It took a moment for Ivy’s words to register.
“What do you mean burnin’ a house with women in it?”
“I’m so sorry, child.”
Genevieve felt her legs buckle beneath her. She knelt in the mud, the rain running down her face, mixing with her tears. Her mother, her sister, Greenbrier—they were all gone.
Genevieve looked up at the sky.
“God’s the one who’s goin’ to have to answer to me.”
It pulled us out as fast as it had sucked us in. I was staring at the preacher again, and Lena was gone. I could feel her slip away.
Lena?
She didn’t answer. I sat in the church in a cold sweat, sandwiched between Aunt Mercy and Aunt Grace, who were fishing in their purses for change for the collection basket.
Burning a house with women in it, a house lined with lemon trees. A house where I’d bet Genevieve had lost her locket. A locket engraved with the day Lena was born, but over a hundred years before. No wonder Lena didn’t want to see the visions. I was starting to agree with her.
There were no coincidences.
9.14
The Real Boo Radley
Sunday night, I reread The Catcher in the Rye until I felt tired enough to fall asleep. Only I never got tired enough. And I couldn’t read, because reading didn’t feel the same. I couldn’t disappear into the character of Holden Caulfield, because I couldn’t get lost in the story, not the way you need to be, to become somebody else.
I wasn’t alone in my head. It was full of lockets, and fires, and voices. People I didn’t know, and visions I didn’t understand.
And something else. I put the book down and slid my hands behind my head.
Lena? You’re there, aren’t you?
I stared up at the blue ceiling.
It’s no use. I know you’re there. Here. Whatever.
I waited, until I heard it. Her voice, unfolding like a tiny, bright memory in the darkest, furthest corner of my mind.
No. Not exactly.
You are. You have been, all night.
Ethan, I’m sleeping. I mean, I was.
I smiled to myself.
No you weren’t. You were listening.
I was not.
Just admit it, you were.
Guys. You think everything is about you. Maybe I just like that book.
Can you just drop in whenever you want, now?
There was a long pause.
Not usually, but tonight it just sort of happened. I still don’t understand how it works.
Maybe we can ask someone.
Like who?
I don’t know. Guess we’ll have to figure it out on our own. Just like everything else.
Another pause. I tried not to wonder if the “we” spooked her, in case she could hear me. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was the other thing; she didn’t want me to find out anything, if it had to do with her.
Don’t try.
I smiled, and felt my eyes closing. I could barely keep them open.
I’m trying.
I turned out the light.
Good night, Lena.
Good night, Ethan.
I hoped she couldn’t read all my thoughts.
Basketball. I was definitely going to have to spend more time thinking about basketball. And as I thought about the playbook in my mind, I felt my eyes closing, myself sinking, losing control….
Drowning.
I was drowning.
Thrashing in the green water, waves crashing over my head. My feet kicked for the muddy bottom of a river, maybe the Santee, but there was nothing. I could see some kind of light, skimming the river, but I couldn’t get to the surface.
I was going down.
“It’s my birthday, Ethan. It’s happening.”
I reached out. She grabbed at my hand, and I twisted to catch it, but she drifted away, and I couldn’t hold on anymore. I tried to scream as I watched her pale little hand drift down toward the darkness, but my mouth filled with water and I couldn’t make a sound. I could feel myself choking. I was starting to black out.
“I tried to warn you. You have to let me go!”
I sat up in bed. My T-shirt was soaking wet. My pillow was wet. My hair was wet. And my room was sticky and humid. I guessed I’d left the window open again.
“Ethan Wate! Are you listenin’ to me? You better get yourself down here yesterday, or you won’t be havin’ breakfast again this week.”
I was in my seat just as three eggs over-easy slid onto my plate of biscuits and gravy. “Good morning, Amma.”
She turned her back to me without so much as a look. “Now you know there’s nothin’ good about it. Don’t spit down my back and tell me it’s rainin’.” She was still aggravated with me, but I wasn’t sure if it was because I had walked out of class or brought the locket home. Probably both. I couldn’t blame her, though; I didn’t usually get in trouble at school. This was all new territory.
“Amma, I’m sorry about leaving class on Friday. It’s not gonna happen again. Everything’ll be back to normal.”
Her face softened, just a little, and she sat down across from me. “Don’t think so. We all make our choices, and those choices have consequences. I expect you’ll have some hell to pay for yours when you get to school. Maybe you’ll start listenin’ to me now. Stay away from that Lena Duchannes, and that house.”
It wasn’t like Amma to side with everyone else in town, considering that was usually the wrong side of things. I could tell she was worried by the way she kept stirring her coffee, long after the milk had disappeared. Amma always worried about me and I loved her for it, but something felt different since I showed her the locket. I walked around the table and gave her a hug. She smelled like pencil lead and Red Hots, like always.
She shook her head, muttering, “Don’t want to hear about any green eyes and black hair. It’s fixin’ to come up a bad cloud today, so you be careful.”
Amma wasn’t just going dark. Today she was going pitch-black. I could feel it coming up a bad cloud, myself.
Link pulled up in the Beater blasting some terrible tunes, as usual. He turned down the music when I slid into the seat, which was always a bad sign.
“We got trubs.”
“I know.”
“Jackson’s got itself a regular lynch mob this mornin’.”
“What’d you hear?”
“Been goin’ on since Friday night. I heard my mom talkin’, and I tried to call you. Where were you, anyway?”
“I was pretending to bury a hexed locket over at Greenbrier, so Amma would let me back in the house.”
Link laughed. He was used to talk about hexes and charms and the evil eye, where Amma was concerned. “At least she’s not makin’ you wear that stinkin’ bag a onion mess around your neck. That was nasty.”
“It was garlic. For my mom’s funeral.”
“It was nasty.”
The thing about Link was, we’d been friends since the day he gave me that Twinkie on the bus, and after that he didn’t care much what I said or did. Even back then, you knew who your friends were. That’s what Gatlin was like. Everything had already happened, ten years ago. For our parents, everything had already happened twenty or thirty years ago. And for the town itself, it seemed like nothing had happened for more than a hundred years. Nothing of consequence, that is.
I had a feeling that was all about to change.
My mom would have said it was time. If there was one thing my mom liked, it was change. Unlike Link’s mom. Mrs. Lincoln was a rage-aholic, on a mission, with a network—a dangerous combination. When we were in the eighth grade, Mrs. Lincoln ripped the cable box out of the wall because she found Link watching a Harry Potter movie, a series she had campaigned to ban from the Gatlin County Library because she thought it promoted witchcraft. Luckily, Link managed to sneak over to Earl Petty’s house to watch MTV, or Who Shot Lincoln would never have become Jackson High’s premier—and by premier, I mean only—rock band.
I never understood Mrs. Lincoln. When my mom was alive, she would roll her eyes and say, “Link may be your best friend, but don’t expect me to join the DAR and start wearing a hoop skirt for reenactments.” Then we’d both crack up, imagining my mom, who walked miles of muddy battlefields looking for old shell casings, who cut her own hair with garden scissors, as a member of the DAR, organizing bake sales and telling everyone how to decorate their houses.
Mrs. Lincoln was easy to picture in the DAR. She was the Recording Secretary, and even I knew that. She was on the Board with Savannah Snow’s and Emily Asher’s mothers, while my mom spent most of her time holed up in the library looking at microfiche.
Had spent.
Link was still talking and soon I’d heard enough to start listening. “My mom, Emily’s mom, Savannah’s… they’ve been burnin’ up the phone lines, last couple a nights. Overheard my mom talkin’ about the window breakin’ in English and how she heard Old Man Ravenwood’s niece had blood on her hands.”
He swerved around the corner, without even taking a breath. “And about how your girlfriend just got outta a mental institution in Virginia, and how she’s an orphan, and has bi schizo-manic somethin’.”
“She’s not my girlfriend. We’re just friends,” I said automatically.
“Shut up. You’re so whipped I should buy you a saddle.” Which he would’ve said about any girl I talked to, talked about, or even looked at in the hall.
“She’s not. Nothing’s happened. We just hang out.”
“You’re so full a crap, you could pass for a toilet. You like her, Wate. Admit it.” Link wasn’t big on subtleties, and I don’t think he could imagine hanging out with a girl for any reason other than maybe she played lead guitar, except for the obvious ones.
“I’m not saying I don’t like her. We’re just friends.” Which was the truth, actually, whether or not I wanted it to be. But that was a different question. Either way, I must have smiled a little. Wrong move.
Link pretended to vomit into his lap and swerved, narrowly missing a truck. But he was just messing around. Link didn’t care who I liked, as long as it gave him something to hassle me about. “Well? Is it true? Did she?”
“Did she what?”
“You know. Fall outta the crazy tree and hit every branch on the way down?”
“A window broke, that’s all that happened. It’s not a mystery.”
“Mrs. Asher’s sayin’ she punched it out, or threw somethin’ at it.”
“That’s funny, seeing how Mrs. Asher isn’t in my English class, last time I checked.”
“Yeah well, my mom isn’t either, but she told me she was comin’ by school today.”
“Great. Save her a seat at our lunch table.”
“Maybe she’s done this at all her schools, and that’s why she was in some kinda institution.” Link was serious, which meant he’d overheard a whole lot of something since the window incident.
For a second, I remembered what Lena had said about her life. Complicated. Maybe this was one of those complications, or just one of the twenty-six thousand other things she couldn’t talk about. What if all the Emily Ashers of the world were right? What if I had taken the wrong side, after all?