"What do you think, I'm going to break my neck?" I asked her in irritation as I poured myself a glass of orange juice. "I'm not an infant."
"Once you have kids, you'll understand," she said knowingly. "Oh! I almost forgot."
She got up and went to her purse, pulling out a paper pharmacy bag. I got a chill when I saw it.
"I refilled your medication," she said, undoing the staples on the top of the bag. "The bottle was empty. I'm glad I check every pocket when I'm doing laundry, which by the way you have a mountain of."
She handed me the bottle. "Thanks," I said, looking it over. What was I supposed to do with this?
"You didn't skip a dose, did you?" she asked suspiciously.
"No. I just forgot to tell you to refill it."
"You can't forget, ever," she said sternly, crumpling the bag for the trash. "You could get really uncomfortable if you miss a few doses."
Tell me about it.
She was watching me, and I knew she wanted to see me take one of the pills, as proof that I wasn't deceiving her. Again I wondered if she knew that I was seeing ghosts, and wanted to prevent it like they had for Eleanor.
I dropped a pill into my hand, but let it fall into my lap as I took a swig of orange juice. She seemed satisfied, and began filling a bucket of cleaning solution in the sink to scrub the kitchen tile.
I ground the little pill to powder beneath my shoe.
Jenna hadn't remembered any more details about the night of her disappearance. Just that there were some guys, although she wouldn't or couldn't say who, and she'd gone with them. She did tell me the plan was to go to a party, and that they'd met up at the gas station to car pool.
I was looking over Eleanor's medical records again in my room one night. Jenna was sitting in my desk chair, playing with the lighter. She was still looking at it like a foreign thing, like it was the first lighter she'd ever learned how to use.
I didn't bother talking to her when she was in this weird zone. It was impossible, and only made her mad at me. The early days when she'd come back, when I thought things could go back to how they were when she was alive, were very distant memories.
Laying on my stomach on my bed, I had taken the papers out and was organizing them. The file had been sloppy when I got it, like everything had been shoved in there by a disorganized doctor. Although I was hardly organized myself, the mess was irritating. Now I had piles around the bed of medication prescriptions, interviews with Eleanor, and doctor's notes.
Click click.
Click click.
I looked over at Jenna. The popping of the lighter was getting annoying, but I tried to ignore it.
Then my phone buzzed. The evening was full of distractions. It was another text message from Henry. I'd been deleting them unread, as he sent me a few every day since Lainey's party. The boy didn't know how to let things go, and I didn't appreciate being stalked. I'd never changed his contact name from
Jerk
, either.
I didn't want to talk to him, but I knew I had to go to the orphanage again. The placement of the gate in my vision confirmed it: She had been there sometime during her final hours. And Henry's father literally held the keys, as much as I couldn't stand the thought.
Click click.
"Can you cut that out?" I asked Jenna. She looked up at me in surprise.
"Sorry," she muttered, and put the lighter back in her pocket.
I felt like crap for yelling at her. I wanted to apologize, but I didn't know exactly how to say the words. I had to get out of this room. How was I going to solve the mystery of my murdered friend with her sitting beside me? I picked up my phone from beside me.
I know youre not going to write me back, however I'm still trying in the interest of persistence.
Henry had written.
Wrong again. I'm writing back.
I sent.
The lady finally speaks,
he replied.
Don't get too excited. I'm asking a favor. You don't even have to consider it.
Shoot.
Can you get me into the orphanage?
Why do you need to go to that place again? Didn't we cause enough of a ruckus there last time?
If you can't help me, nvmnd.
Didn't say that. I can get you in there easy peasy. Name your time and place.
Friday. Daytime, so its not too suspicious. Meet me and my friends there.
Yes ma'am. I'll be there.
I had to tell someone about what I was seeing. I'd been living two lives for months, and I couldn't go on without connecting them. Especially since it was like they were trying to merge on their own. The notes I'd taken from
Other Worlds
proved to me that I wasn't alone, but it wasn't enough.
I needed to talk to a real life person who would believe me. Theo was the only one I had any hope of believing me. And I didn't know how else to convince her to go back to the orphanage with me. And I couldn't go back to that evil place alone again.
She was dropping off some smaller paintings to Erasmus that day, to fill the spaces left by the work she'd sold. One of them was a profile of my face. She'd spent the morning putting finishing touches on it. I blushed every time I looked at it, and I didn't know how I'd feel when it was up on the wall for everyone to see. Her lines made me much prettier than I was in real life, what she had done when she'd drawn Alex. She worked magic.
"You keep this up, and it's going to look great on your art school application," Hugh told her.
Theo beamed. "I can't believe people are actually interested in what I love to do. But I'll take it."
Hugh and Theo talked about frames and placement for a while. I was full of nervous energy, of secrets ready to spill. Now that I'd actually committed to telling her, waiting was nearly impossible.
"Can we go to the library?" I asked her when we got back in the Toyota. "I have something to show you."
"Sure," she said, shrugging and changing direction. Typical Theo.
Inside the library, she followed me into the stacks, where I headed straight for the paranormal section. I yanked out the now familiar book and brought it out to one of the tables. I slammed the volume down without meaning to. It felt heavy all of a sudden, full of the weight of all the secrets and lies I'd been keeping.
"So what is this big mystery?" Theo asked jovially, sitting down across from me.
I was more nervous than I had been expecting, sweat beading along my hairline. I shook the neck of my t-shirt to get some air moving against my warm skin. "You're going to think I'm crazy. I know you've been very accepting of a lot of my weirdness, and for that I'm grateful. But I think even you will run without looking back when I tell you this."
Bemused, she said, "These revelations keep on coming, don't they? Go on, now I'm intrigued. How many people had to die?"
"No jokes, Theo," I said gently.
"Sorry," she said, running her fingers across her lips as if zipping them.
"So you wondered why I took that file from Bernhardt. My grandmother was committed there."
"I kind of figured that. I didn't think she was there on vacation."
"She saw ghosts," I continued. "No one believed what she was seeing was real, though." I took a deep breath, and closed my eyes so I wouldn't have to look at her. "And now I'm seeing them, too."
There could have been crickets chirping. When I opened my eyes, Theo's face was as blank as an unmarked grave.
"When did this start?" she asked.
"Last year. Around my birthday. The thing is, according to the files, that's when it started happening for Eleanor, too. When she turned fifteen. Only she and everyone around her thought she was going nuts."
Theo was silent, thinking over what I'd told her. I was worried that I was right, and any minute she would bolt from the table and say 'see you later.'
"Okay, I'll admit, this is a little wild. It does explain an awful lot, though. The seance last year, going to that asylum, ghost obsessions...I just thought you were an undiagnosed goth."
That got a little laugh out of me. I had been taking myself so seriously.
"It's kind of cool. It's like a superpower," Theo said, shrugging. "As long as you don't start digging up graves, I think we're good. You were really scared to tell me, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Well, wait. Does that mean..." Her eyes became huge, and round. "Oh, Ari."
"Yeah. I see her all the time." Tears spilled down my face, and I wiped them away, trying to breathe. "All the time. But she doesn't believe she's dead."
Theo's hands were up to her mouth, covering her shock. She looked like she might start crying, too. "I'm glad you told me," she said finally. "That's a tough thing to keep to yourself."
"That's why I knew to look around Lainey's dock. And the gas station, that wasn't released in the paper or anything, she told me."
"So now what?" Theo asked, handing me a tissue out of her purse. She had transferred all of her pins that used to be on her backpack to the patchwork satchel.
"Now I was going to ask you a favor. I need to go back to the orphanage, because I had a vision of her being there. That's where I go when you seen me daydreaming. I have visions. I'm trying to retrace her steps, even if they're out of order."
"Ick, that place?"
"Yeah. I know you hate it there."
"It just give me the creeps. And after last year..." She looked off, her expression cloudy. "But I don't mind. If you think we can find some clues, I'm willing to go."
That settled it. I prepared myself for going back to the setting of my nightmares.
CHAPTER 19
"I WOULDN'T HAVE
asked you if I wasn't desperate," I told Henry. It was Friday, and we were on an abandoned driveway where he'd asked us to meet him. His car, a shiny new BMW, was already hidden in the shadow of the trees. Alex had parked the Creep at an angle next to it. We were now all standing in a circle, as though gathering to perform a ritual. Maybe we were.
"Thank God for your desperation," Henry said.
"That's not funny."
"Sorry." The first thing I'd noticed about him that day was that he was dressed in his old uniform of sweatshirt and jeans. Not a tie or a polo shirt to be found. I wondered if it was his way of trying to appeal to me.
The four of us hiked out to the road. The spot was marked with two dead white birch trees, crossing into an X.
It was mid-afternoon, and in the shade of the woods it wasn't too stifling outside, but it was still well into the eighties. The birds sang their infernal song, chirping multiplied by so many it was more like a shriek. Henry pulled out a big ring with what looked like a hundred keys on it, the kind that a janitor would use for school.
"Is the key to every house in town on there?" I asked.
"Close to it," Henry said with a wane grin. "He doesn't know I took it, either, so we can't linger too long."
"Do you even know which one goes to the orphanage?"
"There are three. They're all marked. One for the padlock on the gate, and two for the front and back doors."
"So no climbing in windows this time?" Alex chimed in as we shuffled down the road and the fence came into view. "That's good, I didn't think my pants could take it."
"Not unless you really want to," Henry told him dryly.
Reaching the gate, I saw there was indeed a new chain and padlock keeping it shut. Henry fit the key into the lock and pulled the chain off, while we watched for cars on either side of the road. We slipped inside the gate and he shut it behind us, dangling the chain through the bars.
Standing around awkwardly, the we looked at each other.
"The four musketeers, together again," Alex said with a nervous chuckle. He ran his hand through his sandy blonde hair.
"We're more like the ghostbusters," Theo said. She would not look at Henry, and I had a feeling she was just as uncomfortable being around him as she was about Dexter.
The building itself looked menacing, even with the afternoon sunlight cheerily beaming down between puffy clouds. The sky seemed so far away. I marveled again how much it looked like some sort of haunted castle, even worse than Bernhardt Asylum.
For a moment, I saw a shape on the shadows in the porch. I squinted, and could make out the form of a coal-furred dog. Growling loudly, the dog raised its trembling, lanky body on its haunches.
I tugged on Henry's sleeve. "There's a nasty-looking dog on the porch."
Shielding his eyes with his hands, he looked. "No, there's not. It's just shadows."
I looked closer, and sure enough, it was only the shadows from the porch overhang. "Maybe I need glasses. Let's get going," I said.
Cutting across the lawn, it seemed like a hundred years since I'd visited this place in the moonlight. Maybe it had only been a dream, after all. The SOLD sign was gone, and the place had obviously seen some new construction, although nothing as extensive as what was happening to the ballroom.