Light as a Feather

by Zoe Aarsen

  Mischa blew up at him, her face flushed. “Of course we have! We’ve been texting her for two days, Trey!”

  Trey shrugged and added, “I meant, you know, with the board. Just in case she’s not exactly able to respond to text messages right now.”

  “That is just morbid, okay?” Mischa snapped. “We need to remain positive right now! We don’t know anything for certain. Maybe Violet wanted Olivia dead so she could get her hands on Pete, but why would she be so mean to Candace?” I had a very, very bad feeling that Candace’s disappearance meant that Violet wanted more than just what she’d taken from Olivia. The purpose of her game was about something much bigger, although I couldn’t guess what it was. All three of us pretended for a few minutes to focus on the tacky reality television show in front of us, but the air in the living room grew thick with our thoughts. We all watched the minutes pass on the digital clock on the cable box, counting the seconds remaining until five o’clock.

  “Trey,” I said softly.

  “I’ll get the board,” he agreed, jumping up off the couch.

  Since Trey’s mom was home and might wonder about him hanging out in his basement with two girls, both younger than him, and I was reluctant to introduce any additional spiritual activity to my own bedroom, we put on our jackets and walked briskly to the corner. It had been my own suggestion that we try fishing through the spiritual world for Candace from the abandoned lot where my old house used to stand. It seemed like if there was any chance at all that we’d be able to contact Jennie, it would be there, the very spot where she had passed away. That evening, my concern for Candace outweighed my fear of the abandoned lot. I had a sickening, chilling feeling before we even set the board out in the weeds that we already knew what had happened to Candace.

  “Are you ready?” I asked Trey and Mischa both as we sat down around the board in the long grass. The sky was pale yellow above us. We could hear the occasional whiz of a car passing on the rural highway behind us, the pitch that the noise made shifting due to the Doppler effect as the cars sped farther along on their way out of town. We knew we were mostly hidden by the overgrown weeds in the lot, and paid the traffic no mind.

  This time, Mischa seemed solemnly prepared to communicate with the dead. Her nervous, giggly antics were a thing of the past, and she looked as exhausted as I felt. The three of us placed our fingers on the planchette and moved it around slowly to warm the board up. I did the talking. “We are hoping to contact the spirit of Candace Cotton, if she has indeed crossed over to the other side. We welcome only kind spirits.”

  We waited. The wind blew gently, whistling around us among the bare branches of the trees on Martha Road. For a second, I smelled a little glimmer of winter in the air, the chill, the hint of fires roaring in fireplaces farther away in town. Then I felt the planchette slowly energize beneath my fingertip, and looked up to see that Trey and Mischa sensed it too.

  “It’s here,” Mischa whispered.

  The planchette coasted to the letter Y, and then came to a stop. “Ask if it’s Candace,” Mischa urged.

  But I hesitated, because it seemed like whatever spirit had contacted us through the board already had a message it was intent on delivering. The planchette slowly, deliberately moved from letter to letter, spelling out two words:

  Y-O-U-N-E-X-T.

  CHAPTER 16

  IT WAS A RIPTIDE. THERE wasn’t anything anyone could do. A riptide.”

  Candace’s stepmother sounded like a broken record the day of the wake. She was obviously very emotionally shaken by the events of the last few days, and while Mischa and I both wished she would just stop talking, neither of us felt empowered to put an end to her tirade. She looked like a younger, thinner version of Candace’s mom, athletic and stylish, in a blue-and-white wraparound dress that seemed inappropriately informal for a wake. Mr. Cotton, quite possibly the only person who stood a legitimate chance of silencing his wife, seemed to be in a daze, picking at his fingernails, nodding to acknowledge everyone arriving at the funeral home but barely saying a word to anyone.

  Candace’s mom, on the other hand, was simmering in a corner, nearing her boiling point. The veins in her neck stood out like metal rods supporting her head, and her sisters swarmed around her like bees, attempting to calm her. “We never even saw her fall underwater! The tide just took her out to sea. Who would have known?” Candace’s stepmother continued on, despite Father Fahey, the priest from St. Monica’s, who was scheduled to deliver a short service later that evening, trying to quiet her down. “I mean, who would ever think a riptide might carry someone away from a resort that costs six hundred dollars a night?”

  “Shut that woman up!” I heard Candace’s mom say from her corner. Her sisters swooped in, circling her more tightly.

  Mischa, Matt, Trey, and I sat on the same floral couch Mischa and I had occupied during Olivia’s wake. Candace’s memorial was very different from Olivia’s, which had been somber and respectful. A second memorial for a high school student, following Olivia’s by less than two months, seemed to be more than the good graces of our town could handle. By late in the afternoon, it was evident that the Richmonds would not be arriving to pay respects, probably because it would just be too difficult emotionally to set foot in Gundarsson’s again so soon. Just like at Olivia’s wake, the casket was closed, and the flower arrangements were so abundant that the funeral home director had run out of places to put them. A few were in the hallway, flanking the entrance to the parlor where everyone was gathering for Candace’s memorial. Her extended family seemed endless, with tall relatives of all ages comforting one another and fetching cups of coffee from the lounge area. The wake was held on Wednesday, and classes had been suspended at Willow High School for the day so that students could attend, but because of Candace’s erratic behavior in the weeks leading up to her death, the turnout was significantly less than the number of students who had shown up for Olivia’s wake.

  “Candace’s mom is going to knock her stepmother over,” Mischa muttered, impressed by the potential for violence within the Cotton family.

  “I don’t think I need to see that.” I got up from the couch, smoothed out the skirt of my black dress, and moments later Mischa stood to follow me out into the hallway and toward the lounge. I felt awkward seeing Candace’s mom under such terrible circumstances. She had been holding herself together pretty well since the morning she found out that Candace had drowned. My mom had driven us over to the Cottons’ house early on Saturday morning to see if there was anything we could do to help. At that point, officials in Hawaii had told Candace’s parents to brace themselves for bad news as they expanded their search for the body. I either hadn’t known or hadn’t remembered this, but at one point when Jennie and I were very little, Mom and Candace’s mother had played together in the Willow ladies’ bowling league. We had been there, in Candace’s kitchen when the call had come from Hawaii confirming that Candace’s body had washed up at low tide, nearly two miles from where she had disappeared. “Well,” Candace’s mom had said with unnerving composure, “now we know.”

  In the lounge, we found Julia picking at a tray of cookies with some cousins her own age. She wore a short dress with a layer of black lace over it, which seemed a little provocative for a girl who was thirteen years old. I wondered for a second if that dress had been bought for a school dance. Surely no one had ever thought at the time that the dress was purchased that Julia would end up wearing it to her older half sister’s wake.

  “How’s it going, Julia?” I asked as I poured myself a cup of coffee.

  “I’m okay,” Julia replied, her eyes looking a little puffy. If she remembered Mischa, Isaac, and me waking her up the morning Candace had left for Hawaii, she made no mention of it.

  Violet did not attend Candace’s wake, which wasn’t surprising, but on the other hand, it kind of was. I wondered if she’d dare to show her face the following morning for the prayer service before the burial. Mischa’s parents had denied her reques
t to be permitted to spend the night at my house after the wake, and although my mom would probably have let me spend the night at hers, I wanted to stay close to home and Trey. Olivia’s spirit had mysteriously left my room quiet since the previous Wednesday when Candace had stopped texting me, and it was a source of wonderment for me why she had decided to stop pestering me. If the original haunting had been intended to prevent Candace’s death, I had failed, and maybe her abandonment of my room meant that Mischa wasn’t in danger. Or maybe Olivia’s spirit was preoccupied with welcoming Candace’s spirit to the other side. I couldn’t know the reason, but I had a strong suspicion that my room hadn’t experienced the last of the supernatural activity. There would be more, but there was no way to know when to expect it.

  That night, as I tried to decide what to wear the next morning for Candace’s prayer service, I had a breakdown. Two months earlier, I had been convinced that it was going to be the best year of my life. I had hoped that Candace and Olivia would be the kind of friends I’d keep in touch with forever. We could have been roommates at college, bridesmaids at each other’s weddings, godmothers to each other’s children. Now, both of them were dead, and I had every reason to believe that Mischa would be dead soon too. Then I’d be completely alone with the memory of what Violet had done, and the guilt of not having been smart enough to stop her.

  Doubled over with sobs, I wondered how anything in my life would ever be okay again after all of this. I might never escape from Violet’s game. Ghosts might follow me around for the rest of my life. I fell asleep with the lights on and slept soundly through the night. When I woke up in the morning, my face was still sticky with tears.

  It was Halloween, and Candace’s body was scheduled to be lowered into the ground that day.

  My mother drove me to back to Gundarsson’s that morning for the prayer service, and opted to stay with me rather than wait in the car. All things considered, she was being great about the whole situation, and hadn’t asked me questions about the issues Candace had been having after Olivia’s death. She’d allowed me to stay home from school every day so far that week, which I would have appreciated more if I hadn’t been shocked into a state of pure panic by the reality of Candace’s death matching Violet’s prediction. A cold, restrictive sense of dread had taken over me. My body felt stiff. This time there was no “maybe” about it: It was certain that we were under some kind of hex or curse.

  Even though I didn’t have the energy to think about what my next steps might be while still mourning Candace, I knew that Trey and I were going to need help in bringing an end to this. The enormity of taking on Violet and whatever was helping her in the spirit world was simply too much to consider on that rainy morning of Candace’s funeral.

  Tracy arrived at the prayer service as some kind of an ambassador from Student Government, blabbing about how it was her social responsibility as class secretary to pay her respects. She also stated that Violet had been home sick from school all week with a severe cold and couldn’t pay her respects, even though she really wanted to be there. As Tracy nonchalantly told us this, I sensed Mischa’s muscles tighten next to me, like a cat about to pounce. I may have been going through the motions of the week in an emotionless void, but murderous fury was raging inside of Mischa. And of course it was. We both knew now what was in store for us.

  Mom stood next to me in the cemetery at St. Monica’s as Father Fahey led the small crowd that had gathered in a few prayers at the gravesite. Trey stood on my other side, loosely holding my left hand, letting his long dark hair cover most of his face. Isaac Johnston wiped a few tears from his eyes and shook his head when the casket was lowered. I wondered now if he remembered how Mischa and I had told him that preventing Candace from going to Hawaii had been a matter of life and death.

  On the drive home from the funeral, we passed parents trick-or-treating with their children. Seeing kids outside in costumes and jack-o’-lanterns on doorsteps was a cruel reminder that the world was going about its ordinary business even though Olivia and Candace were no longer a part of it. Back at home that afternoon, I changed out of my black dress and tights and directly into my plaid pajamas and crawled under my blankets even though it was still light outside. In the back of my mind, I knew it was an hour when parents weren’t even driving home from their jobs yet, and the high school marching band was still practicing out on the football field, yet all I wanted to do was close my eyes and block everything out. I wanted to wake up in another town, in another life, another existence entirely, in which I had never gone to Olivia’s birthday party and become a part of this nightmare.

  You next.

  Who next? Who had the spirit in the empty lot meant? It had denied that it was Olivia, denied that it was Candace. Was I vulnerable? Was I protected from the game because Violet hadn’t been able to see my death? But even that wasn’t exactly true; Violet had said she’d seen fire. What would that do to my mother, to lose her surviving daughter in a fire?

  In the middle of the night when I stirred awake, Trey was there, and the lights were on.

  “Can’t be too safe,” he told me when I blinked around, trying to figure out what time it was.

  “Whatever was in my room is gone for now,” I assured him. “If it was really Olivia, we failed. We didn’t put the clues together fast enough. Now they’ve got Candace, too.”

  Trey looked at me intently, directly into my eyes, and after a long moment asked, “The night you played the game, whose turn was it after Candace?”

  “Mine.”

  He nodded. “We’re getting help, and we’re ending this thing.”

  * * *

  On Friday, my mother stood in the doorway and informed me that she was driving to campus for her class but would be coming back immediately afterward, handling her office hours over Skype from home. She didn’t have to spell it out for me because I already knew: Next week she would expect me to return to school.

  Trey’s mother drove him to school and he immediately doubled back on foot, knocking on our front door incessantly until I rose from my bed and met him, still wearing my pajamas. “Get dressed,” he ordered. “We’re walking into town to meet with someone.”

  I didn’t ask questions, simply tugged on jeans and a sweatshirt and followed Trey through the brisk morning air on a long walk through town. It was a foggy day, which was common weather for Wisconsin in the fall. School and regular life felt a million miles away. Mischa hadn’t sent me an e-mail or text message since before we knew for certain Candace had died, but I strongly suspected that she was being kept home from school all week too. Nothing felt real. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was in a state of distractedness, following orders I could barely hear.

  “State your business,” a female voice addressed us through the security system at the back door of the brick rectory building behind St. Monica’s church. Trey and I stood, shivering, on the cement staircase leading up to the rectory, which housed the church’s administrative offices and the priest’s living quarters. Standing there, I suddenly felt very exposed in the overcast daylight, the dead eyes of plaster statues of the Virgin Mary and St. Augustine upon us. I hadn’t felt as if I had been in danger on the walk over from our neighborhood, but now that we were standing at the perimeter of the sanctuary of the church grounds, I felt an urgent need to step inside.

  “We’re here to ask for Father Fahey’s help in a personal matter,” Trey stated, gripping my hand a little more tightly. A surveillance camera was affixed above the rectory door in plain sight, presumably because the rectory hosted a soup kitchen and from time to time, people not quite right in the head turned up on this very same doorstep demanding help. We were asked for our names, which Trey supplied, and then we were buzzed in.

  “Jim, two teenagers are here to speak with you,” a gray-haired secretary wearing a knit vest over a floral polyester blouse announced into her desk phone as soon as we entered the rectory. She sat at a cluttered desk behind a glass window with a slot in it just like
a teller’s window at a bank, and pointed at a wooden bench across from the window where she expected us to take a seat.

  We sat down quietly and unzipped our jackets in the warm hallway. Down the hall and through a doorway, in what was presumably the rectory kitchen, we smelled soup and could hear the clattering of dishes.

  “What’s the nature of this personal matter?” the secretary asked us through the window, her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

  “It’s private,” Trey shot back, glaring at her.

  A moment later, she set the phone back down on her desk and told us, “He’ll see you now.”

  When we stood and walked to the end of the hallway, she buzzed to release the lock on the door and we passed into the cozy kitchen of the church offices. Father Fahey stood at the stove in a brown wool cardigan stirring soup with a wooden spoon. A monthly calendar with a big picture of the Duomo in Milan hung on the fridge, along with a number of church bulletin newsletters held in place with magnets. A cuckoo clock hung on one wall, fixed above a framed picture of Jesus with a tear rolling down one cheek.

  “So, a private personal matter,” Father Fahey said as we entered. I felt like an overgrown giant the moment we stepped into the small room, and the old man nodded us toward the chairs around the kitchen table. “Let me guess. You’re truly in love and you want to get married, but your parents think you’re too young. Or you’re truly in love and you’ve given in to sins of the flesh and now you’re in a predicament and you need my advice on what to do.”

  “Neither of those things, sir,” Trey said, holding out a chair for me to sit down at the table. “My girlfriend and her friends from school played a game involving the occult, and now something evil is killing them, one by one.” From his backpack, he pulled out his copy of Requests from the Dead and set it down on the kitchen table.

  Without even turning to face us, Father Fahey slowly turned the gas knob on the stovetop to its off position. When the roar of the boiling soup quieted down, we could hear that a small radio on the kitchen counter was tuned in to morning talk radio. “You’re talking about Candace Cotton and the Richmond girl, I presume.”