AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I agree,” Jamie said. “Listen, I have to go. Give me the names, will you?”
For a second, Fiona felt the urge to say no. She wanted to do this—she wanted to be the one to track these girls down, to talk to them, to do something for the dead girl in the well. But she couldn’t do as much on her own as she could with the Barrons police force helping her. So she gave Jamie the names and hung up, staring at the deserted roadside with her phone in her lap, wondering why she felt like she’d just given the case away, let it slip from her hands.
She called her father, and the second she heard his voice, she began to feel better. “Dad, can I come by?”
“Fee! Yes, of course.” She heard the rustle of papers, the beep of the outdated computer. He was working, as always. “How far are you? Let me put tea on.”
“Give me twenty-five minutes.”
“You have something to run by me, don’t you, my girl?”
“Yes, I do.”
“That’s my daughter,” he said, and hung up.
The trees waved in the wind, the bare branches overhanging the car wafting like a sultan’s fan. Fiona shivered and sank farther into her coat, unwilling to move for the moment. She had done this the other night, too—sat in her parked car at the side of the road, staring at nothing and thinking. There was something soothing and meditative about the side of a road, a place most people passed by. As a child she’d spent car rides looking out the window, thinking of the places they passed, wondering what it would be like to stop there, or there, or there. It had never been enough for her just to get from one place to another.
Now she watched as a crow landed on a stark branch on the other side of the road, its big black body gleaming as if coated with oil. It cocked its black beak at her and was soon joined by a second bird, the two of them edging cautiously along the branch the way birds do, each foot rising and falling with careful precision, the talons flexing out and curling in again as they gripped the branch. They stared at her with their small black eyes, so fathomless yet so knowing, as if they were taking in every detail of her. Near the end of the branch, having found a good vantage point, both birds were still.
The phone shrilled and vibrated in Fiona’s lap, making her jump. She didn’t recognize the number, but it was local. She answered. “Hello?”
“Okay, fine.” The words were brisk, not bothering with a greeting. Fiona recognized the voice only because she’d just heard it twenty minutes ago—it was Cathy. “Aunt Sairy’s napping, and she can’t hear me, so I guess I’ll tell you. But you have to promise she won’t get in trouble.”
Fiona felt her heart stutter in her chest, the back of her neck prickling. “What do you mean, get in trouble?”
“She had good intentions,” Cathy said. “You have to understand that Aunt Sairy has a good heart. She meant well. She’s been paranoid ever since she did it. That’s why she didn’t tell you. But she’s getting old now, and we’re going to get rid of the house soon. She’s moving in with me. We might as well tell you as anyone.”
“Cathy.” Fiona was sitting up in the driver’s seat now, her mouth dry. “What are you talking about?”
“The records,” Cathy said. “From the school. She took them, the last day. They were going to destroy them—sixty years of records. There was nowhere to put them, nowhere to store them. No one wanted them. The Christophers had bought the land and were going to put the records in the landfill. So Aunt Sairy volunteered to take the records to the dump, but instead she brought them home.”
“Home?”
“In the shed out back,” Cathy said. “They’re all there. They’ve been there since 1979. We’ll have to get rid of them when we sell the house. Give me a few days to talk Aunt Sairy into it, and you can come and get them. Hell, they’re worthless. You can have every single one of them for all I care.”
Chapter 11
Katie
Barrons, Vermont
October 1950
Katie had never been to Special Detention before, not even when she got into a fistfight with Charlotte Kankle. That fight had been broken up by Sally D’Allessandro, the dorm monitor for Floor Three before she’d left Idlewild and nosy Susan Brady had been appointed instead. Sally had had an oddly languid manner for a dorm monitor, and she’d never sent anyone to Special Detention—she’d just halfheartedly dressed them down as she’d stood in front of them with her droopy posture and bony arms. Hey, just stop it, okay?
Katie followed Mrs. Peabody across the courtyard, her hands still jittering in nervous fear. What had just happened? Had that been real? The door banging open? The voice? She hadn’t heard the words exactly, but she’d heard something. High-pitched, plaintive. The other girls had looked as scared as she was. Katie watched Mrs. Peabody’s polyester-clad back, looking for a sign, a reaction, anything from a grown-up. All she saw was the teacher’s furiously angry stride, the swish of her dress loud in the silence.
Mrs. Peabody led her to a room on the first floor at the end of the teachers’ dorm. She pointed to a stack of Latin textbooks, accompanied by blank paper and a pen. “The conjugation exercises,” she said succinctly. “Do them until the detention is finished. I will be checking your work.”
Katie stared balefully at the stack of books. “The exercises from which one?” she asked.
“All of them,” Mrs. Peabody replied. “Think twice before you talk back to me and you pull a prank like that again.”
“It wasn’t a prank,” Katie protested. How was that even possible? How could she have made the door slam open?
But in an angry flash of understanding, she knew it didn’t matter. Because Mrs. Peabody already knew. This was all a fiction to make the teacher feel better. “It was Mary,” she said to the older woman, the truth hard and satisfying as she watched Mrs. Peabody recoil. “It was Mary—”
Mrs. Peabody lunged forward and grabbed Katie’s arm so fast, so hard, that Katie cried out. “I will hear no more of this nonsense!” she hissed, her face so close Katie could smell sugary peppermint on her breath. Her eyes were hard with fear. She shook Katie once, her fingers digging into her arm. “Conjugation exercises. One hour.” She let her go and left, shutting the door with a click.
“It wasn’t a prank!” Katie screamed at the closed door, as loud as she could. “It was Mary!”
There was no response.
Stupid, stupid. She was still shaking. Time to get herself together. Katie did a circuit of the room. A dusty chalkboard; a grimy window looking out toward the woods; a stack of old local newspapers, mostly rotted; a single desk and chair, the desk stacked with the books, papers, and pen. Katie tried the door; it was locked. She yanked at the window, but got a shower of old paint flakes in her hair for the effort. She got on her stockinged knees and inspected the desk, looking at all the initials carved by girls locked in Special Detention over the years. Disappointing—she didn’t recognize any of the initials, nor had anyone carved anything good into the hard wood. A riffle through the blank notepaper showed nothing there, either.
Then she looked at the stack of textbooks. Books that stayed permanently in this room.
Teachers are so stupid.
She sat in the hard ladder-back chair and leafed open the top book. The verb conjugation answers were written in the margins; doing the exercises would be easy. The book was full of other messages left over the years, including an entire story about a unicorn written in pencil over the empty back pages, complete with drawings. The story started innocently, and got progressively dirtier, until the final illustration was so rude even Katie had to laugh. Whoever the author was—the story was unsigned—Katie approved of her heartily. There were other messages in the book’s margins, some of them barely literate, some of them rude, some of them potentially useful.
Mrs. Patton pretends she has a husband but she doesn’t. Interesting. Mrs. Patton was Idlewild’s headmistress, often spoken of but rarely seen. Katie filed this tidbit away.
Mary Hand walks on Old Barrons Road at night. She sucks blood. Maybe true, probably not, and not very interesting either way.
There is a baby buried in the garden.
