Deadwood (9 page)

S
HE'S
ACTUALLY
A
GIRL
– H
ANNAH
. W
E'RE
WORKING
ON
A
COMMUNITY
SERVICE
PROJECT
2
GETHER
.

I
NTERESTING
.

N
OT
REALLY
.

W
E'LL
SEE
. W
HAT
ABOUT
SPORTS?
M
AYBE
X
COUNTRY?

N
O
TEAM FOR KIDS MY AGE
. B
UT
I
'M JOINING A NEW CLUB
. J
UNIOR
J
UNIOR
E
XECUTIVES
OF
T
OMORROW
. As he waited for a response, the doorbell rang.

H
A
! T
HAT
DOESN'T
SOUND
LIKE
YOU
.

I
T'S
A
UNT
M
ICHELLE'S
IDEA
.

He listened to his aunt open the door and cheerily address whoever stood there.

“What are you selling, sweetie?” she said. Martin couldn't hear an answer.

T
HAT
SOUNDS
LIKE
SOMETHING
M
ICHELLE
WOULD
LIKE,
Martin's mother typed. He snickered, picturing her rolling her eyes like she always did when she talked about Aunt Michelle. Then Aunt Michelle's voice chased the image of his mother from his head.

“Then do you have a petition you want me to sign?” Aunt Michelle said in her fakest sweet voice to the person at the door.

S
HE
THINKS
BUSINESS
TRAINING
WOULD
HELP
ME
FOCUS,
Martin typed.

“Martin? Yes, he's here.” He heard Aunt Michelle's high heels clacking toward the room.

F
OCUS IS THE LAST THING YOU NEED
. B
UT MAYBE YOU'LL MEET MORE NICE KIDS LIKE THAT
H
ANNAH
, his mom typed. She was always nagging him to meet new people, spend time on something other than video games.

The footsteps came closer. Was it one person or two? He hurriedly typed, G
OT
TO
GO,
M
OM
. I
LOVE
YOU
.

I
LOVE YOU TOO
. V
IDEO CHAT YOU TOMORROW
,
IF IT'S WORKING
.

S
AME
BAT
TIME
.

S
AME
BAT
CHANNEL,
his mom typed, and then her icon went dark.

Aunt Michelle's footsteps stopped at the door and she peered in without knocking. Martin clicked the window shut to keep her from reading over his shoulder. His mother's words disappeared into the ether, and a sharp pang stabbed him in his chest. IM conversations were nothing like the real thing. And Aunt Michelle was nothing like his mother.

“There's a girl to see you, Martin,” said Aunt Michelle. “See, that positive thinking has worked already. All you have to do is sit there and the girls flock to your door.”

Martin spun the chair around to glare at her. “Hannah's just a friend. We're doing a project together.”

“For now,” Aunt Michelle said, half-winking at him. “Keep your mind on what you want, and you get it.”

“Alrighty.” Anything to stop the mantras. “If Hannah's here, I have to go now.”

“Fine. Be back in time to rake the leaves.”

He closed the door behind him as quick as he could. Hannah stood on the step. Not a leaf was in sight.
What leaves?
he thought.

“So, did your brother win?” Martin asked.

“They lost,” Hannah said, sounding almost accusing.

“What else is new?” He sniffed.

“It's worse than that. Chase, the guy with the knife at the tree, tore his ACL.”

“His what?”

“ACL—anterior cruciate ligament. It's one of the four ligaments of the knee, often injured during lateral movements,” Hannah said, sounding like a TV doctor. He wondered if she had rehearsed. “He's out for the season—maybe for good.”

“So?” Martin didn't care except that he knew it mattered to her.

“He's the best receiver Lower Brynwood has! Maybe you don't care, but Nick doesn't have a chance at a scholarship if there's no one to catch the ball.”

“I'm sorry about your brother, but that guy—Chase—had it coming.” His empathy only extended so far.

“Maybe. But what really matters is that the curse is getting worse. The team didn't just lose—the scoreboard exploded!”

“Really?” Martin perked up. “It exploded?”

“Well, it burned out. But the timing was weird, and the broken glass could have cut someone. And the grass died! It was just like the tree. And Chase is really hurt—anybody could be next.”

Martin thought of his mom and reassured himself that a curse couldn't reach her in Afghanistan. But did he really know how curses worked? Did he want to find out? “So, what do we do?”

She held up an ancient-looking book. “There's something you have to see.”

14

The Witch's House

“
I
'm beginning to feel like your trainer,” Hannah said as she pedaled alongside Martin.

“Then you ought to go faster,” he said. “You're too easy on me.”

“Maybe next time.” She hit the brakes with a screech and hopped off her bike. “We're here.” They stood in front of Jenna Blitzer's cottage, Martin trying to stay upright until his jellied limbs solidified again.

“Cottage” wasn't quite the right word, Martin realized. Like a miniature castle transplanted from an Arlithean mountainside, this house was vertical, not low to the ground—three stories, a sharply pitched roof, and such a small footprint that there couldn't have been more than one or two rooms per floor. The complicated geometry of the many-gabled roof was repeated in three painted, peaked-roof wood hutches that stood in the garden like windowless dollhouses. Smaller houses hung from the trees and perched on metal posts.
Like heads on pikes
, he thought grimly. A warning against trespassers.

“Did that mysterious book of yours tell you to come here?” Martin said.

“Sort of. It's the key to the mystery.”

“What is it? Some kind of magic text?” he said. Hannah propped up her bike on the kickstand and pulled the book out of her bag, holding it up with a flourish.

It was just an old yearbook. He raised an eyebrow.

“This is important, Martin,” she said. “Look! It belongs to Dr. Wiggins—1989, just like the oldest carving. And look at this.” Hannah turned to a black and white page filled with grainy group shots. “And this!” She pulled the notebook out of her bag and flipped it open. Martin took the book from her. All he saw was a bunch of kids in ugly clothes and bad haircuts, but Hannah acted like the book held some big revelation. “See?” she said, triumphant. “EEEEEE. That carving isn't an eye chart. It's an acronym.”

“You mean an abbreviation. An acronym is initials that spell a word.”

“Whatever! It stands for this club—Environment, Ecology, and Energy Efficiency for an Enlightened Earth.”

“Maybe.” Martin had to admit the coincidence was strange, and there was nothing he loved as much as strange coincidences.

“Look! See who's the president?” She jabbed at the page.

“Jenna Blitzer? You're saying she's the witch?” He had thought that anyone who tweaked Aunt Michelle couldn't be bad, but now he wasn't so sure. Was Jenna the bad one? He peered at the little house and its small miniatures among the greenery. It looked as if the cottage was reproducing itself. He couldn't decide if it was creepy, or what his mom would call charming. He shivered as the sweat evaporated from his skin. Definitely creepy.

“I don't like that word, ‘witch.' It sounds sexist. But maybe she's the bad one,” Hannah said, shaking her ponytail. “Look what's printed on her T-shirt.”

“Tree-hugger.”

“It's almost a confession. Remember what we said—the curse was probably set by someone looking for revenge or personal gain. And if Jenna knew anybody was carving up a tree, she'd definitely want revenge.”

“Back it up,” Martin said. “Let's think about this. Wouldn't that mean she carved the six Es to do it? Does that make sense, that she would hurt the tree to save the tree?”

“Maybe. Obsessed people will go to crazy lengths. You've heard of ecoterrorism, right? Super-extreme environmentalists burn down housing developments and shopping malls to save nature. Cutting a symbol into a tree is a lot less drastic, isn't it?”

“Good point. But don't we need a plan before we approach her?” This was going too fast. Martin and Gord had spent half the summer planning a raid on an Arlithean stronghold, and it would have gone perfectly if Martin hadn't moved to Lower Brynwood first.

“We have a suspect, a plan, and a cover story. All we have to do is knock on Jenna's door and we can ask all the questions we want. If we say we're trying to save the Spirit Tree for a school project, she'll be eating out of our hands.”

As long as she doesn't bite them off
, Martin thought. “Shouldn't we rehearse what we're going to say?”

“Just follow my lead. As far as she knows, we're just dumb kids—she won't expect us to know what we're talking about.”

The gravel path crunched under their feet, loud as an alarm. There was no bell or knocker on the arched oak door—just a lighter area where the knocker must have been once. Hannah rapped her knuckles against the wood. They waited a moment, and Martin tried to think of something clever to say. No one answered.

Martin pounded with the side of his fist. Nothing.

“After all that, nobody's home,” Martin said, unclenching his hands.

“We came all this way. We might as well look in the windows,” Hannah said.

Martin rubbed his head, tousling his damp hair so that it stood up more wildly than before. “I don't know.”

“How about we walk around to the back door?” Hannah suggested, as if she was coaxing a baby to take his first steps. “If we happen to see in the windows at the same time, it's not our fault.”

The small casement windows were above eye level and shuttered, yielding no views into the dark house. Hannah and Martin climbed onto a small covered back porch furnished with a hanging wooden swing and cluttered with an assortment of bright rubber clogs and muddy, mismatched garden tools—unlike Aunt Michelle's perfect set, these tools had definitely been used, Martin noted. Hannah knocked at the dented aluminum storm door. Nothing.

“That was useless,” Martin said. “Let's come back tomorrow with a better plan in place.”

Ignoring him, Hannah craned her neck and jumped up, trying to peek over the shutters. “Maybe we can see inside if we stand on one of those little tool sheds.”

“Hannah, you said we would just knock.”

“We did. But we didn't learn anything yet. No one will see us from the street.” She walked over to the nearest red-painted box and looked for a foothold.

Martin sighed. Hannah was going to keep going, no matter what he said. “Let me do it,” he said. “I'm lighter than you are.” She frowned as he scrambled up the hardware on the side of the box. He lost his balance for a moment as he straightened, clomping heavily with one foot on either side of the peaked roof. “I can't see anything.”

“Uh, Martin?” Hannah said with the kind of calm that hid fear.

“What now?”

“I don't think that's a tool shed you're standing on.”

The insect buzz in the garden had gotten louder. Martin realized it was coming from the wooden box beneath his feet. A line of angry bees looped from the underside of what he now realized was a giant beehive.

“You'd better get down from there,” Hannah said. “Slowly.”

Too late. He leaped off, clearing the hive by a good eight feet, but the cloud of bees followed. He dropped to the ground and waved them off his head and face, blinded with pain as if he'd been shot with a hundred flaming arrows.

“Children!” The cry came from the back porch, but Martin was still curled up. A tall woman came streaming toward him and lifted him up. All the bees were gone, except for the dead and dying clinging to the stingers embedded in his arms.

“You're not allergic, are you, son?” the woman said, peering into his eyes with nearly lashless blue ones. Her wet hair dripped, leaving damp spots on the shoulders of her fuzzy fleece pullover.

“No, ma'am. I don't think so.” His arms and face felt like they were burning.

“Good.” Jenna held up each of his arms, seeming to silently count the welts. “Come onto the porch and I'll take care of those stings.”

Martin obeyed, but Hannah lingered behind, looking as if she was about to take off running. “You come, too, miss. I'll get you both a drink while we wait for your parents to pick you up.”

“My parents?”

“I can't let you walk home, just in case something happens. Lucky for you I was home. I thought I heard a knock but by the time I got out of the shower you were already screaming.””

Martin was in too much pain to resist. He let Jenna steer him, settling him onto the porch swing. At least his butt hadn't been stung. Hannah lagged, waiting until the door slammed behind Jenna before approaching sideways, her nose and mouth screwed up in apology. Her weight on the porch swing set it to creaking.