by Norah Wilson
“Back to Harvell House,” Brooke gasped. She grabbed Alex’s arm in her excitement.
“I saw her go through the stained glass window into the attic of Harvell house,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it! But I knew enough not to tell anyone. That is, until Vesta, years later.”
John glanced away again.
“Worst poker face ever,” Brooke said. “Definitely banging her.”
Smith went on, “After that night I followed her back to Harvell House, some nights I’d sneak out of the Dufty house and watch for her to come out of that window. Once I waited in the oak by the river—terrified, mind you—until she returned and went back in.
“Then, one night—February 20— I watched her go from that window, and she never came back.”
“That’s the night they killed her,” Alex said. Smith couldn’t hear her, but Brooke and Maryanne could. Though this wasn’t new knowledge, Maryanne let out a small whimpering sound, as if suddenly wounded.
There was more.
“When I was eighteen,” Smith said, “and the government stopped paying my board, I was done at the Duftys. I had no family. No home. No place to go. Ira Walker offered me a job helping out at the farm one hard winter and I bunked down in the shed, the very one that burned down last winter out there. That’s where I met Vesta, at the Walker farm. We became friends. Good friends, even though she was quite a bit older. We talked about anything and everything. We both knew of the Heller, both held a soft spot for her that we’d never told another soul about. I felt the Heller’s loneliness; Vesta felt her sorrow. We both somehow knew she was trapped.
“After that winter, I got a few jobs around, taking care of properties, including Harvell house. C.W. Stanley—I had no idea what a monster he was—paid me a pittance to keep an eye on the place when he went out west. That was before he fixed it up and donated it as a residence. I would have worked for free at Harvell had the job not come along. I worked harder there than any other place. I spent more time there and hoped—always hoped—that the black ghost would come back to it.”
“And we did,” Brooke whispered. “Different black ghosts.”
“I got a room here in Mansbridge, lived cheaply,” Smith went on. “I kept track of every Heller sighting over the years. Till you three started, they were fewer and farther between as time passed. I saved my money to buy a property of my own, an old abandoned church building, way out on Robinson Road. But you won’t find it registered under John Smith. I used my legal name: John Warren Phann. My grandfather threatened to kill me if I ever used my real name in public. He was that ashamed of me. I guess the Duftys had to have known that was my real name—they got the government cheques for keeping me—but they’re long dead now. Anyway, I bought the old church. Small and sorely in need of repair as it was. Vesta helped me with the money. Beautiful Vesta…
“We wanted to give the Heller a safe place, a quiet place. We wanted to watch over her. Help her. I wasn’t spiritual like Vesta, but I wanted to help this one they hunted. I never could stand to see anyone that lonely. Vesta and I thought that property could be a haven for the Heller. I thought…I thought maybe it could someday be a haven for Vesta, too, if I fixed it up, made it homey. It wouldn’t be much, but it would be safe.”
“But she never left Ira,” Maryanne mumbled. “As desperately as she must have wanted to leave, she stayed.”
Alex and Brooke looked at her. Maryanne shook her head in a never mind way. It was never that simple, especially in those days of fewer options for women in Vesta’s position.
“But the hunters…” John Smith said. “And it wasn’t just Ira Walker by this time. They wanted to make that haven her hell!”
“And that’s what they did,” Alex said. Her anger crackled alive again. She looked hard at John Smith.
“Do you believe him?” Brooke asked.
She hesitated.
“If we don’t, then what?” Maryanne asked. “What happens to John Smith then? What do we do, how far do we go to keep our secret? To keep each other safe?”
“What happens to us if we’re wrong to trust him?” Brooke said. “What if he’s lying and he’s a hunter after all?”
“He might be the one Vesta wrote about, or he might not be,” Maryanne said.
Alex summed it up for them. “Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”
Either way, they could be so freakin’ humped.
Chapter 26
I Think I Can, I Think I…Holy Crap!
Maryanne
Maryanne hovered with the other two casters, trying to absorb every word that John Smith was saying. Trying to pay attention. But her mind was racing.
John Smith had been Vesta’s lover. It wasn’t just the way the man averted his eyes every time he spoke of Vesta Walker that gave him away. It wasn’t just Maryanne’s own way of feeling things. It was Vesta herself.
She’d encountered bones in the graveyard, just like Brooke and Alex had. But Maryanne had only touched the bones of one corpse. Vesta Walker’s. She’d known from that brief encounter with Vesta’s bones that she’d loved someone. Someone not her husband. There had been more to encounter—much more!—and Maryanne could swear that she’d heard Vesta’s voice whisper in her mind, “Hello, dear and powerful girl.”
Maryanne’s original squeezed her hand again around the hagstone. Her hagstone. The world would have to wrestle it out of her cold, dead hands if the world ever wanted it back. But that wasn’t really a worry. This stone wanted her as much as she wanted it.
Grandmother Beach was right—she could feel stones. She hadn’t any doubt on that at all. And this one, she more than felt it; she knew that this hagstone wanted to be hers. She squeezed the stone once more.
And that was the other thing—she was squeezing the freaking stone!
Then she jiggled her left foot. Kicked her right foot up against it at the toes. Flexed both knees. When Maryanne applied every bit of her effort, she lifted her right foot off the ground. Only a few inches. Not enough so that Brooke in the sleeping bag to her right would notice, but she’d done it nonetheless! She felt it; she saw it. Her paralysis was loosening!
Was the stone was making her stronger? Mind, spirit, and body too?
Could she lift a shoulder off the floor? If she really, really tried, if she clutched that stone so hard, could she—
“Are you even listening to this?” Alex turned her around with a hard hand on her dark shoulder.
Not only had her mind been drifting, her cast had been too. She hadn’t even realized she’d turned toward her body.
Now her eyes fell again on John Smith, still telling his tale. His eyes looked a little less frightened, Maryanne was glad to see.
Brooke picked up the knife Alex had put down earlier and carved a word in the dirt, then tossed the knife back down.
CHURCH?
John Smith nodded. “If you want to call it that. I bought that old building for a few thousand dollars from the town decades ago. The building but not the burial ground. Of course, there were stipulations as to what I could do with it. In secret, we filled the building with copper, as much as we could find. We waited for the Heller to come.”
Maryanne rolled her hands in a ‘go on’ gesture.
“I only found this out later: One night a couple men broke into the church. It was close to Halloween, and they were drunk and up to no good. They found our stash of copper. But they didn’t destroy the building. Not completely. That is, until tonight.”
Smith looked away in disgust, but only for a moment. “Eustace Kosnick, that old fellow you…took for a ride. He was one of the two who’d broke in that time. The other was a man named Hal Jackson. He’s dead now. Drank himself into a stupor, froze to death on his back porch swing about six years ago. Those bastards figured that must have been one of the Heller’s nests. So they figured they’d trap her.”
“The nails,” Alex breathed. “Pieces of iron.”
“Yeah,” Brooke said. “They were all over the
walls, the roof, but—”
“But not the floors,” Maryanne said. “The villains were on the outside, not the inside.”
Mary turned back to Smith. He was quiet, intently watching the three of them, clearly understanding that they were conversing, but not able to hear them.
“Vesta and I left a note here, in this cave, for the Hell—for Connie Harvell. A piece of paper with pennies glued on the sides. She told Connie about the place. Told her what we’d done to the old church. Vesta begged her to take refuge in the little building. To take our help…all of our help. The sanctuary was just supposed to be a start. We wanted to help her in others ways.
“We hadn’t known what these men—Eustace and Hal—were doing, that they were spending their nights prying up the old wooden siding to slide in bits of iron, small nails or whatever they could get. They did the same with the roof when they weren’t too drunk to climb up there. They hid their work well, under old shingles they’d pry off and lay down again. We had no idea. We only found out about it later, when they were drunk again, and bragging about it all over town.
“So on the night Miss Connie Harvell finally trusted enough to enter, she was betrayed. Only not by us! We were there, Vesta and me, waiting for her in the church. And when she shot in through the wall, the iron nearly tore the poor girl apart. I could tell by the shrieking when she shot in. I saw the torment on her face. I’ll carry that vision till the day I die.
“Vesta saw those gray lines in her face too—those pained, tormented, accusatory gray lines. There was another one with us…a trusted friend of Vesta’s. She went blind that night after seeing the pain in Connie’s face. It was too much for her.
“Connie thought Vesta—that we—had set her up. Lured her in to hurt her. And oh, the shrieking! I…I didn't dare go near her, but Vesta kept trying to…do something. But there was nothing to be done. Connie flew around the church, but the iron! It had been so painful, so draining, that she didn’t dare shoot through the wall again. It was Vesta who finally crawled to the door and opened it. She left and never came back. We knew she never would.”
“Oh God,” Brooke whispered.
Maryanne fought the urge to bury her face in her hands. How awful for Connie. How awful for them all. At least the three of them—Maryanne, Brooke, and Alex—had each other. She could only imagine how Connie must have felt. Not only betrayed in the worst way, but so completely, totally alone.
“I knew that one of you was at the window tonight when I sat with Patricia,” Smith said. “It was that perfect quiet that gave you away. I knew Cal Kosnick and his thugs were heading out to the church. But I swear I didn’t know they were headed there tonight until Cal phoned to say there’d been a change of plans. I didn’t know they were going to burn it down. I went to protect you. To try to help. And maybe, somehow, make you see what was below the floor.”
No one reached for the knife to scratch out a question. They all knew what he was talking about. John Smith saw this too.
“It was meant to be a gift for Connie. More than a gift.”
Maryanne’s question came on a shrug. “From whom?”
John Smith shook his head sadly, “I was hoping you could tell me. Vesta never would. Poor Vesta…she just never would.”
“We can trust him,” Alex said.
“Oh yes, we can,” Maryanne said. But it wasn’t her cast that had inadvertently spoken out loud.
Loud and clear, the words had come from her now sitting up original.
Chapter 27
Grounded
Alex
Alex blinked in astonishment as Maryanne’s original lowered herself back down into a prone position. The motion was not as controlled as it could have been and she clunked her head, but not too hard. Not hard enough to draw a moan, anyway.
Alex shot over to hover above Maryanne’s body, stretched out again in the sleeping bag. Brooke was already there, peering down in equal fascination. John Smith stayed a respectful safe distance back from it all.
“Maryanne Pamela Hemlock!” Alex snapped. “What did you just do, young lady?”
As soon as the words were out, Alex cringed. Even to her own ears, the question came out more than accusatory. It was downright parental. She sounded like her own mother. Alex stifled the groan. She really did have to cut it out with this overprotective thing she had going on.
And wait—Maryanne’s original couldn’t even hear her caster voice!
Yes, she could, she realized. In a roundabout way. Maryanne’s cast could hear Alex’s words perfectly well, and because cast and original shared a co-consciousness, and because both were awake and aware, Maryanne’s original was therefore hearing everything, albeit second hand.
But Alex still wanted to know what the heck Maryanne had done. No, scratch that. She knew what she’d done. The question was, how had she done it?
It was Brooke who answered. “The hagstone must be helping her. Working on her. That has to be it. Look at how she’s holding it!”
Brooke was right. What once had been Vesta Walker’s hagstone was clutched in Maryanne’s right hand on her chest. As she and Brooke watched, Maryanne gently stroked the gray stone with her thumb. Then she turned that thumb, and gave a slow thumbs up.
“Show off,” Alex grumbled. She looked down at her own wide-awake original and willed it to move like Maryanne’s had done. But as ever, all she could manage was to flop a hand or a foot sideways and there was no control to it. Alex glanced at Brooke’s original. Whether she was trying to move or not, Alex wasn’t sure, but her body didn’t so much as twitch a finger.
Maryanne’s cast twirled in the air in a moment of abandoned delight. “It is the stone!” she said. “It’s like…I can feel the hagstone’s power. It’s giving power to me, somehow.
“Can you sit up again?” Alex asked.
“I’m not sure.” The answer came from her cast.
“Can you talk some more?” Brooke asked. She nodded to Maryanne’s original, as if there could be any question.
Lowering her thumb, and tightening her whole hand once again around the hagstone, Maryanne managed a couple words. “Must…work.”
She was right.
As fascinating as this was, they had work to do. More to learn, and absolutely no time to spare.
The casters turned back to John Smith.
“We have to trust him,” Brooke said, though with obvious reluctance.
“I think we do,” Maryanne agreed.
They were right of course. As with Bryce, they really didn’t have much choice in the matter. It was almost dawn of another day. Another hot, ice-melting, June day.
Alex picked up the copper knife. She scratched a single, small word into the floor of the cave. ICE.
She didn’t even add the question mark. If Smith knew what she meant, she didn’t need to.
He nodded. “I saw the ice out front, the picture there in the pond.” He paused. “Did you do that?”
All three casters shook their head ‘no’.
He didn’t look surprised. “It’s the exact same as the attic window. I saw it in the moonlight, every detail. I can’t tell you how many times I studied that window. It’s perfect. It’s exact, except for the color.”
Maryanne pointed to the stones they’d been sorting and Smith’s eyes widened as he took them in.
“Vesta’s trunk! Her stones! You’re going to use those, instead of the colored glass. And you’ll use the blessed water.”
Brooke gasped. “Blessed water. The verse from Vesta’s grimoire!”
As if on cue, as if he’d been carrying around the words for years in his memory, John Smith recited them:
Water blessed can make one well
But doesn't last long, before back to hell
Fly with the silver, cry with the gleam…
“He didn’t finish it,” Brooke said, confused.
“Maybe he doesn’t know the rest,” Maryanne answered.
Alex extended her hand and made a ‘go on’
motion to John Smith. He must have gotten the gist, because he started talking again.
“Vesta looked out over the pond one time. It was the day she’d finished chiseling her message on that wall, her promise to help the Heller, to be forever waiting. She seemed relieved yet sad that day. As lost in thought as I’d ever seen her. It was late in the afternoon. Ira would be livid she wasn’t home, but this day Vesta didn’t seem to care. She looked out over the pond and recited those words.
When I asked what they meant, she wouldn’t tell me. I knew there was more, but again, she wouldn’t say. And that was something, because Vesta and I had few secrets between us.”
John Smith looked away. It seemed to Alex that he looked back in time. She doubted very much his early attestation that they were just friends, nothing more. He and Vesta had had an affair, Alex would bet her last dollar on it.
“Yep, definitely banging her,” Brooke said.
Maryanne huffed. “Not very eloquently put, but I don’t disagree.”
John turned back from his drifting thoughts, faced the casters again. “That’s how you’re going to get back into your bodies?”
“It’s how we’re going to try,” Alex said. Then, realizing Smith hadn’t heard that, she gave him an exaggerated nod.
Smith ran a trembling hand through his gray hair. “There’s power in that image,” he said. “Some sort of energy. Vesta said people put energy into the stones, and it comes back out—to those who are smart enough to believe in that sort of thing. She worked with those stones all the time.”