The Curse (Seacliff High Mystery Book 2) (3 page)

“They don’t have much time,” Alyson observed. “I hope they can find what we need before fifth period starts.”

“Don’t worry,” Trevor reassured her. “Mac hacks into school records all the time. I think she has most of the passwords memorized.”

“Really?” Alyson was surprised. “Mac’s hacked into school records before? Why?”

“Oh, you know,” Trevor hedged. “Just looking for stuff.”

“She’s fixed grades for you, hasn’t she?” Alyson guessed.

“Maybe once or twice, but only when I was totally robbed of the A I deserved. My dad’s a real stickler for grades. He’d make me quit the football team if my grades fell below a 4.0.”

“My, my, my,” Alyson drawled, “We have a bona fide criminal in our midst. Who’d have thought?”

“You’re not going to say anything, are you?” Trevor worried. “Any of you?” He looked at the others at the table. “I wouldn’t want to get Mac in trouble.”

They all assured him that his secret was safe with them.

Football practice was canceled due to the rain, which meant that Trevor and Eli would be able to go with them after all. Alyson scanned the parking lot, filled with beat-up secondhand cars, many of them topped with surfboards of varying sizes and colors. She doubted there would be many surfers on the water with all the rain, though the local crowd was a hearty bunch that probably figured a little precipitation would make no difference in a sport in which you had to get wet anyway.

Alyson spied Devon’s SUV near the side entrance of the school building. Seagulls circled overhead as the rain let up for the first time that day. Tucking her long hair up under the hood of her jacket, she headed toward the Expedition.

“I called my mom at the museum to tell her that I’d be late and she asked if I could pick up Tucker,” Alyson began after greeting Devon with a kiss on the cheek. “She brought him with her today, but Blake has invited her to dinner, so she wanted me to take him home.”

“Sure,” Devon replied. “We’ll get him right now. Who knows, maybe he’ll find something we might have overlooked.”

“Let’s not forget we promised Caleb that we’d deliver some of the decorations to the barn as long as we were making the trip,” Alyson reminded him.

“The guys and I will get them now. Why don’t you call Mac and let her know we’ll be a few minutes late picking her up from her internship?”

Because Mac was such a computer genius she went off campus for the last two periods of each day to work for a software developer. She was not only gaining valuable experience but she was receiving both high school and college credit for her work.

After loading up the decorations, they picked up Mac and Tucker and then headed toward the Coast Highway, which promised to be a beautiful trip; the road paralleled the ocean all the way from Cutter’s Cove to the dirt lane leading out to the barn.

“So, Mac, were you able to dig up anything on Spyder and V?” Alyson asked as they settled in for the drive.

“Of course.” Mac shrugged. “You can only get so much from school records, but I found out that Spyder’s real name is Myron Wendell Rosenberg.”

“Myron?” Devon whistled. “No wonder he goes by Spyder.”

“I have an address and phone number, as well as parents’ names and occupations,” Mac continued. “His father is a rabbi and his mother is a psychologist. He has a brother named Byron, who attends Cutter’s Cove Middle School. The records indicate that he calls himself Stretch. I can’t imagine why.

“There wasn’t a lot of other information, except his medical and grade history. It looks like he was an A/B student through middle school but has earned mostly Ds since starting high school.”

“As to Ds,” Eli observed. “Sounds like there might be a bit of rebellion at work. High school’s not that much harder.”

“I agree,” Mac continued. “I checked his criminal record and found a bunch of misdemeanor-type stuff. Shoplifting, graffiti, that sort of thing.”

“Did you find anything on V?” Alyson asked.

“Totally. V’s full name is Vanessa Grace Harrison. Her mother died when she was eight. Her father is an on-again, off-again mechanic. V has no siblings listed and she appears to be a straight A student.”

“Still?” Eli asked.

“As far as I can tell. Of course no grades have been posted yet for this year.”

“Did you check her criminal record?” Alyson questioned.

“Yes. She’s clean, but her father has multiple arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct and domestic violence. There was a dramatic increase in domestic violence calls just prior to her mother’s death, but in every case no charges were filed. Might be coincidence. No cause of death for the mother was listed that I could find so far.”

“V sounds like someone who might run away,” Devon observed. “It seems like she’d have justifiable cause. Maybe things got really bad at home and Spyder helped her escape.”

“But why take off with all the decorations?” Trevor asked. “Wouldn’t he either not pick them up in the first place or drop them off before he took off?”

Eli leaned forward. “The fact that he took off with all that stuff doesn’t make sense.”

Devon turned off the highway and onto the dirt road leading out to the barn.

“This road’s really bad.” Devon slowed the vehicle and put it into four-wheel drive.

“The rain has really made a muddy mess. How far is it out to the barn?”

“Several miles,” Caleb said. “Let’s just take it slow.”

It took almost half an hour to get out to the barn. The road had been totally washed out in places and Devon had to cut through the groves of trees to get around the washouts. By the time they arrived everyone’s nerves were a bit frayed.

Alyson let Tucker out of his crate. He immediately set off, running around the area, happy to be free at last. It had stopped raining, but the ground was still muddy and wet.

“Let’s get inside,” Devon suggested. “Any evidence that might have been out here has been washed away by the storm.”

The inside of the barn was dark and dusty. The structure itself looked to be sound, but the boards that made up the sides were worn and weathered and in definite need of sanding and paint.

“Does anyone happen to have a flashlight?” Alyson asked.

“I do.” Devon opened his backpack and pulled out two small flashlights. He kept one and Trevor took the other.

The group broke up, with Alyson, Caleb, and Tucker going with Devon and Eli and Mac going with Trevor. They searched the structure thoroughly before meeting again fifteen minutes later.

“We didn’t find anything,” Devon spoke first. “You guys?”

“Nothing,” Trevor responded. “There are a lot of footprints, but they could have been left by anyone.”

Tucker had wandered off and was now barking at something in the rafters.

“What’s he barking at?” Eli wondered.

“I have no idea.” Alyson walked over to where the dog was standing and looked up, commanding him to be quiet. “It looks like an owl.”

“Really?” Mac joined her friend. “It’s so pretty.”

By then the rest of the gang had come over to check out the barn’s nocturnal inhabitant, which didn’t seem at all happy about having his nap disturbed.

“It looks like there’s a loft up there,” Trevor said. “Look at the slope of the ceiling. It just sort of ends, but the footprint of the barn extends another twenty feet or so.” He tried to shine the dim light from his small flashlight toward the dark ceiling. “There’s definitely a loft of some sort up there. Too bad we don’t have a ladder.”

They looked around both the inside and outside of the barn but couldn’t find anything to use to climb up except a couple of old oak barrels that wouldn’t provide nearly enough height.

“We could open the double doors and I could drive the Expedition inside. Maybe if we stack the barrels on its roof we could get high enough to climb up there,” Devon said.

“Sounds dangerous,” Alyson observed.

“Eli, Trevor, and Caleb can hold the barrels while I climb up.”

Devon did as he’d suggested and centered the SUV so that it was right under the loft. Eli and Trevor handed the barrels up to him and he stacked them one on top of the other.

“I don’t know,” Alyson worried. “That looks pretty rickety to me.”

“It’ll be okay,” Devon insisted, climbing up onto the precariously stacked barrels the others were holding steady. He carefully grabbed on to a rafter, then flung himself onto the floor of the loft.

“You guys have got to see this,” he said a minute later. “There’s a rope ladder up here. I’ll lower it down.”

Eli moved the Expedition out of the way as Devon lowered the ladder.

“I wonder why the ladder was up there,” Mac said as she grabbed on to the ladder to steady it. “It’s really not much use to anyone up in the loft.”

“Maybe someone didn’t want anyone else going up there,” Eli guessed.

“Okay, the ladder’s secure,” Devon yelled down. “Come on up.”

Tucker barked as Alyson started up the ladder. “It’s okay. Sit,” she commanded.

When Alyson reached the top she yelled for the next person to start up. “Oh my God, what’s that?” she asked Devon as she moved away.

“I have no idea,” Devon said as he held the ladder at the top to keep it steady.

Each of them climbed the ladder and then stood staring at the sight that had met them when they reached the loft.

“It looks like some sort of symbol.” Caleb bent down to more closely examine the design that was painted on the floor of the loft. “It looks sort of like the kind of thing that would be used in the black arts to perform some type of spell.”

“Like what?” Alyson asked.

“I don’t know that much about the occult, but I do know that both Spyder and V dabbled in it. They used to paint some pretty dark stuff in art class. One time I saw Spyder with a book of spells.”

“Like this one?” Mac asked, holding up a red leather-bound book.

“Exactly like that one,” Caleb confirmed. “It looks like Spyder and V were definitely up here. Where did you find the book?”

“Over there, buried under a pile of hay. I saw a corner of it sticking out,” Mac explained. “That’s what caught my eye.”

“Look around to see if you can find anything else,” Caleb directed.

They carefully dug through the rotted hay that was piled up toward the back of the loft.

“I found a knife,” Eli yelled, “and it looks like it has blood on it.”

Everyone stopped their search to examine the knife.

“Oh, God.” Mac groaned. “You don’t think we’re going to find dead bodies under that hay, do you?”

“I doubt it.” Eli put his arm around her. “This is Monday. Spyder and V have been missing since Saturday. If they were buried under the hay I think there would be a definite odor.”

“Besides,” Trevor added, “there’s no blood. If they’d been stabbed, wouldn’t there be blood everywhere?”

“Well, the blood on the knife came from somewhere,” Alyson pointed out. “Do you think someone stashed it up here after the fact? Maybe there are bodies buried outside.”

“Could be,” Devon said. “Let’s go take a look. The symbol on the floor might be important. Caleb, you’re our artist, so why don’t you draw the symbol on one of the blank pages of my English notebook.”

Devon pulled a notebook from his backpack.

Caleb started to draw as Devon, Alyson, and Trevor started down the rickety rope ladder. Eli and Mac volunteered to stay with Caleb; they didn’t want anyone to be left alone in the creepy barn.

“I just have one question,” Alyson said as she reached the barn floor and bent down to pet the ecstatic Tucker. “Someone had to be up in the loft to draw the symbol and to stash the knife. How did they get down? The ladder was left up in the loft.”

“Good question,” Devon acknowledged.

“This whole thing doesn’t make sense.” Trevor started walking toward the barn door. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I feel like we’re missing something.”

“Yeah, but what?” Alyson wondered.

“I wish I knew. There’s really a muddy mess out here.” Trevor stepped carefully through the soupy mud. “I doubt we’ll find anything. If there was any evidence it’s gone now.”

“Yeah, I’m suddenly wishing I’d worn different shoes.” Alyson looked down at her previously tan-colored boots.

Caleb, Mac, and Eli came out of the barn. “I found something interesting,” Caleb said as they drew closer to the others. “While I was drawing I noticed there’s what looks like blood blended with the red paint used to draw the symbol. If it really is blood I think it would have been added intentionally. There probably wasn’t a lot of blood, like the amount you would have if someone was stabbed, just a little bit here and there, like you’d get from a cut hand or finger. My guess is that Spyder, or whoever drew the symbol, used the knife to make a shallow incision to produce the blood.”

“We need to find out what the symbol is supposed to mean,” Mac contributed. “Maybe then we might be able to figure out what happened to Spyder and V. There’s an occult shop in town. I think we should start there. And I can look through the spell book we found, and maybe research occult rituals involving blood on the Web.”

Devon looked at his watch. “It’s after five. If it takes us as long to get back to town as it did to get here we’re going to get there pretty late, and we still need to unload the decorations we brought out. Maybe we should all call our parents to tell them we’re eating in town. Our dad’s on the East Coast again, so Eli and I are in the clear.”

“My mom’s having dinner with Blake,” Alyson reminded him. “I have a ton of leftover clam chowder from last night’s dinner and some ham from the night before that. We could all go to my place.”

“I’ll call my mom to tell her I’m eating at your house.” Mac reached for her cell phone.

“Can I borrow your cell after you’re done?” Caleb asked. “Preinheritance, I couldn’t afford a cell phone, and I still haven’t gotten around to getting one.”

“My mom never asks when or where I eat,” Trevor explained. “As long as I’m home by ten on school nights it’s cool.”