Pyxis: The Discovery (Pyxis Series) (8 page)

I trailed behind a pack of kids on the way to the coffee shop, threw my bag behind the counter, and searched the place for Ang. With no luck, I finally went over to the café kitchen.

“Hi, sweetheart, how are you doing?” Dad said, barely giving me a glance. He flipped a chicken breast around in a flour mixture and set it in a large metal pan. “I’d give you a hug if I wasn’t covered in flour.”

“I’m good,” I said, realizing it was a complete lie. “How’s your day been?”

“Lots of full tables.” His enthusiasm sounded forced and his eyes looked tired. But that was nothing new.

“Have you heard from Ang? I didn’t see her today, and she’s, um, not answering her phone.”

“She called in sick this morning. Tell her I hope she feels better soon.”

“Oh yeah, I will,” I said. I was relieved she was home sick and not tied up in a dungeon somewhere with Snake Eyes, but I still felt terrible. How could I not know my best friend was home sick? How long was this silence going to last?

After work, Brad and I stopped at Ang’s house so I could drop off some soup for her, but her mom said she was sleeping.

That night after dinner, I was itching to pull the
pyxis
and from its hiding place. Focusing on a mystery might keep me from dwelling on Ang. Plus, I hoped to learn something new because I thought it might make her happy.

I sat in my room, staring at the names on the crumbly piece of paper from the secret compartment
.
I had about a million questions, and, more and more, I believed my grandmother was supposed to be here, explaining all of it to me. But she was gone.

Pyramidal union formed 1915

P: Ruth Jensen

S: Daniel Smith

G: Catherine Abel

G: Louise Sinclair

Pyramidal union formed 1951

P: Doris Conner

S: Harold Sykes

G: Dorothy Conner

G: Evelyn Wellington

Pyramidal union formed

P:
Harriet Jensen
Corinne Finley

S: Mason Flint

G: Angeline Belskaia

G:

I examined the first set of names on the list, the one that started with my great-grandmother. She’d died long before I was born. I wondered what life in Tapestry had been like in 1915. Did teenagers party at the cove back then? I grinned at the thought of serious-faced girls in long dresses and boys in suspenders hanging out on the beach on warm summer nights, watching for twilight rainbows.

The year—1915—nagged at me. That was a year I knew. I sat down at my desk, navigated to the Tapestry town website, and clicked on the history page.

There it was. My pulse sped as my eyes raced down the page. Nineteen fifteen was the year of the epidemic. The bank robbery. The fires. The McClintock murders. Was it a coincidence?

I grabbed my phone, excited to tell Ang what I’d found, but paused. I’d already sent her a ton of texts, and it was nearly midnight. Besides, this seemed like something we should talk about in person. Maybe the superstition surrounding the McClintock murders or my paranoia about the
pyxis
made me cautious, but I wasn’t going to text it to her. It could wait.

That night, I tossed and turned through a series of bad dreams. In one of them, I watched helplessly as my grandmother stood on the beach at the cove while the black fog swallowed her. I tried to scream, to warn her, but I felt like a spectator watching from afar. My grandmother and the fog faded, and Mason and I ran, hand in hand, on the dirt road leading away from the cove.

Mason’s hand slipped from my grasp, and I blinked against the glare of a blindingly white room, empty except for Aunt Dorothy, who lay encased in a glass coffin on a slender glass pedestal that appeared much too fragile to support its load. Her chest rose and fell with such long pauses between breaths. I stared for a few moments to make sure.

The urge to rescue her welled up in me, but I didn’t know what to do. I could see no visible opening in the coffin, no hinge or latch. My hand felt heavy at my side, and, looking down, I realized I grasped the neck of the white
pyxis
bottle.

Then I remembered Grandma Doris’s instructions. I began to approach the coffin with careful steps when a blaring fire alarm shattered the silence in the white room.

The persistent beep of my alarm clock hammered at my ears, and I groped for the snooze button.

Remembering the stark room with Aunt Dorothy encased in glass, I sat up in bed. I needed to get to Danton to give her the white liquid. But how? I was pretty sure Ang wasn’t up for doing me any favors. The café tied my dad’s every waking hour to Tapestry. Mom worked in Danton, but it wasn’t like I could ride with her and then hang out all day while she was at work. I doubted she’d be interested in making another long drive just to take me to Aunt Dorothy.

Then I remembered my appointment to take the driver’s license exam in Danton next week. How could I have forgotten about something that huge? It must have been a sign of my overly-stressed brain. My parents had coerced Bradley to take me, so now I just needed to convince him to stop at Aunt Dorothy’s retirement home. Then, I’d somehow get her to take some of the white liquid.

That was it. It’d have to work. And then, maybe all the strange dreams would stop.

|| 13 ||

THE NEXT DAY, ANGELINE was waiting at my locker. I smiled at her hopefully and started to ask how she was feeling.

She held up her hand. “I still think what you did was wrong.” She folded her arms. “But the silent treatment thing isn’t very mature. I can’t avoid you forever, and I don’t want to, of course.”

I let out a relieved breath and tried to look sufficiently penitent so she wouldn’t change her mind. I still thought she should take more responsibility for what happened, but I didn’t want to argue any more.

“I swear I wasn’t trying to do anything I shouldn’t. Seriously, Angeline, I want to figure out what all of this is so we don’t do anything stupid with the
pyxis
. Or let anyone else do anything stupid with it. And I realized something last night that I have to tell you about—”

The first bell interrupted me.

“Oh, crap.” I scowled and grabbed my geometry book from our locker. “Guess I’ll have to tell you at lunch. How are you feeling, by the way? You still sound a little stuffy.”

“Way better.” She gave me a quick hug and turned down the hallway the opposite direction I had to go for geometry. “See ya!”

During lunch hour, we ate our sandwiches, and I caught her up on what I’d discovered about the date of the first pyramidal union.

“I wonder if there’s some kind of Tapestry historian or historical society that could help us?” Ang said.

“I bet my dad would know. He seriously knows every person in Tapestry. He even knows stuff like who their parents and grandparents are, and how long their family’s been here.” I laughed. “Maybe my dad should be the town historian.”

“And there might be an archive of old newspapers somewhere. Or historical artifacts or something.”

I started to feel a little hopeful. “There’s gotta be, right? I mean, some of the families have been here for generations. Somebody has to be saving that sort of stuff.”

We both chewed thoughtfully for a couple of minutes. One tiny concern nagged me: what if we ran into another Harriet Jensen as we dug around? Were there other people out there who wanted to get their hands on the
pyxis
?

“Hey,” I said. “I keep having these dreams where Grandma Doris tells me I have to give Aunt Dorothy some of the white liquid from the
pyxis
.” I set my sandwich down and looked at Ang. “I don’t know how to explain it, but they’re
more
than dreams. It’s like it’s really her. I know that makes me sound slightly insane.”

“Wow.” Ang raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think you’re insane.”

“Gee, thanks.” I said. I chewed my bottom lip for a second. “Next week when I go to Danton to get my license, I’m going to go see her.”

“What do you think will happen?”

“No idea. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

* * *

That night, I dreamed about my grandmother’s kitchen. Grandma Doris and I were side-by-side at the counter making cheesecakes with graham cracker crust from scratch. A glass jar of my grandmother’s homemade, deliciously red-pink raspberry syrup sat on the counter, ready to be drizzled over fat wedges of cheesecake. Aunt Dorothy occupied her usual spot, bent over one of her crossword puzzle books in the breakfast nook. I pressed the crust mixture into the bottom of a springform pan while my grandmother measured ingredients into a yellow ceramic bowl, the chipped one she always used when we baked.

Some part of me had the sense that I should ask Grandma Doris about the
pyxis
, Harriet Jensen, the list of names, and all the rest. But I couldn’t bear to bring it up and shatter the moment. I’d ask her after we got the cheesecakes in the oven, I promised myself.

But when I glanced out the window over the sink and saw the dirty gray fog piling up against the glass, I knew I’d waited too long. My heart in my throat, I turned to scream that we had to run. But I was alone. The crust mixture turned to ash under my fingertips, and in place of the raspberry syrup was a
pyxis
bottle filled with muddy, brown liquid.

I heard the front door swing open with a faint groan, and my breath caught in my chest. Footsteps shuffled heavily in the entry, and I watched the kitchen doorway, too terrified to move. A shadowed form appeared, and I knew with a certainty that chilled me to the center of my being that this person, or creature, wanted me dead. Not just dead, but completely erased, wiped from existence. Adrenaline coursed through me, and I willed my body to spring into action, but it was like trying to move underwater.

With the shadow creature in front of me and the black fog pressing on the window, I felt the world closing in. I was going to die.

I woke up thrashing, with a scream dying in my throat. Terror still gripped me, and my legs tensed with the urge to run. I shivered hard, freezing in my pajamas. I reached out to pull my bedspread around me, and I switched on the bedside lamp. Light flooded my bedroom.

Just a dream, just a dream
, I mentally chanted over and over. I sat up and raked my fingers through the tangled mess of my hair. My hands were ice-cold.

I piled my pillows behind me and propped myself up against the headboard. I wasn’t going to risk resuming the nightmare. Despite what I tried to tell myself, I knew deep down it was more than just a dream. Exhaustion finally overtook me around two in the morning, and I nodded off into a dreamless sleep. An hour later, I awoke to my phone vibrating on the bed next to me.

It was a text from Mason:
We r back in Tapestry. Text me when u get up!

||14 ||

I COULDN’T FOCUS ON anything the next day at school. Mason wanted to see me after my shift.

I’ve cleared all my usual Friday night engagements,
his text said. Dork. I appreciated that he was trying to be lighthearted, though. Maybe he was nervous that it would be awkward, too.

Ang and I decided not to distribute any more cookies that day—we wanted to wait and get Mason’s take on everything—which just made our shift seem to drag on forever. Plus, none of our previous victims came in, so we couldn’t even make more observations about their behavior.

The coffee shop stayed open later on Fridays, so when seven o’clock finally arrived, instead of closing down the till, I handed it off to Del. Ang and I split our tips, and I swung by the café for food to take to Mason’s. I packed enough for his whole family. Ang dropped me off at Mason’s house in her mom’s Volvo.

I waited for her to start driving away before I knocked on the Flints’ door. My hands were shaking a little, and I was grateful I had the bags of food to hold onto.

Mason opened the door, and I felt an involuntary smile forming on my lips. “Hey! I brought us—”

My words turned into a squeal as Mason picked me up in a bear hug and spun me around, forcing most of the air from my lungs. The bags in my hands made it impossible to hug him back. He set me down and held me at arm’s length, openly examining my face. His sandy-blonde hair curled across his forehead and over his ears, longer than he used to wear it. It seemed like he’d grown about a foot, and he smelled delicious, like soap and sunshine. He looked like a hotter, more mature version of the Mason I remembered, and I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it.

“Sweet hair,” he said, looking at my purple streak. I felt my cheeks heating up under his gaze. His voice even sounded a little different, a little lower and more confident. He beckoned me inside. “That’s food from the café, I hope.”

“My dad let me pack up some leftovers from lunch,” I said, relieved to be free from his probing gaze. “Hungry?”

“Yeah, starved.”

We went to the kitchen, and I looked for signs that the rest his family was home.

“They’re all in Danton. Costco and some other errands,” Mason said when he noticed me looking around. “They’re going to stay overnight at my aunt’s house.”

“Oh,” I said, my voice small. Without the buffer of his parents and brother, it’d be a lot harder to avoid talking about … I chewed my lower lip and started opening to-go boxes while Mason got us silverware, napkins, and glasses of water.

“How’d you get out of going to Danton?” I asked. I watched him surreptitiously as he moved around the kitchen. He had a deep tan, and he was practically busting out of his dark gray t-shirt. I couldn’t get over how awesome he looked.

“You know my parents. I told them I wanted to see you, and they were fine with me staying. I think they’re trying to keep Ian on a tighter leash, though, so he had to go.” Some things never changed. Mason had always been the only one with any sense of responsibility in his family.

We dug into the café food, and I asked him a bunch of questions about their trip. He seemed relieved to have something to talk about, and gave me the
Reader’s Digest
version of the time they’d spent volunteering in Africa. It had been his mother’s dream to do that sort of thing with her kids. Mason admitted that, although he definitely didn’t want to miss any more high school, it had been an incredible experience. He’d made friends for life in some of the small villages where they’d built wells for drinking water.