The Secret Grave Page 8

  “You don’t think he’s just being lazy?”

  “Listen up, Cady. Now you have to believe me. Scooter would love to be playing soccer or climbing mountains, but he can’t.”

  “He could if he wanted to.”

  “Why are you so hateful? What did he ever do to you?”

  “I don’t hate him. I just suspect that the asthma thing is his way of getting a whole lot of sympathy in your crowded family when everybody else seems to get the attention.”

  “You don’t understand Scooter one bit. Of all of us, he’s the one who least wants attention, especially for being the sick kid.”

  Cady gives me a cold stare, and my fury pings against my chest.

  “Okay, maybe I’m being a little selfish,” Cady says, her eyes softening into sort of a guilty look.

  “A little selfish?”

  “I just want us to be best friends. If Scooter gets sicker and sicker, you’ll want to hang out with him, and I’ll see less of you.”

  One fat tear drips down her cheek, which rips at my heart. I curl at her feet on the dirt floor, wondering when all those girls she mentioned will show their faces. It takes a lot of patience and forgiveness to be her friend. I’ll bet she chased them away with her demands.

  Maybe they don’t exist at all! Maybe she made them up because she’s miserably lonely this summer. I’m not as desperate as she is. At least I don’t want to be.

  “We’re friends,” I assure her, patting her knee until she jerks it up abruptly. “I have time for both you and Scooter, I promise.”

  “Then, come here tonight,” she says in a pleading tone. “We’ll swim together in Moonlight Lake. By the lambent light of the midnight moon.” She’s gone poetic on me again, like when she told me the story about Vivienne.

  I listen and nod, my eyes closed. I see us in the calm, black water, circling a puddle of bright moonlight … the night eyes of forest creatures watching us … opossums, bats, flying squirrels on the hunt for food. Night is their time. An owl screeching like a banshee’s wail … My shoulders jump, which Cady sees. Nothing escapes her.

  “No need to be frightened, Hannah. I’m an excellent swimmer. I’ve saved many lives.”

  My heavy eyelids drift open. “People that were drowning in Moonlight Lake?”

  “I would never let that happen,” she says, soft as a lullaby. “Trust me.”

  At those words, my eyes snap wide open. “Not a chance. My parents would never let me come swimming at night. They don’t even know I’m here now, in broad daylight.”

  “Oh, come on, Hannah, they don’t have to know. And anyway, you won’t get caught. We’re free spirits. Remember, you’re going to make history. You’re a person who will be remembered forever and ever.”

  What is she talking about? And why am I even listening? What would Luisa and Sara think of a weird conversation like this? They’d freak out. My old friends are so ordinary by comparison with Cady. It’s like they’re on Earth, and Cady just beamed down from Planet Zrgph. To be honest, the adventure and mystery of being with Cady gives me giant goose bumps. She’s awesome, powerful. She makes me want to see what life is like on Zrgph. She’s a motorboat tugging me behind her. I want to keep slicing through the waves of the wake of her boat and never stop.

  Whoa! Get a grip. My conscience whispers in my ear, Cut the line. Shake off the skis and tread water to the shore. Right now. Both feelings are equally overwhelming. What’s that Newton thing we learned in science last year? Something about all forces come in pairs—equal and opposite reactions. Boy, am I ever having ’em!

  Cady has her gaze fixed on me, watching my tomato-red face. I put my fingers to my neck to quiet the throbbing pulse in my throat. Warm fingers, not like the icy ones in the attic. Smokey Bear is staring at me from his post on the wall. They won’t let go; neither of them will. It’s up to me to break free!

  A deep, shuddery sigh pulls me out of whatever power Cady has me locked in. Jumping to my feet, I grab the end of the unraveled yarn and furiously begin rewinding it. Now it’s the size of a grapefruit. Now a head of lettuce. Now an orange beach ball, which I jam into the leather tote bag, and I run out the door.

  “You forgot something, Hannah.” Cady follows me with her hand locked tight. One by one she opens her fingers to reveal Vivienne’s cameo brooch. “This could be yours,” Cady says sweetly, “if you come swimming tonight. Moonlight Lake invites you, Hannah. Midnight.”

  Now she’s totally creeping me out! I run outside, retracing my steps back toward the place where I sat cooling my feet in the lake and where I waded in to my armpits. Was it only days ago? Seems like months. I feel like I’ve known Cady all my life—and like I don’t know her at all.

  I keep running toward the edge of the forest. Is she following me with her silent footsteps? A quick glance back, and there’s Cady growing smaller and smaller, standing at the door of the hut with her arms extended toward me. Her words echo in my head:

  “Come … come swimming. Moonlight Lake invites you. Midnight … ”

  There is so much to think about. I fly past the rest of the family and scamper up the ladder to my attic lair and lean against the empty trunk. Late afternoon shadows cloud the attic and swim around the walls. There’s a presence here of something not quite human. I feel it in a warm breath that drifts past me and in a thickening of the air around me. There’s not a sound, but I know she’s here. Vivienne. If not Vivienne, could it be the ghost of Great-grandmother Moira?

  All this has something to do with Cady, though she couldn’t possibly have known either Vivienne or my great-grandparents. What’s the connection?

  Cecil and Moira owned this house for a year, but that was nearly half a century after Vivienne died. No connection. Vivienne lived about a hundred and twenty years ago, in the 1890s. Cady is living now, in the twenty-first century. No connection.

  I’m a logical person. Hey, I’m the one who figured out that the smoky, pungent smell at school was three hundred grilled cheese sandwiches on fire. So the reasonable conclusion is that Cady must have gotten the years wrong, or I heard it wrong, or she’s insane, or she’s lying to scare me, or what she really means is that Vivienne is the generic mother of us all, or Cady’s hoodwinking me for fun as I do to Scooter sometimes. Lots of possibilities, all of them too outrageous to make even a shred of sense. I’m not sure what to think about any of this. Only that there’s no way I’m sneaking out of the house to meet Cady tonight.

  I picked up a letter from my normal friend, Sara:

  Dear Hannah,

  London is awesome! There really is a London Bridge, and guess what—it’s not falling down! Yesterday we did the Tower of London. The Crown Jewels were gorgeous! And there are these ravens that hang around the tower all the time. They say that if the ravens ever fly away, the whole British Empire will collapse.

  That’s a lot of responsibility for a bunch of birds. Sara’s letter goes on for three pages of London this, that, and everything else, until I swear, I’m never going there even if every other city on earth drops into the ocean. At the end of the letter, she says,

  Ta-ta, chum! Oh, how’s your summer going?

  Thanks for asking, Sara. Finally.

  But I guess it’ll be nice to have her and Luisa home next week. It’ll be the three of us again, like it’s always been. Except one thing that’s changed: Cady.

  That’s what I’m thinking about as I make my way back through the forest later that afternoon. Cady and I are sitting on the bank of Moonlight Lake, wriggling our feet around in the water to the rhythm of birdsong. There aren’t any ravens, but it’s a perfect summery day—not too hot, not too humid—and Cady is acting like a normal person, like my other friends, for a change. She reminds me of a poem by another one of those dead white guys, Longfellow. It goes, “When she was good/She was very, very good,/And when she was bad she was horrid.”

  So I warn her, “Sara and Luisa will be home in a few days. And here’s the thing. When I bring them here, you
have to promise you won’t be mean to them like you were to Scooter.”

  “The sick kid,” she says with a smirk, which I let pass.

  “Or the kind of thing you did to Franny, betraying secrets. And you can’t say wild and crazy things, because it’ll freak Sara and Luisa out.”

  “Like what?” she asks, sliding into the water to capture a dragonfly in her cupped hands.

  “Like saying Vivienne was your mother, or that you hung out together a hundred and twenty years ago. In fact, don’t talk about Vivienne at all.” A shiver runs through me at the mention of her name, because I’m convinced that she’s the ghost haunting my attic.

  “Any other rules?” Cady snarls, releasing the dragonfly that takes off like a jet.

  “Yeah, don’t talk about time ripples. I mean, you are a little over-the-top dramatic.”

  She splashes toward me and rises out of the water. “Those girls sound like geeks. You have such boring friends.”

  “At least I have some,” I retort hotly. “Where are the friends you’re always bragging about?”

  “I told you, they’re shy. They’ll only show up for people who are honest and true friends.”

  “Haven’t I been honest and true?”

  “You won’t come swimming with me at midnight.”

  “Yeah, about that … I can’t do it.”

  She shrugs her shoulders, as if to say, it’s your dumb choice.

  “I just want all of us to be friends, you and me and Sara and Luisa.”

  Cady turns toward me with a broad smile that makes her face shiny, almost transparent in the sunlight. “Okay, I’ll be on my best behavior. You’ll be so proud of me, I promise.”

  That’s the very, very good side that convinces me that Sara and Luisa are going to be as captivated by Cady as I am. Because Cady may be strange, but she’s the most interesting thing around for miles. Of course, she sure didn’t fool Franny or Scooter.

  “Come on,” she says. “I want to show you my most favorite thing in the forest.”

  I dust dirt off my shorts, and let Cady lead me toward a bush that is as tall as I am. Heavy purple berries, blue-black and as sparkly as pearls, hang heavy from its vibrant green leaves.

  “Oh! It’s so beautiful, Cady. I see why you like it.”

  “It’s called belladonna. That’s Italian for pretty lady. Isn’t that a lovely name? In olden days ladies used it to make their cheeks rosy and their eyes glisten like stars.”

  “Those fat berries look delicious. There are enough here to make a whole pie. I’ll bet they’re as yummy as raspberries.”

  “Sweeter.” Cady pops one into her mouth and tosses another shiny berry to a squirrel. His bushy tail flaps in joy as he plucks it up between his paws and waits for more. You’d think he’d scamper away, scared of us, but Cady seems to charm forest animals. Wish I had that knack.

  I snap one of those plump berries off the bush. It’s firm; the juice inside is eager to burst. I hold the berry to my lips when Cady stumbles on a root sticking out of the forest floor, knocking me backward against a tree. The berry flies out of my hand and is captured by the squirrel, who skitters away with it.

  I reach for another one, but Cady places herself between the belladonna plant and me.

  “Not for you,” she says firmly.

  “Why not? There’s plenty to share,” and I reach around her.

  She shoves my hand away. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about belladonna. A long time ago, they used to smear the juice of these berries on arrowheads.”

  “So?” I ask, my mouth still watering.

  “And they say that witches use the juice of these berries to help them fly.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, like those bumper stickers, MY OTHER CAR’S A BROOM.”

  “Something else. Kings have killed off enemy armies … ”

  “There you go again, Cady. See, that’s the sort of drama-queen stuff I don’t want you to say in front of my friends.”

  “You’re missing the point, Hannah.”

  Cady’s typical intense stare drills into me. This is the when she was bad she was horrid part of her. “The tantalizing belladonna has other names. Devil’s Berries is one, but the most common is Deadly Nightshade. Because it’s poisonous.”

  I don’t believe a word of it. That beautiful plant, poisonous? No way, I think as I make my way back to the house.

  In the family room, the TV is tuned to a game show. Mom, allowing daytime TV? Scooter must be sicker than I think. He’s propped up on the couch. An oscillating fan waves back and forth at full blast, along with the air conditioner. Feels like a meat locker in here. A dehumidifier hisses next to Scooter to loosen the congestion in his chest, and oxygen is piped into him through two little nose buds. Between the roaring machines and the obnoxious wrong answer buzzer on TV, it’s impossible to talk. Besides, his heavy meds make him drowsy, and he just dropped off to sleep in the middle of a sentence. So I grab my iPad and climb up to the attic.

  The word belladonna keeps zinging around in my head. Poisonous? I’m thinking of the day Scooter met Cady, how he got so sick that he ended up in the emergency room. Afterward he said, “She did something to me to make me sick,” and I teased him for coming up with such a crazy idea. Maybe it wasn’t the pigweed under his nose at all. Maybe Cady slipped him some poisonous berries when I wasn’t looking? She keeps trying to convince me that Scooter’s faking. Is she covering up something awful she did to him?

  In a fury, I’m Googling belladonna poison.

  It’s true! The leaves and berries are real toxic. Some animals aren’t sensitive to the poison, but humans are. Just two berries could kill a child!

  Leaping down the narrow ladder and rumbling down three flights of stairs in, like, twelve seconds, I’m back in the family room where Scooter’s camped out. His bony shoulders rise and fall, and his eyelids are so transparent that I can see his eyeballs jumping around inside. Turning off the roaring dehumidifier wakes him up.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” he shouts.

  “Think, Scooter. That day when I took you to the forest to meet Cady, you got really sick, remember?”

  “I get really sick a lot,” he says, his eyes so sunken that I want to hug him and wrap the Star Wars sheet around him and let him sleep. But I have to keep him alert.

  “You’ve got to remember details about that day. You told me Cady did something to make you sick. Besides the pigweed in your face, did she give you anything to eat when I wasn’t looking? Like something that looked like blueberries, only real shiny and fatter and blacker?”

  “Nope.” Scooter hunches his knees up so I can squeeze onto the end of the couch. “But that doesn’t mean the girl’s not evil.”

  “Franny didn’t like her, either. She’s a little peculiar, I admit it, but that’s what I like best about her. She’s sure not boring.”

  “So what’s up with the fat black blueberries?”

  “A kid could croak from chewing just two of them. Don’t worry, there’s an antidote, if you’re fast enough. You drink a cup of warm vinegar to cut the effects.”

  “I’d rather die of the berries.”

  He means it as a joke, I know, but hearing those words, I get super-scared, scared that we’re going to lose Scooter. Suddenly I can’t look at him. I flip the dehumidifier on again and mumble something about needing to wash my hair.

  Rounding the corner on the second-floor landing, I hear Dad and Mom in her office. Her door’s open just enough that their voices carry clearly.

  “I don’t want us to do it, either, Sally, but maybe we have to consider it seriously.”

  Mom’s voice is firm. “The kids have lived here in Dalton all their lives, and now that we’re settled into Nightshade, they’ve got their own rooms. It’s a family home that will suit us at least until Gracie goes off to college. You’ve got your studio, all that fantastic light, and I’ve got my office with the mountain view. We’ve got a great kitchen and plent
y of yard. It’s everything we need in a house. Everything.”

  “All true, honey,” Dad says, his voice cracking.

  They’re talking about moving!

  “When you left Poughkeepsie to come back here to UGA for architecture, Joe, you never looked back. Our roots are deep in Georgia soil, at least until your mother defected and married a Yankee. But I grew up in Georgia, Joe. The kids should, too.”

  Not just moving away from Nightshade, but from Georgia. No! Do I push the door open and let them know I am fire-breathing mad about this? Summed up in twenty-five words or less, never! I keep spying on their conversation.

  “Your work and mine, it’s portable. We can do it anywhere. We don’t need to be in Georgia, or anywhere on the eastern seaboard,” Dad says. “Arizona or New Mexico, maybe. The desert would be better for Scooter than the soupy air we breathe here.”

  “Don’t say that, Joe! Look, Franny will be at UGA in the fall. We need to be here so we don’t have to pay out-of-state tuition.”

  “It’s not about money, Sal. Think about what’s at risk here.”

  Their chairs scrape as they get up and move toward each other. Mom’s words are muffled in Dad’s shoulder:

  “I know it, Joe. It’s Scooter we have to think about.”

  “Yes, it’s Scooter,” Dad says.

  Up in the attic, I bury my face in my pillow and cry my heart out. I can’t leave Dalton. How could they even consider doing such a thing to Franny and Trick and Gracie and me? This is where my friends are, where my whole life is. When were they planning to drop this horrible news on us? After my heart’s already broken when Franny goes off to college? Just before Trick starts high school and has to miss his big chance to play JV baseball for the Catamounts? When Sara and Luisa go off to seventh grade without me, and I end up a lost sheep in some new school in New Mexico? Is New Mexico even in the U.S?

  And what about Cady? I’m just getting to know her, which isn’t easy. She’ll miss me as much as I’ll miss her. I’m not moving, that’s final. I’ll live with Cady in the woods, or with Sara; she’s always wanted a sister. Or I’ll room with Franny in Athens. I’m sure she’ll love having her little sister in her college dorm room. I know, maybe the new family who moves into Nightshade will let me rent my old room from them so I can get to the attic and learn more about the ghost of Vivienne.