“I’ll go,” said Lisa, eager to get away from Evie, who was now making more repulsive sounds as she picked her teeth. Lisa got up and followed her mother upstairs. The door to her bedroom was locked.
“Mom?” she called, knocking.
There was no answer.
But she knew what to do. She’d find the missing sewing basket, leave it outside her mother’s door. It wasn’t much, but it was one small thing she could do to restore order to the world, to make her mother a little happy. She started in the hall closet and found linens, extra rolls of toilet paper, unopened bottles of shampoo, but no sewing basket. She checked the guest room, where Hazel was staying, which smelled sweet and boozy. Opening the drawer of the bedside table, Lisa found a bottle of brandy and some Valium. No sewing basket. Were you even supposed to mix alcohol and Valium? Hazel would know. She was a nurse, after all.
Under the brandy and pill bottle was a paperback book. Lisa picked it up. It was one of Hazel’s cheesy romance novels with a hunky guy on the cover, holding a swooning woman in his arms. Fairy tales for adults, that’s what these were. Evie said some of them had dirty parts, scenes where the relationships were consummated in sometimes steamy ways. It made Lisa’s stomach hurt to think about. But still, she was curious. She flipped through it. Near the middle, she found a photograph tucked between the pages. Lisa pulled it out and blinked hard at it. Da was in the picture, looking young and happy. No eyeglasses, no crow’s-feet or worry lines on his forehead. His hair was longish and shaggy. Standing in front of him, wrapped in his arms, was a girlish, thin Hazel with perfectly coiffed hair and a little wry smile on her face.
Lisa’s face felt tight. Her head began to pound.
Where had the picture come from? And what was Hazel doing with it now, hidden like this? Lisa realized right away that she didn’t want to know the answers to these questions. The best thing to do was to get rid of the picture, make sure no one else ever found it.
She crumpled the photo, jammed it into her pocket, and threw the book back in the drawer.
Standing up, Lisa glanced out the window into the backyard. There was Evie, casting a quick glance back at the house before slipping into the woods with her backpack on. The same backpack she’d given Gerald.
Pleased to have something to distract her from the photo, Lisa took the stairs two at a time, racing through the kitchen and out the door into the yard.
By the time Lisa caught up to Evie, she was down in Reliance, talking with Gerald and Pinkie. Lisa crouched behind a nearby tree. There weren’t any good trees in the clearing where the cellar holes were, so she had to hang back and couldn’t hear well. A mosquito buzzed around her face, landed on her ear. She swatted at it, missing. The air felt soggy and gray. The sky was darkening, threatening to rain at any second.
Once again, Lisa watched as Evie took off the backpack and handed it to Gerald. He nodded at her, said, “Thanks, Stevie,” but she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t raise a fist or reach for her knife, or even so much as flinch. She just backed away slowly, looking humble and defeated. This was so not the Evie Lisa knew. Evie did a slow shuffle-walk toward home, looking more like a strange hunched-over gorilla than a girl.
Were they blackmailing her? Swearing they’d get her in trouble for breaking Gerald’s arm if she didn’t pay them? But what did Evie have to give them?
Determined to get to the bottom of this one way or another, Lisa waited until Evie was back up the hill, then took off after Gerald and Pinkie. They were walking in the other direction, deeper into the woods. If they kept going, they’d eventually hit Rangley Road, which ran along the back side of the woods. If you went left on Rangley, you’d reach Hill Road, which brought you back into the center of town. Were they just taking the long way home?
“What are you two doing to Evie?” Lisa demanded once she’d caught up with them. The forest was more grown up down here, and there were no clear paths. The ground felt damp and spongy under her feet.
Gerald and Pinkie turned, surprised. They were standing in a cluster of ferns.
“We’re not doing anything,” Gerald said, adjusting the knapsack with his good arm. His cast was decorated in little drawings and scribbles—airplanes and cartoon faces and a huge, swirly BECCA signature done in pink marker. There was a skull and crossbones, which might have looked tough and cool on someone else’s arm, but on his, it just seemed dorky. As Lisa studied the drawings on the cast, her eye was drawn to one of the cartoon faces. It was thin, vampire-like, with dark circles under the eyes. Evie’s work, no doubt.
“What’s in the bag?” Lisa asked.
“None of your beeswax,” Pinkie said. She had a spot of blood on her left check from a mosquito bite. There was a chintzy little toy compass pinned to her shirt.
“You two are messing with my cousin, so that makes it my business. Now are you gonna let me see what’s in the bag, Gerald, or do I have to figure out a way to make sure your other arm gets broken?” Hanging out with Evie so much was rubbing off on her.
“Jeez!” Gerald, said, adjusting his glasses. “You can look already. Fine.” He shrugged the bag off and held it out to her. Lisa opened it and peeked inside, holding her breath.
It wasn’t money, the family silver, body parts, or drugs.
It was food.
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Apples. A package of pink cupcakes swiped from a box in their pantry at home. A can of cling peaches in heavy syrup.
“What the hell is all this?” Lisa asked.
“A picnic,” Gerald said, smiling.
“Not for ants, either,” Pinkie added.
“Why did Evie give you all this?”
Gerald shrugged his shoulders. “’Cause we looked hungry, I guess.” He laughed and added something in his ridiculous made-up language, a long series of half-swallowed sounds.
“What?” Lisa demanded. Her head spun. She hated to be the one left in the dark. How could Evie do this to her?
“Nothing,” Gerald said, snickering to himself. His hair was greasier than ever, and the pimples on his forehead looked painful. Pinkie giggled along with him, though Lisa was sure she had no clue how to speak a word of Minarian.
“I don’t know what kind of hold you two have over Evie, but whatever it is, you need to quit messing with her. If you don’t, there will be consequences.”
Gerald laughed, shook his head. “Consequences, right,” he said. “You don’t have a clue.”
Pinkie gave a twitchy little smile and said, “You think you’re so special, Lisa. But I’m special too.” She rubbed at the spot of blood on her cheek, smearing it. Then she touched the little compass, peering down at it as she jiggled the needle.
“Good for you, Pinkie. Good for you.” Lisa turned to walk back home. It was starting to sprinkle.
“She told us, you know,” Gerald shouted after her.
Lisa stopped, turned back to face them. “Told you what?”
The drizzle picked up and the rain began coming down in huge, heavy drops.
Gerald was putting the backpack onto his shoulder. His bangs were already plastered to his head. “About the cellar hole,” he said, the words nearly drowned out by the rain pounding down on the canopy of leaves above them.
Lisa took in a deep breath and held it as she turned away from Gerald and Pinkie and kept walking, rain pelting her. Act like it’s no big deal. Don’t ask what Evie told them. Act like it doesn’t matter.
But it did matter.
Evie had betrayed her.
CHAPTER 26
Phoebe
JUNE 11, PRESENT DAY
Phoebe was digging around in the office closet, looking for the air mattress, when she found Sam’s old green knapsack stuffed deep in the back corner, under a trash bag full of shredded bills to be recycled. Odd. Sam kept his hiking and camping gear in the front-hall closet. She pulled the bag out,
realizing from its shape and weight that there was something inside. She dropped it on the desk, then went to the doorway to listen. She heard the faint splash of Lisa in the bath. In the living room, Sam and Evie were talking about whether or not they should take Lisa to see a doctor.
“Just think it through, Sam,” Evie said. “They’ll want to know her name. Your relationship to her. Shit, they’ll probably call the cops. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I’m just wondering if maybe we should hold off. Find out what we can on our own first.”
It was strange to hear Sam and Evie getting along so well—relying on each other in a whole new way. It almost didn’t matter if the girl turned out to really be Lisa—she’d brought Sam and Evie together again and that seemed like an incredible gift.
Phoebe eased the office door shut, went over to the desk, and hesitated over the knapsack. It was Sam’s. And obviously he hadn’t wanted her to see whatever was inside.
What if it turned out to be an early birthday gift and she ruined the surprise?
But what if it wasn’t?
Once more, she thought of what Becca had told her on the phone: There are things he’s not telling you.
The sliding closet door was open, and she was sure she saw the slightest hint of movement in the back left corner. She blinked. Impossible, she told herself. There’s nothing there. Heart thudding, she stepped to her right so that she was directly in front of it. She kicked at the trash bag full of shredded paper. Then, taking a deep breath, she pulled the winter coats aside.
Nothing.
Of course it was nothing. What had she been expecting?
Shaking her head at her own foolishness, she went back to the desk, unzipped the bag slowly, and peeked inside.
It was stuffed with papers. She reached in and pulled them out, fanning them out on the desk. Printouts from the computer were mixed up with sheets of legal paper full of Sam’s perfect penmanship.
“Son of a bitch,” said Phoebe, lowering herself into the chair in front of the desk. Her legs felt shaky, like the entire earth had shifted under her and the ground itself was not to be trusted.
Here, at last, was the answer to the mystery of what he’d been doing on the computer each night.
In Sam’s neat script were strange stories, notes in the margins saying what source they’d come from, books and website addresses.
In twelfth-century Suffolk, England, a boy and a girl appeared at the opening of a pit in the earth. Their skin was green and they spoke a strange language. The boy died. In time, the girl learned English and was able to explain that they had come from an underground world she called St. Martin’s Land.
A common story in Scottish witch trials between 1550 and 1670: A woman meets a man dressed in black or green. He asks her to be his servant, offers her something in return (sometimes the gift of clairvoyance). He has sex with her and often leaves a mark on her.
The Scottish Ballad of Tam Lin: A young maiden picks a rose at an abandoned castle. A handsome man in green appears. He lies with her and she becomes pregnant. He tells her he was once a mortal man, captured by the Queen of the Fairies. Now he’s a changeling, moving between two worlds.
The more Phoebe read, the more unsettled she became. These were not the sweet, winged fairies Phoebe remembered from the stories when she was young. These were dark, brooding, supernatural beings with the power to shape-shift, to read minds, to lure innocent young girls away.
But Sam didn’t believe in any of this. He’d been adamant about that. He was the voice of reason. The map and compass guy whom Phoebe knew she’d never get lost with.
The next sheet of paper was a printout that Sam had highlighted and put stars around:
Boston, 1919: A young woman named Jenny Hobbs was arrested after drowning her infant son in a wash pan in her rented room. When questioned by the police, she told a peculiar story. She claimed the child was only half human. His father, she insisted, was the devil himself, a shadow man without a face who claimed to be King of the Fairies. When asked where she had come from, where she met this man, she refused to answer, saying only a small village up north. “No one there anymore,” she told police. “The fairies took them all away.” Miss Hobbs was later committed to Danvers State Hospital, where she came down with pneumonia and died.
Phoebe ran a trembling hand through her hair. Had Jenny Hobbs come from Vermont? From Reliance?
She read over another sheet of notes Sam had taken:
The ability to shape-shift? To appear as a human or an animal?
My dreams of the dark whispering man.
Phoebe stabbed her finger at that line. I thought you said you didn’t dream, Sam.
Her heart pounded. She thought of the trapdoor beneath her childhood bed, the shadow man she’d known but of whom she never spoke.
Don’t think about that.
Did Sam have his own shadow man too?
She went on reading:
A journey to the fairy realm is like a shamanic journey—few who go come back. Those who do are often mad. (Da?) Or gifted—clairvoyant, seers, masters of prophecy. Sometimes, a person is taken and a fairy changeling left in their place. Ugly, sickly. There are stories of humans going into the fairy world where they spend a day, but when they return, a hundred years have passed here and everyone they know is dead. Would Lisa still be a young girl? Is it possible that ten years in our time might only be ten minutes over there?
The world of fairies is the reverse of our world, like a photo negative.
Some say fairies are the dead. Like ghosts stuck in their own world. If Lisa returns, will she be alive or dead? Human or fairy?
To protect yourself from fairies: carry things made of iron, stay in or near running water, ring bells, carry a four-leaf clover, and wear your clothes inside out.
For a split second, everything dropped away—there was a rushing sound in her ears, and the words on the page seemed to pulse with a sickly rhythm. The description the landlord and police had given her of how her mother had been found—An accidental drowning, they’d said. Blood alcohol content of .35. Drunk, of course, beyond drunk—why else would you get into the bathtub in inside-out clothes, with a bunch of frying pans, knives, and assorted junk-drawer hardware, and leave the shower running full blast?
Just a creepy coincidence, Phoebe told herself.
But what if. . .
Phoebe stopped herself cold and went back to Sam’s notes.
The fey are masters of disguise: people, plants, animals.
They can appear as anyone or anything, often appearing as just what the human was hoping to find.
(The fake Evie and Elliot? The old woman/girl?)
“Bee?” Sam called from the living room.
“Yeah?” She scrambled to stuff the papers back into the bag.
“It sounds like the water’s draining out of the tub. I think she’s done in there.”
“Coming!” Phoebe called, stashing the knapsack back where she’d found it.
“What are you doing?” Sam asked. She turned from the closet to find him standing in the doorway behind her, filling it.
“Looking for the air mattress.”
“It’s in the front-hall closet,” he said, “under the sleeping bags. I’ll get it set up. I think you better get into the bathroom with some clean clothes.”
“On my way,” Phoebe said, keeping her eyes on the ground, scared that if she looked at him, he’d know what she’d found. If he didn’t already.
She went to their bedroom to find something for Lisa to sleep in, her mind racing. The framed owl above their bed glowered at her.
She grabbed a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt from her drawer, knowing they’d hang on the skin-and-bones creature in the bathtub, the words from Sam’s notes haunting her:
They can appear as anyone or anything, ofte
n appearing as just what the human was hoping to find.
CHAPTER 27
Lisa
JUNE 13, FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
“I found something in the woods,” Sammy said. He was out of breath, dressed in his bright yellow rain slicker, plastered with mud and leaves. His shorts, sneakers, and socks were soaked. He stepped through the open garage door, out of the rain. Water pooled at his feet.
Evie and Lisa were sitting on the dirty, grease-stained floor of the garage. Behind them was Da’s kiln, throwing wheel, and shelves of glazes, brushes, and half-completed projects. The front of the garage was where they kept tools, gardening supplies, and junk that didn’t have any other place to go. As far as Lisa knew, the garage had never actually been used for a car—there was no room for one with all the other stuff in there.
Evie had her overalls on and was trying to get the mower going. She had taken it apart, pretending to know just what she was doing. There was a blade here, a filter there—nuts, bolts, and screws scattered everywhere across the stained cement floor. Lisa was pretty sure that Evie would never get it back together right. One of Evie’s greatest faults was that she always thought she was way smarter than she actually was.
The whole time Lisa had been watching Evie mess with the poor defenseless lawn mower, she’d been stewing over what Gerald had said: She told us, you know. About the cellar hole.
What exactly had Evie said?
Lisa touched the charm bracelet, imagined Evie, Gerald, and Pinkie having a good laugh about crazy Lisa and the fairies. Poor pathetic Evie trying to seem cool by telling them all her secrets, trying to turn Lisa into the outsider Evie herself was so used to being.
“What’d you find?” Evie asked, wiping grease-stained hands on the bib part of her overalls.
“I think I’d better show you,” Sammy said. “Both of you. And I think we should bring your knife, Evie. And maybe some other weapons. Just in case.”
“Whoa there,” Evie said. “What the hell did you see? A rabid wild boar? Bigfoot?”
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