Close to Home (10 page)

“This is a new student, Jade McAdams,” Mary-Alice introduced.

“Hello,” he said and took Jade's hand, holding it in both of his a little too long. “Welcome. I hope you like it here.” She didn't say a word, just nodded and pulled her hand out of his warm clasp as soon as she could. “You know, Our Lady of the River is an excellent school with a wonderful, caring staff and a student body of good, Christian children.”

You bet, Padre,

“Wait a second. You're Sarah's daughter, right?” he asked.

Jade froze. He remembered her mother? “Yeah, er, yes.”

His thoughtful expression didn't change. “I knew her when she was just a girl and I was the assistant priest here. Years ago. In fact I remember your grandfather too.”

“They attended Mass?” This was news to Jade. She couldn't imagine her grandmother, head bowed, hands clasped as she prayed on a kneeler in the large church attached to this school. Maybe her grandfather came alone, or with his kids?

Father Paul wagged his hand in a “maybe yes, maybe no” motion. Jade tried to keep her face as emotionless as Father Paul's. She'd never heard about any member of the family attending Mass, except maybe at Christmas and sometimes Easter. Not that it mattered.

“I don't know if your parents shared this with you, Jade, but Angelique Le Duc Stewart actually started this school. She donated the funds for the original building, which was much smaller than this, of course, but the point is, she's the reason Our Lady of the River is here today.” He spread his hands and finally his grin seemed sincere. “What incredible foresight she had.”

Jade hadn't heard this before, didn't know if he was telling the truth or just jerking her around, but the good news was there was a tiny bit of horror showing on Mary-Alice's perfect features.

“Really?” Jade asked.

“Absolutely. The town may have been named after her husband, Maxim, but this school owes its very existence to his wife.”

Mary-A looked as if she'd just been shot. “Jade's great-grandmother?”

“A few more greats than that, I think,” the priest said, and Jade didn't bother to mention that she wasn't related to Angelique, that her great-great-great-grandmother was Maxim's first wife, Myrtle.

“That can't be right,” Jade's “angel” finally said, obviously upstaged, and Jade decided not to correct the priest. Let them all think what they wanted. Who cared?

“I assure you it is.” The priest was firm, and for the first time gave Jade a look that almost convinced her he knew how awkward she felt. More sincerely, he said, “I hope you enjoy your time at Our Lady, Ms. McAdams.” And then he was on his way.

For a few seconds, Mary-Alice was struck silent, her gaze following his figure as he rounded a corner at the far end of the hall near the gym.

Through no fault of her own, Jade realized she'd trumped the girl assigned to make her feel welcome and fit in. Assessing the spark of annoyance in Mary-Alice's eyes, Jade decided this bit of information probably wouldn't serve her well, at least not with Mary-A and her crowd.

“Okay, so let's get going,” Mary-A suggested. “More to see.” Her voice was a little curter, a little less friendly as she lifted her pointed chin a notch and started leading Jade toward a back staircase. “By the way, just a heads-up here: You should really answer ‘Yes, Father' when any of the priests talk to you.”

“I did.”

“Nuh-uh.” Mary-A arched one of her neatly plucked brows as they took a flight of steps down to a lower level, their shoes clattering on the stairs.

“I think I said—”

“No,” she shook her head, blond ponytail wagging. “Trust me. You said, ‘Yeah,' when he asked about your mom.”

“Whatever.”

“I'm just giving you the protocol.”

“Maybe I don't care about protocol.”

Mary-Alice's eyes slitted for a second. “Don't you want to fit in?”

Reaching the lower level, Jade lifted a shoulder. “Not sure it's gonna happen.” People like this prim girl with her hair pulled back and round, innocent eyes bugged the crap out of Jade. “ ‘By the way, got a cigarette?”

“What?” Mary-Alice looked appalled, though Jade had spotted a pack of cigarettes in her bag when Mary-Alice had been checking her phone. “No! Why would you think I smoked?”

“Saw the pack.”

Color rose on the older girl's cheeks. “Those are Liam's.”

“Who's Liam?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Don't tell me.” Jade said, mimicking her guide's snarky tone. “The quarterback.”

Mary-Alice's face tightened. “Has anyone ever told you that you're not as clever as you think you are?”

“Oh, maybe a few hundred times.”

“Maybe you should rethink your attitude.”

Jade actually smiled, loving that she'd gotten the suck-up's goat.

“And just to set the record straight, Liam Longstreet doesn't play football. He's into soccer.”

“Same difference.”

Mary-A rolled her eyes before letting out a long-suffering sigh. “If you're so smart, you'd know that ‘same difference' is an oxymoron.”

“Oh, I know a moron when I see one.”

“You're a—” If she hadn't seen a nun, her long habit billowing around her, just then, Mary-Alice might actually have sworn and slapped the grin off Jade's face. Instead she forced a smile over locked teeth. “Hello, Sister Millicent,” she said to the nun, but the heavyset woman was marching past, obviously on a mission, her rosary clacking with each stride; she either didn't hear Mary-Alice's greeting or chose to ignore it.

“Guess she's busy,” Jade observed dryly.

“Come on, let's go back to the library and I'll show you—”

“Forget it. The tour's over.”

“But it's my job—” Mary-Alice feigned surprise.

“Screw your job. Better yet, just leave me alone. I'm firing you.”

“You can't fire me!”

“Sure I can. Go be somebody else's angel.” Jade started walking in the other direction.

“You're making a big mistake.”

“I've already made a lot of them.” Jade had met a dozen Mary-A's at previous schools. She started to turn away but stopped. “And, you know, you might ‘rethink' your choice of boyfriends.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Serious athletes don't mess with their lungs, and if they ever did, they probably wouldn't smoke some old lady brand.” She paused. “Virginia Super Slims?” she asked. “Really? What is this, the nineteen eighties?”

“You're such a piece of . . . work,” Mary-Alice said, her façade finally slipping completely, her mask of ebullience giving way to straight-out scorn.

“Probably.”

“But you won't get away with it, you know. God's going to punish you!”

“Trust me, he already has,” Jade said, looking around the empty hallways of a school that Angelique Le Duc had started. To Jade they represented the nine circles of hell.

“It could get worse,” Mary-Alice warned.

“Could it?”

The blonde bristled, about to explode, when she caught herself and let out her breath slowly. “Oh, Jade,” she finally said, as if she really cared, “you just don't want to know.”

“You're right. I don't.”

Mary-Alice opened her mouth to say something more, changed her mind, then turned her back on Jade and stormed off, an “angel” with her jaw set, her fists clenched, her ponytail swinging with each determined stride, and no sign of a halo to be seen.

S
arah saw Gracie nearly trip as she got off the bus. Fortunately, she caught herself, but not before a ripple of ugly laughter slipped through the closing doors. The faces of several kids were pressed against the bus windows, mingled breaths fogging the glass, wide nasty grins mocking as one of the boys pointed a fat finger at Gracie.

“Rough day?” Sarah asked, hating the fact that her child had to go through the social trauma of being the new kid. The big yellow behemoth rumbled off, belching exhaust.

“It was okay,” Gracie said without any inflection, then sneaked a glance over her shoulder as if to make certain the bus and its load of students was well out of earshot.

God, kids could be so cruel, the bullies ready to pounce on the weak. It really bothered Sarah, but she didn't spout off. Yet.

“Do you like your teachers?”

“Miss Marsh for homeroom is fine, I guess.” Again, no interest as they picked their way along the twin ruts of pebbles, dead weeds, and potholes that were the private drive leading from the county road to the house. A stiff wind was blowing, the smell of rain heavy in the air, though no drops had yet fallen.

“What about the others? Is the jury still out?” As usual, getting her daughter to talk about what happened during her day was like pulling teeth.

Gracie shrugged.

“Meet any new friends?”

“Maybe Scottie,” Gracie said, then added quickly, “she's a girl.” Shifting her backpack to her other shoulder, she glanced up at Sarah with eyes that knew far more than most twelve-year-old's. “I asked why she had a boy's name, and she said her dad wanted a son so her mom came up with the name. Cuz her dad's Scott.”

“Makes sense.”

“Maybe.” Gracie kicked a rock out of her path, and it flew into the brush flanking the drive and startled a bird. Gracie watched the finch flutter from one tiny branch to another higher in the leafless canopy overhead.

“But you like her, right? Scottie?”

Gracie wrinkled her nose. “Don't really know yet. She sits by me in homeroom and is sorta friendly.”

“Well, that's good.”

No response, and for a second Sarah wondered if her daughter had even heard her. Finally she said, “Gracie, everything went okay, right?”

Gracie's eyebrows drew together, and Sarah felt that familiar twist to her stomach, a feeling that came over her whenever she sensed things weren't going well with either of her kids. “It just takes time,” she said as much to herself as her child.

Rounding the corner, they walked out of the shelter of the trees to the clearing where the house and outbuildings dominated the landscape and they could hear the sound of the river rushing far below. Gracie glanced up at the house and Sarah tensed.

Please don't tell me you see a ghost, Please,

“Mom?” Gracie asked.

Here it comes. “Yeah?”

Her face was clouded. “Nothing.”

“Something's bothering you, isn't it?” Sarah asked, bracing herself as a breeze rustled the remaining leaves.

“Maybe.”

Sarah's gut tightened a little bit more. “What is it?”

“Scottie says that our house is haunted and that everybody knows it.”

“People talk.”

“She said a woman was murdered in it. Not just died, but was killed. She's talking about Angelique Le Duc.”

“We've been over this.”

“Yeah, but I didn't know that you saw her too. Scottie's mom said that everyone in town knows that
you
saw the ghost when you lived here with Grandpa and Grandma.”

Sarah didn't know Scottie's mom, but at that moment she wanted to strangle the woman.

“Why didn't you tell me you saw the lady in the white dress too? Why did you let Jade make fun of me and—”

“No, I didn't do that, Gracie. Listen to me,” she said, grabbing her daughter's shoulder, only to have Gracie spin away from her.

“Yes, you did, Mom. You let me think that I was wrong. That I didn't see what I know I saw, and
you saw it too
.” She started running toward the house.

“Crap,” Sarah muttered under her breath. She'd bungled it. She took off after her daughter, catching up to her at the front steps when Gracie stopped short. “I was just trying to protect you.”

“By lying to me?” Gracie said. “By letting me think that I might be going crazy and imagining it when I knew I really did see it?”

She mentally kicked herself. “I didn't mean to make a mess of things.” Her daughter glared at her. “Okay, so I did, and yeah, years ago I thought I saw a ghost too.”

“Where?”

“In my room.”

“In
your
room?”

Sarah nodded. “Sometimes I'd wake up and I'd think she was there, and then nothing. I thought it might be dreams. Once I was on the roof and”—how could she explain what she didn't understand herself?—“that time I don't really know what I saw. I couldn't remember. But I was on the widow's walk when they found me.”

You mean you were up there with Roger.

Tiny, icy fingers seemed to crawl up her spine when she thought of her older half brother.

“But it was the lady in the white dress. That's her, isn't it? The one who was killed by her husband? Angelique Le Duc?”

“I assume so . . .”

“It is her. I know it is. Scottie said she—Angelique—was chopped to death with an axe up on the roof, and there was blood everywhere, running down and gurgling in the gutters to spill out all around the house. She said that my great-great-great-grandpa did it, he killed her and cut off her head and—”

“Wait! Whoa!” Horrified, Sara was shaking her head. “Slow down, okay? This is all crazy talk. No one knows what happened, but I'm sure it wasn't something so gruesome.”

“Well, someone must know how she died,” Gracie charged. “They have to.”

“How?”

“Don't
you?
”

“No. Of course not.”

“Scottie said her body floated down the river and over the falls and disappeared and that someone found the head on the banks right around the spot where that diner is now.”

“Oh, for the love of God. No. That's all a lie.” Sarah placed a reassuring hand on her daughter's shoulder, only to have Gracie shove away from her. “It's fiction woven with fact, Gracie. You've read what happened in books and on the Internet? None of those awful rumors were ever substantiated.”

“So, it's not true?” Gracie wasn't letting her off the hook.

“People love to talk and make things worse than they are. And I'm sorry I fudged a little about telling you the truth.”

“It wasn't ‘fudging,' Mom, it was lying.”

“I won't do it again,” she said. Rain was beginning to fall in earnest, running down Sarah's neck. “What are we doing out here?” Together they climbed the three steps of the porch. “And just one more thing, Celilo Falls, when they existed, were upriver from this house. There's no way a body could float upstream.”

Gracie thought that over silently.

“Angelique disappeared, and no one knows what happened to her. That much is true.”

“And to her husband?”

“Maxim went missing too. Some people think they ran off together.”

“And just left all their kids?” Gracie said incredulously. “They had five of them. At least he did, with his first wife. I already researched it. So, no, I don't think they just ran off. What kind of parents would do that?” she asked before her face fell and Sarah realized her daughter was considering the actions of her own father. After the divorce, Noel McAdams had taken the first flight out of the Northwest to Savannah, Georgia.

“I guess we'll never know.” She unlocked the front door, and they stepped inside, where it was a few degrees warmer and dry, if still gloomy and depressing.

“I think he killed her,” Gracie decided, shrugging out of her backpack and dropping it onto the marble floor of the foyer. “Like in a fit of anger like you see on
CSI.
”

“A crime of passion?” Sarah asked as Gracie peeled off her jacket. “Maybe you should be watching something else.”

“Like what?
Teen Mom
or
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo
or maybe one of those real housewives shows? That's what Scottie likes. She watches them with her mom.”

“Okay, rewind. Forget I said that.”

Gracie said, “I think once Maxim realized what he'd done, that he'd actually killed his wife, he went on the run. Maybe jumped into the river and swam to the other side. Went to Canada somehow, or followed the river to Portland and caught a freighter or a train. Just disappeared so he wasn't caught and hanged. They did that then, you know. Hanged people. I've seen pictures.”

Sarah shook her head. Gracie was only twelve, too young, she thought, to be dealing with these kinds of issues. But there it was.

“Don't let the kids at school get to you. What happened here nearly a hundred years ago is a mystery that will probably never be solved.”

“Not unless someone cares. That's why I think the ghost appeared to me. She wants me to find out what happened.” Gracie walked into the dining room and draped her jacket over the back of a chair.

“You know, Stewart's Crossing is a small town, and it was a lot smaller back then,” Sarah reminded her. “Sometimes people in a place this size just like to talk and speculate. Make more of something than there really was.”

“I did see her, Mom,” Gracie said, on her way into the kitchen.

“Gracie, I know you saw something, but—”

“Don't!” Gracie turned quickly and glared at her mother. “You're doing it again—messing with the truth.
You
know what I saw!”

Sarah regarded her uneasily and finally conceded, “Okay. I
thought
I saw something. Years ago. I was a lot younger than you. But the truth is that I'm not sure anymore what I saw, or even if I did. At the time I was convinced. Was it a ghost? I don't know. Probably not. A bad dream? A shadow? Again, I'd only be guessing. But whatever it was, whether a figment of my imagination or a shadow or something unexplained, it certainly wasn't malevolent, or . . . evil or anything. It was just there. So I don't think we have anything to worry about. There's nothing malevolent haunting the place.”

“I'm not worried,” Gracie stated matter-of-factly. “I just don't like being teased.”

“Is that what Scottie did? Tease you?” Immediately Sarah's protective-mother feathers were ruffled.

“No, not really. Like I said, she's friendly, but some of the boys overheard her.”

“And what?”

“They just called me a ghost whisperer and laughed like hyenas.” She rolled her eyes. “Morons.”

“I bet they were trying to get you to notice them.”

“I did,” she said once they were in the kitchen. “I noticed that they were big, fat losers.”

“Forget them. How about a fiber bar or a fruit snack? I'm afraid that's all I've got.”

“I don't care what they think or what they say,” Gracie said, showing her grit again. She found a box of fiber bars, picked out a peanut butter one and climbed onto a kitchen stool. “I know Angelique's going to keep haunting this place until we find out the truth so that she can pass over.”

“Okay,” Sarah said, trying to lighten the mood, but Gracie was having none of it.

“Don't humor me,” she said. With deft fingers, she opened the fiber bar and announced, “I'm going to help her.”

Before she could ask how, Sarah's cell phone vibrated. Retrieving it from her pocket, she saw her sister's name and profile picture flash onto the screen.

“Hi, Dee,” she answered.

“Sarah. Have you heard?” Dee Linn's voice held a tremulous note of panic. “A local girl's gone missing. I saw it on the news. Rosalie Jamison; no one Becky hangs out with, thank God, but still . . .”

“What do you mean ‘missing'?”

“She was working on Friday night and never came home. I heard the girl has been in trouble. Parents divorced, new spouses and stepsiblings in the mix. Nothing stable.”

“I'm divorced,” Sarah pointed out. “It's not a sin. Or a recipe for disaster with your kids.”

“Oh, I know! I wasn't talking about you, but, you know, when no one's in the home, the kids get into trouble.”

“Mom was home. We still got into plenty of trouble.”

“Don't be so defensive. This isn't about you. But I was sure you'd want to know, and I thought maybe you didn't have your television hooked up.”

“You're right,” Sarah said, glancing out the window as the rain began coming down in sheets. She listened as Dee Linn explained what she knew of the circumstances of the missing girl.

“I suppose she could be a runaway,” Dee Linn finished up. “Look, I've got to go, but I thought you should know. And I wanted to remind you about the party. You and the girls are coming, right?”

“Wouldn't miss it for the world,” Sarah said, turning to find Gracie staring at her and silently accusing her of the lie. “Can I bring anything?”

“No—I've got everything handled,” Dee said before hanging up.

“You don't want to go to the party,” Gracie said as soon as Sarah was off the phone. She wadded up the wrapper from her snack and tossed it into an open garbage bag propped against the table. “Why don't you just admit it? What is it with you and the lying?”

“There's lying and there's lying. I guess I'm trying to protect people from getting hurt.”

“You don't like it when Jade and I lie.”

“You're right, I don't. So we'll all work on it together. Now, come on, we've got to get going. We have to pick up Jade in about half an hour.”