“I spent many an hour here when you asked me to help you figure out if your family was cursed.” He flips through an old newspaper.
“Oh.” I remember that day I bargained with him in the secret study to help me. I thought he was the most frustrating person I had ever met. Still do. I laugh.
“Yes?” he asks, and looks up at me.
“Nothing,” I say, and open a binder. Go away, nostalgia!
For the next half hour we pull Titanic articles and flip through pages. The tips of my fingers get stained black from the old newsprint.
“This is so sad,” I say. “I just read a story about a woman who checked herself into a sanatarium after the boat sank, never again wanting to talk about what happened that night. People say it was probably the screams from the passengers in the water that haunted her.”
Elijah nods. “A great many of the survivors had nightmares about it. It is likely that the passengers in the water were pleading for help for the fifteen minutes before hypothermia set in. Many families were split up while evacuating. Can you imagine being in a lifeboat and wondering if that voice in the water belonged to your relative?”
I shudder. “I can’t. I really can’t. But why didn’t they help them?”
“Some wanted to. There were arguments in the lifeboats about whether they would be overturned if they went back. One man finally did. But he was too late.”
I pull another binder toward me and try to swallow the lump in my throat. I open the cover and instantly the candles blow out.
“Eli—!”
Before I can finish his name, he’s there, his hand on my arm.
I hear him strike a match in the darkness, and a small flame lights up his face. My heart plays a drum solo in my chest.
“What the hell was that?” I whisper.
“You mean ‘who,’ ” Elijah says, and relights our candles. “And I am not certain. The spirit came and went too quickly.”
All the hair on my arms stands up, and I shudder. The binder that I just opened is missing. “Is there another way to get those newspaper records? Maybe a digital copy somewhere?”
Elijah scans the room. “I will certainly look.” He hands me my candle and offers me his arm. “But at present, let me walk you home, Samantha.”
I rub my eyes as I walk toward homeroom. These nights of Elijah waking me up every ten minutes are catching up with me big-time.
I grab the homeroom door, and someone touches my elbow. I whip around.
Matt smiles. “Whoa. Sorry. I didn’t mean ta scare ya.”
“No worries. I’m just extra tired this morning. Makes me jumpy,” I say.
He scans my face. “I can see that. What’d ya pull an all-nightah?”
“Something like that,” I say.
“It’s only midweek. You keep goin’ like that and you’ll never make it to the dance—excuse me, Spring Fling,” he says, like he finds the whole thing ridiculous.
“Aren’t you on the dance committee? Shouldn’t you be excited?”
“About plannin’ an event with Blair and Niki?” He laughs. “It’s just a means to an end. Accordin’ to me parents, I don’t have enough extracurriculars to get into a good university. Leadership skills? I don’t know.”
I attempt a smile, but my face just isn’t up to it. I point at the door. “You going in—”
“Actually…hold up.” He glances over his shoulder and pulls me away from the classroom.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I’m ’aving an altruistic blip or somethin’.” He lowers his voice. “So ’ere’s the deal. Niki’s family and Blair’s family went out to dinner together last night, and I overheard the two of ’em whisperin’ about ya.”
My shoulders tense. “How so?”
“Honestly, I didn’t hear much. But it sounded like they had some big plan. Niki kept sayin’ she couldn’t wait for tomorrow. Today, technically. I just felt bad not givin’ you a heads-up.”
Big plan? My stomach flips. “Thanks for the warning.”
“No problem. And get some sleep,” he says, and walks past me into homeroom.
I take a breath and push the door open. The girls are already there. I sit down next to Susannah and tell them everything Matt said.
“It’s the thirteenth,” Mary says.
“Jeez, Mary, you need to stop saying that every two seconds. You’re gonna give me a twitch,” Alice says. “We don’t even know for sure if it means anything other than the typical Niki gossip.”
Susannah looks at me. “When Niki goes on the attack, she’s usually spreading a rumor—some part of which is true. That’s how she gets people to believe it. But then again, we shouldn’t be underestimating anyone right now. Especially not her and Blair.”
“If it’s gossip, that’s fine. Gossip, I can handle,” I say.
The bell rings.
“Settle down, everyone,” Mrs. Hoxley says.
Blair walks past my desk, makes eye contact, and winks.
Not good.
The class quiets, and Mrs. Hoxley launches into her typical morning speech about homework and study habits.
I lean my head on my hand, and my eyelids droop.
“Samantha,” Elijah says, and I sit up so fast that I smack my elbow into my desk.
Mrs. Hoxley gives me a warning look.
“I have just come from the records room,” Elijah says.
One look at his face tells me I’m not going to like whatever he has to say. He never visits me in school.
“I did, in fact, locate the digital scans of those newspapers. However, the ones we want were missing.”
Damn. I pull out my notebook and open it to a fresh page.
I write: Is there a backup?
“Also missing. What is odd, though, is that the scans were on a machine in a rarely frequented storage room. Everything was covered in a layer of dust, except that one hard drive. I believe that is what it is called.”
Me: Someone rushed over there in the middle of the night?
Elijah waits for me to finish writing. “Someone alive. Spirits do not leave fingerprints.”
Me: Whatever was in those newspapers must have been revealing. Do you think there was a name we know in those articles? Someone we would immediately recognize?
“Likely. I will also check neighboring towns to see if any of their records might be helpful.”
Me: And I’ll ask the girls if there are any other ways to get old Salem newspapers.
He hesitates. “Be cautious, Samantha. I do not know what we may have triggered with our visit last night.”
Me: I’m always careful.
He raises an eyebrow and blinks out.
I write down our entire conversation and pass it to Susannah, who reads it and passes it to Alice and then Mary.
The bell rings.
“The town hall is really the only place to get local newspapers. Some of the historical societies around here keep their own records, but mostly on the Witch Trials. I’d be surprised if they had much on the Titanic,” Mary says, and we all stand up.
“If our grandmothers were still alive, they might know where we could start,” Susannah says.
We make our way into the hall.
“The thing that worries me,” I say in a hushed voice, “is that if someone went to the town hall in the middle of the night, that person has to be here in Salem.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Alice says. “And no one would do that unless they thought we’d recognize their name in the paper. I think we just confirmed that we must know the person who’s doing these things.” We all look around the hall suspiciously. “Everyone be extra careful today. And as soon as we’re out of here, we’ll figure out how to help Elijah get more information.”
The girls and I nod and share a worried look. We turn our separate ways down the hall.
I open the door to Wardwell’s AP History class.
“Ah, Miss Mather. I will see you during my office hours a
fter school today,” Mr. Wardwell says.
“Actually, I can’t today. I have—”
“That’s what you said yesterday. But unfortunately, I’m going to need you to make time today. Thursday and Friday are impossible for me because of Spring Fling preparations.”
“Is there any way we can do it next week?” I ask.
“Not if you plan on passing this class,” he says.
The last bell rings, and I make my way through the hallway. Two girls ahead of me whisper behind their hands and look in my direction. The weird thing is, they don’t laugh. They frown.
I unload my books into my locker. Please let Elijah have made some headway. His not coming back to school is a good sign. I click my locker shut and turn around. Mary, Alice, and Susannah are standing right behind me.
“Whoa,” I say. “Way to creepily sneak up on someone.”
“I’m so glad you think so,” Alice says. “I worked long and hard on that technique.”
Mary bounces slightly and grins at me. “Give it to her, Suze.”
Susannah pulls a small black velvet box from her Victorian jacket. She holds it out to me in her palm. “From us.”
I look at each of them. “What’s this for?”
“Just open it,” Mary says, clasping her hands together with all the enthusiasm of a kid at a birthday party.
I flip the lid. Inside is a delicate silver broom necklace. It looks handmade.
Alice pulls her own broom necklace out of her blouse.
“It’s our personal symbol for our circle. It binds us. Alice chose it when we were kids. We all wear one,” Susannah says.
“It’s silly,” Alice says. “But at eight, I thought it was super cool.”
I open my mouth to say thanks, but my voice catches. Elijah was right. I do belong in Salem. And all of a sudden, I want to cry.
“Well, it’s not that bad,” Alice says, but she’s smiling.
“It’s not bad at all,” I manage, smiling too.
“Consider yourself official,” Susannah says, and links her arm through mine as we head down the hallway toward Wardwell’s.
I slip the necklace over my head just as we pass a couple holding hands. They look from the Descendants to me and frown.
“I think we can definitively conclude that whatever gossip Niki and Blair spread today was related to me,” I say.
“Agreed,” Susannah says. “Normally, I would be annoyed. But I’m actually relieved.”
I nod. “The only strange part is that whatever they said isn’t getting me judgy looks but sad ones. Have you guys heard anything about it?”
“No,” Alice says. “But people wouldn’t tell us rumors about you. They know better.”
“Let’s be honest, Alice,” Mary says. “People don’t usually talk to us at all about anything. Not if they have to meet that death stare of yours. And I don’t know what you saw today, but we got just as many looks as Sam.”
They got looks, too? I stop in front of my history classroom. “I’ll be fast.”
“We’ll wait here,” Susannah says.
I push open the door, and Wardwell looks up from a stack of papers. “Please sit.”
I plop down in a chair next to his desk.
He clears his throat. “I’d like you to complete the remainder of the work you missed by writing a five-page paper.”
“Sounds good. I can do that,” I say quickly.
“I want you to use the research you’ve done these past weeks on the Titanic to create a fictional narrative,” he continues.
The last thing I want to write is a paper on the Titanic, but I know him well enough to not even attempt to ask for a different subject.
“For fun I will give you an object that is similar to objects recovered in the wreckage. You will examine it, determining what kind of a passenger might have carried it and what their story was from the moment they boarded until the moment they arrived home—or didn’t arrive home, as the case may be.”
Object. I glance at the door and catch a glimpse of Alice’s face in the small window.
Wardwell opens his desk drawer. “Be careful with it and do not lose it.” He places a silver book the size of a playing card on the desk in front of me. It twinkles in the bright classroom lighting.
I stand up so fast that my chair almost topples over. The silver book from my dream.
“Is there a problem?” he asks me, examining my face like he’s looking for something specific.
“What? No. Charley horse,” I say, and rub the back of my calf. Damn it. I can’t believe I reacted like that. This lack of sleep has me all jumpy.
Alice comes through the door, with Mary and Susannah behind her. “Want a ride home, Sam?” She feigns surprise. “Oh, sorry, Mr. Wardwell. I didn’t realize you guys were having a meeting.”
“I’d ask you ladies to wait outside, but we are technically finished here.” Mr. Wardwell points at the silver book. “Make sure you take that with you, Sam.”
I don’t move. There is no way I’m touching that thing.
Think. I scan his desk. “Is it old?”
“Fairly.”
“Oh, well, I don’t want to just shove it in my bag, then,” I say. I grab two tissues from his tissue box.
“It’s not that delicate,” he says, but I’ve already got it wrapped up.
I make my way out of the classroom with the girls. We put a good hundred feet between us and his door before we start talking.
“You know this is the silver book from my dream, right?” I say, pointing at my shoulder bag.
“Why do you think we came in, Sherlock?” says Alice, and pushes open the door leading to the back field. “You seriously need to work on hiding your emotions. You looked ten kinds of flustered in there. If Wardwell is in on this Titanic spell, you just set off warning bells.”
“Did he say anything we should know about?” Susannah asks.
“Possibly. He did use the word ‘object’ to describe it,” I say. “If he knew anything about our conversations, he could have chosen that word to mess with me.”
“He also looked really adamant about you taking it,” Mary says as we walk across the grass. “He didn’t take his eyes off you.”
The guys’ lacrosse team jogs past us.
“Sam,” Dillon says, and stops. His usual happy tone is missing. “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” He glances at the girls. “Alone, if that’s cool?”
“Uh, sure. What’s up?” I say. Did something happen with Jaxon?
He leads me away from the girls. “You’re not getting in a car with them, are you?”
“Huh?”
His breathing is slightly labored from his run. “The Descendants. Don’t you think you should steer clear of them, at least until you know if it’s true?”
“Hold on, what are you talking about?”
He looks at me like I’m the one saying shocking things. “Everyone is saying that it was your stepmother who tried to hang you in the woods. And the reason the Descendants haven’t told anyone is because they’re planning their revenge or something. Everyone’s saying they’ve bewitched you. I mean, it is super weird that you guys haven’t hung out for six months and now all of a sudden you’re inseparable.”
My stepmother. My stomach clenches so hard I grab it. “What?” I walk two feet away from him and then back. What is he saying? People know it was Vivian? But how would they even…Jaxon. The conversation we had in his truck. Holy shit. I press the heel of my hand into my forehead. Jaxon must have told Niki. It’s as if someone sucker-punched me. I know Jaxon’s under a spell and that it’s not his fault, but the betrayal is so big that I can’t swallow my upset. Tears prick my eyes.
I jog back to the girls.
“Sam, wait!” Dillon calls after me, but I don’t stop.
I speed-walk right past them.
“What the hell happened back there?” Alice asks, keeping pace with me.
I get in the Jeep and they follow. “They know about Vi
vian. Niki knows. Which means Jaxon told her.” My voice catches on his name.
“Shit!” Alice says, and hits the wheel with the palm of her hand.
“How could he do that?” Mary says. “That’s horrible. Even under a spell, that’s horrible.”
“And people are saying that the reason you guys didn’t tell anyone is that you’re planning your revenge. People think we’re suddenly hanging out because you bewitched me.”
“This is Niki’s lie, but it’s not typical. Someone is setting us up,” Susannah says.
“The only thing to do is try to ride it out,” Mary says. “Not acknowledge it. There’s no evidence it was your stepmother. The police would have questioned you about it way earlier. It’s actually good you heard it from Dillon now instead of being surprised in class. Everyone would take your reaction as a confirmation that it’s true.”
“Riding it out isn’t the issue. What if something does happen to me?” I say.
“That was my thought, too,” Alice says. “Now, there’s a story. A reason for us to have conflict.”
“Redd’s warning,” Susannah says. “Maybe you are the target, Sam. And maybe we’re the ones supposed to take the fall for it.”
“It’s the thirteenth,” Mary says.
No one responds.
“The book,” I say. I cover my hand with my sleeve and pull the tissue-wrapped package out onto the seat between me and Susannah.
“Here,” Susannah says, and hands me two pens.
I pull back the tissues with them. The small silver book is engraved with a lacy pattern, and there’s a ship in the center. “You guys? Am I wrong, or is this the same ship drawing that was on those raffle tickets that put the seasickness spell on Susannah? The tickets Blair gave us.”
“You’re not wrong,” Susannah says before anyone else can respond.
We all look at each other.
I push open the front cover with the pens. The off-white first page reads:
“That’s not a silver book, that’s a silver dance card,” Mary says with surprise. “My aunt has some in her antique shop. Women used to carry them at balls and things and write their dance partners down in them.” She leans over the center console to get a better look. “That one looks legitimately old.”
Haunting the Deep Page 21