The Screaming Season (22 page)

“Oh, my God, you’re one of those sex addicts,” Mandy said. “Or else just an immoral, horny little teenage boy.” She batted her lashes at me. “Must make you feel like a loser to know that he left you out of his harem, Lindsay.” I squawked out a protest. I’d thought we were bonding. I tried to think of an appropriately snarky comment, but I had nothing. I kept thinking about Riley and Jane, and how hurt I had been. How naive I still was. Because in all my scenarios about Troy, I had never figured him for a player.

Because he kept telling me over and over that he wasn’t.

“We’re coming through your crappy dive to go home,” Mandy told him. “And I’m taking everything I ever gave you. Including the pass to our suite at the ballpark.”

“Mandy,” he said, “listen.”

She pushed past him and walked into his suite. I followed, her unwitting, unwilling accomplice. His living room furniture was leather, with brass studs and dark bookcases crammed with lots of books. A gym bag sat in the middle of the floor and there was a sleek laptop beside it. Without missing a beat, Mandy walked to a bookcase and grabbed a hardback book. She handed it to me.

Tantric Sex Secrets.

Ewwww.

His bedroom was significantly more lived in, piled with things. Jeans, T-shirts, and shoes were strewn everywhere. How many pairs of athletic shoes did one need? How many socks? There were posters on the wall, mostly forested landscapes, but there was also a large glossy picture of Emily Blunt, signed. Mandy reached up and ripped it down. She dropped it to the floor and walked over it.

I walked around it.

Mandy grabbed up his bomber jacket—the one he’d placed so sweetly around my shoulders more than once—and pulled open the top drawer of a dark wood dresser. She grabbed up tighty whities, socks, coins, and leather necklaces with things dangling from them and tossed them over her shoulder. She reached in and handed me a Rolex watch. A scattering of cuff links and rings that went flying like comets. And an embossed journal. And a fancy pen. A cashmere scarf.

She picked up speed, showering his floor with his stuff.

“Mandy,” he said.

She flew into his closet and grabbed a black silk shirt. A snowboard. A pair of skis. She handed me the snowboard and started to pick up the skis.

She clearly had not thought about how to get all this back to Marlwood.

“Box the rest,” she commanded him. “Ship it to our place in San Francisco.”

Then she led me out of the bedroom, through the living room, toward a front door. My arms were full. It didn’t matter if she took these things. He had more things. And he could buy whatever he wanted to replace the things we took.

She was heaving with exertion as she maneuvered to open the front door without dropping the skis. I followed, wanting to die.

“Lindsay,” he said.

She got the door open. We were standing in a carpeted hallway with walnut paneling. She charged to the right, hoisting the skis over her shoulder. I dropped a few things. I didn’t stop to see what they were.

I looked over my shoulder at Troy. He looked like he’d forgotten who he was. That might have been nice for him.

We went into the elevator, went down, went out, and crossed to a side door. She opened it, blasted outside, and held it for me.

“Have you got everything?” she asked. “Because once I shut it, we can’t get back in.”

I nodded. We hiked back to the lake, staggering under the weight of Troy’s possessions.

Once there, she stood at the water’s edge and threw it all in. Skis, snowboard, jacket, Rolex. Rings, coins, cuff links.

“Some ghost is going to be very happy with all this crap,” she told me.

And then we rowed back to Marlwood, screaming with laughter, so loudly our voices scared the birds off the water.

EIGHTEEN

THE NEXT MORNING, Mandy walked up to me in the breakfast line, which was such an event that people stopped talking to observe it. Mandy was haggard and pale, and she hadn’t changed her clothes. Her hair was a mess, and I didn’t think she’d even washed her face.

Granted, we hadn’t gotten back to Marlwood until nearly after three, but we’d had at least four hours to clean up and get some sleep. And Mandy had often bragged that she thought sleeping was a waste of time. That she would sleep when she was dead, and not a minute before.

“Linz,” she said, taking my arm and pulling me out of the line, which was annoying. I was tired and hungry. But the fear in her eyes trumped my low blood sugar. Something else had happened.

“Someone was in my room while we were gone,” she said. “And they trashed it. My clothes are slashed. It’s like they took a hammer to my jewelry.”

“God, Mandy. Who?” I kept my voice low. Everyone was dying to know what the great enemies Lindsay Cavanaugh and Mandy Winters were talking about in such hushed, earnest voices.

She took a deep breath. “I locked the door. I made sure. No one else has a key.”

I tried to keep my face neutral. Rose and I had broken into her room with ease, using Rose’s lock pick kit. Later, during a séance, Rose stole a key for me to use. We’d snuck it back, but maybe someone else had taken it without Mandy’s noticing. Her room was usually as much of a disaster as Troy’s had been.

“Is anything missing?” Could she tell?

“My Ouija board,” she said. “And my picture of Belle.”

“That thing with the half-eaten face?” I said. It was so faded and moldy. I didn’t know how she slept with it in her room.

“And Belle’s locket,” she concluded.

I’d had Celia’s locket, but I’d lost it in the snow. The inventory made it obvious that someone else knew about the possessions. And the only person
I
knew who fit that description was Miles.

“What about Miles?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral. “He carted off all that other stuff. Your research.”

“But he just
took
it. He didn’t destroy my belongings. Whoever did this was . . . crazy. Really enraged.” She went even paler. Her skin was tinged with blue. And she was trembling.

“It could be one of your coven chicks,” I whispered. “The ones you tricked into getting possessed. Or one of them
while
they were possessed.”

“Yes,” she mused, showing no remorse over having done so. “That would make sense. We know it wasn’t Troy. But there’s the key issue again.”

“Key issue. Maybe someone can pick locks.” I had to say it. She looked so scared. Now that we were frenemies, it fell on me to help her out if I could.

“Are you going to tell security?” I asked her.

“I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “I think we need to keep it on the down low and figure it out ourselves. There would be too many questions that I wouldn’t be willing to answer.”

I heard the “we.”

“We’ve got to be careful.” She wiped her face with her hands and dropped her hands to her sides.

I heard the second “we.” But she was right. We did have to be careful.

Oh, my God,
I thought,
how is this happening?

“Body part,” I said. “The hair in the locket.”

“But that was David Abernathy’s hair, not Belle’s,” she said. “I still have the mourning brooch with her hair in it.”

I remembered my wish to contact my mother. Did I have anything of hers? I’d washed her UCSD sweatshirt a million times. Maybe her fingerprints were on the framed picture of her, my dad, and me on our last family vacation. We’d gone to Vegas. She wouldn’t gamble for her life, but she’d doubled down for free drinks and potato chips.

I had my mom’s DNA. Could
I
be her body part?

“Well, it is what it is,” Mandy replied. “Later, yes?”

“Sure,” I replied as a default, not really because I was saying yes to anything.

As I went through the rest of the day, I got a lot of looks. Everyone knew that I loathed and despised Mandy Winters. Clearly that had changed, and a big question mark was dangling over my head. Plus, by coming to me, she had outed me to whoever had hurt her and ruined her stuff. It was possible, although not likely, that Miles and I had had a genuine accident. But Mandy had dragged me into the sights of who ever was targeting her. Maybe she’d done it on purpose, to advertise the fact that she had backup.

Her sidekick, Emo Girl.

I gave as many looks as I got, although I was far more discreet. If Miles hadn’t ruined Mandy’s things, who had?

I didn’t rule out Belle. Mandy didn’t remember entertaining a male visitor, so maybe Belle had. Maybe he had wanted to punish Belle for going to see another guy, even if she had done it while hitchhiking in someone else’s body. Just as he had hitchhiked in some guy’s.

I pondered all the pieces as I went jogging after dinner. I knew I was supposed to take a buddy for safety, but I told myself I’d stay in plain sight and stick to the main paths. I didn’t want to fend off any more questions about Mandy.

I needed downtime, desperately. Maybe everyone else had forgotten that I’d come to Marlwood shortly after having a nervous breakdown, but I hadn’t. I was a master at disguising my anxiety, but at dinner, I’d come close to having a full-blown panic attack. In the din, no one had heard my shortness of breath. No one had seen my quivering lip and shaking hands, wrapped in a napkin underneath the table. But I was in serious danger of losing it, and I had to burn off the adrenaline in my system. Dilute the stress hormone known as cortisol.

So I began my run, listening to myself pant, watching my breath puff like a steam engine. I heard the rhythm of my footfalls. I began to feel grounded again. I had come a long way from the days when my panic had overwhelmed me to the point where I was lurching from the ice cream case to the frozen vegetables in our local Vons.

Mandy.
I listened to the cadence of her name as I jogged.
Man-dy. Man-dy.

I felt myself disengage from all my worries. My footfalls changed to
Lind-say
.
Lind-say.
Lindsay Anne Cavanaugh, starting over in the middle of the weirdest weirdness on the planet. Hitting reset. Putting myself back together with superglue. Finding myself in the maze that was Marlwood, all the other little rats and me.

Don’t think that way,
I thought, and then I blinked and looked around.

I caught my breath. I was standing outside the door to the admin building storage room. I turned and looked back, recalling nothing about running up the path, past the porch, around the wall. I had lost time, and I was shivering with cold.

Equally icy and aware, Celia shivered inside me. She had taken me over and brought me here.

My hand was on the doorknob and I knew she wanted me to go inside. Someone must be having a session with Dr. Morehouse.

I cringed at how excited that made me feel. But I had a good reason. I had to know if any of them were after Mandy. I doubted they’d come out and confess to our shrink, but he was good at pulling things out of people. And maybe I’d figure it out, even if he didn’t.

I went in and pulled the door closed. On the balls of my feet, I crossed to the dumbwaiter and crawled inside. As before, I winced, afraid my weight would snap the rope, but stubbornly remained.

“I don’t know
why
I like to eat dead birds,” someone was saying.

“Oh,
God
,” I blurted, revolted. I covered my mouth and pushed on the door. I was going to be sick.

I flew out of the room.

BUT I WENT back again. I was just so astonished that someone (Claudette Hurst) could eat dead birds that I had to find out more. Maybe after I bolted, she confessed to destroying Mandy’s possessions, and I had missed it. Maybe Claudette was the Marlwood Stalker, killing small animals for her own twisted needs.

So I went back again. My stealth was rewarded, but not in the way I expected. Instead of discovering what I wanted to know, I listened in on Charlotte Davidson’s admission that she tried to shrink her feet by wrapping them in Ace bandages every night. Then I heard elegant Susi Maitland’s confession that she was a bed wetter. In on the secret, her housemother stripped and washed her sheets every morning, with no one else knowing.

I learned that when Gretchen Cabot was home, she spent nights folding and refolding all her clothes. She hated to touch anything that was pink. When she touched any hue of blue, she tasted citrus.

Maeve Spitzer was contemplating a sex change operation.

I still didn’t find out what I wanted to know, but my own weirdness was that I got kind of addicted to spying on my fellow Marlwoodians. Each time I eavesdropped on someone else’s misery, I somehow felt better about myself. As if I didn’t have to work so hard to feel normal, because being normal wasn’t all that common. The other girls were as haunted by their obsessions and quirks as Celia haunted me. Maybe one of them was unhinged enough to murder Mandy and me, just because.

I was shocked. Marlwood was still an asylum for wayward girls. I just hadn’t known it until now. Even though they had everything they could want—emphasis on
thing
—they really were under enormous pressure to live up to expectations. Their moms were PhDs or trophy wives. Their fathers were movie stars or billionaires. How could they hope to measure up to that? To surpass it? But they had better do it. Their parents were paying for private schools, enrichment camps, tutors, mentors, nutritionists, stylists, and therapists. And because they paid, they made their children pay it all back in accomplishments, awards, and Ivy League acceptances. These girls had to be the best that money could buy.