Don't Breathe a Word (5 page)

Chapter 5

Phoebe

June 4 and 5, Present Day

T
he knocking on the cabin door got louder, more frantic.

It was Evie who finally rose and went to answer it. She stood a second, her hand on the knob, looking back at the group near the fire, her face a question:
Do I dare?
But what choice did she have? She turned the knob and opened the door.

An old woman with short gray hair smiled in at them. She wore a straw hat rimmed with gaudy plastic flowers. Her lipstick was a garish bright red and looked as though it had been applied by an orangutan in a clownish rough circle around her mouth. She had on a pair of glasses with heavy pink plastic frames. The dress she wore was a summer muumuu—orange with hot pink tropical flowers, and over it she had on a raincoat. On her feet were a pair of red Keds, nearly worn through at the toes.

“Umm . . . can I help you?” asked Evie.

The old woman laughed.

“Are you lost?” Evie asked. “Would you like to come in?”

And then, softly at first, the old woman started to sing:

Say, say my playmate

Come out and play with me

And bring your dollies three

Climb up my apple tree

Holler down my rain barrel

Slide down my cellar door

And we’ll be jolly friends, forever more!

Evie turned from her and looked back to the others for help.

The old woman was clearly out of her mind.

Phoebe and Elliot both stood and walked toward the open door.

“Please come in,” said Elliot.

“Yeah,” said Evie, “we’ll make you a cup of tea.”

She stretched out her arms and, for a brief moment, Phoebe was sure the stranger was about to be enveloped in a patchouli-scented hug, but the old woman turned and took off into the dark woods.

“Wait!” Evie cried. “Come back!” But the woman was gone.

“We should go after her,” Phoebe said. “She’s clearly lost. I mean, we’re miles from anywhere. And she doesn’t seem like she’s in any shape to be on her own in the woods.”

“Sam and I will go,” Elliot said, grabbing a flashlight. “You two stay here.”

“I’m going to put some tea on,” said Evie.

They were gone nearly forty-five minutes, and when they came back they said they’d seen no sign of her.

“It’s pitch-black out there,” Sam reported, shaking his head.

“I think it’s time we all hit the hay,” said Elliot as he slid the bolt on the front door, locking it.

Phoebe couldn’t have agreed more. She was exhausted.

“I’m not comfortable with this,” Evie said. “I feel like we should be doing more. That poor woman is out there all alone.”

Elliot put his hand gently on the back of her neck and massaged it a little. “We can look around more in the morning. Then drive into town and report it if it’ll make you feel better.”

Evie nodded.

After saying their good nights, Phoebe and Sam closed themselves up in their room and got ready for bed. Phoebe emptied her pockets, putting the small orange stone on the windowsill beside the bed. She pulled the memo pad from her back pocket along with a stubby pencil and wrote:

WEIRD THINGS THAT HAPPENED TODAY

Evie thinking I’m pregnant (can’t be, can I???)

Their car had Mass plates

Seeing the note from Lisa (can’t really be her, right?)

The old woman at the door

“Mapping out your plan for world peace?” Sam teased.

“More like world domination,” Phoebe said with a sly smile, tucking the notebook into her purse, then watching as Sam pulled off his T-shirt. His back was strong, arms ropy with muscles from working out in the woods. She smiled at his funny T-shirt, farm-boy tan. She couldn’t wait to get into bed and feel his arms around her, telling her she was home.

He turned to face her, and her eyes went to the pale white scar just below his left collarbone. Sam never said much about the scar, and when Phoebe asked, he told her that he was young and hardly remembered what had happened. His mother didn’t remember either and said only, “Little boys can be so careless—I don’t recall if that was from when he got tangled in the barbed-wire fence or the time he tried to jump his bike over our Volkswagen.” Phoebe still found it hard to imagine that her careful, cautious Sam had once been such a reckless daredevil.

Phoebe kicked off her boots and undressed.

“Do you think she’s all right?” Phoebe asked.

“Who?”

“The old woman. I hate to think of her alone out there, lost in the woods.”

Sam was silent a minute. “It was the damndest thing,” he said at last, his eyes glassy, cheeks flushed from all the wine he’d had. “How she could disappear like that. And that song she sang—”

“What about it?”

“Nothing,” Sam said, turning off the light and getting under the covers. “Forget it. I think I’ve just had too much to drink. That wine had a definite kick to it, didn’t it?”

“Mmm hmm.”

Phoebe crawled into bed next to him.
You should tell him
, a little inner voice said.
Tell him you think your period’s late. Tell him what Evie said.

But when he spooned himself around her, and she opened her mouth to say the words, she instead found herself asking the question she’d always wanted to ask.

“Did you really see fairies?”

He was silent a moment, his body tensing against hers.

“We saw something,” he mumbled into her hair.

She wanted to ask him what, wanted to know the details—were they little green figures clothed in leaves? Or only shadows? But before she could ask, he was asleep. And soon she joined him, her own hand resting over her belly as she wondered if there really could be a tiny baby in there, swimming inside her.

T
he trapdoor was open. She’d heard the scuttling and squeaking of hinges.

She should have piled their suitcases and bags under the bed. Sam would have made fun of her, but so what? At least they’d be safe.

Something had crawled through. She felt pressure on her abdomen, opened her eyes and looked down. A hand was working its way into an envelope of torn skin, fat, and muscle.

Your eyes
, a voice was saying.
You can always tell a pregnant woman by the light in her eyes.

She reached down, but the hand was gone. And the covers were off. Sam was beside her, cocooned in the one thin blanket they’d found on the lumpy mattress in the cabin.

It wasn’t a dream, Phoebe thought, realizing at once how ridiculous this was but holding her hand protectively over her belly as she sat up.

Sam didn’t understand about dreams, had little patience for listening to her retelling them.

“I don’t dream,” he’d told her a hundred times.

“Of course you do,” she’d told him. “Everybody dreams. You just don’t remember.”

It was barely light out, but Phoebe was able to make out a figure at the foot of their bed.

Was her childhood shadow man back?

No. It was the old woman in the flowered hat, and she was going through their things.

Phoebe blinked, sure it was some nightmare image, a freakish hallucination.

The woman turned, looked straight at them.

This was no dream.

Phoebe screamed, clawed at Sam, who sat bolt upright and stared at the old woman with a look of stunned disbelief.

The old woman winked at Sam, then ran out of the room, nearly knocking down Elliot, who was coming from the other bedroom down the hall in only his boxers to see what all the commotion was. The old woman took off through the open front door into the dawn.

“What was she doing?” Elliot asked.

“She was going through our bags,” Phoebe said.

“But how did she get in?” Elliot asked. “I bolted the door last night before bed.”

Sam went to the door and checked it over. “It doesn’t look forced,” he said. His voice sounded high and shaky, like a little boy’s.

“Maybe she got in through one of the windows,” said Evie, who followed behind Elliot. She was in a red silk kimono and looked smaller, younger, without her makeup on.

Sam checked the windows. They were all closed and locked.

The trapdoor under the bed
, Phoebe thought.
That’s how she got in.

But she wasn’t a little kid anymore. And there was no such thing as trapdoors under beds, no such thing as the bogeyman. She had to remind herself that she no longer believed in these things. This was the new Phoebe—the woman who hadn’t had a nightmare for three years. Until last night.

“Did she take anything?” Evie asked. Sam went to check, then came back to report that nothing was missing.

“Well, I say we have some breakfast, then drive into town to call the police,” Evie said.

“I can’t believe none of our phones work,” Elliot muttered, shaking his head.

“It’s like this all over Vermont,” Sam said. “Too many mountains, not enough cell towers.”

“I’m going to put some coffee on,” said Evie, giving Elliot’s arm a reassuring squeeze. “Why don’t you go get your pants?”

Elliot looked down at his bare legs as if just realizing he was in his underwear. Not just any underwear, but boxers with the words
LOVE SLAVE
emblazoned across the front. Clearly not meant for entertaining long-lost family members in. His cheeks flushed a little. As Elliot turned to walk back to the bedroom, Phoebe noticed a tattoo on his right calf—a small, tribal design: a circle with a perpendicular line that led to an upside-down number four. A Greek letter? Some sort of fraternity thing? Phoebe had barely made it through high school, never mind college, so she was clueless. She’d ask Sam about it later.

Sam stood in the front doorway and looked out into the woods, shaking his head. “Who the hell is she?” he asked, running his fingers through his close-cropped dark hair. Phoebe came up behind him, rubbed his shoulders. His muscles felt like golf balls.

“Just some poor old crazy woman,” she said.

Sam shook his head. “That stupid song she sang last night . . . ,” he said.

“She’s clearly ill. Probably has Alzheimer’s or something and wandered off from home,” Phoebe reiterated.

“It was something Lisa used to sing all the time.”

Phoebe worked at the knotted muscles in his shoulders. “It’s just a coincidence,” she whispered. “Lots of people know that song.”

But in the back of her mind, she knew she didn’t really believe it.

Chapter 6

Lisa

June 7, Fifteen Years Ago

“T
here are fairies in Reliance,” Lisa announced at breakfast. The light from the kitchen windows made the floating dust glow and sparkle. The cherries on the wallpaper seemed unusually bright and cheery. The chrome chair and table legs glinted in the sun. The kitchen, like most of the house, hadn’t changed much since her mom and aunt were little girls. The cabinets were all white metal, the countertops worn pale yellow Formica that matched the wallpaper—a bright pattern of cherries against a creamy yellow background. The floor was simple pine planks, painted a glossy white every few years.

Lisa’s mom smiled into her sweet, milky Earl Grey tea but said nothing. As always, she had gotten up early, done yoga, and taken a bath. She was dressed for the day in loose-fitting linen pants with a matching shirt that had buttons shaped like pinecones. Her hair was still damp and neatly combed. She smelled like lavender bath salts and cold cream.

If anyone was going to believe in the fairies, it would be her mom, who’d taught her to love fairy tales, to understand the magic spell cast by the words
Once upon a time
. Lisa’s earliest memory was of her mother reading “Hansel and Gretel,” pulling a sheet over her head like a shawl and speaking in a crackling voice when she read the witch’s parts. “Let me feel your finger, girlie,” she’d say, reaching out for Lisa’s tiny hand. “Oh, too thin. Much too thin.”

It was her mother who told her about Reliance, that the people in town were only half right: it was an enchanted place, but the magic was good, not bad. “One day you’ll see,” she’d told Lisa as she brushed her hair at night. “You’ll see the magic for yourself. If you’re lucky, that is. If you believe.”

And Lisa
did
believe. She’d spent her life believing.

Now she held her breath, waiting. Her Rice Krispies went snap, crackle, and pop. Everything spoke if you knew how to listen.

Across the red Formica tabletop, Da sat in dirty pajamas staring into his coffee cup like there was a whole complicated world inside it: little cities, farms, cyclones. He dumped some sugar in, making it snow.

Lisa hadn’t figured out how to listen right with Da. There had to be a way, though. He was in there somewhere. She listened with all of her might, but Da stayed silent.

“I saw fairies, Da,” she said, leaning over the table, trying to look him in the eye. He kept his head down, studying the murky coffee in his mug. “We all did,” she said, raising her voice a little this time. She was sure she saw the faintest tremble of movement by his left eye.

Da had never been this bad before. Sure, there were times when he wouldn’t get out of bed for days, wouldn’t shower or eat or do much of anything. But this was the first time he’d given up speaking. And the closest he’d ever come to dying.

“Why hasn’t he said anything?” Lisa had asked her mom earlier.

“I guess he doesn’t have much to say right now,” she answered. “Give him time, Lisa. He’s only been out of the hospital a couple of days. The doctors say the overdose didn’t do any permanent physical damage. Things will be back to normal soon.”

Cat got your tongue?

That’s what Da used to say to Lisa and Sam when they wouldn’t answer a question right away, which was usually a sign that they had something to hide.

Da didn’t want to go with them to Cape Cod on Memorial Day, which should have been a warning flag—he loved the beach. He said it had
restorative powers
.

Ever since Lisa could remember, they’d gone to Cape Cod on Memorial Day weekend. Hazel and Evie always went with them. They stayed in a tiny cottage right on the beach, had bonfires, dug for clams, and swam in the ocean no matter how cold it was.

Da and Lisa would spend hours combing the beach, looking for shells and driftwood, making necklaces out of seaweed. Last summer, Da made a whole crazy wig out of seaweed. He put it on his head and danced around shaking a piece of driftwood, singing a witch doctor song. The sand on his bare chest sparkled and his long, narrow feet made funny bird tracks in a big circle on the beach. Even Hazel laughed until she cried.

Da was a potter. He had a studio set up in the garage with a kiln, spinning wheel, and shelves full of glazes. He made mugs, bowls, vases that he sold in galleries and craft shops all over the state. He said each of the pieces he made told a story. He didn’t want to go to the Cape this year because he was working on something new, he explained. “Something those tourists from New York would give their left kidney for,” he said with a wink. He kissed the top of Lisa’s head. “Bring me back a magic rock. And some fudge. Lots of fudge.”

“Things are gonna be different when we get back,” Evie told Lisa one night on the beach. They’d wandered away from the others and stood throwing stones into the waves.

“What do you mean?”

“Your dad told me. Just before we left. He said everything was going to change.” Evie had a faraway look, then smiled.

“Why would he say that?” Lisa asked.

Evie shrugged. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

When they got home last Tuesday, sunburned and bearing gifts of saltwater taffy and fudge, they called out, but he didn’t answer even though his truck was in the driveway. Sammy and Lisa raced up to the bedroom, pounced on the bed, but he wouldn’t wake up. Mom called 911. Aunt Hazel took his pulse, gathered up all the empty pill bottles to give to the ambulance drivers so they’d know what they were dealing with. They found his sketchbook on the bedside table—he always used it for jotting down ideas for new pottery. Lisa turned to the last page he’d filled in. He’d drawn a dark, shadowy figure—a self-portrait, maybe. His face was nothing but a spiral of scribbles, done so hard that the paper was torn in the center.

Did he know the day he said good-bye, Lisa wondered as she watched them take Da away by ambulance. Did he have it all planned? While he was asking for fudge and magic rocks was he secretly stockpiling pills, knowing he’d never eat another bite of Cape Cod fudge? Was that what he was trying to tell Evie? And the bigger question that twisted Lisa’s stomach into knots: Why give Evie his cryptic good-bye message? Why not her and Sam? Lisa wished she could ask him. She tried thinking the questions really hard, hoping some psychic part of his brain would pick up on them and send her a message back. But nothing happened.

“Fairies, Da,” Lisa repeated, speaking the words right into his ear, which had two little hairs growing out of the top of it she’d never noticed before and made him look kind of werewolf-y.

“It was just fireflies,” Sammy said.

Lisa kicked him under the table.

“Ow!” he yelped.

Evie flashed her a smile. She’d put the skeleton key Lisa had given her on a long rawhide bootlace and tied it around her neck. The key was hidden by her shirt, but Lisa could see the leather lace around her neck. Evie had her sketchbook and was drawing a coffee cup, only she had it all wrong—the handle was too big, the top was an oval instead of a circle.

“It was not fireflies and you know it,” Lisa said. Sammy gave her a scowl, then went back to shoveling cereal into his mouth, chewing like a robot. Sammy got no pleasure from food. It was sad, really.

“Tell them, Evie,” Lisa said.

Evie bit her lip, looked down at her drawing.
Scratch, scratch, scratch
went her pen. She’d given the coffee cup arms with claws.

“Evie!” Lisa snarled.

“Ha!” said Sam, smiling. “So much for your reliable witness.” He laughed, shaking his head, then went back to his cereal.

Lisa bit her lip. She’d show him. She’d prove the fairies were real, make Sammy Skeptic eat his words.

“You’ll see,” Lisa hissed. She reached into her pocket, touched the teeth, started to pull them out, offer them up as proof. Evie caught her and threw her a warning glance. She mouthed the word
No!
and gave such a menacing look that Lisa left the teeth in her pocket.

Aunt Hazel, who’d been standing with her back to them at the stove across the room, brought over a stack of pancakes, which she called flapjacks.

“Who’s going to see what?” she asked. Always the opposite of her sister, she wore an inside-out robe, scuffed-up old slippers, her hair going this way and that like an unmanageable nest of snakes. “And while we’re on the subject of seeing things, maybe one of you could tell me what might have happened to the strawberry jam I bought yesterday. You know how Dave loves his jam.”

Aunt Hazel was a little batty, but she was good at taking care of people. She cooked a big breakfast every day (pancakes, Canadian bacon, cinnamon buns from a can) and never lost her patience with Da, even when he peed himself or refused to eat. She worked in nursing homes mostly, so she was used to dealing with old, crazy people. But she didn’t seem to keep any one job too long because of her drinking. She’d call in sick too much or show up reeking of gin. That’s what Evie said anyway. And this last time was no different. According to Evie, Hazel got called in to cover an early shift at Cedar Grove Health and Rehab and was still drunk from the night before. They fired her on the spot, which, it turned out, was good luck because it meant that now Hazel was in no hurry to get back home. She could stay and help with Da until he was better.

Hazel and Evie lived only an hour away, in a dilapidated old farmhouse that was cold all winter and stifling in the summer. Hazel didn’t like to drive, so they didn’t come on a regular basis, but when they did, they’d stay for days, sometimes whole weeks, usually when Hazel was between jobs. Sam and Lisa rarely went to visit there—Phyllis didn’t approve of her sister’s housekeeping and claimed that on various occasions over the years she’d encountered bedbugs, lice, and fleas. They couldn’t go in the basement because there were supposedly rats the size of small cats down there, along with toe-breaking rattraps and poison bait. Lisa was pretty sure the real reason they weren’t allowed to visit much was because of Hazel’s drinking. When she came to their place, Phyllis could keep a tight rein on her, but in her own environment, all bets were off. She had bottles stashed everywhere—even, Lisa recalled, in the toilet tank.

“The kids say there are fairies in Reliance, Hazel,” Lisa’s mom told her.

Aunt Hazel shook her head, said, “Nonsense,” and flashed Lisa’s mother a don’t-encourage-them look. “I’d say we’ve got a bunch of kids with overactive imaginations. Call it a blessing, call it a curse, but there it is.” With this, she turned and shuffled over to the fridge for the syrup, mumbling something about the whole family needing medication, not just Da. She stood with the door open, leaning in to the fridge and banging things around while she muttered to herself.

“You should leave them something,” Mom said in a low voice so that Hazel wouldn’t hear. “Fairies like gifts. Especially sweets. And shiny, sparkly things. Not iron, though. They don’t like anything made from iron.”

Lisa smiled. She was sure her mother would understand and know just what to do.

“Tell us again, Aunt Phyllis,” Evie said. “What happened to all the people who lived in Reliance?”

Da looked up from his cup slowly, as if his head was the heaviest thing. He had a little string of drool coming from the edge of his mouth, getting caught up on the stubble covering his cheek. Aunt Hazel came back across the checkered linoleum floor, put the syrup and butter on the table with a loud thump, and gently dabbed at Da’s face with a napkin, then put a stack of flapjacks in front of him. “No jam, Dave, sorry. It’s a damn mystery.”

“Gone,” Lisa’s mom said, her voice barely above a whisper. It was her best storytelling voice. The one she used before bed each night for as long as Lisa could remember. The one that had told her “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” “Snow White and Rose Red.” “The whole town just disappeared. One day they were there, the next they weren’t. There were dinner plates left on the tables, fires stoked, cows waiting to be milked, horses in the stable. All that was left,” her mother said, her voice as hushed as she could make it while still being heard, “was one child. A baby in a cradle.”

“And what happened to that baby?” Lisa asked, though she knew the story by heart.

“He was adopted by a family here in town.”

“And he was our great-grandpa,” Evie said.

Lisa’s mom nodded. “My grandfather. Eugene O’Toole. He built this house.”

“And grew up to be the town doctor,” Lisa added.

“Went to medical school in Boston when he was just sixteen,” her mother said, a proud smile on her face. “There was nothing that man couldn’t do.”

Except explain why he was the only one left behind
, Lisa thought.

Lisa’s mom and Hazel had grown up in this same house with their grandfather Eugene and his daughter, Rose, their mother. Their own father had left them. “House wasn’t big enough for two men,” Hazel always said, but Lisa never got it—the house seemed plenty big to her.

Lisa never met her great-grandpa. He died just after her parents were married. He walked out into the backyard one evening during a storm and was struck by lightning. If he was so smart, Lisa always wondered, shouldn’t he have known not to be holding an umbrella in a thunderstorm? From that point on, umbrellas were outlawed in their house and Lisa had never been allowed to own one.