Promise Not to Tell: A Novel

W
HEN THE
P
OTATO
G
IRL WAS MURDERED
the killer cut out her heart. He buried it, but the next day, she rose again—from that
exact same spot.
” Ryan poked the campfire with a stick for emphasis, sending a shower of sparks up into the night.

Opal inched closer to Ryan. He was fifteen, kind of cute in that farm-boy way. Tori said Ryan had a huge crush on Opal. Tori was the one who’d set the whole thing up, said it would be fun to go into the woods and make out with the older boys. Opal was twelve and had never kissed a boy before but it wasn’t like she was going to admit that to anyone, even her best friend.

“What, like a zombie?” Tori asked. Opal was quiet—she hated the Potato Girl stories.

“Yeah, back from the dead like a zombie. It’s like a potato: you cut it up into pieces, bury any one of those pieces—even a little bit of peel if it has eyes—and another plant grows.” Ryan snapped a stick as if he were breaking a bone and tossed it into the fire.

Opal shivered. She thought of the visit she’d had just that afternoon. But no, she mustn’t think of these things. And she knew better than to tell the others. They’d think she was lying or crazy or maybe a little of both.

“And she roams these woods now,” added Sam. “You know how you can tell when she’s coming? By the smell. That rotten potato reek. You can smell her a hundred feet off.”

“Oh, puh-leeaase!” Tori rolled her eyes. Sam was her sort-of boyfriend.

“Let me get this straight—you don’t believe the Potato Girl is real?” Ryan was incredulous.

“I believe she existed once. I know she did. My mom went to school with her. She was just some poor kid who was murdered. All this ghost shit? It’s…whaddaya call it. An urban legend.”

“Jesus, Tori, are you forgetting that Dan and Chris saw her right here just last week?” Opal said. “And what about Becky Sheridan’s little sister, Janey? She says the Potato Girl met her down in the Griswolds’ old field and locked her in the root cellar.”

And what about me?
Opal thought.

“God, would you guys grow up? Dan and Chris were wasted, as usual. Janey was just screwing around and got stuck.” Tori spread her hands in a tah-dah gesture.

“Right,” said Opal. “The door was latched from the outside, brainiac. How do you figure she pulled that one off?”

“All I’m saying is, shit can be explained.”

“And all I’m saying is, there’s some shit that can’t,” Opal said.

Opal knew Tori was still mad at her about the jacket. Earlier that afternoon, before meeting the boys, Tori had found out about Opal’s borrowing her cross-country jacket—without asking. That was bad enough, but Opal happened to wear it while fixing the chain on her bike, and Tori was furious about the grease stain on the left sleeve. Opal had to promise to have it dry-cleaned, paying for it with her own money. And in the meantime, Tori could borrow her jacket. Only it wasn’t exactly her jacket. It was her mother’s oldest and most favorite jacket, which Opal had borrowed on many occasions without asking and now was forbidden to so much as touch. It was fawn-colored suede with fringe on the sleeves and front. A cowgirl, rock-star jacket that Opal had to admit looked better on Tori, who was a little older and actually had a figure. The two girls had the same haircut (both done by Shirley at Hair Today on the edge of town) and both were blond, but the resemblances stopped there. Opal knew Tori was the pretty one, the one the boys looked at; the truth was, most days she couldn’t care less. She had bigger things to worry about than boys.

Opal knew her borrowing annoyed people, and that one day she might get in real trouble for it, but she couldn’t seem to make herself stop. Half the time, she wasn’t even aware she was doing it. Like the night she took Tori’s cross-country jacket, she was most of the way home before she even realized she was wearing it. Some people smoked. Some chewed their nails. Opal borrowed. It wasn’t stealing exactly. She took things only from people she knew, people she liked and felt close to. And she did her best to return the things unharmed before anyone even noticed they were missing. It gave her a thrill. A sense that she was so much more than her twelve-year-old self when she carried pieces of other people around with her. They were like good luck charms—talismans—imbued somehow with little bits of other people’s souls.

I
T WAS A COLD NIGHT
. The four kids sat close to the fire, while the boys swapped more Potato Girl stories. Tori mostly kept silent, smoking the Camel Lights she’d pilfered from her dad, occasionally fluffing her hair, snorting and shaking her head at the most outlandish tales. There were plenty of stories to go around without her input. Every kid in New Canaan had grown up hearing about how the Potato Girl walked the woods where she was killed, searching for her murderer, taking her vengeance on anyone who crossed her path.

“I bet the reason she hasn’t left is that the killer’s still here. She knows who it is and won’t rest until he’s dead,” Ryan said.

“But it’s not just him she’s pissed at—it’s the whole fucking town. She’s cursed the
whole town,
” Sam said.

“Curse or no curse, I have to pee. I’ll be right back.” Tori rose, pulling the suede jacket tight around her.

“Take the flashlight,” said Sam.

“Moon’s out. I’ll find my way,” replied Tori as she headed off, out of the circle of firelight.

“Be careful! I smell rotten potatoes!” shouted Sam after her.

“Asshole!” she called back.

They listened to her footsteps, crunching over dead leaves and twigs, moving farther away, then disappearing altogether. They heard her curse quietly once—probably got her foot tangled in the undergrowth. The fire crackled. They told more stories.

After five minutes, Opal said Sam should go look for her. The guys brushed it off, said girls took forever pissing, had a good laugh about just what it was girls did that could take so long.

When ten minutes had gone by, they called to her, but there was no response. The guys said Tori must be fucking with them. Trying to give them a good scare.

“Fine,” Opal said finally. “You two macho men stay here. I’m gonna go find her.” She snatched the flashlight from Ryan and marched out into the darkness.

R
YAN AND
S
AM STAYED
by the fire laughing at how hysterical girls could be. Wasn’t that what they were doing there to begin with? Hadn’t they come to the haunted woods, as countless other boys had done, hoping the girls would get a little scared, need a little comforting? Wasn’t all the ghost-watching shit just an excuse to get out in the woods and fool around? Weren’t the woods behind the Griswolds’ old place littered with bottles and condoms, specters of couples who had come before, with not one sign of some tormented little girl ghost?

Opal’s scream interrupted them. They ran away from the warm glow of the fire, toward the shrill cry in the dark and tangled woods. They saw the flashlight bobbing in the trees and heard Opal sob as they drew near.

Ryan got there a second ahead of Sam—he stopped short, backed up a step.

“What the fuck?” he breathed.

Under a big gnarled maple lay Tori, naked, a cord wrapped around her neck and a square of skin neatly removed from her left breast. Her clothes had been carefully placed in a folded pile beside her. Opal stood over her, one hand clapped to the side of her face, making a horrible mewing sound. The beam from the flashlight danced over Tori’s pale skin.

“It’s a joke,” Sam cried, laughing a harsh, crazy-sounding laugh. “Fucking sick joke. C’mon.” He nudged Tori’s body with his foot, pushing her face into the beam of the flashlight. Her tongue protruded slightly from blue lips. Her eyes were bulging in their sockets, wide and glassy like a doll’s. Sam, too, began to scream.

It was Ryan who broke the spell, took the flashlight from Opal, said they had to go get help. The boys took off running, and didn’t notice when Opal, who had been right behind them, turned back.

She made her way to the clearing, choking back sobs, willing herself not to look at her dead friend, and went straight to the pile of clothes. The suede jacket was at the bottom, folded neatly. She removed the other clothes, noticed the white lace panties on top, folded and glowing like a large moth in the moonlight.

Then she slipped on the jacket—it still held Tori’s heat and this made bile rise in her throat. She glanced one more time at the body. The other girl looked like a plastic mannequin, splayed out on the forest floor. It wasn’t possible that this was the same girl who had just bitched her out hours ago for wrecking the cross-country jacket. The girl who refused to believe in ghosts.

Opal felt as if she were being watched, not by the blank staring eyes of her dead friend, but by someone else—
something
else. Slowly, reluctantly, she turned.

And then she caught a glimpse of it: a small pale figure in a long dress behind a tree not twenty feet away. Opal watched as it backed away from her, zigzagging through the maples, floating off into the dark heart of the woods before disappearing altogether.

Opal ran as fast as she could until she caught up with the boys, heart hammering, biting her tongue to keep from screaming. She prayed they wouldn’t notice she had on the jacket Tori had been wearing all evening. They didn’t. And she sure wasn’t about to tell them what she’d seen when she’d gone back to get it.

Only hours later, back at home, once the questioning was over and the coroner had come to take Tori’s body away, did Opal realize what a mistake it had been. She hadn’t wanted to explain why her dead best friend had been wearing her mother’s jacket, the jacket Opal had been forbidden to touch. But really, who would’ve given a shit? And what was wrong with her that she was even
thinking
about a stupid jacket? Now she’d tampered with a crime scene, which, she was pretty sure, made her a criminal. The best thing to do was hang the jacket back in the closet and never mention it to anyone. And that’s just what she was doing when she noticed what was missing.

The star. The tarnished metal sheriff ’s star she’d pinned on it just that afternoon was gone.

“Shit!” she said, fingering the two small pinpricks in the suede where she’d pushed the pin through.

It must have fallen off in the woods somewhere. The only thing to do was go back and find it. She had to return it before it was discovered missing.

And for the millionth time, she told herself, “This is it. No more borrowing,” and she believed she really meant it.

November 17, 2002
10:20 p.m.

M
Y NAME IS
K
ATE
C
YPHER
and I am forty-one years old.

I killed someone tonight.

I have always believed myself to be a person incapable of murder. Suicide has crossed my mind once or twice, but murder? Never. Not this white-winged dove. I’ve marched for peace and give money on a regular basis to Amnesty International. I’m a school nurse who draws happy faces on Band-Aids, for Christ’s sake.

But none of this changes the fact that it was little old me who pulled the trigger and, with near-perfect aim, put a hole in another human being’s heart.

And in order to truly explain it, I’d have to tell the whole story. I’d have to go back, not just to Tori Miller’s murder in the woods ten days ago, but to one that happened more than thirty years ago. My story would have to start back when I was in the fifth grade with a girl named Del Griswold. It’s not a name many folks around here even remember. There isn’t a soul in town who hasn’t heard of the Potato Girl, though. She is, by all accounts, the most famous resident of New Canaan—which is funny because, back when she was alive, she was just a skinny kid with scabby knees who, you could tell just by looking, would never amount to much.

How wrong we all were.