by Norah Wilson
Behind her, she heard the girls getting up at last. When she turned, they were wiping their faces.
“Sorry about that,” Maryanne said. “I guess I lost it there.”
“God, don’t apologize,” Alex said. “You’re not the only one. And you must have been a wreck to start with. You must have felt the horror of that place the whole while we were down there. I only felt it briefly, when I touched Connie’s bones. Her poor shattered skull.”
“Maryanne almost touched them too,” Brooke interjected, before they could go off on another crying jag. “You knocked her ass over teakettle when you shot up out of there, and she fell right into the ground.”
Alex looked at Maryanne. “Oh, crap. Sorry.”
Maryanne waved it off. “It’s okay. I caught myself before I fell far. And I didn’t touch anything. But it did scare the heck out of me. It’s a wonder I didn’t overtake you on your way back here.”
Alex snorted. “Nothing was overtaking me. I have never been that freaked out. I was on edge to start—with the combination of claustrophobia and absolute blackness and crawly things and the fear of encountering some cast-off hunk of iron and getting stuck... Then finding Connie’s skeleton, touching her skull and feeling all that horror... ”
“Oh, God, I think I’m going to be sick,” Maryanne said.
“Suck it up,” Brooke warned, even though her own stomach pitched at the thought of being trapped below ground with a corpse. “No puking up here, remember?” Then she turned to Alex. “What’d it feel like? And how can you be so sure it’s Connie? Could you tell by how it felt?”
“Oh, yeah,” Alex said. “It was Connie, all right. And it felt awful. All that grief. And omigod, the anger for what they did to her!”
Brooke rubbed her sore shoulder. “She’s pissed, huh?”
“Righteously. It’s as if all her fury... all the horror... stayed with her somehow. Concentrated right into her bones. Maryanne, that must be what you were feeling down there.”
They stood in silence for a moment.
“Oh, and by the way, we can touch bone,” Alex said. “It’s solid to us, like copper or iron.”
Brooke blinked. “But if you couldn’t pass through it, how could you know its essence? How could know it’s Connie?”
“Oh, I felt it.” Alex shuddered out a breath. “It’s probably a good thing I couldn’t pass through it. I don’t know if I could have stood it. I’d probably still be screaming.”
Another silent pause while they thought about that.
Again, it was Alex who broke the silence. “So, I guess we have to dig her up, huh?”
Brooke rolled her sore shoulder. “Why bother?”
“Duh,” Maryanne said. “So Connie can try to reunite with her remains, of course.”
“The bones wouldn’t have to be exposed for that,” Brooke pointed out. “Connie can sink down into the ground just as easily as Alex did.”
“No,” Alex shook her head. “No, we have to be able to see what happens. Unless the bones are exposed, we won’t know for sure if she’s successful or if she just ran into an old pipe and got trapped down there. Unless you want to be the one to go down and check?”
“Hell no!” Brooke said. “I’m not going down there.”
“Then we dig,” Alex said.
“In our regular bodies?” Maryanne asked.
“Yep. No copper shovels required.”
“But how will we get away with doing that?” Maryanne asked.
Alex smiled wanly. “Easy. American Thanksgiving is coming right up, and this place basically shuts down for four days.”
“We get the time off too? Canadian students?”
“Yeah, us too,” Alex said. “They pretty much have to close up. As they’ve discovered, it turns into a ghost town around here anyway, between the American students who go home and the Canadian ones who skip school to rush down to the shopping outlets in Kittery and Freeport for Black Friday. The school calls it a professional development day, but I think all the teachers head across the border too.”
“Right,” Maryanne said. “Border town. I keep forgetting.” She chewed her lip a second. “It’ll still be tricky, though, won’t it? I mean, Betts and the old caretaker guy must still be here?”
“Not if everyone leaves, which they’re strongly encouraged to do.”
“Wait a minute—you have to go home?” Maryanne’s voice rose with anxiety.
“Relax, Maryanne. They can’t make you go home for any of the vacation periods. Well, except for summer break, I suppose,” Alex replied, her tone soothing. “But pretty much everyone does take off for Thanksgiving. Or they just go away shopping in the States, like I said. And when the joint empties out, Betts takes off too. That just leaves John Smith, who lives over three miles away, and he only checks in twice a day, at 7:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., like clockwork.”
“Wow, Robbins.” Brooke lifted an admiring eyebrow. “How do you know all that?”
Alex lifted a shoulder in a casual shrug. “I always pretended to go home but didn’t. No point going home when my friends in Halifax were away at university, since it’s not a Canadian holiday. Well, except for Anika, who goes to Dal right there in Halifax, but she’s stuck in classes.”
Brooke grinned. “Of course! You stayed here and partied 24–7 with your Mansbridge friends!”
“I used to,” Alex confessed. “I’d pretty much just creep back in to rummage for food and to sleep the day away, then head back out again.”
“Okay, so we’ll pretend to leave, then sneak back into the house to excavate the bones?” Maryanne asked. “Is that the plan?”
“That’s the plan,” Alex agreed.
“Somebody has to tell Connie,” Maryanne pointed out.
“I will,” Alex said, to no one’s surprise.
“What do we do if we’re wrong and she’s not ready to do this?”
“She’s ready,” Alex asserted. “But if for some reason she’s not, I think we still dig up the remains, still call the police. At the very least, she’d get a proper burial in the cemetery.”
“Where Connie’s cast could fuse with her remains any time she wanted,” Brooke murmured. “Provided they stick her in a wooden casket, I mean. Not one of those titanium jobs. Who knows what the titanium might be alloyed with?”
“Oh, boy, wouldn’t that suck?” Maryanne shuddered. “We’d have to dig her up again!”
“I don’t think we have to worry about that,” Alex said. “I mean, she has no family left, right? They’ll probably give her a cheap-assed wooden casket, if not one of those cardboard ones.”
“A cardboard casket?” Maryanne sounded horrified.
Brooke shrugged. “Environmentally friendly, I guess.”
“Oh, shit.” Brooke sucked in a breath. “What if they cremate her? Would she be locked out forever then? Or could she maybe get back into her ashes?”
Maryanne moaned.
“Thank you for that contribution, Brooke,” Alex said, then sighed. “Look, I really don’t think we have to worry about that stuff. I think she’s ready.”
“Well, you’d know better than us,” Brooke said, not without a little snideness. “You know, with all that extra visiting.”
Alex ignored the dig. “So, do we have a plan?” She looked from one to the other. “Are we agreed?”
“Agreed,” Maryanne said.
“Agreed,” Brooke echoed, already planning ahead.
Maybe Thanksgiving wouldn’t suck ditchwater after all.
She’d been dreading going home. Her mom and the step-Fuehrer were going to be away anyway, visiting his relatives, and she’d have been alone. And sure as shit, Herr Kommandant would have cleaned out the liquor cabinet. The jerk. But she hadn’t seen much alternative. She figured Maryanne and Alex would be off to their respective families, and she’d pretty much burned her bridges with the locals, who looked at her like she was Typhoid Mary, thanks to that HPV gag she’d pulled on Seth. And thanks also to... well... h
er general bitchiness. That last thought gave her a pang. Maybe she could work on that bitchy thing, at least with her roomies.
Brooke’s mind whirled. They could pack their bags and head out in Brooke’s rental. Pretend they were all headed to the Fredericton airport to catch flights home. Instead, they could go to a local motel and have a pajama party while the rest of the house emptied out. Give Betts and Smith a chance to satisfy themselves the place really was abandoned. Then the girls could sneak back the next day.
Brooke grinned. This could turn out to be fun.
Well, some of it. Her smile faded as the revulsion she’d felt in the basement echoed through her, making her skin crawl.
Yeah, the pajama party part would be great.
The exhumation of the angry corpse part? Not so much.
Chapter 31
The Worms Crawl Out
Maryanne
Maryanne watched wide-eyed as Brooke flipped a middle finger at the retreating Chevy as it spun down Alder.
“What jerks,” Maryanne mumbled.
“Totally!” Brooke agreed.
The carload of boys had rolled down the windows to whistle at them initially. But seeing Brooke was part of the duo when they’d gotten closer, the whistles had turned into insults.
Whore. Slut. Tramp.
The usual.
“Same everywhere,” Brooke scoffed. “Always about that, you know? Trip an old lady or drown a sack of puppies... worst name they can think of revolves around your sex. God, I could be the freakin’ holy virgin and they’d still come out with that garbage.”
“Friends of Seth’s?” Maryanne guessed.
Brooke laughed as if the hurled insults hadn’t bothered her. “Yeah. And maybe even friends of mine last year.”
Maryanne shook her head. “Brooke, sorry that this kind of—”
Brooke waved her off. “Oh, please. Doesn’t bother me a bit.”
It did bother Brooke. More than a bit. Maryanne knew it, saw it in that New York grin she held just a little too long. But Brooke wouldn’t admit that it hurt; that would be a weakness, and she refused to show any. Maryanne sighed, but she knew not to push it.
“Shall we head over to the mall for a latte after?” Brooke asked.
It was the perfect afternoon for it, Maryanne had to admit. A strong, cold wind had met them when they’d left school this afternoon. And she and Brooke had left together. In fact, after what had happened with McKenzie, Maryanne never left school alone. Every day, either Brooke or Alex was waiting there, a safe escort home. Alex’s orders. Not that Maryanne would ever accept another instruction to stay late from McKenzie. And not that he’d left her any more notes. On the other hand, he wasn’t exactly ignoring her. Every day, he scowled pure hatred her way. And though he couldn’t mark her tests wrong—math wasn’t that subjective—every check mark he put on the page was a grudging, angry red slash.
“A latte sounds good. Hey, maybe Alex will join us?”
Brooke raised an eyebrow. “Kidding, right?”
“Right,” Maryanne said, although she hadn’t been. But Brooke was right. They were all casting out tonight, but Alex wouldn’t wait to talk to Connie then. She would go alone, on foot, copper offerings in her pocket, and she would give Connie the news that they’d found where her body was buried.
Alex actually seemed to look forward to her solo treks through the woods. Though she was never alone for long, she’d assured the girls. Connie would hear her coming. Hear the dry, dead branches Alex purposely snapped beneath her feet as she made her way to Connie’s nest. And Connie, concealing herself the best she could in the branches on these grey days, would come out to meet her.
What was it that pulled Alex so strongly to Connie? Sure, they all felt for this poor, lonely caster. Even tough Brooke had cried the night they’d found her bones. But with Alex, it was... different. Of course, everything was different about Alex Robbins, or so everyone said. She still looked tough, and she had the reputation from last year as a kick-ass hell raiser and party animal, but what Maryanne mostly saw was this fragile, somehow haunted person. Somehow even when she cast out.
“She’s an enigma, all right.”
“Talking to yourself again?” Brooke asked. She swung the door to the hardware store open.
“Well... yeah,” Maryanne said, stepping into the little store. “Lots of people do that.”
“Um... not really.”
“Bad habit.” Maryanne shrugged.
Both girls removed their gloves and blew into their hands to warm them as they looked around the store.
They needed gardening gloves. Heavy-duty ones, preferably. Where to start?
Last time Maryanne had been in here was during her frantic mission to get duplicate attic keys made in record time so she could race back and stash the original in its place before its absence was discovered. She’d gotten the barest general impression of the store that day. But now that she looked around for a specific item rather than making a beeline to the bold yellow KEYS sign hanging at the back, she had time to appreciate the organized clutter of the homey store. There wasn’t a lot of stock, but a little bit of everything. Maryanne liked the place. She’d like it even better if they found what they were looking for.
A slow-walking, friendly-looking clerk peered up over his reading glasses as he walked over to Maryanne and Brooke. His nametag read Eustace.
He looked like a Eustace.
“Anything I can help you with, ladies?”
“We’re looking for gloves,” Brooke said. “Three pair.”
“Winter gloves? We got some on aisle three, but they’re men’s thermal work gloves. Don’t know as they’d be what you’d want. Got some indoor work gloves, too, but they’d be too big for you young ladies.”
“Gardening,” Maryanne said. “We’re looking for ladies’ gardening gloves.”
Eustace smiled at her. “We don’t get much call for gardening gloves this time of year. Why would you be looking for those in November?”
Maryanne felt her face flush. She hadn’t anticipated an inquisition. What could she say? Certainly not the truth! Well, you see, Eustace, we’re going to dig up a body from the basement at Harvell House this weekend when everyone’s out of town so the Mansbridge Heller can reunite with it, and we don’t want to blister our hands.
“Christmas gifts,” Brooke said brightly, not missing a beat. “I have three dear old aunts in Florida. Got to send those parcels early.”
“What part of Florida?”
“Bonita Springs.”
“Nice place.” Eustace nodded as if he’d been there. “But still, I’m afraid, all the gardening things have been packed up and—”
Undeterred, Brooke continued her story. “My aunts—bless their hearts—moved down there in June. And poor Aunt Judy, she’s the youngest, can’t fly home because of a heart problem she developed down there. So none of them are coming home. This’ll be their first Christmas away from New Brunswick. They’re missing the Christmas concert at our little church. Family dinner at Gam Gam and Papa’s and Gam Gam’s not well, herself.”
Maryanne watched in amazement as Brooke’s eyes misted with tears.
“I... I haven’t got much money to spend. But I still wanted to get them a gift... something so they’d know how much I missed them all. They just love their little garden and I thought that gloves would be—”
Eustace raised a weathered hand, silencing Brooke. “Say no more. I’ll see if I can’t dig some gardening gloves out for you. I know we put at least a half dozen pairs away at the end of last season.”
Brooke sniffled as though those threatening tears were about to fall. “Oh, I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
“No trouble at all, miss.”
“Oh, thank you!” She linked her arm into his as they headed toward the back of the store in search of the packed-up gloves. Half turning, Brooke winked at Maryanne.
Okay, well, maybe Alex wasn’t the only enigma in Harvell House. The th
ings Brooke could get away with... Maryanne was still smiling as she turned, and the bright-yellow bargain bins caught her eye. Oh wow, she loved this stuff! Even in a hardware store, if you looked deep enough past the packets of tacks and nails and the really cheap measuring tapes, there were often little treasures to be found in the one-, two- or three-dollar bins. Case in point: “Sticky notes!” And they were shaped like little hammers. Treasures indeed. She picked up three packs. The bottom bins looked tempting too. Maryanne squatted for a closer look. Mechanical pencils and gel pens. “I’ve been meaning to get some—”
“Sorry—were you talking to me?”
She looked up. Waaaaay up at the guy who’d just rounded the corner. By the time her gaze finally reached his face, she realized that she’d lingered a bit longer than necessary on the upward trip.
Blushing, Maryanne stood quickly. “Oh, no. Sorry, I was just... well, talking to myself,” she said, half in apology. Oh, man, she could feel the heat in her face now. “I’m told it’s a bad habit.”
“Not so bad.” The young man smiled. “Lots of people do it.”
He was good looking. Not in a pretty or polished way, but in a rugged way. He needed a shave, and she found that terribly sexy, and he looked as if he belonged in those jeans, that lined leather jacket opened just enough at the collar. And tall—well over six feet, and with a casual mess of dark brown hair and the most chocolate-brown eyes Maryanne had ever seen. She was sure she’d never met him before—no way would a guy like this slip her mind—but somehow, he looked vaguely familiar.
And the best part was... he wasn’t moving along.
“So,” he said, “you come here often?” Then he cringed.
And, yeah, it was that bad of a line.
“Twice,” Maryanne said. “I’ve been here twice. Nice little store. Nothing like it back home.” There. She’d set that out on purpose. If he asked, then it meant he was... “Where’s back home?”... potentially interested. Yes!
“Burlington, Ontario. Near Toronto.”
“You must go to Streep.”