Hangman's Curse (15 page)

Carrillo growled, “Well, I say we haul in this Snyder kid and this Sparks chick and get it out of them.”

“But they have rights!” Ms. Wyrthen reminded the officer.

“I'll read them their rights!” Carrillo snapped back. Then he pointed his finger in Nate's face. “But I'll get results, which is a lot more than we've gotten from you!”

Nate put up his hand to signal for caution. “We're getting real close to hearing from Ian Snyder, don't worry. But I'm troubled about something: Amy Warren's locker doesn't have a hex scratched on it, that hanging-man symbol.”

“So what? She got hauled screaming to the hospital, isn't that enough?”

“It's a lot. But it isn't everything, and I'll venture it's not enough to detain Ian Snyder.”

It was Sarah's turn. She spoke quietly but quickly. “Consistent with the pattern, we found a soda straw in Jim Boltz's duffel bag, identical to the other two.”

That got a visible reaction.

She continued, “We checked all three straws for fingerprints, but no results. However, they all had two things in common: small deposits of sugar that seem to indicate the straws were once plugged with sugar at both ends, and a chemical that up until now we couldn't identify.” She unfolded a sheet of paper. “But we just got this fax from an associate at the university. The sugar was saturated with a chemical trade-named Tricanol.”

“Tricanol?” Officer Carrillo repeated.

“It's an additive used in paints, stains, wood preservatives. It's used widely and it's widely available.”

Ms. Wyrthen wrinkled her nose.
“Paint?”

“Does it produce the symptoms we've seen?” Gessner asked.

Sarah sighed and folded the paper. “Afraid not. It can be poisonous in large amounts, but it isn't hallucinogenic or neurotoxic. All that is to say, it probably has no direct relation to the sickness—but it has to mean something. It's a clue and we have to track it down.”

Ms. Wyrthen forced a pleasant, professional smile. “So I would say we're making progress.” She made a point to look at Carrillo. “Slow, perhaps, but progress nevertheless.”

“Progress?” said Carrillo. “Some wood preservative is progress?”

The telephone on Ms. Wyrthen's desk chirped. “Excuse me. This could be important.” She picked up the phone. “Ms. Wyrthen.”

“We'll check the wood shop, first of all,” said Nate.

“I'll get the students' class schedules and we'll see who's been through that room lately,” Gessner offered.

“And maybe we'll check the greenhouse as well,” Sarah offered. “The shelves in the greenhouse are probably treated with preservative.”

“Right,” said Nate, “and then . . .” His voice trailed off. He was looking at Ms. Wyrthen.

Her face was pale as she sank into her chair. The others read her expression and fell silent. She picked up her pen. Her hand was trembling. “Do you have the mother's name and number?” She listened, and wrote it down. “And the medical examiner? Okay.” She wrote some more. “Okay. I'll tell the others. Thank you. Call if you get anything else.” She hung up.

Everyone was waiting.

Nate asked, “What is it, Ms. Wyrthen?”

She looked up at them, her face pale and troubled. “That was Dr. Stuart at the hospital. Amy Warren . . . is dead. She passed away in the hospital only minutes ago.”

Stunned silence. Tom Gessner sank into a chair, resting his head in his hand. Carrillo, red-faced with anger, hooked his thumb through his belt—near his revolver.

After swallowing the initial shock, Nate looked at Sarah. They were each thinking the same thing.

“Its properties have changed,” said Sarah. “It's become more lethal.”

Nate nodded. “The other victims are still alive after close to two weeks. Amy died within hours.”

As Ms. Wyrthen picked up the phone to make a call, Carrillo gave Nate a cold, demanding glare. “So what's next, Springfield? I'd love to hear what your next move is going to be.”

He thought for only a moment, then nodded resignedly to himself. “Same procedure. Go through Amy's things, visit her home. But I'll hand you one thing: Looks like we'll have to press a little harder for a talk with Ian Snyder.”

“And
another
talk with Crystal Sparks,” Sarah offered. “Allegedly, she's one of the witches, one of Ian Snyder's friends, and I know she's holding back plenty.”

“That won't be possible,” said Ms. Wyrthen, hanging up the phone, her hand trembling. “I just spoke with the medical examiner. The police have found Crystal Sparks. She was . . . her mother said she went raving mad last night and ran out of the house. That's why she wasn't in school today. The police didn't find her until an hour ago—in Benton Park.”

“She spent the whole night in Benton Park?” Carrillo asked.

Ms. Wyrthen looked at them directly. “She
died
in Benton Park. The medical examiner guesses she's been dead since last night. We've lost her, too.”

8
hangman's
curse

T
he next morning,
there had been no closure notice and classes were in session as usual. More than fifty students stayed home anyway. Shawna Miller was staying home with full permission and parental supervision. Other parents were calling the school office and tying up the telephone. Doctors and cops were coming and going. Local newspaper, radio, and television reporters were popping up in front of the school and in the halls, shoving microphones in students' and teachers' faces.

Word was spreading quickly all over the school: Amy Warren was dead. Crystal Sparks was dead. Tod Kramer was near death. Doug Anderson and Jim Boltz were critical. Leonard Baynes was crazy and getting worse.

As for the mysterious hanging-man symbol, everyone knew about it. It was impossible to keep the lockers of the victims off-limits. Plenty of students were checking their own lockers to make sure they weren't next.

Rumors were popping up out of nowhere and flying at light speed: The next victim was already chosen and it would be a girl; it would be another guy; it would be a friend of the first three; it would be a teacher. Abel Frye was seen in the Forbidden Hallway; he was seen in the parking lot; he was seen on the roof of the school. Ian Snyder was dead; Ian Snyder had been arrested; Ian Snyder hanged himself. Crystal Sparks hanged herself.

“Now,
please
tell me we have an emergency!” Nate protested as he and Sarah met privately with Tom Gessner and Ms. Wyrthen.

“The school board is ‘undecided,'” Ms. Wyrthen lamented.

“Undecided?”
Tom Gessner marveled.

“I didn't hear that,” said Sarah. “I
couldn't
have heard that.”

“Oh, brother.” Gessner wilted at a thought. “It's the game, isn't it?”

Ms. Wyrthen gave a furtive nod. “The championship on Thanksgiving Day. I know at least two board members who have kids on the team and don't want us to forfeit that game, and we'd definitely forfeit if we closed the school.” She sighed. “They've told me to wait until they decide for sure.”

“And how long will that take?” Nate asked.

“I'm sure we will have enjoyed our turkey and cranberries before then.” They all deflated with a moan. “We'll try to cut back on whatever activities we can. The main thing now is to remain calm and keep the students calm, and please, let's try to put a lid on all this hysteria and all these silly rumors. They're only making things worse.”

Nate regathered himself and said, “So, I guess we'd better have that talk with Ian Snyder.”

“Ian Snyder is missing,” said Ms. Wyrthen.

“What?”

“Not good, not good,” said Gessner.

“Officer Carrillo tried to bring him in for questioning last night—” said Ms. Wyrthen.

Nate and Sarah leaned forward.

“He didn't!” said Nate.

“Please say you're joking,” said Sarah.

Ms. Wyrthen put up her hand. “He got no farther than the front door of Ian's house. Ian's mother wouldn't let him in and he didn't have a warrant.”

Nate drew a breath. “So now Ian could be anywhere—except here where we can find him.”

“Carrillo's prowling the halls right now,” Sarah recalled. “He's probably still on the hunt. This doesn't help us. Not at all.”

“
Whew!
We need to pray.”

“I'll join you,” said Gessner.

“Ms. Wyrthen, it's your office. Do you mind if we have a word of prayer?”

“As principal of this school,” she said, “I insist on it.”

When Elijah opened his locker, he found a possible answer to their prayers: a crumpled note from Ian Snyder, jammed through the ventilation slots.

“I don't know what to do,” Ian said, sitting with his wrists around his knees, hardly looking up.

Elijah and Ian were perched on a cold metal catwalk in the dark recesses above the stage in the main auditorium. From where they sat, they could look down on the racks of stage lights, touch the heavy stage rigging, see the stage floor far below. The towering, vertical curtains below them made them feel they were clinging to a ledge on the side of a skyscraper.

Elijah was skipping Mr. Carlson's humanities class to have this meeting. He was hoping his dad could work it out later with the powers that were.

Ian was hiding, and not just from Carrillo. He kept his voice down. “The others want to know what went wrong. They want me to stop it from happening.”

Elijah knew he would have to be somewhat bold. It was definitely time for answers. “Well . . . just what
is
happening, Ian?”

Ian looked up at him, his pale, ghostly face half visible in the dark. “You're a Christian, so you're probably not going to like this, but . . . Elijah, I'm a witch. I have special powers. I have spirits that work for me. You're into spiritual things. Maybe you can believe that.”

Elijah knew Ian could be tampering with spirits—
or
this whole problem could have another cause they had yet to discover. For now, he would see it Ian's way. “Is Abel Frye one of the spirits?”

Ian hesitated a moment, but finally nodded.

Elijah considered that a moment and then answered, “I guess he
used
to work for you. Looks like now he's doing stuff on his own, am I right?”

Ian's eyes were fearful. “I never told him to hit Amy. Amy's a friend. Out of all the kids in school, she was one person who actually said ‘hi' to me once in a while. She never hurt me, she never shoved me, she never insulted me or talked about me behind my back. She even got on Jim's case for what he was doing to me.” He was near tears. “It was supposed to be Shawna Miller. I told him to go after Shawna Miller, not Amy.”

The chanting of the other night,
Elijah thought.

Ian's head dropped and he shook it slowly in remorse. “And I sure didn't put any curse on Crystal.”

“Crystal was a friend, too, right?”

“More than that.”

“Was she a witch?”

“I can't get into that.” He looked up, not at Elijah but into the darkness surrounding them. “But I'm in trouble. The others are mad. They're ready to kill me. They're blaming me for what happened.”

“What others? Who do you mean? Those guys at lunch yesterday?”

“No, those guys are just, you know, new friends. They're not on the inside.”

“The inside? Like an inner-circle kind of thing?”

Ian gave in. “There are other witches. But it's a secret group. I can't tell you who they are.”

“But they think you put a curse on Amy and Crystal?”

“They think I've lost control of the ghost. And maybe I have. I mean, it was working! I put a curse on Tod Kramer, and
bam!
Abel got him. I put a curse on Doug Anderson, and
bam!
Abel got him, too. Same with Jim Boltz, and same with Leonard Baynes.”

“That's a pretty good record.”

“Yeah, up until now. Only missed once before, but that time
nothing
happened. Abel didn't hit somebody else.”

Elijah prayed he'd get a straight answer as he asked, “You mean, you put a curse on somebody and it didn't work?”

“Can't say for sure. It might still happen.”

“Was it Mr. Marquardt?”

Ian seemed to regret his answer. “No. Somebody else. I haven't had a chance to curse Marquardt yet. But I could do it—I mean, I
used
to be able to do it.” He smiled. “It was great, Elijah. Everybody who ever tortured me, I could get back at them. I could just . . .
remove
them.” He looked at Elijah, strangely gleeful even in his pain. “It's a lot better than guns. Guns are a stupid idea. You try to get your enemies with guns, you just end up getting killed yourself, or thrown in jail—and now with the metal detectors . . .” He chuckled at that. “But nobody can stop a curse. It can go through walls and doors and metal detectors and nobody can turn it away. It's perfect.”

“But what do you—I mean, how do you get Abel Frye to go after somebody?”

“Oh, you have a séance and you call him up, you chant your enemy's name several times, you give the ghost an offering, and away he goes.”

He makes it sound so simple,
Elijah thought. He could only imagine what kind of weird, dark ceremonies Ian and his cohorts must have carried on in their eerie hiding place under the school building. “You, uh, you put the little symbol on the lockers?”

“Me or one of the others. It's supposed to guide the ghost to the right person.”

“And then what, you put something in the lockers?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, some object or something to tag the person. I thought witches did that.”

Ian considered that. “Maybe that's what we did wrong. Maybe the little symbol wasn't enough. We should have stuck something in the lockers to keep the curse focused.”