Phoebe nodded, clutched the strange little bag of teeth, and wondered if they’d ever be able to make sense of any of it.
“They were his first gift, I think,” Sam said, nodding at the bag in her hand.
“What?”
“The teeth. Lisa woke up one morning and found them on her pillow. We thought she was tricking us, that she put the teeth there herself. But now I think the son-of-a-bitch actually came into the house while we were all sleeping and left them on her pillow. Can you imagine? Who would take a chance like that?”
Someone who knew he wouldn’t be caught, Phoebe thought as she shook the bag, rattling the teeth like dice.
Chapter 14
Lisa
June 8, Fifteen Years Ago
Lisa had been thinking about it and had decided that maybe all of the tests she’d given herself over the years—holding her breath until she turned blue, making herself face angry dogs, touching bloody meat—maybe all of this was just training. It was a way to teach herself to not let fear get in the way. Preparing her to one day go into the woods and meet the fairies, no matter what might happen.
“Tell more of the story,” Evie begged, licking her lips like she was hungry. “About the sisters. They’d just left the castle, right?”
She was trying to distract Lisa, to make her forget about going alone into the woods. The very woods Lisa had just caught Evie coming out of, which was its own weird mystery. Evie had snuck off on her own after dinner, and an hour and a half later Lisa spotted her stepping into the yard from the woods. Lisa wondered if Evie was starting to believe and was looking for the fairies herself.
“What are you doing?” Lisa had asked.
“Nothing,” Evie said, not looking her in the eye. “Come on, it’s freezing out here. Let’s go in.”
Now they were back in Lisa’s room, getting sweatshirts because the night had grown cool. Once Evie had on her baggy gray pullover, she grabbed her sketchbook and flipped open to a drawing she’d been working on for the past two days—the cellar hole with the foxglove in the corner. Only in Evie’s rendition each flower had a horrible skeleton face at the end.
“Okay,” Lisa said. “But only if you tell me what you were just doing in the woods.”
Evie gave a frustrated sigh. “Scoping it out. You know, making sure it looked safe.” She scribbled hard, shading in the bottom of the cellar hole.
Lisa nodded, but somehow she knew Evie wasn’t telling the truth. She couldn’t believe Evie would lie to her. But then again, she couldn’t believe Evie had hurt Gerald so badly either. Over and over, Lisa had replayed the way Evie had stood over his crumpled body, taking out her knife. What would have happened if Lisa hadn’t stopped her? How far would she have gone? Lisa shivered. It was up to her to keep Evie under control, to make sure she didn’t hurt anyone again. But now she was worried that somehow she might be losing her influence over Evie.
“Come on, Lisa, the story!” Evie said.
“Okay already. They were on horseback, remember?” She touched the teeth in her pocket, remembering her strange dream.
“Yes,” Evie said, setting down the sketchbook and closing her eyes. “Riding fast through the woods.” She reached under her shirt and pulled out the key, holding it tight.
“Away from the dark, cursed castle,” Lisa said. “They rode all night. And then they came to a river. It was deep and wide. They looked for an easy way across but couldn’t find one. Then a frog hopped out of the water and spoke. He said, ‘If you can answer my riddle, sisters, I’ll get you across.’
“ ‘Very well,’ answered the dark sister.
“ ‘What holds water but is full of holes?’ asked the frog, smiling slyly.
“The pale sister moaned. ‘Cursed frog. It’s impossible. Nothing with holes can hold water.’
“But the other sister said, ‘Not so fast. It’s a sponge. A sponge holds water and is full of holes.’
“And so the frog hopped along the shore to a little grove of trees where he showed the sisters a hidden boat.”
“A sponge!” Evie exclaimed. “You’re the most clever storyteller in the history of the planet!”
Lisa smiled. “I’ll tell you more later. I’ve gotta get down to Reliance.”
They headed out to the yard, where Sammy was waiting. “You still going down there?” he asked, peering apprehensively into the dark woods.
Lisa nodded.
“Take this,” Evie said, pressing her sheathed hunting knife into Lisa’s hand. It was heavier than Lisa expected.
“No,” Lisa said, handing the knife back. “I don’t want to scare them. And remember what my mom said? About how they don’t like iron? So probably they don’t like knives and stuff.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Evie said, looking uncharacteristically nervous. “I don’t think you should go. Not on your own.”
“Don’t worry,” Lisa said. “Besides, you just checked it out yourself, right? Made sure there were no booby traps or an angry army of little green men waiting to tie me up and steal me away?”
Evie snorted, rolled her eyes.
“What if Gerald and Becca come back?” Sam said. “I think they’re the only thing you might have to worry about down there.”
“It’s not me they’re pissed at,” Lisa said, looking at Evie. “And Evie’s got the knife.”
“We’ll be here in the yard waiting,” Evie said. “Any trouble, you yell as loud as you can. We’ll hear you.” She and Sammy had their sleeping bags out. Lisa’s was beside them, an empty chrysalis.
Lisa slowly made her way down the hill and stepped over the brook, wondering if there’d be a frog waiting to ask her a riddle, and across to Reliance. The moonlight cast shadows of the trees with their leaves blowing—they looked like shaggy monsters writhing on the forest floor. Suddenly the whole landscape reminded her of one of Evie’s drawings.
Fighting the growing urge to run, she walked up to the edge of the cellar hole, sure she heard footsteps behind her. She held her breath, listening.
“Sam? Evie?” she called.
Silence.
She was sweating in spite of the cool breeze.
“If you two are following me, I’ll wring your necks. Skin you with Evie’s knife.”
In the fairy tales, the girl gets nothing unless she takes a chance.
Carrying the plate of treats, Lisa carefully lowered herself down, landing in roughly the same place Gerald fell. She thought of the awkward angle of his arm when he got up.
“I hope he’s okay,” she said out loud. And she did. He was just a dork who had found someone even lower on the social food chain than him and couldn’t resist taking advantage. He shouldn’t have said those awful things to Evie, but he didn’t deserve a broken arm.
In the corner of the old cellar hole, next to the foxglove, Lisa placed the plate with a glass of Orange Crush, a couple of cherry Life Savers, an unwrapped Devil Dog. She could barely see the rough shapes in the dark—sweet, shadowy offerings.
Lisa crab-crawled backward across the dirt floor, keeping her eyes on the treats. Then she settled herself against the rough stone wall across from the plate, looked up at what little she could see of the stars through the trees. She zipped her red hooded sweatshirt up tight, touched the bag of teeth in her pocket. Then the penny, which she’d attached to her charm bracelet.
1918. The year everyone in the village went missing.
Except for little Eugene.
People don’t just disappear without a trace like that.
Lisa yawned. She was tired. Bone tired. That was one of Aunt Hazel’s expression, one she always thought was funny—bones couldn’t get tired. At least she didn’t think so. But hers felt tired now. She let her eyes close. If anyone came into the cellar hole, she’d wake up.
A few seconds (or was it minutes? hours even?) later, she opened her eyes. Footsteps. Getting closer. She told herself she was hearing things, it was just that overactive imagination she was famous for.
“Hello?” she called, her own voice a strange crackle in the dark.
“Eugene?” she said, tentatively.
What if there were ghosts? What if everyone who’d disappeared in Reliance was still trapped there in some way? Maybe that’s what the lights were.
Twigs cracked. Feet shuffled through the leaf litter, but she couldn’t tell if they were moving closer or farther away.
She closed her eyes. Said the four most comforting words she knew: “Once upon a time.”
An incantation.
Protect me. Open the door and let me go someplace else.
She held her breath, stood slowly, peeking up at ground level. Maybe it was just Gerald after all, pissed at Evie and looking for revenge.
But there was no one there.
Just her ears playing tricks on her. Maybe the footsteps were part of the dream she’d been having, something about teeth and keys and doors.
She was about to climb out and head for home when a scream filled the woods, bounced off the walls of the cellar hole, through the trees—a scream so loud she was sure that not one human being could be making it. Surely the woods, the animals, even the soft beams of moonlight were all screaming together.
Chapter 15
Phoebe
June 8, Present Day
It had been a Monday like any other, putting aside the fact that Phoebe had spent every free moment telling her boss, Dr. Ostrum, and Franny, the clinic’s head tech, about her strange weekend, hoping to make some sense of it all. And telling the story kept her from thinking about the unopened pregnancy test in her purse. She’d promised herself that she’d do it before she went home. She had to.
She’d stopped at O’Brien’s Pharmacy on her way to work. Not wanting to dawdle and draw attention to herself, she’d snatched up the most expensive test, figuring quality mattered in a case like this. The woman behind the counter was heavyset, with dyed orange hair sticky with hairspray. Her eyebrows seemed to be missing, but she’d drawn some on with a matching orange pencil. She’d worked at O’Brien’s for forever, but her gardenia-scented perfume seemed particularly cloying today.
“All set, hon?”
Phoebe nodded and plunked the test down on the counter. The woman scanned it.
“Eighteen eighty-nine,” she announced. Her nails were coral pink with little rhinestones stuck on.
Phoebe reached into her purse for a twenty.
“Aren’t you Sammy Nazzaro’s girl?” the woman asked, scrunching up her face.
Phoebe froze, unsure how to answer. If she said yes, then word of her having bought a pregnancy test might filter down through the grapevine so that Sam would know by suppertime.
Phoebe shook her head, smiled lamely, and looked down, handing over the money she owed. She flashed onto the dozens of times she’d stopped in here with Sam in the last three years, picking up toilet paper or Tylenol or shampoo. How many times had this very woman waited on them, mentally cataloging their purchases, assessing, judging? She cursed herself for not driving to an anonymous big box store in another town.
The cashier squinted at Phoebe and made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Just as well,” she said, turning to the cash register, then back again to give Phoebe her change. “Cursed, that family is. Stillborn babies, missing girls, suicides. And that old man, Dr. O’Toole”—she gave a dramatic shiver—“he was like the grim reaper himself. There used to be a little song all us kids sang about him.”
Phoebe said, “Oh?” in what she hoped was a politely uninterested way, as she stuffed her change into a pocket and grabbed the bag, already half-turning to leave.
But she continued, her singsongy voice high-pitched and harsh at the same time:
Don’t get sick, don’t miss school,
’Cause your papa will call for Doctor O’Toole;
He’ll eat your heart, he’ll tie you to the bed,
He’ll put bad dreams inside your head.
She paused to giggle and shrug. Phoebe shrugged back, heading for the door as quickly as she could without actually running.
“Have a good one!” the woman called.
Phoebe, Franny, and Dr. O. were gathered around the reception desk just before closing. Phoebe was shutting down the computer and getting ready to turn the phones over to the answering service. The floors were swept and mopped, giving the office its familiar pine-scented disinfectant smell. The seats in the waiting area had been wiped down; the brochures on heartworm, obesity, flea control, dental care, and pet health insurance straightened.
“But why would they go to the trouble of faking a stabbing? That seems a bit much, doesn’t it?” Dr. Ostrum asked.
“It was a sure way to get them to chase her,” Franny said, taking off her lab coat and yanking her unruly brown hair loose from its ponytail. “If the goal was to get them out of the cabin for a while. You should never underestimate what people are willing to do to get what they want. For whatever reason, they wanted something you guys had packed in your stuff.”
Franny was a local. She’d gone to school with Lisa and Sam, was in Sam’s grade. When they all got together for drinks, Franny and Sam talked about what became of old classmates, of the gym teacher with the harelip, of the time the football team lost a bet and they all came to school in drag.
Phoebe nodded. “There was an old book. The one Lisa claimed to have found in the cellar hole that summer. The Book of Fairies. They took that along with everything else.”
Dr. Ostrum pursed her lips, shook her head. She was in her late fifties, a petite woman with short silver-white hair. She reminded Phoebe of a bald eagle, though she would never say that out loud. It was more than the gray hair—there was something dignified about her sharp features and perfect posture. She never lost her cool and was completely poised in every situation. And perhaps the best thing about her, the thing that made Phoebe absolutely devoted to Dr. O., was that she thought Phoebe was smart. She never once looked down on her for not having a college degree, never suggested that Phoebe improve herself by taking adult education courses. She listened to Phoebe’s thoughts and opinions, let her run the office the way she thought best. And when Phoebe had a good idea, Dr. O. praised her for it, made her feel appreciated. It was different from any job she’d ever had.
“Do you think the government might be involved in this somehow, Bee?” Franny asked. “I always wondered if they had something to do with Lisa’s disappearance. Like maybe she and Sammy stumbled across some military secret in the woods or something.”
Phoebe admired Franny’s powers of deduction but not her paranoia. In Franny’s world it was us against them, and the best way to survive was to live under the radar. She believed the government had spy cameras in people’s homes and workplaces, was monitoring every phone conversation and keeping track of every citizen’s credit card purchases. Franny had no credit cards or bank account. “They can’t trace you with cash,” she said. She used disposable cell phones and tossed them every few months, and she rented a post office box at a Mailboxes & More store three towns away. Franny and her husband, Jim, lived in an off-the-grid house they’d built themselves that was powered by solar panels, a windmill, and a generator. They had an underground gas tank, a cellar with enough canned and dry rations to last two years, a hidden fallout-proof bunker with walls made of two feet of reinforced concrete, and guns and ammo enough to supply a small guerrilla group. Franny and Jim said they were only preparing “just in case,” but on the few occasions Phoebe had visited what they referred to as “their compound,” Phoebe got the sense that it was something they were eagerly awaiting.
“It just all seems a little over the top. A little theatrical,” Dr. O. said about Phoebe’s weekend adventures.
“I agree,” Phoebe said. “Whoever these people are, they have a flair for the dramatic.”
“This is like one of those crazy Missing Persons stories from TV,” Franny said. “A woman disappears for fifteen years, only to return and send everyone’s lives
spinning out of control.”
“But not many missing people claim they were living in the land of the fairies,” Phoebe said.
“I don’t know about fairies,” Franny said, “but something weird is going on in those woods. A whole town disappearing like that all those years ago. Plates of food on the tables. Cows unmilked in the barns.”
Dr. Ostrum shook her head. “That’s not what happened,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Phoebe asked.
“I’m afraid it’s not the story of intrigue people like to believe. If you really do the research, you’ll see that the truth is the town dried up slowly, like any other. People packed up and left to go where the work was. They moved closer to the railroad, the quarries, better pasture land for the animals. But that’s dull and doesn’t make for a good story. So over the years, people embellished it, turned it into this eerie legend. The mysterious disappearance of the town called Reliance.”
“But Sam’s mother said that’s what happened. Her grandfather was found out there,” Phoebe said.
Dr. O. shook her head. “Come on, Phoebe. What’s more likely, that he was left by fairies—fairies!—or that he was a child someone had out of wedlock, maybe an orphan, a regular old abandoned infant in the days before access to birth control, much less safe, legal abortion? Stories passed down in families aren’t always the truth. You know that.”
“I still say there’s something creepy about those woods,” Franny said. “And what about the Lord’s Prayer carved into the rock on the way into town? I heard the guy who did it was trying to protect Harmony from what was out in those woods.”
Dr. O. shook her head, laughing. “Just another story,” she said. “And even if it’s not, the man who did it was obviously too caught up in the stories himself.”
“What about all the fairy stuff?” asked Franny. “And what about Lisa? A little girl doesn’t just vanish like that.”
“No,” Dr. Ostrum agreed. “Of course not. Someone—some real, tangible person—took her. No doubt someone who took advantage of her gullibility and superstition. There are evil forces at work here, but I’d say they’re definitely the human kind—as much as that lacks romance. I think the best thing you can do, Phoebe, is leave all of this alone. Tell the police about the note, the phone call, the impostors at the cabin, your stolen things, all of it. Let them sort it out—that’s their job. Someone’s playing games with poor Sam, and it’s not right. But the longer you play along, the harder it’s going to be to extricate yourselves.”
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