The Lingering Grace (18 page)

“How did you manage that?” She was both flattered and surprised by how hard he’d been working at this—and that he’d kept it a secret from her until now.

“I hacked my dad’s email account—he uses the same password for everything—and sent the group admin a glowing recommendation for myself. First time I’ve been glad my dad’s so well respected in the ghost-hunting crowd.”

“I can’t believe you went to all this trouble,” she said.

“It was worth it. After she got my dad’s email, the lady sent me a link and temporary login info for this website. It’s the home page for a group called ‘The Seekers’—their logo is the two arrows pointing to the line. And their goal is to defy death by finding the ‘In Between.’”

“I’m not following. What does this have to do with me?”

He held out his hand in a ‘slow down’ motion. “I’m getting there. The group’s beliefs are based on this idea that there’s a place between life and death called the In Between. When you’re in the In Between, your soul is free to go and do whatever it want. But once you die, you cease to exist. Ghosts are really important to them because they think that ghosts are people who have managed to get themselves into this In Between state. They’re always trying to hunt them down and ask them for their secrets. They practically worship them.”

“Which is why they’re interested in me,” Alice said with a groan.

“They’re not just
interested
in you, Alice. To them, you’re the holy grail of ghosts: someone who unwittingly ended up in the In Between and then
came back
. You’re the only living person who can tell them what the In Between is like, and they think that if they ask you the right questions, they’ll figure out how you got there and how you got back. They think you know ‘The Path.’”

“The
Path
? But I don’t know anything about that. Didn’t I say in the video that it was a curse? It wasn’t something I did. I didn’t want to get stuck there.”

Tony nodded vigorously. “They don’t think it’s a curse at all. They call it ‘The Blessing,’ and they want to find out exactly how it worked so that they can ‘bless’ themselves and walk The Path.’”

Alice gaped. “Tony, they’re crazy.”

“I think that’s pretty obvious,” he said. “Unfortunately they’re crazy people with one goal in mind—you. Thank God your last name wasn’t in the news or anything. All they know is that they need to find some girl named Alice. They want to ask you questions and … try to recreate the In Between. They want to use you as their experiment subject.”

She gulped and tried to take a deep breath, but only managed to swallow a small mouthful of air. If she had gotten into Danny’s car, he probably would have driven her straight to cult headquarters for inquisition-style questioning.

“What am I going to do?” she muttered. She gnawed on her thumbnail, a nervous habit her mother thought she had broken her of years ago. “I can’t just hide in the house for the rest of my life.”

“
We’re
going to keep you safe,” Tony assured her. He leaned over the space between their seats and pulled her close. With her head against his chest and his arms tight around her, she felt safe. But looking out the window at the darkness, even the short walk from the car to her front door looked treacherous, possibly deadly. If she had had a choice, she would never let Tony let go of her. “I’m afraid Danny is going to try something, so I keep close tabs on him. He’s waiting to jump into action until the Seekers finish some ‘purchase’—I don’t know what that’s about yet—but whenever that happens … That’s why I need to keep watching him.”

“Is this why you’ve been driving me to school every morning?” she asked him.

“I had to keep an eye on you somehow, but I didn’t want you to know about this. I didn’t want to worry you if I didn’t have to.”

Despite the fear, her heart burned, shooting out warmth all the way to her fingertips. All this time, he had been secretly protecting her. And she’d been so worried that he didn’t care at all.

“I’m glad to know,” she said. “I think I’d rather know. But still … ”

She didn’t want to admit she was afraid, and not because she was embarrassed. Admitting fear always made it seem more solid as if a few words had the power to take phantom threats out of the realm of imagination and transplant them into reality.

“I mean, I’m probably overreacting,” Tony said when she didn’t finish the sentence. “After all, it’s just some crazy online club with a ghost fetish. I bet Danny just wanted to get a good look at you. He’s probably online right now describing his run-in with the Ghost of Ghosts.”

Alice laughed, but she knew he was making light of the whole thing just to make her feel better. If it actually were just a bunch of random people with a creepy fetish, he wouldn’t have bothered driving her to school every morning for a month. These people were more than just crazy—they were crazy with a purpose. And once people like this had a goal, they stopped being harmless oddities and became a cohesive group with few scruples and serious potential for damage.

But try as she might, she couldn’t wrap her mind around the danger she was in. She tried. She closed her eyes and tried to accept it, but no acceptance came. Her stomach churned and her limbs went cold. Realizing she couldn’t go on like this, she adopted Tony’s attitude and dismissed the worry as casually as she could, smoothing over the bone-clenching panic that threatened to paralyze her.

“You’re right,” she said. She pulled away from him and picked up her backpack. “They’re just a bunch of people online—we can’t take them too seriously. There are, like, a billion death threats in YouTube comments. But stuff like that happens. No one actually buys in.”

“But you’ll be careful? Better safe than sorry.” Tony unlocked the doors. He was grinning, but there was a furrow between his eyebrows.

“Of course. I’m always careful.”

“Says the girl who dove headfirst into a four-foot-deep pool.”

Alice froze.

“Too soon?” Tony asked, his smile fading.

“Too soon,” she agreed and got out of the car. Though she didn’t like being reminded of her accident, she was grateful that he was teasing her again. Tony’s fear—even more than her own—sent shivers down her spine. When he was serious and gloomy, his very presence took on a palpable heaviness that made everything he said seem like a declaration of imminent disaster.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow,” he said, just before she closed the door.

“But it’s past midnight already! You won’t get any sleep.”

He shrugged. “I’ll be fine. I’ll be here tomorrow.”

There was no use in arguing with him. When she said thank you, she tried to make the words count, to show how much she really meant it. She was sure that what she really felt was too strong to express without scaring him away. After all, how would he react if she just blurted out, “You’re the single best thing that has ever happened to me and I can’t imagine my life without you”? Even in her head it sounded ridiculous.

But as she walked quickly up to her front door, she looked over her shoulder at his car. Then she hurried inside, her face hot.

The next morning, Alice woke up ten minutes before her alarm and lay in bed, staring drowsily at her ceiling. Even though she had just woken up, her heart was racing. She vaguely remembered the dream she had been having. Someone was chasing her with a cross and a bottle of holy water.

At least I’m definitely NOT a vampire
, she thought grimly. She was tempted to Google “dream interpretations” and find out if this had a deep, hidden meaning. But she didn’t bother. No matter how she cut it, the meaning seemed pretty clear: she was scared.

Everything felt very real to her this morning. Usually when she got bad news, it took at least a few days to settle before she could accept it as fact. But the news about The Seekers—about Danny—was immediately absorbed and internalized. The knowledge seemed so familiar that she half wondered if she’d known all along.

It wasn’t until she was in the bathroom brushing her teeth that Alice stopped thinking about The Seekers long enough to realize how quiet the house was. At first it was a nagging awareness that something was different, and it took her a few minutes to identify exactly what was missing.

The whistle.

One of her mother’s most sacred rituals was her morning cup of green tea. After her workout, she would put the kettle on the stove, then go to the bathroom and wash her face. Usually the teakettle was whistling for a good minute before she hurried back to take it off the stove.

But today, there was silence.

Alice hurried out of the bathroom and peeked over the staircase banister into the kitchen. The lights were off, the kettle next to the sink.

She must have slept in
, Alice thought as she rushed back to her room to get dressed. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had slept past seven o’clock. A self-declared early bird, she was stringent about her morning cardio routine and had often explained to Alice the many reasons why morning exercise burned more calories.

By the time she had pulled her hair into a ponytail and shoved her binder into her backpack, Alice heard someone moving in the kitchen. She bounded down the stairs, ready to quote the infuriating “Early to bed, early to rise” saying that her mother loved to throw at her. As she stepped off the bottom stair, the person rummaging in the pantry emerged, and Alice stopped short.

“Dad?”

He looked up, his hand in a box of rice crackers.

“Hey, sweetie. How did you sleep?”

Alice didn’t move; her dad was
never
in the kitchen in the morning. He woke up at eight o’clock, long after she’d left for school, and took his coffee in his office while he dug through his email.

“Do you like these?” he asked, tossing a cracker in his mouth and pointing to the box. He shook his head and shrugged. “I never understand why your mom buys this stuff. Tastes like Styrofoam.”

“Where’s Mom?” Alice asked without preamble.

“Oh, she’s gone to visit Bill and the boys,” her dad answered briskly, but without meeting her eyes.

“She never mentioned to me that she was going.”

It was true that her mom liked to drop in on her brother-in-law and nephews at least once every few months since Aunt June died, just to make sure they were getting on okay. But her mom was never one to disappear without warning; she made such a fuss about packing to visit Bill that you would have thought she was going on a jet-setting trip. Last time she left, she tacked a write-up of meals for Alice and Jeremy onto the fridge and left a tower of Tupperware full of single-serving, balanced dinners.

“It was last minute,” her dad said, opening the fridge and staring blankly at the unusually sparse shelves.

Alice didn’t believe him for a second. For a high-powered businessman, accustomed to stretching the truth when he had to, he was an abominable liar when it came to his own family, even about the simple things. When Alice turned twelve, he’d nearly spoiled her surprise birthday party by throwing out wild and contradictory excuses after she asked him why he suddenly wanted to take her shopping on a Saturday morning.

As far as she could tell, the only
true
thing her dad had told her so far was that her mother wasn’t at home. Whether she’d left earlier that morning or sometime during the previous evening before Alice got home, she had no idea. And she could only think of one compelling reason for her mom to disappear like that.

“Oh my God,” she said. “You
are
getting a divorce.”

Her dad stood up so suddenly that he knocked his head against one of the fridge’s door shelves. Two bottles of salad dressing tumbled to the floor.

“
What?
No.” He bent down and picked them up, then stuffed them back into the fridge. He shook his head even more vigorously. “No, Alice, we are
not
getting a divorce. Where in the world did you get that idea?”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Oh, you know, the fact that you’ve
clearly
been fighting, that you
stormed
out of the house the other night, that I found Mom crying in her room. Alone. What do you expect me to think?”

Her dad stared at her, his forehead furrowed as though he was working very hard to put all these clues together. Finally, he said, “I guess I could see why you might think that. But I promise—we’re not getting a divorce. We’ve just had a … ” he cleared his throat, struggling for the word, “disagreement.”

Alice crossed her arms, gnawing anxiously on her lower lip. Her dad didn’t seem to be lying. And yet she was certain there was something he wasn’t telling her. Something he was still trying to skirt around.

“Mom hasn’t ever left like this before,” she said.

“What do you mean? She visits Bill a lot.”

“She’s never left without telling me.”

He nodded and absentmindedly picked up the coffee pot. He held the spout over a mug and tipped the kettle; he didn’t seem to realize that nothing was coming out. Alice cleared her throat and pointed at the kettle.

“Damn,” he muttered, filling the pot and slamming it down on the stove.