Don't Breathe a Word (17 page)

She’d tried calling Sam on his cell phone four times so far to check in, make sure the plan was still on, but he didn’t pick up. She’d left three messages and he hadn’t called back. It was one thing to be rude to his cousin, but closing Phoebe out was inexcusable. And it made telling him about the pregnancy damn near impossible. Her thoughts were going in circles as she skimmed over the agoraphobia printouts, unable to concentrate. She put the printed pages in her bag and dug out her little memo pad.

She grabbed a pen and wrote:

CLUES & LEADS

She chewed on the end of the pen, thinking, then wrote:

Mass plates on fake Evie’s car

Notes from Lisa? Looks like Lisa’s writing.

Evie’s apartment trashed—why?

They knew about Elliot—how?

Man in the cabin must know something—go back and talk to him?

Changeling girl: Amy Pelletier, Castleton State College

A girl named Becca who might remember something—CALL HER!

Reliance: legends. What happened to all those people? Does it have anything to do with what happened to Lisa?

Pleased to have come up with some actions she could actually do right now, Phoebe pulled out the phone book, found the number for Castleton State College.

“Yes, I’m trying to reach my niece. She’s a student there. There’s been a family emergency and it’s very important that we get in touch with her. Her name is Amy Pelletier.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s against our policy to give out any kind of information about a student.”

“But I’m family! And this is an emergency.”

“The best I can do is take a message and see that it gets to her. What’s the student’s name again?”

“Pelletier. Amy Pelletier.”

Phoebe heard keyboard tapping.

“I’m sorry. We don’t have an Amy Pelletier registered here.”

“Are you sure?“

“Positive. Not an active student, and she’s not listed as an alum either.”

“Thank you,” Phoebe said. She shouldn’t have been surprised. She herself had once had a fake college ID she used at bars when she was nineteen—it was easy enough to get. The girl could be anyone from anywhere.

Phoebe turned to the computer and did a search for Reliance, Vermont. Not much turned up. A few brief mentions here and there. And then, an excerpt from an out-of-print book called
Lost Vermont: An Historical Perspective.

Little is known about the village of Reliance. All that remains are the foundations and cellar holes of several homes and barns, a church and blacksmith shop. A small stream runs along the western edge. In the northwest corner is a small cemetery, the names and dates on the stones illegible. In 1918, according to local legend, the entire population of the town (approximately forty) disappeared.

“Duh,” Phoebe said out loud. She clicked around uselessly for another five minutes or so, then gave up.

Next, Phoebe looked up the number for Price Chopper in St. Johnsbury, dialed it, and asked for the floral department.

“Hi, I’m looking for an employee named Becca?”

“You got her. Who’s this?”

“This is going to be a little out of the blue, but I’m a close friend of Sam Nazzaro’s. I was hoping I could ask you a couple of questions.”

“Seriously? How did you find me here?”

“Franny Hunt told me she’d run into you at work.”

“Is this about Lisa?” Becca asked, her voice much more animated. “Have they found Lisa?”

“No,” Phoebe said. “I was wondering if you could tell me about that summer. I understand you and your brother were friends with Lisa, Sam, and Evie.”

God. She sounded like some TV cop. And a really bad one at that.

Becca laughed. “Not Evie. No one liked Evie. No one but Lisa. But I’m sure Sam told you all that already. I bet he told you how close the two of them were. Like little love birds. Kinda sick, actually.”

“Uh huh,” Phoebe said. She was taking notes in her memo pad:
Love birds. No one liked Evie.

“I’m also guessing there are things he hasn’t told you. Lots of things.”

“Like what?” Phoebe asked, drawing a question mark in the margins.

“Does he know you’re calling me?”

“No, I swear. Franny told me you were friends. That you might be able to tell me something new. I won’t tell Sam we talked. I promise.”

“Sammy Nazzaro. God, I haven’t thought of him in ages. We moved out of town that fall—right after Lisa disappeared. I think my mom was trying to keep us safe—out of those woods. And away from that family.”

“Sam’s family?”

“Evie broke my brother Gerald’s arm that summer. Did Sammy tell you?”

“No,” Phoebe admitted.

“Evie, she was nuts. One time she tried to convince us that her blood was green. That she was some kind of alien or something. ‘I’ll prove it,’ she kept saying, then she goes and jabs herself in the thigh with her big old freaking hunting knife. Shit! Her blood was red as red could be. The girl was crazy. Certifiable. But it ran in the family. Everyone in that house was wacko.”

“They were?”

Phoebe heard Becca cover the phone and say, “Yeah, I know. I’m going on break.”

“If this isn’t a good time . . .” Phoebe started to say.

“It’s fine,” Becca said. “Call me back on my cell phone in two minutes. I’ll be outside on break.”

Phoebe scribbled down the number Becca gave her in her memo pad, waited two minutes, and called. Becca picked up after the first ring.

“Where were we?” she asked.

“You said everyone in the family was crazy.”

“Uh huh. Well for starters, there’s Sam and Lisa’s dad, right? He was an odd one. Moody as hell. He almost never left the house, a real recluse. He offed himself that summer. He’d tried before, but they had found him in time.”

They were both silent a few seconds. Phoebe guessed from the way Becca was breathing that she had a cigarette going.

“Then there was their grandma, their mom’s ma,” Rebecca continued. “She was nutty as could be. Lived with her father all her life until she had the stroke. No wonder her husband left. Her dad was a creepy old man, that’s what my mother always said. The town doctor, but half the folks went to the next town because they didn’t want his cold hands anywhere near them. Now Sam and Lisa’s mom, Phyllis, she turned out okay. But Hazel drank like a fish, hid bottles in the garage and the shrubs. Sometimes Gerald and I would find them and take a sip. Real rotgut, bottom-shelf stuff. It’s no wonder she was such a drunk. Growing up in that house. Getting pregnant so young.”

“You mean with Evie?”

“Nah, this was before Evie. She had the baby at home. Her grandfather delivered it. Stillborn, that’s what they said. But people in town, my mother for one, they say they heard a baby crying in that house for some time after.”

“So what happened to it?” Phoebe asked.

Rebecca sighed. “Don’t know. Maybe it really did die eventually. Maybe creepy old Grandpa sacrificed it to the dark lord and drank its blood.”

Phoebe shivered.

“Just kidding,” Rebecca said. “Probably the lucky kid got adopted into some other normal family.”

“What about Lisa?” Phoebe asked. “What was she like?”

Becca was silent a minute. “Everyone said she was just imaginative. But there was more to it than that. She saw things. Heard voices. She said the trees and birds and frogs and shit all talked to her. Would you say a girl like that’s just imaginative, or would you think she needed some hardcore psych meds?”

Phoebe nodded, even though Becca couldn’t see her. “So what do you think happened to her?”

“I think what I’ve always thought. Teilo came for her and took her to the land of the fairies.”

“Seriously?” Phoebe said.

“Look,” Becca answered, “I gotta go. I shouldn’t even be talking to you. If he finds out . . .”

“If who finds out?” Phoebe asked.

“Forget it. You want to know what happened to Lisa, you ask Sammy what he saw in the woods that night.”

“But Sam wasn’t in the woods,” Phoebe said.

Becca laughed. “You ask him how he got that big old scar on his chest,” she said, then hung up.

Chapter 20

Lisa

June 10 and 11, Fifteen Years Ago

“W
ere you spying on me?” Evie’s breath was hot on her cheek. Lisa had just come out of the woods after watching Gerald and Pinkie head down to Reliance with the backpack Evie had given them. Evie had been lying in wait in the tall grass, and as soon as Lisa got into the yard, Evie pounced, tackling her. Now Evie was on top of her, pinning her down.

“No, I wasn’t spying,” Lisa said, struggling to get a breath. “I just went for a walk.” Evie was sitting on her stomach, leaning over her chest. She held Lisa’s arms up above her head. Evie outweighed Lisa by at least a good thirty pounds. She wasn’t going anywhere. The key on a string dangled down from Evie’s neck, hitting Lisa’s face.

“Bullcrap. You were following me.”

“I didn’t even know you were out here. Now get off me!”

Evie’s grip tightened on Lisa’s arms.

“Please?” Lisa begged. “I’m kinda suffocating here.”

Evie rolled off her.

“I think you should stay out of the woods. Quit going down to that cellar hole,” Evie said. She took out her knife and started to use it to cut one blade of grass at a time, making a neat little pile.

“Why?” Lisa asked, squinting at her cousin. “Don’t you get it? Whatever’s going on down in Reliance is the most magical thing that’s ever happened to me, to any of us. Don’t you want to figure out what’s happening here?”

It wasn’t like Evie to want to give anything up or leave any mystery unsolved. Evie wasn’t acting much like Evie these days. The old Evie would have clobbered the crap out of Gerald before conspiring with him in the woods.

But then again, no one in her family was being very normal. Maybe there was a spell on all of them. A curse from a wicked witch.

“Because this is getting too weird. At first I thought it was just someone playing a joke, you know? But now I’m thinking it’s kind of creepy. And what if it’s like . . . like a trap or something?” Evie turned, continued adding to her grass pile.

Lisa laughed. “It’s not a trap,” she said.

“How do you know?” Evie asked.

“Because they wouldn’t do something like that.”

“They?”

“The fairies,” Lisa explained.

Evie shook her head. “Jeez-us!” She stabbed the knife hard into the lawn so that only the handle stuck out. “This isn’t one of your freaking stories, Lisa. This is real life.”

“Exactly,” Lisa said. “And that’s why I keep going back. Because this is really happening. They’re down there. And before the summer’s over, I’m going to find a way to prove it.”

“Just say you’re right,” Evie said. “Say the fairies are real. What if it was them that made that whole town disappear?”

“Exactly!” said Lisa, excited that Evie was finally starting to get the importance of what was happening.

Evie shook her head, pulled the knife out of the ground, and wiped the dirty blade off on her sleeve. “If they did that to a whole town, just think what they could do to one twelve-year-old girl.”

Lisa took a breath, watched Evie clean her knife. The fairies weren’t dangerous. How could Evie think they were?

“You shouldn’t be down there alone,” Evie said.

Maybe it wasn’t that Evie was worried or scared about what was happening in Reliance. Maybe she was just jealous.

“Okay,” Lisa agreed, crossing her fingers behind her back. “We’ll go together next time.”

“Promise you won’t sneak off on your own?”

“Promise.”

Evie put her knife in its sheath and lay down on her back in the grass beside Lisa. She blew out a long, dramatic breath.

Lisa turned to Evie. “I think it’s sweet that you want to protect me,” she whispered. “But I don’t really need protecting.” She felt Evie’s body stiffen beside her. Lisa pushed herself up on her elbow and studied her cousin. Evie’s body seemed all wrong to Lisa. Her forehead too broad, her nose too small for her round face. It was like Evie was put together from a bunch of mismatched parts.

“Evie?”

“Yeah?”

“I heard my mom yelling at you earlier. About Gerald. It sounded bad.”

Evie chomped on her lower lip and shrugged. “It wasn’t too bad, I guess. Aunt Phyllis said I’d gone too far. And that I need to stay away from Gerald. His mom’s real pissed. His arm’s broken in three places.” She gave the tiniest hint of a smile.

Lisa nodded, thinking her mom’s warning must not have sunk in at all if Evie was already having secret meetings with Gerald.

“Has your mom said anything to you lately? About my dad, I mean?”

Evie was quiet a minute, staring up at the sky. “Nah,” she said at last.

“What do you think? About Da? Does he seem any better to you?”

“I don’t know, Lisa.”

“That’s bull. Tell me the truth, Evie. This is me.”

She sighed, turned onto her side, inching a little closer to Lisa. Her breath smelled sweet and fruity. “He seems the same, I guess. No better, no worse.”

“He’s like a zombie,” Lisa said. “Some days I look at him and I don’t think he’s inside there at all. I talk to him, get right up in his face, and whisper in his ear, and he just looks right through me.”

She thought of the Red Sox cap she’d found in the woods—the one Pinkie’s bogeyman had been wearing. Was it possible Da had gotten up? If it wasn’t him, who’d taken his hat?

“It’s like he’s an empty husk,” Lisa continued. “I don’t know if it’s the sickness or all the medicine they’ve got him on.”

Evie chewed her lip, considering. “A little of both, probably. But he’s in there, still. I can tell.”

Lisa shook her head. “I feel like I don’t have a dad at all anymore.” As soon as she said it, she realized it was a dumb thing to say to Evie, who’d never known her dad. No one even knew who her dad was. When Hazel got pregnant at sixteen, everyone had their theories—it was a married man with a family of his own; she was raped; it was the retarded janitor in the nursing home where she worked weekends; it was one of the male residents of the home. Lisa had grown up hearing everyone around her discuss it in hushed conversation: her parents, the people in Jenny’s Café, even old ladies who volunteered at the town library—they all wondered who Evie’s father might be.

“I’m sorry,” Lisa told her. “That was a dumb-ass thing to say.”

Evie shook her head. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Do you ever think about it?” Lisa asked. “Who your dad might be?”

She didn’t answer.

“Evie?”

“No one would believe us if we told.”

Lisa sat up. “So what? You’re saying you know who he is? She told you?”

“Forget it,” Evie said.

“Evie.” She put her hand on Evie’s arm. “You’re not allowed to keep secrets from me, remember? Especially not something this big.”

Evie frowned, plucked up a handful of grass. “There’s a lot you don’t know,” she said.

“So tell me,” Lisa said. Lisa crossed her fingers, showed them to Evie. “We’re like this, you and me. Remember?”

Evie closed her eyes. “Remember what I said about how I started going to church?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s this picture there, in stained glass. It’s the Virgin Mary. She’s got on that blue robe, and her face is all serene and peaceful. But you look down, and there, under her bare foot, is this huge snake. And she’s holding it there, crushing it.”

Lisa nodded. She couldn’t imagine where Evie was going with this, but she wanted her to keep talking. Maybe it would be like a ball rolling downhill—once she started, she’d just keep going, faster and faster, until everything was out and there were no more secrets.

“Sometimes when I’m there, I just scrunch down in the pew and stare at that window. And you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking—I know how that feels. The snake is like . . . like evil, like secrets, and she’s trying to hold it there, to crush it. And maybe she can, ’cause she’s Mary, she’s the mother of Jesus, but who am I? I’m nobody.” Evie’s eyes were full of tears.

“Evie,” Lisa said, reaching out to stroke Evie’s unruly hair. “If you’d just . . .”

“Bioluminescence!” Sammy appeared at their feet, a jar of fireflies in one hand, a net in the other.

“What?” Lisa said, furious that he’d interrupted them. Now Evie would never talk. Evie sat up, rubbing her eyes hard, blinking at Sam.

“Fireflies. Glowworms. Deep-sea marine life. Maybe there are other insects that can do it. Something that hasn’t been discovered yet. Maybe that’s what we saw in the woods.”

He was studying the fireflies in the glass mason jar, blinking green lights.

“What we saw wasn’t fireflies!” Lisa snapped. “Or any distant cousins of fireflies.”

“Right,” Sam said. “Because fairies are the logical choice. Why not leprechauns?”

Evie laughed and said, “Yeah, like the Lucky Charms guy. Magically delicious.”

“Would you get serious?” Lisa scolded.

Evie nodded and said, “I’m so serious. This is big, Lisa.
Really
big. Maybe it is the wee folk and they’ve come to take you to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!”

Lisa couldn’t believe this was the same person who’d just been telling her about the stained-glass window.

Sammy started singing a horrible, chortling rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” while Evie quit laughing long enough to gasp, “Stop! You’re going to make me pee myself!”

“Would you guys quit it!” Lisa yelled. They only laughed harder, both their faces bright red.

“You’re just jealous,” Lisa said, but they were too busy making fun to even hear her.

She turned away from Evie and Sam, looked at the old penny and the Saint Christopher medal on her bracelet. It didn’t matter what the others thought. Maybe these gifts had a purpose, a reason. Maybe they told a story. Or maybe they were something she’d need at some point—magic charms. Talismans.

There was one thing she was sure of—she was ready to take the next step. And Evie and Sam weren’t going to be a part of it.

That night, once she was sure Evie was sound asleep, Lisa snuck back out to the cellar hole on her own and left a note folded neatly under a pile of sugar cubes.

I want to meet you. Please.