by Dawn Eastman
I found it harder to believe that they were truly worried as much as suspicious I had been investigating on my own. Dad would certainly have heard on his scanner if I had been in any further trouble.
“I had to meet with Mr. Worthington after the funeral, and then I went to Alex’s place for a little while. I didn’t know I needed to check in with everyone.” I was feeling surly and a bit like a teenager again. I definitely needed my own place
“Oh. Well, we just figured we’d all come back here afterward. We have to make a plan for what to do next,” Vi said. Mom nodded, and Seth flicked his eyes to the door again.
“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s reading the paper in the dining room. Why did you have to meet with Rupert? Does it have to do with your work situation?” My mom put on her concerned expression. This was a clever maneuver to find out what had happened in my work situation. If I needed a lawyer, she’d know something.
“Let’s go sit down. I need to talk to everyone.”
Seth slumped and shook his head.
We invaded Dad’s quiet time. Tuffy and Baxter joined us—Tuffy on Seth’s lap, and Baxter as far from me as he could get. I wondered if he blamed me for Tish’s death. I wondered if he could still smell the blood. What was I going to do with him?
“Mr. Worthington asked me to meet with him in regard to Tish’s will.”
“Oh,” Mom said, and began smoothing the fringe on the tablecloth.
“It seems that Tish left everything to me.” Just like ripping off a Band-Aid—quick and painless.
“But I thought she—” Vi began. My mother quickly put a hand on her arm to interrupt.
There was a moment of silence as Vi and Mom exchanged a long look.
Dad broke the tension. “She left you the house and Baxter?”
“And some money. She had saved quite a bit.”
Even the dogs seemed to hold their breath.
“What are you going to do with it? Sell it? That house was your parents’, you know.” Vi got her finger ready in case waggling was needed.
“Vi, it’s okay . . . ,” Mom began.
“No, it’s not. You should have the house.” Vi shot a glare in my direction.
“No, I’m not going to sell it. The terms of the will are unusual but very clear. I have to live in the house for at least a year before I can sell it. Otherwise, it goes to charity.”
The ladies gasped at the same moment as if they were taking in the same breath.
“It wouldn’t revert to Rose?” Vi said.
“I don’t know what any previous will contained. I’m just telling you what I know. . . .”
“Then you’ll be here in Crystal Haven for a year?” Mom couldn’t cover the smile.
“What about your job? You worked hard for that.” Dad was always the practical one.
“I think I can get a leave of absence,” I said. Usually when you quit, you got to leave, but I didn’t want to have that conversation right now. I decided to play my trump card. “Plus, I’ll be able to take Baxter, and he won’t have to live here.”
Vi looked from Mom to Dad. “We should talk to Rupert. Or get our own lawyer. If you two want the house back, we should fight for it!” Vi stood as if she would go pull the lawyer out of the front closet.
Mom grabbed her hand and pulled her back into her seat. “We aren’t going to take Clyde to court, Vi.”
Vi glanced at me and looked away. “Right, of course not.”
“It’s not like we were planning on moving, Frank,” Mom said to Dad.
He nodded and sighed. “Of course not. I just thought we might get our own place again someday. . . .” He didn’t look at Vi.
“It’s just a year, Dad. Who knows what will happen?” I said.
Dad smiled. “The good news is, we get to have you close by again.” Dad put his hand on mine.
Vi clapped once and grinned. “I knew it! Didn’t I tell you she’d be coming back to stay, Rose?”
“I don’t remember, Vi. Did you?”
“Absolutely. I knew it.” Vi looked around the table daring anyone to refute her claim.
* * *
While Mom and Vi discussed Tish’s funeral, her will, and what it all might mean, Seth and I snuck outside.
He threw a tennis ball deep into the yard and both dogs ran after it, side by side, Tuffy at full tilt with his short legs blurring beneath him, Baxter in long, loping strides.
“Seth, what’s up?” I said when he seemed to be taking an enormous interest in his shoelace.
“I have something to show you,” he said.
Seth headed for the back of the yard, where my father had built a small tool shed. He looked toward the house before opening the door and reaching behind some sacks of mulch.
He pulled out what looked like a book wrapped in paper towels. I took it from him and unwrapped it. My Diary was printed in peeling gold foil on its dark green cover.
“Is this yours?” I asked. I hoped it wasn’t, because the last thing I needed was to read a thirteen-year-old boy’s diary.
He looked horrified for a moment.
“Of course not. I think it was Tish’s.”
The book felt warm in my hands, and I wiped my palm on my jeans.
“How did you get it?”
Seth looked away. He sighed. He squinted at the dogs, who were playing some tennis-ball game in the middle of the yard.
“Seth?”
“I found it in Baxter’s bed,” he said.
“What? How?”
“Please don’t tell anyone, Clyde. Especially Vi, or Nana Rose . . . or my mother.”
“Okay. What’s going on?”
“I was trying to get Baxter to lie down. He paced around the house the whole time that people were here from the funeral. I brought him up to my room and tried to get him onto his bed. He refused to even go near it.”
“So, you sat on it and felt the book?”
“No.” He looked at the dogs again, then the house, then back to the diary I held in my hand.
“It was as clear as anything. He said the bed was too lumpy.”
“Who said?”
“Baxter.”
I felt my jaw drop.
“You think you heard Baxter talk? Oh, Seth.” I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, but he dodged away.
“I didn’t hear him talk. I sort of felt what he was saying, in my head.”
Seth was such a normal kid that I thought he had escaped. But then I thought of the way the two worst-behaved dogs I knew were obedience champions when he was around.
“When you checked the bed you found this book?” I tried to focus on the more concrete aspect of his story while I figured out how to deal with his Doctor Doolittle confession.
Seth nodded. “I felt something hard, so I cut open the seam and dug around inside. I found the book. I didn’t read much of it; it seems like it’s from when she was a kid.”
I flipped the book open and looked at the date: 1975. Tish would have been around twelve at the time. Why would she hide a diary from when she was twelve?
“I don’t know what to do, Clyde. I kind of like knowing what the dogs think, but I thought it was just a general sense. Today it was different. Today I heard real words in my head.” His eyes were big.
“Vi has been able to get messages from animals for years. Maybe you should talk to her.”
His head shook violently from side to side.
“No. I don’t want them to know about it. I don’t think Vi can really hear them; I think she just makes it all up based on a feeling she gets. I don’t want my mom to know. She’ll think I’m a freak.”
I laughed. “Your mother grew up here. She won’t think you’re a freak. . . .” I stopped when I noticed his expression. It was one of a wise teacher waiting for h
is stupid student to figure things out.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. She always says she hopes Sophie and I get a ‘useful’ talent, if any at all.”
“‘Useful’ being the one she has—predicting the stock market?”
“You have to admit it’s better than talking to cats or telling people they’ll find love during far-off travels.”
I couldn’t really argue with him. I had felt the same way growing up. The kids eventually realized I knew things about them they’d rather keep to themselves. No one feels comfortable around a person who knows when there will be a pop quiz, or who pulled the fire alarm in a deserted hallway.
“Have you had any more . . . messages? From Baxter?”
“No. Not as clear as that one. He’s sad that Tish is gone, but he likes being here with Tuffy.”
“Okay. Let me think about this. There must be a way to stop the messages. Do you want to stop communicating with them?”
Seth shrugged and watched the dogs. “No, I kind of like it. But, it’s just so . . . freaky. What would you do?”
I sighed and put my hand on his back. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”
* * *
I took the diary up to my room after sneaking past the dining room, where my parents and Vi were still rehashing the funeral and the will.
I wasn’t sure what I expected, but there were no secret codes, no notes hidden under the liner papers, no invisible ink. After the shock of that letter from Mac, I had a new vision of Tish as a superspy. I was embarrassed to find myself holding pages up to the heat of a lightbulb to see if anything developed.
I flipped quickly through the entries, hoping for some highlighting or maybe another secret letter she had decided not to deliver. The diary covered the year Tish had turned twelve. It was painful reading. There had been crushes and bullies and mean girls and nice teachers. She wrote about my mother and how much she admired her. Was this why she hid it and told me where to find it? I already knew that Tish had idolized my mother when she was growing up. There were references to our house and how much she loved it. She wanted one “exactly like it” when she grew up. She got her wish on that one.
Tish and her mom had had their troubles. Most of it was due to her mother’s drinking. I had grown up knowing that Tish didn’t get along with her mother and that she had moved in with my parents for the last part of high school. I skimmed over the sections where a twelve-year-old Tish was trying to cover for her mother, trying to do the right thing to avoid her mother’s anger.
In November, the entries changed. Tish wrote a long section about a babysitting night at our house. She’d been watching Grace, who was a baby at the time. Tish wrote that she could tell Grace had some psychic ability but that it wasn’t what my mom had hoped for. Tish had just begun to feel that she might have some ability, a common enough fantasy at that age. She was living with a mother who was either not home or drunk. It would be wonderful to have a special “superpower.” For Tish, the fantasy had come true. After years of work and training, she had developed a name for herself as a medium and psychic. But the girl writing this diary wasn’t there yet. She’d apparently been in my parents’ room that night, looking for my mom’s tarot deck. Tish had the idea that the cards themselves were magical, and she wanted to try them out. There was a long section of justification for the snooping she had done. Then this:
I don’t know why I looked out the window. I wish I hadn’t seen them at all. I wish I had stayed downstairs where I was supposed to be. It was so gross! They were kissing and they’re so old. And she’s married! No one will believe me. Now I wonder what happened to the gun. If I tell, she will for sure find out and then what will happen? But I have to tell don’t I?
There was no special marking for this section, but when I started to read it, I knew this was why she had left me the book. But I didn’t understand it. She’d obviously seen something that wasn’t right, but who was she talking about?
According to the entries in December, she had gone to the police eventually and indeed they had not believed her. She was just the spooky girl with the drunk for a mother. They even brought in a social worker to determine whether it was likely Tish had been drinking that night. It wasn’t surprising. The word of an imaginative twelve-year-old meant nothing.
I wasn’t sure what had triggered the recent murders after all this time, but I was starting to think that Sara’s séance had been much more disturbing for one of the guests than the others.
I decided to use my new set of keys.
* * *
I hesitated outside Tish’s house. How long would I think of it that way? Glancing at the tree where Mac used to leave notes, I felt sadness settle over me. Tish had certainly caused some trouble with her penchant for “helping.”
I went up the steps and ignored the police tape stretched across the door. What’s one more reason for Mac to be mad? I stepped into the front hall and took a steadying breath. I imagined I could still smell blood, which was unlikely after five days and the thorough cleaning Rupert Worthington claimed to have arranged. Ignoring the flashes of memory and avoiding even a glance toward the kitchen, I went directly to the stairs. I took them two at a time and found myself on the landing outside what used to be my parents’ bedroom.
Tish had put her own spin on things since she moved in, and her taste in comfortable, casual furnishings continued into the bedroom. It was decorated in neutral tones of brown and cream. She had a king-size bed between the two front-facing windows and a comfy-looking chair by the side-facing window. I suspected that this was the window she had been looking out of when she’d seen a married someone kissing a man who wasn’t her husband.
What I couldn’t quite get my head around was that Harriet Munson lived next door. I could not, even using all of my imaginative powers, see her having an affair. She was simply too rule-oriented. Ignoring the fact that she and her husband seemed to be one of the happiest couples in town—another shocker—I just couldn’t imagine her doing anything so out of character.
I peeked through the window and tried to imagine what Tish had seen. But there was nothing to see. There was one small window on that side of Harriet’s house, and I was at the wrong angle to see anything. Unless Harriet and her mystery man had been standing at the side of the house near our driveway, which would have made them perfectly visible from the street, Tish hadn’t been looking this way.
I went to the other window and glanced out. This window faced the front, and I imagined would give a good view of the Stark’s privacy fence. I was wrong again. I could see right into their backyard. I could also see into their kitchen. The driveway ran along the side of the house to the detached garage at the back.
My understanding of what Tish had seen shifted again. I pulled out my phone to call Tom.
28
The woods grew quiet as the sun disappeared. The sunlight that had been weakly filtering through the trees gave up and the moon took over. It was Thursday evening, eleven days after finding Sara. I reflected on how much had changed and hoped that soon we could all return to our version of normal. We had launched one more mission to follow Milo. The gang was certain he was up to “no good,” as Vi would say. Since I now suspected someone else entirely, I had gone along with this to keep them safely watching the wrong person. Baxter’s leash was taut in my hand as he strained to sniff the area around us. Seth and Tuffy crouched behind a tree about twenty feet away.
Vi and Mom had set up a vantage point along the road that led back into town; my dad was farther along Singapore Highway in case Milo headed south. He was testing out his new mobile police-band radio. Diana and Alex watched Message Circle. I had turned everything I knew over to Tom; hopefully he was closing in on the murderer. The rest of us were wasting our time, but I felt reassured that everyone I cared about was currently watching Milo while the real killer was nowhere near these woods.
I saw Milo run his metal detector over the ground in the silver moonlight. The familiar click-click sound no longer seemed threatening. He stopped when the clicks got closer together, turned on a portable lantern, and began to dig.
I heard Baxter’s heavy breathing at my side. I was surprised Milo hadn’t noticed Baxter’s loud panting. Seth glanced in my direction, and then I saw a blur of light brown as Tuffy took off into the woods.
Baxter pulled at the leash, and I had no choice but to be dragged along after him or lose him to the darkness. I gave up all pretense of quietly observing Milo and shouted at Seth to run. Milo dropped the shovel and bent to pick up the lantern. He shined it at the tree Seth had been hiding behind, but Seth was already up ahead chasing Tuffy.
I had no idea where Tuffy thought he was going. Wherever he was headed, it wasn’t a silent approach. We made so much noise running, I was sure Milo must be following us as well. My phone vibrated in my pocket—a text. I didn’t have time for Vi’s update.
The branches that were too high for Baxter struck at my face, and I put my arm up to block them. The stitches pulled in my arm as I strained against the leash. I ran with my head down, tucked under my right arm, and hoped Baxter knew where he was going as he tugged me deeper into the woods. I saw a light up ahead in a small clearing and pulled on Baxter’s leash to slow him down. Seth had stopped running as well, and we walked up to the edge of the clearing, breathing hard and staying behind the trees. My phone vibrated again; I reached into my pocket and shut it off. I felt the weight of my gun in the waistband at the small of my back and was glad I had brought it. I felt that I was back in that horrible dream from the night of Diana’s spells. The woods, the moonlight in the clearing, the sense of being dragged through the trees: it all combined with the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. My legs felt boneless as I realized this was the place—the place from my dream, where Mac would be hurt.
Joe Stark was in the clearing with a lantern and a shovel. He had been digging for a while by the looks of the pile of dirt at his feet. He held Tuffy by the collar and tried not to get bit by the snarling, growling demon Tuffy had become. He picked Tuffy off the ground by his collar and got his arm around the dog to stop his struggling. Tuffy yipped and then continued growling.