Our Crooked Hearts(34)
“Hey!” Panic ripped the word right out of me. I sprinted across the street, through the weird violet air. The side of our house was a wilderness of raspberry canes, their fruit boiled jammy by the heat. I almost expected to find her trapped among them like a fairy-tale prince, but they were empty.
The backyard was empty, too. I kept going, tongue running sour, darting toward the fence on Barbie toes, then over it. Past the kitchen windows, the room behind them the indistinct color of lake water. I circled back to the driveway, but the girl was gone.
Or—I thought of the cookies I’d left on my plate, a neat bite taken from each—or maybe she’d let herself in.
I stepped into the front hall and listened. I didn’t think I was imagining the unfriendly texture to the quiet, the feeling of wrongness as palpable as a smell. I circled the first floor, then went upstairs. Hank was in bed, safe and snoring, one hand up under his chin. My room was empty, the bathroom, too. I saved my parents’ room for last.
Nothing inside it looked out of place. But the air itself felt ruffled and staticky. I checked the closet and the bathroom, then dropped to my hands and knees to check beneath the bed. As I scanned the dust, my phone lit up with an unfamiliar number.
I shot upright. No one stood in the doorway. Across the room, the window was a box of empty sky. Still I imagined the strange girl could see me, that she was waiting for me to pick up the phone. I clattered swiftly down the stairs and back out to the driveway, answering after the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
A long silence with a rushing sound beneath it. Like traffic, or the ocean. Something about it made me grip the phone in sudden hope. “Mom?”
“Christ, no,” the voice said. “This is Sharon. You left a message for me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The city
Back then
The spell had to happen at midnight. Because while some supernatural clichés turned out to be crap, plenty were true.
We left the shop just after eleven. The lake had pursed its cool blue lips and blown the humidity away. It wasn’t late for the city, but it felt late in this sleepy summer town.
The people who were out kept an eye on us as we passed, or looked away fast. Together we’d become fearsome, a bouquet of night-blooming flowers. Fee was a plum-mouthed goddess, Marion a shattered-glass witch. Sharon was a barely reformed Manson girl, and then there was me. You can’t ever really see yourself, but I liked the feel of my red hair down my back, the afterparty ache of my insomniac’s eyes.
Marion led us into the campus’s heart, through shadows cast by ugly cement buildings named for dead men. Down a tricky pathway lit orange with old lights, over a fairy bowl of lush clover, and up to the steps of a baroque fever dream of a house.
“Is that…” Fee began.
Marion faced the library that had been the occultist’s house. “We’re going inside.”
“What?” I glared at her. “You didn’t tell us we’d be breaking and entering.”
“We’re not breaking. We’re just gonna enter.”
You could easily miss the little gangway in the lake-facing wall, unless you were Marion and you’d already cased the place. It was an architectural quirk I’d never seen before: a winding interior corridor so narrow we walked single file. One sharp turn, and another, and another, then it ended in a garden that smelled of basil and tomatoes and rampaging mint, bleached gray by the moon. Under sunlight it must’ve looked like something found on the grounds of a medieval nunnery. Fat bees, syrupy herbs, nodding flowers. Fee ran a gentle hand over a sage plant, releasing its scent.
Marion waded into one of the beds. From between the wall and the rhubarb she lifted a gridded metal box. A cage, one of those rat traps you see in alleyways. Inside it blinked a rabbit, a domesticated creature the colors of valentines on snow.
“Oh, come on,” Fee said plaintively.
Handing the cage to Sharon, Marion dropped to her elbows and knees before an arched wooden door in the old stone wall. From her bag she pulled out a flashlight and a bent wire hanger, a magnet banded to its end. There was a gap beneath the door where the wood had warped. She set her flashlight in front of it, shoved her magnet stick through, and went fishing.
“Yes,” she breathed, slowly extracting a key.
Sharon whistled. “Nice work, MacGyver.”
Marion had been planning this for a long time. Longer than she’d let on. I bit my thumbnail as I watched her unlock the door, bumping it with her hip to dislodge the swollen wood from the frame. She’d done that before, too. Pleased with herself, she beckoned us in.
Just a step over the threshold and the temperature dropped. The sweet bakery funk of deteriorating paper and old ink blotted out the green clamor of the garden. Even with your eyes closed you’d know were inside a library. When the door had shut behind us we stood in the silence, an unwieldy circle of four. Five. The rabbit’s eye shone like a dime in the dark.
“Join hands,” Marion said in a slumber-party whisper. “I’ll lead us. We can’t risk the flashlight.” She reached a hand to Sharon, who reached back for Fee. I took Fee’s hand and became the tail of the comet streaking through the quiet library.
It was beautiful. There had to be fifty kinds of magic waiting to be woken in a place this stuffed with old books and history. We shuffled past a carved wooden screen that tossed geometric cutouts onto our skin and up a sweeping staircase. At its top a stained-glass window depicted a picnic party of well-dressed foxes, casting the landing in light the colors of fallen fruit. A recollection hit me with an ice-water charge: Marion had once found a body in this place.