Blackfin Sky (10 page)

8

The two eldest Swiveller brothers glowered at Sky as she walked into the classroom, then turned away. Their well of witty comments had run dry already. Sky tried to emulate her mother’s perfect posture as she held her head up and shoulders back, took off her coat, and draped it over the back of the chair next to Bo.

‘Where’s Cam today?’

Bo looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. ‘She had to go to the orthodontist in Oakridge this morning. She should be here after lunch, though.’

Sky swallowed her disappointment. She had no classes with Cam after lunch, and she’d wanted to ask both her friends to come with her to talk to the old woman in the woods that night. After the weirdness that had led her to the apparition of her own undisturbed grave in Blackfin Cemetery, Sky was a little gun-shy about making another attempt to break in by herself.

But both her parents’ whispered conversation and Jared’s revelation about Madame Curio’s current whereabouts were pointing toward Blackfin Woods, and Sky was determined to get some answers.

‘How come you said my grave’s been dug up? I saw it yesterday, and it doesn’t look like anyone’s messed with it.’

Bo shrugged. ‘It was definitely messed with when I was there Friday. Maybe you were at the wrong grave.’

‘But it had my name on the headstone!’

Bo closed her magazine. ‘What do you want me to say? It was a big, empty hole last time I saw it. If someone filled it back in, or moved your headstone to another grave or something, I know nothing about it.’

Sky sat back, knowing this was getting her nowhere, and that Bo would just ignore her altogether if she kept badgering her. ‘Are you busy later? Tonight, I mean?’

‘Yup. Mum’s off to visit the old man, so I’m stuck babysitting the howlers.’

Bo’s six-year-old twin brothers had truly earned their nickname. Even when perfectly content, they made enough noise to warrant earplugs and had a seemingly endless supply of energy to climb furniture and swing from the curtains. With Bo’s general listlessness, it was amazing that they were even related.

Her plans derailed, Sky sank into her own thoughts while Mr Hiatt took the register. Though he still looked like he might bolt at any minute, he at least managed to talk to her without having a seizure.

Sky was left alone throughout her morning classes, and had even started to relax by lunchtime.

Then the whispers started.

Officer Holly Vega had shown up at the school during third period and had taken Randy, Felix, Jordy and Colby Swiveller down to Oakridge Police Station for questioning.

‘What’s going on?’ Sky set her lunch tray down opposite Bo, knowing that nothing would have escaped her friend’s notice, despite the fact that she appeared to be utterly engrossed in her phone.

Bo spoke without looking up. ‘Cam’s aunt found your coffin – you know, from the grave you said
hadn’t
been disturbed – in the Swivellers’ barn. When they opened it, all they found inside was the Swivellers’ dog, Clarence, dressed in your clothes. Officer Vega thinks they must have dug it up not long after you returned from the dead.’

‘Bo, I
wasn’t
dead.’

‘You were.’

Sky sighed.

‘Do you think they actually found a body in there when they first opened it?’ Bo asked, appearing more curious than disturbed by the possibility. Sky had no answer.

‘Do you think it was really them? I mean, could the Swivellers have dug up my grave?’

Bo set her phone aside and picked at her egg salad. ‘Of course it was them.’

‘But
why
?’

Bo put down her fork, finally looking up at Sky, her almond-shaped eyes narrowed as she considered. ‘Because they’re bobble-headed weirdos who have nothing better to do than sneak around digging up corpses that aren’t there and filling their clothes with dead dog.’ Bo poked her egg salad again and grimaced. ‘How old do you think this shit is?’

Sky leaned over to examine it. ‘Well, it certainly looks deader than I do.’

Cam, can you sneak out with me l8r? Need to talk to M Curio. Wear climbing shoes. X

Sky hit send, then sat back against her headboard and waited. She’d gone up to her room early, claiming she was catching up on the homework she’d missed. That was another rotten thing about her situation – all the homework she’d done over the last three months had vanished along with that separate life she had been living. So now she re-scrawled her schoolwork by torchlight under her bedclothes while she waited until it was safe to sneak out.

But when half an hour had passed without a response from Cam, Sky began to get restless.

Cam??

Another half hour passed, and Sky heard her parents go to bed. Ten minutes later, the faint sound of her mother’s snoring told her at least one of them was sleeping. She felt a stab of guilt, thinking of how her mother had crept in, thinking Sky was asleep, and leaned to kiss her gently on the forehead.

The house creaked, a weary stretch of its bones before it settled for the night. It was time to leave, but Sky could admit that she was frightened by the prospect of confronting crazy old Madame Curio by herself.

Heading over to your place now in case you haven’t got credit to reply or whatever.

Sky laced up her flat-soled boots, put on her long coat and leather gloves – leather being the best option for scaling spike-tipped fences, she’d decided – and checked she had everything she might need in her book-bag. Which was really just the heavy-duty torch she’d been using to do her homework.

Moving stealthily, Sky opened the french windows and climbed over the rail before dropping with a thud into her father’s vegetable patch. She kicked and scuffed the soil a little so her parents would think the mess had been made by cats fighting again, then jogged away from the house as quietly as her boots would allow.

The Vega household lay in darkness when Sky reached the driveway. Keeping to the shadows under the twisted willow, Sky crept toward the house with her eyes fixed on Cam’s upstairs window – and her mind focused on figuring out how she could alert her friend to her presence without waking the police officer in the next bedroom.

‘
Sky
.’

She jumped like a cat at Sean’s urgent whisper. Peering through the shadows she could just about make him out through the open window of his jeep.

‘
Get in.’

Embarrassed at being caught skulking around his front garden, Sky tiptoed around to the passenger side and climbed in. They both winced as her door closed with a
snick.

‘Sean, what are you doing here?’

He held a finger to his lips and put the car in neutral, coasting it slowly down the slope of the driveway and halfway along Provencher Street before pulling over and starting the car’s engine.

‘Cam had her braces tightened earlier and it gave her a migraine. I heard your messages come through on her phone downstairs, so I checked them in case it was anything urgent. Lucky I did,’ he added, smiling. ‘Aunt Holly was getting curious about the beeps.’

‘Thanks,’ Sky said, reaching for the door handle. ‘And I’m sorry you had to sneak around…’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I was going to go home.’

Even in the dark Sky saw the exasperated look on his face. ‘If you want to go home, I’ll drive you there. But you said you needed to speak to Madame Curio. Does this have something to do with figuring out what happened to you?’

Sky nodded.

‘You could have asked me to go with you, you know. I
want
to help you figure this out.’ He gave her that crooked grin again. ‘I’m even wearing my climbing shoes.’

Sky laughed as he tried to manoeuvre one leg from under the steering wheel to show her and accidentally flipped on his headlights.

‘I really don’t need you to…’ A flicker of hurt crossed Sean’s face, and Sky reeled in her words faster than her father reeled in a twenty-pound, two-headed trout.
‘…show off your super-fly footwear, Sean.’ He sniggered, and Sky couldn’t help grinning back at him. ‘Looks like we’re going to the woods.’

The air had grown cooler, leaving ice crystals sparkling on the grass under their feet. Sky led the way, her coat skimming the ground behind her.

‘Isn’t your coat going to get in the way?’ Sean’s voice was unnaturally loud in the absolute silence of the woods. They hadn’t yet reached the fence where Sky had somehow lost her bearings on her previous visit, but the crab apple trees were beckoning not far ahead.

‘It was this coat or no coat,’ she answered. ‘My mum is kind of strict about what I wear, so she only lets me keep what she approves of.’

‘How come?’

Sky shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She’ll just donate anything of mine she doesn’t like to Oxfam. Or one time, when I went down to the charity shop and bought back a pair of jeans I loved, she washed them in bleach. They were totally ruined.’ Sky reached up and wrapped her hand around one of the iron railings. ‘We’re here.’

Sean looked up at the iron spikes on top of the fence. ‘
This
is what you were planning to climb over?’ He shook his head and unzipped his parka, then pulled out a metal jack. ‘Seriously.’

Sky watched as he used the jack – the same type as the ones she’d seen lying around her dad’s garage – to widen the gap between two of the railings. He kept winding it until the space was just about big enough for them to fit through.

‘You just happened to have a car jack hidden in your jacket?’

‘You mean you don’t?’ Sean looked up, his teeth visible in the moonlight as he grinned. ‘When you said we were going to the woods, I figured you had in mind that we were going to climb over this fence. Bringing the jack from the boot of my car seemed like the best way to make sure neither of us got impaled.’

Sean left the jack on the grass and squeezed through the gap he’d made in the fence, then reached back to take Sky’s hand. She followed Sean through, grabbing her skirt with her free hand to avoid tripping over it.

They walked on into Blackfin Woods, the trees becoming denser and denser around them.

‘Hang on a sec,’ Sky tugged on Sean’s hand, realising for the first time that he hadn’t released it after she’d squeezed through the fence, and fished her torch from her book-bag. A narrow beam sliced outward when she switched it on, dark shapes shuffling off into the shadows, chased away by the light.

Sky let her free hand drop back down to her side, cold inside her leather glove without Sean’s to warm it. Even in the middle of the woods, with creatures scuttling around their feet and in almost total darkness, Sky had to fight to keep from smiling as his fingers wrapped around hers again a moment later.

‘How do you know we’re going the right way?’ Sky whispered, and he pointed upwards through the high branches. ‘You’re following the stars?’

He laughed. ‘No. I’m following the church spire. You said she was near the church, right?’

And then Sky saw it, blacker than the sky. The church spire leaned awkwardly, but Sky could still make out the shape of the bell at the top of the tower.

Well that’s one mystery solved,
she thought with a smile. The discovery of where the hourly chime originated seemed like a good omen. Maybe she would find answers to her own mystery in the woods.

‘What if Madame Curio’s not here?’ Sky whispered.
They both knew that she was really asking,
What if she
is
here?

‘Then we come back again. And again. Until we manage to find her and get some answers.’

He sounded so certain that Sky had no choice but to believe him. Then she spotted something up ahead, paler than the shadows surrounding it.

‘Is that … a van?’ Sky whispered, shutting off the torch on instinct.

‘Well, I can’t see now.’

‘Sorry.’ She passed the torch to Sean. He panned the light over the van – as it was indeed a VW van – then clicked it off again.

‘I don’t recognise it,’ he whispered back, ‘and if anyone’s inside, it doesn’t look like they’re awake.’

They walked over to it and peered in through the windows. Nothing moved in the shadowy interior, so Sean shone the light through the windows. Inside the van was a mess of old junk and clothes strewn about, but it was hard to say whether someone had been living in it recently.

Sean killed the light again. ‘Maybe it’s abandoned. I’m not even sure how someone could drive it in here in the first place, with the fence surrounding the woods. Come on, we’re almost at the church. Maybe that’s where she’s camping out.’

They moved more slowly now, keeping the torch off in case Madame Curio saw them coming.

Only two walls of the church remained mostly intact – the rest appeared to have been destroyed by fire. The rear corner of the stone building had been struck by a tree, perhaps felled in an attempt to contain the flames. It hadn’t worked. Whether the fire had originated in the church or somewhere deeper in the woods, it had certainly spread through a good portion of the trees. The charred carcasses stood out in the silvery light, blacker than black, their gnarled branches too barren even for winter.