2 Empath (7 page)

I flinched. “They
burned her alive?”

“So the legend goes,” Tara answered skeptically. “At least, that variation of it. You hear it different ways.”

“I also heard it where the kids beat her to death with schoolbooks and lunch pails,” Kylee admitted. “But they always end with the building burning down.”

“Let’s check it out,” Tara suggested, opening her door and popping out of the car. Kylee followed.

I sat still another moment, letting out an unenthusiastic sigh. I knew that many perfectly normal people had a fascination with horror stories — even enjoyed letting themselves be scared by them. I wasn’t one of those perfectly normal people. I
hated
the grim and the gruesome. Dwelling on any sort of pain and agony, real or imagined, made me feel way too much like I was experiencing it myself.

And I did not care to be burned to death this afternoon.

I gritted my teeth and opened the car door anyway. With luck, the legend wouldn’t be true — or at least there would be no shadows to remind me of it. I tried not to blame Tara for my predicament — she had no idea how deeply scenes of tragedy affected me. Kylee knew, but even she didn’t really seem to understand. For her, tromping around the ruins of a schoolhouse and a spooky old cemetery was harmless fun. And she could actually see ghosts!

Could it be that she, too, secretly thought these local legends were crocks?

Feeling a bit more confident, I stepped out of the car. We were near the edge of the cemetery, and Kylee approached a group of tombstones and waved us over. “These are the oldest ones,” she said knowledgably. “Most of the writing is worn off, but they look about the same age. I heard that a bunch of people were buried all at the same time because of a cholera epidemic.”

I looked at the aged stones, now leaning randomly this way and that, many of them tumbled and broken. The wind gave a sudden gust, buffeting their ragged surfaces with overgrown prairie grass. I felt a chill, but not because of the wind. It was always windy in Wyoming. I just didn’t like cemeteries.

“Kali?” Kylee asked tentatively. I looked up to find both of them watching me. “Do you see anything here?”

I had to force myself to look around. I knew that a lot of people thought of graveyards as places where evil lurked — ghosts and ghouls and restless spirits — but I had yet to sense any evil in a cemetery. It was the emotions of the dead people’s loved ones that made me miserable.

“I see mourners,” I explained tonelessly. “And I can feel their sadness.” I walked away into the clearing, and the stifling sense of grief gradually lifted. I breathed deeply. The rainclouds in the sky had only continued to thicken; for a weekday afternoon in broad daylight, it was eerily dark.

“Geez, I’m sorry,” Kylee apologized as she and Tara moved to my side. “I didn’t think about that. We’ll stay away from the graveyard.”

“It’s okay,” I said honestly, feeling better. I really didn’t want my issues to be a drag on the day. I was happy enough that the three of us were hanging out together again. “Where did the schoolhouse used to be?”

Kylee smiled at me encouragingly. “Over here.” She led us to a spot in the clearing where a rectangular depression was visible, its borders loosely lined with large, half-buried stones. I bent down and took a closer look at one. Its exposed edge was scorched with black. Others bore similar scars.

“Wow,” I said, a little surprised. “Whatever building was here really did burn down.”

Tara nodded. Her eyes watched me intently, her face uncharacteristically pinched and nervous. “Do you see anything?”

Reluctantly, I looked up. Maybe I would get lucky. Fortunately for me,
every
episode of pain and death that had ever happened in a place wasn’t represented by a shadow. Why some were and others weren’t, I had no idea. I only knew that I had been in sites of documented tragedy where I neither saw nor felt a thing. I hoped this would be one of them.

My eyes scanned the area where the schoolhouse had stood. For a long time, I saw nothing. Tara and Kylee stood motionless, watching me.

The shadow took shape before me with a swirling motion, as if it were created by a gust of wind. Higher than I stood, no doubt where the original floor had been. It was a girl, with long skirts, a high-necked blouse, and hair swept up in a massive bun. She looked my age, not much older. Her eyes were wide with terror.

Guilt.
It hit me like a slap in the face. The girl might look like a frightened fawn, but she was no innocent.

Hatred.
I whirled around as someone else’s eyes seemed to bore into the back of my head. Another woman. This one dressed similarly, but shabbier, and a good deal older. Her hair was also in a bun, but an unkempt one, with wisps hanging limply around her face. Her eyes, fixed squarely on the younger woman, burned fiery with rage.

“Holy crap,” I murmured, sensing, but not focusing on, the presence of Kylee and Tara right behind me. The shadows’ dueling emotions pummeled me from either side, and my instincts screamed for me to back away.

But I didn’t. Not this time. My friends were here, standing right behind me. And I had nothing to hide from them anymore. I began to wonder… What would happen if, instead of running away, I actually
tried
to interfere?

Feeling bold, I stepped between the two shadows. I extended my arms as if to ward them off — both from me, and each other.

I should have known better. My actions made no difference whatsoever. The scene the shadows were enacting had happened over a century ago; no one could do anything to stop it. It was going to happen all over again.

“Please,” the teenaged girl pleaded, her heart beating so loud that I swore I could hear it, even over the wind. “I’m sorry. Truly I am. He told me—”

Her last words were lost, smothered into a choking gurgle by hands that reached out and wrapped around her throat. She resisted, but only feebly, as the older woman launched herself forward through my own, pointless self and delivered a body blow that knocked both women to the ground.

The shadows disappeared.

I stood still for a moment, staring at my shoes, which a second ago had been obscured by a dust-caked prairie skirt. The guilt, the fear, the mindboggling fury… it was all gone again.

Just like that.

“Are you okay?” Kylee said softly, approaching my side.

“I’m fine,” I answered mechanically.

“From the look on your face,” she said sympathetically, “that must have been pretty dramatic.”

I felt a strange surge of joy. I looked up again. A man three feet away lifted a crown of lacey fabric up and over a woman’s head. Her freckled young face smiled shyly. He kissed her. His blood thundered in his veins with anticipation.

A wedding.

They were gone.

“Kali?”

I could only shake my head in answer. A church and a school, built in the middle of nowhere and never rebuilt after the fire. So many emotional moments and events crammed into a relatively small area of earth over a relatively short period of time… yet for the entire rest of history, it had been just another patch of ground on the plains.

It was practically like a time capsule.

I focused on where I thought desks might have been, searching the air for shadows of students. It felt strange. I wasn’t used to looking
for
shadows.

I saw nothing else.

No students. No abusive teacher. No tying to chairs or beating with lunch pails. No fire. Just one inexplicable catfight and a man who was anxious for his honeymoon.

“I think that’s it,” I announced. “At least for now.”

I whirled around with a satisfied smile. Kylee blinked back at me, her dark eyes brimming with curiosity. Tara looked mildly ill.

“Tell us!” Kylee urged with a squeal. “Tell us everything!”

And so I did.

When I finished, Kylee was speechless with awe. Which was a little weird, since Kylee was rarely speechless about anything. But what bothered me more was the fact that Tara looked like something dug up from the cemetery. She always had a fair complexion, but at the moment, she appeared to have no blood.

“Tara!” I cried, moving over and shaking her arm. “What is wrong with you? Are you okay?”

Her blue eyes turned slowly my direction. Her lips trembled. “No,” she answered feebly. “No, I am not okay.”

Kylee came to her other side. “Do you feel sick?”

Tara took a step backward, stumbled slightly, then dropped down to sit on one of the foundation stones. “It can’t be. It just
can’t.”

“What
can’t be?” I demanded. “I told you I saw weird crap!”

Tara swallowed. “Yeah, you did. But it could have—” her voice broke off. She stared at the former center of the schoolhouse with a glazed look in her eyes. “Only it couldn’t be. You couldn’t—” She stopped herself again. Then after another moment, she uttered a very un-Taralike word.

“Tara!” Kylee chastised. “What
is
your problem?”

“This didn’t turn out like I thought,” she answered. “Kali was supposed to see… you know… what the legend says.”

“I don’t always see everything that happens in a place,” I explained. “In fact, I usually don’t. Just because I don’t see the shadow of something in particular doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!”

Tara swung her head around to face me. Her voice steadied. “But it
didn’t
happen, Kali. That’s just it. The whole story about the kids mutinying against a teacher — it’s not true.”

“And you know this how?” Kylee challenged.

Tara frowned. “It’s perfectly well documented, if you make the effort. Striker’s Schoolhouse has been written about more than once in the last hundred years — just not lately. There are archives: local newspapers and magazines. It was even mentioned in one guy’s thesis I dug up from the 70s, as an example of how local legends get started and then assume a life of their own, no matter what the facts.”

My knees felt wobbly. I dropped down on a stone next to Tara. “So…” I prompted. “If the legend was wrong, what
did
happen? What caused the fire?”

“The legend was wrong on several counts,” Tara explained. “The church/school building burned down in 1887, that much is true. It’s also true that a woman’s body was found inside, and that that woman had been the schoolteacher. But that’s about it. There’s nothing in the earliest articles about the fire to show that the school children had anything to do with it. One source mentioned that the kids made wreaths for her tombstone and sang songs at her funeral.”

“So why was she in the schoolhouse when it burned?” Kylee asked. “Was she locked inside accidentally or something?”

“That question is what started the mystery about her death,” Tara continued. “They couldn’t find any evidence that the door was locked. Besides, her body wasn’t found by the door, like she was trying to escape. It was found on the other side of the room, where her desk had been.”

My eyes followed Tara’s to the spot in the foundation where I had just been standing. I felt another chill.

“You mean,” Kylee suggested, “that she might have been dead before the fire?”

“That was the theory,” Tara answered. “Because even though the kids seemed to like the teacher just fine, she had issues with the rest of the community.
Home-wrecking
issues. Rumor had it that she was having an affair with a married man. They didn’t come right out and say that in the papers, of course. But the language about “suspected moral turpitude” made it pretty clear. The guy writing the thesis found evidence that some men in the community had gotten together a few weeks after the fire and debated whether a particular woman should be turned over to the authorities. It wasn’t specific about who or why, but it was clearly related to the teacher’s death. They ended up not doing anything. And that was the end of it. Of the
real
story, anyway.”

Tara’s pained blue eyes looked into mine. “You saw it, Kali,” she said quietly. “You didn’t know any of that, but everything you saw fits those facts exactly. A vicious attack by a jealous wife. Maybe she strangled the teacher to death. Maybe the teacher hit her head on the way down and was knocked unconscious or something. But the desk would have been right there.” She pointed to the spot where I had watched the scene unfold. “And that’s where her body was found. Her murderer almost certainly torched the place afterward, to cover it up.”

The expression on Tara’s face was sheer misery.

I didn’t know what to say to her. “I might have been seeing something else,” I suggested lamely. “The girl who got attacked looked too young to be a teacher. She was our age!”

Tara turned to face me. “Sarah Plimpton, the teacher in question, is buried in this cemetery, right over there.” She pointed. “She was seventeen years old.”

This time, it was Kylee who said the bad word.

“Tell me about it,” Tara agreed.

“No!” Kylee insisted, dropping down to sit beside us. “I mean, this is like, so amazing! It proves everything! Kali, you’re a miracle. You’re like a human window to the past. How totally cool is that?”

I couldn’t speak. I was too worried about Tara having a heart attack.

“I thought it was…” Tara mumbled, looking at the ground again. “But it couldn’t be. If the images were coming from inside your head, you would have responded to Kylee’s suggestions. You would have seen something from the story. But you didn’t. Despite what your conscious brain
thought
to be true, you saw stuff that didn’t agree. You saw…” her voice cracked. “You saw what really happened.”

She spoke the words as if pronouncing a death sentence.

“Passed your little test with flying colors, didn’t she?” Kylee said lightly. “That’s what all this was about, wasn’t it? A test?”

Tara nodded stiffly. She turned to me. “I’m sorry, Kali. Please don’t be mad at me. I was just so sure… and I thought maybe it would make you feel better if we could find a scientific explanation.”

“You mean it would make
you
feel better,” Kylee accused. “Kali is cool with the supernatural. It’s always been a part of her life. How could she not be?”