Don't Breathe a Word (11 page)

“I hope it never leaks,” he said.

The woman smiled and sat down in a threadbare upholstered chair. She was average height, underweight in a drug-addict or terminally-ill-person kind of way. She wore a tight-fitting white tank top that accentuated her protruding collarbones and a pair of ripped and faded jeans. Her feet were bare, the nails painted with sparkly blue polish. Around her neck was a chain that looked like something you’d get at a hardware store for pulling a light on with. Dangling from it was an old silver skeleton key.

She had the darkest eyes Phoebe had ever seen.

“So is Evie around?” asked Sam.

The skinny woman laughed, gnawed on an already short fingernail, spit the piece she bit off out on the carpet. “Don’t you recognize your own cousin, Sammy?” she asked with a little wheeze. “Did you get a phone call too? Is that why you’re here?” Her voice was husky, deeper than Phoebe would have imagined.

Sam just stared at the woman in the chair, blinking like he’d just come out of a dark place into a light one.

“You’re Evie?” Phoebe asked.

“Who were you expecting?” she asked.

“Can you prove it?” Phoebe asked.

“Bee . . .” said Sam.

Evie laughed a wheezing laugh that launched her into a coughing fit. Once she recovered, she reached into her back pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, blowing smoke out at them. Then she reached back again into her other pocket and produced a small cloth wallet this time. She shuffled through some cards until she came to a Vermont driver’s license, which she handed over to Sam. “My name is Eve Katherine O’Toole. Mother’s name is Hazel. The last time I saw you, Sammy, you were wearing your favorite shirt: the Superman T-shirt. You’d been in it for days, but no one minded. I remember keeping my eyes on that big red
S
out the rear windshield of the car, watching it, and you, get smaller and smaller as my mother drove me away.” She studied her ragged nails, then took another drag of her cigarette.

“It’s her,” Sam said. “This is Evie.”

“Then who was the other Evie?” asked Phoebe, snapping back from her own memory of Sam in his Superman shirt staring down at her from his bedroom window.

“Other Evie?” asked the woman in the chair. “Jesus Christ, like one of us isn’t enough.”

“She knew things too,” Phoebe said. “She knew about the charm bracelet.”

“Lisa’s charm bracelet?” this new, skinny Evie asked. “What about it?”

“Do you remember where she got it?” Sam asked.

“Of course I remember.” Evie looked disgusted. “She got it for her birthday early that summer. Your mom gave it to her when we were all in Cape Cod for Memorial Day weekend. It had her name on it. Then the next day, we went to this little tourist shack along the waterfront and she picked out the second charm, a starfish. You and I bought eye patches and plastic swords and spent the rest of the trip sword fighting and looking for treasure to bury. We even had secret pirate names. Mine was Captain Evil—I can’t remember yours. Something Sammy or Sammy Something. You weren’t terribly creative.”

Sam looked at Phoebe, nodded, and shrugged. “It’s her.”

“Okay,” Phoebe said. “So if this is Evie, then who the hell was the other woman? And what about Elliot?”

“Elliot?” Evie asked, looking down to crush out her half-finished cigarette.

“Do you know an Elliot?” Sam asked.

“Jesus. I did. I used to date a guy named Elliot. We were kind of engaged.”

This was more like it, thought Phoebe. A clue. Elliot was Evie’s ex—that was how the impostor knew so much about the real Evie. The pieces were falling into place.

“Do you know where we can find him?” Phoebe asked, suddenly feeling like a clever cop on one of those late-night TV shows she seldom watched. She even reached into her pocket to pull out her notebook so she could jot down any leads.
ELLIOT
, she wrote.

Evie looked away. “You can’t. He’s dead.”

Now, on top of missing girls, fairies, and changelings, they had ghosts to contend with.
DEAD
? she wrote.

“You’re sure?” Sam asked.

“Yes, I’m fucking sure,” Evie said. “I was driving the car when we had the accident.”

T
hey drank Mountain Dew—Evie had cases of the stuff—and ordered pizza while Evie told them about her own life in bits and pieces. As she spoke, Phoebe looked from Evie to Sam, seeing one resemblance after another: the dark hair with slight widow’s peak, the delicate nose—even their lips were similar. There was no doubt they were related.

Evie told them she’d been an art major in college and was about to have her first big show in a gallery when she and Elliot were in an accident coming back from dinner one night.

“It was late. Maybe I’d had a little too much to drink. Elliot definitely had—that’s why I was driving. This deer jumped out into the middle of the road, right in our path, this big old buck—rack of horns as wide as my car. I didn’t have time to stop. I swerved, just instinct, you know? We hit a tree.”

She bit at a fingernail, working the chewed-off piece around in her mouth for a few seconds before spitting it out. “The passenger side of the car was crushed. The front seat was pushed all the way to the back. I looked over and all I could see were his feet. He had these new black Frye biker boots. But they were all covered in blood and little fragments of glass. I remember thinking how pissed he’d be, his new boots all messed up like that. It’s funny the things you think of.”

Evie closed her eyes. “Funny,” she mumbled, pushing her thumbs into the upper part of her eye sockets and rubbing hard.

When she opened her eyes, they were red and wet, looking nearly as raw as her lips and cuticles.

“Then I looked out the busted windshield and there, right next to us, was the damn deer. Watching. Totally unhurt. He took off into the woods, his white tail flying out behind him like this big old flag.

“I never did have that art opening. I stopped painting after that. Wound up in the hospital a few times, lost our loft because I couldn’t keep up with the rent,
blah blah
. I moved into this little palace.”

Now, she explained, she lived on disability checks and only left the apartment once a week, when she took a cab (always the same driver, she said) to therapy appointments.

“Agoraphobia,” she told them with a raspy sigh. “You read about it and think it’s made up—how scary can stepping out your front door really be?—but then little by little, you become the pathetic person in the story and you have to pay some kid to take your trash out and buy your toilet paper.”

Phoebe nodded understandingly, overcome with pity. She tried to imagine Evie cleaned up, a few pounds on her. She was a natural beauty, really: dark eyes and red pouty lips.

“So you don’t draw, paint, anything now?” Phoebe asked.

Evie shook her head, played with the metal key on her necklace.

“You know,” Evie said, looking up at Sam. “This may sound strange, but I think my life turned out the way it did because of what I did all those years ago. That summer.”

“What do you mean?” asked Sam.

“I betrayed Teilo. The fairies were supposed to be our secret. I knew that. Christ, Lisa made us swear not to tell a soul. But I was the one who showed people the book. And then, a week later . . .”

She didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t need to.

A week later, Lisa was gone.

“You said something about a phone call?” Sam said.

Evie nodded. “About a week ago. I thought it was a little girl at first. She was talking so quietly, just a whisper.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘I’m back from the land of the fairies. I’ll be seeing you soon.’ Then she hung up.”

“Lisa,” Phoebe said.

“It just doesn’t seem possible,” Evie said. “But who would play a joke like that?”

Sam and Phoebe exchanged a glance.

“So now it’s your turn,” Evie said. “Tell me about this other Evie. Tell me what made you look me up after all these years.”

And so, over pepperoni pizza (Phoebe was feeling nauseous again, so she nibbled tentatively at the crust, claiming that she was too anxious to be hungry) and Mountain Dew, Sam and Phoebe told their story, beginning with the call last week from the woman claiming to be Sam’s cousin and ending with the knock on Evie’s basement apartment door an hour ago. Evie nodded, asked the occasional question, but mostly just listened until they were through.

“So they got the fairy book?” she asked.

“Yeah, and everything else we brought. Clothes, Phoebe’s purse, our digital camera, which had some pictures of this other Evie and Elliot on it—pretty much the only proof we had that they even existed.”

“But nothing was taken from your house?”

“Not that we noticed,” Sam said.

“He’s a tricky bastard, isn’t he?” Evie asked. Her face, Phoebe decided, was catlike. The high cheekbones, the pointed chin and large eyes.

Sam shuffled his feet, looked down at them.

“Who?” Phoebe asked.

“Teilo,” Evie said with a wheezy sigh. She shook another cigarette from her pack. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but I wouldn’t put anything past him. Be careful. That’s my only advice.”

Phoebe shook her head. “You’re not saying he’s a real person?”

Evie lit the cigarette, shook out the match with trembling fingers. “Real, yes. A person? No. He’s way more than that. With Teilo, the regular rules don’t apply. And nothing is as it seems. So far he’s just playing with you. But when he gets serious, you’ll know.”

Chapter 12

Lisa

June 8, Fifteen Years Ago

T
hey crept silently back down to Reliance before breakfast the next morning. The yard and woods were wet with dew, soaking their shoes. Songbirds called out their good mornings from hidden perches high up in the treetops. Evie had spoken very little since she showed up at dinner the night before. She was still in her fatigue shorts and Harley shirt, but they were dry. When Lisa asked where she’d been all afternoon, Evie only shrugged and said, “Around.” They didn’t talk about what had happened down at the whirlpool. Lisa wanted to, thinking that maybe if she could somehow make a joke about it, then everything would be okay. But this felt too big for any stupid joke and the right words didn’t come. All she could think of to say was
I’m so sorry
, but she was sure that would just make everything worse. The best thing to do was pretend it hadn’t happened and never mention it again.

“W
hat the . . .” Sammy said as he peered down from the edge of the cellar hole. Evie gave a very un-Evie-like girlish gasp.

The chipped china saucer was empty, the glass of Orange Crush drained. And there, beside it on the saucer, was a penny, polished to a shine.

Lisa was sure her heart would explode. She jumped down into the hole and the others followed.

She picked up the copper coin and saw it was an old one, a wheat penny from 1918 with a tiny hole drilled through the top.

“Give it,” Evie said, reaching for the coin. Lisa handed it over. Evie brought it close to her face, stuck her tongue out, touched the tip of it against the bright penny.

“What on earth are you doing?” Sammy asked.

“Using all of my senses,” Evie explained. Sam rolled his eyes.

Lisa was sorry she’d let them come. It felt all wrong, them being down in the cellar hole with her. The gift was meant for her—she was the one who believed, right?—and if they made fun of it, the fairies might not come again.

“Will you guys quit it?” Lisa asked. She looked up at the trees, wondering if they were being watched. A blue jay gave a scolding cry. A squirrel chattered.

Suddenly the woods seemed full of spies.

“It’s an amazingly wonderful gift,” Lisa said, her voice as loud as she could make it without shouting.

“I wonder what the hole’s for?” Sammy asked, grabbing the penny from Evie, who was holding it up to her ear, listening.

“Mental case,” Sammy said.

“Hey,” Lisa warned, giving him her most evil look. Evie had suffered enough yesterday. She didn’t need any additional ribbing today.

“I meant it in a good way,” Sam said. “All the best people are a little mental, right? Even Einstein.” He gave a timid little back-pedaling shrug.

“Wait a sec,” said Evie, snatching the penny back from Sam. Her fingers looked thick and clumsy as they held the bright coin. Her nails were chewed to the quick, the cuticles raw. “Look at the year: 1918. Isn’t that when the whole town of Reliance disappeared?”

Lisa nodded. “Everyone except for Great-grandpa Eugene.”

Sometimes I see him in each of you.

“That can’t be a coincidence. Wait till we tell your mom!” Evie said. “And maybe my mom will finally believe us if we bring back proof.”

Lisa took the penny back, closing her hand tightly around it. “No. We can’t tell anyone. This is something special, just for us. What happens here stays a secret. Okay?”

Evie stared at her a second, her brow furrowed.

“Evie,” Lisa said in a pleading tone.

At last Evie gave a tentative nod.

Sam was going to be a little harder to convince.

“I mean it, Sammy,” Lisa said. “Say there
are
fairies. The last thing they’d want is for us to bring the whole damn world down here. Then they’d go away for sure. Let’s just wait and see what happens before we say anything to anyone. Think of it as a scientific experiment. A top-secret one. You can use the scientific method to try to explain it—come up with a hypothesis, collect data, all that.”

He scowled a little, then grumbled, “Okay. But I don’t think it’s fairies.”

“Well, what is it then?” Lisa asked.

“My current hypothesis,” Sam said, smirking, “is that you’ve got a secret admirer.”

Evie stiffened, jutted out her lower jaw in a bulldog-like way.

Lisa laughed. “Well, there’s only one way to find out for sure, right? Tonight, I’m going to come down here on my own. I’ll bring another plate of sweets and sit and watch.”

“But we’ve gotta come with you!” Evie said.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “How am I supposed to gather data to support my theory unless you let us come with you?”

Lisa shook her head. “We don’t want to scare them off.”

“I don’t like it,” Evie said. “We don’t know who or what we’re dealing with. They could be dangerous.”

“No,” Lisa argued, “if they meant any harm, they wouldn’t have left this.” She held the penny up, watched the way it caught the morning light, a tiny copper sun of its own.

“What ya got there?”

Lisa jumped, shoved the penny into the pockets of her cutoffs like she was hiding evidence. She turned. Gerald and Pinkie were coming up to the edge of the cellar hole.
Go away!
Lisa screamed inside her head.

Gerald was all in camouflage and Becca had on a pair of pastel pink overalls and a long-sleeved pink turtleneck, which seemed crazy considering how warm it was.

Sammy leaned over and whispered, “Remember my hypothesis? This just backs it up. He wanted to see you find it.”

Lisa took a step away from Sammy. She looked over at Evie whose eyes were blazing. Evie was breathing fast, her chest making funny accordion sounds. Lisa had to send Gerald and Pinkie away quickly before things got out of hand.

“I said what ya got?” Gerald called down, peering at them from over the top of his dark glasses. He was right at the edge of the cellar hole now, hands deep in his pockets, jittery, rocking back and forth and rattling his spare change.

“Nothing,” Lisa said. She blinked her eyes hard, like maybe she could wish them away. But when she opened her eyes, they were still there. Damn. So much for wishing. She’d have to think of some other more mundane way to make them get lost. But she had to do it tactfully. She didn’t want to make them suspicious.

“What are you guys doing out here so early?” Sam asked.

“Nothing. Just out walking. Getting some air. Doing a little bird watching maybe.”

“Bird watching?” Lisa raised her eyebrows skeptically. “What, are you an expert on hermit thrushes and warblers all of a sudden?”

Gerald smiled. “No, but it’s never too late to learn, right?” He whistled in a birdlike way, looking up at the trees.

“Were you out here last night? Did you leave a little something behind?” Sam asked.

Idiot! Did he really think Gerald left the penny? She shot Sam a shut-up-or-else look but doubted it would do any good.

“Why are you all bundled up, Pinkie?” Lisa asked, changing the subject as fast as possible. “Expecting snow?”

“She’s allergic to mosquito bites,” Gerald said. “Can’t seem to stop scratching, so Mom covered her in calamine and long sleeves. Good thing we don’t live where the mosquitoes carry yellow fever or malaria. You’d be a goner for sure,” he said, giving Pinkie a wink. “Show them, Bec. Show them what those nasty buggies did to your arms.”

Pinkie rolled up her left sleeve to show that her arms were painted pink and underneath were oozing red welts.

“Gross,” Evie said.

Sammy nodded. “Mosquitoes are bad this year because we had a such a wet spring.” Pinkie smiled at him stupidly.

Good grief. Did freaky Pinkie have a crush on Sam?

“So what was it?” Gerald said to Lisa.

“Huh?” Lisa said.

“I saw something shiny in your hand.”

Pinkie nodded her head, shaking her pale white hair; made a funny little smacking sound in agreement. There was something unpleasantly grublike about her.

“It was nothing,” Lisa said, reaching into her pocket. “Just my house key.” The doors at their house were never locked. Lisa had never carried a house key. She hoped Gerald wouldn’t ask to see it.

Gerald looked down at her, shook his head, and adjusted his glasses. “Right, Lisa. Riiiiight.” His voice was a whining buzz, not all that dissimilar from the sound a mosquito makes. “The thing is, you’re a real crappy liar. So I’ve gotta ask myself, ‘Why wouldn’t she tell the truth? What could your good friend Lisa be hiding from you?’ So what is it, Lisa? Did Stevie give you a sweetheart ring or something? You and Cousin It going out now?”

Evie moved faster than Lisa would have believed possible, her breath quick and rhythmic, like a train. She grabbed Gerald’s left ankle and yanked. He tottered forward, arms pinwheeling as he tried to right himself, then went down into the hole. The fall itself happened in slow motion; it seemed like he hung in the air for ages, flapping his arms helplessly, trying to fight gravity. He landed with a screaming crash right at Lisa’s feet.

But the worst noise, by far, was the sound Pinkie made: the high-pitched squeal of a pig having its throat slit.

“Bitch!” Gerald bellowed. “I’ll get you for this, you goddamn freak of nature!” He was lying on his side in the dirt, gritting his teeth and panting. Evie was over him, her right hand resting on the sheathed knife hanging from her belt. She unsnapped the leather strap that held the knife’s handle in place.

Lisa gently but firmly pulled Evie out of the way. “Enough,” she warned Evie, then reached to help Gerald up.

“Get the hell away from me!” he spat. He sat up and she saw his eyes were full of tears. He was cradling his left arm as he stood, and it seemed to be bent up at an awkward angle, like he had a second elbow halfway down his forearm.

Lisa’s heart began to beat hard and her mouth tasted like metal. This was not good. Evie was going to be in big trouble.

“Becca, give me a hand here,” Gerald said.

Pinkie reached a pink-sleeved arm down, and Gerald grabbed hold with his right hand and squirmed his way up and out of the hole, teeth gritted and making horrible sounds anytime his left arm moved.

“Name’s Evie, asshole,” Evie said, the knife out of the sheath and in her hand, the blade glimmering.