I round on Todd. “You didn’t!”
“They’ll be cool about this. Trust me. He owes me.”
“How so?”
“Because I told him I’d kick his trash for creating that fake profile, and I haven’t made good on my promise yet. Among other things,” he adds as though he’s not sure he should have.
I fold my arms, my brain on full panic mode, regardless of Todd’s awesomeness and the smile he’s giving me. I don’t get how he thinks they’ll help us with anything. He knows Joel is injured; these guys are probably dying for more reasons to obliterate me.
“What happened?” Jordan yells through the window. “This place was like, brand new. And now—”
“Shut up and come through the back door,” Todd yells. “But be careful!”
“You’re unbelievable,” I say, pacing away from him again. “They’re the last people in the world I would turn to for help.”
“They’re different, Pipes,” Todd says, barring his arm out to stop me. “You have no idea how much. They probably would have busted in here with me earlier if Kody hadn’t driven up right when he did. But I couldn’t wait around to explain everything to him, so I left. ” He slants his head level with mine. My teeth clamp shut. I refuse to look at him.
He circles around, but I close my eyes. My skin stirs before his hand reaches my face. I cringe for a second, knowing my zits are back, but at the brush of his fingers, my will to fight him crumbles. Especially when he guides my face to his and places a kiss on my lips.
The kiss washes over me like steam from a sauna, unnerving me, and for a split second I forget why I’m so upset. Instead, I get caught up in his heart beating against mine, in his warm breath on my skin.
“I wouldn’t have gone to them if I didn’t trust they would come help,” Todd says against my mouth. His soothing voice makes me bubble inside. “After Jordan axed your—you, I mean. He told me, he felt pretty awful.”
My resentment tries to dig its heels in. But Sierra did say the same thing. And she even came to the hospital with flowers for me. Maybe they really are trying to be nicer, like Todd said.
“You guys gonna make out, or do you need a hand?” Jordan calls down. Gel slicks his blond hair back. The sight of him makes me pout, especially since he saw our kiss. Our kiss. Not his business.
But Todd’s already bending for the top end of Joel’s makeshift stretcher. I dash over and brace with my knees, lifting Joel up. My feet are unstable along the pile of broken stairs, and I nearly fall twice on the uneven mound, but we make it to the wall just below the door.
My arms straining, I hold Joel’s legs and help Todd lift him toward Jordan and Kody’s outstretched hands. A couple other guys from the team help, too.
“Careful,” I say, fighting the urge to bite my fingernails.
Still on the small hill of rotted wood, I support myself against the moldy concrete wall directly below the door. Jordan peers down with his stupid blue eyes and good looks. He offers me his hand.
No way. No freaking way.
“Come on,” he says.
A few blocks of wood clunk together—Todd’s readjusting his footing so he can make a support with his hands. Jordan lowers himself, and I won’t look at him. Any minute he’ll try to spit in my mouth. Or I’ll give him my hand and halfway up he’ll drop me, leave me in here to rot.
“Would I have come here just to mess with you?” Jordan asks.
“Lemme check,” I say, folding my arms. There’s got to be another way out. A larger window, maybe. We haven’t checked the other back rooms. But in my gut I know this is it.
“I’m really sorry, Piper,” Jordan says. Against my will, I blink up at him. He’s crouching down toward me now, holding onto the doorframe. “I was a total douche. I never meant for you to get hurt like that.”
Todd steps forward and rests a hand on my back. “You’ll be okay,” he whispers.
With a resolute breath, I slip my hand into Jordan’s as Todd makes a boost with his hands for my foot. “You better watch it,” I say to Jordan while he and Kody lug me up. “Or I’m axing you next time.”
The two of them, to my surprise, bust with laughter. Jordan’s face holds a smirk. “Fair enough,” he says. A few other kids peer around the decrepit scene, but I don’t care. Let them look.
“I’m not kidding,” I go on, dusting the grime from my hands onto my jeans. The need to be insistent, to switch to offense, drowns every other concern for this one moment. I’m different now, and I’ll make sure he knows it. “After what I’ve just been through, it will be nothing for me to smack you down.”
Still grinning, Jordan nods his head. Kody pulls Todd up, and before I know it, a girl slams into me, giving me a skintight hug. Her hair reeks of starchy hair spray and other products. From the dark curls trailing down her back, I know it’s Cassie.
“Glad you’re okay, Piper,” she says.
I pat her back a couple times, hoping she gets the hint. So not in the mood for hugging.
Sierra stands behind her, chewing her lip. Her silky hair is fried, frizzing out as if she’s spent the afternoon rubbing a balloon against her head or sticking forks in electric sockets. She watches me with obvious apprehension as Cassie releases me, and there’s this awkward elephant between us.
“Zits suck,” she blurts, though her face is clear once more. “And for the record, I only made a face at you your first day of school here because you wouldn’t stop staring at me and it was weird.”
My mouth drops. Of all the things she could have said, where did that come from? I’m pretty sure I’ve never told that to anyone, let alone mentioned it, least of all to her. I’m tempted to argue—she totally made the face at me first! But I decide to let it go. And despite it all, a smile creeps up on my face. “At least you’re washing your face again,” I say.
For the smallest second her brows crinkle, nostrils flare. She pouts her mouth like her teeth are grinding for all they’re worth, and she points a manicured finger at me. “You little—do you have any idea what I…what you…”
She’s interrupted by Todd’s tall presence and his arm around her shoulder. “Hey,” he says, giving her shoulders a squeeze that displays their full ability to move up and down, “you doing okay? Back to normal?”
I notice two major things. First, that Todd is being completely serious. And second, that Sierra looks, of all things, embarrassed. She nods as her fingertips brush her now-clear skin, gives me a final stare, and says, “I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time,” before turning heel and walking off.
“Um…” is all I can manage.
“I’ll explain later,” Todd says, pulling me to him.
“So it was really haunted?” Kody asks, glancing up to the kitchen. I wait for the lights to flicker, the walls to creak. But Ada is gone. And so is Garrett.
“Pretty sure,” I say, ready to phone the paramedics.
“Sweet,” Kody says, rotating around.
On my way out, Todd and I exchange a look. “Glad you think so,” I say.
The mellow tones fade out as I hold back my air supply and taste the woody reed on the mouthpiece. I stare at the music on the table in front of me and catch my breath. The few inmates in the open room clap, along with the guards positioned along the doors. Several women boom out a few cheers. But as I lower my clarinet, I only have eyes for my mother.
Her brownish-blonde hair, the smile stretched on her pretty face, the tears welling in her eyes—
My. Mother.
“That was your audition piece?” Mom asks when I make my way back to her table. I sit across from her and perch the instrument on my thigh. “That was beautiful, hon.”
Mr. Garrett had one thing right, at least. My mom did kill Hunter Morgan. And she was proven guilty and has to serve out her life sentence. The good thing is that she’s sane again. After she betrayed Dad and Garrett, Garrett used the house to mess with her mind, I guess.
I asked her when we first got here if she had be
en present in that floating door room. If she’d known I was there.
“Yes,” she said. “But my body was here, so I couldn’t respond at all.”
“That cage thingy, around your head?”
She smiled. “I’m free.”
“And Dad?” If her mind is free, then he must be too.
“They’ve all moved on,” she said with a trace of sadness in her voice. “Like we’re all meant to.”
Joel and I sit with her now in the open room where convicts visit with their family members. The other convicts, each clad in blue, sit along their tables, chatting under their breaths. A thick white bandage hugs his head like a bandana. The doctors said no skin grafts would be needed, and thankfully, his hearing isn’t damaged either. Joel’s considering surgical replacements, since he doesn’t want to go around, you know, earless.
I examine Mom, not just eager to find bits of myself in her, but to know her face the way I know my own. The sun spots on her high cheeks and lines tracing her mouth, her eyes. Still smiling, she wipes a tear away. The insanity is drained from her eyes, and now they’re bright and blue and full of hope.
“You knew about Ada, didn’t you?” I ask her. “How?”
Her hand reaches out and squeezes mine for the tiniest second before she pulls back. She glances back at the guard, and I know it’s because she’s not supposed to touch anyone while we’re in here.
The motherly gesture nearly over-exhilarates me, and I open my mouth as if I can breathe better through it than just through my nose. She looks to Joel, apology dripping from her expression. I’m startled at the resemblance between them. The long face shape and their thin lips.
“I knew your father was up to something, but it wasn’t until I stumbled across Hunter in the basement that I really became suspicious. I was hauling some bags of your baby clothes down there. Ada appeared, warning me. And I threatened your father I’d divorce him if he didn’t tell me what was going on.”
“You did?” Joel asks with humor.
“Dad must have really loved you,” I add.
Mom nods, her lips a straight line. “Once I learned the truth, I wanted to divorce him. But divorce wasn’t as common back then as it is now. Ada showed me the journal and newspaper articles—she just pulled them out of the wall like a magic act.” Mom flares her hands as if doing a trick. “I knew what I had to do.”
“So you did kill him, then,” I say. Even though I know it’s true, my heart is at a lower spot than usual in my chest. There had to be something else she could have done than murder. Too late now.
Mom stares at her fingers on the table. I grip my clarinet tighter.
“I went to sneak Hunter Morgan out, but by the time I got down there again he was dangling from hooks in the basement. So while Garrett’s back was turned, I stabbed Hunter. If he couldn’t use Hunter’s living parts, his elixir wouldn’t work and it would end.
“I dragged Hunter up, and Ada did her thing and covered the blood. I was going to dispose of him that night, but Garrett attacked my mind. And then you found him a few days later, Piper.”
I fight away the images of my mother stabbing someone in cold blood, for whatever reason. I’m itching to ask the question that’s been on my mind since I was trapped in the walls. I tilt in and speak softly.
“How did you know, Mom? How did you know the trap door was immune or whatever?”
Mom’s brows crinkle. She looks to Joel first, who shrugs, then back to me. “It—it wasn’t immune. It was just a place to hide him.”
Joel seems to be just as confused as I am. His brows crease and create wrinkles on his forehead. He leans back in his chair and rests his arm on the back of it, evaluating me.
“But Ada cleans everything up—” I shake my head. “It was the only place with a bloodstain.”
Mom examines the table as if thinking it over. “Ada left things alone that were under the surface of the walls.”
“Like the cobwebs.”
“She only cleaned up what people could see, and she knew no one ever opened that trap door.”
“The bloodstain!” I say as if I’m struck with inspiration. Joel and Mom watch, clearly stunned at my exclamation, and wait for me to go on. A few of the other people in the large room glance over at us, and I lower my voice. Probably not a good thing to be talking openly about in a prison.
“It has to be. Garrett prepped his victims, right? Ada never cleaned up that guy’s blood in the trap door. It must have sealed that spot or something, right?” It’s the only explanation I can think of.
That must be how Todd was able to come through the Friend Space too. He said Sierra saw the murder. She saw Mom do it, then panic, blood on her hands, trying to dash out through the old servants’ entrance to wash it off because she didn’t want to get any on the doorknob. Ada must have not gotten it all from there either.
Ada must have given Sierra more than she meant to, too. That’s the only plausible answer Todd or I could come up with. I’m just glad she didn’t pass that memory on to me in the process. I’ve got enough in my head—I didn’t need that one.
I look up at Mom now, relieved again to find sanity in her blue eyes. The memory of her madness is bad enough, let alone seeing her here now. Yeah, Sierra can keep it, although who knows how many of my memories she got a glimpse of before we switched back. I wonder why I never got any of Sierra’s. Not that I’m complaining, because yuck, who wants those?
Mom analyzes me. Then she wraps one hand over the other, giving an answer to the question I forgot I’d posed.
“I guess we’ll never know for sure, will we?” she says.
Joel and I stand on Hemlock Avenue, staring up at the sad remains of the house we’ve known our whole lives. The axe mark hacks in the floating door, right where it should have landed. Part of the roof beside the tower on the left is caved in. The porch has collapsed, and patches of lath peek through the siding. And with the shattered windows, the place looks pathetic, especially in the gleaming sunlight.
A miserable sort of emptiness chisels through me, seeing it this way. Pity coils from my stomach and into my chest, now that I know its sad history. The people it’s seen, the lives it contained, the horrors it hid. I grew up in this house. And even though it was weird, it was my weird, alive house.
The screen door from the two-story brick house next door slams. Todd trots down his front steps, hands in his pockets. He’s got on a maroon shirt with rock, paper, and scissors each holding the other at gunpoint.
“Has it started yet?” he asks, giving me a grin that fizzles in my belly.
“Any minute now,” Joel says, a fresh bandage snug around his head.
He and I emptied the few belongings we wanted to keep. My clarinet. Joel’s papers. Clothes. I would have wanted the dollhouse too, but its damage was irreparable. Joel and I made arrangements to auction off the antiques in the house. The furniture, the beds, the china; even the rugs, despite the decaying state of the house, remained in pretty good condition.
It gave us enough money to find an apartment. A modern one—something built within the last fifty years. And Joel has agreed for me to get a job once I turn sixteen next month.
Minutes earlier, we brought a space heater and placed it strategically close to a piece of dry, sagging wallpaper that peeled away from the wall and hung toward the floor in the dining room.
“You knew what was going on, didn’t you?” I asked Joel as he plugged it into the wall and turned the knob to high.
He kept his sight on the crippled wainscoting. “Dad told me. But I didn’t want to do it.”
My father. The type of man who promoted murder. Who consigned his son to do the same. The thought gave me icy shudders regardless of the cold, desiccated house.
“Don’t blame you,” I said.
Joel’s head stayed bent toward his chest. “I’m sorry, Pipes. I should have told you. But I thought like Dad—the less you knew, the better. Dad told me some of it before he died. And then Ada appeared
to me after his death. She got me to go downstairs to talk to Garrett.”
It didn’t surprise me in the least. I waited for him to go on, staying silent, enjoying this newfound camaraderie between us.
“After I heard what Garrett wanted me to do—what he had Dad do, I threatened to burn down the house.” Joel lifted his eyes to mine, striking me by the glossy sadness in them. “Garrett said he’d kill us, Pipes. Both of us. And that Ada wouldn’t allow the house to burn because she wanted to keep living. Dad couldn’t destroy the house either, but he wouldn’t subject somebody else to the life he was forced into since he was a kid. So he moved the whole thing.”
Hmm, maybe my dad wasn’t as deranged as I thought. Still, I wondered how Garrett could follow up on a threat to kill us when he needed one of us to get his final victim for him. I wasn’t about to mention how the threat was probably an empty one.
Joel straightened, and I rubbed a hand along his back. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “Sorry you had to deal with all of that.”
Heat quickly filled the room, making it impossible for us to say anything else. The two of us did a sort of jump-and-roll across the decaying porch which had threatened to collapse on our way back in.
Excitement bubbled up my throat. I couldn’t believe we would be rid of it. I glanced back at the wilted vines crawling along the gazebo, to the once vibrant patch of roses that were now barren and skeletal. The sight brought up my last reservation. “Kick the house, Joel,” I said.
“Uhhh—”
“Just do it.”
I closed my eyes. The sun beat red under my lids, but I wanted to be sure. After a few ticks I peeled one eye open.
“Did you do it?”
“Yeah, I did.” His brow was creased.
“Do it again.”
I kept my eyes open that time. I had to see, to know for sure. Hands in his pockets, Joel strode over and whacked the fallen porch with his foot. The entire wooden entry swayed. And I didn’t feel a thing.
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