Revived Spirits (11 page)

I throw my arms around her. “Thanks, Mom. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she says. “Obviously. Or I wouldn’t be planning a red-eye road trip for your sake. How about we do it on Saturday?”

“I finally got a chance to talk to my mom without
Mamaw
listening in,”
Caylie
says. She and Adam and I are standing under the big maple tree in front of the school where we agreed to meet after the final bell.

“What did you tell her?” I ask, hoping that
Caylie’s
mamaw
had indeed been out of earshot.

“I told her who you really are—that you’re the one people call the Witch Girl.”

“Even if I wish they didn’t,” I say.

“And I told her you used your Sight on her and saw that she’s innocent and that it was probably Daryl who planted the drugs.”

“And what did she say?” Adam asks.

“She didn’t say nothing for a while. She just cried ’cause she was so happy that somebody saw she was telling the truth.”

My chest aches when I think how alone
Caylie’s
mom must feel. I’m glad that me knowing she’s innocent makes her feel better, but I hope she knows nobody’s going to let her out of jail on the word of a twelve-year-old girl who claims to have psychic powers. “The question is how do we make other people believe she’s telling the truth?”

“That’s easy,” Adam says, shrugging. “We get Daryl
Chumley
. We looked him up...we know he’s in Morgan.”

I say, “But that doesn’t mean getting
him’s
easy.” Adam says “get Daryl
Chumley
” the same way he might talk about getting a gallon of milk at the store.

“No, it
ain’t
easy,”
Caylie
says. “But I’ve got an idea.”

“Let’s hear it,” I say. Anything she has will be better than the big fat nothing we’re sitting on right now.

“Okay,”
Caylie
says, swinging her long braid over her shoulder. “When Daryl was living with Mom, he always made a big deal out of wanting me to be his daughter since my real daddy’s dead. He wanted me to call him Daddy Daryl and do things for him—make him sandwiches and get him beers out of the fridge.”

“So he wanted you to be his daughter just so he could make you wait on him?” Adam says.

“Pretty much, yeah. And he always thought I was crazy about him for some reason I couldn’t figure out. I bet if I was to call him up and say I missed him he’d want to see me. You and Adam could come along and you could use the Sight on him...see if you can find anything that might give us some evidence.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Adam says.

“Yeah,”
Caylie
says, wrinkling her brow. “But I’m still not sure how to pull it off because
Mamaw
and Papaw think he’s scum. Which he is. They don’t want me to see him.”

“Maybe you could spend the night at my house and we could go see him then,” I say.

“That could work,”
Caylie
says. “As long as
Mamaw
and Papaw think you’re Ruth and don’t know I’m spending the night at the Witch House.”

“And as long as we can get an adult to drive us into Morgan without letting them know we’re going to meet a drug dealer,” Adam says.

The different obstacles to this plan are bouncing around in my head like
pinballs
. “This is so complicated!”

“I know,”
Caylie
says. “And we have to be careful not to let Daryl suspect we might be checking up on him. The meth makes him real paranoid, so we’ll have to act like sweet, dumb kids or he’ll start to wonder about us. Daryl’s like a watchdog. He’ll be gentle as long as he thinks you’re doing right by him, but if he thinks you’re up to something, he’ll attack you soon as look at you.”

“Great,” Adam says. “We’ll be sure to bring
Milkbones
.”

It’s Saturday just after sundown, and I’m waiting impatiently for Abigail’s knock at my closet door. Once she’s here and packed into her mirror, she, Mom, Granny, and I are headed for
Needmore
, Tennessee, to try to make contact with the ghost of Minnie Belcher.

Adam begged to go with us, but Mom and Granny said no—that we could be walking into anything and they couldn’t guarantee his safety.

This, of course, only made Adam want to go more.

As soon as Abigail knocks on the door, I set the hand mirror on the floor so she can jump into it.

She looks down at the mirror and smiles. “Excited, are we?”

My heart’s beating like a jackhammer. “Aren’t you?”

Abigail jumps up and down in her high-button shoes. “Oh, yes. If I were alive, I’d scarcely be able to breathe! I’ve never been on such a long trip in an automobile, and the thought that at the end of our journey there might be a way for us to stay together...well, the excitement is almost unbearable.”

“Mom says we shouldn’t get our hopes up,” I say.

Abigail’s rosebud lips form a pout. “I’ve never understood the wisdom behind that expression. I’d rather hope and then be sad than be sad all the time.”

I smile. “For a dead person, you certainly are an optimist.”

“I might as well look at the bright side. After all, when you die during childhood, the worst has already happened. So things can only get better.” She leaps into the mirror.

I pick up the mirror and run down the steps to meet Granny and Mom in the kitchen.

Granny is checking to make sure the stove and oven are turned off while Mom runs to make sure the front door is locked. You can tell we don’t travel much because both of them are in a tizzy.

“Now, Miranda, you can tote that picnic basket,” Granny says. “I thought I’d better pack us a bite or two in case we get hungry on the trip. I’d rather starve than stop at one of them roadside places and get food poisoning.”

I lift the lid of the picnic basket to see what she’s packed: a loaf of homemade bread, a wheel of goat cheese, six apples, a couple dozen oatmeal-molasses cookies and a big jug of lemonade. “I think you packed more than a bite or two,” I say. “I thought you said it was just an hour and a half drive.”

“It is,” Granny says, “but you read about people getting stranded on the side of the road with no food all the time. Like that feller Sarah was telling me about who was stuck in his car three days with nothing but a candy bar and half a bottle of water. We don’t want that to be us.”

“Mother,” Mom says. “That was in a blizzard. In January. In Minnesota.”

“Laugh all you want,” Granny says. “But I
ain’t
tempting fate. Miranda, are you gonna tote that basket or not?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, grunting from the weight as I lift it.

Granny settles in the front passenger seat of Mom’s old Toyota, and I share the backseat with Abigail in her mirror, which gives me plenty of room. Once we’re moving I hold the mirror up to the car window so Abigail can see outside.

When we’ve finally left the winding country roads and hit the interstate, Abigail says “
Whee
!” She giggles, then says, “I can’t believe how fast we’re going. Is it safe?”

“Mom, Abigail wonders if it’s safe to be going as fast as we are,” I say.

Mom laughs. “You know, now that I think about it, Abigail’s never ridden on the interstate before. Is she scared?”

“No, she loves it. She’s looking out the window and saying, ‘
Whee
!’”

“Like a dog hanging its head out the car window?” Mom says. “I always like to imagine they’re saying ‘
whee
.’”

Since we don’t travel much, we make a lot of noise when we cross the Tennessee state line. Mom starts singing “The Tennessee Waltz,” then Granny chimes in with “Rocky Top,” and all of a sudden I’m glad Adam’s not with us right now because if he were, I’d be embarrassed.

“What are they doing?” Abigail asks.

“Singing songs about Tennessee.”

“Oh, is it like a parlor game?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Except when you’re in a parlor you can get up and leave. In a car you’re trapped.”

Even though Adam didn’t get to go on the trip, he’s with us in one way: in the set of directions he printed up for us from the Internet. The directions are supposed to get us from the front door of our house to the front door of what’s left of Minnie Belcher’s cabin, and the farther we get from home, the gladder I am to have them.

Mom must be glad too, because as she turns onto a not very clearly marked road, she says, “Thank Adam for these directions. If I didn’t have them, we’d probably be halfway across Virginia by now.”

Needmore
, Tennessee, is well named because there needs to be more of it. It’s even smaller than Wilder, with just one stoplight. There’s a tiny post office, a run-down gas station and a mom ’n pop grocery store. And that’s it. “Wilder seems like the big city compared to here,” I say.

“Yeah,” Mom says. “At least we merit three stoplights. Okay, the directions say we turn right at this next road.”

“We do,” Granny says. “I can feel her. She knows we’re coming.”

“How does she know?” I ask. “Did you send her a message or something?”

“No,” Granny says. “She knows because her Sight is strong. It was strong in life, and it’s even stronger in death.”

“I can feel her, too,” Abigail says. “But it’s strange. I can feel her drawing us there, but I can’t tell what her intentions are. If she wants us there like a lady wants a guest in her home. Or like a spider wants a fly.”

I decide not to share this last bit of Abigail’s message with Mom.

When we reach the last step of the directions, we’re at the end of a hollow on a gravel road. “I guess it’s time to get out and walk,” Mom says. “The cabin’s supposed to be on the bluff over there.”

“The Tennessee-Virginia state line’s around here someplace,” Granny says, opening the car door. “Some folks say she built her cabin to set in both states. When she was wanted in Tennessee, she went to the Virginia side, and when she was wanted in Virginia, she just stepped over into Tennessee.”

“We’re going to need the flashlights out of the trunk,” Mom says, apparently choosing not to comment on this tidbit. “Mother, are you going to be all right walking out here?”

“You know me, I’m as sure-footed as a mountain goat,” Granny says. “And besides, the
walk’ll
be easy because I feel her pulling me to her. It’s too late to turn back now.”

Except for the beams of our flashlights, the only light comes from a sliver of moon in the black, starless sky. An owl hoots in a tree, and somewhere in the distance a coyote
howls. I hope it’s far enough in the distance that we don’t run into him or any of his friends. What if Minnie is leading us not to her, but to danger? The woods are home to coyotes and bears as well as deep, dark holes that would be impossible to see at night. I swallow hard. “What if—?”

Granny grabs my hand. “What if we’re too lily-livered to even try this? Then you and Abigail will lose each other forever.”

“You’re right,” I say. I tighten my grip on Abigail’s mirror. “Let’s go.”

Climbing the side of the bluff wouldn’t be so bad in the daytime, but in the dark it’s a struggle not to get stuck in roots or scratched by branches.

When we finally reach the top, we see it: the remains of a log cabin with most of the roof gone, the moonlight glowing eerily through the gaps between the wooden slats.

“Do you feel it, Sarah?” Granny asks. Her voice is trembling.

“I definitely feel something,” Mom says.

As we make our way down the other side of the bluff toward the cabin, I feel like an iron filing being pulled toward a powerful magnet.

When I reach the cabin’s doorway, the soft
moonglow
shining through turns so bright my eyes squint shut. When I open them all I see is harsh, blinding whiteness. Then my knees give way, and the white turns black.