The She (14 page)

"You look seriously weighted down, mister." Her blue eyes, which were starting to look a little glassy, still sparked with fun. "What can I do to get you to stop thinking about whatever it is you're thinking about?"

Instead of answering, I said something obvious. "It's colder than hell in this house."

"So warm up." She took the joint out of my face and a bottle of brandy popped up. She was double-fisting it. "It'll take at least two hours for the place to heat up. Come on in the kitchen. I've got the oven turned on and the door open for you. And you can have yourself a nice little dance with the spirits of warmth and humor in the meantime. Come on. It's just plain ol' brandy, plain ol' Mexican marijuana. Nothing perilous, I promise."

She'd given me the speech about my lack of imbibement at least four times in the past year, She knew what had happened to me a year ago, but I was never sure she knew Grey was behind it. It wouldn't be like Grey to blather something that could ruin her socially, and Chandra had always acted like she had no clue. She weaved both hands in front of my eyes, and I looked from one to the other thinking,
Screw it.
I took the joint and sent hot smoke down my throat and headed back for the kitchen, where Bear and Harley were playing some board game on the floor in front of the oven, drinking brandy out of water glasses.

"That's not really a board game, it's a b-o-r-e-d game." Chandra followed me in. She put a glass of brandy in my hand. "Take it easy on that stuff. You'll get sick all over your grandpa's superexpensive tiles."

I sat down on the kitchen carpet between Harley and Bear swallowing brandy, which was as biting hot as the joint. The warmth from the oven felt good. I forced my mind to what was going on.

"What're we playing?" The board looked familiar though my brain wasn't working very well.

"Clue, you ninny," Harley told me. "The exclusive edition, Bear's favorite game. I would have picked Monopoly. At any rate, you're too late. The envelope's- been stuffed. The cards have been dealt. All I know is it was Colonel Mustard."

"In the library with the lead pipe." Bear reached and took the joint from Chandra. I leaned sideways to look at Harley's cards. Colonel Mustard was right there.

Our eyes locked, and she scrunched her mouth around. "We ought to be playing for money, shouldn't we?"

I sat there and watched Harley kick Chandra's and Bear's butts all over the place. Bear hadn't played Clue in years and kept forgetting about the secret passages. He kept rolling the dice to get to rooms. Chandra was talking and drinking and not paying much attention. I didn't smoke anymore, but I sucked on the brandy, just until I was toast, until my gut muscles actually started to relax a little.

"So, we're here in scenic downtown East Hook in the dead of winter: Now what do we do?" Harley asked, dealing the three of them again. I'd said I'd rather watch. "Think the Lagoon Bar would card us in the dead of winter? Seems to me they'd be desperate for some clientele."

"Seems to me we'd stick out like a sore thumb and definitely get carded," Chandra said. "We'll have to watch videos. The stores are closed for the season. Unless you want to go window-shopping at the East Hook CVS."

"That's my idea of fun," Harley said, marking her cards on the clue sheet. "Or we could walk across the bridge to West Hook, go see Bloody Mary. Although she's a lying dog. She told me last summer I'd end up spending a lot of time with a tall, dark, handsome guy in October."

"What am I?" Bear asked.

"You're tall and dark."

Chandra giggled, even though she'd been shaking her head all along. "I don't think I will ever, ever go see Bloody Mary again after what she did to me Labor Day weekend. Grey doesn't know this, so when she gets back from Maine you cannot tell her okay?"

Back from Maine.
Chandra had said it so well. Good friend. I took it she didn't know I had been to see Grey, or she would have at least glanced my way. Bear and Harley looked at her without a clue in their eyes that she was lying about where Grey was.

"You heard about the Girl Scout who drowned when Grey and Lydia flipped Grey's Sunfish, right?"

They nodded. I rolled my eyes, thinking,
Here we go with a dead person and The She.
My friends knew about my parents, but I'd always only mumbled that "their boat sank with them on it." Until last year that's about all I could remember so it's not like I ever lied. Even when Bear was with me that horrible weekend, and I was having flashbacks and hearing that shriek, I didn't explain much. He just thought I was having, like, generic flashbacks that had something to do with my parents' accident. I'm not sure he was ever clear on what was going on. It was Emmett I'd asked all my questions of, later.

Chandra blathered right into it. "Labor Day weekend, a bunch of kids wanted to see Bloody Mary because of Grey, whose family had gone back to Philly on Thursday. This story had gotten all over the island: Girl Scout gets sucked out, Grey can't save her Grey's paralyzed in some sort of shock because of some shrieking she heard, there's no body washing up. You can imagine how spooked people were."

"Yeah, but Bloody Mary?" Harley looked at her like she was trying not to pass judgment, but her eyes widened as she moved Mrs. White into a room. "Isn't she for like, love interests? And talking to ghosts if you think your summer home is haunted and things like that? You went to her over a real person?"

Chandra looked kind of ashamed but then recovered. "The only reason I went with them is that, supposedly, Bloody Mary hears that shrieking, too. I wanted to hear what she had to say."

My neck snapped up, and I pretended I'd had a crick in it. It seemed to me that I'd known Bloody Mary heard that shrieking when I was a kid. I had no memory of anybody telling me that, but I had caught wind of it somehow. Maybe it had been through Emmett, who thought Bloody Mary was as big a faker as The She was a hoax. He'd probably delivered that news in some snide, big-brother tone that made me want to forget the whole thing.

"She's faking it," Bear couldn't help spewing. "How could she keep her reputation if she didn't have a personal role in every piece of island legend? Didn't the Coast Guard tell Grey to pay a visit to her doctor? Get rid of the earwax or something?"

"Yeah, that's true. Grey went to the doctor, All he found was a mild case of swimmer's eat I don't think anything to do with swimmer's ear would have paralyzed her on the side of a boat. She's not only a pretty strong swimmer; but she's so not the scary type, you know?"

"So what did Bloody Mary say?" Harley rolled her eyes and stared into the corner of the room warily.

Chandra took a big gulp of brandy, shut her eyes, and swallowed. "Okay, I went with four other people, trying to hang back because I didn't think Grey would appreciate my being there. But she had told me the story personally and nobody else, so I ended up being the one who told Bloody Mary. I couldn't remember a lot of the details. She's got those light green, Nordic eyes from hell that make you freeze up. I think all I said was my two friends had been on this boat with the girl who drowned, and it looked to them like the girl was getting sucked from the harbor and out to sea. I asked what had been sucking her."

"Give me that bottle." Harley reached for it and poured more into her glass. "I don't think I'm going to hear this very well."

She went to hand the bottle back to Chandra, and I intercepted. Chandra went on, "She asked if either Lydia or Grey, or any of us, had heard the she-devil of the hole shriek that day."

I studied my glass, turning it in little circles on the floor in front of me. Harley and Bear just watched her.

"Bloody Mary said she'd heard it. That day. She had this, like, cheesy gas station calendar on the wall in her kitchen. She pointed, and in the August sixteenth square, the day the girl died, there were three X's. She told me she puts X's on her calendar whenever she hears the shriek. She said she usually hears it three times, which explained the three X's."

"She hears that shrieking three times whenever she hears it at all?" Bear asked, but then thought better of it and laughed it off. "She read about the drowning in the newspaper and put the X's on the calendar later."

While they were deciding about that, I felt myself freezing up. The times I'd heard that shrieking, it was some on-again, off-again thing for a day or night. I had ended up complaining about it several times on the same day. I tried to put the whole idea out of my head by getting up and hunting through Chandra's cabinets. She didn't have any chips or real food in there, but I found an old box of soggy oyster crackers and started popping them into my mouth. I figured they would keep this brandy from churning the hell out of my gut.

Harley grabbed the box from me like she also needed a stomach sponge. "So Bloody Mary says she heard that girl being sucked out to sea? By The She?"

My eyes almost popped when Harley called her by that name. It seemed to me I had made it up as a kid, and my dad had told me that the nickname just went everywhere. I didn't know whether to shudder or laugh at my own power.

Chandra nodded. "I swear I went there ready to believe Bloody Mary was full of shit. But she started, like, telling me
exactly
the same story Grey had." She tried to imitate Bloody Mary's Swedish accent. "'Zhey tipped zee sailboat on purpose.' I hadn't told her that part. 'Zhey all spill out,
your friend
climb on zee hull first.' I never told her that, either: 'Your friend pulls one other girl onto zee hull when it's upside down. Zey look for zee third girl,
whom zey don't like...
" I had never told her about the Girl Scout part, or Lydia and Grey being bothered by this. I just said it was three of them. 'And zhey can't see zee girl right away, until she bobs up thirty feet down zee harbor, Zhen ... she gets smaller and smaller and though her eyes are wide, zhey see she is moving fast, and zhey are helpless. Zhey cannot save her from zee witch, who is screaming.'"

Harley folded her cards into a pile and dropped it in disgust. "I hope you told that raving blond bitch to go back to hell where she came from."

Bear's jaw was dangling, but he turned to me quickly. "Bro, does this have anything to do with that shrieking you were, uh, rehearing the day Emmett took you to the hospital? Tell me it doesn't."

"No," I said quickly. Chandra wouldn't tell her story if she thought it related to my family, and some part of me actually wanted to hear what she had to say. Emmett's words rang through my head. "Your choices are clear. Mom and Dad were escaping from the law. Or there's an enormous
She
out there that eats people." My head was still whirling with information overload. I figured I'd listen now and form opinions later like when I got safely back to Philly.

Chandra went on, and as she did, I wished I'd told the truth and shut her up. I did not need to hear her next little speech.

"Bloody Mary gives me this disgusting blow-by-blow. 'Zee girl reaches zee sea. Zee witch quits sucking in air over zee horizon. She extends her longest tentacle, which reaches right to zee edge of zee harbor. She grabs zee girl, sucks her under. By the time she reaches zee witch, she is half drowned, but only half. Because zee witch won't eat a dead body. She picks zee girl up in her bony fingers and chomps down. Swallows. Sends her down, down, down to zee hole, where she remains.'"

"Definitely, she's a lunatic." Harley shook her head, scooping up her cards again. "Don't tell me you believe that bullshit."

"Well, it's hard to not believe the second part after she gave me a blow-by-blow of the first part, which I knew to be true. Then she tells me I can get the girl released. I can get her soul freed, sent on to the great beyond, the light, with this little ritual she does."

My neck snapped up, and I looked at her: I couldn't help it.

"Only she wants fifty bucks?" Bear guessed.

"Sixty-five."

Bear fell backward, yelping like he'd been shot. He laughed his side off. "Please, please, tell me you didn't give that ho any money, Chandra."

"Of course I did! What would you have done? If she'd told you that whole first part?"

Bear gathered himself out of his heap, shaking his head. "She got lucky."

"That's too lucky. How would she know Grey got on the hull first, before Lydia?"

"I don't know, Chandra! Maybe she was watching from the shore."

"It was the height of tattoo season! She wouldn't leave her tattoo shop to come down and see who
might happen to die
in the harbor—"

"She was on her way to the grocery store! Fuck if I know. Some boater saw the whole thing and told her."

"There were no boats around. Grey and Lydia had to right the boat and sail back to say what had happened.
They
reported it."

"Then ... she got lucky." He went back to that. "Lydia went to see Bloody Mary first and never told you ... Or Grey." He stopped to laugh some more.

"Neither of them went to see her. Lydia's family packed it in and went home right away, and believe it or not, Grey has more class."

I remembered Grey's desperation the day I visited her. "What did you do, go see Bloody Mary?" She was struggling even then about what to do. I knew she hadn't.

"The evidence is right there, Chandra! She's a liar!" Bear tossed Colonel Mustard at her bare feet.

"What evidence?"

"The evidence"—he remembered the secret passage and jumped Professor Plum from the conservatory to the ballroom—"is that you gave her sixty-five bucks, you tart!"

"Look, stop ragging on her." Harley held up her hand. "That was a nasty accident. However Chandra wanted to handle it to make herself feel better is a good thing. I think you should stay off her back."

"I can't help it." Bear was threatening to fall on his side laughing again. I looked at the bottle in Chandra's hand. We had drunk a lot of it. Chandra was still grinning, but walking away, singing merrily to herself as she retreated to the family room. I think- she felt frustrated and misunderstood.

I left the room as Bear was accusing Harley of looking on his clue sheet when he fell over though he'd done the same to her; Harley was making the "invisible third-person pile" out of Chandra's cards, like they were sure she had quit. I followed Chandra into the family room.