Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  “That’s crazy!” Henry exclaimed. “I knew your dad’s sister had died in a diving accident, but I didn’t know that someone had predicted it!”

  “I don’t often tell people that part of the story,” Mrs. Richmond explained. “It sounds unbelievable. But sometimes unbelievable things happen. Not everything can be explained.” She patted me on the shoulder. “If you two are serious about doing something to stop the girl who killed Olivia, how could I not be in support of that? All I ask,” she said, turning to me, “is that you don’t let Henry do anything risky.” She placed her hand over Henry’s and smiled at him. “You have to understand, he’s all I have left now. If anything happens to him…”

  From the house’s second floor, I heard the familiar buzzing of an alarm clock. Henry and Mrs. Richmond exchanged worried glances. Mr. Richmond would make his way downstairs soon in his gym gear, and he probably wouldn’t be as sympathetic about my presence in the house as Henry’s mom was. It was time to go.

  On our way out the front door, we were armed for our trip with boxes of granola bars, travel bags packed with clean clothes, and spare hats and gloves. Mrs. Richmond handed Henry her American Express card. “Just in case,” she told him. “Call me if you need anything. Just call my cell, and not the house.”

  “Mom,” Henry said, waving his hand to refuse the card, “don’t worry about it. I have my credit card for school stuff.”

  “The credit limit on that is only a thousand dollars,” Mrs. Richmond reminded him. “You’re going to need a place to stay in Michigan, aren’t you? Hotels aren’t cheap. Just take it.”

  Henry stuffed his mother’s credit card into his wallet, and we rushed out the door and into the pickup truck. As he started the truck’s engine and let it warm up for a few seconds before we backed out of the driveway, Mrs. Richmond lingered in the front doorway, watching us.

  “You know, my mom’s not all, like, one hundred percent right in the head these days,” Henry informed me. “How much about Violet did you tell her?”

  “She asked about the game Violet had us play, and it felt good to tell someone,” I confessed. “Plus, it can’t hurt for us to have an adult on our side. We could realistically end up in very big trouble on this trip.”

  We reached the end of Cabot Drive, and Henry let his left turn signal linger as we waited for a station wagon in the distance to approach the corner and drive past us. It was still dark out, as dark as night, at a little after six thirty in the morning. “I just hope she doesn’t say anything to my dad. He’s really freaked out about how she’s not sleeping at night, not eating. More than once, he’s mentioned having her talk to someone in Ortonville and maybe getting her meds to help her through this,” Henry informed me.

  Having grown up with a psychiatrist as a dad, the idea of speaking to a therapist or even taking antidepressants was so normal to me that I often forgot that there were families for whom that was the strangest concept imaginable.

  I didn’t reply. I was pretty sure that Mrs. Richmond was going to be cool. After all, she could have called my mom or the Willow Police Department when she’d found me in her hallway, and hadn’t.

  The drive north was going to be long and not especially scenic. The rural roads were sloppy with melting snow, and we wouldn’t be passing any large towns on our journey other than Eau Claire. Henry was pensive during the first hour of our drive before the sun began to rise, flipping nervously through talk radio stations in search of any news broadcast mentioning a missing teenage girl from a reform school in Michigan.

  After we stopped at a rest station outside Eau Claire to use the bathrooms, we got down to business. Mischa still had the prepaid cell phone she’d taken with her to Chicago so that the location of her own phone couldn’t be traced. Henry texted her at that number, urging her to have Kirsten get rid of the burner phone and buy a new one since Mischa had used it to call Trey’s school, pretending to be his aunt.

  We also had absolutely no way of getting in touch with Trey. “How are we going to let him know that we’re coming, and instruct him where to go?” I wondered aloud once we were back on the road.

  “Smoke signals,” Henry joked.

  “Your mom might be right. We’re going to have to create some kind of distraction to disrupt the whole school in order to get him out of there,” I said. “Don’t think I’m crazy, but I think we should stop somewhere and get some herbs we can burn so that I can pose questions to this pendulum I used yesterday when I was breaking out of my school.”

  “Did it actually work?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to weird you out, but yeah. I’ve been practicing, and it’s pretty reliable,” I admitted.

  Henry grinned at me. “I doubt we’re going to find any witchcraft stores on the way up to Parkland in northern Wisconsin.”

  A quick Google search on his phone suggested that sage would work reasonably well for clearing negative energy if palo santo wasn’t available. At eight in the morning, when stores in the closest town were open for business, we stopped at a supermarket, and Henry bought sage and a cigarette lighter. After an impromptu cleansing ritual in the cab of his pickup truck, I asked the keys on the lanyard if we were going to be successful in getting Trey out of his school that morning.

  They told me that we would, which was encouraging. I didn’t tell Henry that there was an art to asking pendulums questions, and that its answer for that particular question might change at any point if circumstances beyond our control also changed.

  Northern Reserve Academy was located off of Route 53 in the very northwesternmost corner of Wisconsin, nestled in between two state parks that appeared to be identical from the rural highway on which we drove. At a few minutes before eleven in the morning, Henry and I drove in circles twice around the complex of enormous brick buildings, observing. Like the Sheridan School for Girls, Northern Reserve was set back from the street in a remote location, not close enough to any main roads or strip malls to make an escape by any student particularly easy.

  The school had a large track, just like our high school in Willow, but unlike the track back in my hometown, the one at Trey’s military school was enclosed by a chain-link fence seven feet high with rusty razor wire at its top. As bad as Sheridan was, Northern Reserve seemed much more like an actual prison.

  We told ourselves we were staking out the territory, making a plan. But during our second pass around the building, I knew what we were really doing was panicking. My eyes scanned frosty windowpanes on the school’s three floors as we drove past. I allowed myself to imagine catching a lucky glimpse of Trey daydreaming out the window in one of his classrooms, but the roads that framed the school’s property were simply too far away from the actual buildings to see much of anything inside.

  We slowed the truck down on our third drive around the campus when we saw two single-file lines of boys crossing a courtyard briskly without jackets from one building to another. The lines were flanked in the front and back by guards wearing uniforms and heavy winter coats. My heart swelled for a split second—it would have been perfect if Trey had been in that line and had seen our truck—but out of all the boys with shaved heads marching through the snow in those two lines wearing matching gray wool coats, none of them were Trey.

  “We should park somewhere and make a plan,” Henry said, turning left instead of right to bring us back onto the highway rather than loop around the school a fourth time. “If a big pickup truck drives around a school building four times in a row on an otherwise empty road, someone’s bound to notice.”

  In a McDonald’s parking lot nearby, we drank coffee in silence, both of us knowing that time was slipping away. In a matter of hours, classes would be wrapping up at Willow High School, and the junior class would be boarding rented buses bound for Michigan. We couldn’t afford to waste time developing some kind of master plan to spring Trey out of school, but we couldn’t drive off to Michigan without him either.

  “I’m not sure if creating a distraction is th
e best way to go,” I said. “They might already be onto him because his aunt never showed up to pick him up for his leave this morning.”

  “Yeah,” Henry agreed. “What if we just get someone to go inside and tell him we’re waiting for him? Like an electrician or a deliveryman or something. Or a janitor! Janitors must work there, right?”

  I agreed that sending an outsider in with a message seemed like a good idea, but it had its flaws. “We’d have to pay them. No one is going to help two kids hanging around outside a military school by delivering a message to someone on the inside for free. And then, even if we found someone to take our money, there’s no way they would know which kid was Trey unless they were in the school, interacting with students, every single day. I mean, if we said he was a thin white guy, around five foot eleven, with blue eyes and a shaved head, there are probably, like, thirty guys who fit that description at that school.”

  Just like at Sheridan, each of the buildings appeared to have side doors, but it would have been foolish for us to think that the doors would ever be left unlocked. The worst part of the Northern Reserve setup was that the entire school was surrounded by a tall fence, and the entrance to the main parking lot had a guard station. The only part of the campus that seemed like it might be a possibility for infiltration was the track, and it was unmonitored due to the three feet of snow covering it. But the tallest fence on the school’s property encircled it, and as primitive a means of security as razor wire was, it was effective. I sure as heck didn’t have any desire to risk cutting myself up by trying to climb over it in an attempt to reach those double doors of the building, which presumably led to a gymnasium.

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Henry agreed. “Ask your magic keys!”

  I dangled the keys from the lanyard and asked, “Pendulum, is it the correct course of action for us to send someone into the building to contact Trey?” The keys swung to communicate an affirmative answer. “That’s a yes,” I translated for Henry.

  “Has Trey ever mentioned, like, times of the day when he crosses in between buildings, or gets, like, a recess or something?”

  “Yeah, but that was before it got cold out,” I said. If it hadn’t been winter, this entire operation would have been much easier. Trey would have been allowed outside for thirty minutes after lunchtime and most likely would have walked laps around the track for an hour during his gym period. I had a terrible but awesome idea for a question to pose to the pendulum, and decided to ask it before running it past Henry. “Pendulum, will Henry be able to get inside Trey’s school without being noticed?”

  “Hey now,” Henry cautioned. But despite Henry’s protest, the keys swung back and forth, guaranteeing that he would be able to slip into Trey’s school successfully. “I could get in just as much trouble for trespassing on military school property as I could for phoning in a bomb threat, McKenna.”

  Without acknowledging his concern, I next asked, “Pendulum, will Henry be able to get back out of Trey’s school with Trey without either of them getting caught?”

  The pendulum continued to swing back and forth without wavering or slowing down.

  “Oh, come on,” Henry groaned. “This sounds like an awful plan.”

  “The pendulum thinks it’s legit,” I argued. “Come on, Henry. I know it’s not exactly your secret fantasy to sneak inside a boys’ military school, but if we can’t wait for Trey to come out, then one of us needs to go inside and get him, and I really don’t think a girl my age is going to go unnoticed in there.”

  “And how do you suppose I might sneak inside?” Henry asked.

  Twenty minutes later, in an aisle at Kmart, where a very bad easy-listening version of Luther Vandross’s “Here and Now” was playing on the sound system, Henry flipped through a rack of white short-sleeved button-down shirts trying to find one in a size large to fit across his shoulders. He hadn’t stopped grumbling or talking about how there had to be some other way, but I knew he’d follow through with what the pendulum had confirmed would work. In another aisle, he plucked a package of white V-neck undershirts from a shelf, and then I followed him toward a rack where black dress trousers were on display.

  “I’ll wear this, but I won’t have any of those pins or anything that those guys at the school were wearing,” Henry said. “I mean, I’m going to stand out like a sore thumb no matter what.”

  Henry’s lack of a name tag to pin on his breast pocket was less concerning to me than the other very obvious difference between him and all of the other boys attending Northern Reserve Academy. Henry had thick auburn hair, as thick as Olivia’s had been, but wavier, like his father’s. As much as I hated to think about that beautiful hair ending up in the garbage, I had to say, “Henry, I think we might have to cut your hair.”

  “Oh, I know,” he agreed, not sounding thrilled. “I’m not going into that school without shaving my head. I really don’t want to go to jail, McKenna. I can’t stress enough that starting my first year of life after high school as a freshman at Northwestern and ending it in a men’s prison would really not be cool.”

  We approached the desolate checkout area carrying Henry’s new outfit, an electric razor, and a family-size bag of Fudge Stripes cookies. “Don’t judge,” Henry warned me in reference to the cookies as the tired-looking, middle-aged cashier scanned our purchases. “If there’s any chance I’m going to spend time in a jail cell today, I need cookies.”

  “That’ll be one hundred and nineteen dollars, and fifty-nine cents,” the cashier told us. Henry handed her his mother’s American Express card, and I held my breath when I caught a glimpse of it as the cashier accepted it. Any cashier paying close attention would have immediately asked Henry for identification, since it was rather obvious that his name was probably not Elizabeth Richmond.

  “You know,” the cashier said, causing my heart to basically stop as she waited for the receipt to print out, “you look kind of like that girl.”

  “What girl?” I said, immediately blushing and fearing that I’d become an overnight news sensation.

  “That girl on the news,” the cashier said, confirming my suspicion. “The one from that school who went missing.”

  I giggled nervously, wishing Henry hadn’t just made a joke about ending up in jail before the end of the day. “Oh yeah, that girl,” I said. “That’s awful about what happened to her.”

  “The police think she ran away from her school and tried to hitchhike away,” the cashier said, watching Henry as he forged his mother’s signature on the credit card slip. “She seemed like a real messed-up girl. Got into all kinds of trouble down near Suamico in the fall.”

  “Oh, I saw just a little while ago on the news that they found her body,” I said, freaking myself out a little by lying about my own death. “They’re investigating one of her teachers at that school.”

  Henry thanked the skeptical cashier with a confident smile before shooing me out to the parking lot with our purchases. “God, that was a close call,” Henry said, starting the engine of his truck and evacuating the Kmart parking lot quickly. “I guess your escape from school is on the news now.”

  CHAPTER 16

  WE RETURNED TO MCDONALD’S, AND I agreed to stay in the truck while Henry ventured inside to use the men’s room, assuming that the bathroom would have an outlet into which he could plug the electric razor. I listened to news radio nervously, paranoid that I would hear either a radio broadcast about my own disappearance or police sirens approaching. It was almost noon, and I was already tired from being in the car for so long. It would take us at least another ten hours to drive from Trey’s school all the way to the ski resort where the kids from our town would be staying in Michigan, so I was growing uneasy about where we’d find ourselves at nightfall and where we’d sleep that night—if we even managed to break Trey out.

  “Not a word,” Henry commanded when he climbed back into the truck and immediately reached for his bag of cookies. Even though Henry seemed like he was in a bad mood,
I could tell he wasn’t genuinely angry. I wondered if he was even capable of having a truly dark moment, the kind I had seen wash over Trey so very many times.

  He hadn’t shaved his head completely bald, but had left a few millimeters of auburn stubble all the way around. He’d also closely shaved the light scruff he’d had on his jaw in an attempt to look a little younger, which barely counterbalanced how much older than eighteen he appeared to be with his head shaved. Henry looked like a completely different guy—tougher, more dangerous. I smiled to myself. I, alone, was seeing a side of Henry Richmond, high school tennis star, that no one else from Willow had ever seen. The smile I was trying to suppress eventually pushed its way onto my lips. I never, ever would have thought I’d find myself on a secret mission, incognito, with Henry Richmond, hometown heartthrob.

  We filled the tank of the pickup with gas at a nearby station on the way back to Trey’s school. “So, how am I going to get in there?” Henry wondered aloud.

  “Climb the fence?” I halfheartedly suggested, not really believing for a second that he’d ever make it over that tall fence before a guard saw him.

  “No, really,” Henry said. “Ask the pendulum.”

  The challenge in asking the pendulum was that it would only respond to questions that could be answered with “yes” or “no” without becoming confused. I ran through the list of doors on the school buildings I remembered from our drives around the campus earlier that morning. “Pendulum, will Henry be able to successfully get into the school through the back door near the cafeteria?”

  The pendulum began swinging from side to side. “That’s a negative,” I informed Henry as he drove through the small town back in the direction of the military school campus. “Pendulum, will Henry be able to enter any of the dormitories at Northern Reserve Academy through side doors?” The pendulum continued swinging.