Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  With no time to waste, we got down to serious business. Under different circumstances, Violet might not have considered it strange for Henry Richmond to show up at her party, but she’d just spotted me at Hennessey’s with him. She was likely to be suspicious if Justin mentioned that Henry planned to attend. We agreed that it would be best for Henry to tell Justin he was going to play it by ear, and then commit to plans an hour or two before the party started. Mischa and I would drive over together, but we’d have to figure out some means of getting through the security gate, a small but important detail that I recalled from the time I’d gone over to Violet’s house after school. There was video security, and guests had to either punch the secret code into the touch pad on the gate or into a mobile app, or buzz the house to request that the gate be opened.

  “Text Matt and ask if anyone knows anything about the security gate,” I commanded Mischa. She whipped out her phone and fired off a message. He wrote back quickly, informing us that everything about the party had been disseminated via word of mouth. Violet had asked everyone at school to avoid mentioning the party on social media to keep it off the radar of parents in town. Matt’s wrestling team buddies hadn’t mentioned anything about security at the house; people had just been told to come around nine or ten.

  “She can’t just stand next to the video monitor reviewing who’s arriving all night,” Mischa speculated, and then added with sarcasm, “I mean, she’s the host. She’s going to be busy sentencing people to death.”

  “Maybe you could just idle outside the house and follow somebody else in when the gate’s open,” Henry proposed.

  I thought about this, and how my mom would be planning on waking me up early the next morning for the long drive to Sheridan. We couldn’t leave a single detail to chance. “We need to lock this down,” I said. “She might not even let Henry in if he shows up alone.”

  “We’re probably overthinking this,” Mischa said. “The wall around her property isn’t that high. I bet it’s not even over my head. We could drive around the back of her house and climb over it with my mom’s kitchen step stool and bypass the security stuff completely.”

  Henry pointed at Mischa. “Yes. We should go over to her house and make sure that’ll work.”

  “No. That would be too weird,” Mischa said. “What if she sees you? We have to be super careful.” She turned to me and asked, “Can’t you just ask that necklace you bought at the bookstore whether or not we can climb over the wall?”

  It hadn’t even occurred to me to bring the pendulum with me, although my initial reaction was that it wouldn’t have been helpful anyway. Even though I’d only used it twice at home so far, asking it questions felt like performing a ritual, one that was profoundly personal, not one to be undertaken at a food court, twenty feet away from a Cinnabon. “Kirsten said that the pendulum can only tell us what’s true right now. It wouldn’t necessarily know in advance if Violet will find out about us crashing her party, or predict how she’d react.”

  We couldn’t very well go around snooping along the perimeter of the Simmonses’ property, since I was sure they had some kind of private security firm. So we decided that Henry would drive over alone later that afternoon in his dad’s car instead of in his pickup truck and use a tape measure to confirm the height of the wall around the property. He’d also snap a few pictures over the wall from Fenmore Lane, the residential street that ran along the back of the property, to give us a better sense of the distance we’d have to cover to reach the house in the dark.

  “Okay,” Mischa said, gesticulating as she often did when she was excited. “Assuming we make it over the wall and through the garden, we’ll need Henry to let us in. You said there was a back door near the kitchen?”

  “Yes, there’s, like, a sunroom,” I said, trying my best to remember. An indoor porch, bright and sunny, ran along the back of the house next to the kitchen where I’d baked cupcakes with Violet for her Student Government campaign. She’d shown me the room quickly on the tour of the house she’d given me, and I vaguely remembered seeing a door that led out to the garden.

  “Once we’re inside, people will obviously notice us, but hopefully we’ll find Violet before someone tells her we’re there,” Mischa said.

  Getting ourselves into Violet’s party somehow was going to be our first major challenge of the evening, but once inside, I had no idea how we were going to make Violet agree to let me predict her death. Jennie hadn’t specified how she was going to help me once I got to that point, even though she’d said she’d show me what to say. “So… we need some kind of leverage to make her play the game again,” I said. “She’s going to know why we’re there, and if we tell her I want to predict her death, there’s a good chance she’ll know why. Anyone have any ideas on how to bully her into cooperating with us?”

  Mischa folded her hands and set them on the tabletop. She said enthusiastically, “I’m not suggesting that we go in this direction, but… my dad owns a gun.”

  Henry shrugged at me as if this was worth consideration, but I shook my head. “Bad idea.”

  Mischa leaned back and rolled her eyes in annoyance with me. “Why? We’re not going to shoot her. It doesn’t even have to be loaded. But it would make getting her into a room away from everyone else a lot easier.”

  “I don’t like the idea either, but think about it,” Henry said. “We’re only going to get one chance.”

  Mischa was known for her wild suggestions—like breaking Candace’s legs to prevent her from going to Hawaii—but Henry’s consideration of the idea surprised me. “No guns. We have to find a way to do this without a weapon.” Showing up at the Simmonses’ with a gun greatly increased the likelihood of someone getting killed. I’d just lied to Trey about confronting Violet at her party because he was worried about me getting into more legal trouble, which would keep us apart longer. That was making me feel guilty enough. Getting tossed in jail for attempted murder—or worse, getting shot—was definitely not how I wanted to end my holiday break at home in Willow.…

  Especially because in either of those scenarios, Violet would remain free to keep doing whatever she wanted.

  “What if…,” I speculated, “she’s already planning on playing some form of the game with all the kids who show up at the party, and we barge in and push her to play the game our way? Maybe we use some kind of trick from Kirsten to create a cool ghostly spectacle to blow everyone’s minds, and we, like, peer pressure her into letting me predict her death in front of everyone?”

  “No way,” Mischa said. “That sounds dangerous to me. The fewer witnesses, the better. We may have to pin her down or restrain her, you know? Imagine if people take videos of that. It would be really bad for all of us if people were, like, Instagramming a live assault.”

  A middle-aged mom sitting at the table next two us with her two toddlers must have been eavesdropping, because she looked at all three of us as if we were crazy before clearing their table and evacuating the food court.

  “That’s just great,” Henry grumbled. “Why do I have a feeling that lady is going to be interviewed when someone produces a Netflix true crime documentary about us?”

  Another hour passed and we couldn’t come to an agreement on the best way to initiate the game. If anyone at the party thought we were there to start trouble with Violet, it was impossible to guess whether they’d try to stop us or call the police (even though Mischa insisted no one would call the cops to a house party on New Year’s Eve if just about everyone present was drinking underage). There were just too many unknowns to put together a game plan. As much as I really did not like the idea of showing up at the party unrehearsed and unprepared, it was seeming like being nimble and focused on our goal was the only way we were going to get the task done that night. Kidnapping Violet from her own home—at gunpoint or otherwise—was just too dramatic. Too many things could go wrong, and we’d be dooming ourselves if we took that path and weren’t successful in breaking the curse.

&n
bsp; “You guys realize that it would probably be easier to plan a bank robbery than to get Violet to lie down on the floor so that we can form a circle around her, right?” Mischa joked. But she was right. It would have been a lot less weird, too.

  We trudged out of the mall frustrated and scared. It was colder than it had been when we’d arrived, and the day’s slow drizzle had added to the slippery ice coating the blacktop of the parking lot. As we carefully wandered through lanes of parked cars, I found myself wishing Trey were there with us. I felt much more certain about our purpose and better about our chances of success when he was involved. Mischa and Henry walked ahead of me, discussing videos they could watch on YouTube to learn Krav Maga holds they might use on Violet the night of the party, but I was lost in thoughts about how I might admit our plan to Trey so that I could get his input. But then—

  All of us were brought to attention by an awful crunching noise. I saw a flash of movement about twenty feet ahead of us over the tops of cars, and Henry said, “Oh, shit!”

  Following his lead, we broke into a trot toward his dad’s Mercedes and saw instantly that the windshield was completely destroyed. It looked as if an asteroid had smashed directly into its center, radiating a web of shattered glass outward from the point of impact. As we got closer, it became more obvious what had happened: An enormous icicle had fallen off a branch of the tree under which we’d parked.

  “How did this happen?” he asked. I looked up at the branches at the other icicles, and they were all barely five inches in length. Henry carefully opened the driver’s-side door, and we all peered into the car at the icicle that had punctured the windshield. Its pointy tip had smashed into the gearshift between the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat. The icicle itself was a monstrosity—almost three feet long and probably four inches wide at its thickest point.

  “Oh my God, oh my God.” Mischa began rambling. “This wasn’t an accident. They know we’re here! They know what we’re planning!”

  Henry took out his phone and tapped its screen. “Let’s stay calm, okay? It’s not a big deal. My dad has Triple-A, and I’m gonna call for a tow. It’s just an icicle. This kind of stuff happens in Wisconsin. It’s perfectly normal.”

  But I was just as shaken as Mischa. I didn’t remember noticing an icicle that large hanging off any of the branches when we’d gotten out of the car. My pulse was racing, and I felt just as sure as Mischa that this was a warning, although from what I’d read about spirits’ capabilities in the book Kirsten had given me, it seemed like an extraordinary amount of energy must have been assembled by Violet’s spirits to move such an enormous object.

  Henry paced as he spoke to the AAA operator, and I wrapped my arms around Mischa to console her, squeezing her over her puffy winter coat. A bitter wind blew, rattling all of the icicles hanging from tree branches throughout the parking lot. “Look at this as a good thing,” I whispered into her hair as she squeezed me back. “It means we’re getting closer to breaking the curse.”

  She squeezed her eyes as tears rolled down her cheeks. “Did you see the size of that icicle? All it means is that they can kill us whenever they want to. What if that had fallen a few seconds later, after we were already in the car?”

  “But it didn’t. I don’t think they can move solid objects with that much precision or control over timing,” I assured her. “The point is, we’re fine.”

  “No!” Mischa exclaimed. “The point is, I’m going to die no matter what we do!”

  She was on the brink of hysteria the entire time we waited for a tow truck, and all the way home as we rode in an Uber back to Willow. “I don’t want to play the game again,” she kept saying. “I don’t want to go to her house. You guys are gonna have to do it without me. It’s too dangerous.”

  I kept quiet. The idea of finding a way to play the game with Violet by myself was petrifying, and with Trey scheduled to be back at Northern Reserve and now Mischa flipping out, it was becoming a distinct possibility I’d find myself in exactly that situation.

  Henry made the executive decision to drop Mischa off first because she was babbling about evil spirits and dying, convinced something terrible was going to happen to us on our way back to Willow (which was surely freaking our driver out). We left her at the guard station of her subdivision because she insisted she preferred walking home the last two blocks of the journey to spending another minute in the car.

  “I’m worried. Do you think she’s going to pull it together?” Henry asked me after our driver pulled back out onto State Street. “Because if we’re going to do this on Tuesday night, we all need to be one hundred percent focused.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t want to criticize her for being high-strung because it’s understandable in her situation. But I’m worried about whether or not she’s gonna be cool once we’re at Violet’s house. It could be really, really bad if she loses it that night.”

  We turned the corner onto my street, and my heart stopped when I saw a police car pull into my driveway farther ahead. My first panic-inducing assumption was that Violet had called the police about my violation of her restraining order against me at the hospital the day before, but then the car parked and Mom got out of the back seat. I gasped in surprise. “Oh my God,” I said, unfastening my seat belt.

  “I’ll get out here,” Henry told our Uber driver. “You can skip the third stop.”

  The driver pulled over so that we could get out, and I sprinted toward my house over our neighbors’ lawn as my mother walked up our front steps carrying her enormous purse and a paper bag from the grocery store. Two uniformed cops in heavy winter jackets trailed a few feet behind her.

  “Mom!” I called. “What’s going on?”

  She turned and noticed both Henry and me approaching as she dug through her bag. She seemed jittery and unable to find whatever it was she was looking for in her bag as she said in a shaky voice, “Just a little drama down at the grocery store. Not a big deal. It’s nice to see you, Henry.”

  Of course my mother would have recognized Henry Richmond, even though she probably hadn’t spoken to him directly in eight years, because our town was small enough that she’d shared Classroom Mom responsibilities with Mrs. Richmond at one point or another. Everyone in Willow knew everyone else’s kids, even long after friendships began and ended.

  “Hi, Dr. Brady,” Henry greeted her. Mentally, I gave him points for remembering that my mom had a PhD. “Happy holidays.”

  “Why are the police here? Were you in an accident?” I asked.

  She finally found her house keys in her bag and with an unsteady hand managed to twist open the two locks on our front door to step inside. She grabbed Maude by the collar before motioning for the police to follow her in. I recognized the officer who wore glasses as one of the arresting officers who had apprehended me and Trey back in November. Great. With even less enthusiasm, I realized that the name on the tag pinned to the outside of his coat was MARSHALL. I guessed I had always known that Dan Marshall, the kid whose locker had been next to mine when I’d still attended normal high school, was the son of a cop, but had forgotten that even though Dan was dating Cheryl.

  Mom ignored my question and instead replied in an exhausted voice, “Come on, everyone in and we’ll get this squared away. Don’t all let the heat outside.”

  In an almost frantic state, I entered the house behind the cops and motioned for Henry to come along. The police, who seemed like giants taking up too much space in our cozy living room, wobbled into the center of the room, leaving clumps of snow on our carpeting.

  “Where’s the car?” I asked her.

  “Everything’s fine,” Officer Marshall told me as he took out a small notebook. “We just brought your mom home to make sure she’s doing okay.”

  “Why wouldn’t you be doing okay, Mom? What’s going on?”

  My mother took her coat off and hung it on the rack just inside our front door. “Please, have a seat,” she told the officers
, motioning to the couch. It seemed to me like she was moving kind of slowly, like she was a little stunned. Maude ran back and forth from the police officers as they sat down to Henry standing behind me, sniffing around with her tail wagging, ecstatic to have such an abundance of new smells to investigate.

  After kicking off her snow boots and setting down her grocery bag, Mom perched on the edge of our recliner. “I was just in a small mishap at the shopping center. I still, for the life of me, don’t understand exactly what happened.” She was wringing her hands as if she was still very shaken up by whatever she’d just experienced.

  I felt Henry place a hand on my shoulder to steady me. A sense of despair grew in the pit of my stomach.

  “Ma’am, you said that when you tried to hit the brakes, they failed to work,” Officer Morris said, referencing his notebook.

  “Yes, yes,” Mom agreed, remembering. “I started the car and pulled out of my parking spot. Drove to the edge of the lot as if I were going to turn left back out onto State Street, and then my oil light began flashing out of nowhere. I looked at it for just a fraction of a second, and then when I tried to brake at the stop sign, my brake pedal just didn’t do anything. It just wasn’t…” Mom shrugged. “The car just didn’t stop.”

  Just then, my cell phone buzzed with a text from Mischa.

  MISCHA 3:06 P.M.

  WTF! Call me right now!

  “And have you ever had any previous problems with your brakes?” Officer Marshall asked my mom. She was already shaking her head to indicate that she had not before he even finished asking the question. “Seems like a relatively new car.”

  “I bought it last year. I’ve never had any problems with it before. The only mileage on it is from my driving to and from the University of Wisconsin in Sheboygan a few days a week,” Mom said. Her voice was still trembling. I couldn’t recall ever having seen her so distraught before, not even in the days right after our house fire.

  “Mom, did you hit someone?” I asked, aware that my voice came out of my body a lot more loudly than I had intended for it to.