Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  “Another car hit me.”

  Officer Marshall interjected. “Your mother’s car was struck on the driver’s side. She’s very lucky to be sitting here right now. If the other car had hit hers even a second sooner, things could have been very, very ugly.”

  My phone buzzed again.

  MISCHA 3:07 P.M.

  Is your mom OK?

  I tried to ignore the text for a moment even though I was wondering how Mischa already seemed to know something had happened to my mother.

  “I don’t know what happened exactly,” Mom murmured. “I thought the oil light came on as I was hitting the brakes, but then the car just plowed right out of the parking lot and into oncoming traffic. The brakes didn’t do a thing.”

  “Oh my God, Mom,” I said. My body felt freezing cold.

  “I’m so lucky to be sitting here without a scratch on me,” my mom said. “But I feel so bad for Elena. She must have thought I was asleep at the wheel.”

  It took a second for the full meaning of my mom’s words to hit me. Elena! She had been the other driver whose car had struck my mom’s. There was only one Elena in town I knew of—

  Elena Portnoy.

  I wasn’t sure if Henry had made the connection as quickly as I had, so I looked over my shoulder at him and quietly told him, “That’s Mischa’s mom.”

  Was it a coincidence that my mother and Mischa’s mother would be involved in a freak accident in which they could have both been seriously injured or killed—within an hour of an icicle impaling Henry’s windshield?

  I excused myself as the cops asked my mom if she was sure she didn’t want them to give her a lift to the hospital to be checked out. Henry followed me into the kitchen, and I immediately called Mischa.

  “What the hell?” I barked.

  “I know,” Mischa said, sounding out of breath. She had picked up before the first ring of the phone. “You said that spirits couldn’t make things happen in our world. But they caused your mom’s brakes to fail! This is it. They’re really coming after us. They’re warning us not to start anything with Violet at the party.”

  I didn’t bother explaining to her my theory that Violet’s spirit helpers hadn’t done anything to my mom’s brakes. It was far more likely that they’d manipulated my mom’s thoughts for a few seconds by making her oil light flash to distract her. If I was right, this would have been an example of what the author of Understanding the Spirit World had described as one of the psychological tricks that spirits could play on humans.

  Henry stood close to me as if trying to hear what Mischa was saying over the phone. As usual, his temperament was calm and reasonable. “It’s a small town. It could have just been an innocent accident. People get in car crashes all the time.”

  “My mom said your mom was, like, completely surprised. Like, the brakes just failed at the very last second,” Mischa said. She was talking in a low voice, presumably in her bedroom. She fell silent for a long moment and then said, “We have to stop. If they do something bad to my mom, then I won’t even want to be alive anymore. I really won’t, McKenna. None of this would be worthwhile.”

  “I know! I feel the same way. I would never forgive myself if something bad happened to my mom. But, Mischa,” I cautioned, “you know what happens if we stop.”

  “I know,” she croaked, her voice breaking with a sob. “But I was the one who stupidly played that game with Violet. I deserve to die. My mom didn’t do anything. If something bad happens to her, it’ll be my fault. I don’t want that. I’d rather just get what’s coming to me.”

  I didn’t want to prolong the conversation and listen to Mischa get herself wound up. I needed her to calm down within the next three days and tap back into the anger she’d had for Violet in the fall so that she could be a helpful participant in her own salvation. I reminded her to make sure her candle was still burning and told her I’d call her later.

  We heard the police leave, and Henry summoned another Uber to take him home. He assured me that in spite of the icicle at the mall and the car accident between my mom and Mischa’s, he was still going to drive over to Violet’s house in his mom’s car to measure the wall. “We can’t give up. That’s all they want, for us to give up, because they know we can end this if we try. Promise me you won’t change your mind about Tuesday night.” His green eyes were solemn, and I was struck again by how different he was in reality from the impression I’d had of him when he was a star athlete in high school. Before graduating, he’d seemed like someone who’d never had a serious problem in his whole life, which had led me to believe he was probably a little shallow. But now he was volunteering to trespass on private property and complete outrageous tasks in freezing cold weather. He recognized the risks involved with avenging his sister’s death and was eager to take them anyway.

  I hesitated because Henry was asking me to commit to doing exactly what I’d assured Trey I wouldn’t do the night before. Even though I knew I had no choice but to confront Violet at her party, his asking me to promise felt like a huge betrayal of trust. “I won’t if you won’t,” I replied. As I watched him climb into the back seat of his Uber in our driveway, it struck me as ironic that only three days after learning the truth about what Violet had done to Olivia, Henry seemed much more eager than Trey to assist me in saving Mischa’s life, and Trey had known about what we’d done at the party since shortly after Olivia had died. Maybe Henry’s willingness was actually recklessness, but I wished Trey were as sensitive as Henry was to the urgency in our mission.

  Henry remained true to his word, and later that afternoon he texted me photos he’d taken around the rear of the Simmonses’ property. The wall surrounding their land stood exactly fifty-six inches high, which would make it easy enough to climb over with a three-step ladder. Unless we experienced a freak heat wave in the next four days, the fall on the other side of the wall would be softened by snow. By his best estimate, the distance from the fence across the Simmonses’ expansive garden to the back of the house was around the size of our high school’s football field. There was a chance we’d be spotted if Violet’s family had heavy surveillance on their garden, but the distance wasn’t so unreasonable that we might freeze to death before making our way to the house.

  In other words, this was manageable. Scaling the fence was going to be a much more straightforward way to gain entrance to the party than trying to slip through the security gates. However, my scalp began tingling as I tapped and zoomed in on the photos he’d taken of the back of the Simmonses’ house. I couldn’t tell if it was because we were taking all the right steps to ensure success, or if there was something I was supposed to be considering more cautiously about the back entrance to the house. I’d seen the vast garden behind Violet’s house before, through the kitchen and sunroom windows, but never from the other side. If there was something in the garden that I was supposed to notice, it would have been pretty hard to tell from Henry’s photo what it was. All of the rosebushes and plants were covered in snow.

  This is happening, he texted me, reiterating his commitment to our plan for Tuesday night.

  Maybe Henry was only interested in helping me break the curse out of a powerful need for revenge. It made my heart flutter that Trey was reluctant to confront Violet out of fear that either of us getting into more trouble might prevent us from being together. But I felt a lot more confident about our chances for success on New Year’s knowing that Henry was in it for the long haul with me.

  CHAPTER 11

  THAT NIGHT, I BURNED JUST a little bit of palo santo in my bedroom and set about asking the pendulum questions.

  “Pendulum, are the answers that you give me provided by Jennie?”

  It swung around clumsily, not really clockwise or counterclockwise, as if it was uncertain about how to answer. I was a little disappointed and unsure of what to make of that response, but I’d never assumed that it was Jennie who was communicating directly with me through the pendulum. “Is Violet’s mother still in the hospi
tal?” I asked. Now the pendulum swung in a counterclockwise pattern. To confirm its response, I set it down on my nightstand, called St. Matthew’s in Suamico, introduced myself as Vanessa Simmons’s daughter and asked to be put through to her room.

  “Vanessa Simmons was discharged yesterday,” an exhausted nurse told me on the other end of the call. It was almost one in the morning. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any additional information about her.”

  I tapped my phone to end the call. Simply having the hospital staff acknowledge that Mrs. Simmons had gone home, and that the pendulum could be trusted, was all I needed to know. Stephani had died, so Mrs. Simmons was recovering. But for how long? Violet was still one sacrifice behind. I guessed it didn’t matter; what was important right then was that if Mrs. Simmons wasn’t in the hospital, then Violet’s parents had no reason to cancel their plans to go to the city for New Year’s.

  Just to make absolutely sure, I looked up the phone number for the Mandarin Oriental on Lake Shore Drive and called claiming to be Mrs. Vanessa Simmons. “I just wanted to confirm our reservation for New Year’s Eve,” I told the concierge who answered.

  “Checking in on the thirty-first and checking out on the second,” the concierge said after typing some buttons on his keyboard.

  “Yes,” I replied, very pleased with myself for gathering so much information of value.

  Satisfied with my sleuthing for the night, I flipped my light switch and immediately noticed a pulsating light flashing in through my blinds. When I raised my blinds to see what was going on, I saw the light in Trey’s bedroom turning on and off like a strobe effect. After about fifteen seconds of this, he noticed me standing there watching, and walked over to his window to wave at me. While he had my attention, he pointed to the back of his house and then raised a sheet of paper so that I could see it. On it was written: 9 A.M.

  In the morning, I poured coffee into a thermos and took Maude into the yard. The sun was shining for the first time in a while, which meant the yard was a slushy, dripping pool of mush as the snow melted. A few minutes after nine, the sliding door on the Emorys’ patio opened, and Trey stepped outside wearing his winter coat and carrying an ax. He waved at me and descended the steps from his patio into his yard, and walked around the side of his house toward me to speak to me over the fence.

  “An ax? That’s a dramatic prop,” I teased.

  “We have mice,” he announced. “Walter wants me to chop all the wood stacked against the house and restack it at the back of the yard because he thinks they started nesting in there before it snowed, and now they’ve found a way into the house.”

  We were both smiling, similarly pleased to have a reason—any reason—to see each other. “There are sexier circumstances under which we might have gotten to hang out, but I guess I’ll take what I can get,” I said.

  He looked back at his house over his shoulder to make sure neither of his parents were watching us through the kitchen window. “There’s no one there,” I assured him, since I could see the window clearly from where I stood. “It’s safe.”

  “I needed to see you before I leave tomorrow. I found something.”

  I pulled the letter I’d stolen from his family’s mailbox out of my coat pocket and handed it to him. “I did too. Well, sort of. I honestly don’t know why I did this, but I took this out of your mailbox and opened it before you got back from school,” I admitted. Not telling him about what I’d done had been nagging at my conscience, and I was grateful for the chance to confess in person, even though there was a possibility he was going to be very angry with me.

  He took the envelope from me and looked it over, front and back.

  Coming completely clean, I added, “I read it too. I’m sorry. I know, I totally invaded your mom’s privacy, but it seemed like it might be related to everything somehow.”

  “This law firm has sent letters before. Actually, my mom gets stuff from them all the time,” he said, not sounding upset that I’d read the letter.

  “It says your mom violated some kind of contract eighteen years ago and now she owes their client money, plus damages and interest,” I told him. “I don’t want to stick my nose in your mom’s business, but if the contract they’re referring to had something to do with Michael Simmons, then it’s kind of all of our business. Can you think of anything she would have negotiated the year you were born?” Trey’s mom had only been around nineteen years old when she’d had him. I couldn’t think of many legal agreements common for nineteen-year-olds to enter into unless they were basketball players being drafted into the NBA or rappers being given record deals.

  Trey’s bright blue eyes sparkled. “That has to do with what I found yesterday. My mom kept a diary when she was a teenager. She kept it all the way through high school and her freshman year of college.”

  “Wait, what?” I asked, in disbelief that we could be so lucky as to have discovered a recap of what his mom had been doing the year she met Violet’s father. “Did it mention anything about Michael Simmons?”

  “Yeah. Well, kind of. I just skipped to the end because I didn’t really have time to read it all. But check it out. There’s something in it toward the end about how he asked her to meet with his lawyers after she found out she was pregnant. They literally offered her money to terminate her pregnancy because he was worried about paternity issues down the line. She wrote all this stuff about how he tried to spin it like she was too young for such an enormous responsibility and would be throwing away all of her potential, but she saw right through that. Well, not really, actually. At first she was really angry and offended by their offer to pay her, but then she wrote all this lovesick gibberish about how she knew he’d change his mind after I was born.”

  I wished there weren’t a fence between us so that I could reach for his hand. “That’s so sad. It sounds like she was really in love with him and he broke her heart. God, what a creep.”

  “Yeah, that’s the thing—not only did he refuse to ditch his wife for my mom, but he told her that his wife had just lost a baby and it would be too cruel to leave her while she was still grieving,” Trey scoffed.

  Trey’s mom had always been so thin, so nervous, like someone afraid of her own shadow. I never thought of her as being ten years younger than my mom because she seemed just as old and disappointed by life. Everything Trey was telling me made my heart ache for her; she must have been devastated that the man she loved thought so little of her that he was willing to pay her to not have their baby. “God. I feel so bad for your mom,” I said. And although I didn’t say so, I felt bad for Trey, too. It couldn’t have been pleasant to learn such awful things about your own biological parent.

  “Don’t feel too bad for her,” he said with amusement. “The last couple of pages I skimmed were pure rage. Like real, psychotic, messed-up stuff. She was totally out for—”

  We both startled as the Emorys’ sliding door opened and Mr. Emory stepped onto the deck. “Trey. Are you gonna chop that wood or are you gonna stand around running your mouth all morning?”

  With his back to Mr. Emory, Trey grimaced at me and rolled his eyes. “I’ll get it chopped.”

  “Hi, Mr. Emory,” I said and waved, wondering just how many details Walter Emory knew about his wife’s life, how and why he’d agreed to marry her when she’d returned to Willow several months pregnant and let everyone in town believe that Trey was his biological son. Either he really loved his wife, or there was something else going on.

  “Glad to hear it,” Mr. Emory told him, ignoring my greeting, before going back inside.

  Unable to suppress my excitement, I asked Trey, “Where is this diary? I want to read every word of it.”

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and replied, “Uh, that probably can’t happen. If my mom knew I found it in the basement with all her other crap from my grandparents’ house, she would kill me. I feel bad for even poking around down there, but I was curious to see if there were any pictures of them together. I wo
uld have just given it to you, but I don’t know if she goes down there and looks at it often or what.”

  Still thinking about the law firm’s threat against Trey’s mom and the FOR SALE sign on his lawn, I asked, “Do you think your mom accepted money from Violet’s dad to have an abortion, and then changed her mind?”

  Trey thought this over. “Maybe. But it’s not like we live in Sherwood Hills or anything,” he reasoned. Sherwood Hills was the high-priced subdivision on the other side of town where the Portnoys lived and where Candace had lived. “As far as I know, my mom doesn’t have a secret bank account somewhere. We’re not poor, but you know. Walter drives a Hyundai.”

  He hadn’t yet read the letter folded inside the envelope, so I gave him a bit of a spoiler for its content. “That letter says your mom owes that law firm’s client almost two million dollars.”

  Trey blinked in surprise, and his lips cupped to form an O shape. “Dang. Two million dollars! He must have really not wanted his wife to find out about me.”

  “Yeah, but think about that. Your parents are selling your house. If your mom had two million dollars when she was not much older than us, then where did it go?”

  Our conversation was interrupted again by Mr. Emory, who’d once more opened the screen door to shout, “Trey!”

  “Okay, okay,” Trey called. He smiled at me apologetically and lowered his voice. “Look, we can try to keep talking while I chop wood, but it’s not going to be easy. So just in case I don’t see you again before I leave, I wanted to give you this.”

  He handed me a small wooden box with hinges and a capital M burned into the top of the lid. “It’s not a big deal. I just have to take wood shop at Northern Reserve, so I made this. I wasn’t going to give it to you, but it’s all I was able to get for Christm—”

  I stood on my toes to lean over the fence and reached for his face. I pulled him close enough to kiss his lips and said, “Trey, I love it.”