logan’s sheet music from my bag.

  Lady Elke curled her lip again. She didn’t seem to mind Tristan and Melanie; her
looks of disgust were clearly directed at me. She’d look at me, then her eyes would flick up at the ceiling, then down to me again. The back of my neck started to burn, to prickle.

  “I’ll do it for fifty bucks,” Lady Elke said. “No. Seventy-five.”

  Tristan reached into his wallet, withdrew a bill and placed on the table. She saw the bill was a hundred, and her face softened into a smile. “Let me get you some tea,” she said, her voice now pleasant and sweet. She tucked the hundred inside her tank top, then swayed out of the room.

  That woman does not like me, I flashed to Tristan.

  I don’t like her either, he said. Out loud, he called to her. “We’re in a hurry.”

  “It won’t take long,” she chimed from the kitchen. “It’s all part of the service.”

  Lady Elke had left the room, but her abhorrence for me lingered behind.

  A vision appeared through the fog, one that instantly made me forgive Lady Elke’s crude attitude. “Her ex-husband beat her,” I whispered. “With a wrench. Right here in this room. That’s how she lost her eye.”

  “Oh.” Tristan shuddered. “Now I just feel bad for her,” he said. Melanie and I nodded in agreement.

  Melanie kept looking across me, setting her wide violet gaze on Tristan. He sat straight up, face tight, keeping his hands on his lap instead of putting his arm around me like he usually did. Was he sitting like that so he wouldn’t make Melanie jealous? Or because he was still mad at me for leaving Lilybrook?

  We were sitting on the same couch that Jillian and Logan had sat upon just a few hours ago. I could feel their presence, and I wanted more. I could simply lift the fog to have a vision of them, but I didn’t want to make Tristan even angrier with me than he already was. “Tristan,” I asked, “do you see anything happening if I lift the fog right now?”

  He stiffened. “No. But be careful. Not too high. If I tell you to bring it back in, do it.”

  I touched his arm. “I will.”

  He still didn’t put his arm around me, but at least he didn’t shrink from my touch. “Go ahead. Lift the fog.”