The Secret Grave Read online

  She can’t take them away from me.

  “Wow, those plump, juicy blueberries look yummy!” Luisa says, plucking a deadly one off the bush.

  “No! Don’t put it in your mouth,” I shout. “Belladonna berries are so poisonous that you wouldn’t even know what happened to you before you keeled over dead.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Sara asks.

  “Well, maybe not that fast,” comes a calm voice from behind a cottonwood tree.

  Sara whirls around and Luisa drops the berry. “Cady?”

  “The one and only! And you’re the Third Musketeer, Lucy or Lisa or something, right?”

  Sara reminds her, “You know her name. At the library you asked me if I was Sara or Luisa, remember?”

  “There’s so much on my mind that I forget little details.”

  What could she possibly have on her mind when all she does is appear and disappear?

  Just then a cloud sweeps overhead, turning the forest ceiling into twilight, which makes Luisa fidget with a strand of her sun-bleached hair.

  Cady watches intently. “Feeling nervous, Luisa?”

  “No, not at all,” Luisa lies.

  “Are you sure? Sara told me how you’re real scared of the dark.”

  “Sara! You didn’t!” Luisa cries, and Sara looks stunned. I’m sure Sara wouldn’t have said anything to Cady about it in the short time they were talking at the library, but Cady has an eerie way of knowing everybody’s dark secrets. No one knows that Luisa sleeps with a flashlight shining next to her head and backup batteries under her pillow except her family, Sara, and me (and I guess her camp cabin mates now).

  “I didn’t realize this fear thing was a sensitive issue with you.” And as if Cady willed it, the cloud cover lifts, and rays of sun shine down between the tall pines. “Forgive me?”

  “Sure,” Luisa says grudgingly, because it’s hard to stomp on the face of an apology that almost sounds sincere.

  “Good. Let’s start over and have some fun. Look, I’ve shoved a flat barge into the lake. We’ll pretend it’s a fabulous cruise ship sailing us to Montego Bay or the Panama Canal, like Hannah’s grandparents.”

  I’ll bet if we took a vote, none of us would want to step foot on that flimsy boat, but somehow we all follow Cady to the bank of the lake where she’s got it anchored with heavy rope around a cottonwood tree. It’s not even a boat, really. It’s just a bunch of planks nailed together. There aren’t even sides. It’ll sink with the weight of the four of us!

  “Is it safe?” Sara asks warily.

  “Absolutely. Nobody drowns in Moonlight Lake,” Cady promises. “Of course, our friend Hannah doesn’t believe that. She won’t come swimming with me at midnight. And I know you wouldn’t either, Luisa, since it’d be scary-dark. Would you do it, Sara?”

  “I don’t know. I’m kind of a big chicken.”

  “I’ll do it!” Luisa says, pounding her knees with both fists. “As long as there’s moonlight.”

  “There’s a full moon Saturday night,” Cady says, her face glowing with excitement. “Who’s up for it?”

  Sara hesitates. “I guess if Hannah and Luisa are in … ”

  “See, Hannah? Your friends are honest and true and brave.”

  “We’ll have to sneak out of the house after everyone’s asleep,” Luisa says. “Not one single parent in the whole state of Georgia would let their kid go swimming in a lake at midnight. Well, I guess your mother would,” Luisa adds, pointing to Cady.

  “I’m a free spirit. I do whatever I please.”

  “Must be nice,” Luisa says. “My parents are like the Georgia State Police.”

  Sara murmurs, “What if your mother does find out, though, Cady?”

  “Oh, she’s busy with her own stuff. Doesn’t pay any attention to me.”

  Which is so sad. Wait! I thought she told me her parents were dead. In fact, that Vivienne was her mother, and she’s way dead. I don’t know what to believe.

  “So, y’all will come Saturday night at midnight? It’s the best time to swim. The water’s calm and cool, and you can float on your back and watch the stars dotting the black sky.”

  “You said there’d be a full moon,” Luisa reminds her nervously.

  “There will be. I promise.” Cady’s voice is dreamy, as if she and the moon share something special that the rest of us do not. “Y’all are coming?”

  My knees are shaking, and Luisa’s twisting her hair into a snarl. We look from one to the other, each of us embarrassed to say NO, NO, I WON’T GO! So we do one of those things where you pile your hands and make a pledge, like we used to do a pinkie promise when we were little. And then, I swear, Cady reads my mind!

  “Okay, girls, it’s like a pinkie promise. We have to seal it with a chant, ready? Luisa, Sara, Hannah, and Cady; midnight moonlight loon nightshady. Say it with me,” she urges.

  It feels stupid and embarrassing. It’s something kindergartners would do, but we all four chant it together, a solemn pledge that three of us do not want to keep: Luisa, Sara, Hannah, and Cady; midnight moonlight loon nightshady.

  After the chant, we pretend we forgot about Cady’s boat, because Sara and Luisa and I don’t want to hang around one single minute longer. We’re all clumsy trying to hug Cady good-bye. She slides out of our hug and dusts herself off as if we’ve given her a tropical disease, and that’s without going to Montego Bay on her hopeless boat. So the three of us start home, silent and grim and really confused.

  “Hannah! Wait a minute!” Cady comes running up to me, and we freeze. “You left something.” She hands me the cameo. My first reaction is to pull my hand away so it sinks into the bog of the forest floor. I don’t. Her gaze is so forceful that I close my hand around the cameo and walk on silently, while Sara and Luisa stare at me in wonder.

  When we hear Cady’s footsteps growing dimmer behind us, we all blather at once.

  “That is one wacko girl,” Luisa mutters. “That boat of hers!”

  Sara says, “I wouldn’t have put one toe on it. It’s doomed. It’s the Titanic of Moonlight Lake.”

  “So, what did she give you?” asks Luisa, who pries open my tightly locked hand. “Oh, disappointing. It’s just some kind of old-fashioned pin.”

  Sara says, “It’s so pretty. Whose is it, Nana Fiona’s?”

  “No.” One quick word that sounds like a door slamming, but only opens up their questions: whose pin, why did Cady have it, why did she make a big production out of giving it to me, and why is my hand shaking as I hold it?

  Sara can see that the cameo has me spooked. “Better tell us the story.”

  My voice quivers. “I’m pretty sure it belongs to Vivienne.”

  “Who’s she?” Luisa asks. “Another one of Cady’s tribe of crazies?”

  Shaking my head, I blurt it out: “Vivienne is the blind ghost who lives in our attic.”

  “Ooooh,” Luisa says, “The G-g-ghost of N-n-nightshade! Wait, how can you tell if a ghost is blind? She has a ghostly seeing-eye dog?”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  Sara and Luisa both stop suddenly and give me a good, hard glare. I know they’re starting to think that I’m as crazy as Cady.

  “Let me see that.” Luisa reaches for the cameo, but I pull it out of reach. Annoyed, she mutters, “Whatever.”

  A few steps ahead of the others, I dare to look closely at the cameo. It’s not moving or blinking or freezing my hand or doing anything strange. Maybe when I thought it was, it really wasn’t. Just my overactive imagination, which has been on hyper-alert ever since the first day I met Cady.

  I drop the cameo into my pocket.

  Dusk is falling. Luisa’s getting nervous. “No more talk about ghosts and stuff, okay? This is all too weird. Did they just let Cady out of the loony bin?”

  Sara says, “Loony bin, wow. I just put two and two together. She’s really into the midnight moonlight thing, and isn’t luna a word that means moon, as in moon-crazy, as in lunatic?”

>   “What did we get ourselves into?” Luisa moans.

  “We are not going to the lake at midnight, are we, I mean really?” Sara demands. “My mother would have a cow if she knew I was even thinking about it.”

  “At least our parents care about us. Cady’s? Totally out-to-lunch,” Luisa says. “I don’t know—maybe she’s lucky.”

  Sara says, “I’m sure she tricked us. She does witchy magic or something.”

  “That’s what Scooter thinks.”

  “Must be true. Otherwise I would never have agreed to do such a stupid thing as swimming at midnight,” Luisa says.

  She’s right. But then why are these words falling out of my mouth? “We made a pledge. Luisa, Sara, Hannah, and Cady; midnight moonlight—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we know the rest,” Sara mutters.

  We trot along at a steady pace, crunching pine needles under our feet.

  “I’m sorry about the afraid-of-the-dark thing, Luisa. Honestly, I never said a word to her about it,” Sara says.

  “I believe you,” she says, glaring at me. “So here’s my question. Is Cady just mean, or really insensitive, or totally nuts?”

  “All of the above,” Sara answers.

  I don’t want to defend Cady, but here I am doing exactly that again. “She says she acts crazy because she’s jealous of the people I’m close to.”

  Luisa adds, “She sure doesn’t get how friendship works.”

  I can’t help thinking about her “friends” in the cemetery, Cassandra and Bonnie Ava and the others. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

  Sara says, “And now we’ve got this midnight moonlight thing to deal with.”

  “We still have two nights until Saturday,” Luisa assures us. “That’s plenty of time to think about it and talk about it a few hundred times.”

  “Until we talk ourselves out of it?” Sara suggests hopefully.

  “Before that, there’s something else in the woods I have to show you. It’s on the other side of Moonlight Lake.” We’re almost to the mouth of the forest. I swing my legs over the fallen log toward home. “Tomorrow morning, meet me right here at six o’clock. It’ll still be cool, which is really good, because what you’re going to see, I promise, will set your minds on fire.”

  Sara, Luisa, and I meet at the fallen log. Sara’s slathered on sunblock that’s crusting into a white paste on her nose. She smells like heavy-duty insect repellent. Luisa, fresh from the outdoorsy camp, wears a camouflage cap with drop-down shades and a thing that hangs over the back of her neck.

  “Sheesh, do ya’ll think you’re going on safari in a South American jungle?”

  Sara says, “I burned to a crisp out here yesterday. I’ll totally molt in three days.”

  “We need every defense possible against Cady,” Luisa declares. She looks up at the pink morning sky. “Whose idea was it to come out here at six o’clock? I usually sleep ’til lunchtime in the summer. Cady does, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Yeah, I don’t want to see her today,” Sara adds.

  Luisa snickers. “Why? She’s your new best friend.”

  “Please!”

  “I don’t want to see her, either,” I tell them. “She’d try to stop us from going across the lake, which we’ve got to do. You won’t believe what’s over there. Ready for a shock of major proportions?”

  “Lions and tigers and bears?” Sara asks.

  “No, nothing like that.” I’m trying to keep it light because I know how the graves of so many girls our age will shake them to their bones. “Remember not to pet raccoons or eat belladonna berries on the way.”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t eat anything wild or unwashed,” Sara says as we trudge on.

  She’s out of breath before we even reach the cabin, but Luisa forges ahead, and with my short stubby legs I can barely keep up with her.

  “How much farther?” Sara complains.

  I hand her a bottle of icy water and point to the thick growth banking the lake on the other side. “Just past that, and some grass, and an open field. We’re coming up to Cady’s cabin. Don’t make a sound. She might be in there.”

  I take a quick peek inside. It’s empty—even her picnic basket is gone. The only thing I see is a yellow wax puddle on the floor from the fat candle I saw her burning the last time I was here.

  Where does she go when she’s not here in the cabin? The cemetery? I do not want to find her there.

  We trudge on, trying to keep up with Luisa’s new athletic stride. She waits for us on the other side of the cabin and says, “You started telling us about the ghost in your attic, but we didn’t get the full story.”

  Somehow walking toward a creepy cemetery doesn’t seem like the best time to talk about ghosts. “Later, okay?”

  We march through the bushes, the tall grass, and the stubby, grazed grass, until I glimpse the gravestones up ahead and my heart clenches, then starts hammering insanely, too wild to stay in my chest.

  Luisa stops short. “What are those things?” she asks.

  “You’ll see in a minute.”

  Sara clutches my arm. “I don’t think I want to.”

  Doubling back, Luisa grabs Sara’s sleeve. “Don’t be so jumpy. We got this far. Now we’ve got to see what’s going on here that has Hannah so spooked. Look at her. She’s pasty-white.”

  In fact, I’m feeling a little sick to my stomach. A few more steps, and we’re in the midst of the gravestones.

  Luisa catches her breath. “It’s a cemetery!”

  “I’ve never been in a cemetery,” Sara whispers. “Gives me the shivers, like a ghost is walking across my soul.”

  We all hush our voices out of respect, as if we’re in church. Luisa weaves in and out of the headstones, reading the engravings. Slowly she and Sara get the horrible picture … Here in Effigy Lies … Olivia, Clarinda, Cassandra, Bonnie Ava.

  “They’re all twelve years old,” Sara cries. “Who are they?”

  Luisa says, “They can’t be related, like if a whole town died of a flu epidemic, because look at the years, 1911, 1950, 2008.”

  “Anybody know what effigy means?” asks Sara.

  “I looked it up last night.” My voice trembles. “It means it’s a substitute, not the real thing.”

  Luisa’s eyes are wide as Ritz crackers. “You mean they’re not actually buried here? That the graves are empty, or there are stuffed ragdolls or rotting pumpkins or something weird like that representing Cassandra and Olivia and the others in these graves?”

  All I can do is nod.

  Sara walks carefully between the gravestones. “Look, three more girls. Here’s Emily Dalhart, there’s Delia Fogelman. Ooh, this looks like the earliest one.”

  Here Lies

  CADENCE STANHOPE

  1887–1899

  “Cadence Stanhope,” Sara murmurs. “She died way back in 1899. Makes me just want to cry—Cadence was twelve, like the others.”

  “Cady, short for Cadence?” Luisa brushes wild grass off this oldest of the gravestones.

  “Could Cadence Stanhope have been our Cady’s grandmother or great-grandmother?” Sara asks.

  I shake my head. “Cadence Stanhope was twelve when she died. She couldn’t have been anybody’s grandmother, no matter how many greats back.”

  “Yeah, right. Well, Cady might have been named for her ancestor anyway,” Sara says. “Maybe an aunt or cousin.”

  I flash on Cady telling me Vivienne was her mother, as impossible as that seems, but still I have a fierce sense that there’s a common thread linking Cady, who won’t tell me her last name, and Vivienne, and from them to whoever this girl in the grave is.

  I stand beside Cadence Stanhope’s headstone. “Notice anything different about this one?”

  Sara and Luisa glance from one gravestone to the other.

  “I don’t get it. What?” asks Sara.

  Luisa cries, “I see it. Hers is the only grave that doesn’t say Here in Effigy Lies … ” />
  “Meaning, she is actually buried here,” Sara says.

  I look from Sara to Luisa to the weathered headstone. “Cadence Stanhope’s bones are right under our feet at this very moment.”

  We sit in the grass, each of us in front of a different tombstone and deep in our own thoughts. Olivia Bainbridge, 1996 to 2008, supports my back. She’d be about Franny’s age now, but I don’t remember a Bainbridge family living in Dalton. They could have moved away after Olivia died. When she was ten or eleven, what did she dream for her future? Did she want to be a movie star? A brain surgeon? Did she have brothers and sisters? A pet iguana? What was her room like? Was it full of posters, books, banners, a stuffed giraffe, or a patchwork comforter? Bainbridge sounds like an English name, or maybe Scottish. Were her great-grandparents immigrants?

  What did Olivia die of? That’s the big question.

  Sara breaks the silence. “Think what it must have been like for the parents of Clarinda and Cassandra in 1950, losing two daughters at the same time.”

  “Bonnie Ava Amberson,” Luisa says quietly. “What was going on in the world in 1911 when she died? They were just starting to fly planes. Think she was in a crash of one of those old-fashioned planes with the double set of wings?”

  I’m burning with curiosity about these girls, yet my heart feels like it’s filled with chilled pebbles. “So many years separate their deaths, and none of them is actually buried here, except for Cadence. Why is that?”

  Luisa comes up with an idea. “Wouldn’t they be buried where their parents wanted them to rest in peace? Who would want a daughter stuck out here in the middle of nowhere for all eternity?”

  “True,” Sara agrees, “but then why are their effigies here? And why such a bunch of different years?”

  “And why is Cadence Stanhope actually buried in this cemetery?” I ask.

  Questions inside of questions, and no answers. “Remember when Mr. Treadwell was talking about World War II and that English prime minister guy, Winston Churchill?”