by Zoe Aarsen
Violet and Pete were slow dancing at that very minute. They weren’t dancing very closely together, but they did appear to be having a friendly conversation, which was reason enough for us to be curious. Violet still looked pretty, even despite the bloodstains down the front of her dress, which club soda had done little to remove. I wondered if Violet had ever originally made plans to go to the Fall Fling with Mark Regan, or if her mention of that had been part of her longer-term plan to kill Olivia and steal Pete.
“See that?” I heard a voice behind me and turned to find Mischa taking the seat next to mine, glaring across the ballroom at Violet. She was risking the credibility of our fake fight by speaking to me, but she was in no mood to care. “It’s Pete. She wants Pete. I think she killed Olivia just to go out with him.”
As if her head was guided by a mystical power, Violet looked directly over at us at that moment and made eye contact with me. Her expression toward me was one that suggested I was in trouble rather than one of curiosity as to why I would be conversing with my alleged adversary. Whether she instantly was able to discern that my entire fight with Mischa had been phony, or assumed that we were in the process of restoring our friendship, I couldn’t tell. It was just clear that she wasn’t happy to see us together.
Mischa glared back at her and snarled, “Oh, look at that! Someone’s not happy that we’re friends again. Too bad. No more sneaking around, McKenna. I want that girl to know that you’re my friend too. It’s too dangerous for you to get close to her.”
I had to agree with Mischa. Violet was quite obviously outsmarting us all. It was everything: the popularity, the Student Government victory, the boyfriend . . . all of it. I just needed some kind of a breakthrough to better understand why Olivia had needed to die to make it all possible.
CHAPTER 12
MAUDE THE PUPPY SAT OUTSIDE the bathroom door and barked at me as I scrubbed off my makeup at home in the bathroom later that night. “I don’t know what’s gotten into her. She was quiet all night,” Mom said, studying the little dog. Maude looked up at me and barked, and turned to my mother as if to say, See?
“Crazy dog,” I said gruffly and walked down the hall to my room.
An hour later, when Trey tapped on my window, he announced, “I’m not sure I should keep staying over here. My parents know something’s up.”
My breath caught in my throat with both fear and panic. “What do you mean, they know? Do they know you’re coming here?” I looked through my window over to the Emorys’ house, which was dark and silent for the night.
“They know I’m going somewhere. My mom sat me down tonight and told me that they didn’t want to bug me before the big night but that they’re concerned about my well-being and have noticed that I’m sneaking out at night.” He sank onto the edge of my bed, not wanting to get too comfortable, looking to me to confirm whether he should stay or leave. “Crap,” I uttered. It was already quite late. I could hear crickets in the backyard and the ticking clock on the mantel over the fireplace in the living room. “Maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe because I blew it with her last clue, she’ll leave me alone.”
“Are you sure?” Trey asked, not believing me. I didn’t really want him to leave but was already highly suspicious that his parents knew exactly where he was going every night, and I didn’t want them to approach my mom with the news. The warmth of his body in bed next to mine had grown familiar, and I was a little terrified that Olivia was going to be enraged that I hadn’t figured out what she had wanted me to do at the dance. He took both of my hands gently in his, and ran his thumbs over the tops of my fingers. “I don’t really want you to sleep here by yourself.”
I looked around my dark room, up at the shelf holding my music boxes, and the other shelf holding my CDs, and shrugged. “I can sleep in the living room. I think it’s safe out there.”
Once Trey reluctantly left and scrambled back into his own room through the window, I grabbed my pillow and a blanket and rushed out of my room as quickly as I could. As soon as I was situated on the couch in the living room, I could hear Maude down the hall in my mom’s bedroom softly whimpering to herself. Then I began thinking about how on reality TV shows about ghost hunts, oftentimes pets could detect paranormal activity that humans couldn’t see with their eyes, and I started freaking myself out.
In the morning, my fear that Maude had sensed Olivia’s spirit was up to something in my room was confirmed when I peeked in there just after sunrise. At first everything in my room appeared to be in place, just as I’d left it, but then I nearly jumped out of my skin in surprise when I noticed one word written on my mirror in plum-colored lipstick. It said:
NOHI
* * *
That morning, Mischa borrowed her sister’s car and we drove to the hospital in Ortonville to visit Candace. I hadn’t given up on my hope of trying to determine if she was under hypnosis, although her behavior at the homecoming dance had strongly suggested she wasn’t. We talked lightheartedly about homecoming and about boys, but primarily to distract ourselves from the severity of our situation. She told me that she thought Trey and I made a very cute couple, even though she never would have guessed that brooding loners were my type.
“You have to admit he’s weird,” Mischa insisted, “but he is hot. I’ll give you that.”
“Okay, he’s weird,” I agreed, “but so am I.”
Mischa told me that I’d missed a somber trip to Bobby’s after the dance. Matt had driven her home in his dad’s car after Violet, Pete, Melissa, Jeff, Tracy, and Mike had shown up. Mischa hadn’t been in much of a mood to party after that.
“I mean, seriously, who does she think she is? I asked Matt to talk to Pete, but they’re not really friends. I guess if he actually likes Violet, there’s not much we can do about it, but I mean, God! It’s just so messed up that she’d go after Olivia’s boyfriend and it hasn’t even been a month yet,” Mischa rambled.
The nurse at the front desk in the emergency room told us that under no circumstances would we be allowed to visit Candace, because she had been admitted to the psychiatric ward and we weren’t immediate family members.
“This is really, really important,” Mischa insisted. “It’s, like, life or death.”
“I’m sure it is, honey,” the nurse told us patronizingly, “but it’ll have to wait until she’s released.”
Fortunately, we saw Candace’s mother in the parking lot before we drove away, and bolted out of Mischa’s car to intercept her before she reached her own car.
“Mrs. Lehrer!” Mischa called.
Candace’s mom stopped before opening the driver’s-side door to her car and seemed startled to hear her name called. She appeared to be exhausted, with bags under her eyes, and was dressed far less fashionably than she usually was, wearing a washed-out sweat suit. She carried a cup of coffee from the hospital cafeteria in one hand, and her car keys dangled from the other. “Oh hi, girls. I’m sorry, it’s been a long night. I didn’t recognize you just now.”
“We really need to see Candace,” Mischa pleaded.
“I don’t think the hospital is going to allow that. Candace is having a difficult time and can’t have any visitors. She is still obsessed with the notion that this girl Violet at school has some kind of evil powers because of whatever game you guys played at Olivia’s house a few weeks ago. Her doctors seem to think that game has become the fixation of whatever psychosis she’s suffering. I don’t think it would be beneficial for her to see any friends from school.”
“My dad is a psychiatrist,” I piped up. “He said you should take Candace to the University of Wisconsin in Sheboygan and have her examined by one of his former coworkers. He gave me the name of someone.” I handed her the e-mail from my dad that I had printed out, which included contact information for Dr. Felipe Hernandez. Candace’s mom inspected the sheet of paper before tucking it into her purse.
“Thank you, McKenna, and thank your dad, too. I’m at my wits’ end with all of this. I just don’t
know what to do for her anymore. Candace’s dad and stepmom are driving up from Green Bay this afternoon, and I should have a better idea tomorrow of what’s going to happen next.”
On the drive back to Willow, I grappled with the decision of whether or not to tell Mischa about all the weird occurrences in my house, and about the Ouija board connection that Trey and I had made with Olivia. I really wanted to share, but didn’t want to end up in the room next to Candace’s in the psychiatric ward of the hospital. But still, if there was a chance that Mischa was receiving messages from Olivia, then maybe her messages, combined with my messages, would lead to some kind of understanding about what we needed to do to stop Violet.
“Have you been noticing anything weird lately at your house?” I asked with trepidation. I heard my phone buzz in my handbag with a text message, and ignored it. Violet had been texting me all morning, wanting to see if I would join her and Tracy for a movie that afternoon, and I hadn’t gathered the energy to respond yet.
“How do you mean, weird?” Mischa asked. “My sister is basically a terrorist. That’s weird.”
“Like . . .” I drifted off, suspecting that approaching this territory was probably a bad idea. “Just unexplained occurrences, uneasy feelings. General strangeness.”
Mischa took her eyes off the road to shoot me an are you kidding me? look. “What are you freakin’ talking about, McKenna? Are you losing your marbles too? I’m not sure if I can handle both of my best friends being wackos.”
“I’m not, I’m not,” I insisted, embarrassed by how flattered I was that Mischa acknowledged me as one of her best friends. “Just . . . there’s this word that keeps popping up in my life and I can’t explain it. Does ‘nohi’ mean anything to you?”
“It sounds Japanese.” Mischa shrugged. “Like, ‘kodomo no hi’ is ‘Children’s Day’ in Japan.”
It was hard to hide my dismay. That didn’t seem like much of a clue, and it didn’t sound like Mischa had been observing any strange things like I’d been. While Mischa could surprise with me the wide variety of trivia she stored in her head, there was no chance Olivia had learned how to say anything in Japanese before her death. Acquisition of knowledge had not exactly been one of Olivia’s interests.
“Really?” I asked. “So as far as you know, that word doesn’t have anything to do with Olivia at all?”
We had stopped at a red light before an intersection, and Mischa stared me down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, McKenna. Are you trying to tell me that you think you’re getting messages from Olivia . . . from the other side?”
I took a deep breath. “Before Candace went completely off her rocker, did she tell you that it freaked her out that Violet knew about her half brothers, even though Candace couldn’t remember ever mentioning them to her before? I told you guys what Violet said to me on the track before Olivia died, that spirits tell her things. So I know it’s far-fetched, but maybe Olivia is a spirit now, and she’s trying to tell us things. There’s been some weird stuff happening at my house, and it’s not just me—Trey’s seen it too. I think Olivia is trying to warn us. I think . . . more bad stuff is going to happen.”
The light changed from red to green, but Mischa hesitated before accelerating. “You are seriously, seriously bugging me out.”
We drove a few more blocks before Mischa asked, “What kind of bad stuff do you think is going to happen? Are more of us going to die, like Olivia?”
I stared out my window at my little town as we passed through, not wanting to say the words on the tip of my tongue. There was the florist, the feed shop, the pizza place that reliably delivered through snowy winters (Federico’s was its rival pizza restaurant across town and offered only takeout during winter months), and as we passed the public elementary school, I said, “Mischa, we have to stop at the library. I need to see something.”
Without asking me any questions, Mischa turned right into the parking lot of our small brick public library, just a little farther down the road from the elementary school. I’d been going there with my mom my whole life, and had never before paid much attention to the back wing of the library, which rose to two stories and featured enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. Now that I was taking a closer look, that wing of the library, which had been added onto the original structure a decade before I was born, dwarfed the original structure and had been designed in a far more modern style. It was obviously an addition to the original building, and very little effort had been put into making it look like a natural extension.
“I don’t get it. What are we looking for?”
I pointed to the wing of the library and turned to Mischa. “Guess whose grandfather paid for that wing of the library. I have reason to believe it might be named after him too.”
Mischa squinted her eyes at me. “Get out.”
Inside, we were both stupefied to see the phrase THIS WING OF THE LIBRARY WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY A GIFT FROM THE HAROLD J. SIMMONS FAMILY along with the year 1984 on a copper plaque fixed to the wall near the entrance to the wing on the first floor. I ran my fingertips over the name of Violet’s grandfather slowly. This was the wing of the library that contained the children’s section, and upstairs on the second floor, nonfiction books about art, history, and drama were arranged. Mischa and I wandered into the wing dreamily, even though we had walked those rows of books hundreds of times since we were kids. “Wow, Violet’s family must be crazy rich,” Mischa commented, looking upward at the second floor of the library, which overlooked the reading section of the children’s area. “I never really thought about the library too much, but this could not have been cheap to build.”
We sat down at the row of computers in the media lounge and searched for Violet’s grandfather’s name. The results were so abundant that we couldn’t possibly read through all of them. He had owned an architecture and construction firm, just like my father had remembered, and there seemed to be hundreds of search results about contracts for his firm and buildings they had constructed from the shores of Lake Superior all the way down to Chicago.
“Ooh! What about that one!” Mischa pointed to a headline on the screen that read, WILL DISPUTE OVER SIMMONS ESTATE SETTLED.
I clicked on the link, and Mischa drummed her long fingernails on the table where we sat, earning herself an irritated glance from the man sitting at the computer next to ours, while we waited for the old news article to load on our screen. Our eyes devoured the story as a picture and paragraphs of text loaded. It seemed to be the case that when Violet’s grandfather passed away, fourteen years before her grandmother died, his will was contested by his former business partner, claiming that he had been jilted out of his half of the fortune. Harold Simmons hadn’t left Arthur Fitzpatrick anything, not a dime, and he was adamant the will Mr. Simmons had left behind was a forgery, updated and signed just a few weeks before his unexpected death. Harold Simmons’s widow, Violet’s grandmother, claimed that all of the initial capital for the construction business had been fronted by Harold, and that all profits were contractually his own based on the agreement that the men had made when they began the company. She was insistent that Arthur Fitzpatrick was owed nothing more than the generous salary he had been paid during the time when he’d worked with Mr. Simmons.
“Scandal,” Mischa whispered.
The battle raged on in court for three years until finally a judge ruled in favor of Mr. Fitzpatrick, awarding him a sliver of the land, a fraction of the business profits, and a contract to complete one of their larger unfinished jobs with his newly formed company. The story ended with quotes from Mr. Fitzpatrick as well as Violet’s grandmother Ann Simmons.
“Finally, the court has delivered a fair ruling. I am eager to put this matter behind me, and look forward to a bright future for Fitzpatrick & Sons Construction,” stated Mr. Fitzpatrick outside the Shawano County courthouse.
“Mr. Fitzpatrick may have been awarded what he wanted, but I will not rest until my family’s property has been restored to its ri
ghtful owners,” Mrs. Ann Simmons retorted.
I sat back in my chair, a little winded. So Violet’s grandmother, who had left her magnificent estate to Violet, had died with a grudge. None of these facts at face value explained any of what Olivia had been trying to communicate to me, but at least I finally felt like I was getting somewhere. I texted the link of the article to Trey, and Mischa and I continued searching for more information. Arthur Fitzpatrick developed the land that he won in the dispute in less than a year after the court’s ruling. It was turned into a condominium community, sold off lot by lot. It reminded me of what Violet had told me about her uncle wanting to sell the land on which their mansion was built to be developed as condominiums too, and how her grandmother would have rolled over in her grave if that had happened. Mr. Fitzpatrick died of natural causes five years before Violet’s grandmother did the same. We finished reading his obituary in the Ortonville Courier and both shook our heads. He had been survived by a wife, several children, and grandchildren, but by the time of his death had relocated to California.
“This might not even have anything to do with the grandmother,” I announced, not wanting us to get our hopes up that we were onto something big. “Violet could just be evil, plain and simple.”
Mischa looked unconvinced. “The grandmother was out for vengeance, and we don’t know if she ever got it. And now Violet lives in her house. The entire family is just mean. That’s something. That’s more than we knew an hour ago.”
We discussed researching the possibility of any kind of historical connection between the Simmons, Richmond, and Portnoy families, or any connection between Arthur Fitzgerald and any of my friends’ families, but after a few quick web searches turned up sparse results, Mischa sighed. “My mom’s parents came here from Russia after World War II. My dad grew up in Minnesota and moved here when they got married. I really don’t think there was ever any connection between the Simmonses and my family. I mean, if the Simmonses had anything to do with any family in town, it would be Tracy Hartford’s. Her grandfather was a district judge for, like, a billion years. If we have to read through all these property deeds and stuff, I’m going to die of boredom. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.”