Feral (28 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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C
laire removed her coat and reached for the dishrag hanging from the handle of the half-open silverware drawer. She turned her back to Mrs. Sims and fastened the top button on her blouse to keep the cameo hidden. If Serena was after her necklace, Claire didn't want to give it away—not even to a grieving Mrs. Sims. She wanted that cat to keep coming to her.
The cat knows the truth
, she thought.
No—Serena knows the truth. About this horrible town. And Casey and the crazy things that happen here. I have to fix this. I have to make it right. Serena
wants
me to make it right. I can't do anything that would send her away, or make her think I wasn't invested in her story.

She was on her hands and knees, wiping up coffee, and Mrs. Sims was sweeping wet glass shards into tiny dangerous-looking mounds, when Rich entered the kitchen.

“What happened?”

“Coffeepot exploded,” Mrs. Sims explained.

Still looking bewildered, Rich grabbed a towel and squatted beside Claire. “There's no story on her laptop,” he muttered. “I looked for notes—handwritten notes—through all her desk drawers. Nothing.”

“What about her phone?” Claire whispered.

Rich shook his head. “I can't find it.”

“Mrs. Sims?” Claire asked. “Would you have any idea where Claire's phone is?”

Wrinkles deepened around the corners of Mrs. Sims's lips. Claire thought for a moment that the lines around her mouth were deep enough to cast shadows. “I don't care about things like that,” she confessed. “Maybe those things mean something to you two, but—that didn't have anything to do with my life with Serena. Of all the things I'll miss, that's—” She leaned her broom against the counter, placed a glass-filled dustpan on the cold stovetop. “Excuse me,” she said, and hurried from the kitchen, her face twisted as she attempted to mask the new round of tears beginning to stream down her cheeks.

“Mrs. Sims,” Claire called, as she started after her. “I didn't want—”

Rich grabbed Claire's elbow. “Just clean the kitchen,” he advised. “I'll help. We can let ourselves out.”

The next morning, two days shy of the one-week anniversary of Serena Sims's funeral, life had returned to normal. At least, that was how it appeared to Claire as Rich drove her to school. Tree-trimming crews had officially finished gnawing away the remnants of the broken limbs. Parents, it seemed, as Claire visited her locker and listened to the chatter of voices making after-school plans, had already let go of the tight holds they'd placed on their daughters during the days when they hadn't known for sure what had happened to the Sims girl—when they'd feared foul play. It was a bad thing, what happened to Serena. But it had also been an accident—and sometimes, the word “accident” made it easier to fall back into old rhythms, the pulse of life as it had been before.

The tardy bell rang, allowing the journalism room to settle into a routine as comfortable as a down pillow as students turned on computers and moved freely about the room. Claire glanced up toward the door just as Owen passed by with a large box tucked under his arm, the side branded
Serena.

Claire pushed her chair back and darted into the hallway.

“Claire!” Rich hissed. “Where are you going? You need a pass. Claire!”

Claire motioned with her hand for Rich to keep quiet. She hurried forward, out of sight of the journalism door. She trailed Owen around one corner, down a deserted hallway. She slowed as he dropped his box to the floor. He consulted a wrinkled piece of paper—surely, Claire thought, the combination for Serena's locker, provided by one of the secretaries in the main office. Tucking the paper into his pants pocket, he spun the lock, tugged it free.

Owen glanced up. “Shouldn't you be in class?” he asked Claire, swinging the locker door open.

“Shouldn't you?” Claire countered.

Owen shrugged. “I have a good excuse. Nobody's going to give me detention when they find out I got stuck with this chore.”

“You could do it after school,” Claire challenged.

Owen eyed her. “I can't stand art class. I'm not going to waste my great excuse. If I time it right, I can miss most of it.”

Claire took another step closer to the locker. It was, as Mrs. Sims had said, immaculate. No pictures or mirrors on the door, no wadded-up homework assignments on the bottom. No Snickers wrappers. Her textbooks stood up on the top shelf, looking like books in a library, spines facing outward. A fleece sweatshirt hung on the hook.

“After you left, Mrs. Sims told me—she didn't know where Serena's phone was. She wanted me to tell you,” Claire started. She hadn't known what she would say to Owen when she started talking; her lie only began to knit itself together as she rambled on. “She wanted me to bring her phone back, because—”

“Why would
Mrs. Sims
care about Serena's
phone
?” Owen argued.

Claire blushed. “She—I—”

Owen sighed. “Does it look like there's a phone
here
?” he asked, pointing toward the top shelf.

It wasn't the shelf Claire was interested in. It was the pockets of the sweatshirt. She started to reach for it, when Owen stepped in between her and the locker, blocking her.

“Actually, I've been wanting to talk to you,” Owen asserted.

Something in his tone gave her goose bumps. “Really?”

“Yeah. Really. You passed up a good thing, you know.”

Claire's mind whirled. “What're you talking about?”

“The history test. The one you wouldn't retake.”

“What do you care about my test?”

“Somebody gives you a free pass, you take it. Period.”

“I'm not into free passes,” she spat back.

“Bullshit. Everybody's into free passes,” Owen said. “You know the only thing that counts in life?” he murmured. “The bottom line. That's it. Not how you got there. The right answer. The number of As. Transcripts.”

Claire wasn't sure what to say—or if her tongue still worked. All she could manage was a surprised stare.

“Some of us aren't brain trusts. Some of us
need
a little help. So what? Seems to me, we've got a good thing going, with Isles offering just that—a little extra help.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” she asked, her nerves sparking like the power lines during the ice storm.

“I figured you were the type to rat us all out,” he said, reaching into the top shelf of the locker. As he pulled his arm back, Claire swore she heard it: laughter, hers and Rachelle's. And she saw a pencil box in his hand. Covered in lightning bolts.

“You—heard—I—what?” Claire asked, stepping backward, into a stream of sunlight pouring through a nearby window.

Only, when she stepped into it, it wasn't sun at all. It was a thin sheet of ice. A fragile one, that shattered the minute she touched it. Ice shards flew, hitting the air and falling like a sleet storm, clattering against the tile floor. Claire pressed her palm flat against the closest wall, finding that it was now covered in a thicker, two-inch coating of ice.

The entire hallway glistened. The floor. The walls. The ceiling. Icicles, fat as tetherball poles, clung from the lights. The windows became glazed, so that the sunlight bleeding into the hallway had the same eerie glow as snow beneath moonlight.

When she tried to get a better look at the entire hallway, her feet slipped.

Owen reached back into the locker, freed the fleece sweatshirt. An object tumbled from its pocket.
The phone
, Claire thought.
Get it before he can. Find out what's on it.

She slid across the floor, nearly squealing with joy when she beat Owen, snatching it up before he had a chance.

But when her fist closed around it, her fragile bubble of victory burst. She wasn't yet sure what was in her hand—but she did know with certainty that it wasn't a phone.

Before she could get a look at it, her feet slid out from beneath her. Claire struggled like a passenger on a fitful boat, fighting to stay upright, searching for something solid. Her hands flew, but she slammed into the wall, finding herself mere inches from a window, her face reflected in the glass. She blinked at herself, at the sunlight, at the window now instantly and completely devoid of ice.

Claire panted, confused, as Owen snatched the item out of her hand. “What's with you?” he asked. “It's just her inhaler. So what?” He tossed it into his box.

“There's no phone here,” he declared, shaking the sweatshirt. He put the box on the floor, and dropped Serena's textbooks into it, letting the books thud like a gunshot.

Claire stared down the empty hallway. The tile beneath her shoes was dry. The ice hadn't melted—it had simply disappeared.

“What do you say?” Owen asked, as Claire's head continued to spin. “Truce? About the history test? You get where I'm coming from?”

Claire nodded limply. What had she just agreed to?

Owen slammed the locker door and left her standing in the glow from the nearby sconces.

As his footsteps grew faint, Claire collapsed onto the floor and waited for her body to stop shaking.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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C
laire tried to slip back into the room unnoticed; she slid into a seat next to Rich, attempting to pretend she'd been right there, in class, all morning.

Glancing up, Claire was hit full force with their instructor's disgust. Mavis tightened her mouth as she deepened her glare, tucking her chin down to eye Claire over the top of her wire frames.

“Leaving my class without a pass gets you a warning this time, Ms. Cain,” she said. “If it happens again, you get nonpaid leave. If you don't know what that is, ask Rich.”

Claire turned toward him, eyebrow raised.

“It's a pass to go talk to Sanders,” Rich explained.

Claire nodded. She ached to blurt it all out to Rich—how the hallway had just changed. How she could have sworn she was right back in the midst of the last ice storm. How the entire school had been encased in ice, for a moment. How Sweet Pea had followed her to the Sims house the day before. How Serena needed Claire, because no one—not even Mrs. Sims herself—was willing to believe that Serena could still be here, be part of the earth, be a creature who needed help.

I hear her; I can help her
, she ached to say.

But she couldn't. The words stuck in her throat. All she could think of was the way the ice in the hallway had appeared and shattered with her discovery of Serena's inhaler.

“How bad
was
Serena's asthma?” she asked instead.

“Pretty bad, actually,” Rich said. Even worse when the weather got hot. Why?”

“I just saw Owen cleaning out her locker. Her inhaler fell out of the pocket of a heavy sweatshirt.”

“Fleece. Dark green.”

“Yeah. How'd you know?”

Rich sucked in a breath. “She used it as her winter coat. It was big on her—she wore it over her cardigan. Maybe, when Sheriff Holman checked her locker, he thought it was just some extra sweatshirt—it's not the normal bulky winter coat—but I can't imagine her leaving school without it. Especially if it was already getting bad outside. Even if canceling school did startle her—it's just hard to believe.”

“What about the inhaler? Would she have chosen to leave that behind, too?”

Rich thought a moment, shook his head slowly. “There's no
way
she'd be without an inhaler. Even if she had another one at home, I don't think she'd chance walking home without it, actually,” he said.

“There's no phone. Not in her locker. Not in her room. And apparently, she wasn't carrying it on her when she died—I mean, Mrs. Sims didn't seem to know anything about a phone. The sheriff would have returned it if it was found on her, wouldn't he?”

He nodded somewhat reluctantly.

Claire's eyes grew large as she asked, “Seriously—don't you think it's weird that the police never searched through Serena's laptop?”

“Maybe,” Rich said. “But it's a small town, too, Claire. I mean, yeah, they should have looked. But Holman's been the sheriff here longer than Serena was alive. She was best friends with his daughter. That girl spent too many weekends in his house to count. He probably felt like he didn't need to look at her computer because he
knew
her. There'd be school notes in it. No nasty pictures—no talking to perverts. He knew what kind of girl she was.”

“
Did
he?” Claire asked. “Really? Or did he just assume? A girl in an ice storm, without her books, her coat, or her inhaler. In the woods that she was terrified of. It doesn't make sense. We couldn't find her story, so we've got to get her phone. We need her story, Rich. We need to know what led up to Serena's last moments.”

Rich nodded. “I have a horrible feeling about this whole thing,” he admitted.

Claire glanced up, toward the classroom window. The black threatening fringes of the woods loomed in the distance.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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T
hat afternoon, Claire swooped up her bag at the moment of the final bell, ready to bolt from her history class, down the stairs, and out of the school. Ready to get back to Rich, back to the truth just waiting to be uncovered. But Ms. Isles laid her hand on Claire's desk and stepped into the aisle, blocking her exit.