Possessions (21 page)

I reached out a hand against the wall as a spasm of pain rolled through my stomach. Sweat broke out across my forehead, and my lips and fingertips tingled.

“Rose, I’m sick,” I whispered.

“Here, sit down.” Rose plopped me into the wheelchair. “Let’s check it out.”

“No,” I protested, but I needed to sit down. I felt dizzy, and gripped my hands in my lap as Rose began to move the wheelchair forward, into the depths of the space behind the false wall. Where was she taking me? I tried to stand up but felt weak, disoriented, the room spinning.

She angled the flashlight down over my head. The floor was filthy, littered with mouse droppings and dust bunnies. Cobwebs draped from one side of the tunnel to the other, like party bunting. It was getting colder. I wanted to tell her to let me out of the chair, or use the flashlight to clear away the cobwebs, but I couldn’t speak. Suddenly, my head bobbed forward, brushing my chest.

“This is so freaky,” she whispered.

I didn’t hear another word she said. My stomach clenched so badly that I moaned; I tried to lift my hands out of my lap to wipe the sweat off my forehead but I was paralyzed.

Words echoed off the filthy walls:
Strap down Number One. Get the ice pick.
It was a man’s voice.

I thought I knew that voice.

“No,” I murmured. “We didn’t do anything.”

“What?” Rose said.

My eyes slowly opened. Rose was bending over me; she’d pulled me backward in the chair, and we were back where we’d started.

“Hey, Lindsay?” She shook me gently. “Are you okay?”

I leaned my head back and my eyelids fluttered.

We should hide
, I thought.
We should get out of here.

Two opposing thoughts.

She stepped around me and headed back into the tunnel.

“Rose, no. We have to leave,” I said.

She looked at me. “Why?”

“
Rose
.”

“Lindsay, this is incredible,” she said, going deeper into the blackness. “This is a hidden tunnel!”

“We’re so busted,” I said. “They’ll find it.”

“Maybe not. We can push all those boxes in front of it. Maybe we can make it look like they fell over and caused it.”

I was clammy. “Rose, I have to get out of here.
Now
.”

She looked at me. Really looked. “Are you going to, like, faint?”

I shut my eyes as a wave of nausea hit me. “Help me up. Please.”

“You’re shaking. You’re really scared.”

“Aren’t you?” I asked her, dumbfounded.

“Heck no. This is
cool.”

I flipped up the wooden slats for my feet, and she wrapped her hands around my wrists. I planted my feet on the floor; as she tried to raise me up, the chair rolled forward. I shuddered, hard; I couldn’t stand being in it. I practically threw myself out of it, and she staggered backward from the momentum.

“Except that you’re sick,” she said. “That is not cool.”

I backed away from the chair. But Rose shone her flashlight over it, examining it, then took a step forward. “What does it feel like—?”

“Don’t,” I begged her. “Rose, let’s go.”

Rose took off her jacket and took a few swipes at the floor to conceal our footprints. Descending the stairs, I kept my arm on Rose’s shoulder. We tiptoed out of the attic, down the stairs, hurried down the hall to the balcony, and then we were on the ground floor, and out the door. Rose made sure she still had the key and then we flew across the quad. My heartbeat roared in my ears; I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder, up at Mandy’s window.

There was no one there. Of course.

We crept into Grose, still panting as the saint on the table by the door waved hello; then we got past Ms. Krige’s door, and into my room. By mutual consent, we didn’t turn on the light, only flopped onto my bed side by side in the dark, heaving.

Rose said airily, “That was so weird. What happened to you?”

“I don’t know.” I shivered. I couldn’t stand to think about it.

“I’m thinking black mold. My aunt had a reaction like that. Just muttered to herself and passed out cold. She was flat on her back for
months
until they tore out a wall in the bathroom and, oh my God, it was all over the place.”

I rubbed my head. “I heard voices. Something about an ice pick.”

“No way,” she said. “You know what this means.”

“That Mandy planted that wheelchair?” I asked, rather desperately. “That she made Kiyoko tell me about the attic and then let you steal that key? And this is all one big stupid practical joke?”

“Maybe,” Rose said. “But what I was going for, was that we have to go back again tomorrow night.” She smiled and waggled her eyebrows. “And take pictures. Of ze pictures. And ze wheelchair.”

“Why, so we can make sure there’s evidence to confirm that we broke in?” I was bewildered by her reaction. “Are you, like, a psychopath or something?”

“Lindsay, we went in there to find out why Mandy’s acting so crazy. Maybe she’s crazy because she’s having sex with her brother
and
the black mold is doing a job on everybody who lives in Jessel. Like in Salem. Historians now think the girls who accused all those people of being witches were having hallucinations.” She held up a finger. “Which they got from eating moldy rye bread.
Mold.
”

“Why do you know all this stuff?”

“I read a lot,” she said simply. “I have a high IQ, remember?” She folded her arms. “Okay, so, what’s your theory?”

“Maybe . . . maybe it’s a haunted house,” I said. There. I had said it out loud. My face burned and I felt stupid. But I didn’t take it back.

“
Oh
.” Rose swung her head toward mine. She blinked at me. “You believe that. You really do. That it’s haunted.”

“I just
told
you that I heard voices.”
And I’ve had nightmares. And I’ve seen faces.

And Mandy knows I had a nervous breakdown. And it’s probably drugs that make their eyes go black; and maybe they’ve slipped me some, too.

She shrugged. “You’re impressionable.”

“Are you saying that you think I’m crazy?” I heard the edge to my voice. “Or that Mandy’s crazy?”

She crossed her legs. Then she got up and rested her hand on top of the white head. “It’s just like Lara said that night they practically drowned Kiyoko. Stare into the lake long enough, and you see things.”

She patted the head. “Sometimes I think this thing moves,” she admitted. “It totally creeps me out.”

“But you’re touching it.”

“I know it’s just my imagination.” She looked so superior. If Mandy had told her about my breakdown . . .

“So . . . we’ll go back and investigate some more,” she said. “Don’t you want to go down that tunnel?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure? Oh, never mind. I’ll go by myself,” Rose said.

“Rose, don’t,” I pleaded. “We’ve done enough as it is.”

“And we can undo it.” She cracked her knuckles. “We can fix the wall and no one will ever know we were there.”

“Fix it? How?”

She thought a moment. “Maybe we could get a ride into San Covino and buy stuff. Whatever we need. Boards, paint.” She grinned at me. “Know anybody with a car? Say, a T-bird?”

“I think Troy went home,” I said, trying to sound ignorant.

“Let’s find out,” she replied.

twenty-three

November 21

The next morning, I stood on Jessel’s porch and called Troy. His number was listed in my messages. Standing in the frosty air, I listened to his cell phone ringing and crossed my fingers. I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to answer or not. Rose was on a mission. She was already talking about other ways to get to San Covino if Troy didn’t work out—such as asking to be taken to a movie by a driver, then making a side trip to a store to buy some materials for “a project.”

This is a very bad idea,
I thought. Both versions.

Rose had gone around to the kitchen door of Jessel and let herself in, though with the key or her lock-picking tools, I had no idea. She was upstairs in the attic, assessing the damage and making a list of things we would need to buy in San Covino.

“Hey,” Troy said. He sounded surprised and pleased to hear from me. Also, kind of muzzy, as if I had awakened him. I tried not to picture him in bed. Did he wear pajamas? Did he go commando?

“Lindsay?”

“Yeah. Hi, uh. About yesterday . . . ” What was I doing?

“It’s all good,” he said quickly. “I know things are, well, complicated. . . . ” He trailed off. Then he said, “I’ll row over.”

No
, I thought, but before I knew what I was doing, I was saying yes.

“Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll come over in about an hour.”

And that was that. I flipped the phone shut and waited for Rose. And waited. I sat down on the porch and sighed. I called Julie, but I got her voicemail. I called my dad. The same.

I thought for a moment about calling Heather, my old best friend. My finger hovered over the buttons. I’d left without telling her. But by then, we weren’t speaking anyway. I couldn’t exactly call her in the middle of a crisis and expect her to be there for me.

Ms. Krige opened our front door; I quickly put my phone to my ear and pretended to be talking to someone in case she noticed me on Jessel’s porch. She’d pointed out, quite reasonably, that we could use the landline to call out. When I’d told her I’d rather use my cell because I had unlimited minutes, that made sense to her.

The sun had risen over the top of Grose by the time Rose appeared inside the privet hedge, looking rather pleased with herself. She joined me on the porch and we moved quickly away from Jessel, as if we both were eager to put some distance between it and us.

“He’s coming over here, but I am not okay with asking him to take us to San Covino,” I said. “He’s Mandy’s boyfriend. You don’t think he might mention to her that he took us to Home Depot to buy some lumber and paint?”

“No worries,” she declared, posing as if to say
ta-da!
“Did you know they kept tons of props from the haunted house? Props and building supplies? They’re stashed in an empty bedroom and I mean stashed, girlfriend. I used all their stuff. I got a couple boards and a staple gun and some tape and I actually painted over it.”

“You put the wheelchair back in the tunnel, right?”

She shook her head. “No, I left it out in the middle of the room for them to notice.” She leaned in and waved at me. “Hello? Do I look like a moron? Of course I put it back.”

“And . . . so . . . ”

“And so it looks . . . bad, but then I pushed all those boxes in front of it. By the time anyone notices it, they won’t be able to connect it to us.”

“So you hope,” I murmured, but I had to admit, this was good news.

She gave the back of my head a playful bat. “There you go again with the pessimism, Lindsay. What am I going to do with you?”

Troy came over
, and this time I met him at the lake. He rowed to the little inlet he had mentioned by the NO TRESPASSING sign, and I watched him move like an athlete. I thought about all the things I had told him yesterday and I was sorry I had. He must have thought I was a whiny loser. Boys liked winners.

He looked over his shoulder at Jessel, as if he, too, was worried that Mandy was there, watching us. Then he shrugged and smiled at me, just me.

I didn’t like walking along the same stretch of lake where Mandy had done her
Exorcist
routine but I kept it to myself. We climbed over some wet rocks and I nearly slipped; Troy caught my hand and kept holding it, like the day before.

I wanted to say,
What’s your deal? Are you cheating on Mandy with me?
But I didn’t. He brought his camera this time and took pictures of me, and the sky, and the lake. He had a good eye.

“I heard from Julie,” I told him. “She and Spider went riding with, um, Mandy.” I had forgotten that I would have to mention her in the telling of the story. “They had a great time.” Although I would have rather bitten off my own tongue, I added, “That was nice of Mandy.”

“Yeah, I wonder what she wants,” he muttered. Then he shook himself and cleared his throat, as if he hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “Anyway.” He took my hand again. I let him again.

Was I a boyfriend thief?

Maybe I’d wonder about that tomorrow.