by Zoe Aarsen
I had my doubts too, but added, “It can’t hurt to find out just how sick Tracy is. Did Matt mention her being absent from school before the break started?”
Mischa snorted. “Matt does not keep tabs on sniveling windbags like Tracy Hartford.”
I had a terrible idea, one that made me feel guilty before I even spoke it aloud. “I could ask Cheryl if Tracy’s really sick. They’re cousins. I’m sure they’re scheduled to see each other at some kind of family event today.”
“Cheryl Guthries! Isn’t she that girl in band who kind of looks like a turtle?”
“You mean that girl in color guard who’s the president of the French National Honor Society and on the yearbook staff? That Cheryl Guthries,” I corrected Mischa. Earlier in the school year, when I was desperate for Olivia and my new popular friends to like me, I probably wouldn’t have dared to defend my old friend Cheryl. I didn’t feel much better about defending Cheryl’s reputation now, though, since I was suggesting that we pull her into Violet’s dangerous game. Despite the terrible way I’d treated her in the fall when I’d suddenly found myself hanging out with popular girls like Olivia, Cheryl had written me letters consistently while I’d been away at Sheridan.
Mischa dramatically sighed. “Okay. Yes. That Cheryl Guthries.”
“Like it or not, Mischa, your fate might rest in the hands of a girl who doesn’t even have Snapchat,” I teased. “Honestly, Cheryl is awesome.”
Mischa rolled her eyes at me. “Fine. I’m sorry I called her a turtle. If you’re going to ask her about Tracy, you might as well ask her if she’s heard anything about Violet’s New Year’s party. I was thinking about it, and a house party might be a perfect setting for us to force Violet into playing a game.”
I whistled at Maude for her to follow us inside. “A wake at a funeral parlor might work well too. Did you hear anything about what Stephani’s family has planned?”
“The ground’s frozen solid,” Mischa replied. “No one’s getting buried in central Wisconsin until spring. As far as any kind of memorial service? I don’t know. They probably haven’t had time to process yet.”
Mischa left without staying too long, explaining that her family’s Christmas Day tradition was to catch a movie in Ortonville and go out for Chinese food. In my bedroom, I unplugged my phone and noticed that I had over one hundred missed calls.
“Geez,” I grumbled. Who’d been trying to call me so often? No one who had my phone number besides Mischa and Henry even knew my mom had let me have my phone back for the holiday break. I tapped into the list of missed calls and was stunned by what I saw.
I’d gotten one hundred and twelve phone calls the night before, while my phone was on silent mode. One every few minutes.
They were all from 000-000-0000. ID Unknown.
Anyone else would have assumed this was the work of a robot caller, an automated service just calling phone after phone, programmed to launch into a recording about how I’d won a free stay at a hotel chain if I answered. But I knew better. These calls were probably how Olivia had been trying to express her anger at me for not saving Stephani in time. I’d been wondering if Olivia’s ghost had lost track of my whereabouts while I was away at Sheridan, and if I was right, these phone calls were proof that she had. Maybe Olivia only knew how to reach me in the same ways she had while she was alive: at my house or on my phone.
And just like that, the phone rang in my hands. I almost dropped it from sheer fright. It rang only once before the call ended. When my heart rate returned to normal, I put my phone back into silent mode so that future phone calls—and I suspected there would be more—wouldn’t nearly cause me to go into cardiac arrest.
Cheryl answered on the second ring when I called. “Hey! You got your phone back!”
If I were a good friend, I would have called her sooner after arriving back in Willow, but there was a part of me that wanted to keep Cheryl away from everything having to do with Violet for her own safety.
“Yes,” I said. “Technically only for emergencies, but I guess this kind of counts.”
“A Christmas emergency?” Cheryl asked.
“Kind of. You’re cousins with Tracy Hartford, right? Is there any chance you’re going to see her at some point today?”
“The whole family will be at my grandmother’s in an hour,” Cheryl said, but then added, “But I don’t think Tracy’s coming. She had to go to the ER on Saturday, and they admitted her. She has bacterial meningitis.”
“Um, I’m not a doctor, but that sounds really bad,” I said. Bacterial meningitis was serious enough to imply that Tracy may very well have been one of Violet’s three slated sacrifices.
“Yeah, I guess it is. She fell asleep during history class on Friday, and Mr. Dean yelled at her, but it turns out she’s genuinely sick. It’s super contagious. They might even delay the reopening of school because they need to send in cleaning crews to wipe down anything she might have touched last week.”
“Well, it must be a cold day in hell if they’re actually cleaning Willow High School,” I joked in an attempt to cover up how thoroughly freaked out I was. “There’s gum on the bottom of some of the desks that’s probably been there since our parents were students.” Meningitis. Tracy must have already been in the hospital when I’d heard Violet talking to her on the phone the night before.
“Bacterial meningitis is serious. It can be lethal.”
“You’re right,” I said. “That wasn’t funny. I’m sorry.”
Well, of course it could be lethal. I could have guessed that much. As much as I disliked Tracy in high school for her cattiness and tendency to be a busybody, because I’d known her since preschool, I still felt protective of her. I couldn’t just relax with the suspicion that she was doomed without at least trying to save her life.
“Is she at St. Matthew’s?” I asked, already anxious about what I had in mind. Cheryl confirmed that she was. “Any chance she’s allowed to have visitors?”
“She’s been on antibiotics for a few days, so she’s allowed to have visitors now. I’m supposed to go with my mom tomorrow,” Cheryl said, not sounding enthusiastic about it at all. “I kind of don’t want to, though. Just because we’re cousins doesn’t mean we’re friends.”
Crashing Tracy’s hospital room with Mischa, Henry, and possibly Trey in tow was going to result in disaster. There would be too many of us, Tracy would freak out, and we wouldn’t accomplish anything. If I were going to attempt to save Tracy from being Violet’s next sacrifice, I was going to have to handle it on my own. “Any chance I could go with you? I kind of want to apologize for getting her caught up in all the stuff with Violet in the fall. Would that be weird?”
“I mean, other than the fact that Tracy hates you,” Cheryl teased, and I could tell that she was smiling on the other end of the phone. “But I don’t think my mom knows that.”
We made plans for her to pick me up the next morning around ten, and my mom responded with surprise that I cared enough (or claimed to) about Tracy Hartford to give up a few hours of my time away from Sheridan to visit her. “Meningitis is serious, Mom,” I said to reinforce that I really wanted to go.
That afternoon, I dove into my copy of Understanding the Spirit World because I had burdened myself with the task of finding a way to safeguard Tracy’s life without having access to nuns, fancy rosaries, or an extra seven-day candle (which was out of the question anyway, since I was sure nurses weren’t going to overlook a burning candle in a hospital room). Everything that the book explained about the behavior of ghosts or spirits—both good and evil—matched up with my experiences.
Spirits were able to manipulate energy with the most ease. This is what made their meddling with electricity so common. Lights flickering, turning television screens to static, causing computer glitches: These kinds of things required little effort. It took a great deal more power for spirits to impact matter—in other words, to make objects move. Only super-motivated spirits, or those that had been kickin
g around long enough to have had a lot of practice, were able to achieve this. And even still, because it was so difficult for them to interact with material objects in the living world, they tended to focus on movements that would capture the attention of the living.
In other words, a person might not necessarily notice that a heavy chair had been moved a few feet across a room unless they witnessed it in motion. But if a spirit were to instead wind up the crank of a small music box, for example, the end result would be much more attention-grabbing and instantaneous, similar to the relatively small amount of effort a spirit might put into twisting the knob on a gas stove instead of moving a chair, which would result in an open flame that would probably catch someone’s eye and cause panic.
The book claimed that some spirits were able to alter the temperature of their surroundings, more often with cold than with warmth. The most dangerous and rare thing that spirits could do was implant an idea in someone’s head, which they could do by either leaving “clues” using the tactics above, or by strongly influencing a person’s senses. This was particularly hard for them to sustain for more than a few seconds because of the amount of effort it took, and the author of the book emphasized strongly that this was very different from spirits being able to impact a human’s will, which they could not do.
Toward the end of the book, it went into specifics around clairvoyance and clairaudience, which were powers that some mediums had that made them particularly sensitive to spirits’ attempts at communications.
Clairaudience, I repeated in my head. That was what I had: the ability to hear spirits’ messages. By the time Glenn arrived for the glorious Christmas meal that Mom had prepared, my head was spinning. “Your mom tells me you have plans to study veterinary science,” Glenn said, trying to make polite conversation with me while we ate.
“Yes. That would be cool. But I don’t know. A lot’s up in the air right now,” I answered, not really wanting to get into a conversation about my dicey academic standing that night. After dinner, I noticed that Glenn knew exactly where to put dishes away as we cleaned up. He was pretty familiar with everything in our house, from how our ancient television remote control worked to where Mom kept her favorite chamomile tea bags in the cabinet next to the sink. I wondered if perhaps his relationship with Mom was a little more serious than she’d let on. That wouldn’t have bothered me; I wanted Mom to have a cool boyfriend and to be happy. It just hurt my feelings a little that she hadn’t been entirely honest with me.
That night in my room, I researched online extensively in the hope of finding a method to protect Tracy from Violet’s prediction the same way in which Kirsten was protecting Mischa with the candle. The most promising possibility I came up with was similar to Kirsten’s explanation for why the nuns’ rosary beads had protected Mischa after she transferred to Catholic school. A blessed object given to the cursed person specifically for the purpose of protection might do the trick, although I was positive without even looking that there weren’t any religious artifacts lying around our house that had been blessed by any saints or the Pope.
It was already eleven o’clock at night, and there was little chance I was going to talk my mom into driving me to a church gift shop at the crack of dawn. Suddenly, I had a burst of inspiration. I opened the drawer on my nightstand and pulled out the pendulum. I was about to ask it to reiterate what yes looked like when I remembered Kirsten’s emphasis on safety first. I found matches in the kitchen and then returned to my room, praying that burning the palo santo given to me by Kirsten wouldn’t set off the smoke alarm in the hallway. I raised my window, removed the screen, lit one end of the stick of smooth wood, and held it outside my room by a few inches, waving just a bit of the smoke back inside in a very rudimentary attempt to cleanse the space.
Only after blowing the flame out and closing my window, I dangled the pendulum from its chain with my right hand and asked it once again to show me what yes looked like. It swung in a clockwise circular motion just like it had in the store, which was all the encouragement I needed to keep going.
“Pendulum, is it possible for an object to offer protection to someone who has been cursed?”
Yes, it continued swinging.
“Would that object need to have some kind of blessing on it?”
Still… yes.
Deciding to get a lot more specific, I asked, “If I were to give Tracy Hartford something that belonged to my sister to protect her, would that be enough to keep her from dying before the next new moon?”
The pendulum slowed down considerably. Its trajectory grew wobbly, as if it wasn’t completely sure it wanted to commit to an answer. And yet it remained moving in a clockwise motion.
That was a good enough answer for me.
CHAPTER 8
SINCE JENNIE HAD DIED AT the age of eight and almost everything we owned at the time of her death had burned up, not many of her belongings still remained. Even the photos of us as kids that hung in our living room were reproductions of prints that my mom had given to our grandmother before our house fire. The only physical objects that I knew of that had once belonged to or been handled by Jennie were stored in airtight plastic containers in the garage. They were a tragic assemblage of oddities: drawings, crayons, a pair of scissors and an art smock left behind in Jennie’s desk in our second-grade classroom, a spring windbreaker and a small stuffed giraffe that had been in my mom’s car in our garage the night of the fire (which had not burned down completely), and a pair of size-six children’s jeans that had been in the dryer the night of the fire. The dryer had been reduced to a charred cube, but amazingly enough, the clothes inside of it hadn’t burned.
One denim belt loop from those jeans was what I carried with me to St. Matthew’s Hospital the next morning when Cheryl and her mom picked me up in their station wagon. If there was one remarkable thing about the Guthries family, it was that they were always in a good mood. Even despite the icy roads, Mrs. Guthries was letting Cheryl drive for the practice, and we drove all the way to Suamico with the Holly channel blaring on satellite radio.
Once we reached St. Matthew’s, we roamed every floor of the crowded visitors parking structure in search of a spot. It was odd to think that business went on at hospitals as usual in spite of holidays. As Cheryl set the parking brake, Mrs. Guthries told us both calmly, “I think it would be best if we didn’t mention the news about Stephani deMilo to Tracy this morning.”
Cheryl and I followed her mom into the lobby, waddling in our snow boots. The visitors’ center was nothing at all like an emergency room. Cutout Santa Claus images and tinsel from the recently passed holiday still decorated the area. A fake pine tree had been erected in one corner of the lobby, under which similarly fake wrapped gifts had been placed. There was a sign near the tree announcing that the ornaments on its branches contained the Christmas wishes of terminally ill children at the hospital. It made me a little sad that it was December twenty-sixth, and unclaimed ornaments still hung from branches on the tree.
The nurse at the front desk informed Mrs. Guthries that Tracy was on the fourth floor, which was reserved for children. We would have to wear masks while visiting her, but they were for her protection instead of ours, since she’d already been on antibiotics since Saturday and was no longer contagious. I looked around as Mrs. Guthries wrote our names in marker on our visitor badges, growing uneasy. It felt sinister to be there, intending to visit someone who was probably not going to be pleased to see me. This was the hospital where I’d been taken after our house burned down. This was the building where I’d been given soup and pudding while my parents’ burns were treated, where they’d learned that it was me who’d survived the fire and not Jennie.
It was also the hospital where Trey had been taken after the accident in which Olivia had died.
“Do you guys mind if I stop by the gift shop?” I asked on the way to the elevators. I couldn’t very well hand Tracy a scrap of fabric from my dead sister’s jeans and expect her to hold o
n to it for a few weeks.
From a display of stuffed animals, I chose a plush dog that would be perfect for my plan and paid for it with the twenty dollars my mom had zipped inside one of the inner pockets of the handbag she’d given me for Christmas. Mrs. Guthries bought a small arrangement of peach roses for Tracy, and Cheryl bought herself a bag of plain M&M’s before we headed up to the fourth floor.
Once we stepped off the elevator and found Tracy’s room, I excused myself to use the bathroom and said I’d be right back. In the bathroom down the hall, I used a small sewing kit that I’d brought from home in my coat pocket to cut a hole along a seam in the plush dog’s neck. Into it, I tucked the piece of denim from Jennie’s jeans, and I sewed the hole up as best I could. There was no way Tracy was going to want protection from a curse, even if I explained to her in detail why she needed it, which I’d never have an opportunity to do with her mom, Cheryl’s mom, and Cheryl hanging around. As I stepped out of the stall in which I had been conducting this covert operation, I smiled at another visitor, who was washing her hands, and thought to myself that I had never felt creepier in my whole life.
As I walked back down to Tracy’s room, the nurse behind the kiosk smiled at me without interest. Colorful GET WELL balloons bobbed up and down, waiting to be delivered, and the ward buzzed with weekday morning activity. I peered into rooms with opened doors and noticed listless children lying in beds watching cartoons on televisions mounted to ceilings. Eight years ago a room like one of these had been mine.
I arrived at room 418 and was about to cross the threshold when I heard Mrs. Hartford’s familiar voice. “Well, dear, we’ve been through this. Even if you’re no longer contagious, there’s no way I want you staying up all night doing God knows what less than a week from now,” Mrs. Hartford was saying.
I took a deep breath and entered, wondering if Cheryl and her mom had already informed Tracy that I’d come along for the visit that morning, or if I’d be making a surprise entrance.