The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (82 page)

CHAPTER 9

Phoebe

JUNE 5, PRESENT DAY

W
hen Sam and Phoebe pulled into their driveway at nearly three o’clock, Phoebe sighed—she’d never been happier to be home. She’d shower, put on a clean change of clothes, sit down with Sam at their wobbly kitchen table, and figure all this out. Being home and safe and away from the madness at the cabin would put things in perspective.

It was more of a cottage than a proper house, really, and over the last two years, it had become Phoebe’s favorite place on earth—the only place that had ever truly felt like home to her.

The house with its high, peaked roof, stained-glass windows, and gingerbread trim at the eaves had charmed Phoebe nearly as much as Sam had. It all seemed too good to be true. And when, after they’d been dating for six months, he asked her to move in, she had no hesitation, though he was the first man she’d ever agreed to live with. Until she met Sam and saw the house, she’d always been determined to have her own space, to keep a certain comfortable distance between herself and her boyfriends. But Sam was different. This house was different. Sam had lived there since college, renting it from an art history professor who had been renovating it. Then the professor’s wife got sick and they moved to Boston. He sold Sam the house for half what it was worth.

“Ooh,” Phoebe remembered cooing when she first saw it. “It’s straight out of a fairy tale!”

But now, as she got closer and saw that the front door was hanging open, it felt more like a scene from a horror novel.

“Stand back,” Sam warned, squaring his shoulders, holding the sad little spare car key out in front of him like it was supposed to be a samurai sword.

“Like hell,” Phoebe said, staying right by his side. She grabbed a softball-size rock from beside the front steps.

“Guess we didn’t just forget to lock up,” Sam said, eyeing the front door with trepidation. The dead bolt had been ripped from the wall and the lock in the knob mangled with a screwdriver that had been left hanging there. Phoebe held her breath, kicked the door open with her green boot, and led Sam over the threshold.

The house was trashed: furniture tipped over, drawers and cabinets opened, and everything pulled out. The framed topographical maps were all down, the glass smashed.

“Holy shit,” Phoebe mumbled. Still holding the rock, she ran straight for the aquariums at the back of the living room to check on everyone. The aquariums were about the only thing in the house left intact, and all of the residents appeared unharmed. She set down her rock and gently scooped up Horace. The little hedgehog nosed her palm and fingers, searching for treats.

“Hey there, Buddy,” she said in the singsongy voice reserved for small animals and babies, stroking his soft quills. “What happened in here, huh?” She held her little pale-bellied hedgie up to her face, wishing he could answer.

“They all okay?” Sam asked. With the exception of the snake, Sam loved the animals, and teasingly referred to them as
Phoebe’s menagerie
.

“Seem to be,” Phoebe said, setting Horace down in his cage. In the next aquarium, Orville and Wilbur, the two hooded rats, were contentedly snoozing, pink tails curled around their bodies. Jackson the one-eyed ball python was resting half in and half out of his water dish.

The animals had all come from the clinic, given up for various reasons. Horace had badly bitten a boy at a birthday party (why parents would let a group of rowdy seven-year-old boys pass around the hedgehog—who must have been terrified—was beyond Phoebe). Jackson had been rescued from a home with fourteen snakes, half a dozen ferrets, and countless rabbits, all malnourished and neglected. Orville and Wilbur were abandoned when their owner took off for college and his mother refused to take care of vermin.

“Great. It’s a comfort to know that the twisted psychos are animal lovers,” Sam said.

Phoebe’s legs felt like rubber. She wanted to sit, but the furniture was tipped over, slashed open.

Sam stood, dumbfounded, in the center of their living room, looking for the phone. “We shouldn’t touch anything. I’ll call the police.” He went to set down the mail he’d carried in, but the table had been turned over. He dropped the mail down on the floor and that’s when he saw it: a small envelope with only his name in neat script on the front. No address or postage. He tore it open.

T
hey spent the afternoon putting the house back together and taking stock. It didn’t look as though anything had been taken. Sam decided it was best not to involve the police. Phoebe argued with him at first, but when he reminded her of their interaction with the cops just that morning, she acquiesced. Who knew what might happen if the police stepped in? And what if that girl had changed her story again? The police might well be on their way at this very minute to arrest Sam and Phoebe.

“I think part of the whole setup this morning was to make us look like really sketchy, criminal-type people. It was a smart move on their part,” Sam said. “They know we’ll think twice about going to the cops because the police are going to see us as nutty and unreliable, no matter what.”

“But we know what we saw,” she said. “That woman stabbed Evie! What happened to her? You can’t just take off and disappear with a stab wound like that.”

Sam shook his head worriedly. “I don’t know.”

“And who took all our stuff? Cleaned up the cabin like that? Why on earth would anyone go through all that?”

“Hard to say,” Sam answered. “The fact that this place was torn apart, too, tells me they’re looking for something. Maybe it was just the fairy book they were after, and now that they’ve got it, they’ll leave us alone.”

“But who even knew we had the book?” Phoebe said. “Your mom, Evie, and Elliot. The girl on the phone, maybe.”

She pulled the memo book from her pocket, wrote:
PEOPLE WHO KNEW ABOUT BOOK
in her tiny hieroglyphics at the top of a clean page, and made a list.

Sam nodded, rubbing the back of his neck.

“And why take the book?” Phoebe asked.

“Because it was evidence, I guess. It was made by whoever took Lisa. I should have just listened to my mom and brought it to the cops the day we found it.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” Phoebe said.

“I’m not. I just wish I’d at least opened the damn thing.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because, when Evie called that same day, she asked me to promise not to open it without her. She wanted to be there.”

Evie. Where the hell was poor Evie? Did whoever did this catch up with Elliot and her?

“Okay, so what now?” asked Phoebe. She opened her little notebook to the next page and wrote
THE PLAN
.

“Nothing,” Sam said. “We just get on with our lives.”

Phoebe blew out an exasperated breath. “We can’t do nothing!” she said, sitting forward. “Your cousin could be bleeding to death somewhere, held hostage by a bunch of wackos. And whoever that girl in the woods was, she seemed to know things about Lisa. Things only Lisa would know. You said so yourself!”

Sam bit his lip, ran his hand through his hair.

“If all that isn’t enough, think about your mom. If there’s a chance Lisa might still be alive, don’t you think we owe it to her to find out? Christ, this is
her child
, Sam! Your sister.”

Sam walked over to the Humane Society calendar hanging on the wall. “Okay. The full moon is on the eleventh. Friday. Maybe we’ll take a ride out to Reliance and see what happens.”

“And in the meantime?” Phoebe asked.

Sam shook his head, looked helpless.

“And in the meantime?” Phoebe repeated. “The eleventh is six days away, Sam! Are we supposed to just sit around twiddling our thumbs until then?”

“In the meantime,” he said with hesitation, “I guess we try to find out what happened to Evie and Elliot.”

“Excellent plan!” Phoebe leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You’re very sexy when you get all detective-like.”

He rolled his eyes while she opened her notebook again.

Phoebe knew she should add “Get pregnancy test” to the list, but somehow the idea of writing it down made the possibility of being pregnant all the more real. With all that was going on, she couldn’t let herself think about it right now. Later, she promised herself.

Sam went for the phone, punching in the number of the cell phone Evie had given him. He shook his head. “It’s no longer in service.”

“What about her number in Philadelphia?”

“She never gave it to me.”

“Try calling information.”

There was no Evie or Eve O’Toole listed in the Philadelphia area.

“Shit,” Sam said, “she probably changed her name when she got married. I don’t have a clue what Elliot’s last name is.”

Sam dialed the phone again.

“Hi, Mom,” he said into the receiver. “Hey, I was wondering if you could give me Aunt Hazel’s number. Yeah, I’ll wait. Uh huh. Uh huh. No, we haven’t forgotten. See you then.”

He hung up. “Got it. And she reminded me about dinner tomorrow night. We’re supposed to bring dessert.”

Phoebe groaned. She loved Sam’s mother, idolized her even, and definitely believed she had the right to know what happened to her daughter, but Phoebe felt intimidated by her clean and cozy house, her home-cooked meals. The slightly disappointed look they’d get when they showed up with a couple of pints of Ben & Jerry’s instead of a batch of freshly baked cookies. Phoebe always left Phyllis’s house feeling like she’d never measure up and wondering why on earth Sam had chosen her over someone who could bake. Worse still, Phoebe secretly vowed to change. To one day surprise Phyllis with a triple-layer cake with perfect buttercream icing. She could see it so clearly in her head, this Worthiness Cake that would be the most delicious thing any of them had ever tasted.

Phoebe watched as Sam punched in his aunt’s number.

“What are you gonna say?” Phoebe asked.

Sam shrugged as he put the phone to his ear, listened to it ring.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t tell her we just saw her daughter stabbed by some crazy loon in the woods!”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Of course not!” he hissed.

Hazel finally picked up and Sam spent an uncomfortable fifteen minutes on the phone playing catch-up. With the exception of Christmas cards, he hadn’t had any contact with her in years. Not since that summer.

“Hazel’s a crazy old bat,” he’d told Phoebe on numerous occasions. “Drinks like a fish. My mom and she had this big blowout right before Lisa disappeared. They talk now and then but aren’t all that close anymore.”

The more Phoebe heard about Aunt Hazel, the more she sounded just like her own mother, though she never mentioned this to Sam.

“You never talk about your mother,” Sam had remarked once.

“Not much to tell,” Phoebe had said, shrugging. “We weren’t very close.”

Understatement of the goddamn year. But still it was better than saying,
My mom was a miserable lush who had more meaningful conversations with her television than she ever did with any actual living person.

“They aren’t real, Ma,” Phoebe said once when she caught her mother talking back to the detectives on TV.

Her mother glared at Phoebe, rattled the ice cubes in her glass, and said, “Who are you to say? You think that something’s only real if you can reach out and touch it?” She leaned forward and gave Phoebe a pinch, twisting the skin on her arm.

“Ow!” Phoebe had yelped.

“If that’s what you think, you don’t know shit, sweetheart.”

Phoebe had never flat-out lied to Sam about her mother, but she had definitely withheld crucial information. Like how she died.

She pushed the thought away and focused on watching Sam squirming his way through the conversation with his old alkie aunt. She waved her hand in a hurry-up-and-get-on-with-it gesture. He nodded.

“The thing is, Hazel,” he said into the phone, “I was hoping you could tell me how to get in touch with Evie and Elliot.”

He waited, bit his lip. “Her husband? Elliot?”

He listened again.

“I see,” he said, nodding into the phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Do you have a number for her there?”

Sam scribbled something on a pad, then thanked his aunt and promised to be better at staying in touch.

“So,” he said after hanging up. “The first weird thing is that Evie isn’t married. The second is that she doesn’t live in Philadelphia at all. She’s right here in Vermont. Up in Burlington.”

“Yeah, I’ll say that’s weird. Are you going to call her?” Phoebe asked.

“I’m going to do better than that. I’m going to drive up and pay her a little visit. See how she’s feeling after getting stabbed and all that. I’ve got her address.” Sam jumped up from the couch and grabbed the lone key and his worn leather bomber jacket. “Coming?”

“Damn right,” Phoebe said, practically beating him out the door.

CHAPTER 10

Lisa

JUNE 7, FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

S
ometimes, when they rode together, Lisa imagined they were attached, two parts of a whole, a Siamese twin girl cemented together where her chest pressed into Evie’s back. Evie’s black Harley-Davidson T-shirt was damp with sweat while she puffed and grunted, wheezed along like some ancient steam train:
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.

You can
, Lisa told her with her own breath.
You can do anything you want, as long as you have me.

Evie didn’t have her own bike, but she was the stronger rider, so Lisa perched on the seat holding her feet up, her arms wrapped around Evie’s thick waist. Evie stood, legs pumping, feet cranking the pedals, her fingers tight on the handlebars, never touching the brakes no matter how fast they went.

They raced down Spruce to Main Street, Sammy beside them on his BMX bike, going up on curbs and sidewalks, popping wheelies.

When they got to where Main Street forked with Lark Ridge, they took a right, the dirt road following the stream out past the Tuckers’ farm, their wheels humming, crickets singing, the smell of fresh-mown hay in the air. Then it was right again, on the old fire road, which was little more than an overgrown dirt-bike trail. The air was cool and moist. Twigs lashed their faces. Lisa held on tight as they hopped and bumped over stones and roots, fishtailed through sand, dodged a fresh pile of horse dung. A quarter mile in, they stopped, parked their bikes against trees, and made their way down the bank to the whirlpool. It wasn’t really a whirlpool at all, but the kids called it that. It was a place where a curved boulder crossed the creek, stopping the water enough to form a deep pool. The bottom was covered in smooth polished pebbles and sand. Minnows swam there and, if you held still long enough, sometimes they’d nibble at your toes. Water striders skated across the surface; brook trout hid in the shadows. The mosquitoes and deerflies were god-awful, but as long as you stayed in the water, you were okay.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” Sammy called, peeling off his star map T-shirt, kicking off his sneakers, and diving into the water in his shorts. Lisa peeled off her shorts and T-shirt, stripping down to her bathing suit, which was blue and covered in a light print of fish scales. Evie called it her mermaid skin. Evie took off her heavy boots and belt with the knife. She wore her shorts and layered T-shirts into the water. She didn’t own a bathing suit. Her huge boy’s shorts billowed in the water and the shirts clung to her skin, the edges of her white men’s V-neck peeking out from under the Harley T-shirt. She was a lousy swimmer and spent most of her time crouched in shallow water.

Sammy dove down to the bottom and popped up, hair slicked back and nearly down to his shoulders now that it was wet.

“You need a haircut,” Lisa told him.

“And you need a reality check,” Sammy said, going under, then coming up again and spitting a long stream of water at her. “Fairies!” he said, once his mouth was empty. “How can you actually believe that?”

Lisa shook her head. “How can you not?”

“Because there’s no such thing as little green creatures with lacy wings. I hate to be the one to tell you, but Tinker Bell’s made up, Lisa. You can clap your hands all you want, but believing isn’t going to make them real.”

Evie scowled, her arms cutting the water in slow circles around her, making her own little whirlpool. “Maybe they’re not like that,” she said.

“Huh?” Sammy said.

“I’m just saying,” Evie went on. “Maybe they are real, but they’re not anything like what we think.” She plucked at the front of her T-shirts, pulling them away from her body, but when she let them go, they snapped back into place, sticking worse than ever.

“And what are they supposed to be like then?” Sammy asked.

Evie shrugged. “More like us, maybe. That’s what my mom told me once. That it isn’t like in all those cutesy little picture books—real fairies look like humans, only they’re not. They’re like our shadows, she said. Dark. Magic. Here one minute, gone the next.”

Sammy laughed as loud and hard as he could. Soon his laughter was mixed with the crashing of footsteps running down the bank.

Lisa turned. “Shit,” she said. Gerald and Pinkie. And they weren’t alone. Behind them were Gerald’s two best friends, Mike and Justin. And a girl Lisa sort of recognized from school—a friend of Pinkie’s named Franny. The girl was as pale as Pinkie and had braces.

“Let’s go,” Lisa said to Sammy and Evie.

“But we just got here,” Sammy whined. Lisa threw him a furious look.

“Yeah, stay,” Gerald called. “We’re all friends, right?” Then he turned to Mike and Justin and said something in his made-up, Minarian language. Lisa caught only the last few words, “Bach flut nah.” The other boys laughed.

Gerald could be moderately obnoxious on his own, but when he was around Mike and Justin, he always acted like a total idiot, showing off and saying dumb stuff that didn’t make any sense and was supposed to make him seem all impressive and super smart-assy. It was ridiculous, really. Mike and Justin didn’t need to be impressed—it wasn’t like there was any danger of them ditching Gerald. They were airplane-model-building, computer-gaming geeks, just like Gerald. Three peas in a pod. But for whatever reason, Gerald had to be King Pea. Lisa smiled at this newly thought-up title.

“What’s so funny, Nazzaro?” Gerald asked.

Lisa shrugged. “It’s just that whenever you speak that language of yours, you sound all phlegmy—like someone with a bad cold clearing his throat.” She made her best cat-coughing-up-a-fur-ball noise to accentuate her point.

Gerald’s face turned red.

“Hi, Sam!” Pinkie called, waving so hard she nearly fell into the stream. She had on long sleeves, gardening gloves, and a pink baseball hat draped with mosquito netting.

“Hey,” Sam said, nodding in her direction. “You coming in the water?”

She shook her head.

Gerald laughed. “She only swims in pools. Can’t stand the feel of muck or pebbles under her feet. And the fish and bugs are way too much for her. She’s what you call delicate, Becca is. Aren’t you?” he asked, looking at his sister. “Then there’s all the diseases and parasites, right, Bec? All kinds of nasties floating around in there.”

“Oh man, tell me you haven’t been showing Becca your parasite book again, have you? That’s just cruel,” Mike said. He peeled off his T-shirt to reveal a pale white chest that was sunken in at the center, as if someone had crushed his sternum with a baseball bat.

“It’s fascinating stuff, really,” Gerald said, not taking his eyes off Pinkie. “Amoebic dysentery, giardia, cryptosporidiosis. Then there’s the bacterial stuff: cholera, E. coli, typhoid. That water there is teeming with tiny little organisms just looking for a nice warm body to call home.” He winked at Pinkie.

Mike gave Gerald a playful cuff on the shoulder. “Don’t mind him,” Mike said. “He’s just a little obsessed with the microscopic world. It’s all the research he does for our game. There’s nothing in that water that can hurt you, Becca.” With this, he took a running leap into it, Justin right behind him. Both boys squealed as they hit the cold water.

“See, Becca, it’s safe enough to drink,” Mike called, scooping some up in his hand and slurping.

“You’re going to be pissing protozoa,” Justin teased.

Mike took a second sip. “Amoeba, yum!”

“Actually,” Sam said, trying to sound older by lowering his voice, “most microscopic organisms are safe to ingest. The truth is, our bodies are full of bacteria all the time. We’ve even got E. coli in us, living in complete symbiosis most of the time.”

Lisa rolled her eyes. What was this—attack of the geeks?

Franny moved closer to Becca, leaned in, and whispered something in her ear. Becca nodded, then they both giggled, looking at Sam, then away.

Lisa couldn’t stand girls like that, no matter what age. Girls who tittered and breathed secrets in one another’s ears. Dainty girls who didn’t want to get dirty.

“Come on in, man,” called Mike. “You only feel like you’re freezing your balls off for the first thirty seconds or so.”

Gerald took his T-shirt off carefully over his glasses, kicked off his running shoes, and made his way slowly toward the stream, stepping gingerly over stones, as if his feet were ultrasensitive. He stopped at the edge.

“What have we here?” he asked, picking up Evie’s belt and knife.

Lisa took in a sharp breath. This was trouble. Bad trouble.

“Looks like a bushwhacker to me,” Mike called from the water. “Bach gloon neot?”

Gerald laughed and nodded. “Totally!” he snorted, pushing his dark glasses up his nose.

“Drop it!” Evie snarled from her crouched position downstream.

Gerald unsnapped the sheath, pulled the knife out, and whistled. “Quite a blade on it. Could kill an elephant with this thing, probably. And what is this down by the handle? A little dried blood? Christ, Stevie, what have you been cutting up?”

“Shit, man, maybe it
is
blood,” Mike said. “You know what they said about her great-grandfather, how he made some kind of pact with the devil and did sacrifices and shit out in those woods? Maybe Stevie’s just following in his footsteps!”

Gerald shook his head. “A pact with the devil? Nah. I heard Old Doc O’Toole was the
son of the devil
. He had powers. Could hypnotize people with his eyes. That’s what my mom said. Hell of a family tree you’ve got, Lisa.”

“Enough, Gerald,” Lisa warned, swimming toward him.

“I’m just saying. You might be in danger, Lisa. I mean if cousin Stevie is going around like a young psychopath slicing and dicing cats or something, wouldn’t you be concerned? Didn’t you know that’s how Jeffrey Dahmer got his start—cutting the heads off of dogs and cats and impaling them on sticks.”

“Eew!” squealed Pinkie.

“No way!” said Franny.

“Yes way,” Gerald said. “Totally true.”

“Put it down!” Evie growled. She was still crouched, her body a tight ball, the water up to her neck.

“Oh, and are you gonna make me? Not so tough now, huh? Now that I’ve got your big, bad blade of death here.”

Pinkie and her pale friend looked on in silence, both of them frowning. Mike and Justin were treading water, watching. Mike moved closer to shore, walking toward Gerald, water pooling in the well of his sunken chest. “Looks like a sacrificial blade to me, for sure,” he called. “I’d be careful if I were you, man. It might have some serious mojo.”

Lisa got to the bank and stepped out, moving toward Gerald. “Give me the goddamn knife.”

Gerald gave a disgusted-sounding snort. “Not much of a man, are you, Stevie? Getting your pretty little cousin to do your dirty work for you. She is pretty. Don’t you think so? I know you do, Stevie.”

“Ooh!” crooned Justin from the water. “Stevie has a thing for her cousin? That’s so sick!”

Evie stood up, arms rigid at her sides, hands clenched into fists.

Gerald hooted. “Nice swimming trunks!”

Evie’s green fatigue shorts hung down to her knees, her belly bulging out above them. Her legs were pale and covered with dark hair. The wet T-shirts clung to her so that you could see the curve of her breasts, even the outline of nipples beneath the bald eagle and flag. The words
AMERICAN LEGEND
were stuck to her belly, jiggling as she walked.

Mike and Justin laughed. Pinkie let out a little squeal, then covered her mouth and looked away, tittering. Franny did the same.

Evie moved toward Gerald, her eyes blazing, a low growl coming from the back of her throat.

Gerald flinched, then held up the blade, waving it through the air like a conductor’s baton or a magic wand.

“And I don’t think I’ve ever seen boobs like that on a dude before. Have you, guys? Maybe Stevie’s one of those . . . whatdayacallit?”

“Hermaphrodite?” Justin said.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Half girl, half boy. An It.”

Evie froze in her tracks, knee-deep in the creek. She crossed her arms over her breasts, her chest heaving as the growl broke apart and her eyes filled with tears. Lisa could see the outline of the key hanging from the bootlace around Evie’s neck. Evie’s fingers fumbled their way under the neck of her shirt, reaching for it.

It’ll save both of us one day.

Lisa had to look away.

“Here you go, It,” Gerald said, dropping the knife and heading out into the water, away from Evie.

“Asshole!” Lisa yelled after him.

Evie continued her slow walk to shore, where she stood bent over and dripping as she pulled on her boots. She sheathed the knife and looped the belt around her waist, buckling it with shaking fingers.

Lisa started putting her own clothes on as Evie walked past Pinkie and Franny. Franny gave her an awkward smile. Evie ignored it and began climbing the path up the bank.

“Come on, Sammy,” Lisa called.

Gerald said something to Sammy in a low voice. Sammy ignored it, but the other boys laughed.

Lisa shoved her damp, sandy feet into her sneakers and waited for her brother. At last, he was out of the water, pulling on his shirt. “Let’s go,” she said.

“See ya, Sam,” Pinkie said, as they hurried by her, Sam carrying his shoes. He gave her a half wave.

When they got to the fire road at the top of the hill, both of the bikes were still there, but Evie was nowhere in sight.