The Creeping (21 page)

Sam makes a quiet noise of surprise. Shane leans forward, staring at me hard. “I understand the inclination to want to think the best of someone you've known for a long time.” His brows lift up, softening his face. “But you can be
that
wrong about people. You understand? You can't see what's really on the inside.”

I don't say so, but I think Shane's the one who's wrong. Even if people try to hide who they are, I think there are always indications, clues, and it's just a matter of recognizing them.

For the few remaining minutes Shane is here, my body is on the couch, but my mind is wholly somewhere else. It's across town, in the basement of the morgue, in a cold metal drawer with the birdlike frame of a five-year-old girl who was found murdered, scalped, and clutching an ancient bone in her dead little fist.

I give my head a jerk. Shane is shaking Sam's hand and trying to smile reassuringly at me, but it's lopsided. As he leaves, he calls over his shoulder for me to put a sweatshirt on.

Sam locks the door behind him and walks heavily back to my side. “Why didn't you tell him about the Balco kid? He could have helped us. It could have convinced him to stop looking at Mr. Talcott.”

I stand from the love seat, hands steadying myself on Sam's arms. I'm suddenly so tired I have to focus to stand. “Shane's looking in all the wrong places.” My voice is dead, drained. “You heard him; he won't even believe how old that bone is, and he has an expert telling him. He's going to think that the stress is getting to me if I start talking about missing kids from 1938 and monsters that take little redheaded girls.” After all, it's what I would think.

“If he worries I can't deal, he'll tell Dad to send me to my mom's.” I glare defiantly at my parents' wedding photo that's still on the mantel, daring Mom to argue, as if she'd actually waste her breath on me. I release Sam and force my spine straight. “I want to remember what happened to Jeanie. I can't screw it up by being sent away.
I owe her this
.” I startle myself saying it, how it's bubbling up as words before I think it, how much I feel it, and not just crushed by the burden of being judged as the one left behind once it's said.

Sam reaches for the flannel blanket hanging from the back of the couch and wraps it around my shoulders like a cape. Still holding on to the corners, he tugs me a foot closer. There's the faint whistle of his breath between his teeth. “Okay, we won't say anything to Detective Shane until we have more proof. But if this gets more dangerous”—he angles his head until he's certain he has my attention—“if something else happens where you're targeted, I'll tell him myself. I'll say it's my theory; I'll show him the picture, and if he wants to act like I'm crazy, fine.”

Sam leaves soon after with a wave. It makes me feel disappointed somehow. Empty. But I can't obsess. Whatever I'm
feeling
will have to wait. There's too much to process. And I have the sense that I've
been disassembled and put back together, but none of my pieces fit seamlessly anymore. I stare at the blank space between the lines of a book for an untold amount of time. My whirring mind won't concentrate on what's in front of me. I force myself to wash up for bed even though it's early. After one text to Dad telling him I'm home, I turn my ring tone to silent.

Something occurred to me as I showered, and I prop my laptop on my thighs. Killers and kidnappers don't always limit their crimes geographically. Sam's only looking for a girl who went missing in Savage. I jump from search engine to news database, looking for disappearances of young girls with red hair throughout Minnesota. I hold my breath speed-reading an article that appears to be a report of a six-year-old strawberry blonde vanishing during a walk home from school. Two paragraphs down I discover she turned up with her estranged mother in California. That's the closest I get, and in the results of every search—no matter how I try to filter them—Jeanie Talcott always pops up in the first few names. I snap my laptop shut and drop it to the carpet below.

I curl up around my bunny and try to find peaceful sleep as Jeanie's name runs across the ticker of my eyelids. Sleep comes easy, but peace doesn't.

*  *  *

Mom hasn't taken my summer clothes down from the attic yet, so I'm wearing my Easter dress, even though next week is the last of school. I pinch the dimples on my elbows as I sun my bare arms in Jeanie's front yard. Their Christmas lights still frost the house, but they don't
light them up anymore. Too bad, since they're the twinkly kind. It was a rainy week, and I'm a bottle rocket ready to explode with pent-up yips and hollers. The hum of the TV wafts into the front yard. Sometimes Mrs. Talcott lets us watch her grown-up shows. Mom never lets me watch TV.

“Can we ask your mom for a juice bar?” Zoey calls on the upswing of a leg pump. Her hair is in long pigtails, their strands getting stuck in the rusty chain of the swing looped over a low-hanging branch of a tree. Once she tipped backward, whacked her head on a rock, and bit hard on her tongue, so she doesn't swing as high as I do anymore.

Jeanie and I kneel, surrounding a red mound of dirt. There used to be ants streaming out of it. Yesterday Daniel sprayed it with water until all the little black specks were drowned and washed away. Jeanie and I pick a ladybug family out of the strawberry vines. They're going to live in the anthill, and we won't let Daniel know.

“Can we, Jeanie?” Zoey whines louder. I look up from stuffing the mama ladybug into the tiny tunnel the ants dug. Best thing about Jeanie's is the Popsicles. Jeanie isn't answering Zoey, though. She was trying to feed blades of grass to two little green winged bugs she said were baby boys. Now she's staring over my shoulder at the line of strawberry bushes bordering the woods. Her eyes bulge and water. Her bottom lip quivers. There's a streak of snot under her nose. I turn to see what the matter is.

The slender strawberry vines quiver as if something's just escaped their cover, the red berries wagging back and forth. Beyond them there are only shadows in the wood. It's almost time to go home,
since the sun is tucking itself behind treetops. I turn back to Jeanie. Tears, silent except for her breath slipping through her gap-toothed smile, stripe her cheeks. She's panting, her fists wadded into balls and shaking.

“Is it the witch?” I whisper. Daniel says a witch lives in the wood, but Jeanie says she isn't a bad one. She walked Jeanie home one time when Jeanie got lost and Daniel left her out there. But Jeanie doesn't answer. She doesn't even look at me.

“Is it the monster?” I ask even quieter. Daniel says it can leave the forest, but Jeanie thinks he's wrong. She said so to his face last week. He told her that the monster can smell that she doesn't believe it can leave the woods. He said it's going to come show her.

I think it might be showing her now. A stream of stinking water trickles downhill from Jeanie. Hot on my legs. I hop from the ground as a current of it carries the ladybugs between my sneakers, whisking them away. Jeanie stays cross-legged in pee. She opens her fist slowly, cradling it in her lap, trying to shield it with her other hand.
But I see.
I see mangled green wings and black guts staining her palm.

“They're dead,” I say.

*  *  *

I haul myself into the shower at a little past eight. My eye sockets ache, and a throbbing pain gores my head. I dreamed only one dream, but it played over and over again. Waking up between each, heart racing, lying in the dark convinced that what I was dreaming wasn't a dream at all. It was a memory. Jeanie was taken in June, mere days after summer vacation started. But more than four weeks earlier, she
was acting strange. I don't know if she always acted like a schizo staring out into the woods, but I doubt it. I can't say why I know that that afternoon was the start of everything, but I know with a certainty that hurts that someone was there in those strawberry bushes. Jeanie, slack-jawed, guarding against the woods. So freaked out she crushed the ladybugs in her fist. Jeanie
loved
ladybugs; all of a sudden, this is a truth I know.

I avoid my reflection in the bathroom mirror as I get ready for Sam and the library. There's some flash in my stare that unnerves me, that's entirely other to me. Did Jeanie know that something bad was going to happen? Was she being watched for weeks before? Hunted from the strawberry vines? Did they see what I didn't? Their branches were thin, satiny, and a haven for ladybugs. Now the bramble pervades their patch, its thorns guarding the vine's swollen fruit. Did someone stand in those vines to watch her? Did the bramble grow slowly toward the strawberries to protect them? “Nutso, get a grip,” I tell my reflection, forcing myself to stare me down.

The strawberry vines grew thick and sturdy over time. The bramble that grows intermingled with the strawberries must have skirted them before. It was a casualty to Mr. Talcott's machete wielding too. All sorts of species of plants and animals develop means of surviving. If Sam were here, or Michaela, they'd launch into a mini lecture on evolution. Mr. Talcott brought those vines to the brink of death for eight years—the time between Jeanie's disappearance and her family's move—and each summer they returned more determined to live. When I think about it like that, I can't help thinking
that those strawberries and I have something in common. We refuse to vanish. If Jeanie were being watched, she would have told someone. Her mom. Her dad. Her brother. Maybe she did tell someone, and maybe that person was me?

My hands shake harder as I throw clothes on and run a brush through my hair. A long time ago I got over a slice of my memory being gone. I figured that my recollection of that afternoon, and every day before it, disintegrated like dust along with Jeanie. Turns out neither were as gone as I thought. I refuse to bawl my eyes out like some melodramatic amnesia patient, but what if I could have stopped the person who took Jeanie and didn't? Never, not even for a wisp of a second, have I considered that I might be to blame.

I grab my cell to turn the ringer on fifteen minutes before Sam is set to arrive. I have a crap load of missed calls and texts. One each from Michaela and Cole, checking on me. The other seven texts are from Zoey, each bitchier than the last.

M said you've got cramps?

Call me k?

Where R U?

WTF S?

R U w/Sam?

Lose my #.

And ending with,
FU bitch!

To tell you the truth, I expected worse. Once Zoey egged my
car because I stayed in to study rather than go to a Scott Townsend house party. She helped me clean the yolk and shells up the next morning, but still,
not so nice
.

I hit Zoey's name on the screen and hold my breath, waiting for an answer. After the fourth ring Zoey says, “Now you call? You call at eight-freaking-thirty in the morning, but you couldn't be bothered to call your best friend all day and night?”

I let out a puff of air. “Can we meet today? I have a lot to tell you, and I can't say it over the phone.”

Zoey sniffs. “Text it then, bitch.”

I cringe at how callous she sounds. “No, I mean I want to tell you in person.”

“What about Taylor?”

“What about him?”

She sputters and chokes on whatever she's drinking. “Cooome ooon, Stella. You go hard after Taylor for months. I'm a bitch to every other girl who wants him, so they stay clear, and then you blow him off like that. What the fuck? Why would you spaz right before senior year?”

“Umm, in case you haven't noticed, the whole town is spazzing out. Dead little girls are turning up. Jeanie's mom is dead. There's a killer on the loose. There are bigger things happening.” She's quiet on the other end, but I can picture her flipping her cell off. “Zoey, please. Meet me at the library at nine. 'Kay?”

“Yeah, whatevs. Caleb's using my car because my mom's taking hers to work, so I'll have to see if I can bum a ride from him.”

“I'll pick you up. I'll be there in twenty,” I say, rushing to hang up before she can tell me no.

I decide to wait on the front porch for Sam. The rain and the uniformed cops washed away any remnants of the rank strawberries. I scan the block warily to make certain there aren't any reporters lurking. None. They've probably all relocated to the Talcotts' house. The unmarked cop car parked two houses down is the only thing out of the ordinary. I wave to Officers Reedy and Matthews from afar, figuring that they're probably spying on me. I wonder if they use binoculars. I text Shane to let him know I'm making a quick trip to the library with Sam and Zoey, and then it'll be straight home for me.

Sam
and
Zoey. Zoey's going to
murder
me when I show up at her house with Sam. I sniff . . . bad word choice.

Ten minutes pass, and I start to fidget. What if Sam got home last night and realized what a massive mistake helping me is? What if he's headed north to the border to live a life of crime, all to escape me and the impending doom I bring along? Okay, that's unlikely, but waiting for him makes me queasy.

I focus on my shady street. Gradually, the eeriness hits me. There are barely any cars on the block. Everyone's shades and curtains are drawn, houses wrapped up tight as presents on Christmas morning. Their porches are littered with talismans to ward off evil. Horseshoes, bells and chimes, wreaths hanging above doorways. Crucifixes sticking out of manicured lawns. It looks postapocalyptic. This is what the lost years looked like. Deserted tricycles and basketball hoops rusting in cul-de-sacs. More wild turkeys bumping along the road
than cars. Empty buses headed to school. Kids didn't go anywhere without their parents. And everyone went to church, because people find God fast when stuff scares the crap out of them.

I try to laugh it off. People just being paranoid and superstitious. So what? It's like I'm on the set of a B-movie horror flick. But all I can think is:
if they only knew
. If they only knew that this happened before . . . over seventy years ago. If they only knew what Jane Doe was clasping in her dainty hand. If they only knew she was scalped. If they only knew what six-year-old me was saying when I came back that day. If they did, they'd be sitting on their porches with shotguns rather than leaving a couple of violet rabbit's feet to do the job.