Whisper of Memory (Whispering Woods Book 2)

by Berry, Brinda

  I cut Tracy a glare. You’ll pay later. Slouching and self-conscious, I turned back to my computer screen.

  The bell buzzed, and Mr. Joseph handed me the slip to come back during study hall. I pushed out of my chair and made a beeline for the door.

  * * *

  When I returned to the computer lab, Em sat alone in a corner of the room. Mr. Joseph nodded his head without looking me in the eye. Happy to be saved from my earlier embarrassment, I took the chair next to Em.

  I started the module in my assignment for American government without enthusiasm. After finishing two modules in fifteen minutes, I leaned over to see Em’s screen. The brainiac had obviously completed her assignments and was doing independent research on the Internet.

  “What r u lookn 4?” I scribbled on a piece of scrap paper and shoved it at her.

  “Anomalies in different counties in Arkansas. Sightings. Weird things.” She wrote the words precisely in her neat cursive.

  “Why?” I whispered, squirming. There had to be a good reason for this, and I was sure that I wouldn’t like it.

  “Just interested.” She kept typing while she talked.

  “Liar.”

  Em stopped to think for a moment before answering. “Tiny has a theory.”

  I stared at her. “You talk to Tiny?” Tiny didn’t go to school and was older. He had the social skills of a Brillo pad—abrasive. I tried to imagine the two of them talking.

  “Austin gave me his e-mail. He said Tiny was onto something but needed to know answers about you.”

  “Why didn’t he e-mail me then?”

  “You’ve been busy lately.”

  “Oh.” What she didn’t say is that I’d been spending time with Regulus. I guess Austin wasn’t the only person I’d ignored lately.

  “Miss Taylor?” I jumped at hearing Mr. Joseph’s voice. I had completed my assignments, but I didn’t want to leave. Em was up to something.

  I focused on my screen until Mr. Joseph returned his attention to his newspaper. I wrote a note asking her to meet me after school in the parking lot. After letting Mr. Joseph know I had completed my work, I returned to study hall.

  * * *

  After school, the parking lot roared to life along with car engines. Everyone was escaping, as though they’d be locked in for the night if they lingered.

  I spotted Em across two lanes of traffic, leaning on the side of Austin’s Jeep while fastening her designer floral backpack. Its matching purse cost more than half my closet put together. She talked on her bling-covered cell phone and snapped it shut as I neared.

  “We’re going with Austin,” she said.

  I stepped over a water puddle in a low spot in the asphalt. Almost everyone had left the lot by this point, and Austin wasn’t at the Jeep. Since Austin had graduated last year, I wasn’t even sure why he was on school grounds.

  “Where is he?” I yawned and covered my mouth.

  “He’ll be here in a minute. Think you can stay awake? Or am I boring you?” she muttered, clearly exasperated.

  “Jeez, Em. I’m a little tired. Think you can give me a break?”

  “Sure. Sure.” She laughed. “You’re cranky too. But,” she said, holding up her hand. “It’s understandable.”

  “Where are we going with Austin?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I need to hear. Tell me now.”

  “Cranky to the max.” She shook her head in disgust. “Don’t you trust me that this is important?”

  “Sorry. Again.” I thought about Regulus saying that he needed to practice patience. I could use some practice myself.

  “Hello, my lovelies.” Austin hung out of the passenger window of a pickup truck. It was covered in mud from the top of the cab to the bottom step rails.

  “Hey.” I shrugged the backpack off my shoulder and eyed the driver. I didn’t recognize him. When I stepped closer, I noticed Austin’s purple eyelid and bloodshot eye. I cringed.

  “You had better hurry before she changes her mind and goes home,” Em said to Austin.

  “Joe was showing me a shortcut to Tiny’s.” Austin grabbed the bill of his baseball cap. “You ladies ready to rock and roll?”

  Em and I nodded. Austin jumped out of the truck without even looking back at his friend. The truck sped off without a word from the driver. Taillights flashed as it braked hard at the cars lined up at the exit.

  I jumped in the back of Austin’s Jeep so Em could ride shotgun. She examined the interior of the Jeep, littered with empty soda bottles and snack wrappers on the console and floorboard. She lifted a brow.

  Austin turned on music with a heavy bass beat, and the speaker in the back near deafened me. I tapped him on the shoulder and put my hands over my ears. He smiled and turned it up. Em reached over and turned it down.

  “I thought you liked my music,” he said.

  “When I can hear it, yes. When the pounding turns my cerebral cortex to mush, not so much,” I yelled into his ear.

  He turned the sound off. Silence. “If we don’t have music, we talk. OK? Let’s discuss how Regulus is stringing you along so you can do some of your portal finding if he needs it.” He glanced at me in the rear view mirror and then back at the road.

  “You have no right to say that. You don’t know him.” My guilt over Austin’s bruised eye disappeared.

  Em rifled through her purse as if she couldn’t hear us. She produced a pack of gum, and I held my hand palm up between the front seats. Dropping a piece into my hand, she glanced at me while attempting a small, reassuring smile.

  “I think he cares about her.” Em pushed her bag to the side. “He’s different from us, that’s all.”

  “Different in that we’re regular people not trying pretend where saving the world.”

  “It’s not pretend. I don’t know what your problem is. I’m friends with you. I’m dating Regulus. Do you see me asking you two to be best buds? No, I’m not. You should deal with it if you’re my friend.” I heard screaming, and it was me.

  Em’s eyes widened. “Mia, listen. Calm down. We don’t want to see you get hurt. Your family went through so much when Pete disappeared and—”

  “We? Oh, now you’re on his side?” Had they had talked about this? Conspired to do an intervention? My chest ached.

  Minutes later, the Jeep’s tires sluiced through the mud and flung globules onto the windshield and windows. The hard rain earlier in the day had turned areas of the field into a brown and green mush. The four-wheel drive easily navigated through the mud, and Austin purposely cut corners to sling even more mud than necessary onto the windows.

  He cranked up the music. Em put one hand on the dash and the other on a handle above her head to brace her body. I looked around for something hold on to. My hair whipped into my eyes at a violent turn that had Austin whooping in glee and Em yelling for him to slow down.

  He continued through two more fields with some heavily forested areas between. I began to wonder when the wild ride would end when the back of a structure came into view. The small white house stood near a gravel road that we hadn’t taken. He parked at the side, or what might have been a side, if the house had been square or even rectangular in shape. Instead the house looked as though various rooms had been added over the years whenever needed. Two speckled brown hound dogs waited for us to step out.

  “They’re friendly,” Austin told us.

  “Why didn’t we take the road?” I exited the Jeep while grinning at Em. She stood balanced in a spot of drier ground, eying an enormous puddle of water between her and the house.

  “Shortcut.” Austin stomped randomly but missed the mud. He rapped on the wood frame of the screen door.

  “Come in,” a muffled voice shouted.

  Austin opened the door, Em and I at his heels. The kitchen was small, and we passed in five steps through a doorway into the next room, where Tiny’s voice filled the space. I looked from Tiny to the static ceiling fan that hung right beside his head from the fami
ly room’s low ceiling.

  “What’s up, man,” Austin said.

  “Hi, Tiny,” Em and I said simultaneously.

  “Took you long enough to get here.” Tiny turned his back and walked through another doorway. We followed while I looked at Em with my eyebrows raised. She ignored the silent question.

  The room we entered was large, housing a long, high table along the length of one wall. I guessed it had been custom-built and served as a desk, the height accommodating Tiny’s frame. Electronics lined every square inch of wall. Without windows, the room was lit by a hurricane lamp casting a glow in the corner.

  “Hey, Tiny?” Em asked. “Mia has no idea why we brought her here. Take it slow, OK?”

  “Can do, Em. But you really should have told her before now.”

  “I know.” Em shrugged.

  Tiny’s voice had taken on a different quality when he answered her. He spoke with a courteous tone, full of respect. But Em and Tiny hadn’t known each other a month ago. Something had been going on, and I felt like the outsider. I’d never considered that others might be keeping secrets.

  “Are you guys going to tell me what’s going on?” I stared hard at Austin, noting no guilt on his face.

  “The rain messes with the satellite, so my internet connection flaked out earlier. I think it’s fine now.” Tiny sat in a chair and motioned for us to find a seat. Austin and Em found a couple of folding chairs and pulled them closer. “Sit,” Tiny told me, voice irritated.

  I obeyed, sitting on a nearby blue milk crate. I wrapped my arms around my knees and waited.

  “Tiny got curious after another video of GameCon surfaced.” Em sat back in her chair with an ease that showed me she’d been in the room before. “He decided to poke around and find out who posted it. Guess what?”

  Silence. I realized that I needed to breathe before I passed out. Inhaling and then exhaling deeply, I said, “I give.”

  “Wrong answer.” Austin grinned mischievously. “Try again.”

  “Guys, I’m tired and ready to go home. These games are getting old.” I started to rise.

  Austin motioned for me to sit. “The video was posted by a user with only initials for the username. It was posted by PA.” He lifted his eyebrows.

  “Uh, so?” I shrugged.

  “PA stands for Peter Antares.” Em said the words slowly to emphasize the enormity of the find.

  “That’s a stretch,” I said in a mocking tone.

  “What is it with you? Now that you have your boyfriend and your new IIA gig, you’re not interested in finding Pete?” Austin accused me with each word. He stood, and the chair fell back. He bent and grabbed it without giving me any eye contact.

  “That is not fair.”

  No one spoke for several minutes and Tiny, who had ignored the exchange, began typing on his keyboard, the words huge on his oversized monitor, so big I could see it from across the room.

  “You both are immature,” Tiny said so matter-of-factly that I felt my cheeks redden. “Listen up.”

  “Sorry,” Austin said, still without facing me. He shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it to the side. “We’re good. Show her, Tiny.”

  Tiny removed his toboggan cap, ran his fingers through his hair, and replaced the black knit hat. His red curls peeked out from the edges. He glanced over at Em. They exchanged loaded looks that unnerved me. Then his large hands moved in a flurry of key pounding.

  A video came up on the monitor, its footage dark and grainy. I squinted and leaned forward until my elbow rested on my knees. There was no sound until a voice began to narrate.

  “What is this?” I cleared my throat and shifted uncomfortably.

  “Some footage from a new show about recent sightings of unexplained phenomena. It was on Tales of the Awesome and Eerie,” Em answered. “It’s some footage from Goliath.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure if that explained anything.

  The voice narrating pointed out a glow of light on the screen. The light was dim and didn’t illuminate much as it bobbed over some railroad tracks. The narrator explained the theories surrounding the light and the legends that townspeople had handed down through the generations.

  A reporter appeared in the camera view. “Scientists who study the phenomenon tell us that there is no clear explanation for the appearance of the light. Let’s see what the citizens of this small town have to say about it.”

  The reporter then moved from person to person allowing each to give a theory about the light.

  “I think it’s the railroad worker lookin’ for his head. It got chopped off,” said a little boy wearing a T-shirt with a tractor on the front.

  “It’s electricity given off by quartz,” said a man standing beside the boy. “That’s all it is.”

  At the end of the video segment, all three of my friends turned to me in unison and looked at me expectantly. I stared back, uncertain, and stood while chewing the edge of my nonexistent thumbnail. They all began to talk at once.

  I held up my hand. “What’s with the clip? I can see I missed something,” I said.

  “Think of this as an exercise in finding Waldo,” Austin said.

  Tiny turned back to the mouse and clicked to start the clip again. His deep rumbly voice narrated as he periodically stopped the footage to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

  “Don’t watch the kid. Look at this crowd in the background. Here we have this black pickup truck with the spotlight mounted on the top. These dudes are talking with their backs to the camera. Got the camo gear on so they look like every other hunter wandering around town. This one on the right turns sideways and…now look at him.” Tiny stopped the video.

  I moved closer. “Oh. Nuh-uh. It can’t be,” I said.

  But it was, or he was. Pete looked taller. His shoulders looked broader, and he’d gained weight.

  Now I stood directly in front of the monitor, fixated. “He posted this video?” I asked.

  “No,” Em answered. “We never said that. He didn’t post this. We were looking for a clue about Goliath. We wanted to know if there would be some reason that the guy who broke into your house would take you there.”

  “Pete’s in Goliath. He’s been there this whole time? Is that what you think?” I paced in the narrow space along the wall. Each step came faster than the last.

  Austin threw out an arm to stop me. “He’s there for a reason. No, we don’t think he decided to move to Goliath. This mysterious light and Pete are connected somehow. And you. We need to figure out what’s going on.” He squeezed my hand.

  “I know that.” I looked at Em and Tiny. “You guys need to stop keeping things from me.”

  “You kept secrets from us too,” she said. Em’s voice held no recrimination. Today she wore a flannel shirt over a black T-shirt. The combination might have been a standard in my closet but not in Em’s. Her hair was held back in a ponytail, another uncharacteristic style choice for her. “At first, you didn’t tell us about your synesthesia, about meeting Regulus and Arizona—”

  “Yes,” I answered. “You’re right. I was scared you’d think I was a freak. I needed you.” I broke eye contact with her. “Things are different now.”

  “True,” Austin said. He picked up a yellow stress ball with a smiley face from the floor and threw it from hand to hand as he talked. “The way I see it, we’re now a team of superheroes. You know, fighting to save the world from ultimate doom. But without the leotard outfits.”

  I grinned. Austin always made me smile, and I hadn’t let myself go with him for a long time.

  Em walked over and grabbed the stress ball in midair. “And we have a little more brain than brawn.”

  “And only one of us has superpowers,” Tiny said.

  Em looked at Tiny, smiling. “Tiny’s written some code that puts a cookie on any computer that visits his website. At GameCon, he thought that turnabout is fair play. If someone put a tail on him online, then why couldn’t we do the same?”

  I nodde
d and attempted not to look too amazed at all they had done while I wasn’t paying attention. “Did anything turn up?”

  “Yeah. I detect several IP addresses that are watching my activity. I don’t like people in my business, but I hope they keep hanging around. I have something special planned to blow their minds.” Tiny chuckled, sounding devious.

  “Tiny is doing what he does best. In the meantime, we’ve contacted a ghost hunting team and we’ll meet them in Goliath this weekend. We don’t think Regulus and Arizona should be there. If Pete is around, he won’t come forward if they’re with us.” Emily threw the stress ball in my direction.

  I grabbed the yellow, squishy ball. “Pete was obviously trying to warn me against Dr. Bleeker when he’s left messages in the past. Why can’t Regulus and Arizona go with us? What in the heck does a ghost hunting team have to do with this?” I stopped the rush of questions to take a breath and sat on the edge of a wooden table to stop myself from pacing.

  “This is a coming clean meeting. I have something else to tell you.” Austin rarely sounded so serious. His dark hair hung over his eyes like a shield while he focused on his knees. “Pete’s contacted me and Tiny.”

  “What?” I managed the words in a barely a whisper. I looked at Em and she looked back with no apology.

  “On Quest. We’ve run into him a couple of times online.” Austin finally peered at me between strands of hair hanging over his eyes.

  “When? How many times and what did he say?” I didn’t have time to get mad or let my feelings get in the way. I made the decision to suck it up.

  Austin sat back and relaxed at my calm tone. “Two times,” he said. “Both were very brief. No hanging around and shooting the breeze. He mainly wanted to either ask a question or tell us something.”

  “He sent you a chat message in Quest two times?”