“Hey!” she called out.
I skidded to a stop in the gutter. “Yes?”
She sipped daintily on her milkshake through a pink straw. “Aren’t you Nora McGrath’s sister?”
“Half-sister,” I corrected before mentally chiding myself. Adrienne had more of an influence on me than I thought.
“Same difference,” the girl said. She approached my bike and offered her hand. “I’m Isabella. I’m friends with Nora.”
“Yeah, I think she’s mentioned you,” I said, shaking hands. “You have French Lit class together, right?”
The other teenagers tittered on the sidewalk, but Isabella ignored them. “Yup. History and Pre-Calculus too. We’ve known each other for a while. Have you heard from her yet?”
“Unfortunately not.”
“What about the police?” Isabella asked. “Did they find anything?”
I studied Isabella’s expression in the streetlight. She was concerned. They all were. At first, I’d thought the other kids were impatient for Isabella to wrap up her conversation with me, but now I noticed that they hung on to every word. These were Nora’s friends. Like me, they wanted to know where she’d gone and if she was okay. Some of them had probably been with her on the night of the gala. One thing was certain: I had no intention of telling them about how the police found Nora’s gown covered in her blood.
“They’re working on it,” I said instead. “But they don’t have much to go on. No one’s seen Nora since that night. Were any of you at the gala with her?”
“I was,” Isabella said immediately, but the group behind her shrank backward a few steps. “We all were,” she added firmly. “Except Duncan. He was grounded that night.”
One of the other teenagers, a tall skinny boy with glasses, groaned. “Sheesh, Izzy. Throw us under the bus, why don’t you?”
I looked from Isabella to the other kids. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Isabella glanced over her shoulder at her friends. The spectacled boy pointedly shook his head. Isabella rolled her eyes at him but kept her mouth shut.
“Is this because you were all at Windsor after hours that night?” I asked. “I already knew that.”
The skinny boy threw his hands up in defeat. “We’re screwed.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” I said to him. I returned my focus to Isabella, who seemed most willing to speak with me. “If you fill me in on everything that happened that night.”
The teenagers exchanged glances, as if to check with one another whether or not my deal felt like a trick.
I sighed. “Look, guys. I want to find Nora as much as you do. She’s my little sister, and if anything ever happened to her, I’d never forgive myself. Please?”
Isabella chewed on her lip, as if she wanted to say something but feared retribution from her friends. The boy with the glasses frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. The other girl and boy scuffed their shoes against the pavement, avoiding my gaze. So this was how they wanted to play.
“Okay, you have five seconds to decide,” I said, holding up as many fingers. “Then I pay a visit to the police station and let them know that I wasn’t the last one to see Nora that night after all. What were your names again?”
The skinny boy raced off, abandoning his friends to their fate. He vaulted over a hedge and disappeared into the night.
“Wow,” I remarked. “Heart of a lion.”
“You can turn him in if you want,” Isabella said darkly. “That’s Mark. He’s kind of a jerk. Actually, he was the one who suggested we go to Windsor that night in the first place, so I can see why he’s particularly worried about you turning him in.”
I peeked around Isabella to wave the other couple forward. “What about the rest of you?” I asked them. “I really don’t care that you were at school when you weren’t supposed to be. Believe me, I get the whole ‘teenage adventure’ thing. I just want to know what happened to Nora.”
“We wanted to get away from the stuffy party,” Isabella said. The brunette girl behind her confirmed this with a nod. “It was mostly older people, you know? That gets boring. So Mark suggested we drive to the school.”
“We just wanted to swim in the fountain,” the other girl piped in. “It’s off-limits, so naturally it seemed like a fun thing to do.”
“I wasn’t there,” the boy said.
“We’ve already established that, Duncan,” I told him. “When you got there, what happened? You hung out in the courtyard for a while, drank some champagne, then what?”
Isabella took another sip of her milkshake before answering. “The night watch showed up. We kind of forgot about him. Anyway, we all ran off except Nora. She was acting really weird.”
My pulse sped up. “Weird how?”
“She got all spacey for no reason,” the other girl explained, interlacing her fingers with Duncan’s. “Staring off into the distance, not talking to anyone. We figured she was tired, but when we bolted to get away from the guard, she didn’t move.”
“None of us even noticed until we were already in the car,” Isabella added.
“And you didn’t think to wait for her?” I asked them.
“We wanted to,” Isabella said, pointing to herself and the brunette. “But Mark was driving.”
I laughed grimly. “Of course he was.”
“Nora wouldn’t answer her phone for the rest of the night,” the brunette said. “And the next morning, her mom called us asking where she was. None of us knew. Isabella and I went back to Windsor to check if she was still there.”
“No luck, I assume?”
Isabella shook her head. “She was already gone.”
Another thought crossed my mind. At what point did Nora’s dress end up soaked in her own blood? “This is going to sound really weird,” I said, “but did Nora take off her dress that night?”
Isabella and the brunette exchanged confused glances. “No,” Isabella said. “Not that I know of.”
“And she didn’t seem hurt at all?” I ventured.
“No,” the brunette answered. “Like I said, she looked really tired, but that was it.”
A swift breeze rustled through the trees, and I remembered that my hair and clothes were still damp from my dip in the fountain. “All right,” I said. “Thank you for talking to me. I really appreciate it. Do me a favor though?”
Both girls nodded. Duncan perked up too.
“If you hear from Nora or if you remember anything else about that night, could you call me and let me know?” I asked them. “I don’t have a cell phone, but you can phone the house and ask for Kennedy. Would you do that for me?”
“Totally.”
I placed my feet on the pedals of my bike. “Thanks, girls. Have a good night. Enjoy your milkshakes.”
“Hey, Kennedy?” Isabella called before I could ride off.
“Yeah.”
“Do you think she’s okay?”
I took in the trio’s tense expressions. “Let’s hope so.”
“Okay. And, uh, why are you wet?”
I let out a laugh and flipped my damp hair over my shoulder. “It’s a long, weird story.”
Light streamed from the windows of the house, illuminating the dark lawn as I pedaled up the driveway. I could see straight into the foyer and the neighboring dining room. It was like looking into a snow globe. The inside of the house was a different world. Maybe if I shook it hard enough, it would momentarily disappear in a flurry of fake frost. Though it was well past dinner time, my father sat at the table, picking through a meal of spaghetti and meatballs. Adrienne was nowhere in sight, but Helen stood nearby. She discreetly watched as my father spun a single strand of spaghetti around his fork. When the pasta slid from the tines and back to the plate, Helen’s lips twitched downward. My father’s shoulders slumped, and he pushed the dish away from his place setting.
I left the bike on the porch, propping it up on its new kickstand, and went inside, cradling the champagne bottle in the cr
ook of my arm. My shoes squeaked against the freshly polished floor of the foyer as I made my way to the staircase. Through the door to the dining room, I caught my father’s head perk up out of the corner of my eye.
“Kennedy?” he called. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“Could you come in here, please?”
I sighed, one foot poised on the bottommost step. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to my father. It was the exact opposite. More than anything, I wanted him to know that Nora hadn’t bled out in the Windsor courtyard, but I was having trouble processing the information provided to me. No scientific proof backed up my visions of Nora. All that I had to confirm the truth of their content was the feeling in my gut. That wouldn’t convince my father that his youngest daughter was out there and alive, which made it all the more difficult for me to set the bottle at the foot of the stairs and cross into the dining room. I’d have to lie. Again. I’d been doing it my entire life, but unlike others who found it effortless after years of practice, deception merely exhausted me.
“What’s up, Dad?” I asked.
His face was drawn, the lines around his mouth more prominent than usual, and his hair hung limply over his forehead. “Are you all right?”
I decided not to mention that it wasn’t me he needed to be asking. “I’m fine.”
He shuffled his chair closer to the table. “I thought when you left, you might be heading to your new apartment.”
“No, Dad. I’m staying here until we find Nora.”
“Good.” He cleared his throat. At a loss for words, he gestured to his unfinished pasta. “Are you hungry?”
The cold meatballs and limp spaghetti weren’t appetizing, though it had been hours since I’d last eaten. “Um—”
“I can warm you a fresh plate,” Helen offered from her secluded corner of the room.
“Thanks, Helen.”
She bustled off with a look of relief. Now that I had returned, she no longer had to babysit my father. I sat down next to him. The tablecloth had lace accents. I stuck my finger through the patterns, forming tiny tents in the fabric. We sat in complete silence, much like we had earlier that day in his office, until Helen returned with my dinner. She set it down in front of me, along with a fork and a napkin. I glanced at my father again, his eyes blank as he stared at nothing. This was not how I wanted to spend time with him.
I pushed my chair away from the table, startling Helen like a bird from its nest. “Actually, I think I’m going to take this upstairs.”
Helen raised an eyebrow at my declaration. She knew Adrienne’s rules—no food was allowed beyond the kitchen or the dining room—but she kept quiet. Dad didn’t react at all, and I began to worry that he might slip into a catatonic state.
“Dad.”
“Hmm?”
“Do you know where Nora’s laptop is?”
“In her bedroom, I imagine.”
I left him in the dining room with Helen, whose look of despair returned as I picked up my spaghetti, holding the bowl by the edges so that I wouldn’t burn myself on the bottom, and headed into the foyer to collect the champagne bottle. At the top of the stairs, instead of making a right toward my own bedroom, I turned left instead. The double doors to the master bedroom loomed at the end of the hallway, but I stopped short before I reached them. Nora’s room was right next door. I hadn’t been inside since I was a teenager, when Adrienne occasionally trusted me to watch Nora while her and Dad had a night out. Afterward, when Nora was old enough to take care of herself, I actively avoided her bedroom. It was too close to the master, and I wanted to put as much distance between me and my stepmother as possible. In the past month, Nora had spent so much time in my room that I’d all but forgotten she had her own. I balanced my pasta in one hand and the bottle in the other and eased the door open with my hip. Nora’s light, airy essence hit me like a ton of bricks.
11
It smelled like her. Her flowery spirit filled the entire room. It was like walking into a rose garden at the height of spring. It was in everything, from the perfectly made queen-sized bed with its pale pink duvet and matching plump pillows to the framed pictures of Nora and her friends on the windowsill to the pretty sweaters and delicate dresses spilling out of the open closet. Her energy had been collecting here ever since she was born. I stood frozen in the doorway, overwhelmed by the feel of Nora even though she wasn’t there. It was almost stronger than having her in person, as though she naturally subdued her energy around people and saved it for the privacy of her bedroom. The thought made me sad. I did the same thing, hiding that part of myself because it was unnatural, but the idea of Nora suppressing her true self for the sake of normalcy didn’t sit right with me.
I flipped the light switch. Her laptop rested on the desk by the window, its pink hardshell case glimmering from across the room. I walked over to it, trying to push down the feeling of invading Nora’s privacy, drew out the desk chair, and sat down. I set the champagne bottle on the windowsill, where it reflected the fairy lights from the backyard into Nora’s room. Then, with the bowl of pasta resting just beneath my chin to catch any wayward meatball particles, I opened up Nora’s laptop and clicked to a search engine.
Welcome to Yew Hollow. That was what the sign said in Nora’s latest vision. I’d never heard of a Yew Hollow before. Furthermore, I didn’t recognize the area beyond the windshield of the stranger’s car. It was dark, and the trees looked like any other trees in the state of Massachusetts, but the branches were dead and gray, as if it were mid-January rather than late October. The same applied to the grass outside the mysteriously old house. What kind of place was Yew Hollow that it seemed to exist outside the regular effect of normal seasons? I typed the two words into the search engine, surprised when I was rewarded with an entire page of results. I clicked on the first link. It was a personal account from a small online travel magazine that seemed to focus on exploring lesser known tourist destinations with strange histories like hauntings or other oddities in the United States. I lifted an eyebrow at the corny title, but read the article anyway.
Move Over, Salem. Welcome to Yew Hollow.
By Samantha Scott
When our editor first suggested I check out the small quirky town of Yew Hollow in northern Massachusetts, I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical. We’ve done articles on similar destinations, including those riddled with history like Salem and Ipswich, so I wasn’t banking on finding much to pique my interest in a town that was no bigger than a shoebox. I begged to go to Saint Augustine instead. Ghost stories! Conquistadors! Pirates! The beach in February! That’s what I was interested in, not some tiny spot on the map where the snow was as deep as my knees. Boy, was I wrong about that. Yew Hollow might be the most exciting place I’ve ever visited.
All of us at the office had already heard of Yew Hollow. Ten years ago, it gained a modicum of notoriety when a string of unexplained deaths stupefied investigators far and wide. The weirdest thing was that even though these mysterious deaths went unsolved, everyone seemed to conveniently forget that anything odd had ever happened. While I was there, I made it my mission to ask every local in town what the real deal was, but if ever there were a group so skilled in avoiding the question, it was the Yew Hollow natives. They all gave me the same answer: Ask the Summerses.
Who are the Summerses? They’re the reason we decided to visit Yew Hollow in the first place. You see, the town itself is marginally infamous, sure, but it’s this particular family that put Yew Hollow on our map of historical abnormalities in the first place. Why? Well, the Summers family isn’t just a family. It’s a coven. Of witches.
I squinted at the last line of the paragraph. Samantha Scott wasn’t the only one riddled with skepticism. The article sounded like a poorly thought-out plot to encourage mindless tourists to visit the town. Then again, who was I to judge? I conducted energy that no scientific process could explain. I read on.
We all know the stories. In the early 1690s, mass hys
teria broke out in Salem Village when rumors spread that a pair of young girls had been influenced by the devil. No one really knows the truth about what caused the girls’ epileptic episodes. Was it witchcraft? Demons? The most rational theories claim that the victims were likely affected by a certain type of fungus growing in that year’s crop of wheat, but there are those who to this day believe that witches are real and dangerous. These events, witchcraft or not, inspired a shift. According to lore, the Summers coven, originally of Salem, quietly relocated to another town in order to avoid persecution. This is where the story of Yew Hollow began. I met with coven leader, Morgan Summers, to discover more.
“The Summerses settled Yew Hollow in 1693,” she told me as she took me on the grand tour through the town square. “At that time, those who fancied themselves witch hunters were on the warpath. Our family was in danger of being exposed, so the original coven left Salem in search of safer territory.”
It turns out that Yew Hollow was so named for a reason. The town is full of yew trees, which, according to Morgan, are known to ward off evil spirits. The most famous tree sits smack in the middle of the town square. Once, it rose high above Yew Hollow. Now, it is much smaller due to a fire that burnt the tree to the ground ten years ago. When I approached the topic with Morgan as the locals had suggested, she brushed it off with a laugh.
“Oh, we love to perpetuate the story of the yew tree,” she said. “Yew Hollow relies greatly on its tourism. That’s why the whole town celebrates pagan holidays and other strange rituals. It’s all in good fun.”
Maybe it was just me, but I felt like she was holding back. What was the truth behind all of those unusual deaths? Was it coincidence that the string of violence came to a sudden halt after the yew tree burned down? Why are the townspeople so unwilling to discuss the previous decade? We may never know what secrets Yew Hollow is harboring. In my own personal opinion, there’s something alive and humming in the air around the tree at the center of town. The hair on the back of my neck prickled every time I went within ten feet of it.
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