Every Single Secret(62)

Faint light from downstairs illuminated the hallway. Hopefully, Mr. Cellphone was still up, texting merrily away while his clueless wife slept. I moved closer to the stairs, flipped open the pad of paper, and jotted the message I’d formulated hours earlier.

Mr. McAdam,

I think one of the other patients, Glenys Sieffert, may have gone missing. I realize this may sound strange, but last night, I believe she was on the verge of hurting herself—maybe even jumping out her bedroom window. Now I can’t find her anywhere. I think she may be in trouble. I know you have a phone, I’ve seen it on the monitors (I apologize for the invasion of your privacy). Will you please call 911—ask the police to please come up here and make sure she’s okay? I swear I won’t mention who made the call.

Thank you,

Daphne Amos

I ripped the note out of the pad, carefully folded it, and headed to the McAdams’ door. I slid the note under the door, then tiptoed to Glenys’s door. I paused, straining my ears, but there was nothing—no sounds, no light—so I returned to our room. Back in bed, I burrowed against Heath but couldn’t settle my scattershot pulse.

I kept seeing Glenys, the way she looked the other night on the monitor. Poised on her window ledge, her nightgown rippling in the breeze, her face an etching of grief and despair.

Heath was right, as it turned out. I did wonder if Chantal’s face looked the same the moment before she had died.



Chapter Twenty-Three

Mr. Cleve let me skip school for Chantal’s funeral, even though it was only supposed to be for the eighth graders and up.

“It’ll give you closure. Since you girls shared a room and all,” Mr. Cleve explained when he came to see how I was settling in at the new house. The word closure seemed like it didn’t fit in his mouth. It looked like somebody else had told him to say it. Probably the psychologist.

I didn’t have a proper dress to wear to the service, so Mrs. Waylene, my new housemother, said I could go back to the brown brick house and look in the castoff closet there. I found a dark-green sweaterdress one of the Super Tramps had ditched and some maroon tights from Chantal’s drawer, and I changed in our old room. Her black clogs, still arranged under the bed, were too big for me, but I slid my feet in them anyway.

When I got back, Mrs. Waylene made a clucking sound.

“Should I not wear the clogs?” I asked.

“No, honey. You look just great,” she said and went to call the rest of the girls.

The group of us drove to Hollyhock Community Church in silence. They’d set up the white casket on some kind of stand that had been covered with a white cloth. Vases of plastic flowers and pots of greenery ringed the casket. I was pretty sure they’d gathered them from the houses at the ranch. I recognized a big potted palm Mrs. Bobbie kept in our old dining room.

Mrs. Bobbie and the other house moms were bustling back in the fellowship hall, setting out deviled eggs and ham rolls and sugar cookies for after the service. Somebody said Chantal’s aunt and uncle were there, and there were a few grown-ups sitting in the pews who I didn’t recognize, but I couldn’t say for sure. As far as I knew, Omega’s story was the gospel truth: Chantal’s parents were dead, and she had been alone in the world. Part of me did hope her whole family was gone, so there would be no one to see me there, walking around in her clogs.

The top half of the white casket was propped open, and the preacher quietly announced to all the kids that we were to view the body. Everybody was extra quiet and reverent and got in line without the usual rowdiness. Then we all filed down the aisle. The choir director was playing the piano, something really sad and pretty, and there was only a low murmur of the kids’ voices under that. When it was my turn to walk past the casket, I looked down at Chantal.

She lay nestled in swaths of white satin, her eyes closed, hands folded over her chest. She had on a lot of foundation and even pencil on her eyebrows, which I’d never seen on her when she was alive. Her greenish hair had been curled and fanned out around her. She didn’t look alive, not at all. She looked more like a Chantal mannequin. A Chantal doll.

The white satin made me think of Mrs. Bobbie and all the fabric she kept in bolts stacked around her room. I pictured her cutting a length of white satin and gently arranging it around Chantal, making sure she was safely tucked in for the long sleep ahead. The girl looked warm in there. Safe. Like she’d actually fallen straight from the top of the mountain down into the pillowy satin casket, her hair fanning out like an angel’s.

She’d had a seizure—an epileptic seizure because she’d forgotten her medicine—and then she’d stumbled and fallen from a high rock ledge. It was nighttime and she’d wandered away from the campsite. Later, after I’d seen the psychologist, the police would blame Mr. Al, but Shellie told me it hadn’t been his fault. After everyone had gone back to their tents for bed, she and Tré had snuck out with him. They’d hiked up the gorge to smoke some weed, and that’s when Chantal had woken up and come looking for them.

When she showed up, Mr. Al told Chantal to go back to her tent and go to bed. But she never made it. A parks search party had found her the next afternoon in a crevasse near the base of the falls. She was dead, but hadn’t been that way for long. That was the worst part. She’d lived a good long while after she hit the bottom.

It took twenty-seven crew members from the Fire and Rescue to get her up. The doctors who examined her said she’d had a grand-mal seizure, then probably lost her footing. She’d tumbled over eighty feet to the bottom of the falls. Broken her neck and her back. Smashed the back of her skull to smithereens.