The Turning (16 page)

I brought it over to the window. There was a little red streak on the glass over the picture of the saint. I knew it was Lucy’s blood.

Maybe it did work miracles. Because I felt totally cured. I got dressed and went downstairs.

Linda said, “You look a million times better!”

“I feel a million times better,” I said. “It’s like a miracle cure.”

Linda gave me a searching look. I remembered she’d said that yesterday, about the miracle cure. Did she think I was making fun of her? But it did feel like a miracle. Thank you, saint of hopeless cases.

“I’m joking,” I said. “Where are the kids?”

“Still sleeping, I think,” said Linda. “You’re up early. Didn’t you notice how early it is?”

“Actually, no,” I said. “But listen, I want to apologize. For being crabby. It’s just that I was feeling so sick. I’m sure I said hurtful things to you and the kids that I didn’t mean at all.”

“That’s okay,” said Linda. “Everyone gets cranky when they’re sick. There were days when my husband … well, let’s not think about that. Let’s just remember the good times. Anyhow, why not take another day off to recuperate? The kids can take it easy, too, and you can relax and rest and finish recovering before you go back to hanging out with them tomorrow.”

“That sounds great,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to take a walk. To go into the woods and think and be quiet.”

Was Linda staring at me again? I couldn’t look her in the eye.

“Are you hungry?” she asked me.

“I could eat something,” I said.

In fact I wasn’t hungry. But I faked it, scarfing down two slices of toast and a plate of eggs. It was all I could do not to gag. It wasn’t that I still felt sick, but I was nervous about going to Norris’s cottage.

I would learn something there, Lucy had said. She hadn’t said something good. But I didn’t care how bad it might be. I wanted to know what it was.

I waited a suitable amount of time so that Linda would think I was digesting my food instead of rushing outside to carry out an assignment I’d gotten from a ghost.

“I guess I’ll be heading out,” I said.

“Will you be back for lunch?” asked Linda.

“I’ll only be gone a little while,” I said. “I don’t want to push it.” I reached into my pocket and touched the St. Jude medal for good luck.

“That sounds sensible,” Linda told me. “See you in a while. It’s good you have nice weather.”

I wanted to say, Listen, if I don’t come back by noon, please send someone to find me. But that would probably alarm Linda so much she’d make me go back to bed and stay there. Anyway, who was she going to send to find me, and what was going to happen to me on an island where there were no other people? Was I scared of getting lost? You’d have to be pretty messed up to get lost. Even the marshes were covered by the zigzag path.

In case Linda was watching, I tried to give the impression of being a regular person taking a leisurely walk with no particular destination in mind. I knew that by the time I got to the lakeshore she couldn’t see me anymore. Even so, I sat down in the shade of the tree so Linda would think I was taking it easy and resting.

But of course the reason I stopped there had nothing to do with Linda. I was still hoping that Lucy would appear on the bank, near the boathouse. We could spend the day talking, and I could forget about going to Norris’s cottage. Maybe I could persuade Lucy to break that rule against touching. Laws were made to be broken. There were probably laws against coming back to the world of the living and messing with the heads of guys like me. I would talk her out of the not-touching rule, and we could lie there and whisper and kiss all day. Like we used to do, Sophie, remember?

Should I not be telling you this, Sophie? Is it harsh of me to say all this? Well, it’s okay, I know you don’t care anymore, anyway. And in return for reading this and for letting me be so honest, you can tell me what you’re doing with Josh. Deal?

Once more I stared at the spot where Lucy had been. Only today I looked harder, willing her to appear. It was like a meditation, and sure enough, my mind emptied out except for one annoying thought. What if Linda was just saying I should take another day off? What if I’d gotten so obviously weird that Linda was nervous about my being alone with the kids? And she’d sent me out for a walk so she could figure out the next step. What if she was about to break the don’t-bother–Jim Crackstone law or deal with the problem herself, like she’d done with Norris? What if she was planning to make my dad come and get me, so I could go home in disgrace, with the whole town—including you, Sophie—knowing how badly I’d screwed up? Though I guess you already think that. Maybe you’re the crazy one, after all.

But I promise. No, I swear: There’s no reason to worry. There’s no problem at all about my being alone with Miles and Flora.

I decided to move on. Lucy wasn’t coming back. I didn’t blame her. Why should she come visit me when I couldn’t concentrate on her without worrying about what Linda was thinking about me and the children? I didn’t deserve to see Lucy, and besides, she belonged to Norris.

Maybe the thing I would learn in the cottage was the secret that would save her. Maybe she was sending me on a mission that would break the hold that Norris had over her, even in the other world.

I knew how to get to Norris’s cottage. I just didn’t want to go. But I knew why I had to go, and it gave me the courage I needed.

I felt as if Lucy was guiding me. I touched her medal for courage.

I could tell that no one had been on the path for a while. That is, no living person. And if a ghost had come this way, it hadn’t bothered clearing away the roots and branches. Once I slipped on a patch of slick mud, and once I tripped over a place where brambles had grown across the path.

The weathered cottage was covered with thorny briars and dead ivy. Weeds had grown up all around it. The cottage hadn’t been cared for, or cared about, in a long time.

To tell the truth, I was more worried about animals than about spirits or ghosts. It was just the sort of place where raccoons or bats or squirrels would nest. Even if they had moved on, there would be gnawed-up bones and animal shit. It looked like somewhere rats would go to die.

I pulled some branches away from the entrance and took a deep breath and pushed. The door was swollen shut. I had to lean all my weight against it, until finally the door opened—and I fell inside.

Nothing scurried or fluttered. There were no raccoons. No nesting birds. And as far as I could tell, no dead rats.

The place smelled like a cave—mushroomy, dank, and wet. Someone had left in a hurry. It was impossible to tell the garbage from the possessions Norris had discarded: broken dishes and beer bottles, scraps of paper and old clothes with a strange flower design that turned out to be patches of mildew. The cottage was like a crime scene, only without any corpses or blood. The ripped-up dirty magazines gave me the creeps. I noticed the pool cues leaning against the wall. So this was where all the pool cues had gone! Why had Norris needed pool cues out here in the cottage, where there wasn’t even a pool table? I didn’t want to know.

At first I couldn’t believe that neat, perfect, well-behaved Miles and Flora would want to hang out here. But the more I thought about it, the easier it was to understand. What a relief it must have been to be surrounded by all this mess after spending their lives dressed like old-fashioned dolls, under the constant pressure of Linda’s suffocatingly warm, superorderly, motherly niceness.

But even if Miles and Flora liked it here, it definitely made me jumpy. I kept looking back over my shoulder. What if Norris knew I was here, in his former home? If Lucy could come back, so could he. And I’d seen him—twice. What if he followed me and found me and there was no one around and—?

Just then the door banged shut.

“Please,” I heard myself saying. “Please.” But who was I talking to, and what was I asking? Obviously, I was losing it. It was only the wind that had slammed the door. I was alone in the cottage. Safe, at least for the moment. But I was sure that if I stayed any longer, something awful would happen. I had to get out fast.

I started talking to Lucy, even though she wasn’t there. I said, “What did you mean? What can I learn in this horrible place? Why did you tell me to come here?”

Something powerful whipped me around, like my own private indoor tornado.

“Lucy, is that you? What do you want me to do?” I could tell where the force—or whatever it was—wanted me to look. In the filthy kitchen was a refrigerator. The door had been torn off, and I could see furry scraps of what had once been food (I hoped it was former food) on the moldy shelves. On the wall beside the refrigerator was a hook. And on the hook was a key.

I said, “Is that it?” I took Lucy’s medal out of my pocket and closed my eyes and squeezed the image of the saint as hard as I could.

I swear to you, Sophie. I heard Lucy’s voice.

“The schoolroom,” Lucy said.

I put the key in my pocket.

I know what you’re thinking, Sophie. Jack’s seeing things; he’s hearing things. He’s totally lost his mind. But you know what? I’ve never felt so sane. So calm and reasonable and logical. And you know what proves it, Sophie? When I heard Lucy mention the schoolroom, I didn’t even have to stop and wonder where the schoolroom was, or why Flora and Miles or Linda had never mentioned that there was a schoolroom. It took me about two seconds to understand that it was just another one of the secrets they’d conspired to keep from me. But I’m smarter than they are, and with Lucy’s help, everything was finally becoming obvious. Very obvious. Painfully clear, you could say.

I headed back toward the house. I didn’t exactly feel like myself. I felt more … well, kind of like a wolf. Watchful, quick, alert.

From a distance, I saw that Linda and Miles and Flora were all working in the garden. I watched them for a few minutes, and I thought, Man, those golf clubs are really ugly! She’s made that beautiful garden look like a dead golf-club graveyard.

The fact that all three of them were out there together was pretty unusual. Normally, Linda did all the planting and weeding and picking by herself. I guess Miles and Flora didn’t like to get their little hands dirty.

Once again, I had the feeling that it had something to do with me. That Linda had decided to keep the kids close to her in case I came back to the house. It was just more evidence that she’d started thinking I was out of control and a danger to the children. Which I am totally not!!! Although it’s funny, Sophie. People should be careful what they think you are, because the more they think you’re something bad, the greater the chances of you becoming that bad thing. Know what I mean?

Anyhow, I was glad they were all outside and wouldn’t get in my way or annoy me or offer me some delicious food I didn’t want to eat. I certainly didn’t want the kids asking to go with me when I’d finally figured out how to get inside the schoolroom.

Even though no one was inside the house, I was very quiet going up the stairs. I didn’t want Norris’s ghost to know where I was headed. My only hope was that Lucy was somehow distracting him, or that—wherever he was—he’d reached the point of no longer caring what happened on the island. But if that was true, why had he come back, looking—I was sure now—for Miles? I decided not to think about that and just to keep my mind on what I had to do.

I knew where the schoolroom was. It had to be the locked room. The door the kids had tried to open my first afternoon on the island. The only room that they—by “they” I guess I mean Linda—still kept locked.

The key fit perfectly. I started to turn it, then stopped. Started again, then stopped. I felt as if everything that had happened to me on the island had been leading to this moment, that every mystery and unanswered question would be resolved when I unlocked that door.

So you can imagine how disappointed I was when it turned out to look like … well, like a schoolroom. Though to tell you the truth, Sophie, and now that we’ve broken up, I feel like I can tell you the truth and not have to act like the big, strong guy, the brave, fearless boyfriend … I almost wrote
boy fiend
. A little misspelling, I guess. So maybe it was a good thing I was in a schoolroom, where someone like myself could learn the difference between
boyfriend
and
boy fiend.

Now where was I? Right. I was relieved. I wasn’t ready to deal with another crime scene like Norris’s cottage. And the schoolroom was pretty ordinary, pretty neat: A blackboard. Two little school desks with attached seats—remember we had those desks in first grade, before they renovated the school? Did we even know each other in first grade? I suddenly can’t remember. The room smelled of chalk dust and little kids. Maybe I was imagining it, but underneath, there was a faint scent of that hand cream Lucy used. All in all, kind of pleasant. So what did Lucy want me to find?

The more I looked around, the more everything seemed just a little … off. Maybe it would have seemed normal if I didn’t know Miles and Flora. On one wall was a huge map. Not a map of the world or of the United States, but a map of Outer Mongolia. There were botanical charts everywhere, pictures of flowers and plants with their Latin names. They were old, extremely old. They looked as if they’d been torn out of the kind of books that contain spells and recipes for magic potions that wizards could concoct from … flowers and plants. There were images of volcanoes that must have been there from the time of Jim Crackstone, posters of animals and birds....