The Screaming Season (26 page)

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Authors: Nancy Holder

BOOK: The Screaming Season
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“So you put your ear to the door. You got an earful.” She grinned at her own cleverness. “And you have something juicy to tell me.”
I looked down. I was going to
make
her force me to tell her. She’d be more likely to believe information she had to work for. That was how people were wired.
“Come
on
. You can’t stop now.”
“It was Lara. She was completely losing it. Mandy, I think she’s the one who trashed your room.” The look on her face would have been funny, if any part of the situation could have been funny. I thought about Miles and his definition of sanity—feeling many things at the same time.
“That’s not possible.” Blinking rapidly, she swallowed down half her wineglass. “Lara’s my best friend.”
I hesitated. “Remember that night we went to Troy’s together? You went somewhere without her.”
“I go all kinds of places without her. We’re not
married
. Even if she’d like to be, she’s such a dyke.”
I let that statement speak for itself.
“I heard her talking about stealing things. From classmates. Little stuff. Kleptomania.” I drank some wine, uneasy about the way I was squishing the truth so that Mandy would believe it was the truth.
“That’s just . . . stupid.” She threw back the rest of the glass and poured herself another. “Swiping pencil sharpeners and destroying all my worldly possessions are two different things.”
“That’s true. But it sounded like she was on the verge of copping to it. She sounded like she wanted to unburden herself about something else. Then her time was up.” I shrugged. “I would have let her have my hour.”
“Therapists,” she grumped. “You could tell them you’re suicidal and they’ll ask you to make another appointment because they have a golf game.” She topped off my glass. “Do you think she broke the head, too?”
I sat back in my chair and tipped my glass from side to side, watching the red liquid slosh. No, I didn’t think Lara had.
“I saw your brother,” I ventured.
“I know. He brought us the messenger bag.” She bent sideways and grabbed something, then hefted it onto the table like a dead fish. It was the bag, moldy and smelly. I made a face and cradled my wineglass against my chest.
Did he happen to mention I bit him?
I mentally asked her. I gazed down at the bag, remembering that night of screaming ghosts. How terrified he and I had been.
Our first kiss.
She opened a tiny black leather shoulder clutch and got a tissue. Cupping the tissue, she opened the messenger bag and reached inside. “He found these in the road.”
It was a pair of men’s black leather gloves. They smelled like smoke, and I recoiled. Then I took the tissue from her and lifted one up, examining it.
“Lined with cashmere, very nice. There’s a burn on the inside of the left wrist. Miles thinks it’s from a cigarette.”
“Was there any ID?”
“We have no clue who they belong to. But he found them at the side of the road, right where he saw the white thing that made him swerve on the Vespa.
And
. . . ”
She pulled a wad of transparent fishing line from the bag as well.
“Check it out.” She wadded a fresh tissue into a ball and covered it with another one. Then she wrapped the line around the newly formed “neck” below the covered ball and dangled it above her head.
“So someone stretches this line across the road. If you’re on a motor scooter in the rain, and you see something in the road...”
“Oh, my God.”
“Or, someone was going to do some beading and also dropped their gloves.” She reached into the bag a third time. “While they were smoking.”
She showed me the soggy remains of a white box with a red rectangle on the front. The writing was too damaged for me to read.
“Dunhill cigarettes. Pricey. Miles loves them. But these aren’t his.”
“If someone wanted to kill me, they could have done it while I was unconscious.” I felt cold chills running through me. I should be used to almost getting killed, but I wasn’t.
“They were probably after Miles.” She said it like a joke.
“Your brother
is
scary. Did you find anything else?”
“Aside from all my papers ruined, no. Nice of you to tell him everything, by the way. About the possessions.”
When I started to defend myself, she held up a hand. “It was the right call, Lindsay. I should have told him myself. It just seemed like it would be so . . . tedious to go through the persuasion part. ‘Ghosts are real, spirits are real, I’m possessed . . . ’”
“I skipped it,” I told her. “I told him he could believe it on his own time.”
She snorted. “Sweet. You know, you two skulking around . . . it could make
me
jealous.”
So maybe you alienated my best friend by destroying her prized possession?
I wondered. Or had she talked Miles into doing it? He’d just happened to be outside the storage room when I’d come blasting out. It was a short walk from my dorm to there. Maybe he’d snuck in, ripped up Julie’s things, then waited to see what would happen next.
Maybe he hadn’t found the gloves and other things. Maybe he just said he did. And he was waiting to see what would happen now.
I glanced through the leaves of the conservatory’s lush garden, out the windows into the darkness. Above us, the moon hung fat and yellow.
“You don’t seem too upset about Lara,” I said.
“I’m just hiding it well. I’m upset about all of it.” She nervously tapped the glass with her fingernails. “I look around at everyone, wondering who’s doing these things. Who tried to kill me. And you.”
It’s different now that
you’re
in danger,
I thought.
Now that your evil little schemes have come back to haunt you.
“They’re isolating us, don’t you see?” She kept drumming on the table. “Your best friend made you move out. By trashing my room, they’re making me doubt all my friends. Maybe Lara wasn’t even in that office with Dr. Morehouse. There might have been a tape playing. Like in my haunted house.”
There was no easy way I could let her know I was sure Lara had been in there without tipping my hand. I was confused about how much to tell her.
“They who?” I asked, to redirect her attention.
“They who. Exactly.” She shifted anxiously in her chair. “While Miles and I were going through the moldy, disgusting papers in this bag, I did remember that I originally performed the ritual on the full moon. It was a big deal. Like magic is more powerful because of the lunar pull or something. And we can use that to our advantage.”
“We can? Why?”
She huffed at me as if I were a complete dolt.
“There’s a full moon tomorrow night. It’s a Friday night, too. So I thought I’d have one of my parties. We could invite all our suspects and see if anyone acts suspicious.” Her nails clicked on the glass.
“Like... if they’re moonstruck?” I said.
“
God.
How dense are you?” She tipped the wine into her glass, killing the bottle. “Maybe the moon has nothing to do with it. Maybe that’s just a superstition. But if someone else knows about how this stuff works and holding it then helps make anyone nervous, that’d be a good sign.”
I thought a moment. Mandy gathered up her pretty blond hair and let it cascade over her shoulders. The lack of hair emphasized her bruises, making it look as though her injuries were seeping out from inside her head.
“So we’ll have a full-moon party. And tell people not to moon each other. But if the killer is plugged into any of what’s going on, maybe it’ll be an extra pebble in their shoe.”
“Or maybe it’ll make things go haywire.”
“We can’t hide. That isn’t working,” she countered.
Celia had chosen her host well. Like her, all I wanted to do was hide. But that was no longer an option for either one of us.
“Okay, what’s
your
suggestion?” she demanded, drumming the table.
“Maybe Celia or Belle knows who it is.”
“I got nothing,” she bit off. “You?”
“No. I—I’m kind of afraid to deal with her.”
“Good.” She mouthed,
I’m done
. So we both wanted to stop being possessed. That was good.
“I’m not going to sit around and wait for another attack. Spread the word about the party.” She reached down and picked up a second bottle of wine.
“At the lake house?” I hated that place.
“If we’re going for shock value, we should have it at ground zero,” Mandy argued. “The operating theater.”
I hated that place even more. I hated it the most of all the bad places on campus. Mandy had tried to kill me there. She had set it on fire. Snow had drifted in through the gigantic hole in the roof. And still, it remained standing. And haunted. And evil.
“That was where it all happened,” Mandy said. “The lobotomies. The fire. And
that’s
why we’re having another bottle of wine.”
“Bring it on.” I held out my glass. We toasted each other.
“We shouldn’t invite too many people,” I said. “We won’t be able to watch them all.”
“I disagree. There’s safety in numbers. Plus we don’t know if it’s someone in our inner circle. It might be some sad little loser stuck in one of the bad dorms, out to pay me back for failing to acknowledge her pathetic existence.”
“You do have a practically infinite number of enemies.”
She moved her shoulders. “I like to make an impression.”
“I’d just like to make it to spring break.”
“We’ll say we’re both throwing the party,” Mandy said. “That way, all the have-nots and are-nots will feel emboldened to show. That’ll mix it up even more.”
“Why do you have to be so mean all the time?”
She picked up her wineglass and squinted at it. “There’s sediment in this.” She looked at me. “I’m not mean. I’m honest. And direct. You think these things too. You just don’t say them.”
“I don’t,” I insisted.
“That’s why you’re in therapy. To learn how to be honest with yourself.”
I exhaled. “I’m not going to argue with you.”
“Good. Because I really don’t care if you’re honest with yourself or not.” She swirled the wine and frowned at it. “This is garbage. Now listen, since you’re poor and have no resources, I’ll provide all the refreshments. But we won’t serve any of this crap.”
“Thank you, your majesty. Do you want to decorate? Meet early?”
“
Decorate?
Gee, yeah, maybe we should get a piñata, too.” She looked heavenward. “See, this is why you’ll never command any respect.”
“I’ll help you carry the supplies over.” She wasn’t grasping that I was attempting to find out the time of her appointment with Dr. Morehouse without asking her. So that I could spy on her.
“I see the shrink right after dinner. Then we can get to work.”
Bingo.
“Okay.”
She pressed her teeth together in a rictus grin, indicating her unease. “I’ve been wondering something. Have you ever worried that Celia might make her presence known while you’re talking to him?”
“Yes, I have,” I answered frankly. “But he seems to soothe her.”
“Soothe.” She drummed her nails on the table again. “There is nothing soothing about any of this.”
“I agree. And may I say, thanks for that.” I looked at the bag. “How did you find out about all this? How did you learn how to call Belle?”
“I’ll save that for another time,” she said coyly. “Suffice to say, I couldn’t find anything about uncalling. Believe me, I have looked.”
“I want to see all of it. After the party.”
“Okay,” she said. “Sure.”
ALONE. IN MY ROOM.
Dressed in sweats for bed, I kept the light on. I decided that tomorrow, I’d ask for more lamps. There were too many dark corners.
I dug out my knitting needles and my prized Casbah yarn in shades of purple and plum. I could knit and stare at the same time. And stab an intruder, if it came to that. As I got to work, the knitting soothed me. I had missed the clack of the needles, the sensation of the rich wool, creating something out of nothing for someone I cared about.
“Memmy?” I called out. “Can you hear me? Can you come to me?”
No answer. No geraniums.
I started to doze. Shaking myself awake, I kept knitting, planning some socks for Heather. My back was stiff, my shoulder blades pinched together. Claire was right: I was crazy to stay in this room. The shadows moved, shifted; creaks made me jump.
“Memmy, come to me,” I said again.
Come to me
Come to me
Come to me
Come to me
Come to me
Get her. Hold her down. Silence her.
I’m coming to you
I’m coming to you
I’m coming to you
I’m coming to you
Something was scratching against the other side of the wall. The floorboards in the corridor were creaking. Someone was opening my door. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream.

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