Afterworlds (14 page)

I nodded, but took another half step backward.

“Sorry to upset you, Miss Scofield.” He pocketed the wallet as he stood, then leaned back against his car, arms crossed. “It wasn’t my objective to frighten anyone.”

“Then why the hell are you stalking my house?”

He paused a moment, drumming his fingers on his arms. “I’m authorized to tell you why I’m here, to avoid any misunderstanding. It’s because of the attention you’ve received since the attack.”

“Right. But there aren’t any reporters here.”

“There were, but they gave up yesterday. That was smart, taking your time getting back from Dallas.”

“Uh, thanks.” I wondered if Mom had thought that part through.

“But I’m not here to protect you from reporters.” His voice dropped a little. “My agent in charge is concerned about the group who committed the attack.”

I kept my breathing steady. “But they’re all dead.”

“The attackers are, but they were members of a larger cult.” He paused again, as if wondering whether to continue.

“Please tell me what’s going on, Agent Reyes.”

“You’re only seventeen.”

“Old enough to sneak up on FBI agents, apparently.”

All I got for that remark was a raised eyebrow, and then the words, “Perhaps I should talk to your mother.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that. My mother scares easy. Like, she’s afraid of cars on highways.”

“That must make driving interesting.”

“You have no idea.” I took a step toward him. “Just tell me what’s going on, Agent Reyes. I survived machine guns this week. I can probably handle whatever you have to say.”

He glanced back at my house, then sighed. “Fair enough. The gunmen belonged to an organization called the Movement for the Resurrection, which has an Armageddon mentality, an isolationist dogma, and a charismatic leader. In other words, all characteristic of a destructive cult—what is sometimes called a death cult.”

“Crap,” I said. “But everyone says those four guys did it on their own.”

“That’s what the cult leaders say. But we’re still looking at the group as a whole.” He raised his hands. “Not that you should be concerned. It’s just that you’ve been on the news a lot.”

“As a symbol of hope,” I said softly.

“Yes, Miss Scofield. A symbol of life, even.”

“And they’re a death cult.” I let out a slow sigh. “Crap. I hate death cults.”

“I also dislike them. But, again, this is purely precautionary.” He turned to glance at my house again, as he’d done every thirty seconds or so while we’d been talking, even though I was standing right in front of him. My mother was still inside, of course.

That thought, that as we stood here he was still doing his job, calmed me a little.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It was only fair to tell you.” He nodded, a firm little motion of his chin.

“No, I mean thank you for doing this.” My gaze dropped to his beautifully shined shoes, and I suddenly wished I wasn’t barefoot. “For protecting people.”

My mind went back to the airport. The TSA agents there, the guys my dad always complains about when they search his luggage, had fought back against the attackers, pistols against machine guns. . . .

“You’re very kind, Miss Scofield,” Agent Reyes said. “But rest assured that the Movement will be under surveillance for the foreseeable future. There’s no reason for you to be scared.”

“I’m not.” I had powers now, after all, and I’d walked on the flipside. Some of my best friends were ghosts.

Not that Mindy was anywhere in sight. Had she vaporized in a fit of fear? Or just run off?

“I should go. My mom’s waiting. Thanks for not telling her.”

“That’s your call.” Agent Reyes reached into his jacket and pulled out a business card. “But if you change your mind, I’m happy to explain everything.” With a hint of a smile, he added, “Hopefully not in a scary way.”

“Okay. Maybe.” I looked down at the card. “ ‘Special Agent Elian Reyes’? You didn’t say you were a
special
agent.”

He gave me a shrug as he got back into his car. “Little-known fact about the FBI: we’re all special agents.”

He didn’t sound like he was kidding, but I had to laugh. Then I felt dorky, and waved as I turned and walked away, trying not to consider the fact that his glasses were kind of cute.

*  *  *

Mindy wasn’t in the back lane, or in the backyard. She wasn’t going to be much help if I ever got in trouble in the afterworld, I realized. Not that it was fair to blame her for running away. Whatever year she’d been born in, she was basically an eleven-year-old.

“Lizzie?” My mom stood in the back doorway, rubbing her hands on a dish towel. “Where’d you go?”

“Oh, sorry.” I looked over my shoulder. “I was just looking around.”

“For what?”

I shrugged, and squeezed past her into the house. Mindy wasn’t in the kitchen either.

On the kitchen counter was a pile of dough, stained black with squid ink. It had my mother’s handprints in it, and the uneven look of dough that wants more kneading. I went to the sink to wash my hands.

“Are you okay?” my mother said.

“I’m fine. I just wanted some fresh air.” If Mom demanded a better excuse than that, I could always hand over Special Agent Reyes’s business card and let him explain.

But all she said was, “Okay.”

We split the dough in two and stood there awhile, kneading it to an even consistency. It felt good to have something squishing between my fingers, something pungent and fishy-smelling and undeniably corporeal.

I wondered where Mindy had run off to. Was she hiding in the house? Or was there some deeper level of reality that she could go to? Somewhere farther down than the flipside, where I couldn’t see her at all?

Both she and Yamaraj had mentioned “the underworld,” wherever that was.

My mother was staring at me, and I realized that she expected to hear more about my little wander outside.

So I changed the subject. “Did you ever have a dog?”

My mother’s hands stopped moving. “When I was little, yeah. Do you want to get one?”

“Nine months before I go to college? That would be kind of random.”

“Right, but maybe you’d feel safer with a dog around.” She glanced out the open kitchen door, like she thought I’d been checking the backyard for terrorists.

“I feel totally safe, Mom. I was just wondering. You don’t talk much about when you were little.”

“I guess not.” She stopped kneading again. “Where’s this coming from?”

“Nowhere.” That wasn’t true, but I could hardly say it had come from the ghost of her best friend, the one she’d never mentioned. “I guess I’m asking . . . did you ever go through anything like this?”

“Like a terrorist attack?” Her eyes went wide. “Jesus, kiddo. You know they’re really rare, right? A lot more people get hit by lightning than killed by terrorists.”

She looked fragile saying that, so I smiled and reached out to take her hand. “Lightning? Good. That means I’ve had my lifetime quota.”

We combined the two masses of dough and began to work together, standing shoulder to shoulder, our palms turning gray.
Squid ink takes a couple of days to fade completely from my skin, which always fascinated me.

This time it was extra weird seeing my hands turn gray, as if the flipside were breaking through into reality. Of course, Yamaraj and I looked normal in the afterworld, while everyone else, living or dead, was gray.

We psychopomps were special.

As Mom and I worked the dough, I realized that I’d told her the truth—I
wasn’t
scared of the Movement of the Resurrection, or whatever they were called. What had Special Agent Reyes said about their “isolationist dogma”? That probably just meant they lived in the mountains with crappy toilets. They were small people with a small worldview, and I was learning how to enter a whole new reality. Forget them.

At the moment I was more worried about Mindy. I wondered again why my mother had never told me about her.

“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you, Mom?”

“The worst thing?” She drew in a long breath, dusting off her hands, then opened the big utensil drawer and began to rummage. “I suppose when your father told me that all our years together had been a waste of his time.”

“Oh, right. Of course, sorry.” I stopped kneading to give her a floury hug. “But I meant when you were young. Like, the most traumatic thing that ever happened to you.”

She pulled out a rolling pin and turned it slowly against the palm of her left hand. “Maybe now’s not the time.”

“I think now pretty much
is
the time, Mom. Help me process this.”

“But I don’t want to scare you.”

It was all I could do not to laugh at her then. Not to be mean, but because it was so funny. “Mom, the stuff that’s going to scare me this week
already happened
. And I survived, so please tell me.”

She looked at me closely for a moment, as if I had changed into something she didn’t quite recognize. But, like Agent Reyes had, in the end she told me.

“It was when I was eleven.”

I nodded to encourage her to keep going, and because I’d known that much already.

“My best friend,” she said softly, “a little girl who lived across the street. She was abducted.”

“Oh,” I said.

“She was driving across the country on a trip with her parents, and they were at one of those big rest stops . . . and she just disappeared.”

I stared at her, trying to keep track of all the things that were becoming clear at once. My mother’s fear of highways. How nervous she’d always been about letting me play outside. “Did they ever find out who did it?”

She shook her head. “No, but they found her a few weeks later, and that was the scariest part.”

“What was?”

“Mindy had been buried . . . in her own backyard. So whoever it was
knew where she lived
, maybe even knew her family. Even though she’d disappeared hundreds of miles away. That’s why my parents moved down here. They couldn’t live on that street anymore.”

A shudder went through me, and I felt the cold place inside growing around my heart, like when I’d placed my hand in Mindy’s. The taste of metal slivered across my tongue, and for a moment I thought I would cross over to the flipside, right there in front of my mother.

“Crap,” I said, hugging myself with floury arms.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Lizzie.” Mom’s eyes were wide. “I’m an idiot.”

“No, you’re not.” I breathed hard, gathering deep lungfuls of the air of the living world. “You had to tell me. We both went through something bad. I
needed
you to tell me.”

“Kiddo, you didn’t need that horrible story. Not right now.” Her hand reached out, her fingertips almost touching the teardrop scar on my cheek.

“It’s okay. I’m fine.” I turned and washed my hands. “Just give me a minute. That’s all.”

I hugged her again, hard enough that a ghostly mist of flour filled the air around us, and then walked toward my bedroom.

“Just a minute,” I said, and shut the door behind me.

My heart was beating hard, life pushing back the cold inside me. I touched my lips where Yamaraj had kissed me in the airport, and felt his heat there. I wasn’t going to cross over. It had just been a passing chill from my mother’s story. From Mindy’s story.

I looked around the room.

“Are you here?” I whispered.

There was no answer, but suddenly I knew where she was.

I stepped back out into the kitchen and gave my mother a happy smile. “Turns out I just needed to pee.”

I went past her and down the hall to the other side of the house,
pausing in the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. Then I went a little farther, into my mother’s bedroom.

Her overnight bag lay open on the bed, still half full of clothes. That was weird. My mother usually unpacked everything the moment she got home. There was more mess than usual, clothes strewn on the floor and draped across the back of her dresser chair.

And there beside Mom’s bed was a framed photo of her and her parents, posing on the front lawn of a northern California bungalow with a wide front porch. She looked about Mindy’s age, and had the same long pigtails. The picture was familiar to me, something Mom always kept on her dresser, but I’d never thought much about it.

I crossed the soft carpet and opened the door of her closet.

It was dark inside, only the glimmer of shined shoes and dry cleaner’s plastic catching the light from the bedroom windows.

When I was little, I’d always been afraid of closets. But now I could see the appeal of a private, cozy place to call your own.

I knelt on the carpet, keeping my voice low. “Don’t be scared. It’s just me.”

There was no response.

“I talked to that man, and he wasn’t scary. He’s an agent from the FBI, a special agent. He’s here to make sure we’re safe.”

Still nothing.

“So everything’s okay,” I whispered. “But I get why you’re scared. My mom told me what happened to you, back when she was little.”

I heard a tiny intake of breath, and a moment later she spoke.

“I told you she remembered me.”

“She does. Like it was yesterday.”

“Does it still make her sad?”

“Of course it does.” There was no answer, so I added, “But that’s not your fault, Mindy.”

“No. It’s the bad man’s fault. He messed up everything. My mom and dad. My friends. Me.” She sighed. “Max was the only one who got away, because he’d been put to sleep already. He had dog cancer.”

“That’s sad too.” I swallowed. “But the bad man can’t hurt you anymore. You know that, right?”

“I guess not,” Mindy said, and her form began to emerge from among the shadows. She slipped out through the hanging dresses, which remained undisturbed by her passage.

“Do you want to come and watch us cook dinner?” I asked.

She looked at me, tears glistening in her eyes. “Are you sure? I don’t want to bother you.”

“It’ll be fine. Just remember we can’t talk to each other.”

“I’ll be quiet,” Mindy said, then held out her hand.

I took it without thinking, but when the cool and distant tingle fluttered across my palm, I realized what she was doing.