The Creeping (23 page)

“Look at these,” Sam murmurs excitedly, his hair a wayward pile from all the absentminded rubbing as he read. He arranges three photocopied articles in front of us. “This one is Betty Balco, the girl in 1938 that Mrs. Griever told us about. She was playing in the front yard. Her mom went inside to grab laundry for the clothesline and when she came out, Betty was gone. And these”—he points to the others—“are for two other missing girls. In 1930, Rosalyn Jensen disappeared while hiking in Blackdog with her brother. He said she was lagging behind and then vanished. She was five. And this one, Penelope Petersen, disappeared when she was six in 1936. Her family was picnicking somewhere called Norse Rock.”

Zoey snatches up the articles on Penelope Petersen and squints at the faded black-and-white photograph. “All this proves is that there were sickos in the olden days,” she says. “I have an entire stack of articles testifying to that fact. Big surprise.”

“Read the second paragraph,” Sam tells her.

Her eyes skim quickly over each line. As she reads, the blood drains from her cheeks. “They're little gingersnaps too.” She places
the page down delicately as if she's afraid of disturbing their sleep. “Redheads just like Jeanie,” she adds in the barest of whispers.

“There's nothing in these clippings about their remains being found or any serious suspects or arrests ever being made,” Sam says. I reach for the articles, hands shaking. I scan them for the details Sam says aren't there. I have to make sure. As I do, Zoey rests her head on her folded arms, and Sam stares over his shoulder at the bank of front windows. Their panes give the forest across the street the look of a cubist painting. I imagine his gaze sticks to the dark mesh of trees, searching for the monstrous explanation. The articles are short, and it doesn't take long for me to drop them on the table. Sam was right: no bodies, no suspects, only fruitless leads.

Sam's irises are darker as he turns back to us and says, “They vanished just like Jeanie.”

I
t's too much to be a coincidence,” Sam says for the third time. I slump in the passenger seat and cover my face. Since we left the library, I've been trying to stitch my words into anything believable, anything less horrible than the evil taking shape in Savage. Griever warned us, didn't she? She said I'd wish to be blind if I kept looking in Savage's dark corners. I'm not ready to gouge my eyes out, but I'm close.

Sam turns onto the two-lane highway heading toward Old Savage Cemetery.

“Wait a sec, let me get this straight. I almost lost it in the library I'm so eeked out, and now you're taking me to the cemetery?” Zoey asks, a nervous laugh fluting her voice. “We should be heading home to pack. We should be booking it to make the first flight to Chi-town to stay with Stella's whorebag of a mother. And I mean whorebag in the worst way possible.” She leans forward and wraps her arms around me and the seat. I hug her arms back;
Zoey took my mother leaving me almost as hard as I did.

“There could be more little girls, Zo. The newspaper archives weren't complete. If we find a bunch of headstones for kids, then that's even more of a pattern to show Shane,” I explain as she rests her chin on my shoulder.

“Otherwise he'll say it's a coincidence or that it doesn't mean anything,” Sam adds.

Zoey pops up and wags a finger triumphantly. “But what if the families never added a headstone? Hello? No kiddie corpse, no grave, mathemagicians.”

Sam tilts his head, mulling it over. “That's possible, I guess. But I bet that if families held out hope, they'd still want their daughter to have a headstone in the family plot.”

Zoey stomps her heel against the back of the driver's seat. “Fine, but at the first sign of any monsters, I'm out. I just wish the Savage PD wasn't so epically snowballs incompetent. I'm not effing Nancy Drew.”

The sky darkens as we get closer—kind of an ominous sign—and tiny drops of rain speckle the highway. The air in the wagon sweats. I wrap my hair in a knot on the nape of my neck and concentrate on deep, calming breaths.

As we come to a stop on the gravel lot adjacent to the cemetery, Zoey says, “About all this monster randomness, nothing like that actually exists, right?” She sounds young and scared.

“No, Zo. Of course not,” I say, my stomach flip-flopping in a way it wouldn't have if she'd asked me a week ago.

She leans forward, tugging on my sleeve. “So why were you talking about monsters? Why did that dumpy old lady mention them? Why were we hunting them?” Panic makes her pitch rise.

Sam twists to face her. “People are always looking for someone or something to blame for the bad that happens. It's just the scariest thing people can think up.”

He probably can't see it, but I can spot her vulnerability fading as she tips her head and blinks lazily at him. “It's not the scariest thing I can think of,” she says smoothly.

“What do you mean?” I ask, suspicious.

“The devil,” she says in a singsong voice, slipping out of the car, into the rain.

A white-hot flash of anger sears through me. Zoey knows it freaks me out to talk about stuff like that, especially
here
, of all places. Our one and only major fight—more like all-out war—was over her insisting that we use a Ouija board to—get this—contact Jeanie's ghost on Halloween night freshman year.

I jump out of the car and shout, “Why would you say that? We're about to go searching through a graveyard, Zo. Why can't you ever keep your big mouth shut?”

She stops abruptly; her white tank top already has Dalmatian spots from the rain. In the dim light her edges blur, making her a shimmery specter under the iron heart of the cemetery gate. She calls over her shoulder, “Isn't the devil just the ultimate monster?” A chill travels up my spine.

“You sure you want to do this?” Sam says at my side, making me
start. I nod a little and then grab his hand, lacing my fingers with his, trying to feel his skin on mine more than I feel scared.

Zoey disappears into the cemetery, after tapping the heart, and we follow. “Talking about supernatural phenomena still freaks you out, huh?” Sam asks. I try to focus on a gray van and a beige four-door parked at the opposite end of the lot. Most likely deserted cars from the last kegger.

“Maybe it freaks you out because of how mysterious Jeanie's disappearance was?” Sam continues. “Or maybe it's because of the way people talked afterward? You remember that pastor in Rascan they used to interview on the news? He'd rant about the evil hocus-pocus at work in Savage. I remember my mom hustling me out of the grocery store because some out-of-towner in produce was shouting that we were all devil worshippers and brought this on ourselves. All that stuff would freak any kid out, especially since you were so close to it all.”

“I guess,” I answer flatly. The truth is I don't have a clue. While other little girls giggled infectiously over ghost stories and got adrenaline-junkie highs over scream-fest slumber parties, I hated them. Super dumb, if you think about it. What's real doesn't eek me out, but what couldn't possibly be makes me totally crazy. I know better than anyone that people do beastly things; my mom deserted us, remember. That I can stomach. But just whisper Grim Reaper to me before bed, and I won't sleep a wink.

It hits me that I didn't tap the iron heart once we're a few yards deep in the cemetery. Whatever. It was just one of Zoey's scary stories
meant to screw with me. I tighten my grip on Sam's hand. Strange how perfectly our hands fit together.

“Do you believe in the devil?” I ask quietly.
I know
, it can't be good karma or cosmic juju or whatever to ask about the devil in a graveyard. But at the risk of cursing myself for life, there's something about what Zoey said that coaxes that strange, nagging feeling from my gut.

Sam strokes my hand with his thumb. “Not in a religious sense. Actually”—he feigns a horrified expression—“I agree with Zoey. The devil is just a scary monster that people dream up. And who says there's only one?”

“
Devils
, you mean?” I shiver, scanning the haggard gravestones surrounding us.

He gets that parenthesis mark between his brows. “Yeah, why wouldn't there be? There's more than one bad person in the world. Why wouldn't there be more than one monster? Even more than one
kind
of monster?” I scrunch up my nose. “Sure there is.” He chuckles. “You've got those that aren't bound by space and time, spirit types. And then you've got those that are more animal than ghost, like werewolves, yetis, and vampires. They may have longer life spans, but they can die. Let's hope we're dealing with the latter.” He's smiling in jest, but there's a wistful quality to his voice that makes me doubt he's kidding.

The raindrops bead on the patchwork of emerald moss and soil. Neon-green lichen hangs straggly, like Silly String from the dark boughs of trees. The cemetery is unchanged and peaceful except for
the hundreds of footsteps left between graves. All sizes crisscrossing, like a parade or a funeral procession marched through.

“The oldest graves are along the fence, facing the shore. It makes sense to start on the opposite side, since we need to check the most recent,” Sam reasons. I catch a flash of Zoey's blond head in that direction, so light it glows white as a halo. When we reach her, she's refastening the strap of her sandal, perched on a crumbling gravestone that reminds me of a giant molar.

“I don't think you're supposed to sit on those,” Sam says. Zoey makes a show of jumping down and curtsying. She falls in line next to me.

We work our way from the left to the right. It's morbid work sorting through the dead. Well, the
very
dead, since the last person buried here died in 1946. The only noises are the sigh of the wind and the rhythm of raindrops.

“These names sound made up,” Zoey complains as she stands in the middle of a family plot surrounded by a waist-high wrought-iron fence. “Gottmo, Bbjorstrand, Faltskog—they sound like characters from those online wizard games guys play when they're too fugly to get laid.” She bats her eyelashes innocently at Sam. “You know the type, Sam—everything they know about girls they learned from porn and music videos?”

Sam flicks his hair from his eyes, ignores the slight, and answers, “Many of the families that industrialized Minnesota were of Scandinavian decent.”

Zoey blinks at him. “Come again?”

“Like, descendants of the Vikings? That's why there are so many Scandinavian names here.” His eyebrows arch up, and he looks from me to Zoey. “You know, that's probably why there are so many blond and redheaded families in Savage,” he muses. I chew the inside of my cheek, nodding thoughtfully. I've never lived anywhere else, so I haven't considered that Savage has more redheads, but it makes sense that someone who kills them would gravitate here if it's true.

“There are some families in Savage that are descendants of the original settlers. Not my family, but hasn't Mayor Berg's been here for six or seven generations?” Sam adds. Zoey starts humming to herself to tune him out. She stops at a massive tombstone with a shield and an eagle engraved. “That's the coat of arms for the US Navy,” he says. “There are graves of military families here, since the navy built ships before World War II just a few miles up the Minnesota River.”

Zoey snaps to attention. “Guys in uniform?” She smacks her lips. “Yum.”

After thirty or forty graves, it takes me longer and longer to calculate ages from years of birth and death. Many of the headstones are weathered, crumbling, turning to dust, like the bodies buried underneath. I kneel down at the base of a tall, pointed column engraved with a faded epitaph. I run my fingers along the grooves, able to make out only half the message before I trace the shape of vanishing letters with my finger. It's easier to feel them than see them.
SWEET GIRL, HERE YOUR SPIRIT SHALL REST UNTIL THE HOLY FATHER DELIVERS THEE HOME
.

“Sam. Zoey,” I call. They backtrack quickly. “Look at this one.
The date and name are too faint to read, but the epitaph could be about a missing girl. ‘Until the Holy Father delivers thee home.' They were waiting for her to be found.” I run my finger over the eroded surface. There are striations and grooves made in the stone where the dates and name should be.

Sam crouches next to me and leans forward, examining the headstone. “It's like they've been filed or scratched away. It must have happened decades ago, since even the scratches are smooth and weathered to the touch. Their edges have been rounded by rain and wind like the rest of the grave.”

“But if she went missing and she was never found, at least not when the epitaph was written, why put a year of death?” I say.

“For the same reason her parents made her a headstone at all. They knew she wasn't coming back, and they wanted to memorialize and mourn her. It's probably just the year they lost their daughter,” Sam says.

“So why would someone remove the date and name on a headstone?” Zoey whispers. My hand feels extra empty not holding Sam's, so I take hers.

“They didn't want her grave to be identified,” I say. I feel Zoey's shudder travel up my arm.

“But who did it?” she asks.

I shake my head and admit, “I don't know.”

“Let's check to see if any others have been removed.” Sam's already starting forward. After ten minutes we discover four more graves with names and dates that have been filed away. The vandal
grew sloppy as his work continued, and on two of the graves it's possible to discern the dates of birth and death through the scratches. One of them was six and the other seven. The years of death—or disappearance—are in the 1930s.

Zoey's started to shiver. Her teeth chatter as she says, “Can we get out of here? I'm getting a really bad feeling.”