Sisters of Misery

by Megan Kelley Hall

  She chuckled softly. “Well, I guess it’s my own fault. I shouldn’t have taken you two in so quickly after your father left town. If I’d had my wits about me, I would have forced you two to move somewhere else. But I guess I was selfish. I wanted to help raise my lovely granddaughter, even if it prevented your escape from Hawthorne.”

  “Escape, Grams?” Maddie giggled, thinking that her grandmother could be so overly dramatic at times. Looking back now, Maddie could see what Tess meant, though at the time, she’d never felt any danger in her hometown. “What’s there to be afraid of in Hawthorne?”

  Tess looked Maddie squarely in the eyes as she dropped her hand to the quilt displaying three Jacks and a run of spades. She plucked the Ace of Diamonds and Ace of Hearts from her granddaughter’s hand as if she knew exactly what cards Maddie held and turned them so that she could read the fortunes printed above a slew of birds on a bloodred background and a monstrous-looking fox.

  Maddie read the fortunes out loud:

  “The birds foretell dire misfortune and fierce enemies when near. The fox in close proximity augurs distrust of acquaintances who seek to betray you.”

  “Madeline Crane, when the time is right—and trust me, you’ll know when that time comes—leave everything, all of us, behind,” she whispered as she leaned across the bed and grabbed Maddie by the shoulders, her fingers digging sharply into her skin, “and just run.”

  Maddie was still not sure what Tess had known at that point—or if she suspected the terrible events to come. It was long before Cordelia and Rebecca moved back, so it couldn’t have had anything to do with them. But the look in Tess’s eyes at that moment—like she was looking into the future and seeing only horrific events unfolding—haunted her for months.

  Now, lying in the darkness, Maddie watched the shadows of tree branches come alive on her wall, moving with the wind. Chances were that someone who was still living in this town was involved with Cordelia’s disappearance. And if that person was still out there, Maddie wondered if she was going to be the next target. It made sense. Maddie was the only person convinced that Cordelia hadn’t run away. And perhaps the person responsible didn’t want her looking too deep. Perhaps that person would do anything to keep the secret of Cordelia’s disappearance buried.

  But from what Maddie knew of Hawthorne, a dark place trapped in time that seemed to be straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, untouched by the rest of the world, secrets didn’t stay covered up for very long.

  People lived in the houses built by their ancestors, dwellings that remained unchanged despite the decades they had weathered. Townspeople coveted the antique houses with low ceilings and uneven pine floorboards that seemed to grow up out of the sidewalks, jutting into the crooked streets like holly-hocks. They boasted about their gardens filled with jewel-colored flowers that grew lush and wild, fed by a steady diet of salty air and coastal sunshine. The same houses and the same gardens tended to year after year, generation after generation.

  There was the Hawthorne that most people talked about: the one with stories as old and weathered as the shingles of the historic houses. The town that’s picture postcard perfect, a Currier and Ives landscape filled with scents of apple cider in the fall, pine and woodsmoke in the winter, and honey and jasmine in the summer. The town known for sailing and quaint shops and an enviable coastline.

  And then there were the legends.

  Stories of ghostly soldiers that still lurked outside the Old Sandy Dog Tavern and the specter of Jack Derby, the tyrannical sheriff who terrorized the town over two hundred years ago. But the most startling of all were townspeople reporting the sensation of a small hand reaching up to grab hold and be helped across the street—the tiny hand of Hester Proctor, who died so many years ago, trampled by a horse and wagon.

  Tess claimed that when she was a girl, the thick, heavy scent of the flowers was so overwhelming in Hawthorne that people had to shut their windows during dinnertime or else it overpowered their meals. And at night, many teenage girls were forced to sleep in the stifling heat with windows locked up tight, or else the heavy aroma of the flowers would drive them wanton with ecstasy, causing them to leave the confines of their bedrooms and set off into the night in search of young men.

  And then there was the modern-day Hawthorne that Maddie knew all too well: a town made up of small-minded people, people who resisted change, embraced conformity, and despised outsiders. A town filled with men and women who tried to destroy anything unfamiliar or unwelcome. This was the side of Hawthorne that most people tried to hide, the place that had shaped who Maddie had become. The real Hawthorne, the place that had frightened her for all of these years, was something she’d learned to keep to herself.

  And what scared her most was this: Maddie was one of them.

  Almost a month had passed since Cordelia had vanished. Maddie trudged through the crackling piles of leaves on her way to school each morning, scuffing her knee-high boots through the undergrowth that ran the length of the narrow pathway. Maddie had lost twenty pounds and stopped bathing regularly. Her mother was furious at her appearance, but Maddie had given up caring. She was consumed by guilt and sadness. All other emotions seemed futile.

  Life goes on. But Maddie couldn’t. Though Tess visited Rebecca every day, Rebecca just stared out the window at the ocean, remaining completely mute. Her doctors said she was in a “state of shock” and was going through PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

  Maddie typically walked with Tess to Ravenswood, but she would hang back and wait for Tess in Fort Glover, the part that was open to the general public and ran alongside of Ravenswood Asylum. The fort itself consisted of a sloping mound of earth that perched high on top of a cliff above the water. It was rumored to be connected to Ravenswood by narrow underground tunnels. At the center, there stood a dungeon sunken like a pirate’s ship. A narrow fence ran along the perimeter of Fort Glover, offering minimal protection from taking one false step and tumbling downward to the jagged rocks below. Maddie had heard stories of teenagers who would drink at the fort at night and dare each other to dive into the churning waters below. The unlucky few who were either too drunk to know any better or too desperate to fit in ended up at Bell Hospital with concussions or broken bones. Some kids managed to steal into the long-abandoned prison—where the Pickering sisters had been held captive—and throw parties or have sex on the dirt floors.

  Maddie remembered going to a party at Fort Glover a few months before Cordelia had arrived in Hawthorne. On their way up to the fort, some of the kids from Hawthorne Academy slapped the faces of the Pickering sisters that were carved into the main wall of the original fort. While the rest of the fort area had been turned into a beautiful park overlooking the ocean, the older walls still connected to Ravenswood, adding to the crumbling Gothic allure of the place that once served to protect the town from outsiders and now protected them from those inside the asylum. No one ever knew how the faces of the sisters had gotten there or who kept returning them to their former state after town officials covered them over again and again, not wanting to be reminded of the cruelty their ancestors had inflicted on victims of the witch trials. But the faces of the three sisters always reappeared, each time looking a little more haggard and vengeful. Maddie never looked directly at them, recalling a playground song that warned against doing such a thing:

  Don’t look now at the faces three,

  The Witch Sisters of Misery.

  Close your eyes and hold your breath

  Witches of Misery will bring you death.

  Shut your windows, doors up tight

  The Witches of Misery come tonight.

  As she walked up and down the path between Fort Glover and Ravenswood that afternoon in November, waiting for Tess to come out and inform her of another uneventful visit with Rebecca, Maddie noticed from the look of the dark sky and ocean that a storm was approaching.

  Maddie averted her eyes as usual as she passed the faces of the Pickering sister
s, but something caused her to stop suddenly. The tendrils of ivy, too stubborn to die off in the shivery November weather, had been pushed aside as if someone or something had recently been there. The faces of the sisters pushed out of the massive fortress wall as if trying to break free of their stony prison. But there was another face that had joined the three sisters. The color of the mortar was darker, fresher than the other three faces, which were bleached to the color of sand. This face didn’t have the harsh features and wicked grimaces of the Pickering girls. This face was softer…beautiful…haunted.

  It was the face of a young girl who was both familiar and horrifying. And it took her breath away when Maddie realized who it was supposed to be.

  Someone had added a fourth face.

  And this face looked remarkably like the person Maddie most wanted to see.

  But not like this. Not here, not now.

  It was the face she had seen in her dreams long ago.

  It was the face of Cordelia.

  Chapter 12

  ANSUZ

  MESSAGE

  A Revealing Insight or Signal; Prophecy and Revelation;

  Wisdom and Reason

  DECEMBER

  There was a flurry of activity as Hawthorne Academy shut down for the holidays. Kids ran across the hallways slapping each other on the back, girls huddled in tight knots by their lockers. Laughter, shouts, screeching of sneakers.

  And then, after a half hour or so, silence.

  Maddie waited until everyone had gone to start cleaning out her and Cordelia’s lockers. She hadn’t told any of the other girls of her plans of taking a semester off. She didn’t want a lecture from Kate on how she was throwing away her chance of getting into one of the Ivies. At this point, she didn’t know what she wanted to do, but she knew this much: Hawthorne Academy was the last place in the world she wanted to be.

  Maddie succeeded in getting the headmaster to let her take the semester off to care for her family and recover from the loss. While it seemed like a kind gesture on the surface, Maddie knew that the school board made that decision not out of goodwill, but as a way of taking the spotlight off of the school. Private schools never liked it when anything bad happened to their students, even if it didn’t happen during school hours or on the property. It made parents uneasy. So when Maddie approached Headmaster Collins, he seemed happy to have an excuse to let her leave the premises for a few months—at least until all the news surrounding her cousin’s disappearance and her aunt’s institutionalization died down. Abigail was thrilled as well, because Tess was displaying clear signs of dementia, obviously brought on by the recent tragic events and was becoming more of a challenge to care for. The dementia was steadily taking over, and it wasn’t uncommon to find her grandmother in the strangest of places or situations.

  After cleaning out her own locker, Maddie made her way down to Cordelia’s locker, her footsteps echoing through the deserted hallway. She stopped short, hearing a shuffling noise behind her. She turned, half expecting to see Cordelia escaping from a classroom, running down the corridor. But the hallway was empty.

  She opened Cordelia’s locker and started pulling out books and paperwork and school supplies to throw into the trash.

  Most of Cordelia’s personal belongings had been taken away by the police as evidence. Just as Maddie was about to slam the door closed, she noticed a rune stone stuck way in the back of the locker floor. Reaching down to retrieve the stone, Maddie realized the base of the locker was loose. After making sure no one was watching, Maddie pulled up the locker floor and was shocked to discover a stack of opened letters. Letters that must have been delivered by hand as they were unstamped and without a return address. Maddie flipped through them and then quickly stuck them into her bag, fighting the urge to read them all right there in the middle of Hawthorne Academy. She slammed the locker door closed and continued down the hallway.

  Maddie walked into the older section of Hawthorne Academy where the teachers had their offices. She wanted to see if the rumors about Mr. Campbell getting fired were true. The mansion that once served as the original schoolhouse remained virtually unchanged since the school had opened its doors decades earlier. Perhaps the hardwood floor didn’t gleam as brightly as it once had, but now with all of the scuff marks and chinks, the thickly varnished planks of pine gave off a warm amber glow. The front door banged open suddenly.

  Maddie! A raspy, ghostlike voice suddenly filled her ear.

  She spun around quickly to see who called out, or rather whispered, her name. But no one was there—only the faint tinkling of laughter, from one of the classrooms, perhaps. Her heartbeat quickened, and her breathing became shallow.

  The nameplate had been torn from Mr. Campbell’s office door, so it was as though he never existed at the school. The esteemed academy probably felt it important to remove any chance of being implicated by association with the disappearance of Mr. Campbell’s favorite—perhaps too much of a favorite—student, Cordelia LeClaire.

  Maddie always believed that if anyone was involved with Cordelia’s disappearance, it was Trevor, not Mr. Campbell. She wanted to believe that Mr. Campbell with his twinkling blue eyes and obvious concern for her feelings was innocent. But sometimes when you put a person too high up on a pedestal, you no longer see their actions clearly. And Maddie was smart enough to realize that her feelings for Mr. Campbell were deeper than a mere student–teacher relationship, and that those feelings might be clouding her judgment.

  Maddie reached into her bag and felt the stack of letters, wondering if they held the answers to her questions. Was Cordelia involved with Mr. Campbell? Were these actually love notes between them, confirming a relationship? Maddie raced out of school, anxious to get home and read the letters that might hold the clue, the missing piece to this puzzle. She was so lost in thought over the letters that she didn’t even realize that someone was watching her the entire time. Someone who knew what those letters would ultimately reveal. Someone who would do anything to get them back.

  Maddie’s relief at being out of Hawthorne Academy was short-lived when she caught sight of the note from Abigail scrawled on the kitchen counter, detailing her list of chores. The old family station wagon, complete with fake wood paneling adorning the sides, needed the brakes checked, the oil changed, and various other life-extending procedures. The fact that she was a few months shy of getting her license didn’t seem to bother her mother, so why should she care?

  “Happy holidays to you, too, Mom,” Maddie muttered. As she maneuvered the old car away from Mariner’s Way, Maddie wondered how this decrepit ancestor of the SUV had managed to survive all of the brutal winters and actually run despite the salt water mists that ravaged the metal undercarriage. The way it was handling, Maddie wasn’t sure if it would even make the short distance to O’Malley’s local body shop. Upon entering the old auto shop, Maddie again felt a strange sense of being watched despite the fact that the place seemed empty. She looked around for a security camera, but couldn’t spot one. There was a bell on the Formica counter. The smell of oil and grease permeated the place.

  “Hello?” Maddie called as she tentatively rang the bell. And then a little louder, “Hello?”

  A voice came from behind her. “Hey there, Maddie, what’s up?”

  Maddie turned quickly, surprised by the unfamiliar voice saying her name. A tall, lanky guy stood there, his dark eyes peering from behind long strands of hair.

  “Do I know you?” she asked in a clipped tone.

  He looked slightly hurt that Maddie didn’t recognize him, but then seemed to shrug it off and said in a cool tone. “You go to Hawthorne Academy.”

  His features were strikingly handsome, in strong contrast to the gritty condition of his longish hair, goatee, and oil-stained clothing. It was almost as if under all that dirt and grime, there was an incredibly hot guy. With his high cheekbones and strong jaw, he definitely didn’t fit in with the doughy, baseball-capped guys that Maddie knew from school.


  “You go there?” She cringed upon hearing her own voice—just like a typical Hawthorne snob. “I mean—what I meant to say was…um…are we in any classes together?” God, I’m such a bitch.

  He shook his head and smiled faintly before lighting a cigarette. “Nah, I work there. I go to the tech school over in Lynn, but I work odd jobs around the Academy. My old man’s the groundskeeper there.”

  “Are you, I mean, you’re not O’Malley, are you?”

  “Yup, Finnegan O’Malley in the flesh.” He eyed her for a moment. “Don’t look it, do I? I’m what they call Black Irish.”

  He had read her mind. His features were too exotic for him to be named O’Malley. His eyes were dark, so black that she could barely see his pupils. He looked at her intensely, making her feel somewhat exposed. He was very different from anyone in Hawthorne. Maddie was surprised she’d never noticed him before.

  “You’re Cordelia’s cousin.” He stated this, letting it hang uncomfortably in the space between them. It was weird. Usually, people referred to Cordelia as “Maddie’s cousin,” not the other way around. It was as if, to Finnegan, she held ownership to this town in the brief time she had spent here, and Maddie was the visitor.

  “Did you know her? I mean, I know that everyone knew about her,” Maddie stopped, wondering how to phrase this tactfully, “but she was here for such a short time.” She was confused. Maddie knew everyone that Cordelia knew—she was the one who introduced her around—so how did this total stranger know her? “Were you friends or something?”

  For a moment, he seemed guarded, his eyes drifting over her shoulder. Taking a deep drag off his cigarette, he nodded as he exhaled. A smile lingered at the corner of his lips, and his eyes glossed over as if he was lost in thought. It was the look of someone who knew a person intimately.