“Maera and I decided to race each other to a buoy that was a dozen or so yards from the shore. I'm not sure how far it really was, but she was way ahead of me, laughing while she swam.” He smiled as he remembered the day.
“I was swimming hard, trying to catch up to her. I slowed a little and glanced at her to see if I was gaining any ground. But when I looked up, I saw her splashing around and yelling for me to help her. I still remember how scared she looked. I tried to get to her, but I couldn't swim fast enough. I was almost there, when she suddenly went under, pulled under it seemed.” He shook his head, as if he had just said something ridiculous. “When I finally pulled her back to the surface she wasn’t breathing."
The memories I forced him to recall drained him of his usual cheer and warmth. He blinked his eyes furiously to keep the tears back. Looking into my mug, I regretted the pain I was causing him. I wanted to crawl home and slip back into the comfort of my bed, but something pushed me on, telling me that I needed to know what really happened to these girls.
The fact that both Katie and Maera died on their sixteenth birthdays could merely be coincidence, but because of the dreams and the strange urgency I felt, I sensed something more serious was happening. My own sixteenth birthday was only days away and its approach was rapidly losing its normal appeal.
Neither me nor my grandfather spoke for several minutes. I could not tear my mind away from the lost girls, and the glazed look in my grandpa’s eyes said he was having the same problem. Neither girl’s death seemed particularly extraordinary. A drowning and a horse riding accident, those could happen to anyone. Only the day held some clue. I considered that I had made a huge mistake in my assumptions, but I knew I was missing something very important.
"Why did Maera drown?" I wondered. “It sounds like she was a strong swimmer.”
"Nobody could be sure. To me, it’s strange, but it almost looked like someone was pulling her under,” he said quietly. “Some said it must have been some kind of riptide, but the waters were very calm that day. And why would it catch Maera and not me? I wasn’t that far away from her.” He sighed deeply. “I just couldn’t understand it. It was a very strange incident, just like Katie.”
"Just like Katie? What do you mean? I thought Katie was thrown from her horse. That’s horrible, but it could happen at any time."
"Oh, the fact that she was thrown from her horse wasn’t strange. It was the why that was strange,” he said knowingly. “There was nothing around that would have spooked that lazy old nag of a horse. And the fall shouldn't have killed her," he said matter-of-factly.
I cocked my head to the side. It was the hint I wanted, but was I just fishing for something to confirm my fears? My grandpa sounded a little too much like he was looking for a connection. I began to wonder whether I was doing the same thing.
"After the accident your father told me something that set me on edge,” he said, leaning toward me seriously. “He said that they had been running the horses and he was ahead, but he heard her scream and looked back. He could see that she was galloping her horse way too hard, as if she was running from something. He said that both she and the horse looked terrified.
“The police looked around for something that might have scared them, but they couldn’t find anything. As Katie’s horse neared your father, the animal reared, throwing Katie right into the tree. When the medical examiner spoke to us about the cause of her death, he didn’t really have an answer. Her skull had been cracked, but as the doctor said, it was a relatively mild injury. In the end he said she must have died of shock.” My grandpa shook his head, his tired hands clenched tightly into weathered fists. “It devastated your father. He won't talk about it now."
I found I was speechless. I had come here secretly hoping that my grandpa would simply pat my head and tell me everything was fine. I wanted to hear something that would finally send the incessant nagging feeling away, but now the feeling seemed to increase, begging me to continue. Balanced on the edge of truth and blissful ignorance I knew which way I would fall.
My grandpa looked up at me with the most serious look I had ever seen on his normally cheery face. “Now Arra, what happened to Maera and Katie can’t be undone. There is nothing you can do to help them now. Take my word on that, please. You just have to worry about yourself now. Just trust me, okay?” he asked.
“Grandpa, what are you talking about? It can’t just be coincidence that Katie and Maera both died so strangely, and on their sixteenth birthdays, no less,” I protested. “I can’t just leave it alone. There is something wrong. Can’t you feel it?”
My grandpa sighed and looked at the hot chocolate he had spilled on the table, "Of course there’s something wrong, Arra, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. But trust me, there’s nothing we can do about what’s already happened. You need to start looking ahead, looking to your own future.” Pausing to wipe up the spill with a neatly folded paper towel, he looked as if he were wrestling with a decision.
I struggled to understand his strange words. I had not expected to resurrect the lost girls, only to find out why they had died under such strange circumstances. Maybe unraveling the mysteries of their deaths would free them from their forgotten prison. Maybe my dad would be able to let it go. Why did he keep telling me to look forward, to take care of myself? What did I have to do with anything? I wanted to know about Katie and Maera. A strange feeling suddenly settled over the room. His words were a warning. He was trying to tell me something, something very difficult. I let my other questions float away and turned back to my grandpa.
Finally he shook his head, and said, “Listen, Arra. Katie and Maera, their deaths weren’t just coincidence. After Maera died, I suspected Katie was next, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it. No, I didn’t do enough to stop it. I didn’t believe. We cannot escape our fate, that’s what everyone told me, but I don’t believe that."
The desperation in my grandfather’s voice began to scare me. He suddenly looked so much more tired and drawn. I had never seen him like this before. The abrupt change brought tears to my eyes and fear to my heart.
Not wanting to upset him any more than I already had, I said, “Look grandpa, I’m just making a big deal about nothing. It must be just a coincidence. You couldn’t know that Katie would die just because Maera died, right? That doesn’t sound reasonable. I’m sure you’re right, there’s nothing mysterious, just a terrible coincidence.”
“I knew Katie would die, Arrabella. Don’t you doubt that,” he said gravely. His intensity increased dramatically, scaring me even more. I reached up and put my arm on his shoulder to comfort him, but he wouldn’t calm down. “Arra, you don’t have to keep going with this if you don’t want to. I will do everything I can to stop it from happening again. But if you’re intent on finding out the truth, go home and find the other pictures. Look in your mother’s genealogy records. If it were only Katie and Maera, then maybe I could believe it was just a coincidence, but it wasn’t.
“There are more Arra, there are a lot more. There is something very wrong with our family. And it is not a coincidence that they’ve all died on their sixteenth birthdays. I don’t know for sure how to stop this, I’ve been trying for so long to figure it out, but I promise you I will not give up.” My grandpa started to stand up, but the panic on my face must have stopped him. He paused and looked down at me sadly.
Suddenly his words started to sink in. The warning to look after myself, to look ahead, a promise to stop it from happening again, dying at sixteen, it all finally came together. He was honestly trying to tell me that whatever had killed Katie and Maera was not finished. It was coming back, for me.
“Grandpa, you can’t mean,” I whispered, unable to finish the thought. “No it can’t be. But…I’m turning sixteen in three days.”
As his eyes started to tear, he set down the empty mug and wrapped me in his shaking arms. “I know you are Arra, but I won’t let them take you. I promise you that. I won’t lose you, too.”
<
br /> Chapter Nine
Shaken, I left my grandpa’s home in a much worse state than I had arrived. He had really scared me with his revelations. I had believed before going to his house that there was something odd about the two girl’s deaths, but I never really expected those feelings to be validated. I certainly never expected to have a death sentence pronounced upon me by my aging grandfather.
Expecting that my grandpa would simply allay my fears with a hug and some cookies and send me home a happy teenage girl, I was bewildered by the sudden change in direction my life had taken. It was hard to believe what he was saying, but something in me could not deny his words. Now, I was truly afraid for my life. I wished I had never found Katie’s picture.
The icy truth of that thought sunk deep. That was exactly the kind of thing I had criticized my father for earlier. It was too hard to think about it, so just pretend the problem never existed in the first place. A quick tear slid past my lashes. I had to follow this through, no matter where it led. The first step was to follow my grandpa’s advice and look for the others.
Still brooding about everything I was feeling and thinking, I sulked into the house and headed straight for my room. Unpacked or not, my room felt like the only place I could really focus. And I really needed to focus for a few minutes, at least. I rounded the corner to my room and felt my plans of slipping into a hopefully peaceful sleep were dispelled when my mom called me to the kitchen.
What was she going to complain about now? I left the house for a few hours. That should have made her happy. Didn’t that earn me a least a little guilt free time alone in my room? My feet drug as I approached the kitchen.
“Where have you been, Arrabella? You didn’t even bother to leave me a note,” my mom demanded. “When you didn’t come home for lunch I was ready to call your father.”
“Calling Dad, really, Mom? I think you’re overreacting,” I said. In my family, calling my dad away from work was the absolute last resort. If my mom ever followed through, there had better be a life or death reason for it. If there wasn’t, there probably would be afterward.
“Do not try to tell me whether or not I am overreacting, Arra. I woke up and you were gone. You, who has barely left the house in the last week without me threatening you to do it. I was worried about you.” My mom took a firm stance I knew all too well. If her questions were not satisfied, I knew grounding would be quick to follow.
Considering my own reasons for disappearing that morning, and considering the fact that I had left the house all on my own just the day before, I felt perfectly justified in taking off. Still, I knew my mother would not excuse me without an explanation. Swallowing my irritation, I put on my sweetest smile, and said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I went to Grandpa’s house. I mentioned it yesterday and thought you’d remember. I guess I just didn’t think about leaving a note this morning. This town’s as big as a shoebox. I can’t even get lost if I wanted to.”
“You went to your grandfather’s? Why?” Her hard parental front softened quite a bit.
“Because,” I said. Why wasn’t she just happy I had gone to visit him? She been thrilled about the idea yesterday. My mom’s lips tightened. Because was not an answer. “Because, I was feeling down and I thought he could cheer me up with some of his stories.”
“Did it work?” my mom asked, a smile smoothing over the glare.
“A little,” I lied.
“I’m sorry for snapping at you, honey. I didn’t remember that you mention seeing grandpa yesterday. You should have left a note regardless, though. Please don’t do that again. You know how I worry.” Pulling me into a hug, she said, “I’m glad you went to see Grandpa. He’s so excited to have us near him again.”
“Sorry I worried you, Mom.” The hug tightened.
“Did you have any lunch yet?” my mom asked.
“Not unless you count hot chocolate as lunch,” I replied, bringing a grimace to my mom’s face.
“That man and his hot chocolate. It’s summer for crying out loud. I’ll have to speak with him about his eating habits. Come on I’ll get you a sandwich,” she said, herding me to the kitchen table. The pleasure of having me back home safely brightened her face and I could almost see her checking off another notch for me moving toward well adjusted. My mom seemed so pleased that she failed to notice when my sullen mood took over again. She spread mayonnaise on two pieces of bread, before saying, “Maybe after lunch you can help me with the photo albums again.”
At the mention of the photo albums I came out of my melancholy and the desperation for answers returned. “Sure, Mom, no problem. I wanted to look for some of the people grandpa was telling me about all morning anyway.”
My grandpa had told me that there were more girls like Maera and Katie. I wanted to fight the idea, but I needed to know who they were. I felt sure that if I could find enough information I could avoid whatever course had already been laid out for me by whoever my grandpa thought was making the choices. I hurriedly ate the roast beef sandwich my mom had set in front of me and dove back into the piles of scattered photo album pages.
Leaving the stacks of pictures even less organized than when I began, I searched for the silver-eyed girls of my father’s family. Glowing with pride in her daughter’s sudden fascination with her hobby, my mom happily discussed the ins and outs of building a family history. I felt the slightest twinge of guilt at misleading her, but I pushed that away and chocked it up to what had to be done. As long as I feigned interest in my mom’s stories and advice, the growing mess I was creating seemed to go unnoticed.
I had never before been so grateful for my mom’s obsession with genealogy. It had always just seemed like endless piles of papers and pictures and stacks of notebooks to me. Now as I truly looked through them I saw so much more. In the piles of photos were many generations of relatives, most of whom I had never met or even heard of, but every one of them had lived a life worth remembering. Wondering what the little man with the bowler had done for a living or what was if his wife’s wicker basket, I found another photo.
Not surprised when I found two more pictures with traits matching my own, my stomach still turned with each new discovery. The weight on me seemed to deepened as I searched. I had to keep reminding myself that I needed to do this. Along with several more pictures of Katie and Maera, I found several photographs of a young woman named Elizabeth Malo, who lived during the early nineteen hundreds, and only one picture of a young girl named Victoria. She sat in an old fashioned family portrait dated 1845.
I kept searching after finding the picture of Victoria, but I found no other pictures of the raven haired girls. Eventually my mom excused herself to make some tea, and I laid the pictures out and stared at them. Yes, I had found more girls who looked like Katie, but did they share more than that? I was afraid to find out.
Trying to beat back the desire to look up the names of the two new girls in my mom’s genealogy books, I held out as long as I could. The need to discover what was happening to my family grew stronger every moment I sat staring at their faces. Giving in to the nagging feeling, I wandered into the kitchen. Drinking a glass of iced tea, my mom looked up at me when I stepped into the room.
Casually, I asked, “Hey, Mom, would you mind if I looked through some of your genealogy binders.”
Laughing at the odd request, she was still more than happy to fuel my supposed new found curiosity. “Sure, Arra. Why don’t you bring them over to the table?”
“Okay,” I said.
I quickly retrieved the notebooks from a box in the living room and brought them to the kitchen table. Continuing to organize the cupboards, my mom glanced over at me every so often as I began searching the pages for the two long dead girls. Every page I turned that did not hold their names sent both fear and relief down my spine. Although it took me so long to get through a single page that the mix of emotions could not come very often.
“Do you need some help?” my mom asked.
“Uh, that’s okay,” I
replied. The last thing I wanted to do was explain to my mom what I was really looking for. I could hardly think of a plausible lie to explain my interest in the forms. Quietly I hoped mom would give up organizing the kitchen and return to the photo albums in the other room. After my “help” you could barely walk across the floor because of the mess.
“Those forms can be a little confusing the first time you try to read them,” my mom explained. She took the chair next to me, settling in for a detailed lesson.
What else could I do but accept her offer? Pushing her away would only provoke more questions. “Yeah, I guess they are a little confusing,” I said.
Nodding her head in agreement, my mom pointed to the top of the page and began explaining. There was much more information on one page than I had expected. My mom showed me where to find the names of the parents of the family the worksheet was about, then how to find the children’s names as well. There was also detailed information about where and when each person was born, married, died, and buried.
“Is there someone specific you were trying to find?” my mom asked.
I turned my face to look out the window, unable to trust my features not to betray my uneasiness. “No, I was just curious,” I said. I felt bad lying to my mom, but the truth would only make things worse. “Grandpa was telling me stories about our family, about some of our ancestors in South America. I was just curious to learn about some of the people he mentioned.” I smiled hoping my explanation would hold up.
Smiling even wider than before, my mom put a hand on my shoulder. “You know, Grandpa was the one who inspired me to start researching our family history too. When your father and I were dating, Alden was always telling me stories about one person or another. To be perfectly honest,” she said with a smile, “I thought he was making most of it up, but as I got to know more of the family I realized he was actually telling the truth. Someday I hope to have the family history all the way back to the time of the Aztecs.”
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