Bad Girls Don't Die (21 page)

“Who’s Sarah?” I asked her.

“That’s what I want to know.”

I looked up at the house. It looked so serene from the outside.

“Whatever I felt in there,” Megan said, “it’s totally evil. Like
bad
evil, Alexis.”

She exhaled and started the car. As we drove down Whitley Street, away from the house, her face seemed to at least soften a little bit.

Where could we possibly go after that?

“We’re going to the library,” she said.

I nodded and leaned back in my seat. But as we neared the stop sign on the corner, something caught my eye. In the rearview mirror I could see our neighbor Mary guiding her gigantic grandma car into her driveway.

“Stop here,” I said, undoing my seat belt. “Park right around the corner and wait for me.” Before Megan could even ask where I was going, I was already out the door and cutting across the neighbors’ yards to Mary’s house.

I reached her as she was hoisting her trunk open. I gave her a bit of a scare, which made me nervous because she’s so old.

“Good heavens,” she said, looking at me. “Alexis, are you all right?”

“Yes, fine,” I lied.

“It’s not your father, is it?” she asked.

“No, no, nothing like that.”

I glanced at her trunkful of grocery bags.

“Do you want some help with these?” I asked, nodding toward them.

“Well, no . . . you’re all out of breath,” she protested, but I knew she didn’t mean it. I scooped three bags into my arms. Mary grabbed the small brown sack with the eggs in it and started up the front walk. How on earth did she ever manage to get all of her own groceries inside? She must have had to make a separate trip for every single bag.

Up until a couple of years ago, I went to her house a few times a week and had lemonade and cookies while she asked me all about school and friends and life. She never ate any of the cookies, but she always had plenty around. They must have just been for me, and for Kasey, when I dragged her along. When was the last time I’d been there? I thought of a whole package of cookies going stale waiting for us to come visit.

It took two trips to get all the groceries inside.

Mary pulled a chair out from the kitchen table for me. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked, making a move for the refrigerator.

“Actually, I can’t stay long,” I said. “I just have a question.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. She let the fridge door slip shut and turned to me. “What’s your question?”

“You’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you?” I asked, even though I knew she had.

“Elvin and I moved here in 1972,” she said. Elvin was her husband. He died before we moved in, but I’d heard plenty about him over the years.

“Did you ever hear about anything weird happening in my house?”

Mary froze.

Aha.

Then she shook her head. “Maybe you’d better run along,” she said, suddenly very interested in the contents of one of the grocery bags.

“What was it, Mary?”

Now she looked right at me. “Perhaps when you’re a little older,” she said. “But I don’t feel right telling you now. Not when your father—not when you’ve got so much stress already.”

I wasn’t leaving that kitchen without names, dates, details. Everything she knew, I was going to know. I crossed my arms and looked back up at her. “I won’t tell my parents you told me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

She stared at the floor. I kept my eyes on her. The sunshine coming through the window silhouetted her puff of silvery curls.

“I need to know,” I said simply.

She turned away, but I knew I was breaking her down.

“Who’s Sarah?”

“Sarah?” she asked, spinning back, her eyebrows forming a deep V on her forehead. “I don’t know anything about a Sarah. Do you mean—”

She abruptly cut herself off.

“Mary, please, it’s
so
important.”

“No, Alexis, I just don’t . . . Oh, for heaven’s sake.

Let’s see . . . They moved in at the end of the summer,

1995.”

“Who?”

Mary paced and fidgeted for a moment, wiggled her fingers, stared out the window. “I . . . I don’t remember.”

A lie. We both sighed at the same time.

“Can’t you just give me a
hint
?”

“No. I can’t. I can’t say any more.”

“Just tell me, did someone get hurt?”

“I guess so . . .” She stared helplessly at the ceiling, gripping the cross that hung from a chain around her neck. “I don’t know if I would say
hurt
, but she did . . . die.”

I fell limply against the back of the chair. “In the house?”

“Goodness,” she said. “This was a mistake.”

“No, wait—someone died in
my
house?”

She sighed like she knew it was too late to stop now. “Yes, in your house.”

“From natural causes?”

“No, dear,” she said.

“What year?”

“Let’s see, it was 1996. October. The middle of October.”

“So . . . okay, wait—nobody lived there until we moved in?”

“No, an older couple moved in for a year, but they moved out very quickly. They didn’t seem to like the neighborhood.”

“What was their name?”

“Oh, good heavens, I’m terrible with names. . . .” She frowned in concentration, the corners of her eyes and lips turning downward. “Sawamura. Walter and Joan, they were Japanese. Not very outgoing.”

“And then it was vacant until my family moved in?”

“Vacant, yes,” she repeated.

Holy cow. I leaned back in my chair.

“Are you sure I can’t get you some lemonade?” she asked.

Then I remembered that Megan was waiting for me.

“October 1996,” I said, jumping out of my seat.

“Oh, Alexis, I hope you won’t think about it too much. It was just so awful, we hate to talk about it.”

Well, obviously.

“Thanks, Mary,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”

She nodded vaguely. “Just try to relax and get some rest. I know you’re worried about your father—”

“I’ll come by soon for some lemonade,” I told her, my hand on the doorknob.

Mary stood and sighed, then nodded. She looked tired. “You do that, dear,” she said, and then I was gone.

“I
KNEW IT,
” MEGAN SAID, for like the tenth time. “I
knew
it. If it wasn’t natural causes, that means it was
murder
— no wonder the house is so . . .” We were walking across the public library’s parking lot, and she was all worked up. She’d been talking nonstop since I got back in the car.

“Let’s find out some more details,” I said. “She could be wrong.”

“That’s not the kind of thing you just forget,” Megan said. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it until now.”

“Most of our neighbors have moved,” I said.

“I don’t blame them.”

“But what about what happened to you? What about the story? And my dream?”

She stopped just short of the stairs outside. “Maybe those were just a manifestation. Like how if you have a stressful day it gives you weird dreams. The ghost’s anger could be coming out as this bizarre fairy tale.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

She shrugged. “I read a lot.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It felt so real.”

She held the door open for me. The smell washed over me—cold air, old books, floor wax—the scents of my childhood afternoons.

The head librarian, Miss Oliver, shot us a stern look over the top of her pearly pink reading glasses.

“Where do we start?” Megan asked in a low whisper. “The paranormal books are in special collections, behind the checkout desk.”

“I think we need to check the newspaper archives,” I whispered back.

“The online archives only go back to 1999,” Megan said. “We have to use the microfish.”

“The what . . . ? Oh,” I said. The microfiche. It’s pronounced “micro-feesh,” but I can see why she would say it that way.

She pointed. “They’re in the back corner.”

We found the ancient machines gathering dust behind the biographies. I switched one on, and its screen lit up with a lazy yawn. Next to the machines were row after row of shoe box–size metal drawers, which held the slides of information. Megan grabbed a three-ring binder labeled “MICROFICHE LOG” from the top of the cabinet and started flipping through it.

“Drawer 5E,” she announced.

I pulled open the drawer to see hundreds, maybe thousands, of sheets of celluloid film, each containing a six-by-ten grid of articles no bigger than a fingernail. Four dividers broke the drawer into sections. The second one said SURREY-DENNISON SENTINEL, OCT. 1996.

Megan flipped to the center of the October sheets and pulled one out.

“It doesn’t get any more specific than this,” she said. “I’ve been looking for articles that mention my mom’s accident for about two years.”

“And you haven’t found anything?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Grandma won’t talk about it, and Mom’s headstone only says the year. So I had to start in January and go from there.” She sighed. “I’m up to April, and I haven’t found a thing.”

I thought of my own mother and felt a nervous shudder run through me. I also couldn’t help but be impressed by how well adjusted Megan was about the whole thing. And then I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d have cut her a little more slack all this time if I’d known she’d had such a hard life.

Megan pointed at the screen. “Start looking.”

I set the slide in the little metal tray and slid the whole thing into the slot on the side of the machine. A newspaper article showed up on the screen in negative— yellow-white print on a black background. I tried to move to the next article, but the images spun by dizzyingly. Finally I found one with a date on it: October 4. “Wrong date,” I said. “We’re looking for the middle of the month.” Megan switched the slides. The date on the new one was October 18.

I began scrolling through the articles one at a time. Megan leaned in to look at the first few, but the screen was really only big enough for one person. She backed away and continued flipping through the drawer.

My eyes were already tired of searching the tiny print. I was approaching the last square on the page and starting to doubt that we’d ever find anything.

Then I saw the headline.

YOUNG MOTHER’S DEATH RULED SUICIDE.

Local residents were shocked by the October 15 death of Surrey resident Shara Wiley. Now they have even more reason to be dismayed as the coroner’s report categorizes the death as a suicide and possible murder attempt on Wiley’s two-year-old daughter, who, after presumably escaping out the back door of the house, was found wandering on Whitley Street by neighbors.

Shara Wiley.

Megan’s mom.

I leaned in again, my heart beating so hard I could barely sit still enough to read the tiny print.

Wiley was found deceased in her home at 989 Whitley Street after neighbors called police to report having found the two-year-old, but not being able to reach her mother. All doors and windows had been sealed off, and a gas pipe in the house had been disconnected. Wiley died of asphyxiation and exposure to toxic fumes.

Police initially considered the possibility of foul play, but after continuing investigations, the death has been ruled a suicide. Wiley, 27, bought the historic house in 1995 and lived there with her daughter. She worked part-time as a grocery clerk, but had recently begun pursuing professional photography following years of award-winning amateur work, including the grand prize in
Western Enchantment
magazine’s annual photography contest. A 1987 graduate of Surrey High, Wiley returned to her hometown following a seven-year residence in San Francisco.

The coroner declared Wiley dead at the scene. She was unmarried. Her daughter was turned over to the custody of relatives, who refuse to speak to reporters. As of press time, police investigations continue.

“Alexis.”

I jerked to attention and looked at Megan.

“What is it?” she asked, trying to edge around behind me. I blocked her path with my chair.

“Wait,” I said. “Maybe we should . . . We can print it out. Do you have a quarter? I don’t think I do.” My clammy hands groped in my pockets for change, but they were empty.

I could tell that Megan wanted to push me out of the way and read what was on the screen. But then our eyes met.

She nodded slowly and fished a quarter out of her bag, then stuck it in the coin slot. My fingers fumbled as I pressed the big green PRINT button.

The ancient gears inside whined and groaned and then a page shot out the side with the article printed on it in shiny black ink.

We both reached for it, but Megan was faster.

She started scanning the words.

I tried to think of something to say that might soften the blow.

But of course there was nothing.

“Huh,” she said, and kept reading. I couldn’t look away from her. It felt like my duty, my responsibility. Soon I heard her breath catch in her throat. She pulled the page into her chest, crinkling it against her heart.