Help for the Haunted(18)

“What are you doing?”

I turned to see my sister coming down the stairs. Black cape. Pointy hat. Face slathered with green makeup. I’d been so preoccupied with those make-believe hookers and the bowl that I’d failed to notice her music go dead above me.

“Nothing.”

“Doesn’t look like nothing.” Rose reached the bottom of the stairs, took the bowl from my hands, peeked beneath the foil. “What the hell is it?”

Beef bourguignon, I wanted to say. “Jell-O.”

“Did you see anyone leave it?”

I shook my head, which made me think of Louise Hock, the haggard-looking assistant district attorney who attended our meetings with Rummel at the police station. Lately, Louise had begun telling me I needed to get in the habit of speaking my answers, since there would be no nodding allowed when I was questioned in the courtroom come spring. “I didn’t see anyone,” I told Rose.

“Well, I hope you weren’t about to eat it.”

“Seems like a lot of effort just to do us in. By now, whoever it is must realize it’s not exactly working, seeing as we’re still alive.”

“Maybe it’s a slow poison. Or maybe the freak is waiting until we get used to stuffing our faces with these innocent ‘donations’ before sprinkling in Drano. All those goodies down the hatch then—wham!—the unsuspecting Jell-O mold does us in.”

I stared at her, blinking.

“What?” she said.

“Or maybe someone out there feels bad about our situation and is being nice.”

My sister gave the bowl a wiggle, then sniffed the slick red surface before holding it out to me. “Okay, then. If you’re so brave and determined. Help yourself, Sylvie.”

I hesitated, waiting for her to retract the bowl. When she didn’t, I reached two fingers in and scooped out a blob. The walnut inside made me think of those embalmed bugs once more. I opened wide, my breath causing the Jell-O to wiggle on my fingertips, and then, at the last second, said, “I can’t do it,” and tossed it back.

Rose set the bowl aside. “Thought so.” She fussed with the knot on the collar of her cape while telling me about a warehouse party she was going to two hours away in Philly. Normally there was something impenetrable about my sister’s face, but in contrast to all that green, her eyes looked red and tired, her teeth smaller, more yellow. The effect was not scary so much as gloomy.

“You know, Sylvie, it wouldn’t hurt you to act fourteen instead of forty for a change. Throw a sheet over your head. Go out with your friends.”

“I don’t have friends,” I told her.

“Yes, you do. That girl with the weird name and the other one with the weird face.”

“Gretchen moved when her dad got a job in Cleveland.”

“And Elizabeth?”

“She moved too.” That part wasn’t true, but I didn’t feel like explaining the way Elizabeth stopped sitting with me at lunch after I came back to school last winter. “Forget about them,” I told my sister, and then I thought of what I’d overheard in the school library, the reason I felt nervous about who might show up tonight. “Besides, one of us needs to watch the place in case anyone decides to make trouble.”

“Oh, don’t you worry, Sylvie. I’ve got us covered on that front.”

A fist pounded on the door, startling me. When I opened up, it took a moment to place the driver, since her face was caked with witch makeup too. The extra features didn’t help: matted wig, fake eyebrows, rubber hands with noodly fingers. Instead of a “trick or treat,” she launched into an explanation of how she’d been listening to Rose and me until she remembered the doorbell was broken. “You really should put a sign up, letting people know the thing doesn’t ring. Lucky I figured it out, because someone el—”

“All right, all right,” Rose said, cutting her off. “Come in already, Cora.”

I stared at Cora’s noodly fingers, thinking of that rainy afternoon when I first found her waiting for me in the living room, the way Rose had returned downstairs a few minutes later only to peek over her shoulder at the clipboard and ask us both the questions listed there: How many hours of sleep do you get a night? Do you ever feel anxious during the day? If so, how often and why? “I didn’t recognize you without your clipboard,” I told Cora now, as I remembered the reluctant answers she’d given my sister that day: Four or five at best . . . Yes . . . Quite a bit . . . I’m supporting my sister and me with this new job. . . . And I guess you could say I don’t have enough fun in my life. . . .

She tilted her green witch face and said, “Really? Well, it would have been odd for me to bring it. I mean, witches don’t carry clipboards.”

“That was a joke, Cor,” Rose told her. “It might come as a shock, but we do make jokes in this house. Even Great-Grandma Sylvie ekes one out now and then.”

Cora pressed her fake fingers to her mouth and let out an “Ohhhhhh!” Then she smiled. “How are you doing, Sylvie?”

“Fine.”

“How’s school?”

“Good.”

“No problems?”

“No problems.”

“While I was waiting at the door, I heard you saying something about your friends. Is something wrong?”