I stepped closer to the mantel and looked at the brown-and-white photographs, three of the same girl, and one of a trio of girls dressed in black high-necked gowns and light pinafores, like maids.
The three were seated on a settee holding hands with each other. The one who sat in the middle had long, flowing hair crowned with wildflowers, and she was smiling at the camera, her head tilted to the left. Flirting. She reminded me of Mandy. To her left, a chubby girl had two braids looped around her ears, then twisted into a little crown on top of her head. The other one a long braid, like Julie sometimes wore her hair, held in place by an oversized bow.
I gazed into the steely eyes of the lone girl, who looked more grown-up than the others in a dark, high-collared dress of lace over a sheeny, solid fabric. The long sleeves encased her arms, and the outfit looked tight and uncomfortable. Her light hair was slicked back in a bun. The skin on her face looked stretched, and her ears stuck out. She was wearing jet bead earrings. A large cameo was pinned to the high collar. It was so big it would have made it difficult for her to lower her chin.
I couldn’t imagine having to wear anything like that; she was probably imprisoned inside a lace-up corset, too. Her gloved hands were clenched at her sides. She looked like she wanted to scream in each of the three pictures, each one so similar to the others that at first I thought they were duplicates. But in one she held a single rose in her fist, and in another, she had a death grip on a Bible.
“Are these relatives of someone?” I asked Kiyoko.
“We think they lived here,” Sangeeta replied. “We found a lot of old pictures in the attic. There was an old trunk. The workmen must have found it and left it there.”
Lara took over. “Actually, there is no ‘we.’ Mandy found the trunk. Before your time, Sangeeta.” She shot laser beams at Sangeeta, who swallowed, crestfallen.
“Well, they’re very interesting,” Julie chirruped. “They tie in with your decorating.” She smiled at Sangeeta. “Are you going anywhere special for the break?”
“Mumbai, maybe,” Sangeeta said, regaining her composure. “We’ll see.”
“I’d love to go to India,” Julie said.
We moved on. Ms. Meyerson leaned out of the kitchen and waved at us.
Once we were out of earshot, I said to Julie, “That was fun.”
“Lara is a bitch,” she murmured under her breath. “I think she’s in love with Mandy in a gay way. She hates Troy.”
Then I felt someone watching me, and turned my head. It was Kiyoko. She walked to the panorama window and looked at me again. She wanted me to go outside?
Just then, Elvis came up to Julie and said, “We need you to settle a bet.” She glanced at me apologetically and added, “It’s a horse thing.”
“Go, go,” I urged Julie.
Kiyoko was walking into the kitchen. I sauntered after her. Kiyoko took the side door; I did, too; and we walked out of the kitchen, into falling snow. I halted, admiring it, snow in November. Then she hurried me through the gate to the other side of the privet hedge. We didn’t have on jackets, and she was so incredibly thin I half-expected her bones to snap when she began to shiver.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, glancing at the house. She moved us farther away, so that I could see the empty window above the kitchen. Her teeth were chattering and she rubbed her hands.
I looked at those hands. Her once-perfect French manicure was a thing of the past. Her nails were ragged, the cuticles bleeding.
“Do you want to go on a walk?” I asked her. “Or over to Grose?”
“No.” She stuffed her hands into her armpits and hunched. Then she looked at me, hard. “Something is going on. Something’s not right.”
“Something . . . ” I said slowly. “Something like . . . ?”
“I heard noises in our attic last night. And I went up there . . .” She licked her lips. “It was scary. I don’t know how to describe it, except that I didn’t want to stay in there. I had to leave.”
Where Mandy found a trunk.
I nodded and opened my mouth to say something, but she rushed on.
“When I came back from the attic, I heard Mandy talking in her room. I thought she was talking to Lara or Alis, but she was talking to
herself.
Only, in another voice. And she was laughing. And she said something about her luck changing. That things were going to start moving fast.”
Oh my God. Wait until I tell Rose
, I thought.
“Do you know what she’s talking about?” I asked.
Kiyoko shook her head. Her face was pale. Her eyes darted left, right, and she leaned toward me. “Have
you
ever heard her say anything like that?”
I leaned toward her and said, “As a matter of fact . . . ”
She crooked her neck, as if to catch every syllable I was about to share. And something stopped me. I looked into her ashen, hungry face and it was almost like an actual voice inside my head warning me,
Don’t trust her
.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I haven’t.” It was clumsy. But I stuck to it, clamping my mouth shut.
Her forehead creased. Then she looked me straight in the eye and pulled up the corners of her mouth, as if she really did want to smile, but couldn’t quite force herself to. I was fascinated, trying to figure out where she was going emotionally—and what part of it was real.
“It’s okay to tell me,” she said, in a low, confidential tone of voice. “It’ll stay between us.”
Uh-huh. I had almost forgotten that Kiyoko was a Mandy-minion first, and my project partner second. We’d worked well together, and we’d gotten a great grade. Maybe at another school, we could have become real friends.
“What did Mandy say?” I asked her, throwing her loyalty back in her face. “I assume you asked her about talking to herself?”
Kiyoko gave her head a little shake. “She said she was on the phone to her brother.” She took a breath. “And then she asked me why I was spying on her.”
I waited. Kiyoko’s eyes welled. “Lindsay, everyone says Jessel is haunted. And then this morning, when Mandy decorated our mantel for the party, I think I heard her
talking to the pictures.
And she called one of them Gilda.”
She shivered harder. I could practically hear her bones cracking. “We contacted Gilda the other night using our Ouija board. When Rose was over here. Maybe Rose mentioned it?”
Oh my God, I’m getting the low-rent prank treatment, too, just like Rose,
I thought. Or maybe this was just the warm up. Kiyoko knew I was staying here over break. Everyone did. I was ripe for terror and humiliation. Maybe if I played along, Kiyoko would throw out some hints—planted or accidental—about what I could expect. If anything. Maybe Kiyoko was truly scared—an unknowing pawn.
“Kiyoko,” I said kindly, “maybe she was pranking
you
.”
“I thought of that.” She took a deep breath. “I . . . sometimes I blank out, and it’s like I’m almost awake, or . . . or aware, or . . . ” She looked down. “Plus, I had a horrible nightmare last night.”
That pricked my interest. “You did? What about?”
She stared down at her fancy matte bronze high heels. In the snow. “I don’t remember.”
I hesitated. “Do you guys do drugs?”
“No!” She looked horrified.
“Do you ever slip things into our drinks?”
“No way, Lindsay. That would be so horrible.” She licked her lips. “But we . . . ”
She blanched, and whatever she said was lost as I glanced back up at the window over the kitchen and saw Mandy framed in the dying light. She was watching us. Kiyoko saw her, too.
“You what?” I pushed.
“We should go in,” she said.
“Kiyoko . . . ”
“Forget it.” She lifted her thumb to her mouth, realized what she was doing, and covered her hand with her other hand. Then she turned on her heel and practically ran from me.
“Kiyoko,” I called after her. She stopped, but didn’t face me.
“At least . . . try to calm down and eat something,” I said. “Please.” It wasn’t at all what I had planned to say. It sounded stupid.
But she bobbed her head once before she went into the house. I looked up at the window where Mandy had been standing. She was gone. But the white face with the black eyes was there in her place.
“You’re a trick,” I said, as I looked down, and away. Glanced back up, and the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. Its lips were moving, and it was staring down at me.
Special effects,
I told myself.
Nothing real.
But as I headed for the kitchen door, I felt that awful coldness on the back of my neck again. I clapped my hand down and . . .
Did I feel someone’s hand beneath mine?
I whimpered and whirled around. There was nothing there.
“Of course. There never is,” I said aloud. “But it’s still a trick.”
And just like in the operating theater, I was frozen. I couldn’t move. I was so afraid. Something washed over me, cold and terrifying, and suddenly I wanted more than anything to go home and stay home and never come back here.
eighteen
November 20
Rain was washing away the snow when Julie’s parents pulled into the lot and her strapping older brother hoisted her suitcases and boxes into the gigantic trunk of their Mercedes station wagon. The Statins were very nice people. Beneath umbrellas, they thanked me for taking care of their girl during her first semester at a boarding school.
“She’s told us so much about you,” Julie’s mother said, beaming.
“I’m a keeper,” I joshed, and then Julie darted forward on her crutches and hugged me. In the wake of parting, she had forgotten her anger toward me.
“I’ll miss you this week,” she said. “Hang around Jessel and I’ll text you.”
“Okay, I will,” I promised. I would be hanging around Jessel a lot. Then whispering, I added, “Keep me posted on Spider.”
She giggled, then bounded over to the car like a happy-go-lucky, beloved little girl. Her father took her crutches as she slid in and her brother put them in the trunk. All the Statins waved at me as I stood beneath my umbrella, and they joined the departing parade of luxury vehicles as the rainy sky grew darker, and darker, and darker.
The lights winked on in the admin building as I turned and headed back toward Grose. Through the drizzle the horse heads stared blankly at me, holding their chains in their mouths.
Did one clank?
Clank like the chain of a ghost?
I chuckled aloud at my jumpiness to show that I wasn’t really scared, and concentrated on other things, like the pungent aroma of dinner: in the commons, to be served in less than an hour. Rose would be there. If I trotted onto Jessel’s porch, I could text her. But as I walked along, the rain turned into hail, pelting me with painful stones of ice, and I ducked into Grose, which was closer.
I shut the door and leaned against it, listening to the
tick-tick-tick
on the roof two stories above me and the
snick-snick-snick
against the windows. The howl of a gust of wind rattled the door as if someone were trying to get in.
“At least she took that stupid head with her,” I said aloud. I had watched her pack it myself, in a cardboard box we scrounged from the commons recyclables. She’d surrounded it with socks and underwear.
Ms. Krige was in the kitchen. Christmas carols played on the music system in the common room. I listened for a few seconds, reminding myself that I wasn’t alone.
We weren’t alone when someone tore up Julie’s mattress, either
. She still hadn’t told Ms. Krige about it, and I thought that was a mistake. If anything happened to
my
mattress, I was going to raise holy hell. I was not a victim, not a wimp. I had never been either of those things, and I wasn’t going to start now.
Tick-tick-tick, snick-snick-snick.
And the wind blew against the door again.
Snorting, I walked through the gloom of our hallway and opened the door to our room.
The white head sat on Julie’s windowsill, hollow-eyed and blank, and staring at me.
nineteen
I blasted out
of Grose and raced through the wet to Jessel’s front porch, punching in Julie’s cell phone number as I went.
“Hello?” Julie said.
“The. Head,” I managed. I was panting.
“Oh, you’re so sweet,” she said, and I didn’t even register her explanation of what it was doing in our room until after she had said it: she was worried that her mom would make her throw it out or that one of her brothers would take it, so she had left it with me for safekeeping. Of course, she had no idea how afraid of it I was. “So I left it.”
God, God, God, God
, I thought, shutting my eyes.
She fuzzed out; I figured they were hitting a dead spot and I waited for about a minute. Then I gave up and disconnected.
Sheltered from the hail, I stood on the porch and looked down at Jessel’s doorknob. I wasn’t sure who was still in Jessel. Girls had been leaving in a steady stream all day. The coast was not yet clear for sneaking in.
I moved off the porch and lifted up my sweatshirt hood because I hadn’t brought my umbrella. Then I stared out over the blackened rooftop silhouettes of Marlwood. The rain had turned to snow and it made me feel claustrophobic; I had the thought that it would fall and fall until it filled up our bowl of a campus and smothered us all.
I had the landline for Rose’s dorm, and I punched it in. Rose was my ally, my fellow lifeguard. Hearing her voice would help me stay afloat.
“Stewart.” That was Kim, another girl who lived there.
“Is Rose there?”
“She’s in her room. There’s a DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door,” Kim said.
“Oh.” I hadn’t expected that. “Thanks. This is Lindsay,” I added.
“We’re going to watch a movie after dinner. You can come over if you want.”
“Thanks.” I was already racing through the snow.