Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  Stephani was probably dead.

  “You guys?” I said. “Hear me out. What if the curse skipped Mischa last month because the nuns were praying the rosary for her, and Violet didn’t make a sacrifice because she thought Mischa was a done deal? And because she didn’t make a sacrifice…” My scalp kept tingling, burning as if it were hot to the touch. The elements of the story all arranged themselves like a constellation in my head, dots forming a shape. Even Violet’s ragged fingernails—had she started chewing them because she was freaked out? “Her mom started getting sick—sick enough that her family had to cancel their holiday trip to St. Barts? So then she told a prediction for Stephani, and now Stephani’s missing?”

  Henry turned left onto Maple Road and smiled at me. “I’d say it sounds like a very detailed theory. Maybe too detailed. I mean, it’s been a long afternoon. We should be careful not to overreact.”

  In the back seat, Trey scoffed at Henry. “Um, were you not just with us a few hours ago when McKenna interrogated a ghost? She’s not someone who overreacts.”

  I slid lower in the front seat, mashing my lips together, kind of wishing I hadn’t shared my theory. It all lined up for me. My heart was racing. I practically wanted to type it all into a note on my phone so that I wouldn’t forget how the pieces all worked together. It frustrated me that Henry and Trey weren’t as excited as I was.

  After a minute of contemplative driving, Henry added, “What you’re proposing sounds logical.” Henry looked over in my direction and asked, “Are you okay?”

  Truthfully, I felt like I was overheating, about to break into a sweat. This was the most intense case of the tingles I’d had yet, which convinced me that I was onto something.

  Although Trey was taking my side, his tone bothered me a little. If Henry was going to be pitching in on our mission, animosity toward him from Trey was going to slow us down. We turned onto Martha Road, and I realized that we hadn’t made plans for next steps.

  Our street looked magically beautiful in that calm, safe way residential streets seem to during the holidays. Glowing plastic figurines of Santa, Rudolph, and Frosty the Snowman decorated snowy rooftops, and the Blumenthal family across the street had put an enormous plywood dreidel and plastic menorah in their yard. Trees heavily wrapped in lights and garland watched stoically in front windows.

  “So, what do we do next?” I asked, wondering just how serious Henry was about seeing this through.

  “Regroup the day after tomorrow and figure out how, where, and when we can get Violet to play the game,” Henry said.

  In the back seat, Trey quipped sarcastically, “Right.” He was making fun of Henry’s delivery, as if the four of us convincing Violet to do anything were going to be easy. Trey got out of the back seat of the car, and I unfastened my seat belt.

  “Thanks for coming with us today,” I told Henry. “And for driving, you know. But mostly for coming with. I can’t even imagine what you’re thinking right now, after the day we’ve had.”

  “I’m thinking,” Henry said, and paused before continuing, “that my sister was really lucky to have a friend like you. I mean, anyone would be. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone as brave as you before.”

  I was highly aware of Trey waiting for me just outside the car, but I didn’t want to rush this moment with Henry. “I don’t know if I’m brave,” I said. “Maybe desperate.”

  “Nah. You’re brave. I have something for you, from my parents. I hope it’s not weird for you that they got you a gift.” He reached past me and opened the glove compartment, withdrawing from it a small box wrapped in sparkling gold paper with a fat gossamer bow tied around it.

  I was so flustered that the Richmonds had bought me a gift that I didn’t know how to respond. “You didn’t have to bring me anything! That was really nice of you.” It would have never crossed my mind to buy a gift for him. I’d assumed after Olivia died that I’d probably never interact with Henry again. Although his parents had sat in on my hearings with the judge back in November, Henry hadn’t accompanied them to Shawano County Court.

  “I did. We did,” Henry corrected himself. “It’s something that my mom got for Olivia every Christmas. One of her favorite things.”

  “That’s really… Wow. I don’t know what to say.” Through my window, I’d noticed that Trey had taken a few steps away from the car and was now pacing impatiently in the snow. The kitchen light was the only one that was on at his house, which meant that no one else was home yet.

  Henry took a deep breath and blinked away tears that were forming in his eyes. “My parents have to believe something, because it’s too hard for them to believe that Olivia died in a random accident, and that just a few weeks later, Candace also ended up dead. So whatever it was that you and Trey were doing in November, my parents believe that you were trying to avenge Olivia’s death. They’re grateful, I guess.” He looked out through the windshield at my house as if he was a little embarrassed before adding with more confidence, “Yeah. We’re grateful.”

  I never would have imagined that Olivia’s parents, who were well-respected pillars of our community, were supportive of what Trey and I had been trying to accomplish. Henry’s opinion shouldn’t have mattered to me. Whatever romantic possibilities had ever existed between us were ancient history now. But still, even if it was simply because I had admired Olivia when she was alive, her brother’s opinion of me did matter. “What do you think?”

  “I think… you should rest up because we’ve got a game to play,” Henry told me.

  When I stepped out of the car, I saw a flash of motion in the living room window of my house. It was my mom, waving at me. Luckily, Trey had predicted that the longer the Mercedes idled in our driveway, the more chance that she’d look outside. He’d inched up to our garage door, where he’d be out of her view.

  Henry backed out of the driveway, and my mom vanished from the window, probably assuming I’d enter the house in a matter of seconds. Instead, I trotted toward Trey, and he pulled me close. “Am I going to get to see you at all while we’re home?” he asked, wrapping his arms tightly around my torso as if he didn’t want to let me go. Even though my heart was urging me to melt into him, Kirsten’s warning had driven an ice pick into my stomach. I was as wary as if a hornet were circling my head, and paranoid that he would notice how tense I was under his touch.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I thought all of this was over. I thought we’d be able to spend these few days making plans for…” My words drifted off. The fantasies I’d had at Sheridan about the two of us finding a way to be together after he turned eighteen and was released from Northern Reserve that summer now seemed naïve. I’d imagined us both moving down to Florida closer to my dad, where I could finish high school in Tampa and Trey could get a job fixing cars. Now I was relieved that I’d never shared such notions with him, even if only because our phone calls had been monitored. If he was intentionally deceiving me, revealing my blind trust in him like that would have confirmed what a good job he was doing.

  However, even though the smoke had curled toward Trey when Kirsten had blown out her candle, Jennie hadn’t instructed me to be cautious about him, and the story she’d brought up about the tree in our yard had involved him. I pressed my nose against his neck to inhale his smell, truly not knowing what to believe. It was out of the question to simply ask him why Kirsten had urged me not to trust him and if there was something he wasn’t telling me. If there was anything he hated, it was when people misjudged him. He’d been mouthing off to teachers since elementary school, and there was no changing his mind once he became convinced that someone was his enemy. I didn’t know which would have been worse: finding out that Trey was actually working with Violet to safeguard her murderous practice, or wrongly accusing him and having him turn on me. “I was really hoping we would get to be alone together today,” he said, his voice weighted with longing. “There are, like, a million things I need to tell you.” We kissed, and as soon as I felt h
is mouth on mine I knew there was a risk of us getting carried away and my mom catching us. I needed to get in the house before she stepped outside to find out what was taking me so long. Whatever danger he posed to me, while he was kissing me, I didn’t care. The whole time I’d been away at Sheridan, suffering through commands barked by cruel guards and nasty comments from other students, my hope for being reunited with Trey was all that had kept me going. This was the peak of the danger I was in if he was lying to me, and I knew it. Whenever he reminded me that I, alone, was special, I was willing to cast aside my doubts about his intentions.

  I pushed him away gently, sensing that at least a minute or two had passed since Henry had backed out of our driveway. “I have to go,” I reminded him. “Or my mom will totally know you’re out here with me.”

  “I know,” he said, pressing his fingertip against the cupid’s bow of my upper lip. “Tomorrow, somehow.”

  “Tomorrow,” I agreed, although I had absolutely no idea how either of us was going to slip away from our punitive home situations to connect.

  I reached the path which led to my front steps, and heard Trey call out behind me, “McKenna.” He was still standing where I’d left him. “If you’re right, and Stephani deMilo dies tonight, then Violet’s still a month behind. Unless she killed some random stranger in another town or something.”

  He had a valid point, and I was still thinking about it when I entered the house and unlaced my snow boots. Jennie had said there were three, and one was crossing over. Violet had been talking to Tracy Hartford when I’d overheard her on the phone, and had said something about wanting Tracy to feel better in time to attend her New Year’s party. That meant Tracy was sick, which was a far cry from her being close to death, but still… Could Violet be desperate or evil enough to kill off her closest friends?

  “I hope you had a fun day,” Mom said, standing in the doorway to the kitchen and looking cross with me. A Christmas movie was on TV; my mother’s puppy, Maude, was curled up on the couch; and Mom had turned on the lights on the tree, which were softly blinking.

  I held the bag from Hennessey’s behind my back while wiggling out of my coat. “I did, although the snow really messed up our plans. Mischa was trying to find a lip gloss kit for her sister, and it was sold out everywhere, so we had to go to three different malls.” The lies just rolled off my tongue, which made me feel awful. I never used to lie to my mother before that year. “Then it was a mess getting home because so many roads haven’t been plowed yet.”

  I hurried down the hall to toss my purchase into my bedroom, and then joined Mom in the kitchen, grateful to discover that she’d saved me a plate. She’d prepared a small feast of my favorite dishes: roasted chicken with garlic mashed potatoes, split-top dinner rolls, and baked carrots. We didn’t typically have a special meal on Christmas Eve, so I felt guilty that she’d gone to all this trouble for my benefit, although the sight and smell of so much food was making me nauseous after what I’d witnessed just two hours earlier.

  “Thank you for this.” I kissed her on the cheek, something I hadn’t done in longer than I could remember. My desire to tell her about finding Jennie on Route 32 was making me feel like a balloon about to pop, but I couldn’t drop a bomb like that on her without upsetting her in addition to giving her good cause to send me to a sanitarium. “I’m starving.”

  “That looked like Randy Richmond’s Mercedes in the driveway just now,” Mom said as she sat down across from me at the table.

  There was no point in lying about Henry; she’d seen the car with her own eyes. “Yeah. Henry drove us. Mischa didn’t tell me that she’d invited him.”

  She lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly without saying a word, but implying that there was a reason other than holiday shopping why Henry had accompanied us. “It’s not like that, Mom,” I corrected her. “He just misses his sister and wanted to hang out. That’s all.”

  “If you say so,” Mom said, but I could see the ends of her lips curling into a smile. “It wouldn’t be the worst problem to have if he had a crush on you, would it? I mean, he is totally hot.”

  “Mom,” I groaned.

  After having seen the grisly spectacle of Jennie’s ghost bleeding all over the highway, I didn’t have much of an appetite. But I did my best to push aside everything Kirsten had told me and the lingering visuals in my head of Jennie spattering blood onto the snow to focus on our conversation. Before that year, I had been very close with my mom, and seeing Jennie earlier that night had made reestablishing my bond with her a top priority. She shared with me a little bit more about her relationship with Glenn than she had previously, and told me that they’d met years ago when he had been a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Sheboygan before his divorce. It broke my heart that I couldn’t tell Mom about reconnecting with Jennie, because it would have meant so much to her that Jennie was keeping watch over us from the afterlife. Even though I couldn’t share that with her, I kept Jennie close in my thoughts, hoping that her spirit could channel some of the rare happy moments in our household.

  It had turned out to be an oddly wonderful Christmas Eve, only just as Mom handed me a bowl of ice cream to take into the living room so that we could watch a holiday movie together before bed, the voices began to murmur in the back of my head.

  At first I thought they had resumed their chorus of the eyes, the eyes. But as they grew louder, it sounded more like they were saying, the ice, the ice. Although our living room was toasty, I began shivering, and after thirty more minutes of mental torment I announced to my mom that I was turning in for the night. She made a joke about Santa already knowing that I had been naughty that year, but I was too distracted to react.

  In my room, I typed as much as I could remember of what Jennie had told me into a memo on my phone, just in case a long night’s sleep made me forget some of it. By the time I’d gotten to the part about the five sisters, I was so cold that my teeth were chattering, and I wondered if I had caught a cold that day by meandering around in the snow. I tapped to close the memo I’d created and placed the pendulum Henry had purchased in the drawer of my nightstand. I plucked the tab from the flyer about spiritual training that Kirsten had given me out of my wallet and analyzed it. I put that in my drawer too, for future consideration. The ice, the ice. It was impossible to think straight with the voices demanding my attention. I decided to save the gift from the Richmonds for the morning.

  As I tugged off my jeans, something fell out of my back pocket and hit the floor. It was the envelope that I had pulled out of the Emorys’ mailbox earlier that day. I had completely forgotten about it all day long, and now sank onto my bed, studying it.

  It was addressed to Mrs. M. J. Emory. The envelope was a creamy, heavy paper stock, the kind of sophisticated stationery that meant official business. I ran my fingertips over the label, and then the embossed return address in the top left corner: Ekdahl, West & Strohmann. The law firm’s address was in Green Bay. I feared that not even Trey would be understanding if I were to ever get caught spying on his mother. Opening someone else’s mail was a federal offense, not to mention a serious invasion of privacy.

  But I had to know why Kirsten had warned me about Trey. If there was any possibility that he was endangering our chances of saving Mischa or shutting down Violet’s murderous game, I had to know. So I slid my finger beneath the flap of the envelope and held my breath as I raised it, trying very hard not to tear it just in case I might try to glue it shut later and return it to the Emorys’ mailbox.

  Inside of the envelope was a single sheet of heavy paper, the same eggshell color as the envelope. My eyes had to scan it multiple times before the words forming the letter began to make sense to me. It mentioned that Mary Jane Svensson Emory, Trey’s mom, had violated terms of a contract she had signed eighteen years earlier. She had received payment for compliance with that contract, and now an unnamed client of the law firm was suing her for damages, with interest. This letter was a second notice. M
rs. Emory would be summoned to appear in court if she failed to contact the law firm to make payment arrangements by the first of January.

  My hands trembled so violently that the letter shook as I reread it for the fifth time. The Emorys must have been selling their house because presumably Mrs. Emory needed money. And the amount of money that was owed to the firm’s client was so astronomical that the value of an unremarkable three-bedroom house in Willow, Wisconsin, was barely going to make a difference.

  What could Trey’s mother have possibly done eighteen years ago to have gotten herself into so much legal trouble? And then it hit me. Trey would be turning eighteen in July.

  The eyes, the eyes. Of course. Mr. Simmons’s aquamarine eyes, the very same that Violet had inherited, were the same hue and shape as Trey’s. Now that I was thinking about the resemblance between Trey and Violet’s father, their relationship was so absurdly obvious that it seemed outrageous that Mr. Simmons had sat in on Trey’s courtroom hearings back in November without everyone in attendance realizing instantly that Trey was his son.

  Violet’s father was Trey’s father, or at the very least, his uncle. What kind of contract could Trey’s mother have possibly violated eighteen years earlier, when she was probably just a college student? Was it possible that Violet’s father was the client of Ekdahl, West & Strohmann seeking payment from Trey’s mom?

  Violet and Trey were half siblings, which definitely seemed like a good enough reason for Kirsten to have warned me about Trey… only did Trey know who his real father was? He and Walter weren’t close, but I had never suspected growing up that Walter wasn’t Trey’s biological father. Walter’s boringness matched Mary Jane’s; they had always seemed to me like a typical Willow couple who were perfectly content to drive used cars and live in the old, inexpensive part of town. Now I realized how completely ignorant I’d been my whole life. Trey looked nothing like heavyset, grumpy Walter. Walter liked to watch Packers games and true-crime television shows, and Trey read books about the design of space shuttle engines.